Like its predecessor, That’s a Plenty immersed the Pointer Sisters in a variety of musical milieus, except pedal steel was now thrown in the mix of wah-wah guitar and upright bass. Inspired by James Taylor, Anita Pointer wrote and sang lead on “Fairytale,” a tearjerker of a song that packed an emotional punch as effectively as anything Tammy Wynette or Loretta Lynn recorded. David Rubinson spared no expense giving “Fairytale” the authentic country sound it merited. He arranged a recording session at Quadraphonic Studios in Nashville with musicians David Briggs (piano), Norbert Putnam (bass), Weldon Myrick (pedal steel guitar), Ken Buttrey (drums), Robert Thompson (acoustic guitar), and Norman Spicher (fiddle). With the soft twang of Anita’s voice capping off the production, “Fairytale” became a Top 40 country hit and was later covered by Elvis Presley. It also gave the Pointer Sisters another sizable pop hit (#13).
Country audiences took a shine to “Fairytale” and all four sisters were invited to perform the song at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. There was one caveat, however. “They didn’t know that we were black!,” Ruth exclaims. “Well, surprise, surprise! On the flight down, I think we were the only African Americans on the plane. When we got ready to get off the plane, there were cameras waiting for us. This woman turned around and said, ‘Who are y’all anyway?’ We told her who we were and she said, ‘Well if I’d-a known y’all was somebody I’d-a talked to ya!'”
The bewilderment of Nashville natives created a particularly demoralizing situation at a party thrown in honor of The Pointer Sisters and their hit single. Ruth remembers the night vividly:
“We show up in the car and as soon as we get out of the car, the people meeting us quickly take us around the back of the house. We go in through the kitchen and we’re waiting to make our big appearance in the front of the party. We can hear the party going on out there and we’re just in the back thinking, When are they going to come get us? All of a sudden our manager comes through the door and he says, ‘What are y’all doing back here?’ We said, ‘We’ve been waiting for somebody to come bring us into the party.’ He went and talked to some people and came back all red in the face, so mad. The next thing you know, they were escorting us out into the party. He told us afterwards, ‘They thought you were the help and that’s why they wanted you in the back.'”
Their Opry appearance was no less riddled with surprises. “When we actually did the performance at the Opry,” Ruth remembers, “people were actually yelling out loud, ‘I didn’t know them girls was black!’ from the audience. It was not done in a mean-spirited way. They would stand up and cheer in the middle of the song. That’s one thing I love about country people. They don’t wait for it to end!”
There was no second-guessing who won the award the Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group Grammy Awards at the Grammy Awards in 1975: The Pointer Sisters. With competitors like the Statler Brothers, Kris Kristofferson & Rita Coolidge, and Willie Nelson & Tracy Nelson, winning the Grammy for “Fairytale” was the ultimate validation of the Pointer Sisters’ masterful tackling of a genre not populated by many black artists.
The Pointer Sisters continued to storm across screens, stages, and airwaves throughout late-1974 and 1975. The double Live at the Opera House (1974) album remains the definitive document how they rendered their mesmerizing harmonies and scatting from the studio to concert halls. It remains an indispensable, awe-inspiring recording. They also continued to work with other artists, contributing background vocals to Bobby Womack’s Top Five R&B single, “Daylight.” They were ubiquitous on television as well, singing the “Pinball Count” song for the popular animated number sequence on Sesame Street (which now has, collectively, more than 3 million views on YouTube). “Anita and I brought our children to the session,” Ruth shares, “and they’re actually singing on that song. That song was very difficult to learn, the rhythm and the intonation of it. It’s not just a straightforward song. There are harmonies to it, you had modulations.”
Around that same time, The Pointer Sisters regularly appeared on Carol Burnett & Friends. They hammed it up with the show’s red-haired host, whether singing “Salt Peanuts” or playing Cinderella’s wicked stepsisters in a sketch entitled “Cinderella Gets It On.” They also learned an important lesson about wardrobe from one of the masters of sketch comedy. “We thought we were in a fashion show and couldn’t be seen in the same thing from show to show to show,” Ruth says about their concerts at that time. “We used to throw our jewelry out in the audience and after awhile we were like, This is really getting expensive. Not only that, people started asking us, ‘Can I have that bracelet?’ Carol was like, ‘You make a wardrobe set for the show and that’s what you wear. You have alternates but they’re always the same thing.'”
Viewers who caught The Pointer Sisters on Carol Burnett & Friends might have noticed that one sister was not present: June. The youngest Pointer continued to wrestle with private demons that hindered her consistent involvement with the group. Unlike the early days of the group, before Ruth joined, the Pointer Sisters now had national recognition, industry acclaim, and a reputation to uphold. On a dime, the group had to learn how to adjust the act without June. Ruth recalls one particular time when the group received an invitation to play Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas with Paul Anka, ultimately to the peril of the group’s relationship with critics. She says, “It was the first big engagement that we had ever been offered from a place like that. We showed up and June refused to come. We had to open without her. They slaughtered us in the review. It was a long time before we were ever invited back to Vegas. The day we were opening, we had to quickly change everything about our show.”
On record, however, the group could do no wrong. June participated in Steppin’ (1975), which featured a memorable cover in the shape of a Converse-style open-toed platform tap shoe, and sang a gorgeous rendition of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Wanting Things.” The album gave the Pointer Sisters a chart-topping R&B single on their self-penned “How Long (Betcha’ Got a Chick on the Side)” (later covered by Queen Latifah in 2007), as well as a #20 R&B hit with another Allen Toussaint number, the eight-minute “Going Down Slowly”. Steppin’ further showcased a range of source material, including songs by Stevie Wonder (“Sleeping Alone”), Isaac Hayes (“Easy Days”), Taj Mahal (“Chainey Do”), and a medley in tribute to Duke Ellington.
The Pointer Sisters worked with producer Norman Whitfield the following year when they made their big-screen debut in Car Wash (1976). Written by Joel Schumacher, the film documented a day in the life of a LA car wash and featured an impressive cast, including George Carlin, Garrett Morris, Franklyn Ajaye, and Antonio Fargas. Vincent Canby of The New York Times hailed Car Wash as a “terrifically shrewd piece of movie-making.” The Pointer Sisters landed a part in the film through a friend of Ruth’s who was dating a guy that worked for Gibson & Stromberg. He had a hand in casting and producing Car Wash. With Ruth’s bold suggestion that they be written into the script, The Pointer Sisters appeared as The Wilson Sisters, four glamorous proselytizers who accompany the smooth-talking preacher “Daddy Rich,” played by Richard Pryor. They appear for a total of seven minutes in the movie, stepping out of a white stretch limousine at the car wash with Pryor to preach the gospel according to the Church of Divine Economic Spirituality.
“We had so much fun because everybody was just so free-spirited and so crazy,” Ruth says about the experience of working on the film. “The director, Michael Schulz, got technical when he had to but mostly we were just having a good time and Lord you know we had a good time in that limo! We had an urn with Rémy Martin and we were passing it around. When Richard came up through the sunroof, he said, ‘Now hold my legs ’cause I might fall down when they make the curve.'”
The soundtrack to the movie was essentially a vehicle for Rose Royce save for The Pointer Sisters on the Whitfield-penned “You Gotta Believe,” which they performed during their scene in the movie. Though the song racked up another hit for the group, Ruth confesses that they really had their sights set on recording the theme song. She recalls, “We were in the studio doing ‘You Gotta Believe’ and Norman Whitfield introduced us to Rose Royce. They came in behind us doing the ‘Car Wash’ song. You know that’s supposed to be our song, the title track. I never will forget him yelling at the girl in the studio, ‘Why can’t you sing the song like The Pointer Sisters? Come on! Get some guts in the song!'” Ruth lets out a hearty howl at the memory.
Following the Car Wash album, The Pointer Sisters returned to the studio to record their fifth album for Blue Thumb, Having a Party (1977). Noticeably absent from the album was the nostalgic jazz sound that so defined their earlier work. Instead, David Rubinson had produced a contemporary R&B and funk album, injecting the material with the Pointer Sisters’ signature harmonies and boisterous energy. Blue Thumb, which had been purchased by ABC-Dunhill in late-1974, was practically non-existent by that point. Having a Party vanished without a life on the charts. Even though the album labored to find an audience, the music on Having a Party lived up to its title. The Pointer Sisters sound engaged with the material, including energetic leads by Anita on “I Need a Man” and “Baby Bring Your Sweet Stuff Home to Me” (co-written by Stevie Wonder) and Ruth on her self-penned “Waiting for You”.
When asked what the dynamic was like in the recording studio with her three sisters, Ruth takes a moment and exhales. Her voice breaks slightly when she answers, “It’s almost hard for me to talk about.” Tears well up in her eyes as she reflects on a moment in time that can never be recaptured. “It was fun,” she says simply. “We just had fun. We knew what the other one was going to sing. The only thing I guess we would fight about was who was going to sing lead,” Ruth says, letting out a full-throttled roar of laughter. “Everybody wanted to sing lead.”
The tension about lead parts was resolved, to a degree, and somewhat unexpectedly, when Bonnie Pointer announced that she was leaving the group to venture solo. “We were so pissed off,” Ruth says. Her departure left a void for many fans who appreciated the distinct personalities each sister brought to the group. “Bonnie’s always had a particular following. She was the spunkiest of us all, she was the shortest of us all. We would all be at the hotel asleep and Bonnie would be out in the street, partying with the fans. They loved them some Bonnie, honey!”
Bonnie Pointer signed with Motown in 1978 and released two self-titled albums. She scored a massive pop hit when she re-worked The Elgins’ “Heaven Must Have Sent You” into a dazzling disco showstopper. Her cheeky “Free Me From My Freedom/Tie Me to Tree (Handcuff Me)” also became an underground club favorite but her solo career fizzled as the commercial appeal of disco lost its luster with the record-buying public.
Suddenly, The Pointer Sisters had to forge ahead with a career minus one crucial member, a situation exacerbated by June’s hermetic involvement. They also started to realize how little they actually profited from their recording career … and they got mad. “Back then everybody was getting ripped off one way or another,” Ruth says. “Older performers like The Temptations and Gladys Knight would talk to us and say you guys got to watch out for this, that and the other. All of a sudden, we just fired everybody! David Rubinson was so brokenhearted and upset with us but we were just so naïve and ignorant that we didn’t know anything else to do. We needed to stop and figure out what to do.” Their decision to start anew would make all the difference.