detroit cobras story

"When nobody was in the house, I'd put on an Irma Thomas record and sing to it," she says. "I'd have it on 11, just blaring. I remember thinking, ‘Wow, that's pretty good. I sing kinda like her. And when the record stopped playing it was like, ‘Oh... no I don't."

Well, yes she does, actually. Nagy's voice is sexy smooth with just the right amount of lust, grit, and heartache. And it's not just in her commanding tone. It's also the searing soul that burns from within and hits below the belt that'll send you. It's painfully honest and beautiful.

With more than 10 years at the mic and five albums under her belt, she's not so quick to dismiss anymore.

"I've grown to get used to it and be able to deal with it a little better," she says. "‘Baby' was probably the first record I could actually listen to and not still cringe somewhat. It was the first record where I was like, ‘OK, that's not that bad.'"

Revved-up soul covers tweaked with a touch of garage grease has always been the Cobras' M.O. But the band digs pretty deep into the vault. A lot of the kids that pile in to hear the band are generally too young to have a point of reference.

"Most of the time, unless they're told, people don't know we're doing covers," says Nagy. The Cobras have penned a few righteous originals, but Nagy defends the course they've taken as more befitting the music, more reverential.

It was the spring of 1994 and The Detroit Cobras were already together, churning out lowdown, lo-fi rock 'n' soul, but just couldn't seem to fill the singer slot. The band approached Rachel Nagy, who immediately refused and dismissed it as "a real stupid idea."

"Finally," she says. "You know the old story; they just got me drunk enough to do it. It was fun and I thought it was just silly. But when it came to actually playing a show and stuff like that - much less recording - I was like, ‘Wait a minute, I didn't sign up for that.' When I first heard my voice recorded come back to me I just wanted to cry. I was like ‘What am I doing?"'

Nagy grew up in Detroit, where black soul, blues, and r&b were as much a part of life as the poverty, mean streets, and rides rolling off the assembly line. You can hear it all in her voice.

"What comes out comes out naturally," she says. "There's probably some natural emulation too, growing up with that music all around you."

Despite her initial reluctance, Nagy already had a foundation in the music. It was all around her, even at home. "It was very blue collar," she says. "People didn't have money to go out. So there're early memories of my parents' house parties and people's legs dancing while I sat under the table drinking a soda.

"We could sit down and try to write songs," she says. "We could also do what everybody does and rip things off real easily. It's like a copy of a copy of a copy and after a while it starts to get faded and horrible. So it's like, ‘Wait a minute, let's just go back and do the old stuff, the real stuff and glorify that instead of copying it, doing a bad job, and calling it ours.'"

But no matter how hard the band tries to be true there is still a ragged newness and appeal that gives classics by Solomon Burke or Irma Thomas or Hank Ballard or Otis Redding a salacious spike. That's what soul does, that's what soul needs. It's not to be contained nor done the same way twice. Nobody today sings like Nagy. Nobody sang like her heroes, either.

"Obviously Irma Thomas," she says when asked about her idols. "She's pretty much my figurehead, my godhead. And early Tina Turner; you know, when it was Ike and Tina." Nagy then makes some controversial remarks about the Turners, arguing that, for the sake of her artistic integrity, Tina never should have left the man she considers a musical genius, even given his well-documented abusive behavior. "When she left him... her songs are bullshit," she says. "Yeah, she did better than ever with them, but let's face it, those songs are stupid. ‘Private Dancer'? F**k you. That's not why God gave you that voice.'"