Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir (32 page)

The next day was the press conference. I had on my new look, with red and blue and black jeans from Trash and Vaudeville and my Edie Sedgwick eyes. It was a new me. I was so excited about starting this new chapter of my career—Cyndi as an indie.

Everyone was really nice to us, except I had no idea that homosexuality was illegal in Romania at that time. So during the interview
when they asked, “So you fight for gay rights?” I said, “You’re damn right I do,” and I just started going on about how I think everyone should be afforded civil rights. That caused quite a stir in the room.

While I was doing sound check I told the monitor guy, who was gaping at me like I was nuts, that he had to turn up the guitar, and quick. I was saying, “Come on, come on, you have to do it
now.
” I made him cry. I’m not kidding. If you’re going to cry, don’t take the fucking gig, because it’s not easy. I liked him a lot, but there’s no crying in monitors. (There will always be glitches in my whole “learning to communicate” thing. I do a lot of “I shoulda said this, I shoulda said that,” but I’m still on the path of learning.)

In the meantime, my manager was about to get beat up by this big fuckin’ Transylvanian woman who was managing the Romanian Elvis performing before me. This stupid guy played music that sounded like oldies, but it wasn’t even cool, like the Stray Cats or anything interesting. But the people of that country probably loved it. We got through it though, even though Elvis decided to eat up a lot of the time. I sang a few songs, including “She Bop.”

By the way, if you listen to the very end of “She Bop,” you’ll hear that Michael Jackson took the bass line and wrote “Bad” from it. Right before he went in to record “Bad” he sat behind me on an airplane with Emmanuel Lewis and he was listening to “She Bop.” Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I’m very flattered he even thought of that. Nobody was promoting me like they did him. I was also a little jealous of him—he was on Epic. But they treated him so badly. He had a lot of pressure on him and when all the press about the molestation came out the record company really distanced themselves from him—everyone did. I don’t know what his private life was like but he was always sweet to me. Then of course when he died the record company was like, “Yay, Michael.” They were drooling over all the money that they were going
to make because all his records jumped to the top of the charts, just like Whitney Houston’s.

Anyway, when we finished the songs and got offstage, we discovered that everything in our greenroom was taken. Everything was gone. It was like that old expression, “Here’s your hat—what’s your hurry?” Then the Romanian airplane that we took made an unexpected landing at a military base in the country to get some fuel. It wasn’t first-class—it was low-class. It was a Fred Flintstone flight from hell. But it was a funny moment, and we laughed a lot. And you know what? We saw the country, and I bought a few glass vases.

Back in the US I did a lot of in-store appearances for
Shine,
which I loved. I met so many people and heard sad stories from sick vets who were coming back from the Gulf War. I tried so hard to sell CDs and to sign as many autographs as I could. The weird thing about in-stores is that it’s hard to sign fast enough. You want to shake everyone’s hand, to take a picture, make a connection, and be a human being, but the store managers want you in and out of there in an hour or two. But that’s impossible. If there are five hundred people, then you’re going to be there for three hours.

I always love meeting people, but I miss my family so much when I’m away. I feel like Willy Loman sometimes. I get this feeling of despair, and it gets harder as I get older. It’s funny, my keyboard player Archie “Hubbie” Turner says he wants to do a reality show called
The Old and the Useless
because when you get older in this business, you start to feel useless. But you’re so not. When I first saw Hubbie perform live, I kept saying, “I hope that young kid is easy and good to work with.” It turns out he was older than all of us! He was sixty-five. He gets through life in a magical way. He’s a lucky bastard. I think that everyone you meet and see has some magic and I’m always interested to understand what that magic is. I know Allen Toussaint, who
played on my blues album, has magic; I know that my guitar player has magic; I know all the musicians I play with have a certain magic about them; and I know my family has a magical quality about them. So I do live a really charmed and magical life—it’s just that some days I forget to take that in because I can’t see it, or I’m busy looking at something else.

And even though I complain about how busy my manager keeps me all the time, at least after all these years I’m still singing, and I’m still viable.
Bring Ya to the Brink
was nominated for a Grammy.
At Last
was nominated for a Grammy in 2003—although not for singing, which it should have been, but for arrangement. I don’t read music for instrumental parts. I arrange by ear. I listen; I know what I want. Sometimes I’ll tell somebody to play a completely different song but to change the chords to the chords of the song that we’re playing. And they look at me like I have two heads at first. I’ve gotten savvy with explaining to people now that I have an odd way of working so they need to bear with me. I have always believed that music is like cooking—you take a little bit of spice from this cabinet and that cabinet and you mix it all together and see what you got.

Anyway, after
Shine,
Lisa kept thinking about how the record-company people said that I wasn’t a producer and that the only way they’d sign me is if I did what they wanted. Like Clive Davis said, “Do I think she’s wonderful? Yes I do. Will she ever do what I want her to do? No.” So Lisa said, “Cyn, nobody really understands that you arrange music. Why don’t you arrange some classic songs
and
interpret them? This can be about arrangement and interpretation—let them hear the singer you are.” I said okay. And believe it or not, I went back to Sony, because they had that idea along with Lisa. There was one guy I kind of really liked there named David Massey, and I signed because of him. I figured, better the devil you know. But when I first
met with him, he wanted to hear a tape of what I would do. I said to him, “You want a demo? I’ve been doing this for twenty years, and you want a demo?” But that’s their protocol. They had to put a lot of money up and blah, blah, blah.

When I realized they wanted demos I figured, “Oh, I better find a song to do a circus trick in, because that’s the only way they’ll do this.” So I went and thought about songs that had influenced me when I was younger and influenced the way I heard music. Although “At Last” was not a song that I had originally picked. It seemed like one of those songs that everybody and their mother sang.

So I started thinking about it and I remembered when I was a kid and used to wait for the A train on Liberty Avenue and 104th Street to go to school. I remember a poster in the train station of this beautiful black woman with blonde hair, Etta James. And I used to stand and look at it, and at the other women on the platform all dressed up to go into Manhattan. If you lived in Queens, Manhattan was the mecca—the mecca of style, the mecca of art, everything was in Manhattan. It was your dream. So everyone who went to work in Manhattan dressed differently. (This was around the time I was studying fashion, because I was going to the High School of Fashion Industries.) They stood differently, too. It didn’t look like they were staying in Queens, where all the mothers were going to the A & P supermarket—it was like these women were going to the
city.
Watching them, I felt this otherworldly thing like I always did. Like I said, I’ve always had one foot on this planet and one foot . . . I don’t know, somewhere else, that enabled me to see things and feel things like that. And I was also painting at the time, so it all looked like a painting. Sounds are like a painting to me, too—the clotheslines in my neighborhood sounded like music, with the sheets flapping in the wind. Or the pigeons flying overhead, that sounded like music, or the mothers
calling their children from a distance, planting their feet firmly down and yelling around the corner, and you’d think you heard your name so you’d go running home.

So when I interpreted “At Last,” I tried to put all of that into the music and then I remembered how you could feel the sway of the train’s trestles when it was approaching, so I asked my accompanist and the person I arranged the music with, Steve Gaboury, to re-create that feel with the rhythms because piano is a rhythm instrument. It almost seemed that he breathed with the piano—in and out to the rhythm of the trestles that moved against the wind as the train came into the station. And at that point I stepped off the platform to sing the first line of the song.

I just kept singing and he just kept playing. And at the end of the song, I did the circus trick by holding a big note out for a long time so that the record company guys would say, “Oh yes, she can sing, let’s sign her.”

I also did “Walk on By” and “Unchained Melody,” which were very popular when I was a kid. All these songs were covered by a multitude of artists, so I figured the only way that people would hear my interpretation was if I rediscovered them and found a new soul, a new path, a new story within the story. Which is always how you should interpret a song: What’s the story? Where are you? What’s around you? Is it cold? Is it hot? Is it nighttime? Is it daytime? And what just happened? This is the storyline you start from. When I was a young girl looking at the Etta James poster, it was the time of Janis Joplin, and I saw Janis Joplin and the hippies and the juxtaposition of these two cultures in a swirl, rock and raw blues and a changing culture.

And listeners will feel the story, whether they’re aware of it or not. Because a lot of this wasn’t overt and spelled out—it was an interior rhythm that I needed to connect to. In that space, a story has
more richness and an otherworldly quality. And instead of singing out where everyone else would sing out, I would sing in. And where they would sing in, I would sing out. Then I would wrap my head around the story of whatever spirit was coming to me. When singing ballads I always feel that you have to turn yourself inside out and most of my work on
At Last
was a combination of singing with power and revisiting the power of a whisper.

Every sound is a character. The story of “Walk on By,” which I told before I would sing it live, was that there was this young girl in my neighborhood who became pregnant when she was twelve and wound up raising the kid alone. Her boyfriend went on to other things but her life was radically changed and she was not prepared financially or educated enough to really provide for herself and a child. Her life stopped right where she was and she began a totally different life that had less financial opportunity and less educational opportunity.

I was so glad that Russ Titelman, who has worked with everyone you can think of, from Eric Clapton to George Harrison, was the producer. I knew that Russ would understand this stuff, because a long, long time before that, he sent me this old Richard Rogers–Lorenz Hart song “Little Girl Blue,” by Nina Simone. In the beginning she does a bit from the Christmas carol “Good King Wenceslas.” This, too, is all interior—it’s very quiet and almost stark. Because Christmas is the saddest time for a lot of people, and the loneliest. That kind of thinking colored my version of “La Vie en Rose.”

That whole album was a story about the women in my life. There was one housewife in the neighborhood who was very large. I would see her when I worked in my grandmother’s garden, which was surrounded by those metal fences that squared off your piece of land. You can see through and look straight down and see other people’s backyards. It was the most amazing thing to see all those people during
their daily struggles and joys. So this heavyset woman would make her spaghetti sauce on Sunday, and I could smell it from my grandmother’s garden. While it cooked she sat on a little chair with her accordion and played “Volare,” to the point where I would think, “Oh my God, I’m going to kill myself.” The bat wings on her heavy arms swung back and forth as she squeezed the bellows of the accordion, and later, when I was an adult, I realized that
“volare”
means “to fly” and it all came together. This was a woman with a life of toil who found joy playing a song about her heart taking flight while her bat wings followed. And all those metaphors from
The Old Man and the Sea
came back to me.

So these kinds of images came up a lot for me when I was making the
At Last
album (although I couldn’t sing “Volare” because that would have really killed me). I felt strongly that I wanted to tell these stories through the orchestration and arrangements of the songs chosen for the album. When Russ played “Stay” for me, I remembered being at my older cousin Linda’s house, in her bedroom listening to her 45s. She played “Stay,” along with a lot of Four Seasons and songs sung by girls with girlish voices, like Lesley Gore. Meanwhile Linda’s mom, my aunt Gloria, and the other grown-ups would be listening to Latin music, cha-cha music that had these wild album covers with women wearing fishnets and colorful lipstick. And if I stood in the middle of the house, maybe in the kitchen toasting marshmallows on the stove, I would hear a song that was like “Stay” playing over a Latin rhythm. It was basically a mash-up, before its time.

That whole period when I was growing up in Queens and visiting my aunt on Long Island was filled with Italian music, and women wearing muumuus in the day and cocktail dresses and cha-cha heels at night. And in the backyards they’d have middle-class garden parties that were lavish to us, because they would have a stereo blasting out the bedroom window filling the yard with music. If it was a special occasion
like a birthday party at my aunt Gloria’s, they’d hang out Chinese lamps. We lived large in a way that people who
really
live large don’t—there’s a spice, a richness, a joy that working-class people have. And even though we were kind of products of misery, we still had a vibrance.