Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir

by Lauper, Cyndi

  Nonsingers don’t know what it takes to sing. They were all making fun of me as I did my vocal exercises. I was like, “You stupid idiots, if only you knew a few exercises yourself, your voices would be so much better.” The problem is some of the other contestants were wannabes who did nothing with their lives. I could never take a backseat and not do anything. It would drive me crazy.

  And pretty quickly it started to get a little like high school. I had always been an outsider, and I just had to get used to it again. When Maria, the WWE wrestler, suddenly started turning her back to me, I kept thinking, “Why don’t you go fuck yourself?” Which is what the people running the show wanted me to think, so that we’d start fighting, because that stuff is compelling. Nobody wants to watch a show where everybody gets along, right? Even I got drawn in when I watched it—and I knew what was going to happen. I started watching to see what I looked like on TV, and I thought, “Jeez, I thought my hair was good, I thought my taste was good.” Everything that I do is an illusion of how I’d like to look—not how I actually look. That’s why I get along with drag queens, because I am one.

  I had so much fun with Sharon Osbourne, who I adore, but the rest of the girls were two-faced. So I started to lose my stomach for it pretty quickly. And that Victoria’s Secret model, Selita Ebanks, was really sweet to me. When I was trying to help make over that young country singer, Emily West, in one of the challenges, all the others on my team were putting their two cents in, and they didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. I was like, “Do you care about this kid, or do you not care?” They didn’t care—they were just interested in what came out of their own mouths. When Maria the wrestler was talking to Emily West about how to do interviews, she said, “When I do press, they want to know, do I shave there or do I not?” I looked at her and just wanted to say, “Listen, Miss Thing, if you think I’m going to sit here and tell that kid how to do an interview by talking about if her pussy is shaved or not, you are out of your freakin’ mind. This is about music and integrity—not about that.”

  I was a little leery about Donald Trump because he had traumatized Rosie O’Donnell’s kids by saying bad things about their mother. When you do that, the kids don’t understand. What changed my mind about him was that not only was he nice to me, he was nice to other people, and his kids were good and hardworking. And the fact that he included them in the show was significant.

  I loved performing “Just Your Fool” on the finale and dancing on the desk. There I was on national TV calling attention to the lack of civil rights in the gay community. NBC kept trying to change what I said. When I was on TV for the finale, though, I said what I wanted, and they couldn’t cut it cause it was live. I thought to myself, “Go on, try and edit this out now.”

  Just for the record, I didn’t feel like I was unfairly voted off. I kind of committed hara-kiri because looking at actress Holly Robinson Peete was so paralyzing for me. She was fighting to get funds for autism, a condition her son had. And when it’s a mother and a son, it just gets me right here—I automatically think about my mom with her kids and that time when my mom sang to my brother when she was in a hopeless situation that day in the bathroom.

  When we did the challenge of decorating the apartment on the episode that ended in my departure, it would have been very simple for me to beat out Holly by saying, “Yes, Holly, you chose the color red for the celebrity room of the apartment, which everyone liked, but you also chose that seafoam green, or what I would call a ‘puce green,’ for the master bedroom.”

  The situation with Bret Michaels became very comical. When he decorated that apartment, he kept bringing so much stuff that I felt like I was in a Marx Brothers movie, like A Night at the Opera. Every time I’d turn around, there was another big object coming into the room. I was like, “No, Bret, no, no, no.” But it was interesting to watch everyone. There’s no way to be graceful on that show.

  When I was voted off, I wore a scarf and dark glasses and red lipstick because I wanted to look like a very old-time Hollywood movie star. As I left the building, I thought, “Walk tall, put your shoulders back, be very Grace Kelly, and walk into the car very Kim Novak.”

  But in the end, I made my point. I got to talk about civil rights for LGBTs on national TV—that was pretty big. And we raised $45,000 for the True Colors Fund, which is the most important thing.

  That show taught me that people don’t really change a lot unless life provides them with a gift of understanding, which can come through a gift of misfortune early on. And through your life you can make a better life and better choices because you got that lesson already.

  And I learned something else, too—waitressing still wasn’t my cup of tea.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I WANTED TO DO a blues album for six years, but when I finally did, it was good timing, because it seemed to me like everywhere I looked, everybody was singing the blues. People were losing their jobs, their homes, and all over the world, hard times had hit.

  This time around, the album was going to be on my own label imprint, so I could actually do what I knew was right. I met the producer Scott Bomar through Josh Deutsch, who was head of the label I partnered up with for the album. It just so happened that Josh knew a lot about the blues. Scott was making some noise with a blues revival and I could look him up online. So I did. He looked like a nice guy. He had produced the soundtrack for the Bernie Mac movie Soul Men and had worked with Willie Mitchell. Willie had really been the godfather of Memphis soul. He made the Al Green and Ann Peebles records in the seventies. In fact, he made all the music coming out of Memphis back then. Now I work with his stepson Archie “Hubbie” Turner in my band.

  When Scott told me about some of the Memphis session musicians that could work with me on the CD, I jumped. They were all members of the original Hi Records rhythm section. So I went down to his studio in Memphis for a couple of days to see how this whole thing would work. Scott is the sweetest guy you’ll meet, but he’s also indirect, which is not what I am. In fact that’s how most Southerners are—they’re not up in your face, they have an air of politeness. So here I came, the bull in the china shop.

  Before I even met Scott I had been compiling songs. Once with Rick Chertoff, then by myself, then with everyone sending me songs they loved, and then with Michael Alago, who came down with Lisa and Bill and myself to Memphis.

  At that time I was still battling vocal problems. I had discovered two days before Christmas that I had a polyp. If you stop singing and speaking, the polyps will sometimes go down. Mine did not. I was really crushed because just like the first time I lost my voice, I felt like, “How can I live, or even breathe, without my voice?” I think what finished my voice was when I was on a float in the Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York, and I decided to shout “Happy Thanksgiving” to everyone from Seventy-first Street to Thirty-fourth Street before I sang on TV. (I know—I got shit for brains sometimes.)

  Before I recorded the blues album, I still had to complete songs for Kinky Boots, so I just wrote with whatever voice I had. My dear friend Howard came with me to the doctor the day I found out about the polyp. Howard has struggled with his health, and always with courage, so I wouldn’t let myself feel self-pity.

  To help with the polyp, I started working with a speech therapist named Barbara Lowenfels because I had to learn how to speak without squeezing my vocals together and forgetting to breathe. That was the first step. Then when I did the MAC AIDS campaign with Lady Gaga, Barbara was right there with me, reminding me to keep my shoulders back and take pauses to breathe so I wouldn’t injure myself more. It was a little out of the ordinary to have her behind the camera during an interview, coaching me. And of course this was a little weird for Lisa, my manager. She kept saying, “You’re kidding, right?” But bless Barbara, she helped me and I am grateful.

  After two months, I was given the okay to start singing lightly again by Dr. Peak Woo, the infamous “Dr. Wu” from the Steely Dan song. And then I went
back to Katie Agresta, my vocal teacher, who has helped me back on my feet each time I’ve fallen down. We started from what felt like scratch. Something like this is caused by being so tired and doing so much that you develop bad habits, and sometimes you don’t even realize what’s happening to you till it’s too late. My polyp is now gone but I still have to deal with reflux, which I’m starting to fix. Okay, that was just a backstory—now back to Memphis.

  I knew I wanted to do the Memphis Slim song “Mother Earth.” I thought Allen Toussaint would be great on it. I met Allen when I sang at the Hurricane Katrina benefit with him at Madison Square Garden in 2006. A ton of folks were there, from Elvis Costello to Bruce Springsteen, to the wonderful Irma “Soul Queen of New Orleans” Thomas. I got to sing with her and the Dixie Cups and it was a real thrill. The producers wanted me to sing an old song called “I Know (You Don’t Love Me No More)” for the benefit. And I said, “I’m playing with Allen Toussaint—shouldn’t I do one of his great songs?” I thought maybe I could do a mash-up of two songs to celebrate him, so I found his song called “Last Train” that went really well with “I Know You (Don’t Love Me No More.)” I didn’t want to do a medley, though; I wanted to figure out a way to play the two songs over each other. If it worked, it might be really something. I figure you gotta try for the challenge instead of the safe way all the fuckin’ time. I mean, there was Allen Toussaint! And he kept saying, “I find this very adventuresome.” I respect him so much. I’ve always thought, “If you’re gonna do television, try your hardest to do something that’s real.” Because most stuff on TV is rehearsed to the last possible moment, so that nothing magically unpredictable can happen. Like when I did the Jools Holland show last New Year’s Eve, they had all these big arrangements planned, so I said, “Can I just play with strings, and the dulcimer, and maybe that guy over there could play the tin whistle?” You want to always try something different, something where even you don’t know what’s going to happen, and then you either hear the magic or you don’t. And with Allen, that night, I think it worked out. After that, we wanted to work together if we ever could, but when he did a CD, I wasn’t available for it.

  During the last go-around to figure out the song material I would take to Memphis, I worked with Michael Alago, my computer, and some Chinese takeout in my kitchen. Michael, who I knew for years in the industry, was a great A & R person. All the songs were chosen because of their spirit, their story, and their timeless theme of history repeating itself. Here was great American music created by people who were oppressed and who wrote music that was uplifting.

  Ya know, even though it’s called the blues, you feel better somehow listening to it. I wanted to take the old glamour of this music but also make it into something that could be embraced now. I am always hoping to make music that is timeless. And the blues—well, that’s timeless. I remember the thing that Sony was afraid of way back when was that it was going to sound like a heritage record, which was never my intention. And I was just grateful to make this music without a lot of fuckin’ grief from a company struggling to survive.

  I had two songs I wanted to try first in Memphis, a Lil Green song called “Romance in the Dark” (the singer and pianist Michael Feinstein recommended I listen to it after he watched a True Colors cabaret show that I did at his club) and the Tracy Nelson song “Down So Low,” which I had sung on and off in 2004. I knew I had found the right band for the project: Lester Snell on keys, Howard Grimes on drums, Leroy Hodges on bass, and Skip Pitts on guitar.

  So we tried out “Down So Low” and “Romance in the Dark” with the band. When the players heard the 1930s recording of “Romance in the Dark,” of course they were wondering what the arrangement might be. I said to them, “Please just learn the chords, I will arrange it as I go.” It is frightening to tell this to folks who like to structure everything before the “singer” gets there. But I wanted this to be live—really live. So I kept saying to Scott that everything else would come together as we played. I just needed to sing with them for a minute first. I heard Skip, the guitarist who played that wonderful riff on the Shaft record, call what I was doing “head arrangements” and I thought, “Yeah, that’s right.”

  I brought Allen Toussaint in early the first day he was at the studio, and I worked out the arrangements with the special artists as they came in. It was really the opposite from what Howard, the drummer, said Uncle Willie (Mitchell) did. Everyone in Memphis was influenced by this brilliant man. But even though I hadn’t known him, or studied under him, like Scott, I knew his work. I grew up singing it and loved it. And I had some reliable ears with me who provided checks and balances, like Bill Wittman, who recorded my first album and has worked with me pretty much ever since. I also had Lisa there, who is my third eye.

  When the band came in I let Allen start directing because of his venerable track record, and because I thought maybe he spoke the band’s language more than I did. And Scott was cool with that, too. But Howard, who had just gotten used to taking his cues from me, got concerned and started asking why it changed. I thought the whole band would feel more comfortable with that, but I guess I was wrong.

  After we did the first two songs to try the band out, Howard the drummer came up to Lisa and said, “I hear Cyndi is very popular. I heard she did a cover of a Miles Davis tune, and she had some big hits, but I’m not familiar with her music.” So Lisa said, “Oh, I bet you are—did you ever hear the song ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’?” He said no, and Lisa said, “How about ‘True Colors’?” And he said, “No, I’m not familiar with those jams, but I hear she’s real popular.” I thought it might be good that he didn’t know my work—no preconceived notions.

  But everybody was very nice and generous to me. When we worked on those two songs together in that initial meeting, I knew it was going to work. We really jelled.

  I think once we all felt the center of the music, we relaxed. The center of the music is the gravity of it for me. It’s where I stand with the drums in the center of a song. It feels like the drums are my dance partner, and from there I listen very closely to find an interior motion within the music. I listen to hear and feel what all the instruments are creating in between and around what the drums and I are doing together.

  The way I see it is that each musical phrase creates a weight on whatever side of the center of the rhythm you put it: the center of the rhythm being the drums. The bass needs to support the drums, but the best bass parts, for me, also lead the melody. Distributing the musical parts creates a balance within the song. And that’s the fun part for me. It makes the song sway one way or the other, like a subtle push and pull around the drums and the singer. None of this is new, of course, even though every time I figure out how to make a song breathe like that, I feel like I’ve reinvented the wheel.

  I learned the idea of this when I studied with a teacher named Betty Scott. She was supposed to be my introduction to studying with Lennie Tristano, the great jazz pianist. But I never got that far. I couldn’t quit my rock band. I loved rock and roll too much. But what Betty taught me shaped the way I sang and constructed a song for the rest of my life.

  She taught me how to listen when I sang. To work on my timing, I sang to a metronome. Then she’d blow into a pitch pipe and ask me to sing the note she played. Then she went over intervals with me by blowing a note into a pitch pipe and asking me to sing the fifth or the third of the note, to help me develop an understanding of harmony and an ear for what other instruments were playing around me. To further help me understand this, she had me study the recordings of Billie Holiday with the great saxophonist Lester Young, specifically how Billie responded to what Lester played, and how Lester responded to what Billie sang. After singing with them note for note and breath for breath for almost two years, I felt I could begin to understand how to sing in the center of a song like Billie and answer the way Lester would answer.

  My whole style and arrangement approach is kind on based of the simplicity of that approach. I
kept it in mind when I arranged “Time After Time” and “True Colors.” That’s why I made them record the track live with the electronic drum, so we could feel the center and what could sway around it.

  Every once and a while, like when I recorded At Last, I could do it blatantly, but never in dance or pop. I always had to sneak in that stuff on those projects. But great blues has all that naturally. So when the opportunity came to sing with some of the greatest blues/soul guys in the business, I jumped. If you listen closely to the song “Mother Earth” on the Memphis Blues CD, you’ll hear that Lester Snell and Allen Toussaint are playing back and forth to each other. You will hear “pure joy,” as Lester put it once, and some fine call-and-response.

  And one more thing I want to tell you about listening to call-and-response. If you are ever are up at dawn and just have a minute, listen to the birds. Sometimes if you can answer one of the whistles right, they’ll kindly let you into their round. If you are open enough, your heart might break open with how sweet they are, and then you’ll hear and feel their rhythm too—until you mess up. When I do they fly away and ditch me.

  I have always loved mixing different styles and genres of music together. I guess it’s like how we used to dress in the eighties: we mixed all the decades of fashion together at once, as my first stylist, Laura Wills, once put it. It took me most of my career to think of saying to the people I work with in the studio, “I do things a little unconventionally sometimes, so please bear with me. It might sound weird at first, but just go with me for a minute, and you’ll hear what I’m hearing.”

  And that’s what I tried to tell these much more seasoned musicians than myself while making Memphis Blues. Because for me, Memphis Blues is a soulful blues which is different from New Orleans style, which has more swing to it. Allen Toussant plays New Orleans style, but the minute he played the hypnotic opening of “Shattered Dreams” the two styles just fell into place. I didn’t have to try and explain anymore to the band; they heard it—that is, until I brought in the guitarist Jonny Lang. Then suddenly, I had two lead guitarists: Jonny and Skip Pitts, whose approaches to the music were completely different. It left me in the position of having to coax them and the band into melding their styles to create this swampy feel to the rhythm that I was envisioning, one that evoked memories of Robert Johnson’s early recording of “Cross Road Blues.”