Sound check in London, Dan Dugmore playing guitar.
12
Getting Restless
MY LIFE HAD SETTLED into a fairly predictable routine. I’d make an album a year, which would take a few months to complete, and the rest of the time we would play one-night stands all over the country. By now my records were selling so well that instead of playing in intimate spaces like the Troubadour, I was being booked into hockey arenas and outdoor pavilions with huge audiences. The sound in those enormous places was kind of like being in a flushing toilet with the lid down. There was so much evil slapback ricocheting off the walls and ringing in the rafters, I’d swear I could still hear the lead guitar solo from the band that had played the week before. Those places were filled with zombie sound that simply refused to die; it just grew dimmer with time. In addition to that, people were milling about, passing joints, and drifting off in search of a hot dog or a cold beer at the concession stands that ringed the upper tiers.
Now, I was both delighted and deeply grateful that the records were selling and people were filling up those horrible-sounding arenas to hear me sing, but I couldn’t help feeling that somehow both the audiences and the performers were getting a raw deal. The audience was getting a sound mix that was so distorted by the acoustics of the building that any delicate passages or musical subtleties were lost. This had a sinister effect on the way we created the music. Since they couldn’t hear anything but loud, high-arching guitar parts and a cavernous backbeat, and because they didn’t want to hold still for anything they hadn’t heard on one of the albums, we began to tailor our recordings, consciously or not, to that big arena sound. This meant that all the really well-crafted and more delicate material, like “Heart Like a Wheel” or “Hasten Down the Wind,” had to be slipped in between something that could survive the onstage acoustics.
I stubbornly hung on to those songs and layered them into the recordings like pills in hamburger. I knew that a melodic ballad was a better vehicle for my voice. It would allow me to mine a much richer emotional vein than what I could get from what I used to call a “short-note song.” By that I meant a kind of uptempo song that a rock band would write to fit over a catchy riff, giving it something to do until the lead guitar player got to play his Big Solo. This kind of approach produced some excellent music from bands like Cream and the Rolling Stones, but even the musicians from those bands would regularly complain that they missed the musical heat of their club days and wished they could play in more musically sympathetic settings. Those boomy arenas hammered all the subtleties out of rock and roll as well and then proceeded to play midwife to the birth of heavy metal.
Since there are always talented players in these emerging categories, no matter how grating they may be to the ear of the more traditionally inclined, I was not surprised when the heavy metal band Metallica achieved a style that was huge and orchestral in its guitar textures, showing itself to be perfectly capable of producing beautiful melodies with unusual, finely constructed harmonies. My son at twelve was a devoted metal shredder, and once, while I was listening to him break down a Metallica song and then reconstruct it on the neck of his own guitar, I mentioned that I thought their stadium-size guitar textures resembled a symphony orchestra. He gave me a look of withering teenage scorn. I was vindicated when Metallica brought out an album it made with the San Francisco Symphony under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas. All this is a long way to demonstrate that musicians reach for a rich acoustical setting like a plant reaches for light, and I was no exception.
Something else that made me sad about the action shifting out of the clubs and into the arenas was the fact that artists didn’t get to see one another perform as much as when the folk rock music scene was centered on L.A.’s Troubadour or New York’s Bitter End. The limited space of the Troubadour put the bathrooms in a back-hall area off the performance space. That meant everyone from the bar had to travel through the room where the stage was in order to visit the plumbing. Even if you were an up-and-coming hopeful hanging out in the bar but too broke to pay the admission fee, you could get a rich sampling of what was happening on the stage every time nature insisted. If you had been hired in the past by owner Doug Weston to play at the Troubadour, you got free admission, so when somebody interesting was playing, we veterans would crowd the staircase and the upstairs balcony night after night to see our favorites. I remember seeing artists like Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, the Flying Burrito Brothers, George Carlin, and Steve Martin play every night of a two-week engagement, two shows a night, and three on Friday and Saturday nights. This way, artists got to see a wider arc of another artist’s talent, and some vigorous cross-pollination of musical styles was the happy result.
Seeing each other’s shows in arenas didn’t happen so naturally. The tickets were way more expensive, which left out the newbies, there was no place to hang out and mix socially, like the Troubadour bar—unless one had rare and privileged access backstage—and parking was a hassle. And then there was lousy sound, so we couldn’t listen and dissect the music like we had been able to do in the smaller settings. In short, it became less likely for the artists to trip over the influence and inspiration of one another than it had been before.
I felt some stagnation setting in, and the relentless touring and endless repetition of the same songs over and over again promoted a creeping awareness that my music had begun to sound like my washing machine.
A promotional tour that took us to Great Britain, Germany, and France in the late 1970s jolted us back into the forgotten reality of what it was like to play in smaller, dedicated music venues. I was not particularly well known in Europe, so we were playing in medium-size theaters with proscenium stages and lots of chubby-faced cherubs in bas-relief cavorting around the walls. The cherubs and other fussy design elements, in addition to delighting my Victorian sensibility, softened the parallel surfaces of the theater walls and sweetened the sound. Finally, the dream I held so dear as a child had materialized: I was singing on a real stage in a real theater with a curtain. I was inspired.
The inspiration was short lived. We were soon back in the USA, pounding the same old circuit in the same distinctly uninspiring arenas. Add to this the gnawing loneliness of life lived perpetually in motion, with not enough time in any one place to nurture relationships or build trust. I was beginning to feel miserable. And trapped.
One night we were playing in Atlanta. We had spent the afternoon fooling around in the little shops that had been established in what is called Underground Atlanta, the recently excavated, fire-charred remains of the pre–Civil War city. Big, smudgy, black-ringed eyes were in style then, and I found what seemed like a particularly exotic way to achieve it in one of the little shops. It was an ancient cosmetic called kohl—new to my experience—which was some kind of black mineral ground into a fine powder, and recently shipped in from India. There was also a blue one, which was a departure for me, but I figured if I couldn’t change my life so easily, I could at least change the color of my eye makeup, so I bought that too. It was packaged in a little clay pot with a pointed wooden stick screwed into the lid to use as an applicator.
I was hot to try it out and went immediately to the dressing room of the place we were playing (another arena) and started to smear the stuff around my eyes. The applicator stick and powdered medium were unfamiliar and clumsy for me to use, and I had accidentally dotted my cheeks with what looked like the blue measles. I finished the job of cleaning off all the little stray blue blobs and wondered what I was going to do for the forty-five minutes until I had to sing. I had finished the book I kept in my purse and was scowling at the concrete floor—wishing we were still in a European theater with cherubs and that I didn’t have to face an all-night drive in the bus after the show—when someone knocked on the door, bringing me out of my little sulk. It was one of the security guards, who handed me a book that someone had sent backstage with a note attached saying that it was something he or she thought I might like. “O
h goody!” I thought. “Now I won’t have to be bored.”
I looked at the cover: The Vagabond, by Colette. “Never heard of this book,” I thought. Never heard of Colette, either. She had just one name. Like Cher.
I opened the book and began to read. The story is set in France in 1910. La Belle Époque! My favorite era! There is a woman about my age who performs in music halls sitting backstage in her dressing room. She is applying blue greasepaint circles around her eyes, and some of it has run down her face. Blue for her too? She also uses kohl. Kohl again! I just heard of the stuff that afternoon.
What else? She is kind of bored. She has already read the book she has with her. She is waiting to go onstage and do her act. She has lost the inspiration to continue in her career as “a woman of letters” and is trying to establish herself as “a woman on the stage.” Things are not going as well as they could, and she knows that she is “in for a bad fit of the blues.” She is thinking about her dog and her kind-of-awkward boyfriend whom she misses somewhat. There is a knock on her door …
I have a beloved Akita dog and an awkward boyfriend somewhere. I feel that I’m “in for a bad fit of the blues.” I can relate!
I finished the book that night on the long bus ride. I started to ponder: How can I work in a more theatrical setting, in smaller theaters, and not a different place every night?
13
Meeting Joe Papp
Photo by Martha Swope.
With Joe Papp backstage at the New York Public Theater during La Bohème.
I PICKED UP THE next available phone and called my pal John Rockwell in New York to whine about my predicament. John wrote about music for The New York Times for more than thirty years and is one of the rare critics who can write with equal authority about both classical music and contemporary pop music. We met in 1973, when he came to my apartment on Beachwood Drive in the Hollywood Hills to interview me. He noticed that I had a book on my shelf called Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s, by Otto Friedrich. (Yes, I lent the book to Jackson Browne, who wrote a good song with the same title. This is done frequently and is legal. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, the title of a 1966 science-fiction novel by Robert Heinlein, comes immediately to mind. The great songwriter Jimmy Webb loved the title and appropriated it for a song that I later sang on my album Get Closer.) Before the Deluge was about the Weimar Republic in Germany, just as Hitler was coming to power, and all the missed opportunities that might have stopped him. I had become fascinated with the tragedy of this era, as well as the glamour of prewar Berlin, the architectural innovation, the declining importance of virgin brides (no dowries in a bad economy), the gender-bending clothing styles, the hair and makeup styles, and the wonderful music (Kurt Weill, the Comedian Harmonists). David Bowie was beginning to experiment with one exotic image after another, and in the mid-1970s his look seemed eerily similar to that earlier time. I wondered then if we were heading into our own little version of the Weimar Republic here in the United States, to be followed by the harsh realities of fascism and aggressive imperialism.
Rockwell, who lived in Germany as a child, earned his PhD in German cultural history, and wrote his thesis on the Weimar Republic, is a fountain of information, and we bonded. The day I called him to complain so bitterly about my stagnant state of mind and need for angels in the architecture of my place of employment, he suggested that the next time I came to New York, he would like to take me to meet a fellow named Joe Papp. “Who is Joe Papp?” I asked. Joe Papp, intoned Rockwell, was a brilliant theater man who had revolutionized the interpretation of Shakespeare by insisting it be made accessible across cultural, economic, and social lines, using racially diverse casts and presenting it to the public at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park for free. He also was not afraid to bring in people from other areas of show business. Maybe he had some ideas about what to do with me.
The next time I found myself in New York, Rockwell found a hole in his very busy schedule that corresponded to a hole in Joe Papp’s even busier schedule and took me in a taxi to the New York Public Theater in Lower Manhattan. I still was not very knowledgeable about Papp, and had no idea that he had helped launch a staggering number of fabulous careers, including those of George C. Scott, Meryl Streep, James Earl Jones, Martin Sheen, and Wallace Shawn, and shows such as Hair and A Chorus Line.
Joe Papp was brilliant and compelling. I don’t say this lightly. I could count on one hand the number of men I have met who exuded his magnetism and competence. There was also his thoughtful, curious, and boundlessly informed intelligence, which could have the effect of a wild tiger at the end of a frayed leash. He listened very politely to my lunatic raving about Colette and wanting to sing on a stage with a curtain, and then went about the rest of his day meeting with the long line of people of infinitely greater ability and importance than me. I doubt that he gave our meeting a second thought.
In 1979 the city cut Papp’s funding for presenting Shakespeare in Central Park that summer—something he had been doing since 1962—and he was angry about it. He decided he wouldn’t do Shakespeare that summer. Instead, he would put on Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta The Mikado. He asked the acclaimed director and playwright Wilford Leach to direct it, but Leach didn’t like Gilbert and Sullivan and said he didn’t think he wanted to do it. But, since Papp was very keen on the idea, Leach went to a record store to buy a copy of The Mikado and, for some reason, came home instead with a copy of The Pirates of Penzance. This he decided he did like, but he thought that the traditional way of performing it was too stiff. Leach wanted to approach it like a brand-new play. Since Gilbert and Sullivan was the pop music of its time, he decided he wanted to use contemporary pop singers from our time.
Leach liked to watch the Today show when he woke up in the morning. Coincidentally, John Rockwell had a monthly slot on the program, talking about music. While Leach was in the process of casting Pirates, he saw Rockwell on Today, talking about me.
Leach liked my voice and decided that I was the person he wanted to cast in the role of Mabel, the soprano ingénue. He went into Papp’s office to tell him his idea, and Papp said, “I’ve met her; she wants to work here.” He asked his assistant to call me at home in Malibu.
The call came while I was upstairs taking a shower. Jerry Brown was sitting downstairs next to the phone, so he answered it. Jerry had seen H.M.S. Pinafore when he was in school, and that was what he remembered of Gilbert and Sullivan, so when I came downstairs, he told me that someone named Joe Papp had called and he wanted me to sing in Pinafore. I was delighted! During the time that my sister had sung the alto role of Buttercup all those years ago when I was six, I had learned the soprano part of Josephine out of the big book of Gilbert and Sullivan that sat on our piano at home, and I loved her songs. I burst into a chorus of “Refrain Audacious Tar” and then started to sing the little heartbroken ballad “Sorry Her Lot.” This one was my favorite, and I couldn’t believe I might have a chance to sing it!
I picked up the phone and called Joe Papp immediately. I told him I would love to sing Pinafore. I was a little disappointed when he said that it was Pirates, because I had never learned those songs, and I wasn’t sure that I would like them as much. He assured me that Pirates had a wealth of lovely songs for Mabel to sing, and if I wanted the part, it was mine. I then insisted that I should fly back to New York and audition for them, since I wanted to be sure that he and the director would be happy with the way I would sing it. I didn’t want any unpleasant surprises.
During the flight to New York, I was fretting about my appearance. I was growing my hair out from the really short cut that I’d worn on the cover of Mad Love, my most recent record, and the back of my hair was streaked with big chunks of cyclamen pink. It was the beginning of the eighties, and we were just starting to experiment with the wildly unnatural hair colors that I remember first seeing in their most prescient splendor in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. I made the mistake of combining the extreme color
process with a permanent to make my straight hair curly like Nicolette’s, and my hair simply broke off. The stringy bits that were left made me look like a Polish Crested chicken. I cut them off with my sewing scissors, leaving a mess that my regular hairdresser was unable to repair.
Many actress friends had told me that when they read for a part, they dressed up to resemble the character they were trying to portray. The Pirates of Penzance was set in Victorian times. I collected antique clothes and had some very pretty white lace Victorian summer frocks in my closet, but it was early spring and too cold in New York to wear them, so I walked into one of the rehearsal halls at the Public Theater in cowboy boots, jeans, sweater, and short pink hair. I didn’t look very Victorian. Joe Papp was there and introduced me to Wilford Leach and music director Bill Elliott. I liked them both immediately, and that never changed.
I still had never seen a score or heard a recording of Pirates, which they advised was unnecessary until they decided whether to perform the pieces in the original keys or to shift to other keys to accommodate the pop singers. I didn’t like the idea of changing keys, as it can make the sound of the orchestra murky at the very least, but I decided to keep mum until we explored it. We started at the piano, and I asked Bill to show me the highest notes written for Mabel in the score. He played me a D above high C. I was singing the high C in concerts with my band night after night, so I didn’t think the D—one note up the scale—would be a problem. In the show, I wound up singing Mabel’s “Poor Wandering One” in two keys: the original one, plus a lower key to insert a more contemporary flavor into the interpretation. I had a really high voice with an upper extension that I never got a chance to use much in rock and country except for some little flourishes and embellishments, so it wasn’t as strong as the register where I had been belting “Heat Wave” and “Blue Bayou” all those years. This was going to cause me some trouble, but I didn’t know it yet. Also, Bill wrote me a cadenza (a short ornamental solo passage) to sing in the first act and again at the end of the show that went up to a very high E flat in the nosebleed octave, just like Violetta in La Traviata. With eight shows a week, that would add up to sixteen E flats—something that frail, consumptive Violetta would never dream of attempting in real opera. But I didn’t know that yet either.
Simple Dreams ~ A Musical Memoir Page 11