Julie laughed and said, “I guess you should make some phone calls tomorrow.” By the time I had made them, my publicist already knew. It was in all of the morning papers. It wasn’t a revelation, but it wasn’t expected.
I think The Washington Post ran a story about all of the different inaugural balls, and when it came to the Gay and Lesbian Triangle Ball, I was referenced as butch rocker Melissa Etheridge. All of a sudden I’m a butch rocker. Now that I’ve come out as a lesbian, I’m butch according to the newspaper.
Soon after that, I went back into the studio to make my new album. It was actually quite a traumatic experience. After the underwhelming sales of Never Enough, my record company insisted I get a new producer. I chose Hugh Padgam, who’d had great success with the Police, Sting, and XTC. This forced me into the position of telling Kevin that his days of producing with me were over. Although Hugh did a great job, I felt bad about Kevin. Even more so when the album was partially recorded and the record company again came back to me and said they thought the bass was “weak.” So I had to re-record a number of Kevin’s bass tracks for the album.
At that point, Kevin felt completely cut off from the process and decided that he couldn’t play with me anymore. Fritz was his friend, so he felt the need to follow Kevin out of the band.
There I was, finishing a new album, about to tour, and I didn’t have a band. Luckily, I ran into an old friend, John Shanks, at a benefit. John’s a brilliant guitarist; I’d worked with him years earlier. Our collaboration didn’t work out then, but he had clearly changed. He’d made some choices in his life and was much more open to the idea of working wholeheartedly with me. When I offered him the opportunity to tour with me, he loved the idea. He helped me find my drummer, Kenny Aronoff, and my bassist, Mark Browne, and all three of them play with me to this day.
After I’d recorded all the songs for the new album, I thought back to the one that had been dropped from Never Enough. “Yes, I Am.” Having just come out, I re-recorded the song and thought, “Well, why don’t we just name the album Yes I Am, even though the song is not about my coming out or being gay. It’s a song about how I was feeling toward Julie. The words are really strong and declarative. “Am I your passion, your promise, your end? Yes I am.” It was just about my commitment to Julie—about our love, about my relationship. Am I possessive and obsessive and all these things I talk about in that song? I say I am.
After outing myself so publicly, I wanted the title of the album to be a positive, self-affirming statement. Yes I Am. Owning it. Yes, this is what I am. Yes, I am. That’s how I was feeling. I was finally feeling, yes, this is what I am. Even the photos for the Yes I Am album were reflective of who I am and of me being more like me. Some of the photos on Never Enough were an attempt to look more glamorous, which was so far away from how I naturally feel good about myself. I like being in jeans and T-shirts and I don’t wear a lot of makeup. Yes I Am was my return to the core of who I am. It felt real. It felt very whole. This is who I am, and the songs on that album are really strong pieces of me.
Once I had come out, k.d. and I bugged the crap out of Ellen DeGeneres. We were always trying to get her to come out. For me, it had only been a matter of time before I was outed by a magazine or some other publication. The last article I did before publicly declaring that I am gay was in a magazine called Music Express. The article intimated my sexuality, and I had gotten fed up with hiding it.
When I released Yes I Am, I had to do interviews in every town I played in, which meant that the local newspaper, the college newspaper, television interviewers, and radio interviewers all wanted me to talk about coming out and being queer. I talked about it ten times a day, which was strange at first because I had never talked about it before. I guess it was a new thing after all these years of just kind of speaking ambiguously about everything.
Audiences just went insane after hearing the news that I was a lesbian. It certainly brought more gays out to my concerts. I had a large lesbian following anyway, but once I came out, all of a sudden, the crowds grew and grew and it was insanely wonderful. But I was thrust into a new position—becoming almost a “poster child” for gay and lesbian causes and issues. I never felt like a spokeswoman before coming out. I was just telling a good story through my music. Now I feel like a spokeswoman for gays and lesbians, gay families, and gay divorce. In fact, I think I am better known for who I am as a gay woman than as a musician. That has taken a little getting used to over the years.
The other side of success was that I was out of town constantly. Julie and I had less and less time together. I just toured and toured, the venues getting larger, the crowds getting bigger. There’s such a myth about being on the road. You know, bands trashing hotel rooms, sleeping with groupies. Party until you have to do the show. That was never my road. Mine looked a lot like going to work. And, like anyone at work, I thought about home a lot. Julie and I would talk every night. But, after such a long time on buses and planes with other people, home life seems so distant. And you expect that other person to be the same person you left behind. But that person is growing and changing just like you are. And it’s easy to forget that.
Joy Widmark doing my makeup before a show in Sacramento
© 1996 MELISSA ETHERIDGE/PHOTO BY NICOLE BENGIVENO / MATRIX
Steven Girmant, my tour manager, is always there for me.
© 1996 MELISSA ETHERIDGE/PHOTO BY NICOLE BENGIVENO / MATRIX
Sound check in San Francisco © 1996 MELISSA ETHERIDGE/PHOTO BY NICOLE BENGIVENO / MATRIX
With Bill Leopold, my manager, before a show © 1996 MELISSA ETHERIDGE/PHOTO BY NICOLE BENGIVENO / MATRIX
Being on the road this time created a distance between Julie and me. I couldn’t understand the things she was trying to convey to me from halfway around the world. I couldn’t figure out what it was she wanted from me. I begged her to wait for me to come home so we could deal with things.
It was exactly that sort of miscommunication between us that had caused me to write “Come to My Window.” It’s got to be the most misunderstood song I’ve written. It was one of my biggest hits, but it’s not the love song everyone perceives it to be. This song was so huge that there’s even a Muzak version. “Come to My Window” stayed on the Billboard Top 40 chart longer than any other record at the time.
People seem to think that “Come to My Window” is this tender love song, “Come to my window, crawl inside and wait by the light of the moon. Come to my window. I’ll be home soon.” I still don’t know why it was such a big hit. I just don’t get it because this is a very veiled song. It’s all about the troubles I was having at home. Julie and I were beginning to have such a hard time.
When I was on that tour, I would just call Julie up from wherever I was, and, since it seemed like every conversation would turn into a fight, I would dial the phone long distance and just sit there and listen to her breathe on the other end of the line. I would have done anything not to fight, even if it meant listening to her silence.
Just to reach her and know that she was on the phone gave me hope. I was trying to just get from her an “I love you,” an acceptance. She so represented my mother to me—that same distant and aloof attitude. I could close my eyes and see both of them, my mother closing the door to her bedroom, shutting me out with a book in her hand, and Julie, sitting in our home, reading in the chair in our bedroom. I just felt so left out, so lost and confused.
Metaphorically, I felt as if I couldn’t even walk through our front door at home. Every phone call was a fight. We were not seeing eye-to-eye on anything. We weren’t coming together on anything. We couldn’t agree to meet at the front door, so you know what? Come to my window, just meet me on the other side of the house, you know, and wait, because I’ll be home soon. I was on the road, touring, but it was toward the end of my tour and I kept reminding Julie to hang in there. I’d be coming home soon, and we would work everything out between us. It’s a harshly truthful song that got misconstrued as a love
song. I think Julie had a hard time with it because, to her, it was me saying, “Oh, come on, can’t we just compromise? Can’t you meet me somewhere else, other than what you are thinking?” From what I could see, Julie took the song very personally, hearing that she was supposed to just sit around and wait for me. Maybe she thought that I was trying to say to her, “I know you’re trying to get me to see something. Wait for me. I’ll get there soon.” I don’t think she ever liked it.
COME TO MY WINDOW
Come to my window
Crawl inside, wait by the light of the moon
Come to my window
I’ll be home soon
I would dial the numbers
Just to listen to your breath
I would stand inside my hell
And hold the hand of death
You don’t know how far I’d go
To ease this precious ache
You don’t know how much I’d give
Or how much I can take
Just to reach you
Just to reach you
Oh to reach you
Keeping my eyes open
I cannot afford to sleep
Giving away promises
I know that I can’t keep
Nothing fills the blackness
That has seeped into my chest
I need you in my blood
I am forsaking all the rest
Just to reach you
Just to reach you
Oh to reach you
I don’t care what they think
I don’t care what they say
What do they know about this love anyway?
The response to Yes I Am was incredible. I wasn’t playing theaters anymore, I was headlining arenas now. What a rush it was. Finally, I had made it. Made it by being exactly who I am and what I am. A lesbian rock and roller.
The first time I felt like “Oh, maybe I’m making a difference in the gay and lesbian community” was when I played at Woodstock in the summer of 1994. I was supposed to go on stage right after Henry Rollins and before Nine Inch Nails. There were people as far as I could see. It had just rained during Rollins’s set and the whole field was turning into mud. During my set, the sun came out but I could see a patch of people getting muddier and muddier. During my last song, “Like the Way I Do,” I broke the song down to a tribal-rhythm guitar solo. This whole sea of muddy people started to make their way toward the stage like a big muddy tribe. Their exuberance was infectious; it fed me and I fed them. Just as their dancing broke into a wild frenzy I looked up and saw this one big old rainbow flag waving in the crowd. It was just a huge “Wow!” Something I will never forget. To be up there singing at Woodstock—which always represented our nation’s youth culture, and the fight against the war, and all kinds of protest stuff—and to see gay men and women waving their flag, and nobody beating them up. Nothing bad happened and it was incredible to feel so connected and so full of hope and peace.
One of the glorious things about suddenly being as famous as I was then is that people call you up on the phone and ask you to do really cool things. I got a phone call from MTV. They wanted to do an Unplugged with me. I spoke to one of their producers, and I told him that I wanted to do the show solo because that was where I came from in my career. Just me, unplugged. They agreed, but the producer asked me if there was anybody I wanted to sing with. I hadn’t really thought about that, but my lifelong dream was to sing with Bruce Springsteen, ha-ha. I tell the producer this, half joking, thinking there’s no way that’ll happen, and he says, “All right. Well, we’ll see what we can do.”
Bruce was a HUGE influence on me. The way he wove his life into his music. The way he told his stories. The way he just got up on stage and did it. No opening act, as few barriers as possible between him and his audience. I had always thought of him as one of my heroes, one of those people who had gone before me and had done it right.
My good friends Meg Ryan and Laura Dern visited the studio while I was making Skin.
© 2000 MELISSA ETHERIDGE/PHOTO BY DAVID COLE
Jamming to “Pink Cadillac” with Bruce Springsteen at my show in Milwaukee, 1996
FRANK MICELOTTA /IMAGEDIRECT
Julie, Jann Wenner, John Sykes, and me at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction dinner in New York City, 2000
while k. d. lang and I played for fun at home.
Dermott Mulroney played cello on “Place Your Hand”
The next day, MTV called me back and told me that Bruce said he’d do the show. The next day! I was going to do his song “Thunder Road” anyway. I was planning to pay tribute to my musical influences, like Bruce, and Janis Joplin. I could have done anything with him. I just kept thinking, “No, he’s not going to do that. Someone’s telling me a lie. Someone’s making this up.”
But, sure enough, when I got to the MTV studio, there he was. He came backstage during the sound check, and we sat down to rehearse—just Bruce and me playing. I was just out of my mind, I was crazy nervous.
We worked out who sings what, who sings harmonies, and so on. For some reason, I wanted to sing the line “So Mary, climb in” and then we’d both sing the last two lines together: “It’s a town full of losers and we’re pulling out of here to win.”
Throughout that show, all I could think about was singing with Bruce. I kept thinking, “Five more songs until Bruce comes out. Four more songs until Bruce comes out.” I was just counting down the songs. I was so up, and the audience didn’t even know he was there.
I started talking to the audience about my influences, and I went into this whole story about Bruce Springsteen. I told the audience that the producers of Unplugged had asked me who I wanted to sing with and I said Bruce and then I said, “You know what?” He said “Yes.” And I started to play the opening of “Thunder Road.” It was just the most amazing thing. Up to then, I had done every song perfectly. I played great and it was very professional. But I start in singing with him, and we got to the line where I’m supposed to sing, “So, Mary, climb in.” And I’m, like, five feet away from the microphone, just looking at him.
He turned around and looked at me, because I had totally flubbed the line. So at the end of the song, the director wants to do another take, which was fine with me. I got to play with Bruce again. We did a second take, and once again, I’m standing there just looking at him. He cracked up. I managed to get the line out and we finished the song. Bruce Springsteen singing with me that night is burned deep in my memory. He gave me a big kiss. It was crazy and sooo fun. It was one of the top moments in my performing life, ever.
After I made Yes I Am, Julie and I felt that we had outgrown our Hollywood house, and we started looking for a larger home. I’m not certain of the significance, but Julie and I had a tendency to move a lot during our relationship. We finally found this great old Spanish-style home in the Outpost area of L.A. It was a wonderful old gorgeous house with lots of character. While I went on tour to promote the album, Julie stayed at home and fixed up that house for us.
I thought that things were really starting to get back into a good groove between us, but Julie met a man whom she became very attracted to. In the beginning, she was just having lunches with him and discussing business. He was in the entertainment business, and Julie had an interest in directing films, so it didn’t seem too unusual for them to be hanging out. I never worried that anything was going on between them. I thought it was business and so I supported the friendship. He wasn’t a threat to me. At least I never thought he was.
Julie told me that she had been spending some time with him and that she was starting to develop a strong attraction. At the time, I didn’t think there was a real possibility that the two of them would connect—certainly not on a physical level. Maybe I was denying the possibility to justify my own feelings, but I just didn’t think about it at the time. At this point, there was so much uncertainty in our relationship, and this added a whole new level—one I wasn’t psychologically prepared for.
One day, Julie came home from one of her lunch meetings and proceeded to inform me that she had kissed this guy. In the same way that she explained her attraction to k.d. years earlier, she started to tell me that she missed men in her life and she thought that she might want to sleep with this guy. I just stopped cold in my tracks. No way! I was not going to go through this cycle again. It was not okay with me. I think I might have surprised her with my absolute refusal to accept what she was telling me. I think that she thought it was going to be fine, that it had been a while since the k.d. thing, and that I would surely understand her needs. Boy, was she wrong!
Once again, I felt as if I had no choice in the matter. If I forbade Julie, I truly believed that she would leave me. I just couldn’t bear that thought of her sleeping with someone else. But even worse was the thought of not having Julie in my life. That scared me even more. Julie and I had a way of making everything okay in our relationship by connecting sexually. It didn’t matter what had transpired in the past. All she had to do was touch me, love me, make love to me, and it was all forgiven. The slate would be wiped clean. It was like a great big Band-Aid. At the time, I didn’t have the strength to stand my ground about this. I was too insecure to say to her, “Stop. Don’t do this. It’s not okay.” I didn’t have the sense of myself—that I would rather be alone than be with a lover who needed to be with other people.
I chose to believe that her attraction to men was about the physical connection that I felt I could never give to Julie. For the most part, we had a great relationship, but at the end of the day, even though we were very, very sexual, there was that one thing that I could never offer to Julie that she was now telling me she needed.
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