Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir (14 page)

What I had going for me at the time was that my reputation as a singer was kind of great, and my reviews were pretty awesome, too. The first thing Dave said to me was, “I have someone I want you to meet.” I told him I couldn’t go because I had a job—I was still working at Mama’s. He said, “Quit your job, you’re going to get a record deal.” It was Lennie Petze, who was the head of Portrait Records over at Epic. He had signed the band Boston. Dave had met with him before about other things and Lennie had told him, “When you have something real, come to me.”

So we went to Connecticut to meet Lennie and his family for dinner. It was around the holidays, and it was snowing. I liked Lennie and his wife right off the bat. Lennie was so nice that I couldn’t figure out if he was really like that, but he was. Then they played cards, and I did a reading with them. I was turning the cards over, and I asked about Lennie, and he came up as the King of Hearts, and I did it again, and he came up as the King of Hearts.

Then I did a show in Yonkers, New York, in a club that had been an old bank, and Lennie came to see me. I wore a fifties kind of white
sweater with a cocktail skirt, fishnets, and stiletto sling-backs, and I was wild: It was nighttime, I didn’t care, so I grabbed my crotch, kicked my legs up, and rolled around. (When I became famous and started seeing little kids coming to the show, I stopped that.)

Lennie wasn’t sure about the rockabilly I was doing, but he liked my performance. And all of a sudden, Dave was just doing things. He introduced me to another friend of his named Gibby Silverman, a rich fellow and a really nice man who agreed to support us for a while until we could pay him back. This made me nervous, because when you like somebody the last thing you want to do is take their money, but we agreed to it.

I remember Dave and I still weren’t eating too good, because we didn’t have any money. Both of us lived on two hundred dollars a week in Manhattan, which was kind of tight. Sometimes the plan was that we wouldn’t eat one day or wouldn’t eat until the night. In the meantime, I was going through legal troubles with Blue Angel’s ex-manager, who wouldn’t let us go. He took us to court and sued us to prevent us from going any further without him. He wanted everything—all the music, all the demos—and wanted to make sure I remained a waitress, not a singer. I was trying to get him paid off and he wouldn’t have it. One of the bright spots during that time though was one of my lawyers, Elliot Hoffman. He was very New York. He wore a suit and had a handlebar mustache, and he would pick me up and take me to court on the back of his little motorcycle.

What I came to understand about the law is that what was right had nothing to do with it—what was the law is what had to do with it. Which were two different things. I said to the manager in court, “Why do you want all the songs? They’re not even good. What do you want them for—blackmail?” Everybody started laughing, and the judge said, “Order!” But I just had to say to him, “Why are you doing
this? Why don’t you take a settlement? You could make some money, and I could move forward.” I mean, what a pain in the ass.

And here’s the thing: He met my family. He saw where I came from. In what remote land could you be from, how far up your ass could you be, to think that you are going to have a standoff and think I’m not going to fight to the bitter end, like the bitter-end-rest-of-your-fuckin’-life, motherfucker? He knew the different jobs I had. He understood that I had lost my voice, was told I was never going to sing again, and came back. He understood the ferocity with which I sang. I’m always going to sing. That’s the end of it. I’m going to sing until I die.

Dave Wolff just said to me, “Hold your course. We’re fighting it.” I did what they said and just tried to zip it, and then finally in the end, the judge looked at me and looked at everybody. He took the gavel, hit the desk, and said, “Let the canary sing.” That is exactly what he said. We won the case.

Finally I was able to move forward, although I did have to declare bankruptcy after the suit. But then I had more meetings with Lennie Petze and eventually signed with him. It was November of 1982. The reason I thought Epic Records was a good idea was that I looked at what Epic offered and saw what was missing. They didn’t have a big female star.

Afterward Lennie said, “I know this guy that you should meet with,” and introduced me to Rick Chertoff, a producer from Columbia Records who had worked with groups like the Kinks and the Band. He was looking for a singer who could sing these songs that he had been collecting. I said I wanted to write, but Dave said, “Sing first, and then you can write.”

So I sat down with Rick, who was working with this other band called the Hooters. He played me some of their music, and I thought
that even though the Hooters had two guys who sang, to me, they didn’t have a voice. So then when I heard this reggae stuff they were doing, I had an idea of what I could put together with them.

And in the spring of 1983, I went into the studio to record
She’s So Unusual.

W
E STARTED WORK
on the album
She’s So Unusual
at a studio in Manayunk, which is a neighborhood in northwestern Philadelphia. Rob Hyman and Eric Bazilian, the guys from the Hooters who were working on my album, were from Philadelphia, so that’s where we went. It was freezing fuckin’ cold, even in March. Manayunk is at the foot of the Pocono Mountains, but once it was a very poor industrial place made up of a lot of European immigrants. So we called it the Polish Poconos. Then we recorded at the Record Plant in New York City, which was pretty famous. John Lennon had recorded in that studio and his stuff was all over the place. I saw his face everywhere too—as I did when I was a kid studying his voice so intently.

Kiss was using the studio at that time, and they’d come by a lot and ask what we were doing. Paul Stanley would arrive with all these women and I was always thinking to myself, “I love you guys, but can you take the whole rock-god thing outta here?”

I had this very strong vision of how I wanted to put the music together. I heard it when I sat in Rick’s office and he played me the Hooters record. I wanted to combine their reggae sound with this trashy street sound—this punky, Clash, Police sound—and a gated
snare drum, which was new at the time. It had come out of the street and was being put on dance records (later it became really popular). I didn’t know what it was called, so Bill Wittman, another producer, made me go out and buy some albums to play him the sound I was describing. I played the Red Rockers (remember their song “China”?) and that song “The Safety Dance” by Men Without Hats. Bill looked at me and said, “That’s a gated snare.”

So I wanted to fuse a dance electronic sound with the reggae, which was being done by people like Grace Jones, but with that gated snare, which is
not
what they did. We had a little band—which started out bigger, but Rick and I kept weeding out people. Rick is a very smart guy, and he knew exactly who was good and who wasn’t. When I said, “Listen, that drummer, he’s running me down and he’s always on the phone. We need him because . . . ?” we’d get rid of him. We also didn’t need a bass player. We needed five people: Rob; Eric; Rick; the other producer, Bill; and me. That’s it, and a drum machine—thank you, the end. I could then focus on getting these songs in shape and making arrangements. And that’s what I did.

It was kind of a magical time. We’d eat Philly cheesesteaks at a place called Rosie’s. We’d get really delirious from working all day and we’d entertain everyone at Rosie’s. I’d do Ethel Merman singing Beatles songs. I used to do a really good impersonation of Ethel. Rob would go, “Cyn, do Ethel. Come on! Do ‘She Came in Through the Bathroom Window.’” I just always thought things like that were funny—like, Johnny Mathis singing “Stairway to Heaven.” I always figured, “Why not mix it up?”

But it was a tough time, too, because Rick had never really worked with somebody like me. He kept bringing in songs and suggesting songwriters, and I had to figure out how I was going to make the songs sound cohesive. There had to be a connection, instead of just
a bunch of random songs. A lot of times when producers are put together with singers, the albums sound like this grab bag that doesn’t make any sense.

The first song Rick really got me on was “All Through the Night,” which Jules Shear wrote. It sounded like a Beatles song, except the lyrics were different. It was so awesome. So we put it on the album. When we recorded “All Through the Night” we couldn’t get the first line right. Something happened with the tape and it caused a magnetic thump, and then Dave Wolff liked a line from another part of the song and kept trying to put it in the beginning. So I kept singing the first line of “All Through the Night” literally all through the fuckin’ night. I just kept doing it, trying to get it right, stepping away from it, coming back, trying, trying, trying. It went on and on until I thought I’d lose my mind, and then at dawn I sang the first line and that was it. You can spend days on one tiny part of a song.

Rick then played me this Prince song, “When You Were Mine,” which I also liked, so we added that to the album too. I heard that he liked my version of it. Later, I saw him when we were both at the American Music Awards, but I didn’t speak to him. You’re gonna think this is nutty, but I felt he was so famous that I didn’t want to go up to him. But I have gotten to know him in the last ten years or so. He is still a great artist. And he’s always very sweet to me. I think he’s God’s child. And here’s why: In 2007, while I was writing the CD
Bring Ya to the Brink,
I happened to see Prince’s extraordinary Super Bowl performance live on TV. He was singing “Purple Rain” and it was raining—real hard too. All of a sudden, he needed to fight the elements. It was slippery and he slipped. The large white backdrop behind him that was supposed to gently move with the wind was turning into a sail and still, it continued to rain hard. And all of a sudden, I saw how he accepted and worked with the rain and the
wind. I thought, “This is God’s child, right in front of us, live.” It was one of the most inspirational performances I’d ever seen. So in “Same Ol’ Story,” the lines “People slipping in the rain, I watch them get up again / It makes me feel like I can too” are about him.

Rick also played me this Desmond Child song called “Do Me Right,” and at the time I was like, “ ‘Do Me Right’? What neighborhood did you come from? Coming from where I come from, I could never possibly sing a song called ‘Do Me Right.’ In my early bands, the guys used to make fun of Catholic girls, saying that they’d lie back and say, ‘Do me.’ And I said, ‘Well, I ain’t gonna be one of them.’” Poor Rick, it must have been like talking to an alien. He seemed a little taken aback by that.

I think the guys had a really rough time in the beginning with me. I can’t believe that after they heard me sing they thought I was a delicate flower. But Dave Wolff kept having to come and put out fires because I’d tell them what I thought. First we’d be making these great arrangements together, and they would let me direct, because it was working, I guess. But then they’d get in the studio and keep me out and record some guitar styles that were more dated than I wanted to use. And I was very up-front about it. I asked Eric to play with more of a Clash feel against the track in “Money Changes Everything,” and that worked. So little by little, I took over my album.

Dave would say, “You’re so angry; you’ve got to work on your anger.” I would tell him all the time, “Yeah, but my name is pretty big on the front of the record and the producers’ names are pretty small on the back. Once this thing is done, they go on to something else, but I have to sell it. If this is going to be my thing, and if this is the only time I ever get to open my mouth and sing, I want it to be great and my fuckin’ vision.” I had worked so hard to get to where I was at that time. I had to go bankrupt. I lost my voice twice and came back. And
when I fought for something it was because I knew I was right, and nine times out of ten, I was.

That said, it still was very much a style that all of us contributed to. I just would direct them a bit here and there, and sing with it all the time to make sure it was right. Although I couldn’t articulate it then, it was all about connection. And they would genuinely try and help me get the sound that I wanted. So, bless them for that.

Rick had this one song that to him was like the Holy Grail, and maybe it was. There was a guy named Robert Hazard, who sang “Escalator of Life” and had this whole kind of cool, David Bowie–esque sound. He had written “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” a few years earlier, but it was much faster, and it was also from a guy’s point of view, which made it mean something totally different. He had a verse where a woman comes into his room at night because she wants to have fun and he’s telling his dad, “We are the fortunate ones.” I said to Rick, “So now that I’m singing it, I’m supposed to get a lobotomy and just kick my legs up in the air and basically say girls just want to have sex?” He kept saying, “Think about what it could mean.” And so I thought about what a woman’s version might say. And that maybe I should try to find a new heart in the song. I started to think, “Okay, I’m not a guy. How do I feel?” If I could find the twist in it so that I could use my voice in a unique way, and in a woman’s key, that could change everything. And the word “anthem” kept coming up. So I went about the arrangement in a more radical way. I took what Rob loved to listen to, which was reggae music, and asked him to play that feel but with the chords of “Girls.” And I asked Eric to play a little guitar riff from an old Motown song (the masters of musical hooks with rhythm), and I remembered an old Shirley and Lee song that John Turi had played me a long time ago, “Feel So Good,” that was in a girl’s key. And one last time I gave it a shot. I had the drum machine
on its simplest modern beat. I said, “Just play your part and ignore me and let’s hear it that way.” And all of a sudden, we heard the song in a completely different way that worked and kept the commercial parts and had that anthem feel.