Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir (19 page)

Basically, I didn’t have background singers or any of that stuff on my tours in the beginning. The guy who played guitar kind of sang background and I would sing lead and then switch to background and join him so the sound was a little fuller, and then go back to singing lead. He was a terrific guitar player and he had red hair too. So that looked really good onstage. It was a lot for my voice to handle. My band was wonderful, but I always felt like I could have really used some background singers. I would have loved to have some women with me on tour, either as singers or musicians, but again every time I brought up hiring a female musician Dave would say there weren’t any good ones.

The audiences kept getting bigger. Usually, before I went onstage, I was a wreck. It was always a rush backstage. Sometimes while my makeup artist was doing my makeup—I did my own hair—I’d start doing my vocal exercises. Like I said, I always had a pot and a hot plate so I could steam my voice (for around ten minutes because I never had the time to do it longer). I’d blow up a balloon to work my lungs. Then I’d get dressed and walk around, being nervous. I was always worried that I was not going to be good enough. I was always peeking outside and counting filled seats to see if I did okay, and then wondering if they were going to get their money’s worth. If the place was not sold out, I’d tell myself, “Well, that’s okay—then you show everyone what the people who didn’t buy tickets missed.” Ya know, I kind of still do the same thing.

I’d try and meet up with the band beforehand, to say, “Have a nice show,” but I was always kept apart. And no, I didn’t do a prayer circle before the show. I hate the whole prayer-circle action. Because my Lord is probably not your Lord. I mean, look at me: What do you think? A woman, or a drag queen, or someone who is really interested in fashion and music and the arts—maybe that’s the leader of my house of worship. Or maybe my house of worship is the House of Chanel? The only time I liked the whole prayer-circle thing was when I did it with Cassandra Wilson. I adore her. She called me up one time when I was having a big fight with my husband, David, and I said, “Cassandra, I can’t talk right now, I’m having a big fight with my husband, I’ll call you later.” I thought that she was very insulted and thought I was rude. That was the last I spoke to her for a while. But as life would have it, we orbited back toward each other again in December of 2011, when she performed at the True Colors Fund show “Cyndi Lauper & Friends: Home for the Holidays.” I got to sing and play dulcimer while she played guitar. She’s still awesome.

Where was I? Right: performing. When it was time to go onstage, I’d go out there very unassumingly and quietly, and say, “Hey, how ya doin’?” Sometimes when the audience was very appreciative it almost choked me up and made me cry. Then I talked because I was nervous. After I was done talking, I felt less nervous, and when I started singing, I really calmed down.

But I always felt like I had to prove myself. If I messed up the lyrics, I’d say, “Oh my God, let’s pretend that didn’t happen,” and count the band back in. I always tried to include the audience, like “We’re all in this together.” I always think, “How will the people in the crowd get their money’s worth? They bought the ticket. Maybe they got a babysitter. Now, how do I make it worth their while?”

As I did in the Blue Angel days, I really thought about how I would begin the show. I always thought it’s all about how you open. I’d come out covered up, and then kind of take my clothes off as I performed. I would have my hair dyed the brightest orange and yellow and red, like fire, and shove it under a hat. I’d also wear glasses and an overcoat when I came out onstage. Then I’d pull the hat off and shake my hair to reveal this burst of color, which was exciting to them, or I’d take my eyeglasses off, and that was like a moment. But I would do that for myself too. Because, like I said, it helped me peel off layers emotionally.

And then I started to sing. I knew the first and second song had to be strong. I learned that from watching the Allman Brothers when I saw them in the seventies. They always came out with up-tempo songs first, to get the audience’s attention, and then slowed it down. I would move and sing, move and sing, stop, talk, do a little ballad, and then just when they’d relax, I’d move and sing again until the crowd was in such a frenzy that by the end they were crazy. I’d hit them really hard. I wouldn’t give them a chance. I’ve never given up on an audience, ever. I keep hitting them until I got them, even if I have to go out in the audience and sit on their chairs. I always wished that I could be like the Rolling Stones and sail over the audience in a cherry picker like Mick Jagger. Instead, my act was climbing into a fuckin’ garbage can onstage because I couldn’t afford the cherry picker when I did “Money Changes Everything.” And I thought the garbage can was on an automatic pulley system, but instead it was actually ten men holding me up. They had me sign my will before they hoisted me. I only went up a short distance and as soon as I started shaking and getting off balance, they pulled me right back in. They musta been like, “The golden goose, she’s going down—pull it in, boys, bring her in!”

There were a lot of times that I felt totally isolated backstage, so I always tried to connect with people when I was onstage. With the college audiences, we had no barriers, so they could touch me and I could touch them. We would hold each other, or they’d put their hands out and hold my feet and legs and I’d put my arm out and sing. They never did anything weird—if they did, I would have smacked them. Listen, I was never a sex symbol. Because I didn’t dress like one. I had fishnet stockings with one black sneaker and one white sneaker that I painted in Magic Marker. And I didn’t act like a sex symbol, either. I was selling freedom of expression and the freedom to be different—not sex. I’m telling ya, there were no men who chased after me. Instead I got the sad people, because that’s who I was trying to heal when I sang.

But I couldn’t believe how sexist some of the guys on the tour were. I’d hear about guys sleeping with a mother and daughter, and things like that. I was like, “What the fuck is that? These people are all coming here because of me, and I’m preaching women’s lib onstage, and look what you guys are doing.” It was my moment, but they wanted to have their moment, too. In the end it was really Dave Wolff’s band—he hired them, they listened to him, if they had a problem with me they’d talk to him. (Believe me, that changed a few years later.) But at the time I was kept very busy and I was just trying to keep up with everything. And when people did deal with me, they’d freak out, because I was so direct with them.

Sexism in the music business wasn’t just limited to the record companies and the guys on tour. I saw it with other artists, too. I met Ron Wood from the Stones once at some awards ceremony. His girls were all dressed up and I said, “Yeah, girls just want to have fun.” He looked at me and moved the girls away. You gotta understand, in his generation, women were totally different. Guys like him were not comfortable
with what I represented. Did you ever see that video from Art of Noise called “Close (to the Edit)”? There’s a little girl in there with punky hair who is slamming things around and is dressed just like me. That’s how that generation of men viewed me: I was frightening because when I saw women being pushed down or objectified I said, “Fuck no! That’s chauvinism, I’m not allowing that.”

Another time, when I was at some other event, I told my stylist I wanted to look shockingly different. So I was dressed up very womanly—still rock and roll, but sexy, which, for me, was radical. I was waiting to go onstage to present with an older rocker. I turned my back to him for a second to say hello to a friend, and all of a sudden this very famous guy grabbed my hips and kind of humped my butt. I’m thinking, “What? He thinks this is some kind of handshake?” So I turned around and said, as lighthearted as I could (I even put a little laugh in the middle of the sentence), “Hey, pal—not for nothin’, but if you do that again, I’m gonna have to punch your fuckin’ heart out.” Then he acted like he was frightened of me. I thought, “Oh, ya mean under that mane there’s not a lion, just a whimper? What the hell?” He was taller, he was stronger, and he took me by surprise.

The idea that a woman would actually take offense to having her butt humped by someone she didn’t know that well was probably a shock to him. And why—because he was used to women throwing themselves at him? I just think I was in the middle of a strange generation where the idea of equality eluded these guys (at least until they had children who were girls).

I also had Bob Dylan come up to me one time, not long after I appeared on a special for John Lennon. Now, I adore him. Who doesn’t? But he said to me, “You know, I saw what you did on the Lennon special, and I thought it was really great. I would have you in my band—and that’s saying something, because I don’t like chicks in bands.”

Ai yi yi.
I looked at him and said, “Yeah, well—not for nothing, but was that an insult or a compliment?”

He said, “Oh, what are you, one of those bra-burning women’s libbers?” I took a deep breath and said, “Well, you know, Bob, if I’m not concerned about my civil liberties, who will be?” He just kind of nodded and said, “Oh.” At that point I wanted to say, “Blowin’ in the wind, Bob?” But I didn’t, because it was Bob Dylan and he did write that song, and many, many other wonderful songs. And honestly, I think he is also from a generation where women put out because the men were rock gods. To me that whole fuckin’ generation and their free love, with male musicians being the big peacocks and the women walking quietly behind or next to them, was a bunch of crap. As a woman who maneuvered through so much of that shit, I just want to say sometimes, “Excuse me—but ain’t there light enough for two people?”

When I became famous—I mean right away—the press always asked me about one person: Madonna. They tried to create this big rivalry, but my feeling was, you don’t fuckin’ knock another sister, ever. But even her record company got in on it. They ran an ad in
Billboard
where she was dressed in a white corset. And it said something like, “This girl’s gonna give Cyndi Lauper a run for her money.” I felt really bad about it. Everybody else was fueled up by this supposed rivalry, but I was backing up, going, “I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to be part of this.”

The thing was, our music wasn’t even similar. (Although if you ask me, her voice was sped up in “Like a Virgin” to make it sound high like mine.) She was so smart about business and marketing (I never was) and she always was, and still is, beautiful. I kind of went the other way because I had on the war paint and I purposely wore clothes that were rebellious, and antifashion sometimes, especially
toward the end of 1985. I remember I saw Madonna for the first time at the American Music Awards at the beginning of 1985. I was up for a few awards and was also going to perform “When You Were Mine.” I should have done “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” because the whole place would have erupted, but instead I did the Prince song, which probably went right over everybody’s head. But I wanted my record to move on.

Anyway, I made everything on the set black and white. I talked the producers into letting me work with the carpenters’ union to build this big sculpture made of shoes. I was barefoot and wore black pants, a white shirt, black eye makeup, and a zebra-print vest. Nothing had color except some orange paint that was in a bucket onstage and my hair, which was yellow and orange. So while I sang, I swished color onto the set. To TV viewers, it looked like I was turning a black and white image into color. I wanted to bring art into people’s homes. I was hell-bent on mixing art and music, the visual and the sound and the story, and I basically cut open a vein onstage. I wanted to be larger than life, to be better than who I was, to look completely different. I became a painting. That’s why I relate to Lady Gaga and Nicki Minaj, because they make themselves paintings sometimes.

That year I was nominated for two awards, Favorite Pop/Rock Female Artist (against Madonna) and Favorite Pop/Rock Female Video Artist (against Tina Turner). When I got up to make my acceptance speech for Favorite Pop/Rock Female Artist, I looked at Madonna sitting in the audience, and I felt so crummy, because she had “Like a Virgin” out and it was number one for six weeks in a row. I never had that kind of success in my life, ever. Neither had she, so I thought it was awesome for her.

So I thanked everybody and then I said, “I accept this award for the people that came before me and paved the way, and for the people
that will come after me.” And I looked at her and thought, “Next year it will be you.” I met her afterward and said, “Hey, that track of yours, ‘Like a Virgin,’ is unbelievable, it’s so great, congratulations.” She was nice but it was a really short exchange. I never could have a conversation with her because she always had lots of people protecting her. My whole life, I lived the opposite way.

After the show, I continued with my nonstop life: The American Music Awards ended at around nine or ten
P.M
., and I had to go straight to a recording studio in Los Angeles to shoot the “We Are the World” video for USA for Africa. There was no time to get ready. I was so upset that I couldn’t wash my hair from the art piece I did, so I had orange and yellow paint flakes coming down from my head. I wore this Italian waiter coat because I had a white shag blouse underneath it with overalls and I thought the coat would make me look thinner. Then when I got there I saw Michael Jackson in his bandleader jacket and it looked too similar to my jacket. So I took mine off. Besides, the flakes from my hair were starting to fall on the jacket, so it wasn’t the best look.

Quincy Jones, the producer, told everyone to check their egos at the door, but they didn’t really do that. I wanted to mingle, but I was like the monster. I had the big orange and yellow hair flakes that looked like dandruff. I said hello to Michael Jackson. Not a big talker, but he was fine. Then I talked to people like Huey Lewis and told bad jokes, and laughed, because I think if you tell something that’s not funny and then laugh, it’s kind of funny. But even in that situation, I felt like an outsider. Always. I was always like the Rodney Dangerfield of rock. I did the wrestling, I was weird, and then all of a sudden I was singing these big hits.