Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir (28 page)

When the record-company people heard the songs, they wanted to remix some of them before they were even finished. They had all these nasty-ass mixers that mixed things into shit, so they could be tailor-made for each fuckin’ radio station. Compartmental radio was starting to happen, so now if you wanted to hear a specific genre you had to turn to that kind of radio station, because they split up rock, hip-hop, and dance, as opposed to just turning on Top 40 and hearing it all. I told them, “If you touch my record before I’m done, I’ll gonna have to kill ya.” Unfortunately I said that to the president of the record company. And again everyone choked on their lunch. What I didn’t understand then was that them remixing my music had nothing to do with my album. It just had to do with how they had to make it sellable to radio stations. I had no manager—no one to translate that to me. If they had explained it that way, I would have understood and listened, because I was a good soldier.

But instead I got all emotional and knee-jerk and pushed everyone away. I should have talked it out in a reasonable way. Plus, I looked like a fuckin’ alien to them. Could you imagine Lady Gaga coming
into a meeting in 1993 and getting anywhere? It was a different time then. I even tried to tone down my look, because everyone tried to sell me a bill of goods that it’s all about the inside, not the outside. If you can believe it, I even went through a hip-hop clothing phase. Imagine me in those baggy clothes.

I was proud of that album, and it got nice reviews, but it didn’t sell. There was no single off of it at all and yet I thought it moved music forward. I put so much into it and tried so hard to make it great, to do something different. When it was released in June of 1993 and I saw the sales figures, I went home and cried my eyes out. It was my first real big flop. The record company didn’t bother promoting it. They just threw it away, while Tommy Mottola was up on top, putting every dollar into his new bride Mariah Carey’s career.

I fought with Sony for years, but ya know what? The good thing was, because they didn’t give a shit, they allowed me to grow.

I
FINALLY GOT THE
home life that I had always wanted when I married David, but when you’re a musician, you can never stay home for very long. One of the lowest points of my life was the end of 1993, when I was promoting
Hat Full of Stars
and I was shipped off to the East. (I do pretty well there and my management at the time was like, “Let’s milk her, because she’s big in Japan.”) So I was in Japan on Christmas, not with my husband, and I was so heartbroken. I remember I told Yoko Ono before I was leaving that I was depressed I would be away, and listen to this: She found out where I was staying and she put a fuckin’ Christmas tree in my hotel room. She had her brother do it. I’ll never forget that.

I toured for the album in the US, too, and I had this idea to make a road documentary called
Cyndi Lauper Discovers America.
I would talk to people across the country to find out what’s on their minds—current events, their families, politics, music, whatever—which would be kind of funny and kind of great, too. So I met with TV people about it, and I was told I had to raise the money myself. But my lawyer and my film agency weren’t interested in doing that, so I couldn’t get a director. I even met with Michael Moore, the guy who did
Bowling
for Columbine.
In the meantime, I spent a lot of money trying to film it when I was on the road (a club tour with two buses and a ten-piece band) but it never panned out. That was a real beat-up time for me, even though I was doing great music. (Listen, I didn’t know anybody who was doing loops and pop folk together like I did on that album. Had I known someone, I would have had an ally. I wouldn’t have felt so alone.) I needed a good manager after the last guy that I had, who was a dope. He was from a management company that also managed really well-known bands, so when I hired him, I felt like, “Oh, these guys will understand being innovative, right?” No. They did not. One time, right before I was going to go on a talk show, he told me he had lost the single, “Who Let In the Rain.” You’re managing a music act and you lose the single they’re going to play? I should have just said, “Well, you lost your job too.”

I was going to do a club tour and create a club record, but instead my manager let the record company tell him to go with “Who Let in the Rain,” which was a soft ballad instead of modern music. And it failed. I learned that if I want to write anything about politics I’ll always cloak it in a relationship to make it more palatable to people. That’s why I like the blues, because it’s covert. Everything they write about the white man is cloaked in a love song. Their real feelings are under the page, masked. But with a song like “That’s What I Think,” I was so horrified by what the Bush years were like that I wanted to talk to the people directly and pull them up again. I mean, everything had become so corporate at the time. I remember that everywhere I traveled, every city looked the same: the same cookie-cutter skyline, like the Coca-Cola signs, no matter what country. And that’s when I began to understand the gravity of what was really happening in our world. I’m still proud of the song “Sally’s Pigeons” and its message. But at that time, people in the music industry were so busy trying to do
things that were business-driven and watching profits and the bottom line that there wasn’t much room for creativity. I’d go to music panels to hear people in the industry speak and no one would talk about the craft of writing—they would talk about promotion, selling, and the two minutes of fame you might get. All of a sudden the craft part of it was over.

Then the people from the TV show
Mad About You
said they wanted to work with me. I had never done a sitcom before, but they thought I would be perfect for this character Marianne Lugasso. She was the ex-wife of star Paul Reiser’s cousin Ira, who was played by John Pankow. I said yes, and I was very glad I did, because Paul Reiser was one of the nicest, most talented people I’ve ever worked for. He was so funny and a great, great boss. I got so comfortable with everybody during the first filming that I sang to them and started doing my Ethel Merman impersonation, and the fellow who was directing turned around and said, “That’s Marianne’s voice! That’s her personality.” So all of a sudden, through the voice, I captured the whole rhythm of the character.

Once the character clicked, Paul wrote great dialogue for Marianne. It sounded like it came right out of my head, like it started in my brain. The rhythm of Marianne’s language matched how I naturally speak, because Paul is also from Queens. He was in a better neighborhood, but he was still from Queens, and Queens has a certain lilt whether you’re from Jamaica or Ozone Park or Forest Hills. It gets more swingy in certain places, it loses a couple of vowels or consonants, but it all has the same rhythm. That rhythm was created by the people who migrated there during the 1920s and ’30s—the Italians, the Irish, and the Jews. I love history, and it’s all right there in a Queens accent. (If a French person wanted to learn how to speak English from me, well, you know, it’s going to sound a little funny.)

Anyway, the first year I was nominated for an Emmy. My agent really tried to get me nominated because she felt I did a great job. I didn’t know if I did a great job, but I do know I tried hard to be good for that role. That was the best I could do.

Then they invited me back for another season and when I returned, it was so much more fun, because I was able to figure out who Marianne really was. She also married a rich person, so I had to dress the part. I went to Dolce & Gabbana and they lent me some clothes. (My big mistake was that I had the production company mail back all the Dolce clothes, and I don’t know what happened to them but the woman from Dolce was very mad. I guess I should have done it myself.)

The second year I was also nominated for an Emmy, and I won, do you believe? But do you want to know something? I felt really bad at the ceremony. I didn’t know what I was doing and no one was there with me—no manager, no press person. I went with the makeup artist. I was kind of like thrown into it. I guess everybody just thought, “Oh, Cyndi, she can do this.” But I was dressed like me, not realizing that I had to dress like
them
—not like rock and roll. I wore a Vivienne Westwood outfit with a corset and tight gold pants with gold platform toe-crippler stilettos. I wore my hair up, and it was a few different shades of blond and black. I mean, it would have been cute for the Grammys.

I went to the press room and they asked, “What makes the Emmys different from MTV?” By that time I had been pushed off of MTV. I mean, you know how it is. It’s like they want the next big thing. They weren’t going to play anything if it wasn’t a hit, and I didn’t have a hit. So I said, “I don’t know—I haven’t been there much lately.”

Well. That was the wrong thing to say, so they stopped asking questions. There was nobody from the press department helping me,
and I didn’t know where to go or what to say or do. The manager I had at that time was a music guy, and he didn’t even take a commission for my acting because he had nothing to do with it, so I was on my own. It was time to get rid of him, anyway.

Then I got another manager and he seemed great at first, but I’ll never forget the time when we were coming back from a European trip and he said to me, “You know, you’re never going to be as big as you were.” I was devastated. I said, “What do you mean? You don’t know that.” Billy Joel, and other people, got to do it, got to come back. Then instead of saying to him, “Okay, I’m sorry but if you feel like that, I can’t work with you anymore,” I stayed. I’m an idiot.

You know what it is? Whenever I stood up for myself, it always came out wrong, because it was so over-the-top. It would always be a fight, rather than a negotiation. If you want to be successful in anything, you better learn how to reel it in. That said, I’ve had an amazing manager for many years named Lisa Barbaris who used to do my music press. She is like a sister to me.

Anyway, I was talking about
Mad About You.
The next time I went back, Helen Hunt had been doing well playing Paul’s wife, Jamie, and she had kind of taken over the show. She was directing, which was interesting, but there was tension on the set.

Like I said, I wanted to get out of my record contract but I couldn’t. Then the company wanted me to do a greatest-hits collection. In fact they wanted me to do that before
Hat Full of Stars,
but I didn’t think I had enough hits, so I said, “Let me get this album done and we’ll have another hit to put on it.” How did I know they weren’t going to fuckin’ do anything to promote it? At least somebody appreciated my work, because I heard that when Alanis Morissette went in to talk to a guy at Maverick Records about what she wanted to do next, she took some records with her, including
Hat Full of Stars.
It made me feel better
that somebody heard what I was doing and I wasn’t wrong. I was just there early, and I had a very conservative record company that was going through changes and the executives had their heads in braces.

I remember at that time the producer Jimmy Iovine wanted me to work with him on the
Very Special Christmas
project for the Special Olympics, so he called me up personally. He asked me what I was doing, so I played “Sally’s Pigeons” for him over the phone, and he was genuinely interested. All of a sudden I wished I was at his record company. I also played it for Patti Scialfa, Bruce Springsteen’s wife. We did a photo shoot together and she said, “Cyn, I love the way you put the loop with that music.” And then the next thing I knew Springsteen came out with “Streets of Philadelphia,” with his big voice, low music, and the loop. I was like, “Oh, nice. Why do I play stuff for people?”

So in 1994 I put out the greatest-hits collection
Twelve Deadly Cyns . . . and Then Some.
I reworked “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” to give it a reggae feel and it became “Hey Now (Girls Just Want to Have Fun).” The single did well in Europe, and for a couple of weeks I did a European tour with twelve drag-queen dancers. I kind of just wanted them to be there dancing with me, but I couldn’t help them put together a routine because I’m not a choreographer. We were basically doing it by the seat of our pants. But they had a good attitude about it. And it was me and twelve drag queens in a bus, which was kind of awesome. You’d think that because they dress like women, they’d be more like women. They were a bunch of kick-ass rockers, though, passing around vodka bottles. There were some hilarious times, especially in Spain. One time we went to this restaurant for dinner and the guys went into the ladies’ room dressed like women, which of course caused a big commotion.

The next night I had off, and I was dying to eat early and I said, “Is that place open yet?” so the lady from the record company asked
the restaurant if I could go while they were setting up, because I was starved. A woman at the restaurant said, “Okay, but will she be coming with her . . . friends?” That made me laugh.

During the tour, I talked to the guys about the discrimination that they faced, and I figured that maybe I should write a song for them. I wanted to make it a dance song to celebrate them. It became “Ballad of Cleo and Joe” on my next album, which I had started writing with Jan Pulsford, my keyboard player on
Hat Full of Stars.

The Gay Games started in 1982 and had become this international LGBT sports and cultural event, and in 1994 they were taking place in New York City. My friend was working on the committee and I thought, “I’d love to play those games.” It seemed to just be an extension of the clubs I was playing at night. My friend Howard Kaplan said to me, “Cyn, you should do the new ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’ mix and have, like, fifty drag queens dancing with you.” So I did and that was the first time I worked with Jerry Mitchell, who I’m now working with on the
Kinky Boots
musical. (It still makes perfect sense that I wrote music for
Kinky Boots,
because I still love them shoes.) Jerry was funny and knew exactly how to choreograph the drag queens. So there I was singing the “Girls” remix with them, and their shoes and headdresses were extraordinary. The problem was that I had to remember my steps and not just stand there and look at them. But I was so struck by how elegant they looked that I got struck by a dancer walking by, and the microphone knocked into my lip. But I kept singing. And when I didn’t see them on the JumboTron, it was really upsetting to me. I was like, “Are you kidding me? You mean the gay community is going to discriminate against
drag
performers? What the heck? Why wouldn’t you put those amazing shoes on the JumboTron?”