Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir (38 page)

Going to Europe to write really made me grow. I returned to my voice as a writer and artist in a way that I had never done before. The funny thing was that I had always heard that travel was a great thing for a writer—that’s the first time I ever traveled overseas just to write . . . and without a minder, too. Of course, I did have help. I had a driver (so okay, I traveled a little like a celebrity, but only a little). But for the most part, I was just myself, without a lot of the usual brouhaha. I wasn’t touring at the same time and doing press, or trying to be a mom or a wife. I wasn’t trying to do anything but write. It was so peaceful and comforting to be able to write down what I felt and saw, because that’s all I was doing. I felt awake for the first time in years.

Then I started to wrap up the whole album and record my vocals in the studio over my garage with William Wittman, my longtime collaborator. I also researched a great mixer who I had in mind from day one, Jeremy Wheatley from England—he had mixed a Goldfrapp CD and their single “Ride a White Horse.” I absolutely loved his sonic picture for dance. And so I contacted him through the record company but in the end he had a tragedy in his family, so we wound up mixing online together. In other words, it went a little like this: We would pick a time we could be online together with the same board and speakers up, and he would send the mix over to me on iChat
(which is able to send big files without compression) and I would take that file and play it. And then I’d tell him what I thought needed to be louder and lower. When I heard the first track, “High and Mighty,” I started to cry, because it was such a modern record. I always try and push people to make a modern record, and finally, there it was.

Music is so subjective. The great thing now is that you can go into your garage and make a wonderful record. The bad thing is that nobody is weeding out bad songs anymore. It’s like not having an editor. Which is okay—Prince works by himself, but there aren’t a lot of people like Prince. I like a lot of checks and balances and having a lot of different people hear the music and contribute to it.

Even though I was really proud of
Bring Ya to the Brink
when it came out in May of 2008, it didn’t do as well as I wanted. “Same Ol’ Story” was number one on
Billboard
’s Dance/Club Play Songs, but dance radio, I was told, would not play me because I was over thirty. Like I’ve said, people in the music business have a bias against older people because they operate on the myth that music is a disposable art form. It is not. I was watching Nicki Minaj the other night on
Saturday Night Live
and she ended her song in a pose, just like what I used to do in my concerts. Half her hair was pink and the other half was white, and I thought, “Give me shit all you want, but I inspired stuff like that, and they even get inspired from what I wear now.”

Bring Ya to the Brink
was nominated for a Grammy for Best Electronic/Dance Album. But I lost to Daft Punk. Understandably—their song was sampled in a Kanye West song and it was huge. But just when I was feeling bad about myself, I ran into Nicki Minaj at the Grammys red carpet. She came up to me and said, “People don’t know how obsessed I am with you.” How cool is that?

The record company and I parted ways before I went to the Grammys. I had one release left but all my allies had left the company, so
I decided I should leave, too. Look, it ultimately was a good thing because then I could do what I wanted with my albums. I could own my masters; I could be in charge. I could research how to sell it, how to promote it, and not make stupid mistakes. Anyway, I’ll do another dance album. The music I wrote for the musical
Kinky Boots,
the film Harvey Fierstein and I adapted for Broadway, is mostly dance.

After I left Sony, I did a little two-week tour with Ro called “Girls’ Night Out,” where we asked fans to donate food to local food banks. Beforehand, I met with people from Mark Burnett Productions and said, “Why don’t we film the tour? Then we can do a thing about soup kitchens, too, so it would be about entertainment but also helping people.” They weren’t interested in that because getting the rights from the record company to music in a film can get complicated. Mark Burnett Productions did
Survivor
and when I saw the pictures of the show on the wall of their office, I said I was worried I’d get voted out of the meeting. But I really liked them.

So I signed with Mark Burnett to do something in the future. And they introduced me to the people at Donald Trump’s reality show
The Celebrity Apprentice,
which I hadn’t seen. But Lisa watched it, and came back to me and said, “Why don’t you do
Celebrity Apprentice
?” I said, “Um, yeah—I’m a musician, why the hell do I want to do that for?” Then they told me that I could raise money for the True Colors Fund and that if anybody knows how to work in a team, I do, because everything I did was in a team. And Lisa was like, “Come on, Cyn—you could do this.” So I said okay.

We taped it in New York. At first they said it was a nine-to-five type of thing, but it was not nine to five. It was seven
A.M
. to eleven or twelve at night—like, an eighteen-hour-day type of thing. I’d get up at four
A.M
. to get my hair and makeup ready by seven, so I got no sleep. And there was no downtime at all—in fact, when you ate, you
had to eat standing up. You could never stop because if you did, you’d lose. Consequently I developed really, really bad reflux. My esophagus was burning all the time, and I couldn’t even swallow food. Then I’d have to do these long interviews about the show. I don’t know how to talk—I know how to sing. So I lost my voice, too. Plus the set was dusty and I’m allergic to dust.

Nonsingers don’t know what it takes to sing. They were all making fun of me as I did my vocal exercises. I was like, “You stupid idiots, if only you knew a few exercises yourself, your voices would be so much better.” The problem is some of the other contestants were wannabes who did nothing with their lives. I could never take a backseat and not do anything. It would drive me crazy.

And pretty quickly it started to get a little like high school. I had always been an outsider, and I just had to get used to it again. When Maria, the WWE wrestler, suddenly started turning her back to me, I kept thinking, “Why don’t you go fuck yourself?” Which is what the people running the show wanted me to think, so that we’d start fighting, because that stuff is compelling. Nobody wants to watch a show where everybody gets along, right? Even I got drawn in when I watched it—and I knew what was going to happen. I started watching to see what I looked like on TV, and I thought, “Jeez, I thought my hair was good, I thought my taste was good.” Everything that I do is an illusion of how I’d like to look—not how I actually look. That’s why I get along with drag queens, because I am one.

I had so much fun with Sharon Osbourne, who I adore, but the rest of the girls were two-faced. So I started to lose my stomach for it pretty quickly. And that Victoria’s Secret model, Selita Ebanks, was really sweet to me. When I was trying to help make over that young country singer, Emily West, in one of the challenges, all the others on my team were putting their two cents in, and they didn’t know what
the hell they were talking about. I was like, “Do you care about this kid, or do you not care?” They didn’t care—they were just interested in what came out of their own mouths. When Maria the wrestler was talking to Emily West about how to do interviews, she said, “When I do press, they want to know, do I shave there or do I not?” I looked at her and just wanted to say, “Listen, Miss Thing, if you think I’m going to sit here and tell that kid how to do an interview by talking about if her pussy is shaved or not, you are out of your freakin’ mind. This is about music and integrity—not about that.”

I was a little leery about Donald Trump because he had traumatized Rosie O’Donnell’s kids by saying bad things about their mother. When you do that, the kids don’t understand. What changed my mind about him was that not only was he nice to me, he was nice to other people, and his kids were good and hardworking. And the fact that he included them in the show was significant.

I loved performing “Just Your Fool” on the finale and dancing on the desk. There I was on national TV calling attention to the lack of civil rights in the gay community. NBC kept trying to change what I said. When I was on TV for the finale, though, I said what I wanted, and they couldn’t cut it cause it was live. I thought to myself, “Go on, try and edit this out now.”

Just for the record, I didn’t feel like I was unfairly voted off. I kind of committed hara-kiri because looking at actress Holly Robinson Peete was so paralyzing for me. She was fighting to get funds for autism, a condition her son had. And when it’s a mother and a son, it just gets me right here—I automatically think about my mom with her kids and that time when my mom sang to my brother when she was in a hopeless situation that day in the bathroom.

When we did the challenge of decorating the apartment on the episode that ended in my departure, it would have been very simple
for me to beat out Holly by saying, “Yes, Holly, you chose the color red for the celebrity room of the apartment, which everyone liked, but you also chose that seafoam green, or what I would call a ‘puce green,’ for the master bedroom.”

The situation with Bret Michaels became very comical. When he decorated that apartment, he kept bringing so much stuff that I felt like I was in a Marx Brothers movie, like
A Night at the Opera.
Every time I’d turn around, there was another big object coming into the room. I was like, “No, Bret, no, no, no.” But it was interesting to watch everyone. There’s no way to be graceful on that show.

When I was voted off, I wore a scarf and dark glasses and red lipstick because I wanted to look like a very old-time Hollywood movie star. As I left the building, I thought, “Walk tall, put your shoulders back, be very Grace Kelly, and walk into the car very Kim Novak.”

But in the end, I made my point. I got to talk about civil rights for LGBTs on national TV—that was pretty big. And we raised $45,000 for the True Colors Fund, which is the most important thing.

That show taught me that people don’t really change a lot unless life provides them with a gift of understanding, which can come through a gift of misfortune early on. And through your life you can make a better life and better choices because you got that lesson already.

And I learned something else, too—waitressing still wasn’t my cup of tea.

I
WANTED TO DO
a blues album for six years, but when I finally did, it was good timing, because it seemed to me like everywhere I looked, everybody was singing the blues. People were losing their jobs, their homes, and all over the world, hard times had hit.

This time around, the album was going to be on my own label imprint, so I could actually do what I knew was right. I met the producer Scott Bomar through Josh Deutsch, who was head of the label I partnered up with for the album. It just so happened that Josh knew a lot about the blues. Scott was making some noise with a blues revival and I could look him up online. So I did. He looked like a nice guy. He had produced the soundtrack for the Bernie Mac movie
Soul Men
and had worked with Willie Mitchell. Willie had really been the godfather of Memphis soul. He made the Al Green and Ann Peebles records in the seventies. In fact, he made all the music coming out of Memphis back then. Now I work with his stepson Archie “Hubbie” Turner in my band.

When Scott told me about some of the Memphis session musicians that could work with me on the CD, I jumped. They were all members of the original Hi Records rhythm section. So I went down
to his studio in Memphis for a couple of days to see how this whole thing would work. Scott is the sweetest guy you’ll meet, but he’s also indirect, which is not what I am. In fact that’s how most Southerners are—they’re not up in your face, they have an air of politeness. So here I came, the bull in the china shop.

Before I even met Scott I had been compiling songs. Once with Rick Chertoff, then by myself, then with everyone sending me songs they loved, and then with Michael Alago, who came down with Lisa and Bill and myself to Memphis.

At that time I was still battling vocal problems. I had discovered two days before Christmas that I had a polyp. If you stop singing and speaking, the polyps will sometimes go down. Mine did not. I was really crushed because just like the first time I lost my voice, I felt like, “How can I live, or even breathe, without my voice?” I think what finished my voice was when I was on a float in the Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York, and I decided to shout “Happy Thanksgiving” to everyone from Seventy-first Street to Thirty-fourth Street before I sang on TV. (I know—I got shit for brains sometimes.)

Before I recorded the blues album, I still had to complete songs for
Kinky Boots,
so I just wrote with whatever voice I had. My dear friend Howard came with me to the doctor the day I found out about the polyp. Howard has struggled with his health, and always with courage, so I wouldn’t let myself feel self-pity.

To help with the polyp, I started working with a speech therapist named Barbara Lowenfels because I had to learn how to speak without squeezing my vocals together and forgetting to breathe. That was the first step. Then when I did the MAC AIDS campaign with Lady Gaga, Barbara was right there with me, reminding me to keep my shoulders back and take pauses to breathe so I wouldn’t injure myself more. It was a little out of the ordinary to have her behind the camera
during an interview, coaching me. And of course this was a little weird for Lisa, my manager. She kept saying, “You’re kidding, right?” But bless Barbara, she helped me and I am grateful.

After two months, I was given the okay to start singing lightly again by Dr. Peak Woo, the infamous “Dr. Wu” from the Steely Dan song. And then I went back to Katie Agresta, my vocal teacher, who has helped me back on my feet each time I’ve fallen down. We started from what felt like scratch. Something like this is caused by being so tired and doing so much that you develop bad habits, and sometimes you don’t even realize what’s happening to you till it’s too late. My polyp is now gone but I still have to deal with reflux, which I’m starting to fix. Okay, that was just a backstory—now back to Memphis.