Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir (39 page)

I knew I wanted to do the Memphis Slim song “Mother Earth.” I thought Allen Toussaint would be great on it. I met Allen when I sang at the Hurricane Katrina benefit with him at Madison Square Garden in 2006. A ton of folks were there, from Elvis Costello to Bruce Springsteen, to the wonderful Irma “Soul Queen of New Orleans” Thomas. I got to sing with her and the Dixie Cups and it was a real thrill. The producers wanted me to sing an old song called “I Know (You Don’t Love Me No More)” for the benefit. And I said, “I’m playing with Allen Toussaint—shouldn’t I do one of his great songs?” I thought maybe I could do a mash-up of two songs to celebrate him, so I found his song called “Last Train” that went really well with “I Know You (Don’t Love Me No More.)” I didn’t want to do a medley, though; I wanted to figure out a way to play the two songs over each other. If it worked, it might be really something. I figure you gotta try for the challenge instead of the safe way all the fuckin’ time. I mean, there was Allen Toussaint! And he kept saying, “I find this very adventuresome.” I respect him so much. I’ve always thought, “If you’re gonna do television, try your hardest to do something that’s real.” Because most
stuff on TV is rehearsed to the last possible moment, so that nothing magically unpredictable can happen. Like when I did the Jools Holland show last New Year’s Eve, they had all these big arrangements planned, so I said, “Can I just play with strings, and the dulcimer, and maybe that guy over there could play the tin whistle?” You want to always try something different, something where even
you
don’t know what’s going to happen, and then you either hear the magic or you don’t. And with Allen, that night, I think it worked out. After that, we wanted to work together if we ever could, but when he did a CD, I wasn’t available for it.

During the last go-around to figure out the song material I would take to Memphis, I worked with Michael Alago, my computer, and some Chinese takeout in my kitchen. Michael, who I knew for years in the industry, was a great A & R person. All the songs were chosen because of their spirit, their story, and their timeless theme of history repeating itself. Here was great American music created by people who were oppressed and who wrote music that was uplifting.

Ya know, even though it’s called the blues, you feel better somehow listening to it. I wanted to take the old glamour of this music but also make it into something that could be embraced now. I am always hoping to make music that is timeless. And the blues—well, that’s timeless. I remember the thing that Sony was afraid of way back when was that it was going to sound like a heritage record, which was never my intention. And I was just grateful to make this music without a lot of fuckin’ grief from a company struggling to survive.

I had two songs I wanted to try first in Memphis, a Lil Green song called “Romance in the Dark” (the singer and pianist Michael Feinstein recommended I listen to it after he watched a True Colors cabaret show that I did at his club) and the Tracy Nelson song “Down So Low,” which I had sung on and off in 2004. I knew I had found the
right band for the project: Lester Snell on keys, Howard Grimes on drums, Leroy Hodges on bass, and Skip Pitts on guitar.

So we tried out “Down So Low” and “Romance in the Dark” with the band. When the players heard the 1930s recording of “Romance in the Dark,” of course they were wondering what the arrangement might be. I said to them, “Please just learn the chords, I will arrange it as I go.” It is frightening to tell this to folks who like to structure everything before the “singer” gets there. But I wanted this to be live—really live. So I kept saying to Scott that everything else would come together as we played. I just needed to sing with them for a minute first. I heard Skip, the guitarist who played that wonderful riff on the
Shaft
record, call what I was doing “head arrangements” and I thought, “Yeah, that’s right.”

I brought Allen Toussaint in early the first day he was at the studio, and I worked out the arrangements with the special artists as they came in. It was really the opposite from what Howard, the drummer, said Uncle Willie (Mitchell) did. Everyone in Memphis was influenced by this brilliant man. But even though I hadn’t known him, or studied under him, like Scott, I knew his work. I grew up singing it and loved it. And I had some reliable ears with me who provided checks and balances, like Bill Wittman, who recorded my first album and has worked with me pretty much ever since. I also had Lisa there, who is my third eye.

When the band came in I let Allen start directing because of his venerable track record, and because I thought maybe he spoke the band’s language more than I did. And Scott was cool with that, too. But Howard, who had just gotten used to taking his cues from me, got concerned and started asking why it changed. I thought the whole band would feel more comfortable with that, but I guess I was wrong.

After we did the first two songs to try the band out, Howard the drummer came up to Lisa and said, “I hear Cyndi is very popular. I heard she did a cover of a Miles Davis tune, and she had some big hits, but I’m not familiar with her music.” So Lisa said, “Oh, I bet you are—did you ever hear the song ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’?” He said no, and Lisa said, “How about ‘True Colors’?” And he said, “No, I’m not familiar with those jams, but I hear she’s real popular.” I thought it might be good that he didn’t know my work—no preconceived notions.

But everybody was very nice and generous to me. When we worked on those two songs together in that initial meeting, I knew it was going to work. We really jelled.

I think once we all felt the center of the music, we relaxed. The center of the music is the gravity of it for me. It’s where I stand with the drums in the center of a song. It feels like the drums are my dance partner, and from there I listen very closely to find an interior motion within the music. I listen to hear and feel what all the instruments are creating in between and around what the drums and I are doing together.

The way I see it is that each musical phrase creates a weight on whatever side of the center of the rhythm you put it: the center of the rhythm being the drums. The bass needs to support the drums, but the best bass parts, for me, also lead the melody. Distributing the musical parts creates a balance within the song. And that’s the fun part for me. It makes the song sway one way or the other, like a subtle push and pull around the drums and the singer. None of this is new, of course, even though every time I figure out how to make a song breathe like that, I feel like I’ve reinvented the wheel.

I learned the idea of this when I studied with a teacher named Betty Scott. She was supposed to be my introduction to studying
with Lennie Tristano, the great jazz pianist. But I never got that far. I couldn’t quit my rock band. I loved rock and roll too much. But what Betty taught me shaped the way I sang and constructed a song for the rest of my life.

She taught me how to listen when I sang. To work on my timing, I sang to a metronome. Then she’d blow into a pitch pipe and ask me to sing the note she played. Then she went over intervals with me by blowing a note into a pitch pipe and asking me to sing the fifth or the third of the note, to help me develop an understanding of harmony and an ear for what other instruments were playing around me. To further help me understand this, she had me study the recordings of Billie Holiday with the great saxophonist Lester Young, specifically how Billie responded to what Lester played, and how Lester responded to what Billie sang. After singing with them note for note and breath for breath for almost two years, I felt I could begin to understand how to sing in the center of a song like Billie and answer the way Lester would answer.

My whole style and arrangement approach is kind on based of the simplicity of that approach. I kept it in mind when I arranged “Time After Time” and “True Colors.” That’s why I made them record the track live with the electronic drum, so we could feel the center and what could sway around it.

Every once and a while, like when I recorded
At Last
, I could do it blatantly, but never in dance or pop. I always had to sneak in that stuff on those projects. But great blues has all that naturally. So when the opportunity came to sing with some of the greatest blues/soul guys in the business, I jumped. If you listen closely to the song “Mother Earth” on the
Memphis Blues
CD, you’ll hear that Lester Snell and Allen Toussaint are playing back and forth to each other. You will hear “pure joy,” as Lester put it once, and some fine call-and-response.

And one more thing I want to tell you about listening to call-and-response. If you are ever are up at dawn and just have a minute, listen to the birds. Sometimes if you can answer one of the whistles right, they’ll kindly let you into their round. If you are open enough, your heart might break open with how sweet they are, and then you’ll hear and feel their rhythm too—until you mess up. When I do they fly away and ditch me.

I have always loved mixing different styles and genres of music together. I guess it’s like how we used to dress in the eighties: we mixed all the decades of fashion together at once, as my first stylist, Laura Wills, once put it. It took me most of my career to think of saying to the people I work with in the studio, “I do things a little unconventionally sometimes, so please bear with me. It might sound weird at first, but just go with me for a minute, and you’ll hear what I’m hearing.”

And that’s what I tried to tell these much more seasoned musicians than myself while making Memphis Blues. Because for me, Memphis Blues is a soulful blues which is different from New Orleans style, which has more swing to it. Allen Toussant plays New Orleans style, but the minute he played the hypnotic opening of “Shattered Dreams” the two styles just fell into place. I didn’t have to try and explain anymore to the band; they heard it—that is, until I brought in the guitarist Jonny Lang. Then suddenly, I had two lead guitarists: Jonny and Skip Pitts, whose approaches to the music were completely different. It left me in the position of having to coax them and the band into melding their styles to create this swampy feel to the rhythm that I was envisioning, one that evoked memories of Robert Johnson’s early recording of “Cross Road Blues.”

I kept telling them what was happening in the story of the song like we were making a movie. I told them that each part was a character. And I shared whatever visions I had while I was singing so they
could feel them too. And we began to make a version of “Cross Road Blues” that felt to me like an old black-and-white movie. I guess when my mom played
Peter and the Wolf
to me way back when, it must have left a big impression.

In Memphis I had entered such a different world of musicians with a different language and culture. These were some of the greatest musicians I’d ever worked with. And I’m so glad we didn’t write out music for them to play, like charts, because instead of reading we just listened to each other and fell into a natural lull by using that call-and-response approach. Everything was live, which was totally opposite from my last CD. And all the while above the little sofa in the control room was a painted portrait on velvet of Jimi Hendrix. (He always pops up no matter where I am.)

So we moved forward, and all of a sudden the harmonica master Charlie Musselwhite, the legendary B.B. King, and the wonderful Jonny Lang were on the album. Then I heard the bass player, Leroy Hodges, talking to Howard Grimes, the drummer, about “Ann this” and “Ann that.” And I said, “Ann who? Ann Peebles? Oh my God—you know her? Can you call her?” It was as simple as that. I thought I’d jump out of my skin. I sang along with her for years, like I did with Aretha and Billie and Ella and Big Maybelle.

So when I recorded “Rollin and Tumblin” with Ann, I tried to tell her at first how much her music meant to me, but I became emotional and started crying. I think that scares people when you’re trying to direct them so I had to leave the room. I gave myself the old scuba-diving lesson: “Why are you crying? Aren’t you happy? Okay, then . . . Breathe.” At Scott’s studio, we recorded on an eight-track machine. How’s that for analog? It made a real nice warm, thick sound. Bill Wittman knew how to work it too because he said it was the first machine he ever worked on.

It took a while to get B.B. involved. He worked all the time and really, when you mention my name to people, half don’t know who I am and half don’t think I can sing. When I told Scott that I would like to do a song with Allen playing on keyboards and B.B. King on guitar, he said, “Then you gotta choose a Louis Jordan song, because B.B. always talks about Louis Jordan.” Louis Jordan was a hugely influential jazz and blues musician, composer, and bandleader. So I went online (I love my computer) and pulled up his music. The first song that came up was “Early in the Morning,” and it was so much fun—even the cover was great, just like my aunt Gloria’s old cha-cha record covers. He talks in the beginning and at the end, and there’s great music and a story too. I thought Allen would shine on this song, because it has a New Orleans feel to it. I was right; Allen was wonderful and as Lester put it, “It was pure joy.” The best you can hope for is to have a session that’s pure joy.

When we sent that song out to B.B., his peeps got back to us and said he could do it. But the only time we could get him was when I was going to be away at a gig and then I’d be going with my family to Turks and Caicos with Lisa and her family for the kids’ spring break. So B.B. recorded his parts at his studio in Las Vegas with Scott Bomar, and I didn’t actually get to meet him again. But listen, I was still so thrilled that I did a track with the man I met as a student at Johnson State College, when I was so overwhelmed I couldn’t talk. And B.B. not only played and sang great, but he even did some banter on that song with me, too. Wow!

In my effort to make the blues more accessible to the person who wouldn’t normally listen to blues, I thought I needed to do something aesthetically pleasing with the album cover. So I thought I’d bring it back to the old days, when people like Alberta Hunter and Ma Rainey were dressed to the nines. B.B. King is
still
dressed to the nines in a suit. Then I thought, “How can we make it sexy?” So I asked Ellen Von
Unwerth if she would take the album cover pictures of me because she really took some beautiful pictures when I did the Viva Glam campaign with Lady Gaga. I thought combining the boudoir with the blues looked great together. And I knew Ellen would make a glamorous, modern image inspired by older pictures I found for reference.