Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir (29 page)

After that I thought, “You won’t show them? I’ll show them. I’ll not only show them but I’ll make them all famous.” And I made the
video for “Hey Now” with all of those fabulous drag queens by the twelve-story Unisphere from the 1964–65 World’s Fair, which is in Queens—of course. My friend Kevin Dornan told me about the globe, and I realized it would be a wonderful place to shoot because it’s so iconic and putting the drag queens underneath it is a great visual. I sold a million copies of that record in England, but did you know they wouldn’t put that video out in the US? The record company decided to squash it here. Apparently there were too many drag queens in it. Then Gloria Estefan saw the drag queens and she put them in her video for “Everlasting Love.”

In 1995 I got very sick and the doctor asked me when I was going to have a kid, and I told her, “After this tour.” She said, “It’s always after this tour or that tour.” Then my friend Helena said, “Cyn, just have a baby.” So I did. I started trying to get pregnant in 1996 through in vitro (I didn’t have time to wait). In vitro was expensive, and after a while I realized that the paintings in my doctor’s office weren’t prints, they were real—I was paying for them. But it didn’t work.

When I was trying to get pregnant, I started spending more time in the Connecticut house. Jan Pulsford stayed nearby and we started writing songs for the new album in my little home studio. It was great. I didn’t have anybody breaking my balls, and if Jan went to bed, I could keep working if I wanted to. I had first been inspired by her work when I heard a track she had called “Searching.” We made a great team and I had a wonderful time with her. She was just awesome. The reason I called it
Sisters of Avalon
is because Jan is Welsh and loves Welsh mythology and Arthurian legend and all of that. (She has a son named Merlin.)

I started writing
Sisters of Avalon
while doing a promo tour for
Deadly Cyns,
which took me to three continents in six weeks. When I came back from that tour I was on a cane because I had fallen from a
stage. I had to dance on top of speaker cabinets, because we couldn’t afford the stage that I wanted.

And Jan and I were talking about this book
The Mists of Avalon,
by Marion Zimmer Bradley, which is kind of a retelling of the King Arthur legend from a female point of view. The sisters were the healers, the wise women, and I thought
Sisters of Avalon
sounded really empowering.

The song “Sisters of Avalon” is about a rite of passage. At the time I wrote it, we were traveling during the end of ’94 and I read an article about a little girl who was being circumcised, and the family treated it like it was some big party. And that’s what inspired me.

When I got the go-ahead to make
Sisters of Avalon,
Steve, my manager at the time, told me to find an old mansion like the English bands did and record my album there. So I talked to a producer that David Massey, who was my A & R guy at the time, recommended. This producer had done some work with Tricky from Massive Attack in an old barn and said if we found the right place I might even be able to sing outside. He said we could record using Pro Tools, Logic, and sixteen-track tape. The album was going to be a kind of first, because we would try and get an old-fashioned tape sound with all the advantages of using a computer. I was excited about the idea.

I had come back from that Japan trip where I was away from my new husband for Christmas and New Year’s. I came to realize on that trip that I needed to reassess my career and life. I would need new management and a new me. The one thing I got from that
Hat Full of Stars
project was a wonderful band, which this time I was the real leader of. I talked with and played with and was close to them. I led them onstage the same way I’d seen men like Cab Calloway and Bruce Springsteen and Prince do. I always thought, “Hey, how come Bruce can be boss of his band? If he could be boss, so could I.” Besides, I
wanted to be able to do music live and on the spot. I wanted to be able, when something came to me during a performance, to just lead the band into that. I have said before that the joy of performance, for me, is that in its best moments, I can be anybody. I was Cab Calloway and Elvis and Tina Turner and Ann-Margret. I was Mick Jagger, too, and James Brown and Edith Piaf. Whoever came to me.

My one hope every time I sing is to sing freely enough to have the spirit come to me. And once I am there, it is truly a gift. I am flying free; I finally get to escape everything. And in that space, whether anyone recognizes it or not, I feel connected to something greater than myself. And that’s how it’s always been for me right from the first time I opened my mouth to sing. That’s why in those cover bands I was in, if I asked someone how I was that night and they said, “It was okay,” I never understood. In my mind I was just dancing with Mick Jagger and it was fantastic. I realized eventually that I couldn’t close my eyes anymore and just sing. I needed to get the band and the audience to see what I saw and felt inside. I needed to have them escape with me. So I had to go back again and learn everything I could.

When I toured with that incredible ten-piece band for
Hat Full of Stars,
I played live with a loop. But I had the drummer retrigger the loop every four or so bars. That way, if I wanted to try something and make a slight left turn in the middle of the song, it was possible. We weren’t so locked in. It made it easier to be spontaneous. And I think you need to have spontaneous combustion sometimes. But to really lead, I needed to learn how to give clear cues and I needed to learn to count well enough to count in and out of the music phrases I wanted to include as we were playing.

So I tried to work closely with the drummer. On the “Hat Full of Stars” tour, I worked with Rocky Bryant and then Scooter Werner. I’d ask, “If I wanted to do this kind of change here, what would be a
clear and good count for you?” And they told me. So I’d do that more. I work as close as I can with whatever band I’m making music with. But I think it will always be a process.

Most singers talk in such a cryptic way to these guys it’s a miracle the monitor guy can guess what the heck the singer means. So every time it sounded good to me, I’d ask what he added to my voice or took out. Or I’d ask what kind of speakers he thought would suit my voice best. That helped me learn how to communicate with the monitor guy.

Anyway, back to
Sisters of Avalon
. Jan and I, and our producer Mark Saunders, finished recording the album in an old mansion in Tuxedo Park, New York, which had its own spirit. I was tired of recording in studios. They’re overpriced and overrated, and with today’s technology you don’t need them. And in Tuxedo Park we had a great view. And a housekeeper. And a chef. Unfortunately when I was planting the last petunias and putting the gnomes next to each room, my manager told me he was leaving to take a job at Sony. He was my second manager since David Wolff.

There were so many tracks that I was proud of. “Say a Prayer” was about Gregory, and AIDS, and the fight between life and death. “Love to Hate” was about the record company and the too-cool-for-school younger artists who were so rude and stupid that they didn’t even realize that half of the shit they did, they did because we did it first. (The eighties have become so big now, and now there are these nostalgia tours with a bunch of acts doing a few hits. I wouldn’t go out on tour like that. I just don’t want to.) And “You Don’t Know” was just about people on television who have no idea what they are talking about, like these so-called political experts—the left suppresses the right and the right suppresses the left.

When we taped the “Sisters of Avalon” video we used a keyboard player who was in a wheelchair. Jan thought everyone would think
that was her in the wheelchair, so we never released the video because she was so heartbroken about it. It wasn’t a success anyway because people weren’t focused on it.

When I was in Europe doing promotion that’s when I started trying to get pregnant again. Then in March 1997 I found out that I was finally pregnant. I couldn’t believe it. I wanted this little baby for so long. I used to look at pictures of my husband’s mother holding him with a triangle mouth, and of course now my son has that triangle mouth. I used to call him “Luscious Louie” when he was little. I was so excited, but I didn’t say anything publicly for a while. At first I thought I was going to have a girl, because when I was trying to get pregnant I kept having a vision of twin girls leaving with a suitcase. But as it happens, I had a beautiful boy.

I ended up doing a video for “Ballad of Cleo and Joe” while I was pretty pregnant. It wasn’t supposed to be a video. The record company had me doing press promotion in some design place in New York and I looked around and said, “Hey, I’m all dressed up, I’ve got on a black wig, why not do a video? Just give me a turntable and two lights pointing down on me, aiming for my stomach. You stand up there and film it.”

I made a guy glue tiny mirrors on my big round stomach to make it look like a disco ball, and I wore a silver bikini top because I thought it was funny. I figured this was the only time in my life I could get away with wearing a bikini and not worry that I didn’t have a good shape.

When I was editing the video, I kept getting Braxton Hicks contractions, and the two video editors were looking at me like, “Oh my God, please don’t have your baby here.” People were always saying that to me. Then there are the wise guys. “Hey, lady, what are you having, twins?” David said, “The next time somebody says that, just say, ‘I
don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve been drinking a lot of beer lately, but I’m not pregnant.’” I did that once. It was very funny. And everyone touched my stomach when I was pregnant. I felt like saying, “Get your hands off me before I fuckin’ knock you to the ground! I’ll show you what a pregnant woman is like! You better back off.” People don’t bother an animal when it’s pregnant. You just don’t.

I read fan emails while I was pregnant. You gotta understand, email was new in those days. It was like
Star Trek,
like I was writing in outer space. Many of them were from people who told me about how it was really tough for them to come out and that the song “True Colors” really saved their lives. When they announced that they were gay, they were disowned by their family and friends and lost their jobs. Some were suicidal. But instead of committing suicide, they would sing this song to themselves, in the same way that I would sing “Across the Universe” to myself.

As soon as I started answering those emails, they started coming in heavy. I don’t even know how many—I just knew it was a lot, and that every single one was the same. And that’s when I realized that the gay community had embraced this song. I immediately called my sister and told her about the letters and said that if there’s ever a time that we could help out the gay community we should. And when the time came, we did PFLAG’s “Stay Close” campaign together, which featured celebrities and their gay family members, with a message to support your gay loved ones.

I was also the opening act for Tina Turner’s summer “Wildest Dreams” tour while I was pregnant. This wasn’t an eighties thing: Tina was promoting new material, and so was I. But my mistake was that I did alternative songs from “Sisters of Avalon,” and it just didn’t suit that audience. The tour helped her but it didn’t help me at all. It hurt me. It made me an opening act.

Famed photographer David LaChapelle wanted to take pictures of me pregnant. So I told my publicist Kathy Schenker and she said, “He doesn’t want to take a picture of you.” I wasn’t sure why she was my publicist in the first place—it wasn’t like she was bringing me anything earth-shattering. Years later, David asked me what happened with him taking a picture of me and I told him, “Kathy Schenker happened.” That’s how this business works. It’s kind of fucked-up.

The album came out in 1997 and the record company let it fall through the cracks. Jan was surprised; she just didn’t expect for it not to achieve anything, but I did, because I knew the record company had no intention of doing anything for that CD. It was on the
Billboard
album chart for a week. We sold sixty thousand copies on tour and it was just heartbreaking. When I was pregnant and on tour with Tina Turner, no one from the record company came to see me.

Tina was nice but we didn’t get that close, if ya know what I mean. I connected much more with Cher when we toured together in 1999 for her “Do You Believe” tour. Cher is amazing, just the coolest person. When she invited me on the tour, she said, “Come on, we’re gonna do great together.” She was right.

Cher would do things like rent out an entire movie theater for everyone on a tour stop and we’d all watch a movie. God bless her, every day she did her yoga, every day come hell or high water. That’s a pain in the ass but she could do it all. She was disciplined and she did the right thing and she was pleasant and she’s just cool. If there was a problem, you’d hear about it, she’d come up and talk to you, and then it was done.

By the time she invited me on her 2002 tour, I had just lost the label I was at, and I thought indie was the way to go. But a million people saw that show—a million. And it was kind of awesome because we were able to put on a really great performance. My band was
incredible. Cher started to have me on the JumboTron, and then she began to direct me. I don’t know where she got the time, but she did and at one point she pulled me aside to say, “Listen, when you wear all that dark eye makeup I can’t see inside your eyes.” She suggested I wear other makeup and put more light on me.

During the day, I did in-store appearances, because I didn’t want to just be on the tour, I wanted to really contribute. That’s why I recorded “Disco Inferno,” too, on producer Jellybean Benitez’s label—so I’d have some new material. And I bought clothes to look as great as I could for Cher and for me. My husband had said, “If you want to be successful, you have to look successful. You can’t wear cheap shit.” So I hired a stylist and she bought me stuff from all over the place, including Dolce & Gabbana. Anna Sui also gave me a suit and a pair of leather pants, God bless her. For in-store appearances I put on white jeans and Etro shirts. Onstage I wore suits and ruffled shirts, kind of what I remember Otis Redding used to wear.