Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir (30 page)

I sang fifty minutes a night and I wanted to do something special for the people who came to see me. I knew that Cher’s fans were sitting in the front, but
my
fans were in the back and I wanted to make them feel important, too. So I’d run to the back of the venue and climb up the back stairs while I was singing. I’d rouse the whole place. I had a fantastic sound engineer so it sounded great. And there’s nothing like making a whole bunch of people who are very impressed with themselves feel like they don’t matter by excluding them.

The tour was a blast, but unfortunately I was working so much that I started to wear myself thin. During our show in Oklahoma, I fell while running down the stairs to go in the audience and I really hurt myself. The metal on the steps dug into my leg, so there was a gash and I couldn’t get back up again. I felt so bad because Cher’s dancers looked at me and got really worried. They got people to run
backstage to get something, anything, to help me, and brought me bags of ice to put on my leg. Even though I couldn’t move, I finished the song.

And then I went to the hospital and got it bandaged up and was given some painkillers. But I still wasn’t myself, and I said, “I can’t do this, I have to go home.” When my little boy saw me with crutches he started crying, but he calmed down when I told him I’d be okay.

At first Cher’s people totally understood that I needed to rest and one of her people, who I’ll call Mr. Smiley, wanted me back. I couldn’t go when they wanted me but as soon as I could, of course I did. I only missed two or three shows. At first I had to perform in a wheelchair and one time I almost fell off the stage. And then gradually my leg got better and I switched to a cane, and then I was fully back. But I haven’t been able to jog ever since.

One time when we were heading for a show in DC we wound up getting stuck in terrible traffic and we had a flat tire, and I was going to be late for the show. You’re not going to believe what happened. They sent a police escort so we could make it through. We quickly got dressed in the back of the bus and walked right off the bus onto the stage. It was so dramatic and wild. But I also felt really bad. Cher was a stickler for being prompt and Mr. Smiley said, “You can’t be late anymore. If you are, I’m going to start to dock you.” But that experience taught me to be more on time, which I’m so grateful for. (I still am a little late, though. I’m trying. There’s a lot of shit to do to pull this old ass together—I do the singing exercises, the eyelashes . . .)

Another time we were in Laredo, Texas, and I was running late after an in-store again. My assistant Jackie and I had to pack up everything (she did most of the packing), quickly get dressed at the hotel, and get to the gig. But someone forgot to have a car waiting. So my assistant Jackie got a cab for us and we started shoving all of
our shit in it for the show. We tried to get this poor Mexican cab driver to get to the stage entrance as soon as possible: “Drive on the grass and go backstage. Come on, you gotta go, you gotta go!” So this poor guy who was absolutely horrified drove on the grass, not knowing who the fuck we were. Then we were blocked by a bunch of people who were lined up to see Cher so I stuck my head out the window and yelled, “Please let me through! I’m gonna be late, I gotta be onstage, I’m supposed to be onstage, please,
please,
let me through.” Some of them were like, “Fuck you.” But some of them just looked at me going, “Oh my God, it’s Cyndi Lauper!” and moved over. We finally pulled in backstage and all our trunks were outside because it was a small venue and Miss Thing had everything inside, including the elephant and the kitchen sink. We ran out of the cab, popped open the trunks and pulled out all our shit, and I ran onstage. It was so ridiculous, and again, I was mad at myself because I was late.

Then after we took a break for Christmas, Cher wanted to go back out, but I had to be with my kid because he was such a wreck. He missed his mom. I think Cher understood. After that, whenever she did something good I’d call her up and congratulate her. I think she’s awesome. It’s just really hard to be friends with famous people because they’re really busy.

It’s funny—I did the Cher tour, but I was never invited to the Lilith Fair. There was supposed to be a “women in rock” moment at the end of the nineties but it was really a Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears moment. Those two were like me and Madonna, head to head. But Christina was a different kind of performer from Britney—and although everybody says Britney can’t sing, it’s bullshit. She can sing—she just can’t sing like she does on the record, because no one can, really. Those Swedish producers she worked with made her stop
at every word. That’s why her voice sounds like that—so controlled. I would have killed those producers. They would have been dead.

Here’s the thing that’s so bizarre to me. When producers contact you to work together, it’s because they hear something in your work that they want to combine with what they do. So it’s so strange when they make you unrecognizable—unless, I guess, you want to do something unrecognizable. Which I think is very plausible for me—I sometimes wondered if I should just hide my name the next time, so people would just hear my singing without knowing who I was. I could put together a persona like Daft Punk. You don’t even know who those guys are or how old they are. That’s the wonder and the beauty of it.

The whole idea that young people are the only ones making good music and that older musicians do some form of old-fart music is bizarre to me. A lot of the younger artists now, they sing literally one word, and then the producers piece it together with the other words using Pro Tools. When I did
Bring Ya to the Brink
and I worked with Swedish writers who acted like I was Svengali because I was adding my own input, I just looked at them and thought, “They don’t read credits, they don’t know what I do, they don’t know that I’ve produced.”

When one producer started directing how I should sing I said, “You’re a wonderful drummer, why don’t you show me how to sing like a drum?” And I directed him on the bridge to make it like an echo. And the song “Echo” really worked; it’s catchy and it’s fun. It’s a great dance record. But it was not a priority. The record company had four other acts that were priorities, and unfortunately there was nothing I could do.

Which, by the way, is what’s so great about this musical
Kinky Boots
that I’m doing with Harvey Fierstein and Jerry Mitchell. I couldn’t have walked through the world of Broadway with two better
guys. They’re very gifted. They know the world they live in and they really
like
my music; that’s why they have me there. It’s not like they just threw me in there because of my name. They’re not trying to change me. It’s been exciting because I don’t have to worry that someone’s going to tell me to do something ridiculous that is not me at all (and if they do, Harvey says, “That’s ridiculous”).

And like I said, when I sing something, I really want to connect to something bigger than myself. I don’t want to just sing. I have always wanted to escape, and when you sing in the right rhythm in the right key and say the right things you can open up that corridor. That is the only place I want to go when I sing. Singing makes you bigger than who you normally are. And thank God for my teachers and all the singers who came before me and who are singing now. We all learn from one another and are connected.

So anyway, back to 1997. Declyn Wallace Lauper Thornton was born in November of that year. We named him after Elvis Costello (whose first name is Declan). It’s just like what they say: Your whole perspective changes when you have a kid. After he was born I had a meeting with the record-company people out in New York and they brought in a new A & R guy, Peter Asher. But the head guy was the same guy I met in Paris before I was pregnant who told me everything was going to be good. You can’t listen to a lie twice. I had one more album on my contract and I said, “Listen, if you’re not going to do anything to promote it you might as well let me go. I don’t want to go through that again. I worked really hard, I tried really hard, I gave a really great image, tried to make a really great album cover, but it all doesn’t matter if you guys are not going to promote it.” And this one guy said, “No, this time we’re going to do something. Why don’t you go home and sleep on it?” He was trying to placate me. I pulled out my baby’s picture and said, “Why don’t you go home and sleep on
this
? Tomorrow when you’re shaving, look at this baby’s face in the mirror and tell him how his mother had to get another job, because you wrecked her career. You can do that to me, but you’re not going to do that to my baby.” Peter looked like he was going to fall down; he couldn’t even believe it.

I tried to leave, and they came after me and said, “Okay, you just have to make a Christmas album.” That would be my final album for Epic and then I could get the hell out. I said that I just happened to be working on a Christmas record because I always wanted to make one. I love Christmas. So that’s how it happened. Jan came back to stay with me upstairs at our house in Connecticut with her son, who was eight or nine. We had worked together so well that it was a natural next step to keep writing. And Declyn was just born, and a nice woman named Delilah was taking care of him. Dec was the most awesome little kid. He was funny and laughed a lot—just a sweetie. Jan and I wrote in the living room. I made a lot of great music in that house (what I consider great, anyway). I wrote all of
Hat Full of Stars
and
Sisters of Avalon
in that living room. Later I wrote
Shine
in there, too.

The house has a very magical feel to it that makes you forget time and space. It’s made like a little dollhouse, so it is fun to write there. David would come by with Declyn once in a while as we recorded the album in the garage. The album has a song called “New Year’s Baby (First Lullaby)” that I wrote for Dec, and he grabbed the microphone and just sang into it. So that’s him that you hear in the solo. He thought he was singing. He even did a little yodel thing in it.

When the album came out, my great publicist Lisa (the one who eventually became my manager), got me on the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree-lighting television special to sing “Early Christmas Morning.” And not just that, but I was accompanied by a kids’ choir. All these little kids were in scarves and Christmas sweaters. It was
awesome. I started the song by sitting on the floor in a white cape, playing the dulcimer, and then I threw my cape off and I had on a red satin Mrs. Claus–style dress with white crinoline underneath.

When I was a kid in Ozone Park, my friends and I would come into Manhattan at night during Christmas. In the middle of the night, you kind of had the city to yourself. We’d see the store windows across the street at Saks, decked out with all the Christmas decorations, and then we’d go to see the tree. And there I was performing in front of it. I thought that was pretty amazing.

It was such a special time when Dec was little. I remember when he was a toddler, I brought him out with me on Cher’s “Do You Believe” tour, with his caregiver, Delilah. Dec was his own guy. He wanted in on everything. During that tour I had a few opening bands before me, including Fergie’s band Wild Orchid, before she went on to join the Black Eyed Peas. Dec used to point his chin toward the woman he wanted to be brought to. He was all over Fergie like a cheap suit. He started to have a fascination with drums too so Scooter from my first tour gave him sticks, and he demonstrated how he could use his wrists. Scooter said he had really good rhythm. When he was three we went into Sam Ash Music Store for drums and he sat at a baby kit and imitated everything in a drum instruction video that was playing. One time he went shopping for a cymbal and hit every one in the shop. The guy who worked there looked like he was going to kill me. Anyway, later, when he was three and a half, I included him onstage with me. I’d let him set up his little drums and play with us.

One time I had to leave him for an in-store appearance in Manhattan and he started to cry because he wanted to be with me so I said, “Okay, we’re taking him.” I dressed him up, and Jackie drew a little mustache and goatee on him. He played drums on a cardboard box with the band, who were all very giving to him. And the people just
loved him! He was something. But then at one point the band decided that they didn’t want to play with him anymore until he really learned. So he got upset and didn’t want to come anymore. He also felt like they took me away from him.

But then he got involved with hockey. Can you believe that I became a hockey mom for a minute?

Little one / little son / All my life I’ve wished you welcome.
—“December Child”

S
HINE
WAS SUPPOSED
to be a dance record. I was moving in that direction after I wound up doing some work with these two fellows from Soul Solution who remixed “Ballad of Cleo and Joe.” It became a big dance hit in South Florida because of a fan and friend of mine named Carlos Rodriguez, who was so upset at how the record company treated me that he got a job at a radio station and played my music. (Thank you, Carlos.) And like I said, I had done “Disco Inferno” for the first Cher tour because I didn’t want to just be the oldies artist with nothing to sell. It was nominated for a Grammy for Best Dance Recording for 1999 and became a hit in the clubs.

I wrote the song “Shine,” and some other ones, with Bill Wittman, a longtime collaborator. I wrote with Jan, too, and I kept trying to go back to writing with those guys from Soul Solution. I felt a connection to them because, like I said earlier, my aunt knew Bobby Guy’s uncle and because we had been successful. But time moved on and they changed and I changed.

Anyway,
Shine
started out as a dance record, but when I performed the songs I was working on at clubs, I realized their shortcomings. A lot of them were too complicated for dance. I’d perform something
and realize, “Oh, this song has too many chord changes.” Dance music only has like three chords, or maybe four at the most. It just doesn’t change that much. It has to be simple as hell and not have too many words. Things have advanced a little since then, but basically, I found that dance music was more restrictive than pop, whereas I initially thought it was going to be more creative.