Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir (31 page)

At the time, I would have liked to have gotten input from Junior Vasquez, but he wasn’t talking to me because I insulted one of his friends or something, and he was living with strange people who kind of took over his life a bit. I didn’t really know what was going on, but we fell out for a little while (now we’re talking again). When I started playing the dulcimer on my albums he would say to me, “Nobody likes that hillbilly shit you’re playing.” So sometimes if he wouldn’t return my call, I would just call him again and play the dulcimer on his message machine.

So I had to shift the album away from dance a little and make it right for what it was: an album of pop, rock, dance, and R & B. At that time I also went and did a little something for Tricky. I did vocals for the song “Five Days” for his 2001 album,
BlowBack.
I admire him very much as an artist. I met him in a studio in New Jersey, but it was an odd experience because when I got there, I had to start writing the song with him, I mean literally, everything—the lyrics and the melody. I can do that, but I wasn’t prepared and I was so on the spot that I couldn’t even think. I felt like a deer in the headlights.

While I was there I also played him the ballad “Water’s Edge” to ask him what he thought, and he said, “Cyn, to me, that’s a hit song.” He liked me a lot because his toilet kept running and running, and it was driving me crazy, so I lifted the lid off and fixed it. When he did an interview about the album and they asked about working with me, he said, “She fixed my toilet.”

One song on that album that I always thought was so funny was “It’s Hard to Be Me,” which I wrote with Bill and Rob Hyman. It just feels like a comedy song even though it’s a rocker. We laughed very hard when we were writing it. Like there’s the line “You see me everywhere in my underwear / You may wonder what I’m here to sell.” That’s because around 2000, models were being shown in underwear in their ads, and I kept thinking, “Where are the clothes? What are they selling?” Even though they were in underwear, you didn’t know if they were selling underwear, or music, or clothes, or what. The song is meant to be ironic too, like with the line Bill came up with, “It’s hard to be me / Nobody knows what it’s like to be me / the envy of mediocrity.” (He’s very clever, Bill.)

Along with “Comfort You,” Jan and I wrote “Higher Plane,” which I thought would be a big hit. I loved those songs but then when I played them for the record people, they’d say, “It doesn’t sound like you, Cyn.” I was like, “Isn’t that good?” So what if it doesn’t sound like me? “Shine” sounded like a hit to me, too, but radio wouldn’t play it because of the drums, because of the rhythm. They couldn’t tell me what it was that they didn’t like about the rhythm, but I paid the guy who engineers for Mutt Lange to remix it. He wound up compressing my voice so much though that it sounded like I couldn’t sing. I realized that just because the compressor worked for other people didn’t mean that it would work for me. And then I just felt like Vinnie van Gogh trying to make a hit painting again.

The way I used to sell my records was that I would perform dance mixes of my songs in the clubs. I started to wear all the shit that I wore for Gay Pride when I performed in the clubs. So I had on a bejeweled rainbow flag, so when I spun around in the light, it would shine. Then I started wearing these headdresses too. I remember I went to Canada to do some shows, and at the time, the Bravo network was doing a
piece on me about the creative process. So they were following me around. I was also eating disgusting diet food again to stay skinny.

Anyway, I had booked a couple of shows in what they told me were dance clubs, in Edmonton, Alberta. I had off during the day and the Bravo people went away somewhere, so I wandered around and found this shop with all these beautiful feathered headdresses. And keep in mind this was Edmonton, okay? Not New Orleans. So I went in, and there were headdresses in all different colors: a red one, a white one, a blue one. I was so excited. But then the woman who worked there kept looking at me and asking, “Do you ice skate?” I said, “No, no, I don’t ice skate.” But she continued to ask me. Finally I said, “Why do you keep asking me if I ice skate?”

“Because this is an Ice Capades shop.”

So I bought some new wide feathered headdresses and I brought them with my bejeweled flag to the club for my gig. I walked in and there was chicken wire in front of the stage and a dirt floor, and there was an opening band for me. And I was like, “Um, why is there a band at a dance club?” But I quickly worked out some songs with them—slash-metal versions of “She Bop” and “Girls.” Then I got my headdress on, and I was dancing around with my glittery clothes, dressed up like some crazy-ass witch doctor, and singing songs like “Higher Plane” to a track (like you do in dance clubs), and all of a sudden I stopped and looked at everybody. They were all just staring at me, dumbfounded. So I said, “You all must think I’m out of my mind, but see, I thought this was a dance club, and in dance clubs, you do this kind of thing.”

I don’t know how I got through that show. It was like something out of a movie. I don’t mind getting dirt thrown on me once in a while, but I really felt like I had hit the bottom. I was like, “These people could give a shit about me. I could be dead.” The audience was so disappointed, because I wasn’t the Cyndi Lauper they knew.

There was one more show I had to do in Alberta and the club owner told me that the next club was more of the same. I called my manager and said, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Can’t you just get through it?” my crazy manager asked.

“No, it’s bad for my reputation,” I told him. I got out of that one, at least.

Glamorous, it wasn’t. There is this one makeup artist I work with in Toronto and sometimes my life is so ridiculous that when I tell her about it, she starts laughing and saying, “Okay, where are the cameras? It can’t be this ridiculous.”

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that that was about the time I left my manager, because he had really proved that he wasn’t doing too much to help me. Then I hired the best manager ever—Lisa Barbaris. I actually knew for a long time, since 1995, that she would be perfect. Like I said, that was the year I did the Gay Games in New York City. My friends Brian Salzman and Howard Kaplan got me into the games, by the way, not the record company. They wouldn’t even promote the “Ballad of Cleo and Joe” in the clubs because the head of the dance division thought it was too gay. They were into ballads and speeding them up instead.

So my friend Chris Tanner, who is this wonderful painter and drag performer and an actor, called me and said, “Cyn, Pride is in two weeks, you’ve got to have a float, you gotta be in the parade.” I said, “Are you kidding me? How am I going to get a float in two weeks?” Chris said, “You call the organizers and tell them you’re Cyndi Lauper and you want to be in the parade and you take all of us, and we kill it.” So I called up Lisa, who was my publicist at the time, and somehow she got me this float. I had all these drag queens on it, and I played every version of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” there fuckin’ was. Then I was told that I couldn’t sing “Girls Just Want to Have
Fun” in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, because it was a no-singing zone, and that if I did they would shut it down. I said, “
Please
let me sing and let them shut me down. Do you realize what the headlines would read? ‘Cardinal O’Connor Just Didn’t Want to Have Fun.’” So I went ahead and sang, and the funny thing was, the church did not shut me down: they knew what the headlines would have read. So my little Catholic-schoolgirl heart was all a-flutter.

But I knew when Lisa pulled that parade float out of nowhere that she would be a great manager, and she is. She’s capable, she’s loyal, and I love her and I think she loves me. She works hard—sometimes she works too hard and I want to say, “Hey, come on, we’re gonna die, can you just take a minute here?”

But I still had my old manager then. He didn’t come to Gay Pride. And another time when I did the Vienna Gay Life Ball for AIDS in Marie Antoinette’s white underwear with a wig that had a boat with a guy in it, I remember he looked at me and said, “Why can’t you just wear jeans and a T-shirt?” The last straw was when he sent his assistant on his behalf to the record-company presentation for
Shine.
I decided to can him and hire Lisa.

Anyway,
Shine
was supposed to be released by a smaller record company called Edel on September 1, 2001, but a few weeks beforehand, Lisa called me and told me, “Edel America is going out of business. You’ve got to get the rights to your music.” So we fought to get them back, and then I had the opportunity to put out the album with a really small indie label, but I just wasn’t sure about doing that. Plus some tracks had leaked to the public. I figured this out when I first performed and everybody was already singing along. So Lisa went to other labels to see if they would pick it up, but the feedback was so disheartening, like, “Who does she think she is? She’s not a producer, she should just sing. I can only take her if she does everything I tell her
to do.” They wanted me to work with the songwriter David Foster. I didn’t want to work with someone whose music I didn’t like. Yeah, he’s a very talented guy but he makes very middle-of-the-road music and say what you will, but I don’t make middle-of-the-road music. I didn’t want to do overwrought ballads. How much angst can you sing? Even some of the R & B people came back and said, “She can’t produce, this is horrible.” The horrible work that they were talking about inspired a lot of the music that’s happening now. I can hear “Shine” in Katy Perry’s “Firework.” And Arcade Fire is a huge fan of mine and a lot of stuff inspired them—so I’ve been told.

So after that I said, “Let’s just produce an EP ourselves and see what happens.” Lisa told me to choose five songs, so I chose “Shine,” a remix of it, “It’s Hard to Be Me,” “Madonna Whore,” and “Water’s Edge.” “Shine” is the biggest underground song. When I sing it it’s a huge hit, people go wild.

And by the way, the song “Madonna Whore” had absolutely nothing to do with Madonna. It was about the Madonna-whore complex. I was just writing about my experience as a woman: “Every woman’s a Madonna / every woman’s a whore / you can try to reduce me but I’m so much more.” But of course because of the thing with me and Madonna, that’s what people were going to think. Dopey me.

But Madonna herself brought that concept into her greatest, most provocative stuff, such as “Like a Prayer,” which, not for nothing, made me love her. When I saw that video I said, “All right, she’s fuckin’ great.” She pushed all the buttons with that one—brilliant. And when Pepsi dropped her after that video, not only did she wind up taking money from them, but she used that controversy to make the video even bigger, and everyone saw it—everyone. When Pepsi pushed her down like that, what they really did was push her up. She just knew how to work that. And like I said before, I always put my best foot
forward but I didn’t know how to manipulate the press. I had no business sense.

So I sold the EP on my website and Lisa worked really hard to get it sold through Borders. I would not give up, and I had a lot of help from my friends, who really stepped up. It was a little indie EP, and I think in the end I sold sixty-eight thousand of them. Which I think I sold one by one. The whole thing wasn’t what I had originally planned for the album, but those were decent sales figures and that made it all a little easier. I’ll never forget getting everything ready for
Shine
and finding out that Sony was putting out yet
another
best-of collection, the
Twelve Deadly Cyns . . . and Then Some
DVD of all my videos up until “I’m Gonna Be Strong.” That kind of sucked. They were cannibalizing my sales. You can’t have two things out at once. But what could I do?

During the
Shine
period, I went to Transylvania to do a TV show on a stage across from “Bad Vlad’s” castle. (He was Vlad the Impaler, the inspiration for Dracula, but I think “Bad Vlad” is a much better handle.) So I went to Romania. It was 2000, maybe 2001. My hair was white-blonde and black. It’s funny, I always remember the year and album from my hair. Anyway, it was presented that it was a big deal and that
I
would be a big deal in Romania. Who knew? It was another great adventure. I didn’t have a crew that I was used to, but my band was killer. I had Sammy Merendino on drums, Bill Wittman on bass, Knox Chandler on guitar, Steve Gaboury on keyboards, and Allison Cornel on violin, viola, and sometimes dulcimer, too. (Two dulcimers are better than one, if you ask me, so I played dulcimer as well.) Anyway, I was so excited we were going to play the
Shine
CD along with some other songs.

I had gone to Trash and Vaudeville before I left. I had been scouring the city to find an Edie Sedgwick look. No one was doing that.
I kept going to showrooms and showing them pictures, but no one carried anything remotely like what she wore. Of course, the following year, and the year after, Edie made a big resurgence. Her look just wasn’t available when I needed it. But in the end I changed what I wore and went more downtown.

So when I went to Romania I had a silk blouse that was kind of that sixties type of shirt that started to bell at the elbow, and black leather pants. In the end I was barefoot, but that wouldn’t matter because I actually never made it to the main broadcast.

When I arrived we were whisked away by the show promoter’s crew, racing through the streets with sirens going. I couldn’t figure what the sirens were about, until I found out they were ex–secret police. It became very much like James Bond, all of a sudden. And I kept thinking to myself, “You can’t make this shit up.” Then I started to think about my three-year-old at home and started to get a little nervous, so I told them they needed to slow down. They didn’t—then I got really angry and said I needed to get back in one piece to my kid, and they slowed down as best they could.

I’d never been to Romania before—that was what made it so enticing. We stayed in a mountain village with a big lodge-style hotel. It was very quaint. And there, as promised, was the Bad Vlad Castle. We all went out to eat the first night and Bill ate bear. I couldn’t get down with the whole bear thing. I had the venison. I ate Bambi’s mother or father instead.