Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir (12 page)

And of course I always liked to try new things with my hair. Like, when I was in Blue Angel, my hair was blond in the front and brown, and I would twist it and do different ponytails and things. I made it up myself. The only reason the front of my hair was blond was because of Ed from Flyer. He used to tease me and say I had a mustache, so I tweezed it. Well, it came in darker, so I bought this Jolene bleach stuff. I put it on my mustache, and while it was working I was looking at myself in the mirror. There was some Jolene left over, so I put it on my bangs, so the front was blond and the back was brown. Which was a good look, I thought.

It was such an exciting time for all of us. A radio station ran a contest, “Win a date with Cyndi from Blue Angel,” for Valentine’s Day. So Carl and I and another friend, John, who has since passed away, and all my colorful friends from downstairs in my apartment building, helped me draw a big heart that said “Happy Valentine’s Day,” and put ruffles around it and cut two armholes in it so when I came out, I had a “heart on” . . . get it? That was a thrill because it was the beginning of all the performance art that we used to do.

And we did some shows in Puerto Rico, because not too many famous people from the United States would play in Puerto Rico—at the time, there were no direct flights, so it wasn’t convenient. Plus, it wasn’t seen as this big market. But since I didn’t
have
a market, it didn’t matter. As we were planning the trip, I thought that since no famous people would go to Puerto Rico, why don’t we just dress like we’re famous, and act like we’re famous, and wave grandly to everybody? So that’s what we did.

I remember for my “arrival,” I wore pedal pushers like the ones on the Blue Angel album cover, and little bobby socks with hearts on them. I used to like to mix patterns, like a print and checks and plaids, and for some reason that used to upset a lot of people. I always thought plaid and leopard were really good together, but it wasn’t until later on in the nineties that it became acceptable when Vivienne Westwood did it. Not that I’m saying I did it first—I just did whatever I liked. Blue Angel once got a review and the person wrote, “I can’t even hear her sing because of her clothes.” I didn’t care. I dressed however I wanted onstage, because there were also other people who would say, “Oh my God, what a voice.” Sometimes when I was onstage I would throw my shoes off and dance barefoot because I could dance better. (I don’t know if that was a good idea, because now my feet are killing me.)

When Blue Angel opened for Peter Frampton, I bought this little pink fifties bathing suit and a button-down green dress for the stage. I couldn’t run offstage and do costume changes—I had to do it right there. So I took the dress off during the show, and then I danced around in the bathing suit. Hey, Debbie Harry did it in Blondie, and talk about style: She wore a bathing suit with a suit jacket, which was so sexy and great. She wore a trash bag onstage and made it look good! So I improvised too. I’d come out with sunglasses and take them off, or a cap, and then I’d pull my cap off and there would be my brightly colored hair spilling out. So I basically peeled off things as I performed, which made me feel freer emotionally, too. I was young and skinny, and, you know, when you’re twenty-seven, you can put anything on and look good.

Then we had a meeting over dinner with the head guy from Germany (the label was a German company) and they liked our cover of “I’m Gonna Be Strong” and told us there was going to be a big push for that. Which was fine, but then they also told me they were going to make me into the next Streisand. I said, “Oh no. You can’t do that. I’m a rocker. Why don’t you make somebody else into the next Streisand?” Of course, because I said this to the head of Polydor, everybody choked on their food. They kept wanting to make me into a balladeer, because I could sing a ballad. I told them, “I can’t take enough medications to stand still that long, okay? I can rock out better than most, and I’m not going to let you put a brace on my brain and spirit.”

But what really put a nail in our coffin was the way our manager arranged to record the album. Say that we had a hundred thousand dollars to do it—well, he made a deal to keep whatever money wasn’t used, so that if it cost, say, seventy-five thousand bucks, he got twenty-five. Not a good idea, because in the end, there were no background vocals, there were no extra musicians, nothing. Just us. The album
could have been better than it was if we had had some help. But that was my first album. I didn’t know. And the band was happy.

The plan was to break us in Europe first, which the labels often did at the time. So we went to Germany, and there was a really wonderful woman who was assigned to us, who constantly walked behind me and said,
“Schnell”
(which meant “quick”), with a kind word attached to it, because I always had too many things to carry, like my steam pot. She helped me as best she could.

Things were good in Europe, but when we came back to America,
Billboard
had decided that bands like ours were retro and they weren’t going to cover them. This resulted in another round of meetings with Polydor, who kept telling me, “You’ve gotta lose the band.” I told them no. Producers were offering to put a choir behind me, but I just kept saying no, no, no. I felt I should stick with the band. In another meeting I had a guy draw up a pie chart and tell me how I was going to make money if I would sell all of my publishing to him. You always heard from older songwriters about how they got one little piece of the profits in the beginning and that was it. I had been raped in my first band, I had been abused every which way, and then here’s this guy telling me how I’m going to make money if he buys everything I create. I knew this guy was a crook, and if he took me for a ride and took all my publishing, then I still wouldn’t be making any money to this day if they ever used one of my songs in a movie or anything. That’s your old-age pension, John Turi used to tell me, when you become an outsider—which, for most people, is sort of inevitable.

But I said some really nasty things. I used the N-word in a meeting because I grew up listening to that John Lennon song “Woman Is the Nigger of the World,” and in this band, I was always being told, “You gotta listen to what the producer is saying,” and “Sing what you’re
told,” or that the label had “filled their quota” of women. So in this one meeting, I said, “Listen, I hear what you’re saying, but you see this nigger over here? I ain’t doing it, go find some other ones.” Because I have always felt that women really are the N-word (especially in the music business) and honestly, if you look at the whole world today, not much has changed. But the N-word comes with a long history of abuse and slavery and horror, and I wasn’t sensitive to that. I was still on the John Lennon jag, and as I mentioned, I was always on another planet. And I didn’t have the wherewithal, I didn’t know how to fight anybody. They thought I was racist, but what I was saying is that women were lower than low. You can spit to the bottom of the barrel, and on the bottom are women and children. But that’s me—I’m always saying the wrong things to the right people.

Another time I had a taste of it with Roy, our record producer. There was one song that didn’t come out so good, so we wanted to have a talk with him about it. And he turned around to me and said, “I have an idea. Why don’t you mix your version, I’ll mix mine, and let’s see what the record company thinks—what do you think about that?” I looked at him and said, “I think that’s baby shit, if you want to know.” Then the people who signed us at Polydor left, and they brought in a new president. I remember one meeting in his office. His assistant came in and announced she had the new single from the Jam, and put it on the turntable for everyone to hear. Except it sounded like it was in slow motion. And everyone was bobbing their heads and listening like they were really enjoying it. I looked at the label head and looked at the assistant, who wouldn’t dare open her mouth. So I got up and walked over to the turntable, and I saw that the speed was on 33, and the record was a 45. I was thinking, “Okay, now I’m in Cuckoo Land.” So I moved it to 45, and all of a sudden, there’s the Jam. The president’s eyes lit up and he said, “Ohhh.” Of
course, maybe the right thing to do was not to touch it, but I was curious to see what the hell the real Jam single was.

Meetings were not my strong suit, because I was never good at doing what the record company wanted. But it didn’t take a genius to see that Blue Angel was on its way out, anyway.

T
HE REASON
I kept resisting the record company guys who told me to sing ballads was that the more I worked in the music industry, the more I realized that your first hit was what identified you for the rest of your career, and I wanted to make sure mine was uptempo so that I wouldn’t be pigeonholed. I also fought because I noticed that everybody who rolled over failed. All the cool performers, all the great ones—the Clash, Elvis Costello, the Pretenders—those people did not have the record company invent them. The artists that the record company invented had a fuckin’ shallow life. Because if the record company really knew how to make music, they’d be making music, not selling it, right? What I saw was, “Hey, come listen to the new 45 single from the Jam on 33.” I’m going to let those guys tell me what to do?

But Blue Angel was going downhill. Our single “I’m Gonna Be Strong” reached number 37—in the Netherlands. No one would accept our demos anymore. It was getting worse and worse, and once again the money was not coming in, and we all started to starve. I remember my friend Jutta—she’s German—used to tell me that there were two kinds of people in the world. There are the kind of
people who sit around and think about their problems, and then there are the kind of people who sit around thinking about how to solve them.

I try to be the second type of person but at that time I was pretty down. I went to Katie Agresta’s studio and told her that I couldn’t figure out how I was going to make it work. She started giving me food, because she thought I couldn’t sing properly if I was hungry all the time. That’s why I love her. She believed in me. One time we were working together I was feeling really dejected about the whole business—this was before Blue Angel—and I told her that one of these days, they were going to see my name, and they were going to remember me. We both stopped dead. We felt a chill, and it wasn’t the flu.

But unfortunately, I got really sick—again. And lost my voice—again. I was so depressed. I had an inverted cyst on my vocal cord, which the doctor said was from incorrect singing but it really wasn’t. I finally found a doctor, a saint named Dr. Eberly, who operated on my throat. And Katie helped me back. It was hard and took a long time, but when I could sing again, I was really careful when we were playing live.

I also knew I wanted to get out of our record contract and get away from our manager who, for a lot of reasons, was not working out for us. I went to him and said, “Listen, we would like to break from you completely, or we would like to continue, get another record deal, and then pay you off.” He said, “No. You’re not going anywhere without me.” And then it became a fight.

And I always needed money. I was talking about it with Blue Angel’s accountant and he said, “Why don’t you get a job at a clothing store that you like? You go to Screaming Mimi’s all the time—ask them if they would want to hire you.” So I did, and I was hired as a salesgirl. I ended up staying for a couple of years because I loved it so much. It was like a giant toy store for me, as you can imagine. I
was constantly buying clothes, and they made me stop because what I was buying cost more than I would sell. They couldn’t put stuff out because it was on layaway for me. People would come in and I’d help style them, which was so much fun. One time Lene Lovich came in, who I adored, and was looking at shoes. I just circled her, though—I didn’t even say anything to her because I didn’t want to bother her while she was browsing.

So at least I could pay the bills, but we were still trying to get out of the contract. My lawyer said, “Cyndi, now the whole industry is saying that when you get tired of dragging that little red wagon around with you, they’ll talk to you.” He meant the band. So then, of course, the band hated me.

This was the end of 1981, and I remember around Christmastime, my bass player, Jim Gregory, had a little party. There were other singers and bands around, and I was sitting with my friend Debbie. She was a studio singer who had worked with John Turi and Jim Gregory, and who also sang background with Billy Hocker, a guy with a kind of bruised voice who sang white soul. He really influenced me—he told me I should listen to Otis Redding and open my ear and voice. Anyway, I was sitting with Debbie, and I saw this guy with yellow corduroy bell-bottoms. You have to remember, at that time, everybody wore tight black jeans—it was just a uniform. It was how you knew the cool people from the not-so-cool people. He was dressed like . . . 
ay yi yi.
Along with those yellow pants, he had on white sneakers, a beat-up sweater, a peacoat, a beard, and long hair like Jesus Christ. I’m looking at him going, “Oh my God, what a mess.” It was kind of a seventies thing he was doing, and at that point I didn’t see any merit in that.

It was Dave Wolff.

So we were all drinking, and Dave Wolff hit on one of the girls from the punk band the Sic F*cks. She ditched him to go to the bathroom,
and then all of a sudden, he looked at
me
and I’m like, “Oh, come
on.
” But he sat down next to me, and I said, “You gotta be kidding me. Now you’re hitting on me? You didn’t get anywhere with her, and I look like the number that’s gonna put out for ya?” But everything he said was so funny and wacko, and I just started laughing because he was a character.

So we started talking and I found out he was from Connecticut. So that’s two drawbacks right there—flares and Connecticut. But he wasn’t WASP-y, like I thought at first—he was Jewish—and when we got to talking about rock pygmies that live underground and come up for wampanini juice, I thought, “This guy’s pretty entertaining.” And he had all these different jobs like I had. He had been an exterminator and a messenger. And like a lot of people at that party, he was in a band.