Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir (15 page)

Then Rick brought in Ellie Greenwich, who was one of the Brill Building songwriters/producers, to write with me and sing backup on “Girls.” She wrote and produced all these wonderful, classic songs like “Be My Baby” and “Leader of the Pack,” and I loved her. She wrote with her husband Jeff Barry, in the sixties, and even though she was right there in the studio doing those songs with her husband, only his name was on the records as producer. This was common in the old days. Which is how I started learning that you have to get credit for your work.

So when Rick brought Ellie in, she listened to “Girls” and knew just what to do. She started chanting, “Girls / They want / Want to have fun.” Then she said, “Cyn, come on—sing with me with your accent! Come on, make your Queens accent prominent!” I was like, “Yeah right—ha, ha, ha.” But I sang in the hallway of the studio with her, and I gotta say, she was right.

And Rick said to me, “What if you did that little hiccup sound on the word ‘fun’?” I used that sound, which was a little like Buddy Holly, in Blue Angel a lot. So I said okay. That whole record was a combination of a Bob Marley blues approach to reggae, some Elvis Costello, a little Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Frankie Lymon, some Ronnie Spector, and of course Shirley and Lee. And I put it in the key of F, just like a trumpet. And John Lennon’s picture was in the studio too. And like all good pictures, eventually the eyes move, so he was kind of there in spirit.

It’s funny because later on, I became friends with Yoko. The first night I played Madison Square Garden as a headliner, in 1986, Yoko Ono walked backstage with an eleven-year-old Sean Lennon. Did ya
ever? Could have knocked me down. After that, I’d go to see her at her apartment and I’d be talking to her at her table, where there was a big portrait of John and a beautiful portrait of their son, Sean. And after a while, like any good portrait, I’d be talking to the picture too, and I’d think, “Okay, what’s the matter with you?” And I’d get up to go in the other room to sort of clear my head, and there was a mummy—it was a real mummy, not like the one in the
SkyMall
catalog. When I asked about the mummy, Yoko explained that she was in a warehouse buying antiques, and she heard someone calling her from the basement. She went downstairs and in this dusty room, there was a mummy case with a mummified . . . whoever. And Yoko told me that she felt such sadness that this person, this mummy, was in this dusty old basement, so she bought her and put her in this nice room. I remember thinking, “Wow, that makes sense and it’s kind of her too.” Later I was at a get-together at Yoko’s with my friend and trainer for years, Marion, and we were both nursing babies at the time, so we went to the room with the mummy to nurse away from the fray. A guy who was a friend of hers walked by and said, “Oh, how nice—the mommies and the mummy.” And I thought, “That’s surreal.”

My life is so funny sometimes. Everyone has these moments, but if you’re not aware, you miss them. And we were so tired then nursing the babies and trying to go back to work. I always tell my son to pay attention or he’ll miss something that’s spectacular. Sometimes you can just sit in your backyard and a little dragonfly comes by and lands right on you and just sits there. Or it sits on a flower right next to you. Who is that? Is that a fairy? I never know, but it always feels magical.

Okay, where was I? Right—“Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” I kept thinking about how the music in the song represented different parts of my life. Like the organ sound that you hear was actually from an old commercial for a drag-racing place called Raceway Park that I used to
hear as a kid. (Most people who grew up in the New York area when I did will remember those commercials.) And I loved to dance to Motown while making the beds when my mom worked.

That’s how I work. A little slice of life here, a little piece of a different song there, and bada bing, bada boom, mix it all together and there it is. My musical style has always been a collage of everything. Like Rick would play me “Money Changes Everything” in the style of a Bob Dylan song, and I’d say, “Can we just start it off differently? Make believe you’re playing ‘London Calling.’” Then I’d start singing. The producers’ approach was more traditional, because that’s how it was always done. Except that I didn’t want to do what was always done. So they didn’t want me in the studio when they were doing guitars. So I went straight to Lennie Petze and he stuck by me. And if you listen to “Money,” you can hear the influences of the Clash.

But everyone was watching me sing, which I think is the worst thing to do, because they all would
watch
the performance, rather than
hear
it. I sang it over and over. As I said, I was singing in the key of a trumpet, so after several times when I was pretty sure they had it, I said, “Okay, I think you have it,” and stopped. In that key, it would have been easy to lose my voice. And sometimes Rick would say to use my “head voice.” But women don’t have a “head voice”—only men do. Now that’s biology for ya: For a woman, you either sing high and thin, or you sing low, or you sing in the middle and soft or strong. I found myself trying to close my eyes and forget who I was and try to find the spirit of the story—but there they were, watching me.

So I tried to create another world for myself where I could be less self-conscious, because the first thing I do whenever I do anything really creative is lose that freakin’ third eye. Because you gotta just lose it all and throw it all down right there. You gotta open up a vein, and you can’t open up a vein if you got all these scientists out there watching
you and telling you, “Do this,” or “Do that.” So I started to look for ways that I would have freedom of expression without anyone hovering over me. When I work with new guys now it’s still like that.

I also had to fight to write a song with Rob, too. They didn’t think I was a good writer, but they did like the way I arranged. They had a Hooters song called “Fighting on the Same Side,” which was a good song, but I thought we should take this new style and write with it. I just kept asking and asking. I started to think, “If we’re fighting on the same side, why don’t you want to write with me?” Eventually Dave Wolff got me together with Steve Lunt, a writer he knew from an English band called City Boy. The first time I came over to see him, he had had some drinks and was a little toasty. He was busy writing and said, “Cyn, I have this idea—it’s going to be great. We’re going to write a song about female masturbation. No other girl has done this before.” I said, “Okay, I’m in.” For a little inspiration, I said, “Let’s find one of those boy magazines for girls,” not realizing that the boy magazines are for boys.

My thinking for writing “She Bop” was this: I remember when I was a little kid, there was a lot of talk about the Stones song “Get Off of My Cloud.” The rumor was that “cloud” really meant “my girl” or “my prostitute.” I remember thinking, “Oooh! Really?” You spend time thinking about the most ridiculous things as a kid. I mean, how many times did I sit up all night in the park with my friends, discussing if Paul was dead? “Let’s play the record backward! Isn’t that John saying, ‘I buried Paul’?” So I thought, “Hey, why not pass this legacy on? The kids hear ‘She bop, he bop-a-we-bop’ and think it’s about dancing. Then when the kids grow up, they hear, ‘They say I’d better stop, or I’ll go blind,’ and realize what the song’s about and have a giggle.” And that adds a different dimension to a song and deepens their relationship to it. I wanted the song not to be blatant. Steve was
on board so we made sure that that song did not refer to hands or touching anything, because if it did, then we wouldn’t be writing a song that was multilevel. And covert is always the tradition in rhythm and blues anyway. We had a lot of laughs writing it. We sat next to each other with these lyrics all over the page, which is how I write sometimes, with a basic melody. But we didn’t know how the song was going to begin. So I said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if the sound was kind of like the Big Bopper, which is what John Lennon did when he did
Rock ’n’ Roll,
his rockabilly record?” The thing about the beginning riff of “She Bop” was that it was rockabilly but still held true to that electronic, pop modern sound we were doing, with the gated snare. And come on, the Big Bopper? That was funny, too.

A lot of times, I didn’t know a song was going to happen a certain way until I tried it. Because everything is always like a puzzle, and you start out this way and then all of a sudden the puzzle starts to come together, and sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s bad. Sometimes you and your writing partners are smacking each other on the back going, “We’re geniuses! It worked!” It’s like when the oil gushes through the derrick, and you’re like,
“It’s alive!”
Then the next day, or the next week, after you get shot down a little by the powers that be, you’re sitting there looking at each other going, “What the hell were we thinking?” But that’s how it always is.

I recorded “She Bop” in a room in the back of the studio. It was the big rectangle warehouse room where Kiss rehearsed. I started singing there because it unnerved me to have Rick watching my performances so intently. I was able to convince Bill to run the wires for the microphone and stuff back to the room so I had total privacy.

So that’s where I sang “She Bop.” I could even take my clothes off and sing and no one would know. So of course that’s what I did, and I tickled myself too. That’s why you hear me laughing, because it was
so ridiculous. I was singing half-naked. I heard Yoko took her clothes off for “Walking on Thin Ice,” which I think is cool.

But most people didn’t get what “She Bop” was about until much later, when I went on Dr. Ruth’s radio show. I was playing along with her, making believe I was in a psychiatrist’s office, but then everything I said was blown up later by the press. Suddenly “She Bop” was on the Parents’ Music Resource Center’s “Filthy Fifteen” list of songs that they said should be banned, like “Let Me Put My Love into You” by AC/DC. I was so mad, because I had made sure that I never mentioned touching myself so that little kids would never know. And then I was found out because of my big mouth. Now every kid knew what it was about, and it wasn’t supposed to be that way. Oh,
c’est la vie.
That’s French for “whatever.”

I always tried so hard to make music that would not become dated. And then I had this conversation with Dick Clark and he told me that I was making disposable music. That’s what pop music was—disposable. I said, “No, I did not work my whole life to make disposable music.” After “She Bop,” I wanted to write another song, and Dave Wolff kept saying, “Wait, wait—it’ll come.” But it didn’t, and I had to fight tooth and nail, and finally when the record was almost done I started writing with Eric. It was hard, though, because at the time he seemed a little scattered. Once we’d finally get a sound after working on it for hours—or days—he’d change it. His process would make me forget the melodies I was singing after a while.

With Rob, his temperament was different and he was easier to remember melodies with. There was a sweetness about him. I felt I could show him poetry. And we were both going through similar things with our relationships: He was just coming out of one that was long and hard, and Dave and I were having a lot of bumps. So Rob and I started writing together. Sometimes in our conversations he’d say
something that struck me, and I’d write it down. Like he referred to a “suitcase of memories.” I thought that was a wonderful line so I used it in “Time After Time.” Other lines came from my life. “Lying in my bed I hear the clock tick”—that came from the really loud clock that I mentioned Dave and I had in our apartment. And the part about “the second hand unwinds” was from Rick’s watch. For some reason, it was going backward instead of forward. He kept saying, “Look at this, the second hand is unwinding.” I just looked at him and I’m like, “Oh my God, the second hand unwinding?” and wrote it down. I try all the time to take stuff from conversations. I always look for words that chew well and sing well.

When we started writing the song, I needed a fake title as a placeholder for the time being. So I was looking in the
TV Guide
and saw a couple of movie titles. There was this movie starring Malcolm McDowell and Mary Steenburgen called
Time After Time,
and I said, “Okay, that sounds like a good fake title for right now; it’ll change.” And did I mention I am a huge fan of Mary Steenburgen? She is so funny and a terrific actress. Anyway, when we started writing it, it was like the song title lodged itself into the song. I kept thinking it would be thrown away, but no matter how I tried to remove the freakin’ title, I couldn’t take it out without the song falling apart.

When Rick heard the song, he became very protective of it. If he thought people could kind of hear the song outside the door, he’d shut all the music off because he worried that somebody would copy us. Pretty early on, he felt it was really something extraordinary. The record company loved that song, too, and I kept saying, “Why did you make me do all this other stuff? I could have been writing more songs all along.”

We recorded the album in a couple of months, and we became like a little family. Lennie Petze likes to live, he likes to eat, he’s just a joyful
person, so he’d come by and take us to that Japanese steak house Benihana, which we called Beni Ha Ha. One time during the Fourth of July he brought firecrackers, and we shot them off at the studio. Lennie was always so real and a good guy, very nurturing. We were like kids. And I thought that Rick was pretty fantastic, and I had a great time with him, but he wasn’t used to the singer being so damn vocal, I think. He is a great producer and I did learn a lot from him. And we made an album that has lasted a long time.

We didn’t know what to call the album. There was a song we were doing, just kind of playing around with, called “He’s So Unusual,” recorded by Helen Kane, a singer from the twenties who was the inspiration for Betty Boop. And we used to laugh because my friend Rose would come over and talk about her boyfriend Joe. It was Joe, Joe, Joe, all the time (her husband now for some time). My downstairs neighbor Carl and I used to laugh that the lyrics to “He’s So Unusual” sounded just like Rose going on about Joe (“He’s handsome as can b-e-e-e”).