Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir Read online

  Some of the girls would go up to the guys in the audience and take money from them with their knees during their performance, so I had to do the same thing. It was weird because the men would sometimes insult you. I remember one guy, who clearly hated women, would say horrible things like “I can smell you from here.” And then of course I’d think, “I smell? Oh my God.” You’d try to clean yourself like there was no tomorrow.

  But when I was onstage, the policy was that nobody could bother the performers. Then, after you danced, you had to put on a nightgown and sit at the bar and drink. Dancers weren’t supposed to really drink—instead we were told to ask for white wine spritzers, and they would make it mostly with soda. Then you had to sit and talk with the customers. Some of the guys were real characters. They were truck drivers and factory workers, and their philosophy of things was very interesting to me, and very funny.

  The whole scene was really like a play: the customers, who had a specific way of talking and acting; the people who danced (who were nice enough but all kind of strange); the security people; the club owner; the bartender, who had to work in the middle of girls dancing around him—all of them were characters, really. I love talking to people, because they’re all walking books. Sometimes you only meet them once, but they’re a chapter. So you try to enjoy them. (That’s why, even if you’re in the ladies’ room, you should always talk to the woman next to you. When you’re in the stall, you can say, “Hey! No toilet paper! I guess it’s drip-dry tonight!”)

  It was intriguing at first, so I stayed. And of course I was trying to earn money for my PA. I made two hundred dollars a day sometimes, and that was a big pile of dough. I even had a signature move. I did this acrobatic, stupid thing where I would be lying down on my back, and then I’d take my legs and put them up over my shoulders so that you could see my butt with the G-string on, and then I’d shake my butt back and forth so it was just a butt with no head. It was very funny to me but sexy to the customers. It was so silly, so nutty, but any acrobatic thing that you could do was a big plus to your gig, because as I said, we didn’t have poles. Think about it: If you have a pole, you can do so many more things. The poor things who dance now have to do lap dances—we didn’t have that. Sometimes if one guy wanted extra, I would say, “I don’t really do that, but I know somebody who does.”

  But after a while, I got really depressed. Even though I was ultimately doing it for the PA, for the music, it was hurting me. Part of it felt like it was a safe place to be sexy, where no one was going to hurt me, and that was freeing. But the things that people would say and do, like throw coins down and tell you to pick them up (what fuckin’ circus world are you living in, guys?), made me feel bad. I remember when I was dancing at the club in Nyack, they liked me there, and the owner called me into his office one day and said, “Listen, I know you sing at a club, but let me tell you something, you were made for this. You can’t try and be something you’re not. You’re great at dancing, you’ve got a lot of talent, you should just focus on what you do well.” Everything he said made me realize the exact opposite—that I was a singer.

  So I danced until I got the PA, but I just couldn’t keep going long enough to get the monitor system. It started to get to me. Because my job from the stage was to seduce people, I started to look at men in my everyday life in a weird way, just to see if I was able to do it offstage, too. And I thought, “Oh, no. It’s still going. This ain’t for me.” One night I went to CBGB with Richie, the boy I was in love with, and one of my dancer friends. We were going just to go—it wasn’t like a big act was there or anything. We always tried to see whatever we could because this was in 1975 or ’76, and a music scene was starting to happen in New York. And I noticed that my friend started rubbing his leg. She was doing the seduction thing to Richie, too.

  Since I still had the same crappy-ass monitors, I couldn’t hear my voice, but I was so bored with the way I sang, anyway. I thought, “Okay, you’re still doing Joplin covers, and now you’re singing Grace Slick. If you sing ‘White Rabbit’ one more time, just shoot yourself,” because that’s what the crowd wanted on the Long Island bar circuit.

  And even though I tried to take special care of my voice, I ended up losing it. I was devastated, and so scared, because I had to stop singing for two months. I couldn’t talk—I had to write everything down. Three doctors told me that I would never sing again. In the meantime, the guys in Flyer had hired a girl named Ellen to take my place. When I was watching her once, I noticed she could really keep her vocal range when she was singing. When I did shows, I would always start out with a range and end up with nothing at the end, because I used it all. I asked her how she was able to sing so well in her range, and she said that she studied with a vocal coach named Katie Agresta. I decided to go see Katie, and I brought her a tape of the Joplin covers that I did. I played her the tape and I’ll never forget what she said to me: “This is fine, but where is your singing?” What she meant and what I understood her to be asking were two different things. Katie thought that I had brought her a tape of Janis Joplin, instead of me imitating Janis. But what I thought she was asking was what I was aching for—to sing my own songs, in my own voice, in my own style, that I made up myself. I wasn’t using my voice to my advantage at all, but before I could work on that, I had to get my voice back.

  She sent me to a doctor who looked in my throat and said that one of my vocal cords had collapsed. It just couldn’t take it anymore. He told me that I shouldn’t be singing rock and roll music, and because of the way I’m built, I should try country and western. He said that people have different vocal cords. I have a small frame and I’m white, so I have completely different vocal cords than, say, a man who is on the large side, or a black woman. Really, I’m a lyrical soprano, which is different from what I normally sing, but I have a big, three-and-a-half-octave range, or on an extraordinary day, a four. So despite what he said, I wanted to use my voice that way, anyway. Because when I sang, there was something in me that was bigger than me and I somehow had to learn how to use what was inside without wrecking the outside. I just had to find a way to fix and maintain it, and I thought Katie might be able to help.

  So I started studying with Katie, who changed my life, and I’m still with her today. In fact, I saw her last Tuesday. She taught me vocal therapy. A man named Dr. Dwyer was her teacher, and he developed this technique based on operatic and therapeutic stuff that he used to help Broadway and opera singers. Katie taught me about vocal exercises and warm-ups, and how your diet affects your voice, and the damage that alcohol and drugs can do to it.

  I mostly stayed away from drugs anyway, but one time at a show, somebody said to me, “You sing great—you want some coke? This will make you sing even better.” Of course, I would do anything to sing better. So I tried it and sang great for about two seconds, before all of a sudden I couldn’t sing at all. Coke numbs your throat so you don’t feel what you’re doing, and you blow your vocal cords out and: the end. I freaked. I couldn’t sing and all I kept thinking was, “I thought that person liked the way I sang.”

  I was always leery about the coke thing. When I was around fourteen, my friends and I used to hang out at a park on 106th Street and Atlantic Avenue, and dealers used to drive by and hand out coke, like free samples, and tell us it wasn’t addictive. People didn’t know then that it was.

  After I rested my voice and, with Katie’s help, got it back, I got a gig singing at Trude Heller’s. What I loved about it was that it was a nightclub (now it’s gone) where people didn’t pick up each other but really sat and listened to music. All of a sudden, they really heard the things I was doing. Like we did “Magic Man,” the Heart song, and you know the two guitar parts that they play in “Magic Man”? I sang one of the guitar parts. I wanted to sing like an instrument. And people noticed it and actually liked me. So when I got a taste of that, I told myself I wanted to keep playing in Manhattan and stop doing cover material.

  I tried to write with the gu
ys in Flyer but they were just goofballs—every time I’d get a melody they’d change the chord, over and over, and we never got anywhere. Then, when I sang at Trude’s one night, my friend Rose brought down a songwriter named John Turi, who also played saxophone and keyboards. We hit it off and started writing together, and eventually I just quit Flyer, and John and I formed the band Blue Angel, named after the Marlene Dietrich movie. We went through a bunch of different versions of the band, with many different guitar players, and we went through many kinds of sounds before we settled on rockabilly. John and I wrote a song called “Flyer”—which Flyer kept. At the time I was influenced by Queen and Freddie Mercury. Later I changed so radically and totally away from that influence that when I had an opportunity to meet them at the height of my career, I didn’t. But I was an idiot kid. You know how you get when you think something is cool and then something isn’t? Actually, by then I was thirty—I wasn’t a kid. Everything was late for me. It’s a shame when you don’t know the value of what’s in front of you.

  In Blue Angel, we recorded expensive, bad demos to send around to record labels and played clubs like Great Gildersleeves, which was (physically and sort of symbolically) right down the block from CBGB. Gildersleeves was never the place, never the “scene.” Instead it was always the corny rock place that had the straighter bands. And things didn’t go so well with our manager after a while. He had put out money for these terrible demos, and after a while he wanted his money back—which I don’t blame him for, but there was no way we were going to make the money back because we just could not get a leg up.

  So one night at a gig, he got really upset, and took the money we earned and just left. So we needed a new manager. One night when we were playing Trax, a club on the Upper West Side, a guy named Steve came to see the show. He was the Allman Brothers’ manager and had heard our demos. Not that he was impressed—he thought they were bad—but somehow he had been persuaded to see us. Then John arranged for me to meet a new manager in his office in midtown. (I don’t know why John didn’t go, too, but he didn’t.) It was one of the weirder meetings I’ve been to. I was supposed to go in at five, and when I did, everyone was leaving. That was a little creepy. I went in there, sat down, and while I’m talking to him, he started scratching the corner of his forehead, like by his scalp. Then, when it bled, he would reach up and blot the blood with his finger, and then put it on the blotter on his desk. Pick, pick. Dab, dab. Blot, blot. He was totally comfortable, talking away. After he made a pattern, he picked up a pen and started drawing around the blood on the blotter.

  I didn’t know who was nuttier: him, or me for being there. I was thinking, “Okay, this ain’t right, and I’m gonna be killed.” We talked awhile, and then I got the hell out of there really quick. I told John about it and said, “Listen, we can’t do this.” He said, “Oh, Cyn, come on. You’re not marrying the guy. He’s gonna manage you, that’s all, and we’re gonna get to the next spot. We need that help.” I told him I thought he was wrong, but I’d do it. So he became our manager and set up a showcase for Blue Angel for all of his industry guys to come see.

  We ended up getting a record deal with Polydor, a major label, in 1980, which was so exciting. There was a lot of enthusiasm around the whole New Wave rockabilly thing, and it was really happening. We had our picture in Billboard magazine, and the world seemed open to us.

  Even though Blue Angel was signed, we had already been through so many versions of the band. And even then, we were convinced that this latest version would really happen for us. At that point, I had been writing with John Turi for four years and trying to come up with a formula that would be the sound and the style of the new band. We were kind of expanding the rockabilly pop thing to a more New Wave rockabilly pop sound, and we’d sit for hours just listening to Wanda Jackson, Elvis Presley, Elvis Costello, the Police, and the Specials. John would play me these great fifties and sixties singers who I didn’t even know existed but kind of sounded like me.

  When we first started Blue Angel I was living in Woodhaven, Queens, with my kid brother Butch, not too far from my mom’s apartment on Ninetieth Street. Every night that I wasn’t working in a club or practicing with the band, I’d go back to the apartment. I finally had him living with me like I wanted to do when I first left home. But by that time, he was no longer eleven, and it was hard to be living together when we were both in our twenties. I did my share of knuckleheaded things, and so did he. Except this was his first shot at being an adult—this was my third. I had already tried to live in Long Island, Vermont, City Line, in between Queens and Brooklyn, and wound up coming back home to my mother.

  But then I moved out of the apartment with Butch in Woodhaven and into a little studio apartment in Manhattan on East Seventy-seventh Street. I fixed up the place with all of my family’s old furniture and curtains and whatever I could buy cheaply (but looked cute) from McCrory’s, where I worked. It was one of the day jobs I took. Usually they didn’t last because I worked so much with the band, but I had gotten this job through a friend of mine. He told me he was my first fan and had been coming down to see me for years. He was the assistant manager of McCrory’s, a Woolworth’s type of five-and-ten store across the street from Alexander’s in Rego Park, Queens. He introduced me to a woman named Doris, who ran a jewelry concession in the front of the store. At Christmas she personalized Christmas stockings with glue and glitter. She sold T-shirts, too, and you could purchase the picture you wanted her to iron on. My favorite iron-on was a cartoon of a grimy-looking soldier type who had a bubble coming out of his mouth that read, “Though I walk through the Valley of Death I fear no evil, ’cause I’m the meanest son of a bitch in the valley.” That made me laugh. Doris made me laugh, and everyone around her too. I liked her so much right away. She was small and had bright red hair, the exact shade I used to search the drugstore shelves for in the early seventies (and she didn’t mind that mine was purple and blond, either). She had a big smile and reminded me of the Italian women I used to see on 101st Avenue in Queens coming out of the beauty parlor. She and her mom (also a bottled redhead, but not as deep and rich as Doris’s) used to know Barbra Streisand when she lived in Brooklyn. Her mother would visit and tell me her friend Barbra lived upstairs from her—Barbra, who was just like everybody else.

  Doris was a woman who knew how to do a lot of different things. And sometimes if I had a gig, she would let me miss work. I was usually a little late for the job—my friends always called me “the late Cyndi Lauper”—so I’d always be running in at the last minute. But Doris liked entertainers. At McCrory’s, my job was to engrave cheap jewelry. I used to practice my handwriting on a pie plate with an engraving pen. Little kids would be excited about their Christmas present for their grandma and would bring in a little, inch-long silver- or gold-plated heart with rhinestones. They’d ask me to write, “Dear Grandma, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, Love, Tommy, Judy, Larry, and Susan.” Then they’d say, “Oh, and can you put the date on it, too?”

  But I was doing well, and Doris, who was so funny, liked me. She moved me up to the front of the store one Christmas Eve and had me doing Christmas stockings. She told me to start barking. I had to say as loud as I could (which was pretty loud), “Get ya Christmas stockings! Personalized Christmas stockings!” And the price would go down the later in the day it got. But I remember getting into the spirit with that glue and glitter.

  She asked me to pierce people’s ears, too. I figured I could do it because when I was a kid, I helped my mother reupholster the kitchen set. My mother really knew how to sew and could remake anything (remember, we all came from the garment industry). So we kids helped her with the vinyl and Naugahyde; we’d stretch it over the chair and staple it.

  So piercing ears was just another staple to me, right? But when I went to staple the earrings in and it passed through the flesh, it felt totally different from a chair. I forgot that I’m really squeamish—I couldn’t even cut the frog in biology—and I kind of freaked
out.

  Doris was somewhere else in the store, and it’s not like there was a panic button. I was trying to talk to the lady, but I couldn’t speak Polish like she did, and I was feeling a little sick, and trying to call for Doris out of the side of my mouth, like, “Doris. Doris.” I couldn’t leave the lady with the staple gun in her ear and she was a large woman, and then she started to laugh. Which made her sway back and forth, and the staple gun started to sway, too. Which made me feel really queasy, so I kept calling for Doris.

  The store did not have an intercom. Instead, it had Big Mary. Big Mary sat in the back of the store in the office behind a sliding door, and she would open it and holler down in the store for whoever. So Mary caught wind of what was going on and opened the door and hollered, “Doris, I think Cyndi needs you!” And Doris came running up the aisle and made it all fine for the lady and finished the other ear, and I never pierced another ear in my life.

  Doris worked in two locations: Queens and Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I started in Queens, but later they needed me to fill in occasionally at the store in Brooklyn, too. But it was in Queens where I met two older gals: Minnie and Margaret, the sweetest-looking older woman with the filthiest mouth. They were what were known as returnees. New York was having a fiscal crisis at the time, and people had their pensions cut, so a lot of people over sixty-five suddenly had to return to the workforce. My boss Steve, who had hired me, got such a kick out of these women. So did we all, because they were hysterical.

  They would say things just to shock you. Margaret worked at the food counter. She looked like a sweet auntie, but then she’d hit ya with “Cocksucker.” As for Minnie, if I went over and talked to her, she’d start out perfectly normal—until I kept questioning her about something she didn’t feel like talking about. Then she’d say something like, “Look, you seem like a nice kid, but go fuck yourself.” That one Christmas Eve when I was selling Christmas stockings, I asked her what she was doing that evening. She said she’d be waiting for Santa on a bearskin rug, naked with nothing on but a bow, and some milk and cookies by her side too. She said she’d be waiting for Santa to come up her chute.