CYNDI LAUPER: DOING THAT PRIMITIVE THING

She would have been born in the back of a New York taxi if they hadn’t crossed her mother’s legs and stuffed her back in ’til the hospital. That was 33 years ago; Cynthia Ann Stephanie Lauper has made a point of never being early for anything since! She’s a couple of hours late for our interview—though there are excuses; since “True Colors,” the first single from her second album of the same name, has been doing a Sir Edmund Hillary up just about every pop chart in the world they’ve kept her busy...so busy in London that I had to fly to Paris to talk to her. But there’s plenty to do to pass the time, like being searched and searched again by the guard at the Paris Intercontinental who’s convinced the tape recorder is a bomb, or musing that there can be no just God who gave those cheekbones '.to Parisians...

We meet as she’s ordering coffee and a plate of outrageous French tarts from room service. She’s child-sized and looks like a child on her best behavior, dressed in a soft, pretty mohair sweater with a tiny collar, her blonde hair unplaited and brushed into a little halo around the perfect face. She has an airbrushed quality about her like those old vaseline-lensed movie-star pictures, a fuzzy-edgeness, not only from her looks but from the way she talks, drifting from subject to mood to subject, stopping there to pose awhile, and drifting on again. One minute she’s all mystical and cosmic, the next downto-earth and practical, and just as you think you’ve pinned her down, she’s earnest. Then innocent. Then funny. Funny ho-ho as opposed to funny peculiar. Definitely—-as far as the pop world goes, and probably as far as any world goes— unusual. When most people write about her they call her “The Zany Cyndi Lauper,” “The Kooky Cyndi Lauper”— you’ve seen the stuff. America’s favorite wild-and-crazy girl in the same way Boy George was everyone’s favorite queer, where the only thing they’ve probably got in common is that they can both sing.

Cyndi has one hell of a voice. Talking to her you wouldn’t notice it—she sounds like Olive Oyl from Queens after a Tweety-pie burger with the volume turned way down. Singing, she has a threeand-a-half octave range, four on a good day. She can belt it out with the best of them (as back in her Blue Angel days, when she was the female Gene Pitney, when she wasn’t being the female Eddie Cochran), then curl up into a tender, childlike ball of whispers. Though I can’t claim to love every track of it, there’s plenty of that variety on the second album. But anyway, back to Cyndi, who’s munching tarts and staring at a picture of Samantha Fox on the cover of a German magazine and telling me:

“It was always an uphill battle. I always had to fight for everything. It never came easy—not in the beginning, not even after the success of ‘Girls Just Want To Have Fun,”’ the boisterous pop anthem that propelled her, arms and legs flailing, thrift-shop clothes glaring, into the public eye two years ago. “Nothing was a given. Even now I have to work and fight for everything. I guess,” shrugs Cyndi, “it’s because I take such a radical approach all the time and it needs that push to do it. I was always too odd.”

Always. When she was five her parents got divorced, and in the Pope-kissing, line-toeing Catholic neighborhood where she grew up with her brother Butch and her big sister Ellen, you just didn’t get divorced. So Cyndi and Co. were the only family with no father. And then there was the nasty stepfather and being sent away to convent school (“torture chamber”), where Cyndi soon sussed the nuns and their habits and got beaten for hers. When she was nine she dyed her hair green to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. She haunted thrift shops for antique clothes “and when I walked down the street people pointed and said ‘What the hell is that\’ because of the way I looked. I’ve just never believed in doing things to conformity, I guess.” And somewhere along the line—like most sensitive kids who’ve been pummeled into a corner— she retreated into a world of imagination and music.

“I started singing when I was two years old.” The girl has a good memory! “I remember I was put up on the table, and I would do my little performance and the lady upstairs would come down and...I think I spoke Italian then, I was supposed to be calling her ‘Signora,’ but I could never pronounce that so I always called her ‘Senuda’ which is someting rude in Italian, or Sicilian, because I’m Sicilian...

“But I didn’t actually want to be a singer, I wanted to be an actress. But I didn’t know what an actress did exactly. Because I kept seeing musicals, people like Judy Garland, that’s what I thought an actress was. I used to act them out in my bedroom. I would imagine the hero sitting on my bed—nothing sexy or anything, because I didn’t even know what that was then!—and I would sing my little heart out to him!

“And then it finally dawned on me that an actress was words.”

The first singers that fascinated her were “Stachmo and Mario Lanza—boy!” her voice goes small and faraway. “He had a great voice! I used to listen to him for hours and hours. I didn’t know what the hell was going on, but the emotion in the voice, that was something. I loved Camelot and South Pacific. I really loved ‘Happy Talk,’ and I would do that. It was full of different voices I could sing. I can change my voice. When I first joined bands I did cover stuff, ‘Piece Of My Heart,’ that sort of thing. If I’d had to sing ‘White Rabbit’ one more time I’d have killed myself!”

After her first band—at age 11, playing in their basement with her sister and a girlfriend—it goes something like this: Cyndi took up acoustic guitar and went the folk route for a while, then left home at 17 with her dog to live in the woods, taking all manner of jobs (stable-girl, judo instructor, waitress, ear-piercer), going to art-school, dropping out of art-school, living with an older man, leaving him after getting hit and going back to Ozone Park and home, before winding up as a backing singer on the New York club circuit and going to a voice coach for eight years, convinced that she couldn’t sing anymore. Evidently she could, and keyboardist-saxophonist John Turi heard her doing just that in Greenwich Village, and together they formed Blue Angel. Turi turned her on to Elvis Presley and early rock ’n’ roll.

And Cyndi was a star. Not a hit: hardly anyone bought the one record they made for Phonogram in 1980, but anyone who heard it or saw her sing with them at one of their showcases knew she was a star. Record companies tried to lure her away to a solo deal, but she wasn’t moving. Then Blue Angel broke up in a shambles, their manager claiming they owed him $80,000, everyone telling her she’d never make another record, never sing again.

“And we had to plead bankruptcy,” says Cyndi. “There was nothing to go bankrupt with, nothing, you know, but the judge declared me bankrupt because if I didn’t I wouldn’t have been able to continue my career. They’d actually said I couldn’t make another record, ever again!” she says, as if she’s still in shock. “And the judge heard the whole thing and I remember to this day what he said. He said: ‘Let the canary sing.’ And I thought, that’s great, that’s exactly right.”

Her manager these days is the man who gave her the fetching diamond ring on her engagement finger, former musician David Wolff. She says they met five years ago at a party: Wolff was trying to pick up another girl and, undaunted by failure, turned his attentions to Cyndi, “and I was giving him a hard time, calling him an old hippie,” and not without some justification, looking at the pictures. But then they kissed and fell in love and they’re getting married when the job allows time for a honeymoon, and she likes him working with her. There’s several people from her family and circle of friends involved in the organization— her mom, for example, is a Cyndi Lauper video star, so’s her dog; Laura Wills, who owns the Screaming Mimi clothes shop where Cyndi worked when Blue Angel broke up, is now working with her as her stylist. Not that these things always work out; her former personal and spiritual adviser, Captain Lou Albani (the big, bearded bloke who was in the “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” video) was shooting his mouth off, saying lewd and nasty things about women in general and Cyndi in particular. Cyndi replied by challenging him to a wrestling match—Lou’s a former wrestler and a wrestling manager—and Lou’s champ went into the ring with Cyndi’s, a woman called Wendy Richter. Wendy won, and Cyndi ended up managing a women’s world champion for two years and organizing “Rock And Wrestling” shows on MTV.

And it wasn’t a gimmick. See, Cyndi’s a feminist. Ms. Magazine made her Woman Of The Year in 1985 for “taking feminism beyond conformity to individuality, rebellion and freedom.” And in a recent music magazine poll, boys voted in for Madonna as their favorite, while far more girls voted for Cyndi.

“I’m probably the way I am because I saw the kind of life my mother had to live—and my grandmother,” who was shipped over from Italy to marry a man she hadn’t even met, let alone been consulted about, “and the whole neighborhood where I grew up,” where Catholic women made babies and kept their mouths shut, except in the confession box. Cyndi’s never kept her mouth shut. Take her song “She Bop,” a ditty about female masturbation. She chuckles, “It was more than just masturbation, that wasn’t all it was about. It’s like how you’re told everything is no good and that God is up there watching everything you’re doing and come on\ God’s got nothing better to do than watch what we’re doing with our genitals?” She laughs: “You know, with all the things that are happening in the world today, war and hunger and earthquakes and tornados?” Cyndi looks suitably exasperated. “And it’s not a bad thing to love yourself a little bit, is it?”

And then there’s “Girls Just Want To Have Fun,” a song written by a boy, as it happens, as a macho thing about a male faced with a horde of easy women. Cyndi changed it into a celebration for women. “Well, every girl does want to have fun, all over the world. It broke all age barriers and country barriers. It just said what was true.”

And millions bought it and it was a huge hit. So were three other singles off her first album. But that was almost three years ago. Why such a long wait for a follow-up? Fears of being just another novelty in a disposable world?

“No. I just wanted to do it right. It’s got to go out there with my name on it and my voice on it so I’m not just going to whip one out quick.” And in-between there was another musical project—even if it wasn’t, by her own admission, a particularly good one as it turned out—when Steven Spielberg made her musical director for his children’s movie, The Goonies.

"It didn’t turn out great, I must say. But it was my project and I was real excited by it. I got the Bangles on it—I love the Bangles, and I said, ‘I want these guys to come over and sing on the movie.’ They sang on my album, too. They sing like angels, so I used them on this real hard track with Nile Rodgers, all these combinations together, and it was killer. I like opposites. I always like to take people and things that are opposites and put them together and see what happens. See, I like so many different kinds of music, and I like to invent new things by incorporating different stuff. What I do is nothing new but I make it different.”

As for her singing style, one minute balls-to-the-wall, the next minute tender-baby:

“It’s a funny thing, singing, It’s not like playing an instrument. It’s something that comes right out of you with nothing inbetween. Singing is a way of communicating and giving to people, and at the same time it gives you, yourself, enormous strength. But it’s not like you’re ‘yourself’ when you sing. When I sing, the last thing I think about is ‘Here I am, Cyndi,’ I don’t think anything when I sing. There is no time, there is no body, I go backwards and forwards in time. I can remember when I was two, the world disappears, I can imagine the cavemen...

“Rock ’n’ roll came out of the black church in America and have you heard of this thing they do sometimes called ‘speaking in tongues?’ Where you come out of yourself and go to this different place where stuff comes out of you that you’re not even conscious of, although it’s down inside you?

“On True Colors I did everything I could to get across the pure emotion through the Dolby and the digital this-and-that and all the technical things involved in making a record. I wanted it to be really internal, to go right inside, and I wanted to be on the radio so you’d be driving along in your car and suddenly there would be this call to the Ancient Soul right there in the car with you.

“And I heard the song on the radio and it knocked me over. It was like, ‘That was me, all right.’ I felt almost embarrassed, as if they’d seen me naked. Because it was like I’d peeled off everything on the surface and that was the real me there, real feelings. And I’m a really shy, private person.

“This song was like tribal. I always go back to the tribal thing. Even ‘Time After Time’ had this tribal thing. And though ‘True Colors’ is more gospel, I wrote this little bit behind it and that drum beat which is a call to the primitive thing, the ancient soul inside us that goes all the way back to the cavemen and the Indian tribes and the African tribes when drums were the first form of communication. If you wanted to contact somebody on the next mount, you know, you would cut up a tree, bang on your drum and say ‘Hey Kemosabe, what’s happening,’” she chuckles.

“I know it’s not really me that’s important, it’s the song.”

And yet she’s listed on the inner sleeve of the album as co-writer, arranger, coproducer, co-this or that time and time again. Is that just a way of saying she wants to be taken seriously?

“I just wanted credit for my work,” says Cyndi. "Plus I love the technical side of things, and I hate it how women are expected to be singers, you know, go and sit in the corner quietly and leave the technology to somebody else. I’ve always loved that stuff, and I’m a damn good backseat driver!

"Because I’ve always fooled around a lot, maybe people don’t know or realize that I am a serious artist. And the way I dress became so popular that it came before me, you know. My personality became bigger than my voice or my music—or maybe because of the wrestling or something, people didn’t understand what the hell I was doing. But I don’t believe in doing things to conformity.

"And with an album titled She’s So Unusual, the ‘unusual’ became a hook they could hook me with. That helped, but it also hurt me. Then again it doesn’t matter, because as long as I’m there it affords me to do the next thing. No matter what I do it will always be interpreted. I just like to make people feel things. I read the word ‘zany’ a lot—well, sometimes my personality’s like that, sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes I’m real intense and thinking about all the little details.

"When I started this, there was no category in music for meri-made the category. No one else was doing it— unfortunately for me! I wish somebody was. But it’s OK, because it opens the door for others, just like Blondie opened the door for a whole wave of people. I didn’t fit into the Blondie category either. I just didn’t fit in\ I was an outcast. And then, all of a sudden, ‘outcast’ was the category!”

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It’s got to the point now where so many people are dressing like Cyndi that she looks part of the crowd, even if she doesn’t want to be.

“Yes—my God, it got to the point where if I saw someone in yet another corset I would scream! There were soap opera stars in corsets! It became straight. I wore the corset because I thought it would make my shape look better. But it was good to see society opening up, people doing all different kinds of makeup and colors and a freer attitude to clothes.

"I remember talking to Laura, my stylist, saying, ‘The minute we do it it’ll be gone, someone else will be doing it,’ and she said, ‘So what? We’ll just do something else.’ And that’s what it’s all about. One thing generates another which generates something else. Because in the end nothing is new, someone’s always done it.

“Sometimes I feel bad,” sighs Cyndi, “but you know what? It’s so satisfying, because I’ve always wanted to change things, change the face of music. This album I think—I hope— has done that. I made the best music I could.

I wanted to make some really penetrating stuff that can really get you, you know what I mean? That’s all I’ve ever really wanted to do.” ®