This was published 7 years ago
Cyndi Lauper's career renaissance: 'I guess you have to prove it wasn't a fluke the first time'
After global success in the 1980s, Cyndi Lauper’s career nosedived. Then came an invite to write songs for a new Broadway musical.
By Darryn King
ONE OF the enduring catch cries of January's Women's March on Washington cheekily alluded to the chorus of an '80s pop tune. Protestors held up posters with the defiant message: "Girls Just Want to Have Fun-damental Rights"
As performed by Cyndi Lauper in 1983, Girls Just Want to Have Fun was always a rollicking ode to feminist sassitude. Lauper influenced the musical direction of the song but, just as crucially, she tweaked the lyrics. In Robert Hazard's original version, the song was sung from the perspective of a guy. Lauper wasn't having any of it. "A man's not gonna say what a woman's gonna say," she says. "So I edited it." Hazard's sleazy pronouncement "All my girls have got to walk in the sun" became Lauper's indomitable "I want to be the one to walk in the sun". Lauper pitched her vocals high, she explains, "like a trumpet".
The day we meet in the bar of a midtown hotel in New York, the 63-year-old's look is Upper West Side chic with a dash of East Village grunge: a black suit with a fringed hem and sleeves, her punk hairdo dyed bubblegum pink. We meet immediately before a concert event honouring her Tony Award-winning Broadway musical, Kinky Boots, which opened in Sydney's Capitol Theatre on April 12.
Kinky Boots is based on a 2005 British film, itself based on a true story of a struggling British shoe factory branching out into custom footwear for drag queens. If the musical has anything in common with her biggest hit, Lauper says, it's that they're both bursting with humanity.
Lauper had a journey worthy of the most hardened hip-hop artist.Credit: Martin Schoeller/Art + Commerce/ Raven & Snow
"Even when we were doing the first album I wanted to do songs that meant something," she says. "I love the fact Girls Just Want to Have Fun still inspires young women to be joyful and strong and express themselves. And to understand that being a free spirit is not necessarily bad and it doesn't necessarily mean you're doing bad things." Lately, she's been spruiking "Girls Just Want to Have Fundamental Rights" T-shirts, with proceeds donated to Planned Parenthood and the True Colors Fund, battling LGBT youth homelessness.
The importance of writing meaningful songs is a lesson that Lauper's son, 19-year-old fledgling hip-hop artist Dex Lauper, has inherited. Mum is a fan, of course. "I don't really know what the hell he's saying," she admits, "but it's catchy." As Dex has proudly pointed out in interviews, before the carefree pop breeziness of Girls, Lauper had a journey worthy of the most hardened hip-hop artist.
Growing up in Ozone Park in Queens, young Cindy Lauper – she shuffled the letters in her name later, on a whim – wanted desperately to attend a performing-arts high school. She might have, if not for the school guidance counsellor's warning that she'd wind up waiting tables 13 hours a day like her mother. Instead, at a regular school, she failed classes, had rocks thrown at her by other kids and was voted "most likely to fail". Her mother started lighting candles to Saint Jude, the patron saint of lost causes.
Leaving home at 17 to escape a leering stepfather, she lived in a roach-infested apartment with drug-dealing neighbours and got around by hitching. Some days she would spend entirely in bed, or crawl into the cupboard during anxiety attacks. One winter, she stole a jacket from a department store (and a dress for her sister); another time, when there was no food at home, her boyfriend shot and brought home a squirrel for dinner.
There was a seemingly endless succession of soul-crushing jobs. She fell asleep in a windowless room as a receptionist at a Park Avenue publishing house. She worked in a kennel and a shoe shop, as an artist's assistant and life drawing model, and offered judo and karate lessons, knowing nothing about either.
She sought solace in a mixed bag of spiritual teachings: Christianity, Hare Krishna, Khalil Gibran's The Prophet, even The Lord of the Rings. "Spiritually, I felt guided. And I also felt that I had a guardian angel. That really kept me alive and going. In dark times, I would always pray."
Singing, too, had always been a prayerful activity for her. She sang before she could really talk, she says, and wrote her own songs from the age of 10. Growing up, she idolised the Beatles but was also enamoured of Louis Armstrong (the first music she ever heard, she swears), the Supremes, Joni Mitchell, Debussy. Her mother's collection of show tunes got endless replays, too, Lauper doing her own renditions of tunes from South Pacific, The King and I, Camelot and My Fair Lady, regaling the little old Italian ladies in the neighbourhood.
The transporting joy of singing has been a constant ever since. "It's hard to explain. I guess the closest is when people who run, they get into that zone after a while, and it's very addictive. When you're performing, you go into that zone. It's a feeling where everything is possible. And you're not always in control of it. You're just riding that wave, and that is the most unbelievable feeling. You always strive for that. Does that always happen? Oh, hell no. But sometimes you're blessed with those moments."
When things get really bad, I figure, ‘You know what? It doesn’t matter. I’m supposed to walk through these times and find the other end.
It was at a college party singalong that a fellow student turned to her and remarked that her voice sounded "professional". She notes, "Once I joined a band, I didn't look back."
Lauper's eclectic sartorial style – a riot of colours and textures, pony-hair boots, false eyelashes – suddenly made sense. (During the women's liberation movement in the late 1960s, Lauper burnt a training bra but, secretly, she says, she enjoyed the attention-seizing fashions other early feminists frowned upon.)
"My socks weren't funny to people anymore. I fit in. I wasn't odd. And even if you were odd it was okay, because musicians were odd!" She sang in cover bands, playing gigs in dreary clubs and dive bars in Long Island City, teetering around in platform shoes and falling over a lot. She really hoped she'd cut it as a background singer, but before long she was coaxed to the front of the stage by a band manager. "I wanted to be in the background, but it didn't work out," she says, sounding genuinely regretful.
It wasn't until 1984, years after a false start with rockabilly band Blue Angel, that Lauper skyrocketed to fame. Her debut album, She's So Unusual, boasted four top-10 hits, including She Bop, a winking ode to masturbation, and the melancholic Time after Time. Lauper's technicolour style and personality seemed tailormade for the advent of MTV.
But success was tricky. An otherwise gushing 1984 Rolling Stone article described her Queens-accented speaking voice as a "throttled yowl" reminiscent of Francis the Talking Mule. For someone whose biggest pleasure was losing herself in music, the intense scrutiny of celebrity made her suddenly self-conscious.
"For me the best part of singing is when you're in another world and half out of your mind. Really. And then you read a review and they think your speaking voice is so dreadful and they didn't understand the clothes but 'Oh my God, you can sing … ?' " Lauper crinkles her features in distaste.
She especially chafed against the pressure to sing songs she hadn't written. "I had a big voice, and, when I was coming up, women with big voices didn't write – they sang other people's songs. But yeah, I had a really colourful and interesting life, so I wanted to put that in my music."
IN 1986, Lauper had another hit in True Colors – also destined to be taken up as an anthem of the marginalised, for the gay community – but, as the '80s wore on, her softer sound and increasingly autobiographical lyrics appealed less to the mainstream, and her career lost all momentum. Her 1993 album Hat Full of Stars was Lauper at her most starkly personal: tracks like Sally's Pigeons (about a back-alley abortion) were a million miles away from the fluoro effervescence of 10 years earlier. It was the first time, Lauper says, that she felt she was honouring the "rhythm of my own speech" – it also signalled the moment she effectively took leave of the pop charts.
By 2008, Lauper was putting herself through what she calls a "prove yourself" tour, dishing out her greatest hits in European clubs and being carted around in a double-decker bus. She can, and does, laugh about it now, while making clear it was a definite low point.
"It was a stinky-ass bus with some driver who, not only did he not like to wash, but he didn't clean the bus much," she says. "It was just awful. And I was in the backseat, where you're tossed around like a bushel of vegetables. I was just over it."
But, just as musical theatre had been a refuge in her childhood, Broadway once again provided Lauper with a way out. In late 2008, playwright Harvey Fierstein invited her to write the music and lyrics for a stage musical of Kinky Boots for which he was writing the book.
She leaped at the challenge. "I just thought, 'Well, it's pretty inspiring to work on something that's about inclusion, and about how we feel about ourselves.' " Lauper dutifully attended rehearsals, crafting song and lyrics to suit the individual performers, drawing on her wide-ranging musical tastes. At the centre of the story, she brought the vivacious drag queen Lola to life with "a little Tina Turner, a little Shirley Bassey, a little Cab Calloway".
Kinky Boots was the hit of the 2013 Tony Awards, winning six Tonys including Best Musical, with Lauper the first solo woman to take the Best Score award. In the last year it has opened in Melbourne, Malmö, Seoul and Tokyo, and will open in Manila and Hamburg later in 2017.
Does she feel she's sufficiently proved herself now? Even tonight, of all nights, she doesn't provide the easy, sunny post-script you might hope for. "I don't know. Then there's the second show you do. Then I guess you have to prove it wasn't a fluke the first time."
Still, there's a hint of that hardy determination to "walk in the sun" that she sang of more than three decades ago: "When things get really bad, I figure, 'You know what? It doesn't matter. I'm supposed to walk through these times and find the other end.' " she says. I mention that I've been enjoying her pre-Kinky Boots memoir. She lights up. "Well, it turns out good. So don't worry."
Kinky Boots is now playing at the Capitol Theatre, Sydney