Cyndi Lauper Bops
Through the Night
by Dave Zimmer​

​

Padding slowly through Burbank airport , clutching a grey handbag and a Walkman cassette player Lauper, at first glance, resembles a simple immigrant from the "the old country": loose grey overalls hitched up high over a red and white checked shirt, no make-up, tiny blue tinted sun glasses. well-worn, high-top leather shoes and a black and white pinstriped cap pulled down over electric orange hair. This is Cyndi's public garb-at least it is on this particular autumn day, as hurried travelers, young and old, shuffle past her in both directions, with only a few giving her a second glance. It isn't until she flies through the metal detector without causing the alarm to sound that she does something which immediately turns a few heads. She talks or, more accurately, shouts with her squeaky, Queens New York voice "LENNIE! CAN YA GET ME SOME TEA, PLEEAZE?"

 

A moment or two later, Lennie Petze, a stocky CBS Records producer, comes bounding toward Lauper holding two cups of hot tea. He hands her one. After a long sip ,she says "Gotta take care o' the throat. It's the only one I got." By this time, the rest of Lauper's entourage has arrived. Band members, roadies, technicians and her road manager form a rock and roll caravan - with Cyndi in the lead, when thay come to a stop at Gate 6, passengers from a previous flight are circling and searching for friends and relatives. One young teenage girl spots Cyndi and seems to recognize her immediately. But instead of rushing up for an autograph, the girl simply gives her the thumbs up sign and smiles. Cyndi smiles back.

 

"I really do love the kids," she says, standing at the gate. "Except, last night in Santa Barbara a fan in the audience tried to grab my jewelry. That I don't like. You grab my jewelry it's (using a line from The Honeymooners in perfect Ralph Kramden style)" To the moon!" She shakes her fist, then giggles, "Only kidding. But on stage, to look out and see the kids screaming and crying, that's been unexpected. And I feel bad when they cry, because I don't know why they're crying, you know?"

 

Explaining such Beatle-like audience behavior isn't hard when one considers the kind of year Cyndi Lauper has enjoyed. Her Debut album, She's So Unusual, the passed 2.5 million mark in sales and yielded three top five singles, "Girls Just Want to Have Fun", "Time After Time", and "She Bop" plus "All Through the Night" another hit on the move, She won Best Female Video at the September MTV Video Awards, and made two appearances with Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show. This all happened after she'd reached rock bottom- with no money or record deal, just a lot of heart.

 

Now, at 31 she's a certified star and wears her celebrity like a new party dress. Boarding a plane to San Francisco, Cyndi pauses on the ramp, turns around, smiles and waves good-bye to Burbank terminal. "This famous stuff," Cyndi says, after buckling her seat belt, "it's nice, because people are listening to what you're saying.

 

There's communication back and forth. It's a strange kind of thing, because I know the audience is showing a lot of affection because I'm doing well now. Still, affection is being passed around, so that's good. I may never see a lot of these people again, so I try and share as much as I can.

 

I've never seen any reaction like this for a woman before, and that's good. Because everything is always so male dominated all the time. Let's just forget this here separatism shit, you know?"

 

While performers like Chrissie Hynde, Pat Benatar and Deborah Harry have preceded her rise to the top of the charts, none have done it with quite the same amount of flair and color that Lauper projects. In fact, a lot of media coverage has focused almost exclusively on her outrageous dress and conversation. "That's all right," Cyndi shrugs, "as long as people enjoy what I do. It's entertaining. They're havin' a good time. I'm having a good time. But, you know, they never do put in there how much I actually do put into my work."

 

She's proud of her four-octave singing voice, as well she should be. It was developed during years of unbridled yelping, then an intense period of vocal training. "What I sing," she says," may seem very simple. but believe me, it's tricky and hard to hit all those notes every night. "Performing everything from raucous rockers to sassy soul/R&B; to emotional ballads to old timey torch songs Cyndi seldom sings off key," That's because ," she explains, "I’ve learned some discipline. I know I gotta work on throat and body because I'm a pipsqueak. So, you know, I gotta work hard.

 

This level of intensity carries over into her approach to video - a medium she admits "helped put me all over the map." Many have described Cyndi as a natural actress. I present myself. I don't present somebody else. You know what I mean? Actors and actresses who are really good can present themselves in any form. I can present myself in lots of forms, but they're all me.

 

When creating the video for "Time After Time" with director Ed Griles, Cyndi says, "I didn't want to show fake love, because it's a very poignant song about love and relationships and struggle and so to show it visually, I wanted to show real love.

 

And the only way to do that is to get real people who really love you, and you love them, and that comes across in the video. When me and my mother are crying, we’re really crying, you know? I could never fake that.

 

“And ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’ was me and my mother havin’ a blast. And all my friends and Lou (Albano), before he flipped out, joinin’ in. When it’s real people relating to real things that’s what makes it contagious.”

 

Of course, Lauper also expresses some of her fantasies on videotape. “’She Bop’ is total fantasy,” She says. “We wrote it and just laughed and laughed. Sometimes I see some pretty weird things in my head.” Cyndi’s vivid imagination was active as far back as she can remember, to her childhood days in Brooklyn and Ozone Park in Queens New York. I had strange dreams,” she says, “where I’d be sitting and talking to these people who were very abusive to me. Then all of a sudden they’d all be listening to me, and I was like this little old woman. I just let these go by because, you know, when you’re a kid, what’re you gonna do? Go to a doctor and tell him your dreams?” Not Cyndi. Instead she began performing. “I started singing when I talked,” she says. “When I was five , Iwas singing records. I had all the different voices. I’d do South Pacific. I’d have to change from Ezio Pinza to Mitzi Gaynor. I’d have to go (She drops her voice to almost a bass range) really low and (she slips up to falsetto) really high. When I’d sing for the old ladies around the block, they’d gimme quarters. Then they’d walk me home and tell my mother they’d given me quarters, and I’d have to give ’em back. I knew I wasn’t going to go into business that way right off.”

 

As tough and independent as Cyndi now appears, as a child, she admits, I was a wimp. When I was three or four years old, I used to like to go under my mother’s glass skirts. I used to feel like it was a little house, you know? And I’d walk under her skirts while she walked.” When Lauper ventured from her “little house” She didn’t always like what she saw. When Cyndi was five, her parents divorced. In order to support Cyndi and her brother and sister, her mother was forced to work fourteen hour days. I was really heartbroken,” Cyndi says, “when my parents got divorced and my mother had to work. But I was lucky, in a way, because I started to see how grown-ups really are. I realized that grown-ups were kids, too. I was never really sheltered from anything . I had a lot of really awful things happen to me. But in the end, they balance out.”

 

Cyndi wasn’t able to take quite as philosophical a view as a child, especially when she was enduring a six month stay at Catholic boarding school. I tell ya, the nuns tortured me,” she says. “God was not at that school. I’m lucky I got out alive.” Even now, although she describes Christmas as “a very special time of year because people are nice to each other,” she has no use for organized religion. “Gandhi had the right idea,” she says. He is a great inspiration to me , because of the things he said about the Christians and the Jews and the Muslims and the Hindus and the Buddhists…he said, “They’re all the same.’ That’s how I believe. It’s a universal thing. No one’s above or below anybody else.” As a young teenager, though, Cyndi remembers, “I didn’t feel like I belonged anywhere, I didn’t fit in. And the harder you try to fit in when no one is supporting you, the worse things get.” Fortunately, she was able to turn to music. The records of Billie Holiday, Mario Lanza and Louie Armstrong intrigued her. Then came the Beatles “I wanted to sing like The Beatles,” she says. “Of course I couldn’t . But listening To their records and singin’ their songs with my sister, that really got me goin’.”

 

Where, she wasn’t sure yet. She also had a love for art, but never was able to translate this enthusiasm into strong performances in the classroom, eventually having to settle for a General Equivalency Diploma in lieu of a regular high school education. Her hope of learning how to sculpt by working in a mannequin factory were dashed when she realized she was too small to handle the rigorous working conditions. So, at age seventeen, she left home in search of a dream. She rambled from place to place, studied art for awhile and earned a meager living taking whatever jobs she could find – the most unusual one being a race track attendant. “I saw a different kind of culture ,” she says. “I learned , ”Somebody’s gotta clean the fish.’ You gotta find some way to live, Ilearned a little bit more about life and about me, and about the fact that I was trying to run away from what I was. I’m a singer. So I went home and I sang.”

 

While she had written a few songs with her sister and had played in a couple of basement bands. In her early teens, she’d had no professional experience as a musician. Consequently, she had to take whatever singing jobs she could find. From 1974 to 1977, she spent most of her nights in New York dance bars, singing with cover bands.

 

“That experience,” Cyndi says, “wasn’t that great, because all I was doin’ was copying other singers. I did a good Joplin, but , you know, I didn’t’ want to be her, I wanted to be me.

 

She still hadn’t approached a vocal style of her own that she was comfortable with. And in fact, by concentrating so heavily on the idiosyncrasies of other singers, she almost lost her voice. “It was close,” she admits. “My voice got raspy. It hurt when I sang. It hurt when I talked.” She subsequently turned to a vocal coach named Katie Agresta. “I’ve always valued what she taught me,” Cyndi says. “She taught me how to sing correctly and to warm-up right . I studied jazz. I never took what I learned and sang jazz. Because I’m a rock singer, you know? That’s what I do. That’s what I feel. I’m sure I’ll sing other styles in my lifetime. There’ll come a time.”

 

In the late 70’s, Cyndi was intent on making it as a rock and roller. She hired a manager named, Ted Rosenblatt, and , through him, hooked up with a struggling keyboardist/saxophonist, John Turi. Together, they formed the nucleous of a band dubbed Blue Angel.

 

I guess you could say we were rockabilly,” Cyndi says. “I wrote and arranged most of our stuff. But nothing always fell into place. There was some magic in Blue Angel, but it didn’t happen very often.”

 

It must have happened often enough to interest an attorney named Steve Massarsky. While still managing Allman Brothers in 1979, he began managing Cyndi. He urged her to go solo, but she refused, and eventually Blue Angel got a record deal with Polygram . The band’s one and only album, Blue Angel, released in 1980, was a commercial failure. When it came time to record another one, Lauper recalls, “There were people they (Polygram) wanted me to copy, But the singers they wanted me to copy, I didn’t think they were as good as me .” She held her ground and the record company refused to finance another session.

 

While Blue Angel was fizzling, so was Cyndi’s association with Steve Massarsky. He wound up suing the band for $80,00. Cyndi filed for bankruptcy in 1982, Virtually Destitute, Lauper somehow persevered. “sure things looked pretty bleak,” she says. “But you know , I had another dream where I was sittin’ in the backyard of where I grew up. I was sittin’ on a little ledge singin’ to the garden, to all the tulips . There were all these tulips, and They were looking up, and they were dancing. They were very happy.” Cyndi giggles,” And I was waving to the tulips, and the tulips were waving back. It was neat, you know? I kinda knew that maybe that meant something else. It was one of those things where you don’t have to run out and buy Psychology Today to figure out,”

 

She was guided by still another internal message. “You Know, I hear things,” she admits. “I have visions. I see things. I don’t talk about ’em all the time because, hey , maybe I took a couple of trips too many back when… too many trips around the block, you know?

 

“Anyway, ever since my late teens, I started hearing this voice in my head and it kept telling me, ‘Wait till you meet David.’ So everytime things got realy bad, I’d say to myself , ‘Wait till I meet David.’ And every David I’d meet, I’d wonder, ‘Is that David?’ If it was a guy who wasn’t too nice I’d go, ‘ Oh no, that’s not David, please!’ Then, finally, I met David Wolff at a party.”

 

Wolff was a member of a band know as Arc Angel – who had recorded for Portrait/CBS Records. He was also attempting to start a career in personal management. “David was a wise guy,” says Cyndi. I wasn’t even going to talk to him. But, for some reason, we hit it off. He was really something and after I was with him awhile, I realized that he was DAVID! Strange isn’t it?”

 

Strange, yes , but after Wolff became her manager and boyfriend in early 1983,Cyndi went from singing ballads in a Japanese bar and selling clothes as New York’s Screaming Mimi’s into a record studio with CBS executive producer Lennie Petze and producer Rick Chertoff. A solo deal was soon struck with Portrait,and Cyndi was On Cloud Nine. I’d always wanted to sign with a company that was small,” she says, “but that had big distribution and muscle. I don’t like to get lost in the shuffle.I can’t deal with a corporation. I can deal with people, individuals.”

 

In the studio, working with Chertoff, multi-in-strumentalist Eric Bazilian,keyboardist/songwriter Rob Hyman and a collection of studio musicians, Lauper was given an amazing amount of rope, in terms of arrangements and song selection.

 

I didn’t want to do cover material,” she says. “But while listening to stuff, I heard a few things that really touched me. I saw opportunities to sort of twist the meanings around and really sing some nice interpretations.”

 

In the case of Robert Hazard’s ”Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” she says, When I first heard it, it was offensive. I said to Lennie , ‘What am I supposed to do? Take a can-can and sing “I Just wanna have fun”, like a real dummy?’ So I altered it until it became more like an anthem for girls.”

 

She put her stamp on more songs , like The Brains’ “ Money Changes Everything” and Prince’s “When You Were Mine.” She fell in love with Jules Shear’s “All Through the Night” and then started writing with him.

 

She collaborated with Rob Hyman on the tender “Time After Time:, and came up with the groove and key lines for the saucy “She Bop.” Then she dusted off an old 30’s tune, She’s So Unusual.”

 

Throughout my career,” Lauper says, “I’ve always felt there was something very noodgy about the Sound of my voice, which I thought was a terrible thing . So I worked my butt off, literally, to change that sound, but I never could quite get the noodgy stuff out. The noodgy is always there. When I heard the sound of some real old records, I heard other singers that had that sound, that different sound, that noodge , you know ? So, in a way, I guess it’s been a blessing , even though I was always told that if I didn’t sound like the flock of so-and-so’s or human so-and so’s I’d never be successful”. Whoever told Cyndi Lauper such a thing had to swallow their words when She’s So Unusual, released in 1983 , went on to become a huge success, to the point where she’s now even marketing commercial versions of some of her outfits that were originally pieced together out of flea market bins. “I figured I’d better represent myself in a way that looks good,” she says. “So I made a couple of little outfits that are really nice, better than the ugly things some other companies have been puttin’ out saying they’re my style. But really, it’s the style of the street, the poor people- which I was one of until recently.”

 

The way things are going for her, it’s doubtful if Cyndi Lauper will ever be poor again. But she shrugs off the notion that money will ever change her. Her favorite TV program is still The Honeymooners, and one of her non-musical hobbies is wrestling . No, she doesn’t wrestle. She manages Wendy Richter, a 25-year-old wrestler who recently became “world’s champ” after besting Fabulous Moolah- manager Lauper’s former ”advisor ” big-time wrestler Captain Lou Albano. He’s on the road to recovery,” says Lauper, in reference to Albano’s supposed “calcium deposit on his medulla.” “And even though he really flipped out, Captain Lou probably did a good thing. He gave chauvinism a very bad name.” Captain Lou also passed along his P.E.G Principal to Cyndi “Yeah “ she says “Politeness, Etiquette and Grooming….good principles don’t ya think? What can go wrong if ya follow ’em?

 

In Lauper’s case, very little, it seems . Even amidst the endless rush of activity –touring, interviews, TV appearances- she’s managed to maintain her sunny, outgoing friendliness. This doesn’t mean, however, that she’s immune from the fatigue factor. After being Whisked through San Francisco International Airport on a baggage cart -her pal Lennie pushes, while she waves- Cyndi ducks into a limo and heads for the Miyako Hotel and one of her last tour dates of 1984.

 

I seen what happened to Loretta Lynn, how she got over-exhausted and everything.” Lauper sighs, training her eyes on the limo’s sunroof.” “but that’s not gonna happen to me. In the next year I’m gonna definitely submerge myself into, what do you call it? Oblivion. And as soon as I rest and begin to calm down, that’s when I become creative again. I need time off to create, and I’m not gonna set a deadline, Let’s just say, sometime in 1985 you’ll hear from me.”