shame & bad hair: from an interview
Sunday 17 February 2008 | someone left a cookie
A month earlier, already several months into a ten-month world tour, a road-weary Tori [Amos] had been holed up in the Chicago Ritz-Carlton, thinking about throwing herself out of the window. She rang former Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant for advice. What could she do to make touring more bearable? Plant advised her not to tour at all, but just make the records, put them out, and let them sell what they sell. “It’s all right for him,” Tori says, exasperated, “but some of us have a living to make.”
So much for the legend. How about the cult artist? Next she called Nine In Nails’ Trent Reznor, and told him that she was about to throw herself out of the hotel window. “What hotel are you in?” he asked. “The Ritz-Carlton in Chicago,” she told him. “Well, then I’m not worried about you,” he said. “I’ve already tried it and you can’t open the windows.”
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Tori’s big moment of rejection came in the mid-eighties when she was trying to carve out a career as a rock chick, fronting a soft metal band called Y Kant Tori Read? Transvision Vamp-like, they were hyped by the industry and then critically savaged. When their debut album came out, Billboard called Tori “a bimbo.”
“I walked into a restaurant called Hugo’s in LA that I ate in all the time—I mean, I lived there. And I walked in, and there were two tables of acquaintances of mine in the industry, and they ignored me,” Tori recalls. “It’s not like I’d call them friends, but I thought they were good acquaintances. One was a publisher—and you know he would give one of his balls to have my publishing now—and the other was an A&R person. One of them turned away and pretended I wasn’t there. And the other one turned away and was sniggering with his girlfriend. And she was laughing at me. I had my hair all piled up—six inches—I had my snakeskin boots on. I mean, now that I look back it was kind of sweet, this little thigh-high rock chick. But when you’ve been publicly humiliated, you’re not even a cool cartoon character any more, you’re a cartoon character that they’re erasing…and they have the power to erase you.
“So I hid my tears behind my 17 applications of mascara—you know, the waterproof kind—and walked out with what little dignity I had…went home…sat on my kitchen floor for a long time. A few days later, I was still on my kitchen floor—you know, you’re in shock. All my ideas: coming to LA, wanting to be…it’s not about music any more, it’s about approval: am I okay?”
Eventually Tori called her friend Cindy Marble, then lead singer with the Rugburns, just another band from LA that never got signed. “And Cindy said, ‘I think you need to come over here.’ So I did. She had an old piano, and she said, ‘Will you play for me? I really want to hear you play. I haven’t heard you play in a long time.’ And I played for her. Five hours. And she said to me: ‘Tori, this is what you have to do. You play your piano and you sing your songs. That’s what you do. And you’ve been trying to get away from it and be Lita Ford or somebody for the past five years, but this is what you do. Doesn’t matter if it’s hip or cool or not.’”
This is a friend worth having, I suggest. “Yes,” Tori agrees. “This is a friend worth having. This is a beautiful soul.”
(“Devil Woman” by Mark Edwards, The Face, October 1994)
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Tori Amos’ music has evolved as I have. Her work still manages to grip my heart tightly and not let go, even after all these years.
And on a whole different note, good friends can truly be a blessing.