Between a Heart and a Rock Place (6 page)

It was exciting, but even then I knew a huge part of what I wanted to achieve was absent. While I loved bands and singers from every genre of music—the Beatles, Linda Ronstadt, Simon and Garfunkel, Dylan, and all things Motown—none of those were how I envisioned myself. I wanted that amazing, blistering guitar player, a partner to play off. Musically, I wasn't getting that monstrous chordal “bed” I was looking for. Zeppelin, the Stones, the Clash, Foreigner—all had that intense, guitar-driven sound. I was well aware that this was new territory for a woman, but that made it all the more attractive. I had listened to Grace Slick and Janis Joplin, and I admired them. But neither of them had the sound I wanted. I wanted to be Robert Plant.

The success of my live shows highlighted that whatever was working live clearly wasn't coming across in those demos. Finally Newman
decided that it was time to showcase me for labels, to let them see the onstage energy I projected. We held it downtown at one of the city's best-known clubs, a place called Tramps, on Fifteenth Street. It was the kind of place where up-and-comers debuted and established players went to showcase new material. Newman ran around getting people to promise that they'd be there, and every friend and relative I had showed up. The showcase would be for two nights, and I should have felt tremendous pressure about the whole thing—not only were we paying for the show but sometimes in the music business, you get one shot. If you pull those label people out, you better be prepared to deliver. But I knew that I would put on a good show. It wasn't arrogance. I had worked for three years for this day and I was confident I was ready.

The first night my set list ranged from Roy Orbison's “Crying” to the Rascals' “You Better Run” to a reggae version of “Stairway to Heaven.” The crowd ate it up, partially because the entire room was filled with my friends and family. The one label representative I met that night was Jeff “Buzzard” Aldridge from Chrysalis, who loved it. And one music critic in attendance
really
loved it. This will tell you the power of the press back then: Carl Arrington from the
New York Post
wrote a rave review about the show—the kind of accolades normally associated with parental adulation or eulogies. The next night people were lined up around the block for my set. It was insane. On that second night of the showcase, five different record labels came to the show, all because of the
Post
review. Buzzard was back, and after the show he brought Terry Ellis and Chris Wright, the founders of Chrysalis Records, backstage to meet me. Suddenly all of the record companies who had passed were interested.

The very next day I started meeting with record labels. But having already met Terry, Chris, and Buzzard, I really felt like I wanted to sign with them. It was a smaller label, which was very appealing to me, since it meant I might get more personal attention than at the giants.
After one meeting with Terry and Chris, I was signed to Chrysalis, unprepared but on my way.

What I didn't know was that the contract I signed practically made me an indentured servant. Because Newman hadn't managed a singer before, he didn't know what to be on the lookout for. As a result, neither one of us really knew what was necessary to protect me. From the day I first signed on that dotted line, I felt like I was playing catch-up, learning on the fly as I tried to follow the record label's rules.

At that first meeting with Terry and Chris, I explained what I wanted to accomplish, trying to describe for them the hard-rock sound that I'd been working to articulate but had yet to achieve. Though they'd liked what they'd heard and seen at the showcase, they were intrigued by my idea. The thought of having a female front person who could compete with male rockers, filling arenas, selling massive amounts of records, was unheard-of. Female pop singers, yes, of course, but a solo female rocker? There wasn't anything like that out there. The cash registers in their heads were chiming.

The fact that they'd had such success with Blondie only made them salivate more, and oddly enough, one of the first things they threw my way after signing with them was the chance to take a small part in an independent movie called
Union City
that Debbie Harry was also in. I showed up on the set, and over the course of making it, Debbie and I ended up spending a few days together. From the start, I really liked her. She was everything I wasn't—quirky in the best sort of way and definitely part of the New York art crowd, a group I admired and whose libertine lifestyle I enjoyed vicariously. She was crazy yet sweet as could be. The movie itself was a bizarre little thing, and I'm only really in it for a minute, but the whole experience just made me bat my wide eyes in disbelief at where I was standing. I was hungrier than ever to find that sound, my sound.

As it turned out, Chrysalis desperately wanted me to find that sound too, and they thought they knew how to get it. They assembled a
group of New York's finest session players, Paul Shaffer (later of David Letterman's band) among them, and hired a successful producer named Ron Dante. With this pedigree, everyone thought we were off to a great start. The label had given me a song called “Heartbreaker” that we were pitched through the Chrysalis A&R department. It was written by a couple of British guys, Geoff Gill and Clint Wade, and though it was obviously a strong starting point, the original lyrics had too many English colloquialisms that an American audience wouldn't understand. The record label worried that it wouldn't fly with American listeners and asked me to rewrite some of the lyrics.

In spite of these promising beginnings, the sessions were a disaster. Everything was wrong. The tracks were played technically well, but they had no soul, no passion. The music was so uninspiring that I couldn't conjure any fire in the vocals. We had “Heartbreaker,” for God's sake! But the recordings were a fiasco. I cried for days, saying that I was finished before I'd even started.

After listening to the sessions, Chrysalis determined that they'd been a little hasty jumping on my “female rocker bandwagon.” They had a new plan. They had seen a “great vocalist” on that stage at Tramps, a technical singer who also knew how to work the crowd. They had determined that female singers were easier to market as solo artists, and marketing niches usually trump all else. They'd bring in the great producer Mike Chapman, who was working wonders with two other acts on their label, the Knack and Blondie. I'd be a pop star or a New Wave singer. See, all better.

But when I met with Chapman, the opposite thing happened. He got it. He knew exactly what I had been talking about. He started suggesting songs like “No You Don't” and “I Need a Lover.” I was instantly drawn to “I Need a Lover,” a song that John Mellencamp (“Johnny Cougar” back then) had first released as a single. While it didn't do much in the U.S., it went to number 1 in Australia. Mellencamp included it on his next record, and it charted in the U.S. It was
exactly the kind of material I was looking for. The idea of singing that lyric from a female point of view was perfect. Chapman also thought “Heartbreaker” was the ideal vehicle for me lyrically and that the sentiment it exuded was spot-on. We both agreed that there wasn't any female out there shoving that kind of message in your face.

Now all we had to do was get those tracks to rock. Not someone's idea of how a “girl” would rock, but the real thing—only sung by a female. Chapman even thought he had an idea about where I could find that elusive guitar-playing partner I so desperately wanted.

 

I'
M JUST GOING TO
put this out there once and for all: without Neil Giraldo (or “Spyder,” as I'd later dub him), my career would not have happened. I'm not saying that I wouldn't have had any success as the pop princess Chrysalis wanted. But I never would have succeeded to the degree I did, made strides for women, been part of the eighties rock movement, had my face on MTV, won four Grammys, sold millions of records, and still been around thirty years later without the genius and heart of that man.

Because
I
am not responsible for it;
we
are responsible for it, all of it. From the moment he stepped into the room at SIR, our lives changed—first musically, and later romantically and spiritually. We were each other's muse. It was like we had each been missing a part and when we met, we were finally whole, connected on a primal level. The sexual tension between us and the instant musical compatibility was intoxicating. The creativity that flowed was unstoppable. And even though I was crazy for him from the moment he walked into SIR's rehearsal hall, Spyder and I did not become a couple at first. We had music to make.

From the moment we first started collaborating, I knew Spyder was a visionary. His mind
never
stopped. He was constantly experimenting
and trying new things, yet he knew precisely what needed to be pushed farther and what needed to be discarded. It was exactly what I'd been missing. That's not to say I had no vision, but I was such a grounded person. A lot of that had to do with my musical upbringing. There wasn't much room in classical music to go crazy or experiment. Your main job was to deliver what had been written in a precise and technically perfect way. Artistry was valued over innovation. Spyder was the perfect counterpart to my organized, by-the-book self. He'd get these out-there ideas, and I'd make them palatable to human beings. Together we worked beautifully.

The fact that we meshed so well was surprising given how different our musical backgrounds were. His experience was the antithesis of mine. Unlike me, Spyder grew up in rock and roll and spent his entire musical life playing it. He came from a Sicilian-Czech family from Parma, Ohio, just outside Cleveland. In the beginning, he'd balked at playing music. His sister played accordion, which his mother (from the Czech side of the family) loved. But Mrs. Giraldo thought that for family gatherings on a Sunday afternoon, the accordion would sound better backed with an acoustic guitar. Spyder was natural musician and a great acoustic player, but he had no real interest in the whole thing until his uncle stepped in.

Uncle Timmy was much younger than Spyder's mom, and he was a rocker. Timmy was into the Stones, Zeppelin, and Hendrix, and being only four years older than Spyder, he helped bridge the generation gap. After listening to Spyder play acoustically and gripe about it, his father bought him an amp, but once his Uncle Timmy showed Spyder how to turn that amp all the way up, all hell broke loose. Nobody ever had to tell him to practice again. Music was his entire universe. While I was practicing arias, he was finding new ways to bend the strings on his guitar and turning his amps up to “eleven.” At fourteen, he was sneaking in back doors to play in clubs, and this prolonged exposure to the
fringe of rock had pushed his musical taste and creative sensibility far left of my own.

I'll say this about Cleveland: that city
is
rock and roll. Those people love music to the point of being insane. They're crazy. Spyder says it's because it gets so cold there, that Cleveland has the worst weather in America. People out scraping the ice off their cars in 4-degree weather don't complain like some of us do. They've got to get to the steel mills to get to work. Cleveland ain't Hollywood. It ain't foo-foo. They need something to distract them. So they play football and they rock. The music they make is gritty. You're not going to find that scene anywhere else.

Spyder's connection to Mike Chapman came through his work with Rick Derringer. In 1978, Rick was getting ready to go on the road to promote his new album,
If I Weren't So Romantic, I'd Shoot You
. Rick held auditions to replace his guitar player, who quit just before the tour. Out of the two hundred players who showed up, Spyder was chosen. The gig was perfect for him because Mike Chapman, the album's producer, had put keyboards on the project, and Spyder was a multi-instrumentalist.

When Chapman came out on the road and heard the band, he was sold on Spyder's fierce and innovative approach, as well as his understanding of the songs. Chapman also loved how aggressive Spyder was on the stage. After working out so well on the road, Spyder played on Rick's next record,
Guitars and Women
. Just about the time they finished up recording, Chapman was brought in on my project.

From the beginning, Chapman thought that what I needed was a guitar player who had a good feel for the structure of songs, who came at music from an organic place instead of just playing along on whatever someone handed him. That fit Spyder perfectly, and as I watched him play guitar on that first day, I knew he was the right one.

Buzzard watched my face while Spyder played, and as Spyder fin
ished, Buzzard lifted me up, walked over to where Spyder was sitting, and plopped me right in his lap.

“He's our guy!” Buzzard announced.

Buzzard didn't know the half of it. I was embarrassed and furious; I was
never
that transparent with my feelings. More than Spyder's guitar playing had hit me in the gut. Spyder later told me that he too felt an instant attraction, but they had told him I was married and he was in a relationship himself, so he put those initial feelings aside (of course, he could just be saying that so I don't look like a lovesick dog). Regardless of the attraction, he'd felt a good vibe between us, good enough to know we could work together on a record. That was how I saw it, too. But my head was simultaneously in the clouds.

My relationship with Dennis was disintegrating, and I knew that this meeting was the motivation I needed to get serious about my divorce. I went straight back to my apartment and called my best friend, Cynthia Zimmer.

“I met the father of my children today,” I announced.

She exploded. “Jesus Christ! Are you crazy? You're just now trying to get a divorce! Give me a break. Live alone for a little while! Don't be a dumbass!”