The Beat of My Own Drum (27 page)

23
. Hi-Hat

A pair of foot-operated cymbals

Just realize it’s an image before it goes too far

“SEX CYMBAL”

SHEILA E

I
f someone had told me back in the seventies when I’d gingerly sneaked my foot across the boundary of a curtained stage that I would end up playing for a billion people worldwide, I’d have laughed in their face. And yet that’s exactly what happened.

Working day and night, including weekends, holidays, and birthdays, had allowed me to follow my dream.

Wow. Was it real?

I’d gone from wearing tennis shoes and shorts to romantic and beautiful seventeenth-century-themed swashbuckling costumes. I was writing songs, making movies, performing at sellout shows, and breaking fashion boundaries. It was crazy, but crazy good.

And then there were all the amazing people I met along the way. It was at the American Music Awards that I first met Whitney Houston, whose star was on the rise. I loved her voice—angelic
and powerful, soulful and sweet. Connie and I had been working on a few songs with my sax player Eddie M, and we had an idea. At the after-party I told Whitney about the song.

“We wrote a song for you,” I told her, smiling. “It’s called ‘Touch Me/Hold Me.’ It would be an honor to have you sing it on your next record. Can I send it to you?”

“Sure, honey,” she said, a sweet grin on her face.

She never did pick up on our song, which was a shame, but I heard from her hairstylist later that Whitney had misunderstood my pitch.

“Sheila E tried to hit on me!” she claimed. “She told me she’d written a song called ‘Touch Me’ or something—but I knew what she meant!”

Fortunately, we met on many occasions in the following years and always laughed about it. She even came to see Prince and me play only a few months before she passed. I’ll always remember her standing there in the wings, telling me she wanted to get up onstage and hit some drums with me. I’ll never forget her vibrant smile, her warmth, and the purity of her relationship with music. It was something we shared—our true love of music. I threw her some sticks that night and she caught them before blowing me kisses. She beamed up at me, head nodding to the beat, tapping out a rhythm on the floor.

The pace never slackened as I began 1986 by filming a concert at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco for my
Live Romance 1600
video, as well as working at Sunset Sound Studios on my third album,
Sheila E
(due to be released in February 1987).

Choosing our outfits for the tour was a high point. We had the finest designers, stylists, and pattern makers create clothes for everyone in my band. They decided to dress me in matching (or at least color-coordinated) fabrics to complement the six-inch heels I wore. I’d usually step onto the stage in a coat that lit up, but after
that I chose to wear all kinds of different outfits—usually something new, tailor-made, tight, and sexy.

Inspired by the 1984 movie
Amadeus
and its bejeweled eighteenth-century costumes, I had a lot of fun coming up with all sorts of crazy variations on the
Amadeus
theme. The famous Patti LaBelle, a friend from my teen years, was the one who suggested a stand-up collar for me, which was a look I wore for years.

The designers played with ideas and tried out different concepts. I’d see things I liked in all the hippest fashion magazines and tear out the pages to show them. “I like the look of that one in
Vogue
,” I might say, “Can you copy the neckline on this?” or “This would look great in blue silk.”

There were no rules, and if there were, we broke them.

My main concern was that whatever I was wearing be easy to get on or off because I had to do so many quick costume changes. Everything had to have Velcro or snaps—there could be no buttons or zippers in case they got stuck. Between us we figured out what made sense. Some of my outfits were very risqué and had little more than doilies over the spots that needed to be covered. I took it to the extreme.

There were times when even Prince looked at me as if to say, “Are you sure you want to wear that?”

The media was picking up on my over-the-top-sexy outfits, too, and the critiques confused me. I was either being called a role model for being a woman who could play a typically “male instrument” or being judged for dressing too sexy. At the time, I viewed both playing drums and wearing revealing outfits as ways of celebrating my womanhood. Even though I was very much a tomboy, I still loved being a woman.

During the song “Next Time Wipe the Lipstick Off Your Collar,” I started to lure men from the audience up onto the stage and
sing to them as a security guard tied them to a chair. They were not allowed to touch me at all, but I got to tear their shirts open, buttons flying, then sit on their laps, straddle them, grope their crotches, and rip their belts off. This was long before Janet Jackson or Madonna started acting out bondage scenes onstage, and it was all my own idea.

I guess the act was all about being in control of a man—something I had never once been as a little girl—and I loved the power and the freedom of it. I went through that routine in almost every show, so at least ninety-eight men must have been publicly humiliated (and/or enticed/aroused) by me. But at some point it started to feel wrong to me. I felt empty and dirty.

Word got out about the kind of thing I was doing, and people soon started coming to see me in my own right and not just as an opening act. The downside was they also started to comment about how I looked. I read what they wrote, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it at first. I wasn’t even sure who I was anymore. The Sheila E I’d created was up-front, provocatively dressed, and playing with men like toys. I wasn’t even playing the drums so much anymore. I was getting further and further away from my craft.

More and more, people began writing not about my musical abilities but about my outfits. The tone was, “I wonder what she’s going to wear or
not
going to wear tonight?” I started to feel naked in the wrong way. That really bothered me and made me begin to reevaluate the image I wanted to project.

One night in a city somewhere in the middle of the tour, I looked into the audience and spotted dozens of young girls dressed like me, which really alarmed me. I was half-naked a lot of the time, and I didn’t want teenagers who weren’t yet aware what men were capable of to have anything happen to them because they were trying to emulate me.

It was time to reconcile my public and private selves. From then on, I started to wear more and more clothes in public.

Prince was intrigued by me both as a musician and as a sexual being. He made me feel empowered and sexy, and part of that process had made me dress the way I did. I think it worked both ways too. I doubt he’d ever met anyone, especially not a woman, who could stand up against him the way I liked to. That was part of my attraction. I was always so competitive, and we were testing each other to see who could stay up the longest, work the hardest in the studio, or win at basketball, pool, or Ping-Pong. He was up against the wrong person. I was a part-time boy and competitive as hell thanks to my mother.

Prince wasn’t great at relaxation, either—he always had so much stuff on his mind that even eating a meal seemed a waste of time. As he said in one interview: “Sometimes I can’t shut off my brain, and it hurts. . . . Do I have to eat? I wish I didn’t have to eat!”

It didn’t help that people went so crazy for Prince and me that we couldn’t go anywhere; we couldn’t even walk the streets or do something as mundane as go for a coffee or to the mall. Fans would tear at our clothes the minute we stepped out in public. It was like being back in Colombia—only all the time. I hadn’t been prepared for that. We were constantly surrounded by bodyguards, many of them hulking professional wrestlers.

One way I could get him to relax, though, was to watch a movie, either in our hotel room or—if we could manage it—by sneaking out to a theater very late at night so that no one would spot us. Occasionally we’d hire the whole movie theater so we could watch a show undisturbed. His normal wasn’t my normal, because he couldn’t even go out in daylight anymore.

I was dating a vampire.

After a while I found I couldn’t keep up with the relentless nature of my new life, especially as I’d just come off a couple of
big back-to-back tours with Marvin and Lionel. I was massively grateful and happy for everything Prince was doing for me, but adjusting to the way he pushed himself and everyone around him was a tough transition.

When I was a kid I’d wanted to run in the Olympics and win gold for the United States. Those first couple of years with Prince felt to me like the kind of physical and mental training that an Olympic athlete must have to put herself through. And like any athlete, I knew in my heart that there had to come a time when I would crash and burn. My moment in the spotlight would inevitably come to an end. Pushing that thought as far from my mind as I could, I somehow found the reserves of energy to carry on.

Even when I wasn’t with him, the partying never stopped. I guess it wasn’t that easy to kick the habit. Some of the craziest things we did were when we were on days off between gigs. Just like Moms, I was always looking for fun—especially as an antidote to the stress. I’d be in a speedboat with the band in Miami with me screaming, “Go faster!” or we’d go Jet Skiing in the middle of the ocean.

We might be somewhere in Europe with a bunch of friends and I’d say, “Let’s get on a plane and have lunch at the Eiffel Tower!” I’d ask my secretary to find me somewhere hot to take a break if we had a few days off. She’d suggest somewhere, and I’d check the weather reports
USA Today
for the hottest place of all—Hawaii or Florida—and then I’d change my mind and fly there instead.

While touring in Chile, someone offered us a helicopter ride. “Hell, yes!” was my response. “Fly over the beach!” But the chopper went into free fall, and my stomach ended up in my throat. The band was all screaming and yelling. We flew over the venue at the Vinca del Mar Festival we were playing in, but then we got lost as the fog rolled in. The pilot had instruments, but he didn’t
speak English very well, and we were terrified as we watched him guessing in broken English where to land. Another time we visited the Olympic equestrian team and went horseback riding, and I just took off. Everyone panicked because they thought my horse was out of control, but it wasn’t—I was.

Someone else took us parasailing, and I told them to let me out as far as they could. I went up so high I couldn’t even discern the motor of the boat anymore—all I could hear was silence and my own heartbeat. That completely freaked me out, and I waved at them to get me down.

All my life I’d never heard silence like that—there was always a tone of the world, always something—and it didn’t sit well with me. That surprised and scared me a little, because I’d thought I wanted silence. I was beginning to find the constant throng of people and demands way too noisy. There was no time to be on my own, and there was never any peace. We didn’t stop, and the madness of the life we were leading almost began to feel normal.

The loneliness of never being alone started to get to me.

I could never seem to find a quiet place for myself. I’d grown up in a house full of noise and should have been used to it, but my life was different then.

Even more confusing was the growing feeling that I could have anything I wanted, whenever I wanted it. People were buying my music in droves, and my fans really did love me and my work. They were singing along to songs I’d written, and that seemed crazy to me. Sleep deprivation didn’t help. Nor did the intensity of being in a full-on relationship with someone I was not only working with every day but who was constantly surrounded by people, especially other women.

After a while, I started to become paranoid that I could no longer do things by myself. Fearing that I was close to losing my mind, I asked Connie and Karen to join me and found them jobs as
assistant tour managers. It felt so good to have my friends around me, and they helped me enormously. They were surprised by how quickly I’d gone from being the tough Sheila they’d always known to being a semi-helpless celebrity.

We were in New York doing a movie shoot one day when I admitted to them that I didn’t feel I could even walk down the street on my own anymore.

“That’s crazy!” said Connie. “Right now, Sheila, you are going to walk to the corner of the block by yourself, go into that deli over there, sit down, and eat a meal by yourself.”

I swallowed my shock and shook my head vehemently. “No way!” I said. Then, in a tiny whisper, “I can’t.”

Karen took my hand. “You can. You have to learn to be by yourself again, okay?”

I felt naked and vulnerable without security and was afraid everyone was looking at me. I couldn’t believe how scared I was to do the most normal thing in the world. But I was grateful to have my good friends support me and give me some tough love.

Connie and Karen remained several paces behind me as I put one foot in front of the other and headed toward the deli.

“Table for one, please,” I stammered. I was so embarrassed as I sat down. Did I look stupid in a restaurant all by myself? I was so out of touch with reality that I’d forgotten that eating alone was perfectly normal.

My girlfriends followed me in and sat at a table on the other side of the room. I kept looking over at them longingly, but they deliberately ignored me. It took all the strength I had to sit there and try to eat a little something. I don’t think anyone really recognized me, but I felt like everyone did. I thought they were all whispering about me behind my back. I couldn’t stop thinking about what people thought of me. It was insane.

The girls made me do that kind of simple task a few more times
until I began to feel more comfortable in my own skin. It was like exposure therapy. Their leveling presence also made me painfully aware that by being surrounded by people whose only job was to say yes to whatever I wanted, I was at risk of becoming an egotistical monster.