Cyndi Lauper needed only two things to make her performance of She’s So Unusual into a masterpiece.
1. When Van Morrison performed Astral Weeks in 2009, he changed the running order of the album on stage. Contrarian perhaps but it was a smart move, it forced us to hear the songs freshly. Cyndi Lauper should have changed She’s So Unusual’s song order. It is too top heavy. Back when albums had two sides, side one was a masterpiece, the first three songs on side one are the signature achievement of her entire career and the following two songs are no slouches either. Side Two is an alright, but nothing much five tracks. Well in keeping with the rest of her frankly disappointing career (or at least until her foray into musical comedy). The net result, you can guess.
2.Cyndi had to stop talking. I had a balcony seat and while she spent half an hour at the tip of the stage jabbering, I felt as though I was watching the radio. There was nothing to see from where I was and while she was certainly a funny and sweet storyteller, she went on and on and on. It disrupted the sets flow (what there was of it), it dragged the concert to two hours, and it got painful. Cyndi is like somebody you meet at work, who is really nice and friendly and funny and fun and you think “wow, she’s cool, I bet she’d be great to hang with”. And within a week you cringe every time she comes around because you know it is gonna take 15 minutes and some very direct rudeness to get rid of em so you can work.
Between the two, Lauper’s performance fell apart on Wednesday evening. But it began very, very well. Four songs, “Money Changes Everything”, “Girls Just Want To Have Fun”, “When You Were Mine” and “Time After Time”, one after another, each one performed so sparklingly and freshly it is like they were brand new. Better than when I saw her perform them back in 1984. The Brains classic “Money” simply couldn’t have been better. At 60 years of age, Cyndi, incandescent and fabulous, ripped into it with gusto, a synth, a keyboards and 80s neon sounds were fitted to a hard rock modern sensibility and a keyboard behind her throwing in tinted pop hues made it a rock out of spectacular power and smarts. She dropped, she bopped, in leather pants and her dyed red hair glistening in the lights, she used the entire stage in a state of exacting power movements. During the bridge Cyndi let it go and the high pitched falsetto smashed the roof of the theater. The show was just starting and she had stopped it dead in its tracks.
The next song, the following track, is a feminest anthem that cut right across all sections of the female population when first released, and today, well, today it isn’t as important but then it was because in its simply declaration of hedonism, it put the boot to any concept of parental or male at all supremacy. That was Paula Iwamoto-Schaap’s point in her review here last week. Studying at college, she embraced Cyndi as a cry of freedom from the strictures of encroaching adulthood. “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” is song, mantra, nostalgia and party rolled into one and Cyndi knows it and on Wednesday she made sure we knew it too.
Cyndi began the song as standard fare though with more muscle than the recorded version. But the deeper in she went, the more intense the performance became: The song is pop froth, Cyndi would claim that she was trying to include every sound she likes on the album, but it was a pop froth too big for its boots it’ a Slade like stomper on sexual intimidation. Lauper may have scared you but she wasn’t out to scare, the operative line was “Oh daddy dear, you know you’re still number one”: the rebelliousness was in the pureness of its spirits and included everyone, it wasn’t for female supremacists or separatists, but for mothers, daughters, lovers: an entire sex set to celebrate. And on Wednesday night, Cyndi honored it and then she did more, she honored us with it. First, she stopped dead in her tracks, that includes you Mr. Drummer, and then she pulled a face and scolded us until we joined in on the chorus at the top of our lungs. On the second song of the evening.
The third song, Prince’s sexy but also heartbroken “When You Were Mine” was yet another song. Built for Prince’s falsetto, but still, Cyndi already knew how to sing. And after the high leg kick and jump of the first two songs, she leaned on her mic stand and belted it from the gut. This could have been the single best time I’ve ever heard the song sung, including by Mr. Nelson himself: she just stood there, a timeless figure, 60 years old, 30 years old, it didn’t matter, and gave the superb r&b number everything it could take. R&B singers, guys like Joe and Maxwell, they can’t do this: they can’t write crossover that actually crosses over: this is Motown timeless with a Dirty Mind thrown in. And, along with “She Bop” enough to give Daddy dear a heart attack. Cyndi didn’t need any more than these three songs, and she loses it after that. “Time After Time” is as lovely as ever, but it isn’t a major game changer the way the first three songs are.
Cyndi sings “Time After Time” and sings the full on break up ballad very well though it isn’t a favorite of mine. And if you just take those four songs one after another, they were such firebreathing, take no prisoners power pop they singlehandedly gave Cyndi a career and that career with just a handful of additional songs has sustained through last year, where her music to Harvey Feinstein’s book of “Kinky Boots” rejuvenated her, it has been all she needed.
Really, even for its 30th Anniversary, Cyndi was worried about a nostalgia trip and didn’t want to play the album. “I did it for you guys” she claimed and I absolutely buy it. But she needn’t have worried –these were not easy, nostalgia versions: her voice was powerful and the band were first rate. It included her guitarist and coproducer of She’s So Unusual and the “Kinky Boots” soundtrack William Wittman and was as superb a piece of music as I’ve heard all year.
And then it stopped.
Cyndi decided it would be fun to tell us about the recording behind the recording of the album and it is funny for maybe ten minutes. Cyndi is a story teller and all of it is interesting and some of it is fun. The story behind “She Bop” isn’t all that, but the explanation as to where she got the “Lying in bed, I hear the clock tick” is very funny and it is just fun hearing about her old apartment. I visited Cyndi there once just after the album was released and it was fun to see how my memory of the place fit in with the reality of the situation. David Wolfe was her boyfriend at the time and he broke her clock and took his Mommy’s clock as a replacement. It was very loud…
By the time she reached the end e of the story, 20 minutes or so later, I was ready for her to have reached the end of the story and then some, and by the time she started into a pretty good version of “She Bop” the magic had gone. Cyndi can really tell a story, she is a born raconteur, but it gets really tiring. And that was just the first story. For the entire last hour she spoke more than she sang and it was annoying.
So the talking and, and this was a problem on the album as well, a really iffy flip side. The following five songs were not as good as the first five and never ever have been. Which is why she should have switched the songs for the live performance. The albums first half was so strong nothing else much mattered. Nobody listens to “Witness”, or “Yeah yeah”, “He’s So Unusual” is fun but Betty Boop did it better and “All Through The Night” isn’t as good as “Time After Time”. None of it is bad as such, but it isn’t why you come to the album. She should have played it in reverse.
And I’d forgive her and be a good sport but she spoke more about “He’s so Unusual” than she sang it. Much more. She’s a Maiden Aunt, worse, a self-congratulating Maiden Aunt, who won’t stop showing you how wonderful she is . I settled into the encore willing to give her more time she had accrued so much good will at the beginning of the evening but after reprising “She Bop” with the opening act she told a story, sung a song and told another story and long ones as well and anyway, that did it for me.
Grade: B