Producer: Joe Layton
Musical Director: Gary Scott
Cher’s Costumes: Bob Mackie
Wardrobe: Alan Trugman and Debbie Paull
Hair: Renata (formerly Renata Leuschner)
Band: Mark Richard (lead guitar) Warren Ham (also in Black Rose, saxophone, harmonica and flute), Gary Ferguson (also in Black Rose, drums), Ron “Rocket” Ritchotte (also in Black Rose, guitar), Ken (“Kenneth”) Rarick (keyboards), Bob Parr (bass) and Gary Scott (piano, conductor)
Backup singers: Michelle Aller (songwriter on Cher’s Take Me Home and songwriter and vocals on Cher’s Prisoner album), Warren Ham (also in Black Rose) and Petsye Powell
Dancers: Wayne Bascomb, Damita Jo Freeman (the choreographer of Cher….and Other Fantasies), Warren Lucas, Mykal Perea and Randy Wander
Impersonators: Kenny Sacha (Bette Midler), Russel Elliot (Cher) and J.C. Gaynor (Diana Ross)
Filmed at The Monte Carlo Sporting Club
Aired: HBO as part of their Standing Room Only series (8 February 1981)
The special has never been re-released.
Video
This special captured what was the Take Me Home tour, (comprised of 81 shows in North America, Europe, South Africa and Australia from June 1979 through December 1981) and is also based on Cher’s first Las Vegas residency from June 1979 through August 1982 at the Circus Maximus Showroom at Caesars Palace and the Stateline Showroom at Caesars Tahoe. The show can be seen as the “rough draft” for the concert that would be aired as A Celebration at Caesars Palace (Showtime, 1983) which was
Some interesting transitional details: as the tour moved into 1980, it ran parallel to Cher’s promotion of her new rock band Black Rose touring in the summer of 1980. This show was also her first crack at creating a show by herself and she was very nervous about this. She would immediately introduce male impersonators to her show (very controversial at the time and probably would be now again) and this would be a feature of Cher’s live shows well into 1990s.
This show, with its next incarnation Celebration at Caesars, marks a huge turning point in Cher’s image, just as much as the transition from the late 1960s to the early 1970s where Cher went from grungy/hippie to glamourous. Here Cher goes through glamourous into tough. She just goes bigger.
The opening shots of Monte Carlo look dull and grimy, played over a Monte-Carlo-esque rendering of “The Way of Love.”
Cher’s mother Georgia Holt does a voiceover against joyous, slow-action shots of Cher singing in her tinsel-fit: “Ladies and gentleman, the Monte Carlo Sporting Club Proudly Presents…my daughter, Cher.”
(You can totally see Georgia Holt in Monte Carlo at the casinos looking glamourous and enjoying her role as The Mother Of.)
Open
A male impersonator dressed as Cher in the outfit from the Take Me Home album cover dances upstage and lip syncs to “Take Me Home.” The band sits above the stage around two white staircases, a modest set that will get bigger and better in the next iteration of the show. There is a clutter of dancers with square silver panels and Cher in her Laverne character (in a poofy-fringes sweater and a redder wig) interrupts the opening with a bit of comedy. The dancers and band try to shoo her off stage.
“It’s a lucky thing I happened to be cruising the casino,” Laverne insists. She sends the Cher impersonator packing saying, “they’re just not making women the way they used to.” (The audience doesn’t know yet that the impersonators are men.)
Laverne kids Cher (who she says she is backstage in the dressing trying to fit into a Reynolds Wrap outfit. There’s a clap joke (“Don’t give me four lousy claps,” she tells the audience, “that are too hard to get rid of!”) Laverne claims Cher is so nervous about the show, she’s “tossed her cookies into the Monte Carlo sewage system.” “I’ll get ’em hot for you,” Laverne promises Cher. Laverne calls Cher “a nice girl…a quart low but a nice girl.” She advises Cher to do a couple of costume changes and the “show them your belly button.” Laverne calls the dancers penguins.
This is a similar meta separation of Cher and Laverne that happens in 1978’s Cher…Special where Cher and Laverne converse through a mirror. Like all of us, Laverne knows who Cher is and has opinions.
I just want to stop and take a moment to talk about this impulse to not come out big, like Cher will do in later shows (down a bigger staircase, descending from a chandelier, etc.). There’s some hesitancy here and Cher is providing us with a transitional character (Laverne from her past variety shows) to introduce us to a very new Cher, the Cher who struts and swaggers, less of a glamour goddess than a practicing disco queen/rock chick. This is definitely a more adult Cher (risqué nightclub jokes and gender bending illustrating).
Ain’t Nobody’s Business (Anna Meyers, 1920)
There’s a cacophony of movement on the stage and Laverne asks the band to give her a big intro. Laverne quips, “I love a man with a big intro.” She launches into the first song, one used in openings for episodes #3 and #23 of the Cher show and the big historical opening for her just previous special, 1979’s Cher…and Other Fantasies. This is the last time the song will be part of her act.
As Laverne sings the song badly, the dancers are laughing. Laverne calls them “jealous bitches.” She does some inappropriate touching of a male dancers and in the middle of “I just don’t care what people say” she inserts, “you’re looking at a woman who just does not give a shit.”
It looks like Cher-as Laverne runs off stage and an impersonator-as-Laverne returns, faces the audience, gives them a fuck-you gesture and then confuses herself into a bunch of dancing and prop business around the big silver square stage cards, where we see Cher and non-Cher Lavernes come and go. You can tell them apart, if you’re a Cher-aficionado, by their body movements.
This all gives Cher a chance to do a costume change into CHER. They make a big show of dancing legs behind the silver cards which you are pretty sure are not Cher’s but a slight-of-leg distraction.
Cher comes out from behind the cards in a glamourous Bob Mackie one-shouldered gold dress with a white fur-trimmed cape and a curly wig. She shows us the front and the back of the dress. The look she gives us at the end of the song is new Cher.
Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours (Stevie Wonder, 1970)
Cher makes a sarcastic comment about her tasteful dress and her belly button. The dancers keep moving Cher around and she quips, “they think if they keep me moving I won’t be nervous” and she admits it works. They take her white fur piece and attach purple feather pieces to her dress. Cher says when she first considered doing “an act by myself” she wanted to pass out. But she says she worked out the show and rehearsed it and, about her first audiences, “everyone was really terrific to me, so…”
Before launching into the next song she says, “this is the official beginning of the show right now.”
These pseudo beginnings go all the way back to Cher…Special but these declarations about a delayed beginning in her live shows start here and continue to this day. But we’re three bits in by now. What was all the prior riffraff if not a true beginning? Are these to be considered prologues? It’s never been clear what this line in the sand should mean. “Now we’re getting serious.”
I really love Cher doing this song and here is our first glimpse of The Cher Strut. It’s like a dance-walk and it really works with this particular song and the outfit of flying feathers which are pulled hither and yon by her sharp movements. Cher is coming into a kind of great and powerful-seeming Oz, her later-day self with the knee bends and pop-ups, the shoulder rolls, just her new body confidence. It has something to do with how she moves her hips, her shoulders and the new aggressive Cher stare. The camera operators don’t fully know how to capture it yet.
One thing is strange about this show (considering shows to come), the set is very uninteresting. The stage seems very small and almost cramped. Similar to the next special, Celebration at Caesars, you can see the dinner tables and the jet-set audience, a far cry from who she is trying to target with her Black Rose band at the same time.
Unlike the slickness of Celebration at Caesars, this show seems tougher but maybe sexier in a gritty way. This song will also carry into the next iteration of this show.
She does her breathy “thank you” in between numbers.
Fire (Bruce Springsteen, 1977, The Pointer Sisters, 1978)
This is a very sultry version of a song The Pointer Sisters already fired up a few years prior. Cher will use another Pointer Sisters song to open up the Caesars show, “Could I Be Dreaming.”
Those feathers are so suggestive and it’s like they know tempo! Cher is still hanging her hand but she adds a slight shoulder roll to it. This is hanging hand with attitude. There are still some lip licks and there’s even a one hair toss in the show. Cher does some new finger pointing.
I really love her version of this song and the way it goes bouncy casually in the middle and at the bridge.
There are some low shots that seemed popular at the time. Cher does some hip dancing with the female backup singers. She rubs up against Warren Ham, the harmonical player. They use an echo effect at the end of the song.
Easy To Be Hard (Hair, 1968)
I love this Hair song from the movie. It’s lovely that Cher does it. The song was also included as part of the 2001 retro-release of Cher’s 1969 album 3614 Jackson Highway as part of an album Cher did in the late 1960s that never got released. It’s such an amazing song (especially for these times).
The Video Reel
Three male dancers do a little interlude. Cher comes back while a big screen shows home movies and photographs. Cher’s mother Georgia holding her as a baby, childhood pictures. Cher talks about “the wicked nose fairy” that visited her between the age of 9 and 11. Then she met Sonny, she says, and he had an even bigger nose.
Georgia’s voice-over quips that Cher always did want to be naked (over naked baby pics). Cher claims she was a normal half Armenian, Cherokee, French child. Cher says that when her mother first saw Sonny she asked Cher, “what is that that in the living room?”
We see clips of Sonny & Cher in early television appearances, Cher’s adoring look at Sonny, Ed Sullivan mispronouncing her name, S&C with Tommy Smothers on The Smothers Brothers Show, with Carol Burnett, Merv Griffin, Andy Williams, clips from the The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour, the photos of Chastity being born at Cedars Sinai hospital in Los Angeles (we saw those on the Comedy Hour), a string of very moving mashups of the end of their show, singing with Chastity.
Cher will continue to use video montages in later shows. The reels will include fewer personal clips in the future and more professional moments like movie and TV clips. This is one of those things Cher was accused of being self-indulgent about and she kept doing it and now everyone is doing it. (I even saw Sammy Haggar do a retrospective video in his show a few years ago.)
So I think’s it’s also important to mention that here we are at Cher’s first live concert special and she’s already including a tribute to her work with Sonny. So this mythology that Cher was walking away from “Sonny & Cher” to be a solo superstar was false all the way back to 1981. Sonny was always a part of the video tributes from this first live show.
You’d Better Sit Down Kids / The Way of Love (Cher, 1967, Kathy Kirby, 1965 as “J’ai le mal de toi,” Cher, 1971)
Cher wears a simple white dress with a fringe skirt, tall white boots and long, black hair to sing a partial clip of these songs. There are hand hangings.
By the way, Cher isn’t doing a hits show. We won’t hear her sing her big #1 1970s hits for two decades. She’s doing a covers-show like she will do for years until 1987’s Heart of Stone tour which will showcase only her most recent hits and then another bunch of covers. Not until the Believe tour will Cher do a show of her own hits, and then only back into the early 1970s. Not until the Dressed to Kill tour and the later-day Vegas shows will Cher climb back into the 1960s catalogue for live shows.
The Impersonators
Ain’t No Mountain High Enough (Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, 1966, performed by J.C. Gaynor and Cher)
Cher tells the audience they probably think they know everything about her life and everyone in it. But a voice over of Diana Ross (which really is Diana Ross) admonishes Cher for forgetting about her friends. “Diane,” Cher calls her and says if she’s coming out Cher wants to change her dress. “That’s why I’m here,” Diana Ross says.
Cher uses these segments for dress changes. She is gaining the reputation as a singer who makes multiple dress changes in a show (sometimes, good lord, over 10!) She was called a clothes horse for it but this is now de rigueur in diva shows.
Cher introduces the Diana Ross impersonator as “my best friend, Miss Diana Ross” and “Ross,” in a red gown, sings the beginning of the son. Cher then appears with long hair and a purple halter dress that reveals her belly button. The look is somehow off and its either the long wig which makes her face look big or the big ugly 1980s shoulder pads or maybe even the too-heavy eye makeup. Cher finishes the song with “Diana.”
Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy (1973 Bette Midler song performed by Kenny Sacha)
Cher introduces “Bette” as The Devine Miss Bette Midler who tells us what Cher taught her: “never work in the same dress for longer than eight minutes and always show a new and unexpected body part each time.”
“(You Got to Have) Friends” (Bette Midler, 1973, performed by Sacha, Gaynor, and Cher)
Cher has changed into an amazing sparkling gown. It’s hard to tell what color it is. Cher says she’s been friends with Bette for six years and they’ve “gotten into all kinds of trouble together.” Cher sings, “We have lived without money; we have lived without men; we have lived without limousines…” while Bette mimes disapproval in the background.
It should go without saying here that male impersonators (and Drag Queens) were definitely not mainstream at the time. For Cher to be the first mainstream artist, (albeit one who tested censorship and “family-friendliness” on television already), to bring impersonators into her live shows is significant and quite extraordinary looking back; and although she was probably a budding Gay Icon already at this time, (for all the young kids who grew up seeing her on 1960s and 70s television), this aspect of the show probably helped solidify a future status all the more.
It’s also worth noting that Bette Midler and Diana Ross were allegedly very unhappy about these male impersonators (even though they did pre-record the voice overs) and it sounds like it adversely affected all their relationships. Which is a shame because the whole segment passes the Bechdel Test (years before it was even invented) in a very lovely way, four songs that step back from the drama of men (something Cher’s life has never been short of) and demonstrating her love for her female friends (with the song “Friends” even). But both Ross and Midler saw the impersonations (as many artists did at the time before all the fun was seen in the plethora of Elvi and the proliferation of cover bands, as an intellectual property violation and possibly identity theft. It might have been divisive also for the fact that J.C. Gaynor’s Diana Ross was performed in modern-day blackface.
What is illuminating, however, is how the show conceptually removes Cher from the persona of CHER and how happily willing Cher was do do that in ways that Midler and Ross were not. Cher was fully ready to poke fun at her own image. She hired the impersonators herself, after all, embracing the pastiche and trying to gift that to her friends, which failed unfortunately but not surprisingly when considering her friends where showbiz friends with showbiz egos. It all serves to show how ahead of the curve Cher was in matters of showbiz identity claims.
This set of songs with the impersonators will also appear in Celebration at Caesars albeit in reverse order with “Bette” coming out first. In that later show, Cher does not sing along on “Aint No Mountain High Enough.”
The Rock and Roll Medley
The 1950s were nostalgically revisited in the 1970s (American Graffiti and Grease) and even The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour did a tribute to Check Berry, Jerry Lewis and other rock and roll pioneers (episode #46) in 1974. Sonny & Cher were more aligned with rock-and-roll than they were the harder rock of the 1960s and 70s (at least for Sonny, anyway) and I think this is why they were not trashed by rock critics like Lester Bangs (due to a perceived lack of pretention). But nonetheless, Cher will not dip back into the 1950s much again in her music career until the Christmas album of 2023 where she revisits not only Chuck Berry but Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound and Motown.
Jailhouse Rock (1957 Elvis Presley)
Dancers in colored shirts and black pants do an introduction/interlude before the rock and roll segment, an unexpectedly long tribute to the 1950s. Warren Ham (I think) starts it off by singing a snippet of Bob Seger: “Give me some of that rock and roll music….”
Cher comes down the stairs strutting, wearing the original hole-fit. This is ground-zero for the amazing hole-fit, which I first my laid eyes on when I was home sick with the stomach flu and my mother brought me the latest People Magazine from the newsstand. In the interview, Cher was swearing like a sailor and me at age nine was like “Fuck! This girl swears too goddamn much!”
Cher also sports a curly wig with the embedded sparkly headband at her forehead. Never again would the hole-fit looks so amazing. Later-day versions would all be pale imitations. Bob Mackie’s own nickname for the outfit is Swiss Cheese. This version even had a swinging panel at the crotch and Cher wore black sheer stockings held up with garters built into the dress. It was pretty awesome.
Cher would also do “Jailhouse Rock” on Divas Las Vegas (2002) in a seriously under-considered return-the-favor moment of Elvis drag. Would it be fair to argue that Cher is only second to Elvis is sheer amount of impersonators out there? For her then to create an impersonation of Elvis, one of her early idols! That went insanely unremarked upon in 2022. So much so that I made one of Cher’s Elvis impersonations (a “Walking in Memphis” video still) as the cover to my third Cher zine.
Dream Lover (Bobby Darin, 1959)
Great Balls Of Fire (Jerry Lee Lewis, 1957)
Cher does a lively version and a great kneel-down during “Great Balls of Fire.” Interestingly, these old numbers give Cher a chance to rock out in a very 1980s way.
Rockin’ Robin (Bobby Day, 1959, performed by Cher and Damita Jo Freeman)
Johnny B. Goode (Chuck Berry, 1958)
Cher shows how much she loves the guitarist here. After the song ends, everyone pauses for applause and you think the segment is over but it continues with…
Dedicated to the One I Love (The Shirelles, 1959)
Hand Jive (Musical Grease, 1971)
Cher’s delivery makes a case for the more colorful interpretation of the song.
Honky Tonk Women (The Rolling Stones, 1969)
The rainbow boa (from the People magazine cover) comes out and makes its way around the dancers. Cher makes a pick-up gesture and simulates sex with one of the dancers. Her rendition of “Honky Tonk Woman” is better here than in episode #48 of the Comedy Hour or episode #23 of the Cher show.
Old Time Rock and Roll (Bob Seger, 1978)
Cher continues her covers of Bob Seger here (remember “Feel Like a Number” from Cher…and Other Fantasies). By this time, Cher is clearly tired and sweating and getting a bit screechy. The audience looks absurdly frozen. This whole thing has been a tour-de-force tribute and very un-Cher like unless you’re looking backwards.
The dancers take over. The dancing is good in this show but the dances also feel a little manic.
Take It to the Limit (Eagles, 1975)
Cher is starting do do covers of another of her favorites, the Eagles. She’ll also do this song in her late-1980s Heart of Stone live special, Extravaganza: Live at the Mirage. Along with “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” and the songs with the impersonators, this is the only other song in the show to carry over to the next iteration, Celebration at Caesars. Cher wears a flattering light purple sparkly top and shiny purple pants with long hair.
It feels like we need a sense of quiet before this song which will get resolved in the next show where they will place “Out Here On My Own” (from Fame) ahead of it. Some might feel Cher really Chers it up here in her pronunciations but I think Cher really owns this song and always does it well. Just wait until she puts on big wigs and does the song at Caesars Palace and again in 1989!
This is the part of the show where Cher gets real. She will do this in all the subsequent live shows, the moment where she dresses down, sits on a stool and chats with us.
Band Intros
Cher is sweating and saying thank you. She says she is embarrassed by applause. (Odd career choice, then.) She tells us she won’t introduce the band. She says, “um….now I just forgot everything….Ok, I know where I am.” She says, “there are 28 of us and I always screw up the names” and, more importantly, there haven’t been enough costume changes.
Cher calls out to “Bette,” saying she’s melting out here and the impersonator comes back for a short comedy routine that begins with a joke about a bi-plane that “went both ways.” “Bette” says “Je suis ici because Cher wants to change her drag.” She then gives some kudos to Cher: “Miss Cher, doesn’t she work those buns off? She works those buns right off!”
So it is here that Kenny Sacha introduces the band, the singers, dancers and impersonators. He gets all the names right. He makes me snort when he introduces Russell Elliot and J.C. Gaynor and says, “Oh God, they’re boys? I didn’t know they were boys!”
He then introduces “J.P.C” or “Just Plain Cher.” This was Cher’s own nickname for herself at the turn of the decade. It signified two things: one that Cher had just legally dropped all her prior maiden and married names (Sarkisian, LaPierre, Bono and Allman). She said she did it for her kids. She was now legally known as Cher, “just plain Cher,” which brings us to two, the ironic idea of Cher’s plainness. Professionally she was anything but plain (who could describe Cher as plain?). But personally, she still felt…
Take Me Home (Cher, 1979)
Cher and the backup singers begin with the lovely slow version of the song from Cher…and Other Fantasies. Cher comes down the white stairs reminding us of the larger staircase in Celebration at Caesars. She is wearing the tinsel-fit with the tinsel-wig, an outfit that she will use thereafter for the song “Take Me Home.” In the Farewell and post-farewell tours, the tinsel will have red and blue variations.
Her legs look great in this dress, by the way. That dress really moves. She does some disco dancing as the songs breaks into full speed. Cher does some lap walking, moves that will get perfected by the next show. She’ll drop this song in the next show, along with any indication of her other hit singles.
She’s out of breath and introduces Kenny Sasha as the DQ (drag queen) of the Year.
Cher then announces she wants to bring out “two products that are my best work,” the 11-year old Chastity Bono (with long hair) and 4-year old Elijah Blue Allman (who sits on a lap looking unhappy and apparently there was a conversation about him not wanting to come up on stage). Cher quips about their blonde hair, “the milk man was blonde” (a by-now, time-honored joke regarding her fictional promiscuity). In 1980s interviews she disclose how un-promiscuous she really ever was.
Takin’ It to the Streets (The Doobie Brothers, 1976)
This is another favorite band of Cher’s. She did sings some of these songs (badly) in duets with Sonny (#37 and #44 and #52 of the Comedy Hour and in episode #3 and #4 of the Cher show and what is probably the worst Sonny & Cher record on their last duet album of 1973. This song will re-appear in her late-1980s Heart of Stone live special, Extravaganza: Live at the Mirage. There will be many famous looks and struts in that version, too.
Dancer Damita Jo Freeman does her moonwalk here, one she purportedly taught to Michael Jackson before he premiered it to hysterical fanfare on the Motown 25 special in May 1983. Remember this is 1981.
Cher takes the song to a sultry end. Cher states that by now she has given the audience “everything worth looking at. I’m gonna split now, now” she says. “I’ll catch you guys later. You’ve been wonderful. Good night. God bless you.”
The dancers dance her out and then freeze. Cher comes back out and does some more bows among the frozen dancers. Some god-awful side panels close and then open. They look like a rock-climbing walls in some disco romper room. Cher gets a standing ovation.
The Encore: Ain’t Got No Money (Bob Seger, 1978)
This song reminds me a lot of Cher’s Bob Seger cover in the Heart of Stone tour, “Fire Down Below.” She does her kneeling move a few more times and some strut singing. Thematically, the song also prefigures her dance hit “When the Money’s Gone” from her Living Proof album.
It’s here where Cher tries to bridge the gap between Las Vegas glitz and her harder-rocking aspirations for Black Rose.
This song also foreshadows the Heart of Stone tour and some of Cher’s rock moves there, pointing at herself, strutting, the come-hither gesture and that new high-chinned confidence.
Highlights: All we have are bootlegs and in even the best bootlegs, the lighting and video quality aren’t great. The show is long and a bit rambling, as well; but this is our first look at the less family-friendly Cher. This is the new cable-television Cher, the one step tougher and cooler Cher.
This show also has all sorts of little experiments on identity and star identity, switching Chers, gender swapping. The show is ambitious and Cher is trying to express her own musical preferences. It’s quite surprising that it would only take one more concert special to perfect her new moves. Only Cher fans and casino attendees are seeing it right now but by 1987 Cher will be doing many of the same moves in MTV videos.
When you consider the tone-change between this show and the Black Rose performances, you can see how the Cher brand was getting a bit confused at this time with Cher placing a few divergent bets.
But more than anything she did with Black Rose, this show is truly the remarkable beginning of a rock star Cher and it’s also the seed of a show Cher would continue to do in some shape or form for the next 25 years or more.
We’re still in a transitional period now however with remnants of the hand hanging, lip-licking era of the 1970s. Once those moves phase out, we will be completely into Cher’s formidable 1980s-era.
