This year has found me reading a lot of Cher scholarship from very young fans (by definition new fans) and journalists. When you grow up with something, it’s easier to remember the details of it. I notice this a lot at work. New people have a hard time understanding the complicities of the systems. But three of us have been there forever and saw the complexity added bit by bit and we can keep it all rolling around in our heads.
In Cher’s case it’s like which pictures go with which eras, details of chronology, trivia. Casual and new fans often miss this.
An example: the older fans, we see a lot of AI photos of Cher being posted now online, from photo sessions that never were. They’re weird and disturbing. Another fan I know recently used the word “discomfiting” which is a good word to describe a really well written and positive review that will get some major facts wrong, like Cher’s band’s name or the first of something that wasn’t the first of that thing or they hate whole categories of things because they’re not used to the sound of that time. There’s a dissonance there for older fans to grapple with.
But anthropologically speaking, listening to new fans is still very interesting. Because Cher’s old work is being remediated and meaning is being created by people in the context of another generation. Their point of view is invaluable. And their excitement is nice. We didn’t grow up with that either, us older fans, so many people writing about their love of Cher.
So after I read this article by college student James Fitzpatrick from a column called No Skips, it reminded me that this Greatest Hits LP was one of the first Cher albums I ever owned (of my own anyway, after wearing out my parents two Sonny & Cher LPs). I brought it home from the record stacks of the Styx Baer & Fuller department store in St. Louis at Chesterfield Mall (an at-the-time new shopping mall that is now demolished). I bought it with the other LPs Cherished and Stars, all discounted for a few dollars each, which was money I had to finagle out of my parents who had dragged me along on a shopping trip (fully not expecting to have to buy any Cher records). These were Cher’s latest releases and Take Me Home hadn’t come out, so this must have been 1978. I didn’t have, or even know about, the studio albums from which all these songs came, Cher (1971), Foxy Lady (1972), Half Breed (1973) and Dark Lady (1974). I was 8 years old and for me these songs belonged together on this Greatest Hits album.
The 1974 Cher’s Greatest Hits Fitzpatrick listened to was a bit different. On the streaming and CD versions “Dixie Girl” was added to the end and the songs were displayed in a different order on the album cover (on the CD/streaming album cover the songs are listed in the correct playing order; the LP doesn’t list them in the correct playing order).
Reading essays about fan behavior over the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about how music comes to you and how the track listing and the album covers are really formative extra features of music, maybe even more so in the old days before the distractions of smart phones. You’d sit and listen to an album while staring at the album cover in total immersion with the thing. And how the songs played alongside each other affected some deeply subconscious part of how you understood them.
These songs belong together in my head and heart because this is how I first heard them and its this gathering of tracks that has the most meaning for me when emotionally considering Cher’s early 1970s solo music. It deeply affected my views of these songs and of Cher herself.
On the NPR interview a month or so ago, I was telling Robrt Pela about how I came to be a Sonny & Cher fan because they were glamourous and charming and never boring and how Cher has carried on this tradition very well over the years. But also that I am now able to enjoy fandom on two levels, an academic level and still on a very nostalgic, childish level. I love this album quite sentimentally. It takes me back to my childhood self tout de suite, back to my living room in St. Louis singing along with the songs over and over again. The evening street lamp shining into the big front windows.
The format of these old MCA greatest hits was meaningful too, the big block lettering listed down two sides of an iconic photo. Think of Neil Diamond’s Greatest Hits. (We had that album in the house, too.) Sonny & Cher had their version of it too (seemingly naked!). Seeing the songs on the cover gave them some kind of extra weight. And songs became associated with the left side or the right side of the universe, as much as they fell to side A or side B of a physical disc of vinyl.
The picture itself was impactful, Cher with the deepest 1970s tan she would ever sport, the beautiful casually hanging hand, the bare foot and ankle bracelet (still trading on something indigenous). The gauzy flowing dress. Is that her nightgown, I wondered. She’s obviously not in a bedroom though, with that pink background.
Her look is both serious yet a smirk of friendliness. Not the Cher stare of other albums. Kid friendly. Very kid friendly. Even the pose, as if she were bending down just to see what we were doing. We were listening to her Greatest Hits album a gazillion times on repeat, that’s what we were doing.
A Side
Dark Lady: The album starts with this quietly exotic intro and I remember landing the needle on the vinyl every time. The song was completely without the context of the Richard Avedon cat photo for me, the song’s studio album cover. This was just one of the characters Cher played. The Cher I saw singing it was the Cher in the gauzy, white dress. Not quite so serious, in other words. Singing with the same smirk she gives us in the picture. (This is why album covers are important.)
Barbra Streisand often talks about ‘performing’ songs (sort of acting through them) in ways Cher never does, even for these narrative songs, as if they weren’t even worth the trouble to discuss how she sang them. To Cher they just seem uncool end stop. But I could still understand the narrative conventions. I didn’t fully understand the complicated drama of this song. I certainly didn’t know there was a MURDER! Or even register the danger of the gun.
Fitzpatrick talks about this being his favorite Cher song (“I’d argue it’s Cher’s best song”) due to the “theatrical performance [that] blows me away during every listen.” He even compares this to Liza Minnelli’s 1972 performance in Cabaret! Not a comparison a 70s kid would ever dare to make but an interesting one to think more about.
I would like to say one final thing about these story songs. No one else could have pulled off this material. No one. No one else would have been able to perform the song with the same cool commitment, let alone even lift the darn thing. The song would have fallen on its face in any other hands (or throat). The song would have died an unknown death.
The Way of Love: We get a breather now from the carnage. Time to catch our breath. A very quiet, pulsing beginning that evolves to pure, cry-to-the-sky bombast. The torch song to end all torch songs. I grew up on these studio drum fills, these horns that go marching off like horses running another race.
Fitzpatrick calls it “orchestral swell” and does not mention the accidental gender entanglement of the song (“then what will you do when he sets you free, just the way that you said goodbye to me”) but admits that even though “she’s had two divorces now, I’d take relationship advice from her any day of the week.”
“Keep your heart out of danger, dear.”
Don’t Hide Your Love: A break in the drama. Yes. But this was some musical toxic-positivity when I was a kid. A little too pert. A bit milquetoast. However, old age has beaten me down and I now find the song very relevant. Oy. “Come let’s be fair with one another.” There’s some solid relationship advice hiding a bit too playfully in this one.
Cher even does her own backups here. There are some interesting orchestral touches and moments where vocally the song falls endearingly out of Cher’s reach.
Fitzgerald calls the song one of the albums “weaker performances,” possibly indicating it contains everything but the kitchen sink.
Half Breed: Like “Dark Lady” and “Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves,” no one else could have pulled this off. This is a hill I’m willing to die on. Okay, the chuggy chanting does not age well. And okay, the “Indian drums” are not great. But my vinyl album was spent pretty quick and our phonograph wasn’t great so I barely even noticed these things. It felt very multicultural at the time.
When Cher sings “but I can’t run away from what I am.” That’s still a moment. (I just scrolled back on the streaming bar to relisten to it and guessed exactly where it was. High five.)
Fitzgerald mistakenly labels this song as “where Cher begins her various instances of singing as a character.” This was officially “Gypsys” two years earlier. But you could argue she was singing from characters going all the way back to the “fallen woman” songs of the 1960s. Fitzgerald does note that the song was “pushed…to the wayside” and was noticeably missing from her recent Forever compilation. I think the modern-day Cher Enterprises might be quietly trying to retire this one.
Train of Thought: And then the whistle blows and we’re off on the train of more drama! Like I said, I grew up on Jeff Porcaro’s drumming and it gets me every time, holding his own with these big, crazy productions. Cher sings with a very, very slight southern drawl that is put to use very fluidly through parts pop-screech and parts bluesy gospel. This is just a very exciting thing, start to end.
And silly too: “Wooh, wooh!”
In his review Fitzpatrick mentions the “deeper register” and the “tempo of a train chugging along” being “an immersive experience.”
B Side
Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves: What a way to start side two. The unforgettable staircase sound of a cimbalom.
This was a veritable “old song” for this compilation. Critics are now calling this song one of the best songs of the century. Annie Zeleski asked Cher about this viewpoint (as told in her new book) and Cher did not agree.
But just think of the speed at which she and Snuff Garrett recorded these songs. It’s pretty impressive. The song’s texture and the ingenuities of its production. It doesn’t sound dated at all. It still sounds quality.
Fitzgerald calls this song “a banger.” (Kids today.) “Her performance—namely on the bridge—is immaculate.” And it is.
He adds, “thankfully, this one wasn’t removed from Forever despite its similarities to “Half Breed.”
The problem of the Cancel, right there.
I Saw a Man and He Danced with His Wife: This has been one of my favorite songs since childhood. Surprising to me now considering how “adult” it seems. The tragic, slow torch open and how it widens into a big-band midtempo dance-hall song.
The sweeps and punctuations of Cher’s vocals on all of these songs were (and still are) so delightful to me. The syrupy parts. The gravely parts, too. The way she sings “saw me” showing how young she still was.
Fitzgerald says this one “comes painfully close to being a big band song,” but that Cher somehow saves it. He links the narrator to the one in the song “Gary Saw Linda Last Night” by Gary Wilson (“an artist you wouldn’t expect in a Cher review,” he says) so I had to follow that rabbit trail and he’s right; this is a category. “Is She Really Going Out With Him” by Joe Jackson and “Misunderstanding” by Genesis. But those songs don’t end well and this one does for Cher and her fella.
And every time I listen to it, it feels like a surprise.
Carousel Man: The sad love continues with this little whirlwind. I loved this dizzy song when I was a kid, its whole pop tragedy. Beware of the older man/carnival barker, kids! I took the song very literally, not as an extended metaphor. I now think the song is about showbiz girlfriends.
Fitzgerald calls this “the third head of the hydra” of best Cher songs. Another song about “traveling shows and carnivals” like “Gypsys,” a song that “hides innuendos,” that is explosive yet subdued in the right places.”
Living in House Divided: And then even more tragedy in the song about a domestic breakup. These songs have great opening parts. And this is a song like no other. What is this thing? A bombastic, deadpan melodrama is what it is. And yet it works. Cher belts it out and the schmaltz just forms into a good thing somehow.
Fitzgerald writes about the “brass fills and tambourine hits on the cinematic chorus” that “compliment the marvelous vocals…Cher sounds especially liberated here.”
See what a generational perspective will do? Younger fans can’t help but see the modern-day Cher now when they listen to her older songs. How could they? I don’t hear liberation here. I hear pure torch melancholy.
Melody: I would usually hop off at this point. I had no use for the meandering melody-lessness of this. I kept losing the thread each time. And who was Melody anyway? A kid? A doll? A dog? It was a doll, a ‘dolly’ to be precise. And Cher already had another dolly song I did not much care for as kid. (I’ve since come around to it, too). These are both definitely innocence-to-experience songs, very similar to “Bang Bang” in their use of childhood toys to express the hard facts of life. But what 8 year old had the information to perceive this?
This song has stray lines I find much more poignant these days: “Three days crying took its toll./This typing and crying’s getting old.” This is another ruined-woman song (a whole other blog post). But the music is still aimless and dull to me.
Fitzgerald called it a “tame cut…with no chorus.” (Hence my girlish problem.) He says “it could’ve functioned better as a palate cleanser a few songs ago.” But “not a skip,” he says. I disagree. It’s a whole song of an album fade-out. My 8 year old self would have been annoyed to have had to do the hard labor of skipping it.
Fitzgerald’s album version (the later-day CD or streaming version) also had “Dixie Girl” which he doesn’t elaborate on and neither will I. He says Cher still sounds excellent on her Christmas album and that “she and Elton John are built different” which explains their longevity.
When I made a mix of this album for myself on Tidal and it finished playing, the algorithm served up immediately next “Indian Reservation” by Paul Revere & the Raiders, which is not okay on so many levels. And no, Cher never ever covered that song. (Sigh.)
These Greatest Hits songs as they played for me in this order while I was staring at this particular album-cover photograph described a kind of Cher personality to me, one that I wouldn’t have formulated from listening to the studio albums first (which I found later, all in used record stores). I would recalibrate my idea of those songs in context of those other listening experiences.
And only today am I reminded of how I first encountered them and how lovely that was.
Being a Cher kid during this lush period of music was what I would call almost magical. (Do we all say that about the music of our youth?) It was not just glamourous, charming and interesting, it was sparkling, dramatic and fun.
