New Dolls

By the way, the new, blonde Cher FunkoPop is out. Sweet!

Christmas is Over

It seems the end of last year got pulled into the vortex of Cher’s Christmas album. And I must say, the convergence of Cher and Christmas was so thrilling to me that I ended up buying something like 31 copies of the album and not just because I was encouraged to buy multiple copies by that cynical practice of an artist releasing multiple covers on the same day, which is not a modern practice, my friend Christopher reminds me but one going back to rock albums of years past, including The Police (Synchronicity), Led Zeppelin (In Through The Out Door which apparently had 6 variants), Genesis (Abacab) and The Rolling Stones (Some Girls).  Hardly, crass pop-album ventures those.

But anyway, everyone at the chile-relleno-making party got a copy as did everyone at my family reunion as did all my family and friends who I exchange with.

But I have a pretty draconian rule that Christmas stops on New Years Day, not on Epiphany (6 January) like many people extend it. It starts on Thanksgiving weekend (this year was an exception) and ends on New Year’s Day. I was out of town this New Year’s Day. Otherwise the ornaments would have been re-boxed already. And we have a snow storm coming now so I probably won’t get everything down until January 6. D’oh!

Anyway, we do need to wrap up two Cher interviews from last year in major magazines, the UK’s You magazine and its U.S. cousin Parade. The covers are even similar.

In You, Joanne Hegarty does a great interview with Cher, remarking on her “vast entourage: PR teams, record-company executives, make-up artists [plural] — even assistants to put on her wigs [again plural].”

The attention to the ring Alexander Edwards purchased for Cher at Christmas in 2022 is getting so much attention, it reminds us of the sapphire ring Sonny gave Cher that she wore throughout the late 1960s.

 

 

 

 

 

Hegarty says at the beginning of her piece, “an unexpected exchange tells me straight aways that this will be no bland, cold Hollywood interview.” [They talk about pants.]

“The first thing to report is that, at 77, Cher doesn’t have a wrinkle on her face. She’s had that ‘good work’ done that very few, wealthy people manage to pull off.”

[This is a cryptic allusion to the plastic surgery but in truth it seems a lot of people who see Cher up close with makeup are fooled but how good the makeup is (compare these to paparazzi shots of Cher without makeup), which may explain the fleet of staff around to do makeup. Cher was honest about it years ago on The Today Show where she joked that at her age the makeup has to be “troweled on.”

Cher says a normal day sees her up at 6 or 7 am (which conflicts with our idea of her as a night-owl). She says she has coffee on the veranda with Alexander if he’s over. Then she works out and goes to see friends or invites them over. “Just regular stuff.”

She lists her friends as Laurie Lynn Stark (of Chrome Hearts), Loree Rodkin (the jewelry designer), her sister Georganne and their new Russian friend Masha Adonyeva, an art collector and philanthropist.

Cher says “I am a godmother–and a fairy godmother–to so many.” Truth.

The articles seems interested in her imbibing habits. She says her friends tease her for being a “stick-in-the-mud” for not drinking more than an occasional glass of champagne. “I smoked with I was young but gave it up after I got pregnant with my son [Elijah] and never picked it up again.”

She calls Edwards “intelligent, kind, funny and very talented.”

Her career highlights she lists as singing “I Got You Babe” every week on her variety show with Sonny, doing her solo variety show. Oddly this interview tends to conflate different time periods, or maybe Cher is doing this. The period of leaving Sonny in 1974 then skips to “Believe” as if nothing happens in between but a manager dropping her. Later it happens again, converging the yearlong slog up to the success of  “I Got You Babe” with the hotel-circuit days before the Sonny & Cher comeback of the early 1970s.

Cher says after leaving Sonny she wasn’t “looking forward to going on the road by myself because I had always been a duo. To be Cher without Sonny seemed impossible….When I was putting my own show and songs together, only then did I begin to feel myself.”

[We’re about to talk about just this time period in our next review of Cher’s shows in the late 1970s for the Take Me Home tour, the Monte Carlo TV special and Cher at Caesars special in the early 1980s,]

“People used to make fun of how extravagant my performances were, but now everyone is doing it.” Truth.

“I had so many people telling me every year that I was finished. You just have to keep going. I always think of myself as a bumper car. I’ll hit a wall, but then I’ll back up and go in a different direction. You always have to be prepared to step out of your comfort zone, always, always.”

Cher talks about making movies and her friendship with Meryl Streep from Silkwood, Nicolas Cage from Moonstruck and Jack Nicholson from Witches of Eastwick (“Jack’s wonderful–we’ve been friends for so long and he is always hilarious.”)

She tells a story about how men are much nicer to blondes than brunettes.

She talks about being married to Sonny and how it was “rough” because it was integrated with work. “I’d always do as I was told.” She talks about how Sonny discovered her singing while she was making their beds [before they were sleeping together and he was letting her live with him if she would clean his apartment] and he thought he was hearing the radio. Cher says, “My whole family used to sing songs when we got together. I thought it was what every family did.”

Cher has been saying since the 1970s and she says it again here, “If I hadn’t met Sonny there never would have been a Cher. I was just a young chick with all this insane energy that wasn’t channeled in any direction.”

Cher says she’s been an outsider before. She knows what that feels like. But as a famous person she doesn’t “want to go that many places now. I don’t go to Hollywood parties any more. I’m  not doing the red carpet. Now I just like hanging out with my friends.”

She talks about her mother’s tough upbringing without a mother and an alcoholic father who she lived with on Skid Row in Los Angeles. Cher says her mother told her she was special back when Cher felt like an ugly duckling. “You have to trust me on this,” Cher says Georgia would say. This quote made me a little verklempt.  A parent telling a child to “trust me” is so moving because it’s such a difficult situation full of tension (and disbelief) and one that Cher is going through right now with her own son.

She says Sonny was a great father to not only Chaz but Elijah. She said parenthood taught her that “I’m not the only person in the world. I was the center of my universe, but when Chaz was born in 1969, it was so exciting….I always wanted to be a mother, but nothing prepares you for it….you always try to be a mother to them, even if they want you to stay out of it. But sometimes you just can’t. They’re your kids.”

There’s a break-out discussion about Christmas where Cher admits she doesn’t cook. “The food is on an island in the kitchen…” She talks about how loud and rowdy the occasion is and how she loves to give presents.  She reminisces about family Christmases and how she was the tinsel putter-upper on their family tree (“my sister would just plonk it on.”)

The article also brings up the record of Sonny & Cher having five singles in the top 50 at the same time, “an achievement equaled only by Elvis Presley and the Beatles.” (Is this still true, post streaming and Taylor Swift?).

The article also states that The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour was watched by more than 30 million viewers across its three-year run” and that Cher was “the first female singer in the U.S. to have four number ones at the time of “Dark Lady” and that the song “Believe” went to number one in 23 countries.

I love that Hegarty takes a picture with Cher and the magazine publishes it. I wish more print interviews would do this. It’s nice.

Nicole Pajer interviews Cher for Parade. “There’s the music, the singing, the dancing, the acting–and then there’s the ice cream. Cher talks about Cherlato…with just as much enthusiasm as she does anything else…”

In fact, Cher has been talking about how at Christmas everyone loves her mother Georgia’s cheesecake recipe and even that flavor has made it into the Cherlato line of products with “renowned Gelato artisan Gianpaolo Grazioli….Cher is in the process of making it available for others to enjoy outside of SoCal.” [Good news, because my most recent LA-work-trip has been postponed. Boo.]

Again they talk about Cher’s Christmas traditions including getting out all the childhood ornaments, her collection of Christmas plates (that she jokes take up half her pantry), and the stockings for her kids she needlepointed during the making of Silkwood. She talks about the expensive dolls and cowboy jackets and boots she and her sister received even though her mother had no money. She also remembered a fuzzy kitten her mother found for her with her name on it. She also has memories of watching It’s a Wonderful Life with her mom.

She says along with the amazing diamond ring Edwards gave her last year, she also received some beautiful handmade books from him. She says she worked on her Christmas album night and day for months. She says her new album will have songs Edward’s has found for her, another P!nk track (there was on Closer to the Truth called “I Walk Alone“) and Cher is working again with Sarah Hudson.

She jokes she wants to do a compilation album of her “greatest bombs.”

Pajer says, “Love it or not, Cher has stayed authentic to herself, doing things unapologetically her own way.” Thank you.

When Cher says about her hair color that “sometimes, it’s just so boring,” Pajer quips “says the least boring person on earth.”

The article lists some music and movie stats as well, noting that Sonny & Cher were once nominated for a Best New Artist Grammy in 1966 but lost to Tom Jones. Seems fair.

And that Cher’s first acting appearance was probably her 1966 The Man from U.N.C.L.E. guest stint with Sonny.

The Believe 25th  Anniversary

Speaking of “Believe,” there have been articles and reminders in interviews about its 25th anniversary, including another boxed-set release on CD and vinyl.

NRP did a short piece. The article talks about auto-tunes influence with rappers and pop-singers like T-Pain and Jennifer Lopez.  NPR reminds us, via a quote from T-Pain, that auto-tune cannot turn a bad song into a good song, “No, you’ve still got to make good songs. You can’t throw on Michael Jordan’s shoes and think that you’re going to be the greatest basketball player of all time. It’s just not going to happen.” [And haven’t the slow renditions of “Believe” proven that, really.] NPR plays auto-tune songs by Bad Bunny, Drake, Lil Durk and Sza. NPR talks about how auto-tune was created in 1997 by Andy Hildebrand but that his original algorithm was developed for oil companies “to use seismic data to map subsurface strata to find oil.” He won a Grammy award in 2023 for his invention.

I did break down and purchase the LP boxed set (although the album was already previously released on vinyl). It’s another disappointing box-set “retrospective” without any actual retrospection happening in it. The box set for It’s a Man’s World last year at least had the distinction of never having been released before on vinyl.

But fun colored vinyl, corralled remixes and an additional “exclusive numbered lithograph” do not a retrospective make, especially something so career-defining and industry-changing as this album was, it deserved an essay and behind-the-scenes commentary, artifacts and photos. Huuuge missed opportunity.

I mean I do like the compilation box sets, as I’ve said. But the box sets need a big hefty think-tank of a booklet to go with it.  These feel half-assed and I felt guilty for buying it. Comparatively, I did not feel guilty buying 31 copies of Cher Christmas.

The reverberations of Believe, however, continue unabated and this remake by Alexa Wildish from The Voice last year reminds us that we have a good song in “Believe” without any of the technology (thanks to Cher scholar Michael for sending).