a division of the Chersonian Institute

Author: Cher Scholar (Page 5 of 5)

Cher History

One of the crazy things happening in Cher-scholarship right now is that as Cher is producing new material and engaging in new activities (charities, appearances, romances, etc.), previous works are still being experienced and re-evaluated. Cher stuff is rolling up and over itself.

Cher Films

From “Why Mask is a Much Better Movie Than You Remember” by Adam Lowes in The HotCorn

“The trend for applauding actors who ‘go ugly’ for a film is a rather reductive form of praise. It’s the true embodiment and total immersion of a character beyond their physical appearance which deserves the plaudits.” Lowes cites Charlize Theron’s characterization of Aileen Wuornos as an example.

He calls Mask a “poignant biopic…very low-key and dramatically unfussy…very much mirroring the no-bullshit approach and grounded attitude of Rocky’s protective mother, Rusty (played to utter perfection by Cher).” The article mostly focuses on Eric Stoltz’s performance as Rocky Dennis and “the character’s day-to-day struggle in being accepted. The masterstroke here, however, is introducing him as a slightly older and confident teenager, at home in his skin and popular at school” yet also a teenager where “all-too relatable moments of teen longing and vulnerability occasionally creep in….Stotlz’s Rocky really is an inspiration.” Lowes talks about the “heart-rending” ending, saying “Mask remains a superior Hollywood weepie….a film which refuses to dwell on suffering and sentiment, and instead embraces optimism and hop in the face of pretty insurmountable odds.”

from “Almost There: Cher in Mask” by Claudio Alves in The Film Experience 

“Over the years, [Cher] has amassed a small but impressive filmography.” Her “bullheaded no-nonsense attitude. …Cher embodies Rusty like a complicated hurricane of abrasive motherhood.”

“One of Mask’s greatest assets is its reluctance to paint the main characters with broad strokes…allowing the shadows of their imperfections to enter the picture….Cher extruding enough radiant movie star charisma to turn the night into day. With a cloud of curly hair that could be alternatively described as a lion’s mane or an oxidized halo, Cher’s Rusty dominates every moment she’s on-screen [that’s Cher pulling focus] while never breaking into the naturalistic spell of the proceedings. Her magnetism feels organic, so tightly woven into the character’s essence, that we can’t discern where movie magic ends and honest humanity begins.”

Alves describes Cher as “brassy and loud, but never strenuously so…Watching her maneuver through the comedic possibilities of the scenes with earthy dryness reminded me of Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich….Cher is careful with her maternal affections and affectations….Mask never indulges in simple one-dimensional emotional tones despite the schmaltzy possibilities inherent to this story of disability and young death. In reality, nobody’s entirely a hero or villain, so neither are Rusty or Rocky. She’s cool as hell and tough as nails. She’s also an addict, capable of neglect, cruelty too.” Alves talks about the mother-son relationship as a “…an undercurrent of perpetual irritation to bubble over.” He says Cher’s “sculptural features and big eyes make for a gorgeous movie mechanism, equally able to project compassion and steeliness, warmth and glacial coldness,” [occasional descriptions of Cher as well]. “Her fury has interesting dimensions as well.” Alves talks about her facial representations of regret, spite, aching vulnerability and adds that While she’s often thought of as a singer first and foremost, Cher’s astoundingly nimble when it comes to playing silent reaction shots. It’s difficult to forget the bittersweet awe” (of the funhouse scene).

“Because of Bagdanovich’s downplayed empathy…Mask rises above a tricky premise and delivers one hell of an emotional wallop…Cher’s asked to perform an overwhelming cocktail of despair and material perseverance…in one show-stopping sequence, Cher goes through the many stages of grief, allowing us to see how her character survives the loss of her son.”

In the comments below the piece, readers talk about the public feud between Cher and Bogdanovich, the March release date hurting the movie. On comment quotes a long Bagdonovich interview where he says Cher was the most difficult person he ever worked with because, her surmised, she doesn’t like men. He speculates this is why she dropped all her surnames. (Cher has always said this was for her kids). Bogdanovich said Cher couldn’t sustain a scene, (Suspect-era criticism as well), but was very good in close-ups. In fact, he shot closeups than in any other picture he made, he says, because “her eyes have the sadness of the world.” Bogdanovich admits he didn’t like her, “She was always looking like someone was cheating her.” After about seven weeks, he claims, they liked each other better. But then he got mad at her again when she sided with the studio over the scene cuts and the music replacements.

Another commenter then retorts that Bagdanovich’s comments say more about him than Cher. Another commentor says “Hmm. Bogdanovich says Cher can’t act? And he cast Cybill Shepherd repeatedly in everything? Methinks he means that Cher is strong minded and has her own opinions…”

Another comments says Bogdanovich “version of events are always interesting, but his blind spot where women are concerned is well documented.” Another comments say “that conversation captures the uphill climb for respect that Cher had to climb” and the person reminds us that “Robert Altman, Norman Jewison and Mike Nichols never had a problem with Cher or dissed her acting ability” Another comment astutely comments that Cher would not have won for Moonstruck without this Oscar snub for Mask. “It gave her momentum.” Another comment says of Witches of Eastwick that “her charisma is amazing—the camera just loves her. I just think actors who have that startling quality always make some people less able to acknowledge their talent.”

Interestingly, Mask was the only Cher-look I tried to emulate, down to creating shoelace necklaces.

Moonstruck: Cher’s 1987 classic is bizarre, hopelessly romantic and yet somehow entirely plausible” by Helen Sullivan in The Guardian.

Sullivan notes the “unsettlingly charismatic Nicolas Cage” and calls the movie a “glorious contribution to the romantic comedy canon.” She mentions a New-York-history podcast called The Bowery Boys who dedicated an episode to the movie. I’d love to hear this. Whenever anyone is looking for movies that feel like New York City, I always mention After Hours and Moonstruck for me. My neighbors and landlords in Yonkers all had apartments like the Castorninis with the plastic couch covers and the hallway runners. My employers and many of my co-workers at Yonkers Contracting were also all Italian and I used to be able to tell the borough accents apart.

“Like an opera, [the] characters each have specific themes they return to. For Loretta it’s luck—she believes her’s is bad. For Rose Castorini, it’s her believe that men chase women because they fear death.”

Sullivan says the movie contains many tropes of romantic comedies including the makeover scene. She concludes, “what makes it a truly wonderful film is that the lines are so incredibly surprising. Bizarre, deranged even, and yet somehow entirely plausible.” She says the movie is “human, true, funny—and hopelessly, gloriously romantic.”

Cher Music

I came across this I Paralyze review in Ultimate Classic Rock which starts out with the theory that “Cher is one celebrity who seems too big to fail. But in the late 70s and early 80s, she faced a string of musical flops.”

This is a good reminder that the niche-popular Cher of the early 1980s is not the solid worldwide iconic Cher of today. The article lists Cher’s previous 1970s record labels MCA, Warner Bros and Casablanca and says, “all of whom pushed her towards disco material.” This is inaccurate. Only Casablanca did this, as they was primarily a disco label. Interestingly, this article sketches out the pedigree of the musicians and producers:  Steve Lukather (Toto), Howie Epstein (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers), Desmond Child penning a song, producers David Wolfert and John Farrarr of Olivia Newton John’s then-massive(ly annoying) hit “Physical.” There’s a story about how much I could not stand that “Physical” song that runs straight through a series of random events involving my former sister-in-law Maureen to my eventually finding a Babys record in my brother’s stack of records. Which is ironic because there’s no mention of the covers on this album, one of which is a Babys song.

But anyway, the author Courtney E. Smith speculates the album flopped due to lack of support from Columbia Records, her label of one album (never really a good fit). Smith notes that there was no push to radio, no music video produced and because the album was never pressed to CD officially, the album has become a rarity. She mentions Cher’s lip-sync appearances on Solid Gold and American Bandstand.

She quotes producer Wolfert to say didn’t support “I Paralyze” (US single) or “Rudy” (UK single) as the singles and wanted “Walk with Me” instead. None of those three songs really captured the tone of the times, though. ‘Smith quotes Cher in a 1999 Rolling Stone interview saying her favorite singles of all time were “I Paralyze” and “Save Up All Your Tears” but Cher also said she “hatred the [I Paralyze] album because she “didn’t have anything to contribute, had no control, and hated the whole experience.”

This may also be the biggest reason why the album failed. Smith notes that as the album was released she was already filming the movie Silkwood and wholly focused on her acting projects.

I dug out of a stack of online articles I printed off but never read from about 20 years ago. Some fan compiled the Black Rose reviews (which are no longer online):

from Rock-A-Rama: “If the idea of Cher and Les Dukek making music together has you scratching your head in wonder, then the product of this seemingly unmeldable alliance’ll have you scratching your vinyl to bits as you race to get it off your turntable and out of the house. The first track is the only one that works at all…and Dudek can actually go through an entire song without having the great god of excess willing him into another boring solo.”

Stereo Review calls the album “Not Bad” and says “Cher is a show biz pro, and to stay in business she must adapt to the times.” Her foray into disco is mentioned. Her one album of New Wave Rock is also mentioned. “Black Rose is an attempt to emulate Blondie” [it is??]  and other outfits with feisty-mama lead singers. [wha??] Many of these groups are produced by Mike Chapman or his associates, and sure enough…”  “How long will the fad for foxy-chick neo-punk commercial groups last? Can Cher—our Lady of the Charts [she is??] find true happiness and an occasional Las Vegas booking on this route? No one can say, but—much to my surprise—I find myself rooting for her. I suffered through Cher’s monotone braying during the sixties, but during the seventies she got a little better and today she is no longer awful but quite capable.”

From Billboard: “Guess who’s gotten punked out now?…Cher’s vocals are emotional and full of life on the entire disk. Master guitarist Dudek contributes some sterling guitar playing.”

From People Magazine: “Cher’s quivering, over-mannered vocals…need all the help they can get and she gets more than she deserves. [The players] make this a musically fine album, their finesse however, unwittingly focuses attention on Cher’s shallow talents…Cher sings mostly on pitch and is likably raunchy when she growls. But she indulges—regardless of mood or tempo—the same tendency to pronounce simple words like some Elvis imitator in drag: heavy becomes “hay-vee”; parting becomes “pawting”; temperature is mumbled as “temp’chuhh.” In the word “split” Cher even discovers several entirely new vowels….This album could be vastly improved, rerecorded by the “Group with No Singer.”

(In case anyone has forgotten what mercilessly bad reviews Cher once received on her records.)

“Recording Cher’s “Believe” (1999) from Sound on Sound: This is an early 1999 article on the technical aspects of “Believe,” remarks on the “bizarre vocal processing.”

“For most of last year, it looked as though Celine Dion’s track ‘My Heart Will Go On’ was going to be the best-selling single of 1998 — but this accolade was snatched from the Canadian Queen of AOR at the 11th hour…” The [“Believe”] single spent “seven weeks at the top of the UK charts and…achieved sales of 1.5 million and rising.

The article marks the collaboration of two producers (from Metro Productions from Kingston, Surrey), six songwriters…and talks extensively through the song’s many rewrites, what the “brain crunch of a dance record” is, how producer Mark kept starting over. “This was tricky, because dance music is very specific. To get what I was after I had to think about each sound very carefully…it was really a question of finding, say, a kick drum that didn’t sound like a typical TR909 dance kick drum….wasn’t so cliched…compressed to give them a weird, pumping, smacking sound.”

The author says, “Mark believes one doesn’t need expensive technology in order to make a hit record” but then there’s three long paragraphs explaining in detail all the technology they used.

“Basically it was the destruction of her voice, so I was really nervous about playing it to her.” Although the vocoder effect wat Marks’ idea, the other obvious vocal effect…the ‘telephoney’ quality of Cher’s vocal…came from the lady herself—she’d identified something similar on a Roachford record and asked Mark if he could reproduce it.”

The whole thing took ten days. “Looking back, Mark says the most satisfying part of the project was getting to know Cher who spent six weeks in the studio working on the album…’I thought she might think our setup was a bit small, and that she would turn out to be a bit Hollywood. But she was really great and easy to get on with.” (but Peter Bogdanovich said…??”)

“Cher: Closer to the Truth” review by Kevin Catchpole from PopMatters:

“Cher has always been a polarizing force in terms of musical taste: those who love her often love her unconditionally, and those who hate her, hate her with a passion. She deserves credit for being able to laugh at herself…Not every pop titan who employs this trick has managed to stay savvy using this approach as the years have gone by (see also: Madonna’s trying-too-hard MDNA). And while the stomping, layered “Take It Like a Man” joins a first half of solid made-for-the-club cuts, here she uses, and perhaps abuses, the Antares vocal manipulation… it just feels over-done and it distracts from what are, at the core, still solid disco-ball-spinners done Cher style.”

“Some have called her vocal talents limited, this is only half-true. Having the ability to push your voice all over the scale and indulge in excessive flights of variety is not a talent all by itself (the real talent there is taking that range and using it to create a vocal performance that has depth and expression.) What this means for Cher is she knows what she is capable of, and she makes it into something beautiful. It is a little ragged around the edges at times, but this is the sound of careworn experience, not of a performer too long in the tooth who ought to hang up the microphone.”

“Cher Predicted Her Comeback with the Underrated It’s a Man’s World” from PopMatters:

“A cultural and musical shapeshifter…Cher’s vocals which often can sound like Presley (or at least an impression of Presley) [has made]…a collection of covers (originally recorded by male singers) as well as original pop tunes. …For a singer who thrived on camp bombast and kitsch bravado, the arrangements and vocal performances on the album were surprisingly restrained and subtle. Cher’s strange voice—that androgynous instrument with the stuttering vibrato—is often relaxed and sweet on the album’s wistful ballads…The relative neutrality of Cher’s voice, as well as her adaptability as an artist, means that if the material is solid, she’s a sure fit. It’s that adaptability that has lent Cher that legendary longevity (but it’s also kept Cher from establishing a genuine musical sound or persona – it feels as if Cher ‘sounds’ like whatever current iteration she’s inhabiting at the moment). That is why It’s a Man’s World is such an important entry in her discography because rarely has there been so much attention paid to songcraft on a Cher album.”

Cher At Large

Fashion

Cher attended Fashion Week in Paris again this year with Alexander Edwards and it looks like “things” are back on. The week produced some beautiful pictures and happy-looking pictures of Cher.

Life

Then there was the big scandal uncovered in the released divorce documents between Marieangela King and Cher’s son Elijah Allman. The news sources online went batsh*t that day. I’m always uncomfortable commenting on Cher-family news, those private details we only know because Cher is world-famous.

And yet it is those personal stories that are the most poignant of any memoir or life story, those human moments that go beyond the journal of work experiences. And actually, this was what made the stage show The Cher Show meaningful I felt, the key idea being that Cher is not fearless (as we everyone might believe). She is, rather, a person full of fear and the show explores how she navigates in that space of fear. It’s beyond any movie, song or personal appearance, and yet it’s also about all that, too.

On Stage

Speaking of which, the stage show has finally hit the road with a list of shows coming to a town near you (except not a town near me because apparently most touring companies, like most Americans, consider New Mexico to be a foreign country). I would love to go see the show again but I’m not sure I will be able to make a show trip happen any time soon.

Peruse the touring schedule and watch a video excerpt: https://thechershowtour.com/

Even though the pre-Covid touring show was planning to hit the University of New Mexico’s Popejoy Hall in Albuquerque, this new tour seems to be playing smaller venues with a new cast. Oddly, there’s no update or mention of this show from the main Broadway page, https://thechershowbroadway.com/, which still lists a 2021 tour coming soon.

Music

The new single was released for the Christmas album and there are some good reviews.

from Attitude:

“to be as daringly un-Christmassy as possible. Save for some subtle sleigh bells here and there, that is. And you know what? It’s refreshing.

This is a cut-glass powerhouse pop-dance banger that would work just as well in the height of summer at a beach party, or year-round at circuit parties. Fire will be blasting it through the speakers come Christmas Eve, that’s for sure, and maybe through to Boxing Day.

After so many desperate attempts by modern artists to tap into the commercial viability of Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ – when even Chris Brown is dropping cringe-inducing festive fare, you know all bets are off – Cher outshines them all with this cool, chill cut from upcoming album Christmas, which the icon promises is “not your mother’s Christmas album.” We don’t doubt it. Just call her Mother Christmas!”

The Rolling Stone review posted the track list: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/cher-holiday-album-single-dj-play-a-christmas-song-1234847962/

“DJ Play a Christmas Song” is the first record listed on the track list, which boasts guest appearances from Stevie Wonder, Darlene Love, Michael Bublé, Tyga, and Cyndi Lauper. The 13-track album features four original singles and new interpretations of “Santa Baby,” “Run Rudolph Run,” and “Please Come Home For Christmas.” Helmed by producer Mark Taylor, the album recreates Wonder’s “What Christmas Means to Me” and Bublé’s “Home. This meant she would entertain the thought of updating classics, but would also recruit Tyga to rap on “Drop Top Sleigh Ride” and drop it on the tracklist right next to the Bublé cut. Sarah Hudson — a pop songwriter with credits on records from Dua Lipa, Katy Perry, Justin Bieber, and more — helmed that unexpected collaboration, as well as “DJ Play a Christmas Song” and “Angels in the Snow.” 

Billboard also did an article about the album: https://www.billboard.com/music/pop/cher-talks-first-holiday-album-christmas-1235435413/

And the wikipedia page also lists the tracks and other basic info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_(Cher_album)

The Pink News https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/10/06/cher-releases-festive-single-dj-play-a-christmas-song-and-the-reviews-are-in-top-tier/

Initial fan Tweets: https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/10/06/cher-releases-festive-single-dj-play-a-christmas-song-and-the-reviews-are-in-top-tier/

Cher Universe is also tweeting about how the downloads and presales are faring around the world: https://twitter.com/TCherUniverse

The Cher-effect is definitely already present in song one, but interesting Cher’s voice gets clearer as the song progresses. Voice manipulation will continue to be controversial. And I continue to evaluate my own feelings around it. I’m never excited to hear it. All my favorite singers have voices I like for their organic qualities. Whatever values they have, those voices are solidly themselves. I do not want to hear, for example, Barry Manilow’s voice put through a vocoder. Well, maybe for a minute, just for chuckle.

But the point is, Cher doesn’t like her natural voice. So shouldn’t she be afforded the artistic license to use it as a material to manipulate like, for example, clay or paint? What I don’t like personally, I do defend intellectually. And at this point if you criticize Cher for using voice manipulation, she’ll give you the middle finger. Which is what we have here, in a nutshell, as a Christmas song. And that’s just as badass really as having the reputation for hiring four hitmen to rescue the son of Gregg Allman from a British pop singer.

There are four new songs by Sarah Hudson (who turns out to be the daughter or Mark Hudson from The Hudson Brothers) including the dance track. Billboard describes another one of her contributions, “I Like Christmas” as bluesy. Also on the album are 3 1960s-era R&B/Soul songs, 1 1950s-era rock-n-roll classic, 2 pop songs, a big-band jazz song, 1 rap and 2 country songs. Pretty good spread.

  1.  “DJ Play a Christmas Song” – new song
  2. “What Christmas Means to Me” (duet with Stevie Wonder)
    This Motown Christmas staple popularized by Stevie Wonder in 1967. The original b-side of the record was “Bedtime for Toys.” One 3 occasions on this album Cher revisits originals with their artist of note, which is a nice way to express her respect for these songs.
  3.  “Run Rudolph Run”
    According to Wikipedia, this 1958 hit was “written by Chuck Berry but credited to Johnny Marks and M. Brodie due to Marks’ trademark on the character of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Oh boo. The b-side was “Merry Christmas Baby.” You may remember the Bryan Adams version if you are a child of the 80s and had that first red “A Very Special Christmas” album with the Keith Haring cover.
  4. “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” (duet with Darlene Love)
    The nice thing about this duet with Darlene Love is that Cher and Love worked on this Greenwich-Barry-Spector-penned song together back in 1963 (Cher singing background vocals) on the Phil Spector Christmas album, “A Christmas Gift for You” where the song originally appeared. It wasn’t technically a single but the song has become one of the most popular Christmas songs of all time. Darlene Love reports that she and Cher were very excited to re-record it together again. And Darlene Love doesn’t get nearly enough popular attention for her amazing vocals nowadays, so it’s significant that she’s on this album getting some spotlight.
  5. “Angels in the Snow” – a new song
  6. “Home” (duet with Michael Bublé’)
    This is an unlikely choice, Michael Bublé’s 2005 single “Home.”
  7. “Drop Top Sleigh Ride” (duet with Tyga) – a new song
  8. “Please Come Home for Christmas”
    “Please Come Home for Christmas” was a 1960 Charles Brown hit, later re-done very memorably in 1978 by the Eagles (a favorite band of Cher and so this technically adds to her covers of Eagles songs). The b-side of the Brown hit was the awfully parenthetical “Christmas (Comes Once a Year)”… but it starts in October so…
  9. “I Like Christmas” – a new song
  10. “Christmas Ain’t Christmas Without You”
    This song is not yet linked on Cher’s “Christmas” album Wikipedia page so its provenance is a bit mysterious. It might be from the 1965 “Christmas with Buck Owens and his Buckaroos” album, although the song, co-written by Owens, is technically “Christmas Aint Christmas Dear Without You” on that album which also contains the charmer “Santa Looked a Lot Like Daddy” and “Santa’s Gonna Come on a Stagecoach” which unfortunately sounds more interesting than it is.
  11. “Santa Baby”
    This big-band/jazz smash by Eartha Kitt with Henri René and His Orchestra from 1953 was also covered by Madonna on that first 80s “A Very Special Christmas” album. I hope Cher takes it in another, less baby-doll direction.
  12. “Put a Little Holiday in Your Heart” (duet with Cyndi Lauper)
    Cyndi Lauper and Cher sing this country song together, one of the songs LeAnn Rimes performed on her 1997 ABC movie “Holiday in Your Heart” about Rimes (playing herself) “preparing to make her debut at the Grand Ole Opry at Christmas” (Wikipedia). I liked Cyndi Lauper’s 2015 country album, “Detour” so I’m looking forward to this duet. Plus those two have great chemistry with each other.
  13. “This Will Be Our Year”
    This is the track that gets me all verklempt. This Zombies song was not even a single from their 1968 Odessey and Oracle album. I started the year with this song; it my New Year’s Day Tweet. And I grew quite attached to it during the year. That Cher closes her Christmas album with it and thus my year will end with it…well, that’s really quite moving. ❤️

I forgot to mention this but back in January, Cher and Eric Esralian published an Op Ed in Newsweek about Armenia: https://www.newsweek.com/you-cannot-erase-us-opinion-1776282

Cher in Literature

I came across another instance recently of Cher in a poem. This one is by Anita Endrezze.

La Morena and Her Beehive Hairdo

1965-1970

The Dark One sported a beehive hairdo
where she once hid her brother Alfonso.
His girlfriend had a husband who carried a switchblade
pretty as a butterfly in his back pocket.
Alfonso camped out in La Morena’s dusky hair
until the coast was clear, at least as far a San Pedro.
Then he vamoosed to Tucson
where he married a young hairdresser
from the Yaqui barrio.

Without any family responsibilities, La Morena felt light-headed.
She changed her name again. Old Lady. It was the sixties, man,
and she was everyone’s old lady. She really dug those long-haired vets
from Nam. She wore granny boots and long paisley dresses
and carried a small baggie of white horse
in her leather fringed purse. Everyone called her
Indian Princess and said Cher looked just like her.
She slept around, snorting coke up a straw
until she saw red stars galloping around her heart
and herds of tiny white horses dying in nights of Black Velvet.

I won’t ask her if she remembers. It was real
but it wasn’t true. She was living in someone else’s mandala
because it was on the top-ten chart. Somewhere
along the way she lost herself. It’s the Yaqui Way
of Knowledge by Carlos Coyote-Peyote.
When we found Jesus, we held out our palms
for coins, Bibles, good-looking Indian Boys.
She was my sister. Kneel down, little sister, she said.
And we did, down in front of altars of bees
and tubes of pale lipstick, crosses made of lovers’ bodies,
broken shoes, floods of moons, Janis Joplin, rowdy measures
of life. Those summers, slab dancing and picking up guys,
were the best times, she says, the best. When she was young
and I was just beginning my own story, my own howling
at the American moon.

2000

Cher is Cookin’

Christmas is Coming Early This Year!

A lot has happened in the last few weeks. Cher set a release date of October 20 for her Christmas album and unveiled a series of covers. And those covers seem to just keep coming. I suppose everyone has to draw their own line on how many different covers they need of Cher’s Christmas album.

On October 28 I’m starting a road trip to get to a family reunion in Cleveland.  I should have my copies by then because guess what’s going in every family swag bag! Whoo-hoo! (They’re all also getting pistachio wine from Las Cruses.)

Anyway, Cher has been keeping quiet on the track listing of Christmas songs and regarding names of any duet partners, but in all the kerfuffle of the pre-order announcements, Amazon’s special-cover (my clear favorite of the three, by the way) was leaked with the little sticker on it. So now we know: Stevie Wonder, Darlene Love, Michael Bublé, Tyga and Cyndi Lauper.

I actually keep those little stickers from my Cher albums and CDs. I once drove a friend to Las Vegas from LA and this person opened my CD case for Heart of Stone, the sticker fell out,  we lost it and I’m still upset about it.

Last week on social media, we saw pictures and clips of Cher’s house all decked out with Christmas trees and poinsettias and Cher was sitting with Darlene Love.

This duet is pretty awesome for a few reasons. For one, Cher and Darlene Love are longtime friends. When Darlene Love was in financial trouble, Cher hired her for one of her concert tours.

Also, they both sang  on the famous Phil Spector Christmas album back in 1963  (Darlene Love soloing and Cher as part of the backup crew) so they have Christmas history together.

And finally because Darlene Love has done some of my favorite Christmas songs, her Home Alone song and the fun one she did with Ronnie Spector.

Apparently the new clip is for an upcoming episode of The View but it seems too early to be shooting appearances for future talk shows. But maybe Cher will start promoting the album in October. Would it be hard to whip up a Christmas TV special like Mariah Carey does?  Easy, right?

Darlene Love and Cher through the years:

We know the song “Silent Night” won’t be on the album. Cher has said that about a million times. She also likely won’t redo anything she’s already done (my 2021 breakdown of Cher Christmas moments).

To find all the formats and covers: https://cher.lnk.to/Christmas 

Recent Interviews & News

A really good recent interview was in the Hollywood Reporter.  They call her “the world’s most recognizable mononym.”

On Music and Movies:

The most common quote she gets from strangers is still, “Snap out of it.” She still gets that “over and over!”

Last week, people were reporting Cher’s name has shown up under the IMDb.com entry for a film called Hail Mary, a football movie staring Jennifer Aniston. Her character name is Roxy Fields. I’m getting a football franchise owner vibe on that.

We found out Cher just sold her music catalog to Irving Azoff.  “Well, everybody’s doing it. (Laughs.) I get to keep everything from Believe on, so I’m fine with it.”

In captions on the article we find out October marks the 25th anniversary of “Believe” and April the 35th anniversary of Moonstruck. 

About auto-tune, Cher says she had a hard time with the song and  producer Mark Taylor kept asking her to sing the verses better until she finally said, “If you want it better, get somebody else” and stormed out. This is artistically preferrable to walking out over a broken manicured nail as would have happed in 1972.

She says, “the record company didn’t want to do it. They said, ‘You can’t tell who it is.’ I went, ‘Yes, I know, that’s the beauty of the whole thing!”

Let’s just sit with that for a minute. Imagine having a voice so identifiable that you feel disappearing from it to be beautiful. Just think about that for a minute.

On Elephants, Ukraine:

Cher is still working to save Billy, the LA Zoo elephant (and the elephant that started her captive animal advocacy). It’s so shocking that the zoo has been confronted with so many recommendations and that 40 other U.S. zoos are phasing out elephants but they refuse to budge. Cher says it took five years of legal work to save Kaavan from Islamabad. And Billy is still showing psychological distress so she’s not giving up on him. She’s asking people in Los Angeles to “bombard the [LA] city council” because “the citizens of LA essentially own the zoo but don’t have the authority to influence the decision making.”

She talks about saving  six lions, a  panther and a tiger from Ukraine right before the war broke out. “We left the bear, so we had to sneak back in with a big pickup truck and get him out during the war.”

On the war itself, she says, “We’re helping them fight the war so that Russia doesn’t go in and take all the NATO countries. I don’t think a lot of people in Congress understand or realize that, but [the Ukrainians] are doing us a service.”

She also talks about her first dog, Pansy, and her beloved cat Mr. Big who she rescued while on tour at a two-day stop in Detroit.

On Twitter:

She laments the changes on Twitter, the disabled Tweetbot that was helping her dyslexia. “I went to Threads, so I’m on both now. I used to love going on Twitter.”

Me too, Cher. Me too. I’m using Facebook now but there are many more ramifications. I even have much better feedback on Facebook but that’s not the point. I miss talking to strangers.

On Cherlato:

During the Hollywood Reporter interview the Cherlato truck was at the Taylor Swift concert. Cher says they have many flavors but the truck can only support about five at a time. Her favorite is chocolate. “I’m pedestrian,” she says. “When I saw the [edible] gold cones, I almost lost it. I wanted to wear them as earrings.”

On Her Life Stories:

The interviewer, Mikey O’Connell, asks her if she’s still amazed that a news story transpires whenever she leaves her house (my paraphrase). Cher talks about bad periods in her career, periods that would make anyone else give up. “I didn’t quit,” she says.

When asked about performers she likes, she refuses to use her position to single out anyone “because there are so many great people right now. When you single out one of them, it just diminishes everyone else that’s working.”

That’s a good answer.

She’s starting over with her bio-pic. That doesn’t sound good. I hope she’s not been firing a succession of directors. But in any case, she says “we’re going to have to wait [for after the strikes]. I’m not going to go against my people.”

She keeps saying “my people.” I don’t think she means that in the royal sense, but like in “my squad.”

Her autobiography is still not done. The big problem with these projects, she says, is how long her life has been and how hard it is to squish it down into a story.  That is a challenge.

Her House:

She finally explained why she’s been trying to sell her beautiful Malibu house. “You can’t be flexible in this house — as much as I love it.” I think this means it stifles her decorating creativity.

Someone did a little article solely about Cher’s Malibu entryway: https://www.homesandgardens.com/celebrity-style/cher-entryway


There was also a Good Morning Britain interview where we find out that  Mama Mia  doesn’t even have a script yet. And Cher is not committed to it. On this interview she claims she’s never had duets on her albums. That might sound odd when she had a Peter Cetera duet on Heart of Stone and all of those with Gregg Allman and Sonny duets. I think she means she hasn’t made it a habit on every album or hasn’t done The Duets Album, like Tony Bennett.

Cher’s Tuna Pasta Salad

In other Cher cooking news, way back my sister-in-law Susan sent me an article online about Rock-and-Roll recipes that included Cher’s tuna pasta salad and wanted to know if it was any good. So I dug out my Cooking with Cher cookbook and found the same recipe there and made it.

So this was back when the fad was to make everything fat free. People aren’t doing this anymore.  Michael Pollan has said in his book In Defense of Food that the fat-free craze just made us fatter. And we need some fats as it turns out.

The recipe tasted….well fat free.

I still hope we’ll get a Sonny cookbook someday and a maybe new more-fat-ful Cher cookbook.

Cher….and Other Fantasies

I’ve finished reviewing the final TV Special from the 1970s. It took a long time, was often hard to describe and this one had a lot of context:

https://www.cherscholar.com/cherand-other-fantasies/

Little Richard, Cherlato and Cher Specials

Little  Richard:  I Am  Everything

A few weeks ago I watched the documentary Little Richard: I Am Everything. It explored how underappreciated Little Richard was during his lifetime and the queer influence inherent in the origin of rock-and-roll music.

The documentary relates to Cher for two reasons. One, Sonny worked closely with Little Richard back when he was employed with Specialty Records. There’s a documentary out there where Sonny tells some  wacky anecdotes about being one of Little Richard’s handlers. I’ll try to track it down. It might even be an old Phil Spector documentary.

Anyway, at one point during the Little Richard documentary Mick Jagger is talking about how beholden everyone is to Little Richard and then Nile Rogers tells how Little Richard paved the way for everything that followed. And at that point there is what I would call “a collage of flamboyance” at marker 1:35:52 pulling the thread from Little Richard through to contemporary artists. Someone says, “it’s almost as if everyone is defined by Little Richard.”

As I was watching the collage unfold I thought Cher will not be included in this, flamboyant though she is. I just took it on faith she would not be included.

But she was.

Here’s the partial list in the collage. It’s pretty impressive:

  • Elvis
  • James Brown
  • The Beatles
  • Jimi Hendrix
  • Prince
  • Elton John
  • David Bowie
  • The Eurythmics
  • Freddie Mercury
  • Boy George
  • Mick Jagger
  • Jimmy Page
  • Robert Plant
  • Rick James
  • Cher
  • Madonna
  • Rod Stewart
  • Lady Gaga
  • Plenty more new people after this I didn’t know.

I did a screen capture of Cher’s appearance (above). It’s a big deal. There were plenty of other deserving flamboyant artists who didn’t make it.

Cherlato

Cher’s new gelato truck finally started rambling around Los Angles a few weeks ago. I asked my peoples in LA to try it out for me because I can’t very well make a visit just for gelato. as reasonable as this seems to me. My friend Coolia caught the truck near Canter’s Deli  while she was on her way to another event.

At first when I mentioned the gelato truck to Coolia, she said, “I don’t buy that Cher even eats ice cream!” So I googled ‘Cher eating ice cream’ and sent her the resulting collage, which looked something like this:

Coolia said, “I stand corrected.” She then fit it a Cherlato truck visit in between a family tragedy and a trip to Japan so I’m very thankful to her for taking the time to not only track it down but let it interfere with her diet.

Julie said the gelato was good but not mind blowing. The staff was really nice, she said, and they told her business was good. By closing time they had run out of three of their flavors (and it’s not like they have that many!) Coolia had the Chocolate XO Cher flavor (allegedly Cher’s favorite) and her boyfriend Dave had the Breakfast at Cher’s Coffee and Donuts. They didn’t upgrade to the $18 gold cone understandably.

The staff gave them tasting spoons and Coolia said the Stracialetta Giapo’s Way flavor was also good.

Here are Coolia’s pics:

You can check Cherlato’s landing schedule on their Twitter/X page: https://twitter.com/cherlato_gelato.

Cher on TV

I’ve been updating the main Cher TV page on cherscholar.com, adding links to her music videos. Strangely, not all of her videos have been published on her own YouTube channel.

I’ve also started to add the dates and songs for all the televised guest performances.

And I’ve started documenting the TV specials. I’ve completed two new ones so far, The Sonny & Cher Nitty Gritty Hour from 1971 and the 1978 Cher…Special.

A big theme of Cher…Special is hair. Cher-the-child laments the fact that she is not blonde. Intro 2 Anthro with Two Humans just did an episode about hair. So I’ve been thinking about it. I was blonde once inadvertently when I first arrived at Sarah Lawrence and I was highlighting my own hair. For those of us who were using that plastic head cap and needle instead of the foil, you were going to be blonde eventually.

I was never allowed to watch the movie Grease when it came out (one of only two things I was deprived of watching, that and the comedy Soap). So in high school I finally saw it and thought Cha Cha was the prettiest character in the movie. So I had red hair my senior year, constantly chasing the sultry Cha-Cha color and ending up occasionally with the more innocent-looking Molly Ringwald. I’ve had about 50-shades of brunette since then and the Susan Sontag streak. Right now my hairdresser Maxine, (who I just found out went to the same grade school I did only ten years earlier), is helping me evolve into a natural salt and pepper. Fingers crossed.

Hair color seems so fluid to get upset about. But I guess if you were Cher and your mother and your sister were California blondes in the 1950s and 60s, you might become an upset tween too. Honestly, I’ve never found hair color, eye color, height, shape, size, the car you drive or the shampoo you use a relevant factor in any successful friendship or relationship, but I understand other people have their fetishes. Sonny apparently did although he married two raven-haired beauties.

To elaborate on a comment Mr. Cher Scholar made in his Anthro episode about Cher, after a decade of Barbara Edens, seeing Cher on TV as a raven glamazon was a big deal. And due to Cher’s somewhat fluid-looking ethnicity, many kinds of women were impacted by this. It was beyond a personal statement; she was pulling us all through. She was all non-blonde women around the world on TV.  Someone once told me they loved her in Iran. But still, she never lost her own blonde fetish. And she’s dipped into blondeness occasionally through the decades. I could probably do a whole essay on Cher exploring blondness.

And Then the Thing Was Done

If you grew up in St. Louis, you probably shuttled relatives downtown to take them up into The Gateway Arch (gateway to the West) about a dozen or so times in your life.

And if you were my Dad, you’d have those relatives sit through the making-of-the-arch documentary, a 60s-era movie that ended with the last steel section being placed at the top of the arch, all to great fanfare and a building engineer’s educational-film voice pronouncing, “And then the thing was done!”

So I now feel compelled to say this phrase every time we hit a milestone with any of Cher Scholar’s enterprises.

I have finished synopsizing the variety shows of Cher and Sonny & Cher: https://www.cherscholar.com/the-tv-variety-shows-and-specials/. The first episode synopsis was posted way back on January 15, 2019! It’s taken me 4 years , 6 months and 3 days!

Huuuuge thank you goes to Jay Pickering, who contacted me early on in the process and has been helping me fill in the gaps with his personal knowledge and a collection of TV Guides.

You know Cher fans are special. I’ve met good fans everywhere for many artists of all kinds in many cities. I love to talk to fans. But Cher fans are another thing. Cher fans don’t posture. They’re not possessive. At least the ones I know. They help each other find stuff. They know what it means to be an outsider. That’s probably why they like Cher in the first place.

Another thing I love about Cher’s fans, they have specialties. There are Cher doll specialists, movie specialists, TV show specialists. In music there are even subcategory specialists: singles specialists, album specialists, compilation specialists. We are truly an enterprise of an enterprise.

And I love you guys! It makes being a fan so much more fun.

I feel both happy and sad to be at the end of this project. Doing this every week has gotten me through some hard moments over the last few years: Covid lockdowns, my parents both getting Covid at the same time and other personal challenges I’ve been experiencing. I’ve been able to come to this project when I needed a pick-me-up and I will miss it. I’ll miss watching Sonny & Cher again every week.

But I’m also pretty amazed I finished. Here’s an animated gif that shows how I feel right about now:

I still have a lot of cleanup to do on the episode pages, replacing broken links to videos with the show videos Cher has been publishing on her own YouTube and I have some episodes to revisit and refine.

It’s been amazing watching the evolution of these shows. Sonny & Cher came a long way from Jimmy Durante to Tina Turner, from “The Beat Goes On” to “Teach Me Tonight,” from “You Made Me Love You” to “Danny’s Song.”

I hope this catalogue will be useful to fans and future Cher scholars.

More Records in The Man’s World

Dollhouse Records

So when I was a kid my grandmother used to give us $25 savings bonds as gifts all through the 1970s. Pleh. Snooze-fest for a kid. Then one day my father said, “the market is good, you should cash those in.” I was eleven. Yes! Enough of this investing. Let’s blow some moolah!

In St. Louis near where we lived there was a mall they called Westport Plaza. This plaza had a Mexican restaurant, trendy bars, and back-flipping baseball star Ozzy Smith’s restaurant (my grandmother loved it because she could nibble spicy chicken wings there). Jugglers and magicians performed outside. This is where our high-school friend Jonathan Levit started the fire-eating, juggling act he had at the time. There was also a tiny theater in the round there. I saw Cyd Charisse perform in the play Mister Roberts and the band ‘Til Tuesday.

Anyway, back in 1981 when I was flush with cash, I was obsessed with a fancy toy shop called Aunt Heidi’s Corner at this mall because it had a whole room of dollhouses, hobby kit dollhouses. I took my cash spree and bought the biggest one there. My Dad was not too happy about assembling it but he spent a few months building the thing and then told me it was up to me to shingle it (which I did) and paint it (which I’m still doing).

Last week I purchased a stereo for the house. There was a console looking one (near to what I had as a kid) but the table-top stereo didn’t match the built-in one we had. So I opted for the 1980s-looking component version.

After high school I also came into some graduation cash. My two older brothers talked me into using it to ditch their hand-me-down all-in-one stereo for stereo components. We all went to the stereo store and they picked out brands of speakers, receivers, turntables and a tape deck and then they taught me how to hook it up, which I did through five of six moves until I sold it all in a Redondo Beach garage sale along with half of my records.

So to go with the new little version, I recently purchased a set of 60 tiny record albums from a woman on eBay, plus 6 custom records I asked her to make. They were sold in sets of 5 for $6. So back when records were $7.99, this calculates to 24 weeks of a teen’s diverted lunch and allowance money. Whoo hoo!

(Just like the old days, I alphabetized them.)

Big People Records

I’ve always listened to record albums. When I was  six in Albuquerque, my parents taught me how to handle them and get them on the turntable. I was just learning to read so I became obsessed with storyteller records that each came with a read-along book. My favorites were the ones that faithfully stuck to the text.

Later I would love the ones that didn’t read faithfully from the record’s embedded book but had music. My brothers had most of the Disney albums and a few others. I listened to all them probably hundreds of times and they show the wear.

By the time we moved to St. Louis, I was heavily invested in Sonny & Cher records. I had a small stack by the time I was eight. My parents had their own collection of records, which they kept in a long gold rack. I re-organized their stack and culled out the Sonny & Cher (and Cher) records and put them in a smaller ornate gold rack my parents also had. The racks looked something like these:

This isolation was important because we had just moved from the desert of New Mexico to the alley of tornados in Missouri. And because we were not used to such scary weather systems, the whole family would scramble to the basement whenever so much as a weather watch was announced. My Dad even found us a special tornado weather radio.

But then after a while we became jaded and only headed to the basement if sirens went off in the neighborhood (which happened a few times a year). My self-appointed job was to make sure the dog make it to the basement and to save my Sonny & Cher records, which were helpfully sorted out for handy retrieval in the smaller record stand. There were so few of them an eight-year old could port them to safety in just one trip (along with the dog). You can see what I valued.

Dog, check. Sonny & Cher records, check. Parents and siblings, who?

And so yesterday the latest Cher record has arrived, Cher’s box-set re-release of It’s a Man’s World.

And this is all to say if you had told me back then, when I was stashing a modest amount of Cher records into a gilded, gold record stand at age eight, that one day I’d have so many Cher records, they wouldn’t even be able to fit into the largest plastic bin I could find, I would have told you to Shut! Up!


The Latest Record

So let’s talk about It’s a Man’s World, which was a very unusual Cher CD when it came out in the mid-1990s for the sole reason that it is the only Cher album with widely divergent UK and US versions. Many of her later-day Warner dance albums have small differences of a song or two from country to country (Living Proof had a Japanese version with extra songs, for example), but no other album was released twice with so many differences, not just the list of songs but track order and different mixes of songs. The UK album was released first by Cher’s new label after leaving Geffen, Warner Music UK (WEA) in 1995. A U.S. version from Warner Records (address in Burbank) arrived a year later in 1996.

The 2023 re-release is a re-release of the UK version (at least the track listing is).  I haven’t listened to it yet. Depicted below is the front and backside of all the releases (and my mix tape mashup of the UK/US versions):

 

The 1995 UK and 2023 Warner Bros listing:

  1. Walking in Memphis – a Marc Cohen cover and hit in the UK at #11. This song did not chart in the US but was discovered anyway and is one of Cher’s underground hits among Cher fans and non-Cher fans alike.
  2. Not Enough Love in the World – a Don Henley cover and a single in the UK at #31.
  3. One by One – a hit in the UK at #7, a flop in the U.S. at #52.
  4. I Wouldn’t Treat a Dog (The Way You Treated Me) – a Bobby “Blue” Bland cover.
  5. Angels Running – a Patty Larkin cover.
  6. Paradise Is Here – a non-charting single in the US and UK and a Paul Brady cover.
  7. I’m Blowing Away – a Joan Baez cover.
  8. Don’t Come Around Tonight
  9. What About the Moonlight
  10. The Same Mistake
  11. The Gunman – a Prefab Sprout cover.
  12. The Sun Aint Gonna Shine Anymore – #26 in the UK and a The Walker Brothers cover.
  13. Shape of Things to Come – a Trevor Horn song.
  14. It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World – a James Brown cover.

For some reason three songs were removed from the U.S. album and different versions included, which also had a lithograph on some versions of the CD:

  1. One by One was changed to a slow-jam, R&B song and became so sleepy it could put you to sleep. Well, the more dance-oriented upbeat UK version (used in the video) was only slightly better. To add to its dullness, the video didn’t include Cher doing much more than waving her hands slowly around her face.
  2. Not Enough Love in the World – here they tried the same trick, giving the song an R&B vibe where the UK version is lighter and more peppy.
  3. Angels Running skimmed out the UKs drum intro and the slap-you-awake bridge, neither of which is needed for this beautifully melancholy song.
  4. What About the Moonlight – the UK version was a sweet, dripping version with atmosphere and the US version, although not quite a dance mix, was too jaunty. Not the seriousness of a song that has Cher singing someone down from the ledge of depression. It shouldn’t be such a peppy mix.
  5. Paradise Is Here – we had the opposite problem with this one. The UK version is too meandering for such a happy lyric. The song takes forever to get up and running. The US version is lightly more upbeat and happy.
  6. The Same Mistake – the same versions.
  7. Walking in Memphis – same versions.
  8. The Sun Aint Gonna Shine Anymore – same versions.
  9. The Gunman – the UK has a vocal intro and outro. I prefer the song cleanly without that.
  10. It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World  – same versions.

My Mix-Tape Version

Frustrated with there being some good versions on the US CD and some good versions on the UK CD, I made my own mix-tape compilation as follows:

  1. One by One (Junior Vasquez version) – The US slow version was really dull for me. But these days if you have a little patience with the song, it’s actually a sexy little burn. But back in the day, I preferred the remix.
  2. Not Enough Love in the World (UK version)
  3. What About the Moonlight (UK version)
  4. Paradise Is Here (US version)
  5. Walking in Memphis (Shut Up and Dance Mix) – I actually don’t know what I was thinking with this remix. It feels silly now. And the ending makes my head hurt.
  6. The Sun Aint Gonna Shine Anymore
  7. The Gunman (US version)
  8. Shape of Things to Come (UK album song)
  9. It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World
  10. One by One (UK version)

Since they’ve re-released the UK version only, I suppose it’s now the canonical version. But is it really? Which songs should be the canonical versions? This issue is always complicated when a dance re-mix does better on the charts than the album version. But when there are multiple album versions to start with it’s a bigger quagmire. And if you lived in the US and didn’t have access to import albums, (I was in Yonkers at the time, living pretty close to Tower Records which had an import bin and plus I was mail ordering imports), you may have never even heard these UK versions before.

The 2023 box set is beautiful. And I’ve never had colored vinyl records so I’m really enjoying that.

I do notice two things, however. They don’t make record album covers like they used to. The cardboard for these new vinyl releases feels cheaply produced. You rarely got a paper-cut from an old vinyl album cover.

Also, there’s plenty of room in this big spacious box for a new lyric sheet (the original CD didn’t come with one either), maybe even on the back of that needless lithograph sheet (or on all that quadruple album gatefold real estate). And a retrospective liner-note essay is conspicuously missing. This is simply the re-release of the original assets, with a deluxe version that includes the remixes. That’s it. No Cher scholar is weighing in on the importance of the album, what made a re-release pertinent about now, and what all the versions mean. And that feels like a lost opportunity.

These song covers are inspired. Cher’s performances were unified and understated and unlike anything else she’d done since Stars in 1975. And now those US versions are downright rarities, unavailable anywhere to stream online and now a lost bit of gold for diligent collectors.

Cher Went Public Again With a Boyfriend

So Alexander Edwards. This also happened while I was away. This relationship was short (about 6 months by online estimates) and it ended with a whimper and was very controversial. So it’s interesting from a lot of perspectives. People were so fascinated, even People Magazine did a story that was basically “Who is this guy?

Cher’s been on the down low with her love life for the past few decades and, as if we didn’t know why, we must know now. It was every bit as paparazzi-crazy as you’d expect. And everyone had to have an opinion about it. Some fans expressed  they were “worried about her” which seemed a bit whistle-y and unnecessary. This is Cher were talking about. Some people expressed concern about his age and/or previous dating history.

You can unpack this all many ways. And race had to be a trigger for a few of Cher’s fans. Although mostly left-leaning, Cher fans aren’t all left-leaning. And besides, I know a few very racist leftists. So…

But Sonny & Cher always had black friends and colleagues and invited many black acts to their shows long before other variety shows, if they ever did. Sonny was very enmeshed in  soul and gospel music, more so than the Phil Spector sound he got distracted with for a bit. But I can unfortunately see some fans having an issue with Cher dating a black person. Even if they didn’t want to admit it (to themselves). Race for me was a non-issue. I have more struggles as the age gap keeps widening. I would love to see Cher with Danny Glover, for example (born the same year!). I don’t even know anything about Danny Glover. He might be a total creep but they look good together in my head.

So the age thing. When Cher was younger there was already bruhaha around her dating younger men, starting with Gregg Allman. As she gets older, it just prompts handwringing about opportunism, like for the late-in-life marriages of Liza Minelli or Martha Rae. But Cher, we must remind ourselves, is not Liza Minelli or Martha Rae.

Dating younger people is one thing. My father is younger than my mother. And yes, we tease him about this, especially because he was underage when they married. And there have been plenty of solid relationships between people with big age spans. There’s the famous Bogart & Bacall span. I guess the issue for me is we should probably keep things on a level playing field. For men and women and everyone. Whenever women do something (like serially dating very young people) and they deflect criticism by saying well hey…men are doing it….I think, but what does that mean? Should Leonardo DiCaprio be doing it? I’m not saying yes or no. I’m just saying the whole topic of Cher dating younger men tends to give me cognitive dissonance.

Which I realize is more about me. Once of the things I find fascinating about my Cher fandom is how little I imagine I would actually have in common with Cher personally. We’re different people and I’m totally okay with that. One perfect example of this is Cher’s taste in men, few of whom I find even remotely handsome.

During the Edwardian Era (this is what I’m now calling it), I had many conversations about this with Cher friends. And I will defend Cher because we each have our thing. Sexual attraction gets imprinted on us pretty young and you can’t really fix it. First there’s Sonny, who I didn’t think was attractive at all in the 60s as Prince Valliant but I could kind of see something there in the 70s with the mustache and his rocking kind of Sergio-Leone-villain look.

Then there was David Geffen (who I don’t even think Cher found handsome), Gregg Allman (whose sideburns always reminded me of a Chia Pet), Gene Simmons (that handy hanky), Tom Cruise (a real plain Jane), Val Kilmer (yeah, ok), Josh Donen (passable) , Robert Camilletti (probably the most handsome but it felt boring at the time), Richie Sambora (no), Ron Zimmerman (I can never even remember what he looks like), and Alexander Edwards (eh).

Contrast this bunch with Cher’s very handsome leading men and you’ve got a real stack: Sam Elliot and Stanley Tucci are two particularly handsome men. Nicolas Cage (in a pinch),  I don’t agree with much about Kurt Russell but he was pretty sexy in Silkwood.

But you know what? It’s not about me. In a big sense. Like the biggest sense. In no way is this about us fans. Cher isn’t a movie character. Sure, it is fun to travel through the list of lovers with a few cents here and there (I just had a pretty good time up there). But as long as Cher is happy (even for sexy, 6-month stretches) and the man treats her with the respect (and reverence) she deserves…we need to stay out of it. Just go back to Sonny and Cher when they first met if you need any reminding of the zero fucks Cher gave about what her people said about him.

I think she’s got this.

But just incidentally Danny Glover is single again.

Dolls and Records

I’ve been so busy catching up on older projects interrupted during my site moves, I’ve missed talking about some big Cher news stories from the last few months.

The Dolly Parton Rockstar Album

I almost titled this post Dolls and Dollys.

So Cher was originally set to do a duet on Dolly Parton’s upcoming duet album Rock Star. Dolly has just been inducted, amidst a bit of controversy, into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and she is adhering to the great advice of Henry David Thoreau when he said, “if a dog runs at you, whistle for him.”

It was rumored Cher and Dolly would be a covering the Eurythmics debut song “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” which isn’t really rocking out but okay. Maybe for Dolly it is. Unfortunately Dolly recently tweeted that Cher, along with Ed Sheeran and Lionel Richie, didn’t make the final album cut “due to a vinyl manufacturing deadline.”

I keep wondering if this really means “scheduling problems with my duet partner.”

Anyway, we’re stuck with the Dolly duets from Cher’s 1978 TV special, which are great but…

 

Man’s World Reissue on CD and Vinyl

This is long awaited. This great album unfortunately got lost in the mid-1990s due to all the 1990s and Cher’s own Chronic Fatigue problems that decade. I know because I even missed learning about its existence for almost a year.

The snakeskin box set looks delightful. There’s a hefty price of $100 for the vinyl but there are four colored albums in the box so that seems about right. Besides, this was a long album if you consider all the UK and US variations and all the remixes included in the re-release. You can also buy the re-release on CD or, if you’re a completist, both. Sigh.

Funko Pops

Now I don’t collect Funko Pops so I’ve never bought one before. But something interesting I’ve learned, these little buggers don’t stand up on their own. You have to buy the flat, plastic stand separately! Harrumph.

Oh and if you’re a completist here, there’s the basic and Diamond Collection versions (mere dollars extra) with a diminutive amount of extra bling.

Ho Ho Ho! It’s Cher Bitches

Cher announced this week there will be a Cher Christmas album this year! This might just be the only thing that could ever elicit a Beatle-scream from me. Fans have been hoping for a Cher Christmas album for decades. Decades! At least their pining has been officially documented all the way back to the first Cher Convention of 2000 where we added our Christmas wish-picks to a petition someone created there.

Cher says the album is mostly done so there’s not a lot of room for requests at this point.  I’ve been advocating “Little Altar Boy” since that 2000 petition. But it’s such an obscure Christmas song.

Cher says one of the songs already recorded is one of her favorites ever. I hope she tells us what that is. My Christmas-song-obsessed self is dying to know.

A Cher Christmas album. This is gonna make everything in the world alright I’m pretty sure.

Newer posts »

© 2024 I Found Some Blog

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑