Last week Mr. Cher Scholar was out of the house for an evening which gave me a chance to catch up on my Cher-related documentaries, which included watching the final cut of Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion (2024) and first-time watching Larger Than Life: The Kevyn Aucoin Story (2017) and Diane Warren: Relentless (2024).
I would have imagined these subjects to be as different as could be; but I was surprised by many interesting similarities (aside from Cher’s stage-stealing presence in each of them). All three of these people, (Bob Mackie, Diane Warren and Kevin Aucoin), knew from a very young age (like under 10 years old) exactly what they wanted to do with their lives vocationally and each one of them began working on their professional goals as teenagers, becoming known in each case as artists who started out very young. Aucoin and Mackie achieved success younger than Warren, but she made herself known to professionals in her field around the same age. They were all hustling early, with little interest for anything else.
Both the Mackie and Warren documentaries open with alternate takes of Cher’s “Turn Back Time.” (How could a documentarian resist using that song if Cher is involved, I guess). Mackie’s movie uses a slow rendition and Warren’s doc uses an acapella version.
Both Mackie and Aucoin practiced drawing pictures of celebrities when they were young boys. For Mackie it was old movie and musical stars and their outfits. Aucoin did faces and was obsessed with Barbra Streisand and he played Streisand and Cher records all the time, to the chagrin of the cis-gendered brother he shared a room with.
In all three cases, these artists are or were ubiquitous in their field: Diane Warren has written for more recording artists than any other songwriter, “all the real stars…the biggest stars wore Bob Mackie” and Kevyn Aucoin was the makeup artist most favored by the female models, musicians and actresses of his time.
Bob Mackie “made them look like the superstars they were.” Kevyn Aucoin’s presented them at their most beautiful. And Diane Warren gave them number one hits.
All three documentaries talk about matching or unveiling the unique characters of their clients: matching the right song to the right artist, designing a costume to “pick up on somebody’s essence” and designing makeup to accentuate a person’s unique beauty. In the Mackie documentary Law Roach says, “every superhero has his costume” and Mackie gave stars theirs. Diane Warren and Kevyn Aucoin likewise gave their artists extraordinary assists.
In Mackie and Warren’s case, they did not become divas in the way Kevyn Aucoin allegedly became. They also survived their fame and he did not. But they all suffered bullying and trauma for not conforming to social norms as kids. (Which was news to me watching all three docs.)
Paul Stanley is seen in Warren’s documentary stating that her genius is her lack of a fingerprint, meaning the university of her songs. Warren calls it a kind of openness. It’s hard to disagree with this in a business sense. (Her success speaks for itself.) But I would disagree in an aesthetic sense. Every great writer has a fingerprint, a unique vocabulary of words or styles. And I was comforted to learn Diane Warren was as eccentric as she is and not as “open” and unspecific as a person. The uniqueness is where the true gold lies and Warren seemed refreshingly unique under all those hits.
Cher’s presence in each of these documentaries is different and those differences were fascinating to compare.
Bob Mackie and Cher are almost synonymous. Aside from his ingenious work on The Carol Burnett Show, his career seemed to soar right along his glamourous make-overs of Cher in her 1970s variety shows and later live appearances and tours. His documentary dramatically recounts the dress she wore to the first Met Gala in 1974 and the effect it had on everybody attending. I never get tired of hearing Hal Rubenstein’s retelling of his Lillian Gish conversation that night, seeing Lillian Gish at the Meta Gala sitting all by herself, lit by only one candle. And when she sees Cher walk by she exclaims, “Oh my! Look at her.” Rubenstein adds, “so did everyone else in the room.” (The story has such undertones of changing Hollywood beauty standards and passing the torch.)
“Style is really confidence,” Rubenstein says and you would imagine Diane Warren and Kevyn Aucoin might agree. Cher is a predominant talking head in the Mackie documentary, as you would expect, talking about her first meeting with him, how he helped give her confidence with his designs and how much fun they had creating them.
Side note: I was lucky to be able to attend the premiere of Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion at The Paley Center in 2023, where we spotted Diane Warren in the audience (and Mackie’s master seamstress, Elizabeth Aghayan, sitting in our row). And I don’t remember the Mackie documentary covering this, but Cher and Mackie seem to have the closest personal relationship of all his clients. I seem to remember a story about Cher helping Mackie financially at one point. In any case, it’s been a very bounteous friendship.
In the Kevyn Aucoin documentary, Larger Than Life (a reference to his size), Cher has a much smaller footprint, but then she seems to have worked with him for only a short amount of time. The documentary has them first working together from Cher’s“Dov’è L’amore” video (1999) to her “Song for the Lonely” video (2002) and he apparently died a few months after that. Cher talks about the “Dov’è L’amore” video where Aucoin took hours upon hours to do the amazing eye makeup for Cher.
Cher says they hung out from time to time shopping for makeup together, even though, Cher quipping, nobody could have possibly had more makeup than the two of them already had. Cher’s admission in her 2024 memoirs that she did her own makeup for most of her career sheds new light on this affinity with Aucoin. It reminds me of her long-time relationship with interior designer Ron Wilson. They share with Cher a love of those particular art forms (the room and the face).
And although Cher isn’t seen much in the Aucoin documentary, her appearances are very significant to his story personally. First of all, as an early fan of Streisand and Cher, it’s interesting to note that it wasn’t Streisand who befriended him. And I’m no Streisand scholar but I don’t overhear many stories about Streisand befriending people who work for her. Maybe she does. But you hear about Cher’s friendships with long-term working partnerships pretty often. Maybe she’s just friendlier. In this case it was Cher who first alerted Aucoin to the fact that his big health issue (he was suffering chronic pain and growing taller and larger into adulthood) was acromegaly. The documentary recounts that Cher told him this while they were working on a second video shoot, which was most likely the video for “The Music’s No Good Without You.”
Sidenote: As I was researching this, I read about the video on the song’s Wikipedia page: it “was filmed on October 7–8, 2001, on an elaborate sound stage with a ‘spaced out’ design at Nikken Building, in Irvine, California. The director commented, ‘Cher is about the only other person I know who knows anything about Gormenghast – and that was my model for this video’.” (I had no idea. And I’ve read those crazy Gormenghast novels. But even I didn’t make it through the series.)
Cher not only correctly guessed Aucoin’s condition but she found him the world’s leading expert on the disorder. Maybe she learned about it through her association with the movie Mask and her involvement with Children’s Craniofacial Association? In any case, the diagnosis did lead to surgery but unfortunately the drug addiction Aucoin used previously to manage the pain continued and his behavior deteriorated.
In the documentary, it was on a third, unmaimed Cher video, (Cher says it was on a rooftop in the Village and research shows it was for the “Song for the Lonely” video), where Aucoin failed to show up and Cher had to do her own makeup and then he did show up and there was an exchange with “Liz” (Cher’s publicist, Liz Rosenberg?) who told Aucoin not to take anything until after the shoot was over but two hours later Aucoin collapsed and paramedics had to be called. This hit the news and Aucoin’s career went into a tailspin as a result. In the documentary Aucoin’s husband Jeremy recalls the denial surrounding Aucoin’s condition and says, “but Cher wasn’t in denial.” Cher told Jeremy, ”He needs help.” And it sounds like his people did try to help but to no avail.
So not a lot of screentime for Cher in this documentary but pretty important bits.
Cher is again a bigger presence in the Diane Warren’s documentary. Cher has plenty to say about her friendship with Warren. They’re seen talking on the phone and Cher is the first talking head, producing adjectives for Warren such as nuts, cheap, unrelenting, optimistic, sweet, crazy and “she writes great songs.” I could see two Cher posters on Diane Warren walls as the camera weaves around her messy spaces. Unlike Mackie and Aucoin, who seem neat and organized, (for Aucoin at least while he was while sober), Warren’s brain space seems much more disheveled. Cher jokes that every time Warren calls her, it’s with the promise of “the best song she’s ever written.” I realized watching this documentary there were more Warren songs I liked than I remembered: “Rhythm of the Night” was a song I used to dance to in my basement as a tween and I wrote a poem once while “Unbreak My Heart” was on repeat play.
Warren and Cher both tell the “If I Could Turn Back Time” story with Warren’s horrible demo. They play the demo and am I crazy to say I like the demo better because it sounds grittier? They dramatically re-enact Cher saying over and over again that “she fucking hates” the song. (These two fucking potty mouths, am I right?) It wasn’t until Warren offered to “pay for the track” and Cher’s realization of Warren’s innate cheapness that made Cher change her mind. Cher says she recorded the song in 15 minutes and from the start of singing it she realized it was the perfect song for her. Warren was vindicated. Cher now calls it ”one of my favorite songs and one of my biggest hits.”
What is curious to me is why this Diane Warren’s documentary was produced by the Master Class people. Normally this is streaming service full of lectures about craft. This documentary was mostly about Warren’s personal life and professional accolades. It was, by Warren’s own admission, antithetical to discussing any kind of craft process at all. In fact, the only backstory we hear in any detail was for the origins of Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” (which interestingly could be traced back to a Barbra Streisand and James Brolin interview. The other backstory was for her very personal song written for Lady Gaga, “Til It Happens to You.” It would have been great to hear about the creative origins of other songs like “If I Could Turn Back Time” or “When I See You Smile” or my high-school’s perky graduation anthem, “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.”
Regardless of whether her songs have personal origins or not, Warren maintains her songwriting is an ephemeral, almost magical process for her and she doesn’t like to talk about it. Which would seem to disqualify her from a Master Class type situation and It reminded me of seeing the poet Albert Goldbarth (one of my favorite poets) at The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books one year and him saying he same nonsense about the writing poems, an attitude which would also have seemed to disqualify him from sitting on a panel about writing poems. It’s not that I don’t believe in magic and mystery. It’s just that I just don’t attribute that to the workings of the animal brain.
It’s not introspection that Warren fears, however. I was happy to hear her say she believed starting therapy only helped her songwriting. Turns out she’s just superstitious. Fair enough.
I did appreciate Warren calling out the other unheralded songwriters who get marginalized for being women: Joni Mitchell, Laura Nero and Carole King. It was hard to watch all her Oscar close-calls. It was like watching a heroic outcast keep trying to win favor from the popular kids. But then maybe Warren’s situation had more to do with early childhood memories and drama than it did courting acceptance from her peers.
And although Bob Mackie’s scars are not dealt with head-on in his documentary, they are alluded to. And you can see they still take their toll. His childhood struggles and adult tragedies were the most poignant parts of his documentary. All of these three artists struggled to find support during their childhoods to some extent, finding one or two cheerleaders if they found any.
And Diane Warren’s one-time partner, Guy Roche, plays keyboards on Cher’s Heart of Stone album and plays synthesizers and produces with Warren on the Diane-Warren-penned songs for Cher’s Love Hurts album.
“Makeup Breakup” (New York Magazine) – More detail about the final interactions between Aucoin and Cher.
At Aucoin’s Face Forward book launch party, you can see him with two titans of 1970s CBS television. Have you seen them together in one picture before?
The big news from the last week was Cher’s appearance on 30 August 2025 to help her friend Cyndi Lauper finish out her farewell tour at the Hollywood Bowl. Unbeknownst to me, Lauper’s closing song for this tour, “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” was paired with a set inspired by one of her favorite artists (and mine), Yayoi Kusama.
And not in a million years would I have been able to even drum up a fantasy of a Cher/Kusama mashup. But there it was. And the news went nuts. A sampling:
Oh and Joni Mitchell was also there (!) and SZA, John Legend, Trombone Shorty and Jake Wesley Rogers.
Clips are going up and being taken down as we speak. Apparently the show is being turned into a TV special so stay tuned on that. Fans who were there say Cher said “I’ll see you soon” which they took to mean a new tour. But it could mean anything.
Anyway, I thought it would be a good time to do a news rollup of articles (old and current) I’ve come across over the last few years that have been stuck languishing in my phone’s browser tabs. I had over 200 tabs open as a kind of to-be-read-later list. Now that I’ve culled out all the Cher articles and dead links (pages and even whole websites now gone), I’m down to 124.
Sigh. I categorized them.
Movies
Let’s start with this young YouTube film aficionado who does video reviews, in Cher’s case her whole oeuvre. Nora! has watched every Cher movie and talked about the experience, all of which is interesting. I mean just hearing how young Cher fans see Cher movies differently than we did in the theater. Also, Nora has interesting thoughts about even movies we don’t enjoy, like Faithful. Spoiler alert: she liked it. I equate this to my thoughts about the movie Suspect. Sometimes there’s a fan out there who sees something nobody else does.
Nora astutely notices (and why haven’t we?) how Good Times is basically Sonny’s movie with Cher appearing only as a minor character. (To answer her befuddlement about this: it’s because he pretty much wrote the thing.) Nora calls out Chastity for having a “nothing story” and “no real plot,” that it’s just basically “Cher walking around and pontificating” which pretty much sums up that movie. But she gives those films redeeming points for Cher fashion.
Nora comments on what an uphill climb it must have been for a pop icon to become a serious actress because “society doesn’t let women be complex and multi-faceted.” Truth.
She finds a “weird looming element of racism that is never explained” in Silkwood. I completely missed this (and can’t even locate it in memory) and so I will watch it again to see what I can see. She calls out Silkwood’s “extreme de-glamming effort” on Cher. She focuses on “the emotional stuff” in Cher’s performances and quotes the L.A. Times in noting Cher’s ability to reveal depths underneath. This is helpful for me when trying to figure out how to write about Cher in her movies, not being a film critic and all.
It’s interesting to see how a younger person scoffs at the whole Cher, Sarandon, Pfeiffer love-lines plot in The Witches of Eastwick (“how three queens fall for Nicholson”) . As Gen-X kids we did not do this. We remembered Jack Nicholson as a sexy younger man and I guess we just started to suspend belief as he aged. Huh. Likewise, the character played by Dennis Quaid in Suspect annoyed her in ways that were novel to me. His audacity. We focused on the improbable illegality of his behavior, but not his audacity with Cher.
It’s great to hear Nora enthuse about Cher’s “career-defining role” in Moonstruck and the balance she struck between comedy and emotion. She calls Cher’s ability to continue with parts after the age of 40 in the 1980s an “astonishing accomplishment.” She expresses surprise at the good reviews of Mermaids because it “seems like the kind of movie male critics love to hate on.” This I think speaks more to the increasingly misogynist manosphere Nora grew up around as opposed to male critics writing in the early 1990s. Asshole Male wasn’t such an institutionalized thing back then. (As Nora says earlier, “Lord, give me strength.”) She rightly notes the shifts in roles Cher gets after Mermaids, how Cher begins to play her own persona. And Nora is right to call the plot of Tea with Mussolini meandering but as a kind of memoir, maybe that was unavoidable. She ends the video in talking about Cher’s unique sense of agency in show business.
Nora also did some great research on Cher’s press at the time of her movie releases and I tracked down some of the articles she sourced and quotes from:
Let the Oscar Sweepstakes Begin! Our Fearless Forecasters Predict Who Will Will, Say Who Really Should (Washington Post, 9 April 1988) – I’ve always said Cher is not as popular in Los Angeles (her hometown) as she is in New York. I take that knowledge just from having lived in both places and attended multiple Cher concerts in both places at different venues (including the Broadway musical). The difference in enthusiasm is palpable, my favorite NYC overheard quote being “That Cher! I just love her!” L.A. is, ironically, too snobby for Cher. This article explains, for one, how the best movies rarely win Oscars. It’s a great overview of how the Oscars really work behind the scenes. It also articulates why Cher always gets snubbed by L.A. (and double the irony, she didn’t this particular year): “But, again, the overwhelming grass-roots response to “Moonstruck” — and Cher’s own fairly heavy media barrage — has all but eclipsed the early positive feeling for Hunter. Also, with “The Witches of Eastwick,” “Suspect” and “Moonstruck,” this is thought to be Cher’s year — especially since she was snubbed in 1985 (remember the Spider Woman dress?), when she was left off the list for Mask. Speaking of that dress, the only possible fly in the ointment here is that Hollywood is not really crazy about Cher. Yes, they think she has talent (finally). Yes, they respect her drive and determination to break through as an actress. But the sentiment is that she is too independent, too outspoken, too, well, tacky. They’d much rather give the award to Meryl Streep or Glenn Close, because even if they’re playing bums or psychos, those perpetual Oscar-baiters still have class, taste and legitimate acting credentials — all the things that appeal to Oscar’s sense of snobbery. And all things that Cher gloriously lacks.” And all which seems very rock and roll to me but oh wait…she’s usually snubbed there too.
“The Cher Conundrum: The Oscar Winner/Pop Diva/Exercise Goddess Talks About Acting, Relationships, Being Fortysomething and Other Serious Stuff” (Los Angeles Times, 3 November 1991) – This is a great article to follow the preceding because it further underscores how Cher is treated in L.A. by reporters who are just not that impressed. This is a particularly tough interview that pushes back on almost everything Cher says particularly about why she isn’t making more movies, and the conclusion of the piece seems to be that it’s due to a perfect storm between parts Cher turned down, difficulty with a few directors (Mask, Suspect and Mermaids), the infomercials (which historically have taken the most heat on this issue), and the fact that Cher just didn’t love the process of making movies. The interview then gets into comments about difficulties Cher was having with her mother (Georgia situations which occasionally used to show up in interviews but surprisingly were all but missing from the memoir last year). The article also misspells the name Sonny. Oy.
“Cher: ‘Women have always been sex objects and always will be’” (The Guardian, 7 November 2013) – I struggled on whether to put this in movies or music because it talks about the Closer to the Truth album and the legacy of “Believe” but also about the movie Burlesque. And it even occurred to me to consider what she was wearing for the interview: sweats or jeans (movie interview) or leather jacket, fishnets, tiny skirt and biker boots (music interview). But that felt reductive. And the comments about Burlesque were what Nora was referring to in her review.
More movie articles from my phone:
“The best singers turned actors of all time” (The Week, date unknown) – The article doesn’t really say why. Just that these people have skills in both areas. And that this is rare.
“Cher rejected Eric Roth’s biopic script” (Film Stories, 1 March 2024) – More news than scholarship but hey, it was hanging out in my phone. All I will add is that there are music stars and there are film stars and then there are films about music and film stars.
“Guardian writers on their ultimate feelgood movies” (The Guardian, 22 July 2025) – In a list that begins with Big Night, Rushmore and Amélie, I assumed Cher’s title would be Moonstruck would be the listed movie and was painfully wrong on that assumption. Here’s the link to the article’s full review of Burlesque by Guy Lodge where he agrees was a “less-than-seminal 2010 musical…a film with precisely zero complexities to unparcel, that exerts a strangely forceful hold on me just the same.” Also of note is the inclusion in this list of The Towering Inferno, which sticks in my mind because in Sonny’s book he talks about taking Raquel Welch to that movie on a date (after they met at a Christmas party hosted by Cher) and that they both agreed to leave early because they thought it was a terrible movie.
“Top 10 Sonny & Cher Songs” (Classic Rock History, 2020) – top 4 are good. “It’s the Little Things” should be higher. A few factual errors.
“Top 10 Cher Songs of All Time” (Classic Rock History, 2025) – Odd list. I don’t even think #10 is Cher’s best Diane Warren Cher song (the subject matter was already handled better by Elvis Costello, for one). “Take Me Home” at the top but no “Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves” or “Bang Bang”? Tsk tsk.
“Cher’s 30 Greatest Songs–Ranked!” (The Guardian, 18 October 2018) – a good interesting list that goes through all the years and all the things and puts “Gypsies” up on top.
“The 150 Greatest Albums Made by Women, Shocking Omissions: The Resilient Reinvention of ‘Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves” (NPR, 20 September 2017) – the album “was written to showcase and cultivate her signature contralto and the title track became her first No. 1 hit on Billboard Hot 100” (as a solo artist). “It even scored her a Grammy nomination for Best Pop Vocal Performance” (losing to Carol King’s Tapestry). The song “presented a darker, more powerful Cher, whose strength lies in her embodiment of the character.” Even Cher’s dislike of the song does not deter this writer (Désiré Moses), who said, “that’s exactly the sentiment that makes Cher, well, Cher.” Right! We’re under no obligation to agree.
“In Praise of Cher, the Self-Proclaimed Betty White of Rock and Roll” (Salon, 29 May 2021) – This one is by Annie Zaleski, the same rock journalist who did the write up for Cher’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee program essay and this year’s picture bio, I Got You Babe, A Celebration of Cher (which I still need to blog about). Great writing as always, “Although Cher is often viewed through the lens of a comeback narrative — among other things, she had to extricate herself from a bad business relationship with her late ex-husband, Sonny Bono, as well as climb back from solo career nadirs — this has softened into her being positioned as a beacon of resiliency.”
“The Number Ones: Cher’s ‘Believe’” (Sterogum, 4 July 2022) – “Less than a minute into her improbable comeback smash, Cher shatters. The moment happens when she sings the line ‘I can’t break through.’ On the word “can’t,” Cher’s voice atomizes, breaking into a billion tiny little shards, before coming back together. She sounds like a glitching-out robot, or like a kid singing into a fan. All throughout ‘Believe,’ her first #1 hit in a quarter-century, it keeps happening. Cher’s voice falls to pieces, and then it resolves.”
“Cher Sells Range of Music Assets to Irving Azoff’s Iconic Artists Group” (Music Business Worldwide. 2 August 2023) – “Cher is the fifth-ranked female artist with the most Billboard US Hot 100 charted singles….Cher is one of the world’s best-selling music artists. Launching her career in the 1960s as part of Sonny & Cher, the superstar made unprecedented strides in what had long been a male-dominated industry. Cher has sold more than 100 million records. Her three-year 325-show world Farewell Tour from 2003 to 2005 played to more than three million fans and became the most successful tour ever by any female artist.”
“Cher, 77, on her six-decade career: ‘I’m some sort of freak’” (New York Post, 20 October 2023) – NYC loves Cher. “…when it comes to taking on Mariah Carey for Christmas queendom: ‘I’m not gonna take over that spot,’ she said. ‘I’m kind of out of my league there.'”
“Cher Scores No. 1 Song on a Billboard Chart in Seventh Decade” (Billboard, 30 November 2023) – This article is in my phone because I sent it to my brother last week after my sister-in-law sent me a Cher drawing from the Canfield Ohio Fair and I asked what the art category was and my brother said “has-beens.”
“Inside Cher’s Stunning Malibu Mansion” (Show Biz Cheat Sheet, 5 January 2022) – “Every day when I wake up and look out my bedroom window I’m never not amazed.”
Two takeaways here. One, there are many more news stories out there than any one mere Cher scholar could keep up with.
And two, the categories of this list are a good study itself in demarking the areas of Cher’s cultural influence (in real time surfing the Internet). And the spread of articles across each category is telling in where the most interest seems to rest.
Although I would correct that in saying the articles in the movie section are the most laudatory, so even though that category is small in number the section is still pretty packed with cultural value.
First of all, my condolences to all the Ozzy Osbourne fans out there. I have a few friends in mourning today, including my friend Julie, a.k.a. Coolia, who is a huge Ozzy fan, collector and attendee of many of his shows. My mentor in many new online things, Coolia inspired one of my earliest online handles (before Nerdia even), which was RemovedCherRib after her OzzyBat (our handles from scandals). Anyway, Ozzy had many, many fans out there who are sad today so cyber hugs to them. For so many years, Ozzy seemed indestructible. He was also one of my very few celebrity sightings in Los Angeles. I crossed paths with him on the sidewalk once in Santa Monica during his reality TV show days as I was heading to the promenade.
When In Rome
Cher has been spotted. She performed a few weekends ago at the Dolce & Gabbana’s 2025 Alta Moda event in Rome on 12 July and then was seen around and about at parties and on the go.
Cher Universe has posted bits of Cher’s performance edited together. It’s interesting how they had dancers pose as a kind of soft paparazzi (to the music of “Bang Bang”) to begin everything, especially considering they were in Rome, the birthplace of the term paparazzi.
Cher starts by lip synching (there are a few mistakes) to “Song for the Lonely” in a big puffy jacket over a black, sparkly vest (it almost looks bullet proof) and a kind of grass-green sparkly pantsuit. She’s wearing a long blonde wig.
Cher then talks for a bit about how she came to be involved in the movie Tea with Mussolini. She leaves to change outfits and a solo male dancer does a flamenco to the introduction to “Dov’è L’amore.” This also appears to be a lip sync, especially since there seem to be some hiccups with the backing audio when she exits the stage. At least the backing instrumentation is new for these songs. The hairstyle is the same here, only black and she’s in an outfit similar to the “Dov’è L’amore” video. I keep forgetting what a great song this is.
Finally, Cher returns again in her hole-fit (the latest incarnation anyway) and lip syncs “Turn Back Time” and “Believe.”
The trip produced lots of shots of Alexander Edwards and Cher having a bit of Roman romance, which was very sweet. Hopefully, Cher got a break from family issues to work and play with friends.
Cher Food
A few months ago I received a message that Microsoft Publisher will no longer be supported. This means, for one, no more Cher zines. But it also means I now have to rescue my prior zine content (electronically-speaking) from my old Publisher files. I had already planned to start publishing some of my food-related articles from past zines and creating a new food section on the Cher Scholar site.
And that new section exploded like a batch of hot liquid from the top of an out-of-control blender. I ended up breaking up the existing Sonny & Cher (and family) recipe page into multiple pages. And while I was at it, I’ve cooked three more recipes from the Cooking with Cher cookbook by Andy Ennis, all which were a home run.
To be honest, I’m at a disadvantage when I make these celebrity recipes. For one, I’m a vegetarian and also not a low-fat diet. So sometimes I make modifications that don’t match the true historical experience if the recipe. Secondly, I constantly make mistakes. Not as many as I used to make before a few years making dinner with Hello Fresh, but still plenty of mistakes. So my results should not be taken as the value of these recipes. I’m doing my own thing here.
The Original Sonny & Cher Recipes Page https://www.cherscholar.com/sonny-bono-recipes/
It’s the spot for most of Sonny’s recipes I’ve been able to find and the cookbooks that feature Sonny and or Cher. It also contains the link to the Mike Douglas cooking spot from 1969 and expanded information about Sonny’s restaurants and food ventures.
Movie Food https://www.cherscholar.com/movie-food/
This is rabbit hole. I’m sure there’s more to add here but I had some basic information about Mermaids food from a promo cookbook. Then I remembered those Moonstruck eggs! And then more foods as seen in Witches of Eastwick, Moonstruck, Mermaids, Good Times and the 1969 movie Chastity. Plus bonus links to movie drinking games!
The Jack Nicholson Cher Muffin-Off https://www.cherscholar.com/the-jack-nicholson-cher-muffin-off/
On 4 April 2004 I had a small dinner party in Los Angeles with my friend mentioned above and Ape Culture co-editor Julie Wiskirchen. For Cher Zine 2, we had a cookoff between the cookbooks Cooking for Jack and Cooking for Cher.
Progeny Recipes https://www.cherscholar.com/recipes-of-the-children/
Last night I made Chaz Bono’s Italian Spinach and Onions dish and Elijah Allman’s Mustard-Caper Burgers. Both turned out great. It felt like a good time to send good vibes to Cher kids via their foods.
Updates to the 1970s Variety Shows
First off, my many, many thanks to Cher scholars Jay Pickering and Barbara Lorenz for their help this month cleaning up the TV Variety Shows page. Jay helped me update The Sonny & Cher Show episodes 19 and 31. And Barbara helped me revamp all the re-airings based on better information she had, which included reminding me of the fact that the Sonny & Cher shows were syndicated in the early 1980s. (I think I assumed that was just some weird dream I had or strange St. Louis vortex I was in when I made cassette tapes of those airings (and then repressed it completely).
Anyway, we’ve cleaned up the episode guide main page to include a summary of all the re-airings and made edits to a ton of the episodes thanks to Barbara’s materials and notes from watching the shows during their first airings.
I’ve also gone through Cher’s YouTube channel to replace missing or taken-down videos. Cher has been great about restoring some long-lost clips of musical numbers and I was about a year behind linking relinking to them. And I missed some truly great never-re-aired numbers:
The restored video of Cher singing “You Turn Me On” from Cher, episode 20.
Barbara also corrected me on a song title which led to my finding the video for “You Make Me Feel Brand New,” the solo from The Sonny & Cher Show, episode 2.
Is this an embarrassment of riches? (More like tender mercies, tbh.)
We have three new Cher books on the horizon (at least), not to mention part 2 of Cher’s memoir, if she meets the deadline. She has many more years of her life to cover in part 2 (the years 1980 to 2025) but less family history…so who knows what that word count will be. If it’s a real juicy part deux, maybe cooler heads will prevail and we’ll get a part 3.
A girl can dream.
I Got You Babe, A Celebration of Cher by Annie Zaleski, forward by Cyndi Lauper
Cyndi Lauper will be writing the forward. That’s good news. We’ve been waiting for this new picture book for a while. Zaleski wrote Cher’s essay in the 2024 RnR HoF program and she did a good job so I’m looking forward to this.
The book will be released next Tuesday, 6 May 2025 and it also happens to be the last thing I had pre-ordered from Amazon, thereby ending my final purchase with that website.
If you haven’t yet ordered the book, consider ordering from bookshop.org, which also does extensive mail-order but while helping to support a local bookstore of your choosing.
Style Codes: Cher, A Guide to Dressing Like a Fashion Icon by Natalie Hammond
I found this one today while looking for the other two books on the list. This one comes out 14 October 2025. The description says the 196-page book contains:
“inspiration and practical advice garnered from the many looks and bold wardrobe of Cher….[her] timeless glamour, unique sense of style, and famous long dark locks have inspired generations. From statement bell bottoms to studs and embellishments to her signature leather looks, Cher’s star quality is unmistakable. In each chapter, you will learn how to develop your own personal style, guided by interviews and fabulous photographs that capture the quintessential aura of Cher’s fashion legacy. Embrace the power of taking risks with artistic makeup, bold colors palettes, and avant-garde designs. Style Codes: Cher is more than just tips and tricks to help elevator your wardrobe. It’s a call to believe in and fully cherish who you are and who you want to be.”
So “a call to believe in and fully cherish who you are and who you want to be” if who you are and want to be is exactly like Cher. Oy.
We were recently talking on this blog about the Australian Uber Eats commercial and the image of Cher on the cannon (which just made me check the spelling of that word which made me think about the other word and how Cher is so often not considered “part of the canon,” any canon; but in fact she is often commandeering it). But anyway, that image is famously a phallic symbol for many people, although ironically she is dressed casually in that scene and not scantily.
It doesn’t matter. The cannon pulls focus.
Anyway, this reminded me of when Mr. Cher Scholar and I were talking about Cher in the Half Breed outfit (which is his go-to outfit to describe Cher’s sex appeal). Apart from the problematic eroticism of the performative Indian-ness, Cher was just revealing so much skin. Howard Stern also commented on this in his interview with Cher last year, how it was literally embarrassing for him to see Cher perform in this outfit on her TV show while Stern was watching it in the same room with his parents.
Mr. Cher Scholar added something important though: it was also the fact that she was singing astride the horse. And we’re back to the canon again. I began to think this Half Breed moment was more universal for boys and teens who saw it in 1974.
We talk about sex appeal from time to time, Mr. Cher Scholar and me. What stars can tap into that sexuality better than others? Lady Gaga vs. Cher has come up a few times. “I get no sex off her,” says Mr. Cher Scholar, which sounds worse that it is. He means sex-appeal or rather “I don’t find her very sexy personally.”
So what is that mysterious thing that emanates sexuality on screen?
If I’m being honest, the Cher images I find sexier than phallic cannons and horses are from the Take Me Home album front cover or the I’d Rather Believe In You back cover (which showed the shadow of a naked breast!) because they seemed more playful in their sexuality, either because of the costume or the action.
But that’s the difference between human triggers, right there. Some people, like David Letterman, were turned on just seeing her big butt tattoo.
But that shot almost seemed too clinical for me. And the ink itself was not a factor in sexiness, in and of itself. Although her willingness to dip into her drawers to show them struck me as very sexy.
Those acting-era, pubic-adjacent photos felt defiantly daring to me. I never forgot them. I got tired of the whole tattoo thing, especially now that they’re ubiquitous. Besides, my Dad has one. Automatically out of the sexy category forever. (More on this below.)
Cher can be effortlessly sexy, even in paparazzi shots and unstaged photos and I think that’s no small part of her appeal:
Women artists are often accused of selling sex with their music. And there’s a whole fleet of women artists who either keep the makeup on and fight it (Pat Benetar) or lose the makeup and go gritty with maybe only eyeliner if anything (Patti Smith, Chrissy Hynde) or women who take it to a drag-queen level but still maintain street cred (Dolly Parton) or women who try to have it both ways, their lipstick and their badassery (Madonna, Cher). Women who are somewhere in the mix of all this (P!nk).
While I was trying to sort through all this I was also reading some academic anthologies about fandom and the kinds of fans (for a larger Cher project). I’ve been re-reading my marginalia to try and zero-in on how the material relates to Cher specifically (and fandom generally). One book was called The Adoring Audience, a book of essays edited by Lisa A. Lewis. And there I was reminded of the double standard around displays of sexuality for both the artists and their fans.
Women are accused of playing the sex card more often than men (which doesn’t feel true) and female fans are also accused of focusing on sexuality more often than male fans do, what with their love of boy bands, their focus on shirtless, pinup pics (which also doesn’t feel entirely true).
You could argue women face more pressure to display sexuality in performances but you can see just by perusing any teen magazine that most of the pinups are men…marketing their sexuality happily, without much pressure to do so.
As Sonny’s TV show character Alvie might say on Sonny & Cher’s later-day variety show, “turn to any Tiger Teen Hit Beat Bop Parade Magazine” and you’ll see all those male pinups. And sure, those magazines may cater to the girls but I saw plenty of college dorm rooms with pinups and posters of sexy ladies that were gotten somewhere. We all had ‘em.
By the way, I think Sonny understood the value of those teen magazines, which is why maybe Sonny & Cher were in so many of them, embedded into them in some cases. And at the same time you might argue he often tried to tamp down the sex appeal of Cher (as his wife), watering it down in things like the movie Chastity or maybe just not watering her blossoming sex appeal at all. So then Richard Avedon in Vogue Magazine and Bob Mackie had to come along and sexploit the situation. Cher seemed grateful about it. She said before Avedon and Mackie, no one considered her to be sexy.
In the book of essays mentioned above there are a series of excerpts from Cheryl Cline from Bitch Magazine and she goes into the selling of the male sex in those teen magazines.
“Rock stars are sexy. Surely this is not a novel idea? Men can mumble in their beards about the ‘goddamn Tom Jones syndrome’ all they want, but I ask you: isn’t there a hell of a lot of good material for sex fantasies in rock’n’roll?…Playgirl pales by comparison….peddles a narrow assortment of universally handsome, clean-cut, well-formed male model types. Nothing as weird as Ozzy Osbourne, or as sinister as Billy Idol, or as fat as Meatloaf, or as misshapen as Ian Dury, or even as, ahem, old as Mick Jagger.”
I would have to agree with her about Playgirl, which I had to buy surreptitiously as a teen in order to read a Cher interview in it. (I swear, Mr. Paperback Bookstore Sales Clerk, I’m buying it for the articles!!) Like male strip shows designed by men, the magazine was not very sexy. But I did spend a lot of time drawing that conclusion…you know, to be really, really sure.
Cline continues, quoting Lori Twersky:
‘”Many rock star crazed girls have a wide variety of desires. It’s not unusual to find pictures of Shaun Cassidy, Roger Daltrey, Meatloaf, Pat Simmons, and Mikhail Baryshnikov on the same wall.’
.…And what does Playgirl serve up? Tom Selleck. Look at any copy of the sleazier rock magazines and you’ll find at least as many real hot photos of the men as you would in Playgirl. Rock stars are hardly averse to playing the sexpot in the pages of magazines, in posters, in ads, on stage, in videos…it’s all soft core porn, to be sure, but hey, it’s pretty good soft core porn.”
So female pop stars aren’t the only ones who traffic in sexpot. And aren’t we all the better for it? So why are we giving men more agency in this activity? Women are the pressured ones, men are not?
This reminds me that a few years ago I wrote a poem (or part of a poem) about how my mother used to make my bed every day while I was in high school and in doing so she had to face the 3D crotch of a certain rock star on a poster every morning while she was making that bed. What she must have been thinking as she did this? I compared it to me as an adult first viewing a picture of my Dad while he was stationed in the Philippines, out in the sun wearing some low-slung pants and his very fit shiftlessness. What feelings did this picture evoke in my mother? I even asked my mother, did she find this picture sexy? The poem was about how each of us had been forced in this way to experience the unpleasantness of having to consider the other’s sexuality and gaze of desire.
Later Cline goes on to talk about the idea of class, foreignness or ethnicity, something outside of the “clean cut,” something unruly and she uses Elvis as an example of one person triggering all these fantasies in women:
“What made a rock music sexier than Tab Hunter was transgression.”
(It is now very ironic to me that the board game Mystery Date has only one sexy man behind the door: The Dud.)
I would argue that a similar thing was going on with Cher: a hint of ethnicity, not your blonde, clean-cut girl, the symbology of all that hair, and the essential unrulyness. The mysterious, possibly slightly-dangerous, untamable Cher.
And speaking of the female artists who revolted against selling sexiness and reverted instead to playing with the boys, adopting their cultural cues, there are also the female fans who do the exact same thing, the ones who take great pains to appear as if they’re “one of the boys” by focusing more on the music than the performative bodies. They would never squeal, for example, these girls. They have internalized all the criticism of female fandom and co-opted the culture of reserve.
So as a female audience you’re enticed to get turned on by the performance but then you’re disparaged if you do.
In fact, you’re disparaged if you like sexy artists at all. Because isn’t it supposed to be about the music?
But that’s the sad little secret. If one has to distance themselves from their own sexuality, how rock and roll is it?
I like to see a full spectrum of human (consenting) sexuality on display, from tomboy to full-on glam girl, from effeminate to macho, and different looks for different occasions because (and beyond the gender-academics, didn’t Drag U teach us this?) all sexuality is performative. And, in its best display, playful.
Which goes back to why some stars aren’t sexy. As Mr. Cher Scholar would say, “they’re trying too hard.”
Cher’s movie career and television career have given us a little bit of Cher in many different sexualities. And it’s been fun. She’s never been locked into anything. Which is very, very sexy.
As a female fan of both male or female artists, I refuse to check my squeals or trump up much respect for those who do.
As a friend of other fans, many who are people in marginalized groups, people who are vulnerable to this kind of dismissal for freely expressing what they are turned on by, I want freedom for them. They should be allowed to show enthusiasm for the human body without being disparaged as unserious fans, especially when sexuality is completely baked into the whole shebang.
Here is Cher as the very sexy showgirl. And how very seriously sexy she is, too.
Due to recent events starting a few years ago, I started moving from X to Facebook. Then I completely cancelled my X (its owner has been trolling my family members; I really couldn’t stay) and moved to Facebook, knowing that wasn’t a very good alternative. But at least Bluesky (a more healthy place for former Tweeters) was a viable space for short form posts. Facebook really has no similar space out there in the world and many people rely on it for their businesses.
I, however, don’t. So I didn’t have a good excuse to stay there. Especially after hearing details from the the book Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams and the international malfeasance Facebook is causing worldwide. So I have now given up Amazon, X/Twitter and am far down the path of extricating myself from Google and Facebook. It’s not like we didn’t once live our lives without them.
Change is hard but it can also be fun. More on that below.
This is all to say I won’t be posting notices about Cher Scholar Blog on Facebook anymore. I’ll be doing that on Bluesky and Substack. I’ll also be publishing Substack-only articles, longer-form pieces that don’t fit either on Cher Scholar or Big Bang Poetry. Previously, I’ve had no space for that kind of thing.
I’m very happy with Bluesky and so far Substack feels almost like a clearing of the mind when you consider its interface compared to the noise of Facebook. It feels refreshing. The first thing I did there was to type in “Cher” to findcontent. That’s always how I learn a new research or technology tool. I type “Cher” into it.
I found some very good things. And some sassy, good writing, like the early pre-2000s Internet.
Unlike Bluesky, Cher fans were on Substack years before I got there. (I’m still waiting to find my Cher people on Bluesky.) A few pieces are about fans discovering Cher media for the first time.
Mostly he doesn’t like the 1960s stuff. He calls Look at Us “among the longest 36 minutes of my life” and after that he would try no more S&C records, But the 1960s solo records also sound “monotonous” to him and he didn’t know the covers on those albums He does like the “musical spaghetti” of “Bang Bang” and he says, “Cher always kills a story-based song.” The first album he likes much is With Love, Cher because it’s where Cher is “really starting to sound like herself.” He also likes “You’d Better Sit Down Kids” which is “fun, sad and a little kooky.” He likes the artwork of Backstage and a few of the songs there. But the Jackson Highway album, he feels, is where “Cher is free from Sonny’s production…everything [he did] felt so flat prior to this.” He really likes “the twang” on that album.
Oh and Cher Scholar gets a shout-out there so that’s nice.
Like her movies: novelist Kerry Winfrey had a Cher Summer of Movies in 2024. She describes her experiences watching the movies (and other Cher things) with her husband and son. I particularly like the irreverent way she writes movie reviews, which is very funny and knowledgeable both. And she’s a novelist so the writing is good.
Silkwood: https://substack.com/home/post/p-145674456
Winfrey marks the beginning of Cher’s career here. But Cher would say it was the preceding film version of the Broadway play Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean. I would put the beginning at Good Times and Chastity a few decades earlier. Why leave them out?
Winfrey talks about how hard Silkwood is to find (life-hack: she gets them from the library). Her “gentle roasting” style is very addictive. She describes it as “when you love something with your whole heart and are also making fun of it just a little bit.” But the Cher love comes through loud and clear, which makes these reviews a very good example of audience reactions to Cher in these movies, especially a woman’s reaction.
“This movie was harrowing and emotional…and still quite fun in parts,” she says and then she talks about the great cast and Cher’s role as “a butch lesbian,” (a soft butch I would say). “This is a pride month watch for two reasons: Cher in general and Cher as a lesbian.”
This paragraph is typical of Winfrey’s style:
“Kurt Russell is, as always great. Have you ever seen Kurt Russell in a role and thought, “no thanks,” because I certainly haven’t. I’m always happy to see him. He wears very low=slung jeans and, at one point, pours a beer over his head….He’s a flawed character and he’s a character that knows the importance of reduce/reuse/recycle.”
That’s adorable film reviewing right there. She also sees things in the movies that I’ve missed. Like Meryl Streep’s mullet.
“Like, what a cast! The tree of them together [Streep, Russel, Cher] light up the screen! There’s just so much hair!”
She talks about Craig T. Nelson’s work as a heavy in movies and I didn’t even realize E. Katherine Kerr is the same person who is in Suspect. Playing different social class of character, too. How amazing. Winfrey catches the cross over of John Mahoney in Suspect and Moonstruck. But if she watches Come Back to the Five and Dime, she will see the cross-over of Sudie Bond there and in Silkwood.
Her reviews are also full of empowering Cher asides, which I will catalog here.
“At one point Cher starts dating a makeup artist but it turns out she’s a makeup artist at a funeral parlor and she’s making Cher look like a corpse. Hollis was like, “What was that whole plot in there?’ and listen, he’s my husband and I love him, but sometimes I don’t know what he’s thinking. Why wouldn’t that little detail be in there? Why wouldn’t I want to see Cher date a funeral home makeup artist?”
I love reviews like this.
She quotes Roger Ebert’s review at the time expecting the film to be a predictable, angry political expose but that it was really an unpredictable character-driven story where the villains are mysteriously drawn and not cartoonish.
Then there’s an aside about Winfrey working out to Cher music. “Have you ever power-walked to ‘Song for the Lonely?’ Because I have and it was beautiful.”
Winfrey’s son was shocked at seeing Cher’s entire butt in the “Turn Back Time” video. and she says, “it’s never too early to start talking about Cher.” Her son also asked,
“why did that sailor grab Cher’s leg?” and I responded, “I guess he just loves Cher.” But then I remembered that we need to teach our children about the importance of consent, so I added, “but you shouldn’t grab someone’s leg, even if it’s Cher…especially if it’s Cher.”
She begins this review talking about how all the moms who are hot for Sam Elliott. She says she didn’t watch Mask in high school “because I would have, as they say, made it my entire personality.” This tracks with my behavior after seeing the movie, how I went out to find white sleeveless t-shirts and shoelace necklaces.
She focuses on the mom aspects of the movie which I only half-considered on previous viewings, how the kids are mean to Rocky but “he has something all those other jerky kids don’t have: a biker gang as a family.” She compares these bikers to the romance novel trope where a group of “traditionally very masculine guys is actually made of up romantic softies.” She also highlights Rocky’s transitioning from a little boy who collects baseball cards to a teenager who likes girls and how touching and precious she finds this. Very interesting point there.
You can tell from the review that she’s watching the director’s cut because the scene with Cher singing at the camp site is back in and Bruce Springsteen songs are on the soundtrack (which was Rocky’s favorite artist). Of Rusty, she says, “She is such a tough, take-no-shit, badass mom at times (I mean, she’s Cher, of course she is) but does she have a job?
I’ve thought about that too. How do they pay the rent? Cher is always “making morning smoothies while listening to what sounds like my Spotify yacht rock playlist.” And also, Rusty also cannot drive a car….whenever there’s a a lawn or a curb, she’s gonna drive over it. She can’t even park in her own driveway–diagonally on the front lawn it is!…No curb can contain her.”
And Winfrey claims “You’ve never seen a more attractive biker couple.” And then she makes fun of one of Gar’s t-shirts in the movie, the one that says “Mustache Rides” (which was lost on me in 1986. Winfrey says, “literally anyone else in this shirt would look like a drunk frat boy.”
Other good sentences:
“In my experience, knowing a lot about the Trojan War was never a ticket to popularity in high school.”
Upset when Rusty ignores Rocky’s new poem, Winfrey says, “I know she doesn’t’ have time to read parent books….but come on.!”
She does respect Rocky figuring out how to ride all day on the bus across Los Angeles to get to see Laura Dern again: “Things were so much harder in the time before cell phones and Google.”
She says some say the movie is too long. I didn’t realize this. I hadn’t heard. But that “art doesn’t have to be efficient” and she makes a case for Nothing Happens cinema.
Winfrey is surprised this role did not earn Cher an Oscar win, not to mention just a nomination. She feels this is a better role than Moonstruck. I’ve been saying that for years. It’s more of an emotional tour-de-force. Winfey notes that Rocky’s puppy grows bigger in the background while the story plays out, which is a nice touch.
This was also a hard movie to find, Winfrey says. The library again.
“I know we have a lot going on right now as a country, but at some point we need to look at why so many Cher films are almost impossible to watch. Something’s not right here. I think Cher is being silenced, you guys.”
And she leaves us with this bombshell at the end, artist Jens Lekman having songs about this movie. Who knew this factoid?
From Wikipedia:
Gradually, he adopted the pseudonym Rocky Dennis, a name he borrowed from the protagonist in the movie Mask. Under this name, he began releasing limited edition CD-R discs, the first of which was 2001’s The Budgie. In the early 2000s, he sent a collection of the songs to the American record label Secretly Canadian, who contracted him.
From 2000 to 2003, Lekman recorded and released much of his material privately on CD-R. Because one of his songs during this time was titled “Rocky Dennis’ Farewell Song to the Blind Girl”, inspired by the movie Mask. Lekman was mistakenly referred to as “Rocky Dennis”. Lekman says that it was a “mistake”: “someone thought that was my real name cause I had a song about him, and then radio picked up on it, and I never had a chance to change it,” He put the confusion to rest with his Rocky Dennis in Heaven EP (2004).
“I wish Cher was my lawyer” Winfrey says and I had to think about that for a minute. Would this be good or bad?
“Yesterday, May 20th, was Cher’s birthday. A national holiday, if you ask me!”
She compares Suspect to the courtroom drama And Justice for All but :instead of Al Pacino being hot, we got Cher being hot.”
Winfrey notices a lot of the outfits Cher rocks in this review: “absolutely rocking a beret,” and she “looks amazing in all her oversized sweaters” (she totally does), and “Cher looks amazing in glasses” and how great she looks between the library stacks talking to Dennis Quaid, “and at the end “where she’s sitting at her desk and looking like the baddest bitch in town.”
Cher as a character: “beleaguered and tough.
D.C. as a character: “the D.C. of Suspect is a nightmare. We’re, like, five minutes in and we’ve already had a suicide, a murder, and a carjacking.”
So true.
She makes over Cher’s bad chalkboard handwriting and about Liam Neeson, “this hostile murder suspect [who] is just betting hotter and hotter” with every progressive clean-up scene. And Winfrey tracks all the ethics violations, including Dennis Quaid having to sleep with E. Katherine Kerr: “That’s honestly so much work. Good for him.”
Instead of jury-tampering there’s Cher-tampering and about Quaid, “no sequester can hold him.
“I screamed when he grabbed her and scared my son…I had to be like, “I’m sorry, someone was hurting Cher in a movie, but everything’s okay, go back to bed!”
About Cher’s solving the mystery at the end: “I don’t really know, but I believe she can do just about anything so I’m willing to overlook any gaps in logic.” Winfrey affirms Cher was believable as a lawyer and I do too.
She reminds us Cher “was in Suspect, The Witches of Eastwick and Moonstruck all in the same year. “We used to be a proper country.”
This is the last movie I could find that Winfrey reviewed.
“I’m not sure this is her best performance (she’s been great in everything, and different in everything…we love a queen with range), it’s certainly her biggest performance. I’d say her star-making performance, if Cher wasn’t already a star….the quintessentail Cher role…she’s luminous, lighting up the screen with that husky voice and je nais said Cher.” No one else could play this role.”
Winfrey talks about how Cher can play an Italian character (and notes the other non-Italian actor, Olympia Dukakis) and that Cher “can play any identity. She basically wrote a song about it.”
What is this song she speaks of?
She talks about love in New York City movies in the 1980s and mentions Crossing Delancy. I was once at my local tearoom on a book club night and I sat with two New Yorkers now living in Albuquerque. I asked them what movie they thought most reminded them of New York City and they answered Crossing Delancy. We talked about me living there in the late 1990s and I said the movie that most reminded me of my co-workers and my landlord was Moonstruck (especially the plastic runners and the plastic on the couch and the way they were less broadly Italian than I had been led to believe Italians were from the movies.)
I didn’t notice this before but Johnny asking Loretta to invite Ronny to the wedding was kind of pushy. “This is so much emotional labor to foist on Cher and she’s not even your wife yet!”
Winfrey goes into great detail about the “meet cute” (which is a ROM-COM term I had to look up) at the bakery. Chrissy and all the cast reacting to Ronny in great detail. She says this is one of the “greatest lines in the history of cinema”: “I lost my hand! I lost my bride! Johnny has his hand! Johnny has his bride!”
Winfrey says she taught her son to memorize those lines because “I do think it’s important for children to learn at least one Nicolas Cage monologue while they’re young, and if they don’t hear about Moonstruck at home, they’ll hear about it on the streets.”
When Loretta makes Ronny a steak, “we should all be so lucky as to have Cher makes us a steak.”
Winfrey then talks about the knocking over of the table in this scene: “Today’s romances could never. Point me to one single romantic comedy made in the last ten (fifteen?) years that has even on-tenth of the raw sexual chemistry that Cher and Nicolas Cage share in this scene”…and then she talks about male desperation in movies.
She then compares Ronny’s hotness (“He’s already knocked over multiple things”) to Johnny’s boringness (“I seriously doubt he’s toppled a table even once.”)
Winfrey then talks about characters who have to make tough ethical choices (Olympia Dukakis’s character) and Cher’s makeover.
“It’s pure elation whenever we get the chance to see Cher get glam again. It’s her natural state….she loses the gray hair and puts on some blood red lipstick, buys a new dress, and BAM! She’s Cher!…and she looks like a million bucks. And do you know what Ronny says when he sees her dress? He says “thank you.” This is the correct response.”
Back at Ronny’s place, Cage delivers what Winfrey says,
“I swear to you, the best monologue I’ve ever heard…this one is a romance novel….He has his little bowtie on. It’s snowing. Cher’s crying. Show me a better scene in cinema, I dare you.”
She then recites the whole monologue. Which is great indeed.
“Cher walks home in the morning looking the absolute hottest she’s ever looked, kicking a can down the street with the city…Name a better romance. You can’t. This one has it all: New York, Nicolas Cage, Italian food [that egg dish alone], opera, Dean Martin singing ‘That’s Amore,” a lot of dogs, and Cher..”
I quoted Kerry Winfrey a lot here just to show how she is very adept at showing us why Cher is so likable in the movies. So check out her other stuff on Substack and her novels at Goodreads.
Ford does random smackdowns of artists (Liza v. Aretha) with topics like Plastic Surgery of which he says you can look weird or old. but that “weird is people too.”
I like that he writes his way into his thoughts. As he begins she says, “Monocles in.”
He says there are only two movies of consequence for each of them, (Winfrey would beg to differ, as would I), Moonstruck, Witches of Eastwick, 9 to 5 and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. He says he didn’t make it through Silkwood and Mask. And of Mermaids and Mama Mia 2 he says, “Meh” which actually does map to my feelings. He says considering Burlesque would sink “the SS Mrs. Bono” and I wonder if he knows Christina Aguilera is about to be made that into live show. He happens to love Moonstruck.
He also reminds how great the 9 to 5 cast was. He scores Dolly and Cher evenly here. “It’s tight. Let’s move on.”
Of The Witches of Eastwick, he loves the polyamory aspect in a movie “before everyone was doing it, Jack Nicholson, in a role no other actor could have played” and he loves the Veronica Cartwright cherry scene. (I saw the movie with my high school friends and this was one of our favorite scenes as well.)
Ford also reminds us about Dolly’s two Golden Globe nominations.
Musically, Ford says Dolly and Cher are like peaches and pomegranates.
“Cher’s musical repertoire spans folk rock, disco, pop-rock, dance-pop; she put Auto-Tune on the map; and has died and risen from the ashes so many times, she might be our closest living embodiment to a phoenix ever….she has sold 140 millioin records (including 40 million with Sonny) and has had #1 singles in six consecutive decades.”
But he says he didn’t “become a believer until ‘Believe.'”
“Dolly is country music,” he says. “When she bleeds, Southern Comfort gushes out.” He notes Dolly’s monster songwriting credentials: about 3,000 written and 450 reordered. Dolly also has 11 Grammys to Cher’s one. But he equates Cher’s breadth to Dolly’s depth. Another tie.
Next is Philanthropy: Dolly’s Imagination Library (200 million books donated), The Dollywood Foundation. He says they both donated 1 million to Covid research. Dolly got publicly vaccinated and for doing so, “she’s a hero,” for setting an “example among demographics who [maybe wouldn’t].” Cher has contributed to AIDS research, poverty initiatives, solders and veterans, LGBTQ+,
“and then there’s the elephant….excuse me for just a moment, I have an onion to chop.”
The last contest is for “America’s Grandma” which was inspired by Betty White.
Betty White really did feel like America’s Grandma. Dolly is more like a fabulous Aunt. Cher is not even a family member, in my mind.
Ford says, “Dolly would be delighted; Cher might be annoyed.”
Yes and No. She would like her own grandchildren. She doesn’t need to be yours.
He reminds us they are in the same age. “Our two divas are class itself,” he says and note that on Cher…Special (1978), they “clearly like each other.”
He ends with, “Dolly is still America’s Grandma, but Cher will probably outlive us all and reinvent herself anew as singer babe mother gypsy tramp thief TV star mother KISS-groupie lesbian mermaid service member tarantula infomercial queen witch Italian-American Jewess nightclub owner singing grandmother Empress of the Universe.”
She reviews Joni Mitchell’s Blue, Marianne Faithful’s Broken English (it has a blue cover) and Madonna’s True Blue. She then, for some reason, moves over to Cher’s Heart of Stone. She talks about Cher’s look, her “striking countenance and deep eyes,” “unforgettable clothes, her eras and styles, “the folk style, soon she would become a mysterious gypsy, a powerful witch with her black cat, matured into a daring rocker in the 80s and the futuristic version at the turn of the millennium.”
“Like it or not, Cher’s Believe irrevocably changed the face of modern pop music.” He notes it topped the charts in over 20 countries and moved “upwards of 10 million units independently” and “is best know as the first certifiable smash shaped around autotune.”
He tells how the producers lied initially, said the song used the vocoder, “a technology pioneered by Kraftwerk in the 1970s. But that Autotune is in the average producer’s toolbox now. He calls out Daft Punk, Dua Lipa, Kanye West, and T-Pain for their work in Autotune.
“Music snobs can decry its ubiquity and gripe about how it’s “not real” singing, but the fact remains that much of the 21st century’s catchiest songs wouldn’t exist without Cher.”
He says, “there’s more to this record than “Believe” and goes on to talk about that.
“In an era where too much pop music takes itself too seriously, Believe is a fun, nostalgic antidote” and you can “sing along to that iconic warble.”
Another treatise on the song is found in Italian by Canzonette.
“There are songs that change the course of music history, and it almost always starts from an accident.”
“Cher’s career at the end of the century was (given for) over,” he says and he goes through her highs and “then oblivion again.” He talks about Brian Higgins’ years of (re)writing the song for demos and how Mark Taylor and Brian Rawling get involved, Then goes into the invention of the technology by Andy Hildbrand who was an electronic engineer and who developed algorithms for sonar to locate oil deposits and the seismic acoustics that led to Antares Technology, or the early version of the plugin “which would change the history of world music and which will cause huge fights between the old and the new generation.” (Canzonette positions the problem generationally. He might be right.)
He delves into it (and this is a Google auto-translation):
“Is using autotune right? Is it an effect or is it like doping in sport? What is the use of splitting singing lessons [if] there is a machine what intones you? (Now to be honest, I don’t believe the false myth that Autontune can fix anyone: you need a half idea, even a vague one, a rudiment of intonation so that the algorithm works as it does best. Of course, the more out of tune and the more you hear the correction, which then becomes a habit, a stylistic element, an identifier, an almost perennial color of the modern drifts of rap and pop–but this does not change the reality of the facts: it cannot fix all.)
There have been countless debates on the matter, a single truth or a solution that would please everyone has never surfaced because it is impossible, even just for an ideological reason, for two distant generations to find themselves…on common ground on something as fragile as technological progress. This is how systematically every x weeks we witness the format Singer From Another Era Who Says His Own Against Those Who Use Autontune, rightly or wrongly, independently.
Note 1: in all fairness, these fingers have the duty to underline how even in the 60s the guitar amplifier and distortion pedals were seen as the devil.
…
Setting zero sounds very robotic…in the following years the Autotune manual will call the Setting zero ‘Cher effect.’
He says Cher suggested trying a Roachford vocoder effect. Mark Taylor decided to try the new plugin…
“that thing that instantly makes Cher’s voice intonatissima in an algorithmic, cold robotic way. It looks like the vocoder, but a vocoder it is not….. we could talk about…how, even today, the piece sounds fresh and innovative, despite the sound of Autotine is now absolutely everywhere, from trap to new records crooner like Bublé.
“…there are passages, fore example the initial one ,”I can’t break through,” in the first verse in which Cher’s voice breaks, she becomes roboticfor the first time in the history of music in an audible and desired way and at the same time is extremely emotional…”
He notes when Kayne West “abandons the alpha male character” to use it, suggesting the use of Autotune is gendered and feminine. Which judging the amount of male rappers who use it…
“If you want to know other and further modern evolutions of the Autotune: turn on the radio.”
This is a style and fashion article from an Armenian perspective. Vee calls the 1970s Cher’s “defining decade” and she recalls her first Cher impression, “watching my mom get ready in Armenia” while listening to “Believe” and “Heart of Stone.” She says Cher is one of Armenia’s few international stars. She traces her quirky, counterculture style of the 60s,to the TV star and fashion icon of the 70s.
“(Sonny was also there.)”
Here is her gallery of Cher 70s fashion kills:
She then mentions that the solo spots of Cher’s variety shows became increasingly, elaborately staged. Here is her gallery of looks from the TV shows:
She remarks about how Cher thrived in “predominantly white entertainment industry” and mentions the work of Bob Mackie and she makes what is probably the most astute summary of Cher’s impact of the fashion culture:
“She became a walking revolution in fashion, redefining what it meant to be glamourous, edgy and unapologetically individualistic…an aesthetic that fused Old Hollywood grandeur with a daring, futuristic edge. Her style wasn’t about looking good–it was a statement of self-expression, definance and liberation.
Cher rejected the understated norms of the the time in favor of extravagance and risk. Her looks weren’t just clothes–they were moments of performance art, each outfit telling it’s own story….with her sharp cheekbones, almond-shaped eyes and long black hair, she embraced her erotic features which stemmed from her Armenian heritage…a powerful act of self-empowerment.
Her wardrobe inspired generations of artists and designers. From the daring cut-outs seen on modern runways to the maximalist red-carpet looks seen on our favorite stars.
Her story encourages to embrace change, own your unique identity…she proved that beauty, success and identity are not one-size-fits all…true icons don’t just reflect the culture, they shape it.”
Wow. That was great!
As I said on a recent Substack article, the days of us all being on the same social platform are probably doing away for all of us, Cher, herself, isn’t very active on X/Twitter anymore, where she used to be one of everyone’s favorite Tweeters. Or as much on Facebook either (she even removed her account there for a time) and now she’s more on TikTok or Instagram maybe, but those platforms have their own issues. Cher has never been very good at posting her news from her own sites anyway. Fan clubs and sites tend to get their news elsewhere. Who knows how long those fans will stay on their platforms. The winds of change are afoot.
I’ve been talking to some Cher fans who believe we’re in a new golden age of Cher, starting from the release of the Funko Pop dolls to the record re-releases through the Christmas album, the Forever compilation, the Hall of Fame moment, the memoirs and now this year’s out-of-the-blue Uber Eats commercial, which was smarter and more self-depreciating than anything Cher has done in a while. Not to mention being hip and well made.
If we digress a moment and go back and count the prior golden ages:
New Artist Phase: 1965-66, Sonny & Cher are the latest music fad
Sonny’s Killer Comeback Phase: 1971-76, TV star and Cher becomes one of the most photographed women in the world
Strong Woman Comeback Phase: 1985-89, Cher becomes a popular and respected actress and charts with a new string of MTV-era hits
Breaking-Age-Records Comeback Phase: 1998-99, I would argue that “Believe” was more of an intense blip (based on one hit song) but it was the most intense of worldwide, culture-dominating blips so it counts
And so this would be the fifth golden age, the Icon Phase (and with humor; so nice we don’t have to deal with all that self-seriousness!)
I’ve been waiting so long to talk about this ad campaign but we had so much else to do first. Here we go…
We are at Cher’s house presumably with many depictions of international luxury, the ornate walls with hidden cupboards, gold records hanging, one of Cher’s iconic pirate outfits on a mannequin (very Australian choice), portable racks of clothes (not something normal people have), high ceilings, jewels hanging randomly off things.
In the second shot we make out that we’re in Cher’s bedroom. She’s looking at herself in the mirror and we see her bed behind her. She’s wearing a now-iconic Cher outfit, the short skirt, embellished leather jacket (in this case studded holes), big hoop earrings. Her own song, “Turn Back Time,” is playing in the background and she’s humming along. We see a closeup of her ordering from Uber Eats, with gem-glued nails, on her smartphone. She types “Time Machine” and you can see her last search was for “antiaging cream.” (Psst! She’s just like us; this is also a foreshadow of the claims of her agelessness to come.) She turns around when the doorbell rings (it’s here already?!). We see her mirror is strewn with jewels.
(click to enlarge)
Cher exits ornate doors. Uber Eats has a diminutive green bag waiting there with a time machine inside. (The foley on her books is too much and not synced, but that’s my only single quibble.) She wistfully asks to be taken to the 80s. (Cher herself is like a time-machine and so this is the most magical of scenarios.) She blissfully awaits the time travel.
But when the time machine is done we see that Cher should have been more specific in her request. We get the best sight gag of the commercial: Cher sitting astride a cannon being pulled by men. It’s the 1680s not the 1980s. It’s now a fish-out-of-water gag with Cher dressed like modern Cher (but with some 80s-throwback references) interacting with technically Restoration Period (I looked it up and asked around) villagers.
This is a big joke about an iconic moment in her 1980s video for “Turn Back Time.” The villagers are caked with grime, exhausted-looking and very perplexed. Cher exclaims, “This isn’t the 80s!” A villager says “Tis the 1680s.” Bad weather looms in the background. A woman looks at Cher closely and with disgust and says, “She’s both young and old…at the same time!” This is a joke about Cher’s face, a joke somewhere between her genetic youthfulness and plastic surgery controversies.
In the background an old woman stuck in a pillory (presumably for being deemed a witch) screams, “She’s a witch!” (After all, only a witch could stay so young looking.) A Ye Olde music band gasps in dismay. Cher defends herself badly, “I’m not a witch, I’m an icon.” (This is funny because Cher is always dismissive about her status as an icon. So she often jokes sardonically about being an icon.)
A somewhat flamboyant judge deems Cher a witch immediately without much of a legitimate trial. (There are a lot of bits in this ad about projection or a sort of defensive judging outward; Cher is also being scapegoated for appearing so strange to them). The band furiously plays “Turn Back Time” which is the second funniest piece of this commercial. That they would know the song, that these performers throw themselves into playing it so enthusiastically.
Immediately Cher finds herself being burned at the stake before the song is even finished. Cher shows no fear while being burned. She just wants to know if one of the villagers has taken her boots. “Are those my boots?” They pan up from the bedazzled knee-high boots as worn on a 1680s man (which is a nod to the first Cher drag moment). Note the man next to boots-guy. He is falling in love with Cher and will appear in a later extension of the commercial. The judge is dancing in his chair to the spectacle, (an early gay male Cher fan?) and the “witch” lady is out of the pillory and the first one to light the straw. Cher just looks annoyed. “This is ridiculous,” she says.
Cher is then back in her kitchen with an Uber Eats bag full of Thyme. The tag reads, “Time Machine No Thyme Yes.” Cher is cooking and humming her song.
In a season full of nostalgic celebrity Superbowl-era ads, this one stood out. Not a false note in it.
Since then, at least three shorts have come out, which is great because these are all fabulous characters to spend time with. For some reason these shorts are not on the Uber Eats YouTube account.
Maybe it finally rained, extinguishing the stake-burning, or maybe Cher won over the villagers but in these mini-ads she has escaped. In this short she is trying to teach the 1680s musicians how to play “Turn Back Time” but they go crazy with embellishments. They’re actually pretty good but Cher doesn’t like it and and is deflated at the end, saying just “No.” The tag at the end says, “Band No Bandages Yes” showing a bag full of bandage boxes.
Cher is in the middle of explaining to the “she-looks-young-and-old-at-the-same-time” woman what Uber Eats app is. Of course the woman has no cultural context for any of this and Cher is not explaining it very well and getting frustrated. “What’s a phone?” “It’s used to call people!” The woman calls out “Call people? Like ‘Good Morrow!'” Cher gives up and says. “I hate this place.” (as you would imagine Cher would). The ad ends with the tag, “Get almost almost anything.”
These shorts hint that Cher is somehow stuck in this era (maybe the time machine broke) and these frustrating conversations are ongoing.
It’s brilliant because it sparks your own imagination.
During the stake-burning, one of the villagers was falling for Cher. Let’s call him bad-teeth guy. He tries a pick-up line on Cher: “Dost thou have a map? For I keep getting lost in thine eyes.” (I can imagine the writer’s room full of these joke pitches: 1960s pickup lines!) And then he raises his eyebrows and winks at her. Cher says, “never gonna happen, honey” looking annoyed. The door bell rings. Off-screen we hear Cher say, “not a snowflake’s chance in hell” and the final tag reads “Romance No Roma Tomatoes Yes” with a bag full of fresh and canned tomatoes showing.
Australia’s Today Show did a behind-the-scenes interview with Cher in January with Reid Butler and they talk about Cher being called an icon. Cher says (endearingly), “I’m just a working girl.” (A lot of this commercial is about common perceptions of Cher.) Butler sees the commercial as full of “Ozzy humor…being not afraid to make fun of yourself.” Did that draw her to the ad? Cher says no but she loved the humor in it. She talks about her mother’s sense of humor.
They don’t answer the question of what drew her to the ad. Probably the money I would guess.
They talk about the canon-moment of the ad. “It was crazy. Look, it was silly and it was fun.” With a time machine, Cher says she would go back to her 40s (the 1980s) and how that was a great time for her. She says she felt like she was 20 and went from doing a play on Broadway to Silkwood and how things “just fell into place by accident.”
They then talk about Cher’s newly published memoir. And then about how rough 2025 has started and did Cher have some words for those of us who have been feeling down. Cher references her town in California and they show an image of the then-ongoing Los Angeles fires. Cher says she admires the LA spirit and “we’ll come back but people will have to work really hard.” Cher says she missed out on one of the benefits because she wasn’t decisive enough. They show footage of the devastation. She talks about the unfortunate national vs. state politics. “I can’t imagine how terrified people are,” she says.
They then move over to discussing Bob Mackie. They talk about Cher’s two favorite dresses, the 1986 Oscar F.U. dress and the 1974 Met Gala dress. The Australians call her “feisty and fabulous” and “every inch the icon.”
I keep fantasizing that I have moved to Australia and Cher is already there.
The Cher Show traveling musical is now in its second year around the U.S. The closest it has come to me has been Phoenix (or maybe Denver). And those cities are a 7-hour drive in either direction, far from really “close.” And this is not the kind of show I would travel farther than Kansas City to see. The first incarnation of the traveling show was set to come to our Popejoy Hall on the beautiful campus of the University of New Mexico here in Albuquerque where I have seen many other traveling once-Broadway shows.
But that whole enterprise was cancelled before it began due to COVID. The reboot show has not returned to Albuquerque for some reason. We get plenty of pop and rock shows finding there way to us as a second or third-tier market. Since I’ve been here I’ve seen Elton John (solo, bucket list) at Tingley Coliseum at the city fairgrounds (where my parents once saw Johnny Cash in the 1970s and where Sonny & Cher came to play), Bob Dylan at the Kimo Theater, Sammy Hagar and Don Williams at the surrounding casinos (Route66 and Isleta respectively). I have yet to visit our local amphitheater although I came close to seeing Elvis Costello on tour with Steely Dan there (I had seen Steely Dan already at the Riverport amphitheater, now Hollywood Casino amphitheater in St. Louis).
All to say I’m hoping The Cher Show comes to Popejoy in year three.
But I do have a few friends and relatives in Phoenix and one of them is journalist Robrt Pela, who you may know from previous Cher Scholar conversations and interviews. I decided to head out in that direction for the 28 March 2025 show at The Mesa Arts Center. I really wanted to see it again because the first time was mostly a Broadway blur.
While I was in Cleveland a few months ago moving my parents, Robrt and I did a Phoenix Magazine conversation about the show and then the day before the show we did another brief conversation at the KJZZ studio for NPR. It was the first radio station I’d ever been in and it looked just like any other office space. Later that weekend when I was talking about the experience to my cousin, she asked me what I was expecting and I said WKRP.
Unlike the 2022-23 British version of the tour last year (which had unique costumes, sets and assets), this show appears to be a simplified replica of the Broadway show.
We have a new cast and I’m now noticing the interesting combinations of characters played by single actors. These are the major parts:
1980s Cher, a.k.a. the Star (sometimes called Icon or Badass) played by Morgan Scott in her second year
1970s Cher, a.k.a. the Lady (sometimes called the glam pop star or the Smartass) played by Catherine Ariale in her second year
1960s Cher, a.k.a. the Babe (sometimes called the Kid or the Sweetheart) played by Ella Perez in her second year
Sonny played by Lorenzo Pugliese (who played Joe Pesci in a show of Jersey Boys similar to Jarrod Spector who also played Frankie Valli in Jersey Boys on Broadway, which is telling about the crossover of the Sonny role to the Italians in Jersey Boys)
Georgia Holt/Lucille Ball played by Kristin Rose Kelleher (the press sheet for this show listed actress Lucy Werner, as does the Wikipedia page) so were we seeing a new, unlisted understudy or has Werner left?)
Bob Mackie/Robert Altman/Frank played by Tyler Pirrung
Gregg Allman/John Southall played by Zack Zaromatidis (which kind of turns Gregg Allman into a southern-style father figure here, which is not really what he was for Cher)
Robert Camilletti played by Brooks Andrew
Phil Spector/Sid the Censor/Male ET Reporter played by Kevin Michael Buckley (kind of a subset of villains)
Infomercial Director/Digby the Writer played by Mark Tran Russ (another set up even larger villains…these two get a big amount of shade in this musical and, by the way, Digby Wolfe was the head writer on Cher in 1975)
(click to enlarge)
I like to crowd-watch these things. Most of the audience was comprised of older couples and groups of women. This might because younger people don’t go to these shows. There was one young, gay couple ahead of us who seemed very into it, as did the groups of women around me.
There were a lot of gray-heads, including mine. But talking to my group, we thought we might have skewed younger than most of the crowd. One blonde woman in the row ahead talked about having bought a Cher doll.
I took notes this time at the risk of looking weird. Which is something I wasn’t willing to do at the Neil Simon Theater on Broadway.
The show started with an audio cacophony of Cher from interviews and other clips. A pack of sailors enters with the 80s-Cher dressed in the Hole fit. This was a hippier, more full-figured Cher. And I like these variations. She was less of a powerhouse of a singing voice than the other two but my group all agreed she had the best talking voice. I don’t see why the “Cher voice” is necessary but people seem to like to understand Cher as this drawling creature (they, likewise, make Sonny cartoonishly nasally) when normal people using normal voices would probably do. My group noted that this show is very old Broadway and I agree that the characters were all broadly played. “Cher puts the Broad in Broadway”…okay I’ll stop now.
One thing this musical does is that it embellishes. This Cher’s holefit had wings. Which is a fiction. Which reminds us, this isn’t a documentary. It’s part fiction. It has embellishments and conflations. Cher never wore wings with her holefits. The holefit was enough.
Likewise, the 60s Cher also was not known for bare midriffs. She showed much less skin in the 1960s. But the archetypical Cher outfit for 60s Cher is a halter top. So 70s Cher is dressed too conservatively and 60s Cher too scantily.
One of the things Robrt Pela and I talk about in the interview is a survey of fans and non-fans I did years ago that amounted to people saying Cher was resilient and strong (as a single impression). The musical underscores how this is only part of the story and really focuses on Cher’s fear and the overcoming of fear. This time I noted all the ways it does this. Cher, according to both this musical and her memoir, never feels naturally, organically strong and fearless. The 60s Cher is especially shy and tentative. Which means, this is something we project on to her as an audience. We see the results not her struggle to get there.
During the scene where Georgia and John Southall, Cher’s step-dad, (as opposed to John Sarkisian, her biological dad), take little Cher to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, Georgia tells Cher, “life can be scary.” There’s another line about fear, “the real you is terrified.” Another line: “See what happens when you high-kick fear in the butt?” And “being shit scared and facing it anyway.”
One of the effects of seeing a Broadway show is shock and awe, usually from the huge stage sets. My first Broadway show was Sunset Boulevard. And I remember thinking, this set is bigger than my Yonkers apartment! The traveling show has traveling sets which are quite a bit smaller and scaled down. The show relies a lot on projected images and a few, representative pieces, like a dressing table to signify Cher’s childhood house. But thankfully there is still a plethora of wigs, costumes and love beads.
And I found it interesting to watch the show after reading Cher’s 2024 memoir. Because not only do we know the story better now, we get more detail in the book. All the broad strokes are fleshed out. Which makes the show seem super-simplistic. Plus the events are not new to readers anymore. But this show is still a good option for those who don’t read celebrity memoirs.
When Georgia tells the kid Cher (technically is this the fourth Cher?) “you may not be the prettiest, smartest most talented,” I heard the crowd in front audibly laugh/groan. Cher has said this quote from her mother for decades. As time goes by, it has less punch. (The crowd did not agree. I do not agree. Howard Stern did not agree). Contrast this to the very similar Silkwood story about the audience laughing when Cher’s name came up during the previews. We feel great sympathy for Cher but we find that event believable. She was undervalued. It’s the flipside of the Georgia Holt story. Holt is talking to a pre-swanned Cher. There’s dramatic irony going on there added to the fact most of Cher’s fans find Cher prettier than Cher finds herself.
When Cher meets Sonny, she is intimidated and embarrasses herself with some inane small talk, “I’m a taurus” and Sonny responds disdainfully, “I’m a Bono.” This dialogue isn’t in the memoir. The musical also claims Sonny is 28 when they meet instead of 27. The musical also has Cher saying, “I like to run through fields of flowers” which if you’ve seen Good Times…
Our party commented that seeing the characters Bridget and Coleen felt like an Easter-egg and at one point one of them tells Sonny that Cher is “someone who will make you feel ten feet tall.” (This is a very concise, telling and bittersweet line.)
The show conflates Cher’s first two meetings of Phil Spector. According to the memoir, she didn’t actually meet him with Sonny. She had met him before with previous boyfriend Nino Tempo. This is where they had the famous French exchange which is not depicted here. (Spector: “Coulez vous coucher avec moi?” Cher’s sassy response: “Pour de l’argent.”)
The Spector sessions scene has a great line though, maybe from Sonny: “Like Columbus, the world before Cher was flat.”
The audience engaging in spontaneous clapping gave me cognitive dissonance, to be honest. I’ve been one of a marginalized fan group for so many decades, I initially wonder how non-Cher fans even know these famous tags and triggers? Like S&C coming out to sing “I Got You Babe” (in those furry Sonny boots and there was a story about those in the memoir), or some semi-famous Cher quip, (the line, “I am a rich man”). And then I realize, oh yeah…hundreds of people have now come to a roadshow musical because they actually like Cher (or were dragged here by someone who does…being a Barry Manilow fan didn’t teach me nothin’). Cher’s F.U. Oscar dress eliciting big applause is another example.
The scenes in 60s England were represented with four TV monitors (depicting the flurry of their appearances there) and Union Jacks. Sonny & Cher wear retro-I-Got-You-Babe outfits. Or rather, our shorthanded idea of them, but not exactly it. Similar to Bob Mackie’s recreations for Cher’s “All I Really Want to Do/The Beat Goes On” moments in live shows.
One of the anachronistic things about this musical is the scrambling up of the musical timeline.” When the Money’s Gone” plays with Sonny (so we can re-read this song as Cher’s challenge to Sonny’s love: would he love her without the money she earns for him; and we are left with doubts on this point). My normal distaste for images used in the wrong decade is suspended when song order is scrambled on purpose to raise questions or when lyrics are rewritten for the dramatic situation.
To break it down: we start, of course, with “Turn Back Time” because this is what storytelling is doing. The UK show also included “Believe” in the intro part of the show.
Songs signifying childhood include:
Half Breed (Cher is part Armenian and looking dramatically different than her mother and sister)
A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes (from Disney’s Cinderella) (not in the official cast recording)
You Better Sit Down Kids (which was changed to “You Better Sit Down Kid” in the UK and traveling US programs and does not get included on the cast recording)
Half Breed is then reprised (in the traveling UK and US shows)
Meeting Sonny and Phil Spector-era songs include:
Da Do Ron Ron (The Crystals) (not in the cast recording)
Be My Baby (The Ronettes) (not in the cast recording)
The Shoop Shoop Song (signifying the 60s)
I Like It Like That (a Dave Clark Five song in the US/Broadway show that took up valuable real estate for little gain, we thought, and was non included in the UK version or on the cast recording)
Career with Sonny songs include:
I Got You Babe
Little Man (not in the cast recording)
When The Money’s Gone
All or Nothing (Not listed in the Phoenix program but I vaguely remember it)
Vamp (not in the cast recording)
Aint Nobody’s Business If I Do (the Mackie parade)
Bang Bang (only in UK and traveling US show)
Living in House Divided (a rare treat)
Bang Bang (Reprise for UK and traveling US shows)
Believe (Ballad)
All I Ever Need Is You (UK position only, the song is moved to Act II for the US shows)
Song for the Lonely (interesting end for the Sonny-era)
Solo/Gregg Allman Era songs include:
All I Ever Need Is You (US shows only)
Heart of Stone (US shows only)
Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves
Midnight Rider (Gregg Allman)
Ramblin’ Man (The Allman Brothers Band) (US shows only)
Just Like Jesse James
Believe (UK only)
Dark Lady
Baby Don’t Go (Sonny’s departure) (not in the cast recording)
Post Husbands/Movie Era songs include:
Strong Enough
When the Money’s Gone (not in the cast recording)
The Way of Love (as an acting performance)’
The Beat Goes On (movie montage)
It Don’t Come Easy (Phoenix show program) (the Ringo Starr song? I don’t remember this)
D’ove L’amore (UK only)
I Found Someone (video with Robert Camilletti)
Last songs include:
A Different Kind of Love Song (UK only)
Heart of Stone (UK position only)
We All Sleep Alone (UK only, removed August 2022)
Song for the Lonely (UK added August 2022)
I Got You Babe Reprise (UK and US traveling shows only)
You Haven’t Seen the Last of Me (Broadway and UK only)
I Hope You Find It (UK shows in my program but not on Wikipedia)
A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes Reprise (US shows only according to my UK program but not listed on Wikipedia and also not in the cast recording)
Finale Medley (US traveling show didn’t list the medley they played)
Believe
Strong Enough
Woman’s World
You Haven’t Seen the Last of Me (Broadway only)
D’ove L’amore (UK only)
Shoop Shoop Song (UK only)
I Found Someone (UK only)
Believe Again (UK only)
Take Me Home (Curtain Call, US only)
So you can see how the songs were used out of order to further the plot. This makes the show a new thing and not just a kind of Review of her existing songs. You can’t sing along to this. Songs are put into dramatic medleys and used as segues.
I did not know this until Robrt told me but “When the Money’s Gone” is a cover of Bruce Roberts (1995). A nice, sweet version with juicy alternative lines like “Shred the credit cards/just like Watergate” and “black and white TV. When the weekend comes, we can watch Pee Wee.”)
The scene with the television show seem rough as it’s mostly about Sonny’s slave-driving and temper. The joy of working, depicted in the memoir, is absent from the musical. There are lines about bad writing, too, (which is a bit unfair considering the cultural work the show did for women) and there’s a line from about Cher being dismissed with “it’s all about the clothes anyway” which goes into the James Brown song “It’s a Man’s World” (in my notes but not depicted in any of the show programs). This was probably true but it doesn’t map to the memoir, where the censors were discussed but not so much the struggles to work around bad writing. Besides, some of those writers went on to do big things (Steve Martin, Bob Einstein). The musical is dismissive without details.
The big Bob Mackie number really wowed the Broadway crowd. I checked my program pics to confirm this but this show’s parade of outfits couldn’t be track back to real Cher outfits as easily in the traveling show. The Broadway show had recreations of the real iconic Cher outfits: the Ringmaster, one of her recent live Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves outfits, the D2K opener, Laverne, the Rhinestone Cowboy fit from the solo TV show. There was a male dancer in the Phoenix show in drag wearing the Take-Me-Home-Viking-fit with a bare ass that got a big laugh. Looking back at my Broadway program, it was a male dancer in the Half-Breed outfit for that show. So, similar to the UK show, the costumes have been reworked and made “in the style” of Cher, aside from one or two emblematic efforts (like the “I Got You Babe” outfits and the “Take Me Home” one).
The woman next to me would grunt whenever Sonny said something sexist or mean, like she was feeling it viscerally. In fact, there was applauding when Sonny was finally shuffled out of Cher’s life. That seemed harsh, even though Sonny was harsh himself. Sonny was played so broadly, as we’ve said, his scary lines seemed super-scary. And Sonny did have his scary moments but they were conflated here with his controlling moments. For example, he slammed a wall in their 60s kitchen, not a glass mirror in their 70s dressing room (according to the memoir).
The Gregg Allman part never ceases to feel very kitschy. I mean, Gregg Allman…as a character…in a big, broad musical? Singing Cher songs? A Gregg Allman impersonator? It’s just so wonderfully weird. He sings pieces of “Midnight Rider” and “Ramblin’ Man” which reminds me of a meme my friend Coolia just sent me (unrelated):
Sonny and Gregg Allman expressing their discomfort in stepping over each other in Cher’s life during the late 1970s via the song “Dark Lady” and Cher’s duet with Allman on “Just Like Jesse James” are strangely satisfying for the audience.
They mistakenly call the post-solo, reboot of the Sonny & Cher Show, the Comedy Hour and the show wasn’t cancelled after a half a season as the musical states, more like two half seasons and 34 episodes.
In the Robert Altman (discovering Cher as an actress) scene, the audience laughed at Cher’s casual Popeye comment and in this case the musical elaborated farther than the memoir did, having Cher qualify her critique: “It was just so dark.”
There was another line in the musical about there being basically two emotions, fear and love and love is the better side of it because it’s full of vulnerability. (Which is very astute.)
The infomercial filming seemed revealingly harsh, the depiction of the director. That didn’t seem pleasant.
And even though they cheered when he exited, we all got teary when Sonny came back as a ghost. Cher still needed to talk to him.
The Assets
This show has no swag. I tried to remember the traveling shows of my youth and can’t remember swag at the outdoor Muny theater in St. Louis either after Show Boat. But then, I wouldn’t have gone looking for it.
On my ticket, this introduction was printed: “Superstars come and go. Cher is forever. For six straight decades, only one unstoppable force that has flat-out dominated popular culture – breaking down barriers, pushing boundaries and letting nothing and no one stand in her way.” [Ok that sentence is a bit much. Things did, in fact, stand in her way quite often], the kid, the glam pop star and the icon. 35 smash hits, two rock-star husbands, a Grammy, Oscar, Emmy…enough…Bob Mackie gowns to create a sequin shortage in New York City, all in one unabashedly fabulous new musical that will have audience dancing in the aisles!”
Well, in Phoenix they weren’t.
While we were all talking about how we became Cher fans, I told the story of starting out as a Sonny & Cher fan, how I loved their charisma, their glamour (another visiting cousin confided to me last weekend she had a crush on Sonny), their glamour and how they were never boring. How Cher has carried on that tradition and how I can now enjoy being a fan through scholarly digs and also the same childhood delight.
Impersonators can’t recreate that. The impersonation gets in the way.
Robrt and I also talked about how this show is about anxiety and fear as much as resilience. About the great wall of fear. And how Cher’s impact and legacy may still be evolving in these very times of political fear. We’re gonna need these lessons in overcoming anxiety. This is a time when the powers in place want to put women and minority groups back in our place (their words). And therefore, this musical takes on a practical value, being as much about vulnerability as it is about heroics. We see Cher doing this work of encouraging us during her Hall of Fame speech last October: “don’t give up, you belong here.”
At least, it affects me that way personally.
This musical is one of the lucky things we have now that provide meaning for the last seven decades of Cher: music, a musical, a memoir, dolls, perfumes, a skin care line, a Vegas poker machine, cookbooks, maybe someday a movie, a video game, a board game, who knows.
Rolling Stone had just come out with a 2024 list of their take on the 500 greatest popular songs and “Believe” had made this list. This was interesting to me for two reasons. One, it allowed me another thought-dive into “Believe” and also it reminded me of Cher’s appearances on previous RS lists and how arbitrary these lists are.
1988
Let’s go back in time. Back when I was in high school in St. Louis I had a subscription to Rolling Stone. The September 8, 1988, issue included a list of “100 Best Singles of the Last Twenty Five Years.” Around that time there had been a best albums issue already and my brother Randy (home from college) and I had had a friendly competition to see who had the most albums on the list. Very surprisingly, we tied. (Five years younger, I was fully prepared to lose.)
But anyway, on this 1988 list, which I recently dug out of the Chersonian Institute’s archives, there was one Cher song. Well, almost one song. It was really the Sonny Bono /Jack Nitzsche penned “Needles and Pins” which ranked at #64 between Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” and Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower.”
To put things in perspective, the #1 and #2 songs on this 1988 list were “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones and “Like a Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan. Which seems a bit to much rolling stone considering the name of the magazine.
The paragraph write-up about “Needles and Pins” talked about how the 1964 Searchers version had done something “formidable,” in that it “introduced the twelve-string sound, which would become a staple of American bands from The Byrds to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.” Searchers guitarists McNally and Pender then talked about how this came to be by accident.
Sweet Little Band (2015, an I’m only including this muzak version because its part of a delightful collection called Ramones for Babies which if I had a baby, I would totally play this for them)
Kramer (2017 neo-prog/alt) (interesting and unique version)
(After listening to all of these, I need to listen to the inverse song, “Pins and Needles” by Kristina Train just to reset the machine between my ears.)
But nothing was said about the songwriters and plenty more could be said about Sonny’s “best friend” as Cher said in her Memoir of Jack Nitzsche who would go on to become the arranger for Phil Spector during the Wall of Sound era. Nitzsche is often given the most credit for his work on “River Deep Mountain High” with Ike and Tina Turner. He also worked with The Rolling Stones and did the choral arrangements for “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” He would go on to write the scores for movies like Performance, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Exorcist and co-wrote “Up Where We Belong” for the movie An Officer and a Gentleman.
2004
But sadly, “Needles and Pins” wouldn’t stay on the next incarnations of RS lists. By 2004 there was an expanded list of 500 songs. And Sonny & Cher allegedly made that list where “I Got You Babe” ranked at #451. By this time, the top two songs had switched spots. “Like a Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan was #1 and “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones was #2.
2021-2024
On the RS 2021 list, (which started from scratch and then was updated in 2024 with songs from 2021 to early 2024), “I Got You Babe” had fallen off but “Believe” had landed at #338. (I’m not sure if that position maintained between 2021 and 2024 because I haven’t seen the official RS 2021 list. The song may have been at #337 in 2021.)
So “Believe” remains the Cher song on the list. I would not die on the “Believe” hill, as I’ve often said, but “Believe” did introduce a technical trick that became very popular, I guess like the twelve-string in “Needles and Pins.” But that doesn’t mean it was a well-constructed, conceived or a well-written song. It’s value will be remembered in its production. But “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves” had production values that have also stood the test of time. And none of this even speaks to the metaphorical or literary values of a song. Among Sonny’s cowboy songs, for example. “Bang Bang” is certainly undervalued. Or songs that became part of the common lexicon, like “The Beat Goes On” or Diane Warren’s “Turn Back Time” which not only became a meme but has become a yearly meme for the end of daylight savings.
Or maybe it just comes down to votes not values. Where would we be without lists to argue about, I guess.
Music journalists Rob Sheffield (whose 2024 book Heartbreak Is the National Anthem: How Taylor Swift Reinvented Pop Music I just purchased to try to understand that whole phenom) and Brittany Spanos chose “Believe” as one of the 25 songs they would discuss on a podcast created for the 2024 list. And their 6 August 2024 discussion was not only thoughtful and fascinating, as it put thoughtful context around Cher’s entire career, but it also explained how the song “Believe” landed for kids in Great Britain.
I myself did not experience “Believe” as a kid or teen. I was 26 years old and living in Yonkers, New York, hearing the song while driving home from work at Yonkers Contracting and following the song’s weekly charting from my crappy apartment along the Hudson River. I remember being somewhat baffled after coming upon NPR discussing the song one day on my car radio. It was kind of cognitive dissonance for me. Why this song? So this podcast was interesting to me in that it explains how the song held meaning for an age group that wasn’t mine.
Sheffield and Spanos begin by calling the song “actually perfect…a perfect song,” one that represents the “whole, story, legacy and madness that is pop music.” Spanos says it’s also a song that is “part of the grand story of Cher” and she talks about the ups and downs of her career (big success, big flops and disappearances) and how over the last decade there has been “newfound appreciation” for Cher,” a “Cher revival.” Sheffield talks about the “synthi-ness of the chorus and vocal,” how “new and exciting” it was among other typically Cher-sounding Cher hits of the 1990s. (I think he means 1980s or maybe the late 1980s into the early 1990s, which was the span of her big Geffen-era hits). He said this was a “Cher-like” song on a whole new level.
Spanos talks about being at a friend’s house watching Spice World as a kid and the mother of her friend put on the DVD for what sounds like the live Farewell tour with the instruction to “pay attention to the wigs.” Spanos says that instruction changed her life. She starts talking about Cher’s history with Sonny. She mistakenly says Sonny was 32 when they met. (Sonny was born in 1935, Cher in 1946. Cher was 16 when they met, Sonny was 27.) Spanos talks about their early pop-folk hits. Sheffield comes in discussing their variety show, how kids would tune in to see which music artists would show that week to perform songs. He said it was a “weekly education in music. They were the DJs.” (This is overstating it a bit considering the musical acts were often people like Joey Heatherton and Merv Griffin.)
Spanos goes back to talk about the “country/rock covers” of Jackson Highway album and how critics panned it at the time but that it’s actually “a great album.” The digress to say Cher’s swampy “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” is one of the “greatest versions of a Bob Dylan song.” (They make a joke about “outsung, outsold” that I am on the outside of). Sheffield says Cher’s “Bob Dylan connection itself could take up three whole episodes.”
They then cover her solo TV work of the 1970s. Sheffield says Cher would “steal from everything” and she had “wide open taste.” They talk about the “astounding” performance with David Bowie on her solo TV show, the “insane medley,” one of the “freakiest things ever to air on network TV.” Sheffield then brings up the “insane” West Side Story performance from her 1978 TV special. Spanos also notes Cher as being “integral in bringing Tina Turner back” on TV for multiple appearances when she was trying to relaunch as a solo artist.
Spanos says Cher then stared a band called Black Roses. She says Black Roses three times incorrectly. (It’s Black Rose). They talk about Spanos’ love of the Broadway Cher musical, how she particularly liked the fictional duet between one of the Chers and Gregg Allman doing the Diane Warren song “Just Like Jesse James.” She did not like the actual duet album which they mistakenly mispronounce (as Howard Stern also did in his 2024 Cher interview) as All Man and Woman. The correct title is Allman and Woman. There is no space between All and Man. It’s literally Gregg Allman’s name, as in Gregg and his woman (oy vey) and not some kind of traditional declaration of gender roles. (This is like trying to differentiate between caveman version 1 and caveman version 2.)
Anyway, Spanos says she cried several times during the musical and they call Cher and Gregg, “an incredible couple.” And I think it is nice that a kind of revisionist kindness in reconsidering this union in a new light these days. Sheffield highly recommends Allman’s memoir, My Cross to Bear, and tells of a Cher story in it where Gregg Allman is trying to pick Cher up for their first date in a limo and Cher exclaims that she will not ride in a funeral car and so they take her Mercedes.
Spanos talks about how Cher is “an experimental person.” Sheffield agrees saying Cher would “do anything” and was “not bothered by genre,” be it disco, southern rock, glam rock, hard rock or a medley or West Side Story songs. He says “she is part of every story in pop music.” Spanos says Cher has been “proven right by history” and critics are looking back and re-evaluating her, seeing that her voice does indeed “sound great” singing in multiple styles. They talk about how every year people rediscover the West Side Story clip and how “insane and fun” it is to watch.
Sheffield goes into Cher’s 80s decade of movies, how “she did it the hard way,” how she had no celebrity inside track to movie roles, how Silkwood was not a Cher-type role and how many actresses saw playing lesbian roles as a “career killer move.” “It cannot be stressed” enough, Sheffield says, how “bold and unprecedented and unexpected and unremarked-upon at the time that was.” Spanos talks about the iconic, respected actors Cher co-starred with and how Cher “is holding her own” along side them. Sheffield calls her performance in Mask “astounding,” that she played a working-class biker mom, a character that was very “unglamourous, gritty and unsaintly.” Spanos says that in all Cher’s movie roles she was de-glamming, dressing down, playing an everywoman.” And at the same time, she was having hits like “Turn Back Time,” balancing her gritty acting roles with glam-Cher music moments, keep her acting career going while relaunching as a rock vocalist. Spanos talks about the the “Turn Back Time” video “onesie” outfit. Sheffield enthusiastically remembers “the entire U.S. Navy” on the war ship.
They then talk about the struggles of the 1990s and Cher’s battle with the Epstein-Barr Virus, how she was seen (again) as “past her prime.” There were the informercials and the Writing Camp album (Not Commercial) recorded in 1994 but not released until 2000. Spanos calls it an introspective “great album, one of the first Internet-only releases.” They talk about her reunions with Sonny and his death in 1998. Spanos recalls Cher’s “stunning” and “heartbroken” eulogy for Sonny and how the loss of someone so transformative might have affected her performance in “Believe.”
As they set up talking about “Believe,” they acknowledge that Cher was seen as “washed up” for the first time in her late teens! She’s now in her 50s. She was “not expected to be still going into her 30s.” The song becomes thematic of her resilience. Spanos calls it “one of the great dance songs of all time” and she explains how it arrived during the dance renaissance of the late 90s, the “euro dance club wave,” that the song was an “unexpected sound from a 50 year old.”
They talk about the popularity of what became known as Auto Tune, how the song was ahead by decades in its influence on rap artists like T-Pain and Kanye West. Sheffield clarifies that it is not a vocoder but pitch correction and Spanos talks about how the song is “one of the great hopeful, euphoric dance songs” and how “do you believe in life after love” is a “gutting line.” (Because how common it is to feel like life itself cannot go on after a great, failed love.) They talk about the song in the context of Cher’s 1990s “major health issues” and her “uncertain future,” losing Sonny, one of the great loves of her life…a great love.” Sheffield says the technology is not used to hide” or “to fix flaws,” that the technology “is flaunted” and that right around “the self-doubting part of the song” you get this “flutter” and “vocal pirouette,” that the song is “blatantly digital” and “robotic” in a way that “makes it sound more human.” Cher “expresses a part of the song by altering her voice.”
Spanos talks about how the producer Mark Taylor wanted to experiment with the pitch correction and Cher wasn’t afraid of it. They claim, as does Cher, that the song “changed pop music” and they remind us that the record won a Grammy. Spanos said the song also made people re-evaluate artists in their 50s, especially women, that hitting the age of 50 need not mean the end of one’s chart-making career. Spanos insists that “Cher only gets more popular every single year” and that she’s a “beloved figure in entertainment history.” She talks about Cher’s “remarkable Twitter account” and Sheffield thinks that Twitter “will only be remembered as part of Cher’s timeline.”
(I believe the Twitter/Cher thing is long past. Cher moved to posting social media content on Instagram years ago as her primary social media. Twitter, in the meantime, will probably be remembered more for its entanglement into the fascist politics of Donald Trump and Elon Musk.)
After a commercial break, the hosts introduce Rod Thomas (Bright Light Bright Light), a DJ, artist and producer. Spanos and Sheffield thank him and he says “it’s not exactly a hardship to talk about this lady or this song.” They ask him about his first experiences with Cher and he talks about how his parents were into the Beatles (he was born in 1982) and how Cher was a famous movie actress when he was growing up. He said the first time he paid attention to her as a music artist was on the album It’s a Man’s World. He talks about loving Junior Vasquez’s “One by One” remix but that it wasn’t a hit. He says he “ran out to buy” the “Believe” CD at Woolworth’s in his hometown of Neath, Wales. They joke that Cher was on her 4th or 5th life by that time. Thomas says, “Everyone in school was talking about it, the straight kids, the weird kids, the bullies, the popular kids. Everyone was playing it. You heard it everywhere.” He feels it was the fist time there was “an all-engulfing wave around an artist everyone knew.” It was a song everyone loved. He feels “Believe” is a “very British-centric sound” and he credits that to songwriter/producer Brian Higgins. He said the song really feels like “you’re in a British gay club.” He thinks the phenomenon was helped by the show Queer as Folk. People then were listening to “really gay music, like Gina G and The Spice Girls”. Very camp. And he believes the song was a legitimate “British gay anthem.”
Spanos says she likes to think about where music started and ended in the 1990s, from grunge to pop-punk to euro pop and House Music like “Believe.” Thomas says it was a time when “everyone was on the same page for a moment in British pop culture.” Whether you were straight or gay, whether you were in coffeehouses, clubs or a shopping center and how unusual that was, “especially for a heritage artist that traditionally younger kids wouldn’t gravitate to.”
They talk about the song being a #1 hit worldwide, a song Sheffield calls “immortal,” a song that you “instantly knew …was a timeless song. Thomas claims that Cher hates the song and how regrettable this is. He says there is a famous interview where she talks about hating how ubiquitous the song was at the time. I don’t remember this from any of the U.S. interviews. Thomas toured with Cher and might have seen a UK interview where she said this.
Thomas says that every time he works as a DJ, someone will request “Believe” and that it’s a “very mixed bag of gender, age and demographic.” “Everyone dances to this song. People melt in these ephemeral things and go feral.”
They ask Thomas where he was when he first danced to the song. He describes a British club called H2O that had three floors: a bar, a restaurant and a club at the top. He says you would hear the song playing on every single floor and that the upstairs club would play the song at least once or twice each night. He says the song represents “a specific sound and a specific moment in time.” He says Brian Higgins went on to do some great stuff but that this song “was a pivotal moment for him, for Cher, for British pop culture and for music.”
Thomas says the song “changed ageism” and put the focus on the song over the artist. Sheffield says Cher had “built her legend already” but that this song “invented a new Cher.” They then talk about Cher’s look around that time, her “wiggery.” How wonderful and cool it was. How her look was “trashy and fabulous…shimmery….” what Thomas calls “gaudy and tasteless but also fabulous and cool.” He also talks about how amazing her voice sounded on the record. “Her voice is perfect.” How the production was perfect and the genius of the technology. Of the Cher Effect, he says, “everyone was doing it in school” (imitating it) and how the song was at its peak for “many, many months.”
Sheffield talks about being at the punk show Mannequin Pussy recently and the venue was trying to “shoo everyone out” but “Believe” came on and then “no one would leave.” Thomas says, “that’s not even my favorite song on that record.” He talks about opening for Cher for nine shows across Europe and how he first saw her show in Brooklyn. He references the video montages and her other dance songs (“Strong Enough” and “All or Nothing”), but when “Believe” came up “you could feel the room lift,” how fans were there “from every conceivable living age bracket” and that this song brings them all together. He says, “it was amazing to watch it.”
So we have another marathon item to get through, from way back to last October. I’ve broken it up into parts to help us digest it.
I was able to attend the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction “ceremony”
last year, despite my ambivalence about it, because my friend Julie motivated me to go (and she’s a fun person to attend a concert with and she loves Ozzy Osbourne who was also being inducted). Also because the show happened to be in Cleveland (where I was spending a lot of time in 2024), and because it was a chance for me to see a concert with my brother, Randy, who lives in Cleveland.
The whole weekend turned out to be a lot of fun, but this still didn’t resolve my continuing ambivalence about the institution. We’ve discussed before the issues with the gatekeepers, the issues with halls of fame, the issues with institutionalizing rock music. But there’s also the issue of rock music itself.
A very telling incident happened when Julie and I were touring the Hall of Fame the day before the live show. We passed a group of young kids, mostly girls, (late grade school, early middle school?) at the Hall of Fame on a field trip with their Catholic School. This made my friend Julie, who spent a childhood in Catholic schools, very very annoyed. She kept telling me that back when she was a KISS-loving kid in Catholic school, the nuns kept telling them rock music was the music of the devil. Now it’s become a field trip for young Catholic kids, like going to see how Wonder Bread is made.
And I’ve been to the Hall of Fame twice now and when I was there most of the people visiting had gray hair. I do see some youthful strays wandering around respectfully but that’s not the majority. And I love rock music myself, but then I’m a happy-gray-haired too. I often find myself telling Millennials and younger friends who old rock groups are, like KISS. (Hell, last weekend I had to explain to them who Vincent Price was.) It’s not quite the music of the world’s youth any more. And that’s okay. It’s the natural order of things. If it wasn’t we’d all still be talking about how swell Rosemary Clooney and Bing Crosby still are.
I read an essay on poetry movements recently where the author observed that things written in resistance eventually become “the new national tradition.” Rock and roll is no longer the language of resistance; it has lost its currency of resistance. It’s now tradition. And the Hall of Fame just underlines that fact. Many of its practitioners and listeners have been taken into the grips of nostalgia, just like their parents before them. As they say, what goes around…. And nostalgia is pretty much antithetical to progress.
Which is why the genre has teetered conservative over the decades. It’s practitioners are no longer young rebels. It’s listeners are no longer young rebels. Rock and Roll is a genre that is over 70s years old. For that matter, at 50 years old, RAP music is also quite long in the tooth.
And who likes to admit their own culture has moved on? Nobody. I had a bit of an existential crisis myself the night David Letterman went off the air because soon I’ll be explaining to young people who he is. But that’s a fact of aging and having sex and babies being constantly born with prospects of future musical genres twinkling in the fresh little eyes. Welcome to the human race.
So if Cher had never been inducted into this basically nostalgic circle jerk, it wouldn’t have bothered me. If you can keep a career going longer than rock music itself, I don’t see that as a bad thing, all things considered.
Aim bigger, I say.
And to be clear, I am not trying to culturally disenfranchise old people in pursuit of the often-suffocating cult of youth. Virtuosity will always skew older. Wisdom will always skew older. This is simply a perspective check. Why did we set such narrow limits on the celebration of contemporary music in the first place? It was generational hubris.
But for all of that, I am going to now fan-girl on a few of these aging rock stars below. Including Cher.
The 2024 Inductee Insights Video
The Hall of Fame developed a short film series for each artist before the induction called “2024 Inductee Insights.” Cher’s six minute film includes the songs “Believe,” “Bang Bang,” “I Got You Babe,” “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves,” “Turn Back Time,” “I Found Someone” and “Woman’s World.”
It begins showing clips from Cher’s “Believe” video cut with her receiving awards, performing in music videos and on television performances and then, oddly, scenes from the movie Chastity. “The one and only Cher has used her distinctive voice, stage presence and avant garde fashion to achieve unprecedented success while blazing a trail for women artists. A woman who personifies feminine, creative freedom in a male dominated industry.”.
I would add that she blazed a trail for gay male artists, too. They delve into her biography, how she was born in El Centro, California, and grew up wanting to be an actress but got sidetracked working for Phil Spector. “During this time,” the video says, she met Sonny and they got married blah blah blah. I keep seeing this error in recent stories about Cher. As the Memoir confirms, Cher did not meet Sonny while working for Phil Spector. She already knew Sonny and Sonny brought her to the Spector sessions purposefully and strategically (gold star for Sonny there, pun intended). And the problem with the statement is that it implies Cher came to ideas about a music career on her own, before Sonny. She did not. The video also incorrectly claims she was an extra on the television show Ozzy and Harriet. She was not, but her mother, Georgia Holt, was.
The video claims Cher was obviously “the shining star of the pair” but her stage freight made them a duo. “I Got You Babe” was a “definitive musical moment for the early hippie counterculture.” They go into her solo hits, somewhat out of order, but okay. {The show a variety show clip of Cher singing “Gypsies” while talking about her life in the late 60s. (My poor soul right now.)
“In a society that idolized blonds” Cher became an idol for dark-haired girls. They saw themselves in her.”
Digression point: I guess that’s true in a way, but many of us did not exactly ever see ourselves in Cher because that was too much of a stretch. We were just happy to see some dark-haired lady being idolized on television. That’s not to say we didn’t see ourselves in other television characters. I recently started watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show again and in episode 4, we meet this girl named Sparkle (Pat Finley, the actress who played, in a much more serious way, the sister of Newhart on The Bob Newhart Show and also the wife of Becker on The Rockford Files). I grew up seeing myself as some kind of amalgamation of the annoying buttoned-up, toxic positivity of Sparkle and the milk-toast, squeamishly-waspy Mary Richards.
Digression to the digression: I used to hate the very sound of Tyler Moore’s voice when these shows first aired in the 1970s and as a namesake, her nebbishness horrified me. Is that what it meant to be a Mary? But one of the beautiful points of the show, which I would come to see as a young adult watching the show’s reruns on Nick at Nite in the 1990s, is that sometimes women who feel unassertive can find strategies to be very effective and assertive. Marge Gunderson, Frances McDormand’s character in the movie Fargo, is another wonderful example of this.
But anyway, I have always felt my person to be this unsatisfying Sparkle/Mary combination, not great identifiers, but accurate I have for a long time begrudgingly accepted. But Mr. Cher Scholar likes to tell me (often) that the way I see myself is pretty far off from how other people see me. So I told him my theory last night and asked him to weigh in: was I more or a Mary, a Sparkle, a Rhoda or a Phyllis? He thought about it for a second and said I was definitely a Rhoda. I’m too much of a wiseacre to be a Mary, he said. (I guess he has a point; Mary Richards would never say ‘nostalgic circle jerk.’) And I wasn’t a Sparkle or Phyllis. I was positive he was going to agree that I was an amalgamation of the milk-toast Mary and the toxically positive Sparkle. Rhoda is my favorite, for sure, but I never in a million years saw myself as a mile within the vicinity of Rhoda. But that was very good news…for me anyway, if not for him.
The next day I came back with three more ladies of the 1970s: Shirley Feeney (Cindy Williams from Laverne & Shirley, not too dramatically different from my high school experience), Rhoda or Emily Hartley (played by Suzanne Pleshette on The Bob Newhart Show). He changed the Rhoda to Emily Hartley, which is not bad news either. By the way, this game is much harder to play in reverse. Mr. Cher Scholar was a dead ringer for Rickey Schroder as a kid, but as an adult he’s mostly impossible to place.
But back to the Cher Insights video…it goes on to talk about Sonny & Cher’s “string of successful albums” and we see their album covers, one of which was very unsuccessful, Mama Was a Rock and Roll Singer… and then they show the wrong cover for All I Ever Need Is You. The videos talks about the couple’s “chemistry onstage.”
They then turn to Cher’s focus on acting and her “acclaimed roles” in Silkwood, Mask and Moonstruck.
“But she always turned back to music.” So true.
They mention she has been active for “more than five decades” (the museum exhibit just says six) and that she has continually “reinvented her image and mastered multiple music styles” including the earthy folk pop of “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves”, (more narrative pop, really; “I Got You Babe” was the folk pop), the melodic disco of Take Me Home,” power ballads like “I Found Someone” (they show the music video clip of her slapping boyfriend Robert Camilletti here). “Cher’s versatility is ever present.”
They then come back to the “quintessential dance pop classic” of “Believe” which “pioneered auto tune as an artistic tool” and that this “worldwide hit” became an “enduring queer anthem.” This feels a bit reductive only because the song had major cross-over appeal (we’ll explore this more in an upcoming post about a podcast about the song.) The video talks about her being an ally of LGBTQIA+ and how she has influenced other trailblazing artists like Madonna, Beyonce and Lady Gaga. Why do they keep listing those same three? Were there any male artists they could have found? Any older female artists? (Zendaya and others will broaden this influence later in their induction commentary.)
“A tenacious performer who has triumphed over adversity and made comeback after comeback.”
The 2024 Inductee Program
The preface of the program talks about the Hall of Fame has reached its 39th year. Oy. Even the nostalgia tripping is old. Jan Werener is not even listed under former board members. John Sykes, now head of board, talks about the diverse list of inductees, how rock-and-roll is not a single sound (See? He has to play Twister here because the founding scope was too tiny.) He says of rock-and-roll, “It’s an attitude….a collusion of rhythm and blues gospel and country, but basically ‘life changing music.'” Life changing music could be anything.
The section on Cher was written by Annie Zaleski, who has a new Cher picture book coming out this year, I Got You Babe: A Celebration of Cher. Zaleski is a Cleveland-based writer and editor who has worked for NPR music, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, Salon, Billboard and Vulture, She did the 33 1/3 book on Duran Duran’s Rio album, a Taylor Swift book, Stories Behind the Songs and has done liner notes and illustrated bios of Lady Gaga, Harry Styles and Pink.
Cher section pics include Stars album back cover shot, the butterfly dress picture from her 1978 special promotion, the the famous Phil Spector, Darlene Love and Cher photo, a candid with her kids and Tatum O’Neal, a Jerry Wexler session shot from Jackson Highway and pictures of Cher with David Geffen, Labelle, Stevie Wonder, David Bowie, Ray Charles, Elton John and Gregg Allman, a picture of Cher holding her Oscar and the hole fit from 1992.
There’s a breakout box called Selected Discography of her supposed important albums and here I take some umbrage. Stars is egregiously missing. Other albums that could have been included: Backstage as well as Man’s World. I understand why Believe is there. Because it has “Believe” on it. And I guess Heart of Stone is there because “Turn Back Time” is on that. And Jackson Highway definitely deserves to be there. (In Cher’s Memoirs, she even tells us Sonny thought that was her best album to that point which is an interesting compliment considering that was the first Cher album he didn’t produce.) But Black Rose? That should not be there. I appreciate that album in many ways, but it is not one of her important albums. It was a brave experiment that didn’t go anywhere. It was a mess in some ways. (Some reviewers lost their minds over it.) It’s far and away not better than Man’s World or Backstage.
But Zaleski does explain Cher’s cultural relevance very well. “Her singular voice has never lost its formidable power,” she says and she covers the musical points many other Cher historians miss, her time with Phil Spector and her inclusion on important records like “Be My Baby,” “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” and her work on the Spector Christmas album. She talks about Cher’s “big contra alto voice” and quotes Cher as saying, “My voice just cut through.” Zaleski repeats, “Cher’s voice has never lost its dominance or power…with her warbling vibrato and graceful sense of dynamics, Cher sounds effortless singing nearly every style of music.” Mic drop.
She then lists the types (and I love the adjectives she uses doing it):
Orchestrated torch songs
Roaring power ballads
Luxe disco
Blazing hard rock
Playful Broadway showstoppers
Slinky soul
High-energy electro
Melodramatic pop
“She also possesses a unique and recognizable vocal timbre, one that’s dusky and sultry, like exquisite black velvet, with a sumptuous low range and a soaring high one.” (I once compared her voice to syrup but velvet is good too.)
Zaleski calls Cher a generous philanthropist, an outspoken activist, a prolific emoji user, a queer icon and ally and “unabashedly herself at all times….honest, funny, vulnerable and real.” Fans, it doesn’t get better than that. We picked good.
“Cher isn’t afraid to be earnest, her vocal delivery often feels like a direct line to her soul” and she “doesn’t suffer fools gladly, doesn’t mince words.”
The essay covers her stand-out influences, Cinderella’s “A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes,” early musicals, early rock and roll, American Bandstand, seeing Elvis live and Ray Charles on TV. Then she goes into describing Cher’s iconic songs with the same delicious adjectives:
The rollicking garage-pop angst of “Ringo I Love You” (genius to illustrate the song’s grunginess.)
Those qualifiers!! She skims over 1971-74 and the narrative ballads which is unfortunate because that music produced three number 1 hits, plus many other top 30 hits and was arguably one of the peaks, if not the peakiest, in Cher’s popularity.)
She covers Cher’s television grind, long days of writing, rehearsals, meetings, and show tapings. Her “acrimonious divorce,” her 2 Golden Globes (3, the Memoirs reminded us), her 1977 Oscar, the Geffen label era music of “glossy production, blockbuster hooks” that “suited her powerhouse voice.”
Then there was the 1990s health issues and Sonny’s death ending the decade. But also “Believe.” At the time Zaleski reminds us, Cher was the oldest female to top the Billboard Hot 100.
She calls the ABBA covers album “buoyant” and says the electropop “DJ Play a Christmas Song” (which hit #1 in the Dance/Electronic Digital Sales category) is the song that put her over to the record breaking 7 decades of #1 hits. The only other artist to do it was the Rolling Stones (as you recall Cher’s quip on The Kelly Clarkson Show, “it took four of them to be one of me.”
Finally, the essay remarks on the full-circle duet with Darlene Love on Cher’s album Christmas, as a joyful and “brassy unison.”
In the back of the program were interesting paid-for congratulation pages to peruse, from record labels, publishers, lawyers and streaming services. Cher got a page from her managers, Roger Davis and Lindsay Scott. Warner Music Group’s page included Cher, Foreigner, Mary J. Blige, Kool and the Gang, MC5 and Dionne Warwick. ASCAP’s page had Cher, Mary J. Blige, Foreigner, Dave Matthews, Ozzy, Tribe, MC5, Peter Frampton, Kool and the Gang, Alexis Korner and John Mayall. The Hard Rock Casino thanks everybody, Spotify thanks everybody, there’s a mystery thank you in there too,
The main image shown all throughout the lobby of the Hall of Fame (click to enlarge) was the very cool picture of Cher in the 1980s incarnation of her Hole Fit. I love that this is the representative photo because, it shows Cher performing, sweating, rocking.
The year’s inductees always get their own little exhibit upstairs.
Left outfit: The violet and purple “All I Really Want to Do” fit, an amalgamation of the Farewell Tour outfit (vest) and the Here We Go Again tour outfit, credited to the Cher Collection, made by Bob Mackie. The credits mention the outfit was also worn by Teal Wicks in the Broadway Cher Show.
Display on the monitor below: A Sonny & Cher live show ticket with Brian Farnon and His Orchestra for a show on March 3, 4, 5 at Harrah’s Lake Tahoe, the South Shore Room and the tagline, “The World’s Greatest Entertainers Appear at Harrah’s.” There’s a Cher quote from a recent interview about how success is like a string of pearls, moments you string together and you’ve got a necklace.
Middle outfit: The “Take Me Home” Fit (red) credited to the Cher collection from the Farewell Tour, made by Bob Mackie.
Display on the monitor below: The Bob Mackie sketch for the dress. There’s Cher quote about a conversation she had with Barbra Streisand and how Cher wants to work as long as she is able to do it.
Right outfit: The Halloween mermaid outfit from the movie Mermaids, 1990, designed by Patty Spinale & Gail Baldoni, now owned by Gary Scarborough.
Display on the monitor below: The Mermaids movie poster. The text mentions Cher six decades-long music career and she’s “also an actress” who “first starred in 1976 play Come Back to the Five and Dime Jimmy Dean Off-Broadway. This is a big error. She was in the 1982 big-Broadway Robert Altman production at the Martin Beck Theater. The play was first published in 1976. The text also mentions her movies Silkwood, The Witches of Eastwick and Moonstruck.
In the middle of the exhibit there was a large electric sign of rotating copy about all the inductees and this had a very good paragraph about Cher (mimicking the insights video):
“Cher has used her distinctive voice, stage presence, and avant-garde fashion to achieve unprecedented success. A musician who personifies female creative freedom in a male-dominated industry, Cher is the only woman to have a Number One hit in each of the past seven decades . Cher’s breakthrough came from her work with then-husband Sonny Bono. Sonny & Cher’s 1965 hit “I Got You Babe” was a definitive musical moment for early hippie counterculture. Amid the pair’s success, Cher launched her solo career, scoring hits like “Bang Bang.” In 1971, The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour TV variety show helped establish Cher as a consummate entertainer and fashion icon. Cher continuously reinvented her style and mastered multiple musical genres. Equally adept at the folk pop of “Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves,” the disco of “Take Me Home,” and [rock?] ballads like “I Found Someone.” Cher’s versatility is unmatched. Cher also became a star of the silver screen, winning the Academy Award for Best Actress in Moonstruck (1987). In 1998, Cher released the quintessential dance-pop classic “Believe,” pioneering the use of Auto-Tune as an artistic tool. A tenacious performer who has triumphed over adversity and made comeback after comeback, all while influencing trailblazing artists like Madonna, Beyonce, and Lady Gaga, Cher has earned her status as the Goddess of Pop.”
Below this description were in influences and legacies:
Influences: Bob Dylan, Darlene Love, Tina Turner
Legacies: Madonna, Beyonce, and Lady Gaga
Cher was placed at the left end, next to Jimmy Buffet in the U-shaped exabit and directly opposite Ozzy Osbourne. Those two are the bookends. This was not the order of the show in any way.
Studying the fan board again, Barry Manilow is still on there at #54. This makes me a bit crazy. I don’t even think Barry Manilow thinks he should be on this board. But he’s up there with 228 votes. You only need about 100 or to get up there on the fan board.
Elsewhere in the museum was an “In Memoriam” tribute to Dickey Betts of The Allman Brothers, (also married to Cher’s best friend Paulette, who was Paulette Betts for many years). The board said he was a 1995 guitarist inductee noted for his “Improvisational magic with the Allman Brothers…his double-barreled harmony and counterpoint” and that he shared lead guitar duties with Duane Allman until Duane died in 1971. He died in April 2024.
I also scanned the gift shop for Cher books (none yet). There was only one t-shirt, recycled from Cher’s own tour merch. There was a the promo pic of Cher from her 1978 TV special. The vinyl album bin did have Believe, the new greatest hits package and Dancing Queen. As a reminder, my first visit in 2023 only had only one Cher item: the first FunkoPop doll.
Julie bought the Foreigner t-shirt and we both liked what they did with it, creating a special Hall of Fame shirt with their career timeline on the back.
Induction Show Performance and Speech
We weren’t so far away but big monitors in front of us showed closeups. Julie had a sudden migraine headache and missed the show’s high energy opening. Cher’s “Believe” started to big cheers. Dua Lipa came out strutting in a black leather outfit, The song sounded much more bland coming out of Dua Lipa. But then Cher came out to help finish it. From the televised cut-aways you can see Keith Urban (who played in the Peter Frampton tribute) and Jelly Roll (who played in the Ozzy tribute) both seemed very excited to see Cher. Julia Roberts (who gave the Dave Matthews speech), too. And even Roger Daltry (Peter Frampton). Cher and DL hold hands at end in a very cool gesture of solidarity. Cher’s outfit is both crazy and restrained. Very black and over-lappy. At the end, Dua Lip yells, “Give it up for Cher.”
We were surprised that Cher opened the show. Usually the push her toward the end for ratings. But after hearing all the other performances, this seemed best.
Zendaya arrived to give the induction speech. I wasn’t expecting much. The prior speeches for Cher have been fair to bad. And I would agree with Howard Stern that I would have preferred someone already established in the HoF to induct Cher. But that said, Zendaya’s was great! Perfect even. She did the job that needed to be done. And her outfit was the best Cher fashion tribute of the night.
[By the way, my sister-in-law Susan kept track of the celebrity situation down on the floor and Zendaya stayed for much of the show and danced to all the performances almost until the very end. In her estimation, Zendaya was by far the biggest star at the event by far.]
Zendaya said there’s not one person “in this room, in this country, in pretty much the whole world who doesn’t know” Cher’s name. “It’s impossible to measure the influence Cher has had and continues to have on every one of us….her impact spans generations. Cher is a “constant inspiration and reference point,” not only with the dance-floor innovation of “Believe” but 27 other solo albums and an Oscar, but lessons in “living in the spotlight” and deftness in “keeping her sanity.” The audience gives some good cheers during the speech, during which the camera would pan to Cher waiting backstage.
Zendaya underscored this, “Come on, she does it all really, really fucking well.” And it wasn’t just “effortless charm and acting chops” and “stunning dresses” that got Cher into the Hall of Fame. “You need the musical goods and Cher has got the goods.” (Cheer.)
This is so great, that Zendaya made this case about Cher’s music credentials. She talked about Cher being the only solo artist with a #1 in each of the last seven decades, how she’s sold 140 million records worldwide, how Cher became an “instant sensation (with Sonny), shattering stereotypes about what a female artist is supposed to sound like,” creating something “new, innovative and distinctively her own,” how she navigated ” a multitude of genres, defined new ones and reinvented others” and has “stood test of time.” Zendaya quipped that there are “drag performers all over the world currently in a makeup chair” (this earned a laugh from Roger Daltry) “putting on their best Cher face.”
Zendaya spoke about Cher being a “brilliant and captivating performer, fearless in her presentation, an inspiration for every female artist who came after her” and is someone who “never acknowledged or accepted there things women were not supposed to do…she did exactly what she wanted,…This fierce woman is a hero, an artist and just about as authentically rock and roll as you can get” (thank you!), an advocate, an ally, and a person “paving the way for people to speak their truth” both “daring and open hearted.” She quotes Cher in saying, “you should never be inhibited by what people expect you do to.”
The video is about four and a half minutes and starts with Cher telling the Hall of Fame to fuck off. There are 60s pics of Sonny & Cher and how there was never going to be a duo. Cher saying she can’t do this by myself and Sonny saying Cher is a very good singer and he that was “desperately trying to make people aware of that.” Cher is shown in her Rona-Barrett Owlwood bedroom talking about being newly single and being not as dumb or weak as she thought she was.
P!nk says unequivocally “Cher is a fucking rock star…genre-less and brave…one of the most unique artists our world has seen.”
The video then plays “Dark Lady” and the irony here is that song like this might have kept Cher out of the HoF for this long,
Cyndi Lauper then says, “She’s always been rock. Even on her television show. She had all the rockers on.”
They show a short-haired Cher in a TV interview for Black Rose talking about how she wanted to be more rock and roll and they conflate that with images from the Geffen label era and the amazing 1979 Take Me Home tour hole-fit shot. This is very confusing.
Shania Twain then talks about watching Cher “go through all of these evolutions in her life, her fashion sense and herstage presence…she is the most diverse artist ever.”
They show a clip of Tina Turner talking about how they had the same type of careers, starting with their husband managers. Tina says, “she was an icon then and she has remained an icon.” [Thank you, Tina. Because she was iconic by 1975 already.]
They show Cher’s iconic “Turn Back Time” video image of her straddling the canon. (Later when I watched the show’s telecast with Mr. Cher Scholar, he quipped that he’s still waiting for that V.A. claim about some sailor who got blue balls or threw out his lower back while sliding down the deck toward Cher during the shooting of this video.)
P!NK talks about Cher’s voice, “this incredible masculine/feminine mix. You can’t mimic that.”
The song “Strong Enough” plays and Cher talks about performing, feeling energy from thousands of people, “It makes you feel about sixteen feet tall.”
Cyndi Lauper says that “Cher’s success is in her gumption,” how she made “Believe” after they wrote her off. (But for that matter she made “Gypsies” after they wrote her off and “I Found Someone.” She’s the most written-off singer in the history.)
Cher talks about being dropped from two record companies.(But there were so many labels.) Mark Taylor explains the Cher effect works.
P!NK says “I don’t know many people who can say that they put out 27 studio albums and have a hit in every decade.
They show a Vogue cover, the Time cover, a shot of Mask and the Oscar moments.
Zendaya finishes by saying “It’s about time everyone” and introduces Cher as “the coolest woman on the planet.”
Her performance of this song struggles a bit. It doesn’t feel smooth. She did better at the Victoria’s Secret event earlier in the week and will do better in 2025 for other events. Does that outfit have chaps? But she is very bouncy. Dionne Warwick and her son smiled along. She still owns the stage but she can’t belt out the notes, Jelly Roll and Keith Urban are seen participating again. Thank you guitar solo. Cher might agree because she touches him on the shoulder and he give her a big grin.
In a sea of older artists struggling to stand up, walk or walking without much oomph, my family group commented on how well Cher was moving for her age, how youthful she seemed compared to some of the other aging rock stars.
The speeches would trade off from the right side of the stage to the left. Unfortunately I was on the opposite side of the arena and had to watch Cher’s speech on the monitors.
Cher hugged Zendaya. Cher admitted the speech would be a crap shoot (and it was). We again got a lot of ums and a kind of ditzy-voice Cher uses in these speeches that doesn’t appear similarly in her televised interviews (which are all more concise and assured). Maybe it’s the anxiety. She started off with a joke that getting into the Hall of Fame was harder then getting divorced from two men.
And this sets the tone for the speech. Cher decided she was going to accept the honor as a solo artist and as a woman. She was going to focus on women’s strength and perseverance. She dismisses the men she worked with from the beginning of the speech. And although I was hoping Sonny would get a minute in the sun, I didn’t dislike this approach. I think for the time, especially as it turned out just weeks before the Trumpapocalyptic election, it was the right move. Cher has been solo for over 40 years longer than her work with Sonny (which lasted about 13-14 years professionally, 1964-1977, give or take a few reunions). Cher surely deserves this award on her own. Sonny does get his due slightly in the video, and more so in her Memoir and on the book show in appearances like on The Howard Stern Show interview where Stern said multiple times that Sonny deserved his own spot in the HoF and Cher agreed.
Cher accidentally started to say the “Hollywood” instead of “Rock and Roll” Hall of Fame. She thanked her “guardian” David Geffen for “writing a letter” that she credits for getting in. She told some stories about her life: seeing Cinderella as a four year old, wanting to be famous, having a crazy yet amazing mother who told her she was not the prettiest, smartest, most talented kid, but she was special. She talked about not doing well in school, the ups and downs of showbusiness, being “lower than a snake’s belly” at times, as her mom used to say. Cher says she never gave up. She got from her mom her perseverance. (The television coverage cuts to Mary J. Blige clapping.)
Cher says after she left Sonny she had a car and her clothes and that it took Francis Ford Coppola’s encouragement for her to move to New York to pursue acting more seriously. She mentions getting a play and then getting to work with Meryl Streep. Cher talks about being lucky, being dropped by 4 labels, that her #1 hits in seven decades surprises even her. On the telecast you can hear her clearly say, “I’m a good singer. I’m not a great singer. I’ll take good.”
I misunderstood this at the event. I heard her say “I’m a good singer” and then a commotion. In the bootleg clip below you can see what I mean. Her full comments are completely obscured. I thought she was defending herself, not being self deprecating. But I think her assessment is right. Some of us love her singing but she is a combination of many things (fashion, singing, attitude).
She says, “Believe changed the sound of music. It was an accident…Believe was kind of a bitch in the beginning.” She retells the story about the record company head complaining that “No one will know that it’s you. Yes, that’s the deal. That’s the great part.” She said it’s been a roller coaster life. But she implored us to “never give up. I’m talking to the women, okay….We keep striving. We keep going. And we keep building. And we are somebody.”
She thanked her family, Chaz, Elijah, her sister and brother-in-law, Slash and Alexander.
She walked off without her award and on the TV broadcast you can see Zendaya trailing after her with it. And then she was not seen again in the crowd or backstage photos. And there was no group song for this induction year, possibly due to some backstage squabbles. There were those Foreigner stories we started hearing the night before the show.
The show was broadcast live on the Disney channel which…I mean…let’s be honest…is not a good look for rebellion and resistance.
There were images that came out later of Cher talking with Mary J. Blige, posing with Dua Lipa and Zendaya and a video of her interacting with super-fan Flavor Flav.
Kool and the Gang
That was not the last Cher reference in the show however. Chuck D. came out next to induct Kool and the Gang, He referenced “the Roots” and I didn’t understand who they were. Later I found out that Questlove and the Roots are the house band for Jimmy Fallon’s The Tonight Show and they were also the backing band for the HoF ceremony that night. Chuck D. continues, “I know a lotta rappers gotta thank, Cher, right? We gotta thank Cher“ and that gets cheers. He is referencing her auto-tune song “Believe.”
After Kool and the Gang played, my brother and I agreed this was a really fun part of the show. (He had one Kool and the Gang album as I recall.) I even liked “Celebration: which as a kid of the 1980s, I was fully prepared to never have to listen to again. They have plenty of great songs, “Too Hot” and I also like the end of the song “Ladies Night.” (And of course, Miss Ladd, which egregiously they did not play.)
Foreigner
Sammy Hagar did the induction for Foreigner. My oldest brother was the biggest Sammy Hagar fan, but they were both at the Checkerdome that night he recorded his MTV special there in 1983. My younger brother was the bigger Foreigner fan. So it was fun to see this induction with Randy. As I recall he once played me the song “Juke Box Hero” on our credenza-like phonograph and called it a masterpiece. Sammy Hagar later agreed as much.
Sammy Hagar started by taking a long time to tell what amounted to Cher joke.
He said musicians have been asking themselves what the criteria is for getting into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “What do you have to have done? There should be some rules.” Yes, this sounds logical. He goes on to speculate: should you need to have one hit song? Foreigner has had “nine mega hits in the top 100.” Do you need a gold record? Foreigner has sold 80 million records and has six top 10 albums. Or maybe you have to have been around long enough, longevity, still filling arenas and amphitheaters (he almost says arenas, Cher is still filling arenas but not stadiums. Metallica is still filling stadiums according to a traffic jam I was in last summer in Boston). Hagar continues, even though the tour doesn’t have the original members, that’s how good the songs were. Hagar said this as if it were a compliment; but it seems some fans and members of the band do not see it this way; see the Foreigner article above.]
Then Hagar said that backstage he was thinking maybe the band wasn’t glamourous or pretty enough. (Well imho, Lou Gramm was plenty pretty), but then Hagar said that “if that were the case, Cher would have been in the Hall of Fame about 10 times already, every time she reinvented herself. Welcome Cher. Congratulations.” (cut to members of Foreigner laughing.) “What was I thinking?” Then he goes on to explain why Foreigner deserved to be in the HoF.
I have to say I was probably more of a Lou Gramm fan. but I sure heard a lot of Foreigner in my house growing up and I know all the hits. I was especially a fan of his solo hit, “Midnight Blue,” and in high school would blast it from my car radio. I thought the interactions between Kelly Clarkson and Lou Gramm were very moving. Graham seemed very old and unsteady.
Demi Levato also did part of the Foreigner performance. Like Dua Lipa, I cannot get into Demi Levato either. There’s lots of leather bustiers and chains. Being a Cher fan I should be primed to like this. But it always feels like these women are trying too hard.
Then Roger Daltry arrives to induct Peter Frampton and this is how it should be. Underdog inductees should always inducted by an unquestionably accepted members. Franpton shouldn’t have ever have been an underdog but his teen idol status insured that he would be. I looked over at my brother when Roger Daltry came out and our eyes got big (later that night we had to explain to my Dad who he was and yes my almost 90-year-old parents stayed up to watch the whole show because we were there at it).
Before we left for the show, someone in the house (not me and I won’t say who it was) asked why Peter Frampton was even being inducted. Well, Roger Daltry told us why and it was a great speech. The induction video went on to put his guitar playing on the level with Jeff Beck. And then Peter Frampton did an amazing performance with friend Keith Urban, which impressed even the naysayer above. After his performance, Frampton was helped to the stage (due to his own health problems) and he gave what was maybe my second favorite speech of the night, full of humility and wisdom and the insistence that “Kindness is King.”
Jimmy Buffett
All of my party got up to use the bathroom at this point and to go get snacks. Not me. I did not move. They missed the Big Mama Thorton’s video and the beginning of the Jimmy Buffett’s tribute. Julie was the big Jimmy Buffet fan who initiated me into the two shows I went to and loved. But his tribute was a big letdown. The songs chosen by Kenny Chesney, James Taylor, Mac McAnally and Dave Matthews were all ballads at the exclusion of those festive party songs that were a staple of his live shows. And I love me some Buffet ballads. But the overall feeling of the tribute was of sadness. And it is truly sad that Jimmy Buffet is no longer with us; but I have never left a Jimmy Buffet show feeling sad. I did like how James Taylor explained Jimmy Buffet as a hero in a Greek myth.
Susanne de Passe
Motown’s Susanne de Passe talked forever and forever, ignoring the prompter’s many pleas for her to wrap it up. (We had a good vantage point from which to see the prompter) but she had one good piece of advice, “You have to make “no” your vitamin.”
A Trip Called Quest
The third Cher mention of the night happened when Dave Chapelle (and Randy is a huge Chapelle fan, too) was inducting A Tribe Called Quest. Fife Dawg’s father, Ward Taylor, introduced his family and ended by saying “Cher, I got you babe: and a wink. And then went on to say, “I am headed to San Jose but I don’t have a GPS. So Miss. Warwick, I need your help” and then he pointed both fingers at Dionne Warwick in the audience. She laughed. (She had returned to the audience after her induction which was nice but I haven’t much else to say about it.)
We all surmised that Cher was possibly flying home by then but she told Cher she stayed for the whole show.
It was fun to watch Flavor Flav dancing to the great menagerie of old school rappers during the Tribe tribute and I was excited to see Queen Latifa, probably the only rapper I ever got into.
Mary J. Blige
Mary J. Blige’s speech was my favorite. She talked about how, in order to sustain a career, you have to have humility, that life is full of peaks and valleys. How you have to move with grace. Trust the process of your journey. Share your wisdom and love and respect with all who cross your path. She said you don’t need to wait to be perfect. “You are worthy.” Her knowing chuckle was very, very charming. She emphatically thanked her fans.
The Dave Matthews Band
None of us were Dave Matthews fans but the majority of the crowd in that arena were, which is why they were saved for last. They had been a fan fav in the HoF polls for two years. And although I do love the playful and orgasmic sexiness of the song “Crash Into Me” (“I’m the king of the castle, you’re the dirty rascal…please crash into me”), they only played a snippet of that. Julia Roberts inducted them like a giddy fan. I couldn’t get into it.
Due to Julie’s migraine and the five-hour length of the show, we had skipped dinner and were all pretty hungry by 1 am. We went to Happy Dog, a hot-dog bar in Cleveland and had some booze and fancy, creative hot dogs.
Bob Mackie and Cher are almost synonymous. Aside from his ingenious work on The Carol Burnett Show, his career seemed to soar right along his glamourous make-overs of Cher in her 1970s variety shows and later live appearances and tours. His documentary dramatically recounts the dress she wore to the first Met Gala in 1974 and the effect it had on everybody attending. I never get tired of hearing Hal Rubenstein’s retelling of his Lillian Gish conversation that night, seeing Lillian Gish at the Meta Gala sitting all by herself, lit by only one candle. And when she sees Cher walk by she exclaims, “Oh my! Look at her.” Rubenstein adds, “so did everyone else in the room.” (The story has such undertones of changing Hollywood beauty standards and passing the torch.)
“Style is really confidence,” Rubenstein says and you would imagine Diane Warren and Kevyn Aucoin might agree. Cher is a predominant talking head in the Mackie documentary, as you would expect, talking about her first meeting with him, how he helped give her confidence with his designs and how much fun they had creating them.
In the Kevyn Aucoin documentary, Larger Than Life (a reference to his size), Cher has a much smaller footprint, but then she seems to have worked with him for only a short amount of time. The documentary has them first working together from Cher’s“Dov’è L’amore” video (1999) to her “Song for the Lonely” video (2002) and he apparently died a few months after that. Cher talks about the “Dov’è L’amore” video where Aucoin took hours upon hours to do the amazing eye makeup for Cher.
And although Cher isn’t seen much in the Aucoin documentary, her appearances are very significant to his story personally. First of all, as an early fan of Streisand and Cher, it’s interesting to note that it wasn’t Streisand who befriended him. And I’m no Streisand scholar but I don’t overhear many stories about Streisand befriending people who work for her. Maybe she does. But you hear about Cher’s friendships with long-term working partnerships pretty often. Maybe she’s just friendlier. In this case it was Cher who first alerted Aucoin to the fact that his big health issue (he was suffering chronic pain and growing taller and larger into adulthood) was acromegaly. The documentary recounts that Cher told him this while they were working on a second video shoot, which was most likely the video for “The Music’s No Good Without You.”
Warren and Cher both tell the “If I Could Turn Back Time” story with Warren’s horrible demo. They play the demo and am I crazy to say I like the demo better because it sounds grittier? They dramatically re-enact Cher saying over and over again that “she fucking hates” the song. (These two fucking potty mouths, am I right?) It wasn’t until Warren offered to “pay for the track” and Cher’s realization of Warren’s innate cheapness that made Cher change her mind. Cher says she recorded the song in 15 minutes and from the start of singing it she realized it was the perfect song for her. Warren was vindicated. Cher now calls it ”one of my favorite songs and one of my biggest hits.”
The Dresses of Cher & Bob Mackie
