a division of the Chersonian Institute

Category: Television (Page 2 of 22)

Continuing On With the Cher Specials

So the Christmas album, huh? That was fun!

The bad thing about Christmas albums is that they have a short shelf life for hits and appearances. They end abruptly at the end of the year.

So anyway, where were we?

We were cataloging Cher’s TV appearances that’s where we were, specifically the TV and concert specials.

I’ve been looking forward to doing the early 1980s specials, Cher in Concert from Monte Carlo (1981) and Celebration at Caesars (1983). They are so under-appreciated and yet so unobtrusively crucial in the  timeline of Cher’s slow transformation into becoming a rock singer by the mid-to-late 1980s.

The shows were so important, I kind of procrastinated starting these summaries. I had pages and pages of notes!

Here we go with the rougher but still deliciously ambitious Monte Carlo show!

We’re Officially In The Season To Be Merry and Bright

So Christmas season is officially upon us. The Cher tree is up with a new, sturdier nativity.

It’s also time to link to my Massive Christmas Playlist(s). It was a pleasure, (a pleasure!), to add three of Cher’s Christmas songs to the list. Now Cher is officially ON my massive Christmas Playlist.  And her songs add some happy and fun to the blend.

You can listen to the playlist on Spotify or Tidal. Usually I plug the Tidal version of my playlists because Tidal pays artists more per stream and has HiFi. But there’s one song that’s suddenly missing from the Tidal list this year. (Tidal displays those songs grayed out.)

And so this troublemaker is making the Tidal list sub-par this year. Thus, I have to recommend listening to the Spotify mix this year instead.

Harumph. There’s always one.

Anyway, Cher said in one of her interviews, (excerpts post coming shortly), that she didn’t want to do a Christmas Special this year due to the writers and actors strikes (going on at the time of the interviews). Fair enough. I support that. But this just means we can start dreaming for next year!

Idea’s for next year’s possible Cher Christmas special:

  1. Cher dressing up as Mrs. Claus. That would be fun and adorable. A little feminist spin on the North Pole maybe.
  2. Cher showing us her favorite Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour and Cher show clips with maybe some behind-the-scenes dish.
  3.  New Christmas skits and other Christmas-song-singing musical guests. And because everyone has done at least one Christmas song or an album or two, that’s like possibly everybody.

(See? It writes itself!)

Finally, I know we’ve all been listening to Cher’s new Christmas album non-stop over the last few weeks, but there are actually other 2023 Christmas album releases this year and although I surely won’t be able to listen to them all before the end of the year, there are a few I have listened to and I would like to mention the new Gregory Porter Christmas album, Christmas Wish, which is very good.

Every song is great, but there are some very timely songs included considering this troubled year, like “Everything’s Not Lost, and “Someday at Christmas.”

His song “Christmas Wish” is probably the best song with that overly-sentimental title.  After listening to it, you may want to kiss your mama if she was one of those who could turn Christmas into a magic time (as my mother could).  Porter does a very good duet-version of Ella Fitzgerald’s  great song, “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?” (I also love Patti LaBelle’s sparkly version.)  Not many artists every take on the Peanut’s Christmas theme, “Christmas Time is Here,” except jazz artists like Porter.  So that’s nice. Porter does a good version of Nat King Cole’s “A Cradle in Bethlehem” and I love the quietly-exciting end to his version of “Do You Hear What I Hear?” Overall, a poignant-feeling Christmas album.

So enjoy a Christmas cookie and some nice new Xmas jams…and my new Cher-boyfriend nativity.

Cher Christmas Reviews & Upcoming Appearances

It’s way past time to catch up on how Cher’s new album has been doing.

Remixes

Before we start, the digital remixes for “DJ Play a Christmas Song” were just released. Check your local streaming service. Some remixes I like even better than the “canonical” song, and I think I can only say that about two prior remixes. Although I acknowledge the fun aspect of remixes, (which is a very unfun way of saying it), remixes kind of confuse me in a scholarship sense: what’s the canonical version if remixes fare better than the album versions in sales or on the charts?

And anything that stars with a pounding beat for three minutes will send me to bed with a headache. But happily, this is not the case with these remixes.

Good Reviews

So let’s start with the fans. Ones I’ve heard from have been playing the album nonstop. Starting with Google reviews, I couldn’t find anything less than a five-star. The Amazon reviews are spread out between the two editions Amazon is selling.

Amazon 1 or 2 stars complain that their CD cases were cracked. I bought some extra copies for gifts and the majority of mine from Amazon US were cracked as well. None of my Amazon UK cases were cracked. But some fans were complaining that their CDs were cracked too! Boo Amazon US.

One four-star review said the album lacks the sparkle of a typical Cher album and they wanted more dance songs. Another four-star review wanted the songs to be more traditional. This speaks to the variety of Cher fans and how many subgroups want different things.

Some other four-star examples:

“So it’s arrived ,after year’s of rumours Cher’s Christmas album has finally landed. Overall its a good affair with stompers Dj play a christmas song and Angels in the snow ,Drop top sleigh ride withTyga could have been awful but is a winner, couple of ballads which fit in well.Home feat Michael Buble is almost the same version he recorded with Blake Shelton ,should have done Baby it’s cold out side instead or maybe that’s to woke or snowflakey for these days. Dissapointing mastering or production ,not sure which it is but the sound is very basie and not clear at all which for me spoils the whole album. That said Put the dec’s up have a drink and put this Cher-mazing album on ! ,”

Or this funny four-star:

Good CD except for 2 tracks which are awful

There are more cracked CD complaints.

Some of the five-star reviews:

“refreshingly different, in top form, Cher puts her stamp on Xmas, “Favorite Christmas CD of All Time”

Two fans disagreed over one song:

“I love “Drop Top Sleigh Ride” with Tyga! It’s has a great upbeat and is just plain fun.”

Another fan disagrees:

“Track #7 “Drop Top Sleigh Ride” with Tyga is the stand out bad track simply the rap ruins the song. The song starts great and fits perfectly, then Tyga puts the spoil on the song with rap. Wish there was a [Tyga] rap free version of the song.”

And this hilarious five-star review:

“JUNK the album is a piece of junk..cher should leave christmas ALONE

Or this review speaking to the variety:

“This is the best album Cher has ever recorded! The perfect mix of 60’s nostalgia, dance, rock and ballads.”

Other headlines used words like fabulous, quality, wonderful, loved it!

The overall Amazon rating is 86% at five-star (at this time). But these are most likely big fans. Dancing Queen also has a five-star rating at 85% (and I don’t remember such enthusiasm for that album) so this could just mean Cher fans like Cher stuff and they’re motivated to give Amazon reviews. Not that there’s  anything wrong with that and I use those reviews all the time when picking out books for authors I’m less familiar with.

But next I put it to Mr. Cher Scholar. Mr. Cher Scholar is not a Cher fan, per se. He’s also very much entirely not a Christmas song fan. So this album posed particular problems for him potentially. But he lives with a Christmas song / Cher fan who made him listen to the album four times on a recent road trip (I gave him 48-hour breaks in between). But his opinion was already contaminated by my complaints about the album’s one bad online review so he defended the album as “fun.”

But let’s be honest. Mr. Cher Scholar is Mr. Cher Scholar for a reason. He’s no dummy. So we need to go searching for other reviews. But where do you even go to find album reviews these days?

The Harvard Crimson gave the most detailed review and called it a “strong showing from an industry legend.”

“While holiday albums are a dime a dozen, Cher gives her own take on the saturated genre by combining mid-twentieth century doo-wop and early 2000s dance-pop with beloved…classics.”

“Christmas is at its best when Cher leans into one of two genres: big band ballads of the 50s and 60s and dance-pop tracks reminiscent of her 1988 hit ‘Believe.’”

The reviewer likes the high notes and vocal runs of Darlene Love and Cher and thinks “Angels in the Snow is a strong track” (although the reviewer considers the song a love song which I don’t because of the strong backup by Cyndi Lauper).

“One experimental, yet highly successful track that deviates from these genres is ‘Drop Top Sleigh Ride’ with Tyga. Proceeds with a bass and 808-heavy instrumental. Tyga’s highly suggestive verse. “These rap elements would be astonishing on any Christmas album, let alone one by Cher. Still, the track is surprisingly festive and cohesive, as the jingle bells and Cher’s silken vocals soften its more unconventional parts.”

The rap song comes up again and again as a touchstone in reviews. We’ll talk about this song more at the end.

The reviewer didn’t like the  duet with Bublé, but for no other reason than it’s too slow. Slow and sad Christmas songs have long been my favorite type of Christmas song and last week The Guardian agreed with me.

The reviewer talks about the “uplifting anthems” on the album but then doesn’t like the most anthem-y ones:

“Some songs display too much holiday: ‘This Will Be Our Year’ and ‘Christmas Aint Christmas Without You’ (mistakenly listed as “Christmas Won’t Be Christmas Without You) for those songs’ ”pine-scented mediocrity.”

It’s interesting our bad review below will single out “This Will Be Our Year” as  the only “charming” track on the album.

Herald&Review says, “There isn’t much Cher hasn’t done in her career. A Christmas album is new territory, though…The secret, of course, was to lean into the incredible eclecticism of her career, all while avoiding the sleepy, saccharine pitfalls of a ‘Silent Night’-heavy holiday release.”

They go on to say, “Alexander Edwards, Cher’s romantic partner and a credited producer on the project, is best friends with Tyga, who helped make the most unexpected and delightful collaboration happen.”

Yes: “most unexpected and delightful” – keep that in mind for later on.

This review also had some interview elements.

“She was asked to do a special, she says. ‘They said, ‘Well, we can do it in England.’ I said, ‘We can do it on the moon, but I’m not doing it,'” she says, not until an [acting strike] agreement is reached.’”

Yup, I support that. Maybe we can get a special next year once the strike is, hopefully, resolved. Because that would still be awesome.

Allmusic gave the album3 1/2 stars and said it was a “nice balance an upbeat contemporary energy with the storied Motown sound of the original recordings..”

Digital Journal’s review was almost too positive. They liked just about everything with no clear indication as to why. The most specific they ever got was to say that on “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” Cher and Darlene Love “both showcase their powerhouse crystalline vocals, to the point where it is hard to differentiate where Cher picked up and where Darlene Love left off.” They also say “Angels in the Snow “would be a good sing-a-long and they end the review with “Mariah Carey ought to watch out… With this new collection, it is evident that there is a new ‘Christmas Queen’ in town.”

Well, not quite.

Retro Pop was the only review, fan or online to talk about the “riotous rendition of “Put A Little Holiday In Your Heart” and called “’DJ Play A Christmas Song’ a “genius opener that sets the scene for an album where Cher throws out the Christmas album rulebook and places the focus on having a good time.”

They go on to say, “the Motown-inspired ‘Christmas Ain’t Christmas Without You’ and hip-hop leaning ‘Drop Top Sleigh Ride’ (feat Tyga) add to her musical toy box.”

However, “there’s the occasional misstep; a reworked ‘Home’ with Michael Bublé is less a winter warmer and more an ill-judged vehicle to shoehorn him into the set – and clocking in as the longest track on the album between two feelgood originals, something of a vibe-killer – while ‘Santa Baby’ is a little out of place on an album that largely avoids the obvious holiday staples.”

That’s kinda true on both counts.

But, the review says, “come closing number, a cover of The Zombies’ ‘This Will Be Our Year,’ however, those shortcomings are forgiven and the overall effect is one of joy and warmth that has you reaching for a snowball and soaking up the holiday cheer….Overwhelmingly festive and quintessentially Cher – there’s a new Queen Of Christmas in town!”

Okay, let’s drop the Queen of Christmas thing. This is one album, people.

Bad Reviews

I have to say if you want to be a Cher fan who reads positive reviews about her all the time, you’ll have to be a fan of her movie career because she gets about 100% positive accolades for her acting performances, even in movies where she’s clearly playing a version of herself. Film people love her.

Music people, not so much. The music reviews historically have been very disdainful reviews. Not just bad reviews, but vitriolic. Like pre-trolling, offensive ad hominem reviews. They’re usually personal attacks and this goes back to the beginning of her career. But something changed in the last 10 or so years where these trashy reviews suddenly stopped, like overnight.

But sometimes you still  see one and you have to think about what it is about Cher herself they do not like. And you can tell it gets personal because attacks on what she represents will slip in there. Oftentimes, it’s political. They don’t like her politics.  So whenever I read a bad review, I try to separate legitimate points, (because even Cher herself will criticize her vocal performances as being far from perfect), from reviews with subterranean agendas.

On an album like this, reviewers could focus on her vocal changes or the sentimental Christmas genre they just don’t like, on production matters.

Slant Magazine put out not one bad review but two pieces trashing not only the album but the song “Drop Top Sleigh Ride” particularly and we’ll end this conversation talking about that song.

The author of both articles is a self-described fashionista and cool-finder. Which, of itself, does not make her a bad critic. But cool-finders and fashionistas tend not to like Cher because her fashion is of-its-own-path and the only people who find her cool are other cool people, like Nile Rodgers, for example. There’s surface cool and foundational cool and the ones who gravitate to the prior don’t like the later.

But let’s look at her points individually: “A Holiday Album We Didn’t Know We Didn’t Need

The reviewer talks about the “long-dated dance-pop of [Taylor and Cher’s] late-’90 smash ‘Believe’” and how “the sleigh goes off the rails” with the “paint-by-the-numbers” DJ single, ” its “gratuitous Auto-Tune” (she likes the word gratuitous) “and half-step key change.” She complains there are too many songwriters, a common lament for Cher’s dance music songs and says “Santa Baby” is “vampy-to-the-point-of-campy” and that’s kinda true but fully in the pocket of a Cher thing if you knew her history at all. In fact, to invoke the words “vamp” and “camp” in a review of Cher without any acknowledgement of irony says a lot about the age of the reviewer and their cultural literacy.

She says, “but that most “cringe-inducing” is the “trap-adjacent ”Drop Top Sleigh Ride.’” She calls the song “a crime against the holiday spirit” and dislikes the “embarrassing wordplay.”

So here’s my question: if she found the toned-down sexual elements of the Cher song uncomfortable, what does she think about the entire genre? Because she is the only reviewer to repeatedly label the song “trap-adjacent” vs rap.  I looked up bios and Wikipedia pages for both Tyga and Alexander Edwards and a page on the top trap artists and they were not listed as trap artists.

According to Wikipedia, “Trap is a subgenre of hip hop music that originated in the Southern United States in the 1990s. The genre gets its name from the Atlanta slang term “trap house”, a house used exclusively to sell drugs.”

Both Tyga and Edwards are from California, not Atlanta. I’m not sure how these are trap artists.

In any case, the reviewer even hates the album title (but what Christmas album ever had a good title?)

She only liked “This Year Will Be Our Year” and went on to highlight its hipster credibility.

In another article, “The 15 Worst Christmas Songs of All Time” the same reviewer starts with even more snark beginning with “apologies in advance” (a total hipster adage). The list included, judging by the Facebook comments defending them, some fan favorites. All the comments I could find about the Cher’s song on their Facebook post were defending the song. Some examples:

The reviewer alo attacks Dan Fogelberg’s “Old Lang Syne” for its “gratuitous details” but aren’t the details of the scene in that song the whole effect? She hates that effect! She attacks the usual novelty songs for being novelty songs.

The Rap Song

So….anyway. There’s something significant about a white woman (who gives a lot of good reviews to Taylor Swift) placing a laser focus on the one rap song over multiple reviews. Which is not to say a white, female, pro-Swiftie can’t make sentient points about rap, but this review seems to be sticking out like a sore thumb. It feels like a dog whistle. Especially when so many other fans and online reviews single out the song as a good showing.

As I was driving to Cleveland a few weeks ago I was tooling some response jokes  to this review, like this one:

“This reviewer needs to pull that piece of coal Santa gave her last year out of her ass.”

Or “Isn’t if funny that on this album Cher asked us to ‘put a little Christmas in our heart’ but the reviewer couldn’t find it.”

Anyway, those were my jokes. Once I got back I realized this bad review was a very significant review. Because after trying to figure out what so offended this reviewer about the song,  I have come to believe this is the most important song on the album. And a crucial song at this juncture of Cher’s recording career.

I believe there is a direct through line from Sonny’s love of gospel and R&B to this very song. And there’s a direct connection between this song and “Believe.”

Rap music has always incorporated technology in subversive ways. The white rock response to this just illustrates that subversiveness, like this other ironic Cher intersection involving Gregg Allman. “When asked what he thought about rap music, Gregg Allman said rap was “short for crap.”

So it’s politically significant that Cher included a song from her boyfriend, who happens to be a rap producer who then called on his best friend, Tyga, to sing on the Cher song.

And it’s also significant that Cher recorded “Believe” which is known as the Cher-effect, a technology that she stubbornly continues to use, a technology establishment rockers dislike but that the rap community has wholeheartedly embraced,  a fact proven not only in the rap songs themselves that went on to use the technology but with the famous story of Jay-Z approaching Cher at the Met Gala one year to tell her “thank you” for spearheading its use. (In one story I read it was the former Mr. Kim Kardashian who said thank you). In any case, rappers understood auto tune’s potential as part of their ongoing use of technology. And since then, Cher has been seen as much more popular in the rap community.

Therefore, the song makes perfect sense on this album and can be read as Cher’s merging musically and officially into the community she is already a part of.

The first essay in The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock (I’m only two essays in) is called “Plugged In: Technology and Popular Music” by Paul Théberge and it covers a lot of this ground:

“Any discussion of the role of technology in popular music should begin with the simple premise: without electronic technology, poplar music in the twenty-first century is unthinkable.”

He talks about pop technology from instruments to recording, performing and playback. Technology is a baseline and has a long history of being a “catalyst for musical change” as does using technologies in ways for which the technologies were not intended, much of music’s technology having been historically developed for other industries like for example the microphone being developed by the telephone industry.

There have been “conflicts in musical aesthetics and values have accompanied virtually every development in music” and that “different uses of technology reflect different…cultural priorities.”

Théberge talks about microphones and amplifiers that fueled the new crooner of the 1940s and how those were once controversial technologies which have now been naturalized. He says it is a lie that pop and rock music can ever really be ‘unplugged’ and how this is more of an ideology than a possibility.

The impact of the microphone alone “was both subtle and profound: for example, the string bass could be heard clearly, for the first time,  in jazz recordings and the instrument quickly replaced the tuba…” Crooning was instantly “regarded by early critics as effeminate and their singing style and both technically and, by extension, emotionally ‘dishonest.”

The microphone.

Théberge  talks about how crooners would develop a singing technique better suited to the microphone and how Bing Crosby’s “low register was particularly enhanced by the microphone though the physical phenomenon known as the ‘proximity effect.’”

Singers sing, Théberge says, “first and foremost to the microphone and every microphone has it’s own characteristics and colours the sound in subtle, yet unmistakable ways.”

This is a fact fans have noticed in the Michael Buble duet where the sounds of their respective microphones possibly doesn’t meld well in the final result.

Théberge says our experience of the ‘grain’ or ‘warmth’ or ‘presence’  of a singers voice is always mediated by the microphone.

Then, Théberge shows, we begot magnetic recording and putting mics on other instruments. Then engineers “gradually took over much of the responsibility for achieving musical balances” and then multi-track studios and then guitar pickups and then rock amplification and feedback and distortion and then computers and computer software.

“The loudness or rock or the booming bass of hip hop are sounds that can only be produced and experienced through technological means.”

Théberge talks about early technology effects that started out as novelty effects but have since become normalized: the echo effect in Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog,” late 1960s “flanging” on many psychedelic rock recordings, (created by manipulating the speed of tape recorders), and the multitrack tape recorder “which makes of song recording a compositional process and is thus central to the creation of popular music at the most fundamental level.”

Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole used multitrack recording to isolate their vocals from their orchestras. Overdubbing was used by Les Paul and Marty Ford and “a single vocalist performing multiple harmony parts [was] a technique pushed to its limits by artists such as Joni Mitchell…through overdubbing.” Phil Spector and Stevie Wonder also using overdubbing for various purposes.

And then mixing “ a complex and specialized tasks” used by Giorgio Moroder and other disco producers continuing on to dance remixes and DJ mashups and rap songs.

And then MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) which led to synthesizers, samplers, drum machines, sequencers, home computers, software simulation. “The technical reproduction is not without its social consequences. The technologies of rock and pop music production have long been a male-dominated terrain, and this has been as true for the most basic of rock technologies, the electric guitar, as it Is for the wider range of electronic technologies associated with stage and studio.”

“Musical instruments are often the centre of controversy in pop and rock because their use is so intimately tied with musicians’ notions of personal expression….even Bob Dylan’s adoption of the electric guitar…was looked up with derision.”

Théberge then addresses rap and the Roland TR-808 drum machine (see above in The Harvard Crimson review of “Drop Top Sleigh Ride”) that became “the instrument of choice among many  hip hop, house and music producers….for the ability to detune the bass drum, creating a sound akin to a low-frequency hum, and the necessity of building rhythm patterns in a precise grid-like framework, have been cited as influences on the musical style of these genres”

“…scratching and the art of the DJ, ” digital samplers, tape loops going back to the Moody Blues and King Crimson,

Electronic pop is criticized “by the rock press for being ‘cold’ and ‘inhuman.’ but that digital effects “appear in a surprising number of genres.”

He ends by saying, “technology must be understood as both an enabling and a constraining factor, that acts in complex and contradictory ways in music production, distribution and consumption….Technology acts to disrupt both music performance and recording practices but the business of music itself,…mediating the ever-shifting power relations.”

Théberge adds this article in is his notes: “An insightful case study of the uses of technology in the production of rap music can be found in “Soul sonic forces: technology , orality, and black cultural practice in rap music” by Tricia Rose” (1994)

It’s worth a full read but let’s just excerpt the salient parts of that piece. Tricia Rose talks about common criticisms of rap: it’s too simple and repetitive, it’s not creative or musical, its just noise. She takes the structures of rap, (the volume, looped drum beats and bass frequencies), back to earlier black cultural traditions and explains rap’s social and emotional power for black communities. She also outlines the differences between Western classical music structures and African-derived structures.

Since we’re talking about technology here, I just want to say Rose makes a very detailed case for repetition and how new technologies enable that repetition in rap, “this advanced technology has not bee straight-forwardly adopted: it has been significantly revised in ways that are in keeping with long-standing black cultural priorities, particularly samplers….[which have raised] complex questions regarding fair use of musical property and the boundaries of ownership of musical phrases.”

That we already know. But Rose then explains how sampling is “critically linked to black poetic traditions and the oral forms that underwrite them….intertextuality, boasting, toasting, and signifying in rap’s lyrical style and organization. Rap’s oral articulations are heavily informed by technological processes….in the way orally based approaches to narrative are embedded in the use of the technology itself….these black techno-interventions [me: of which auto tune is now one] are often dismissed as nonmusical effects or rendered invisible.”

“The arrangement and selection of sounds rap musicians have invented via samples, turntables, tape machines, and sound systems are at once deconstructive (in that they actually take apart recorded musical compositions) and recuperative (because they recontextualize these elements creating new meanings for cultural sounds that have been relegated to commercial wastebins)….These revisions do not take place in a cultural and political vacuum, they are played out on a cultural and commercial terrain that embraces black cultural products and simultaneously denies their complexity and coherence. This denial is partly fueled by a mainstream cultural adherence to the traditional paradigms of Western classical music as the highest legitimate standard for musical creation, a standard that at this point should seem, at best, only marginally relevant in the contemporary popular music realm (a space all but overrun by Afrodiasporic sounds and multicultural hybrids of them).”

“Advances in technology have facilitated an increase in the scope of break beat deconstruction and reconstruction and have made complex uses of repetition more accessible.”

Rose talks abut the bass line, the loop, the rupture of the pattern and “the cut,” where she establishes a ground zero in the music of James Brown and goes on to say, “….music embodies assumptions regarding social power, hierarchy, pleasure and worldview.”

“Although rap music is shaped by and articulated through advanced reproduction equipment, it’s stylistic priorities are not merely by-products of such equipment.”

(An important sentence and the same is absolutely true for “Believe.”)

And here’s the thing:

“If rap can be so overwhelmingly mischaracterized, then what other musical and cultural practices have collapsed into the logic of industrial repetition, labeled examples of “cult” like obedience. [Theodor] Adorno’s massive misreading of the jazz break, beside betraying a severe case of black cultural illiteracy, is another obvious example of the pitfalls or reading musical structures in the popular realm as by-products of industrial forces.”

“Retaining black cultural priorities [and feminist ones, I would argue] is an active an often resistive process that has involved manipulating established recording policies, mixing techniques, lyrical construction and the definition of music itself.”

Rose also states that “Rap lyrics are a critical part of a rapper’s identity, strongly suggesting the importance of authorship and individuality in rap music. Yet, sampling as it is used by rap artists indicates the importance of collective identities and group histories.”

And again when we criticize a cadre of writers on a Cher song, or a producer’s advanced involvement in a Cher song, we’re fighting this same idea of a collective cultural project.

“Rap musicians’ technological in(ter)ventions are not ends in and of themselves, they are means to cultural ends.”

If Cher doing Rap offends you, that’s on you. She has a direct connection to rap although she heretofore never crooned a syllable of it. The majority of the reviews and comments state that it hasn’t offended many listeners. I have no doubt there are sinister areas of the internet that are trashing Cher for her involvement with rap and for her attachment to Alexander Edwards and black culture. But the song is not offending the rap artists I’m pretty sure, which is an interesting phenomenon itself in an era of calling out cultural appropriation.

What is Cher doing differently, (other than dating a rap producer)? What cultural work did “Believe” perform? Controversy always illustrates something.

Rap has been using technology in music in empowering and subversive ways. Cher, as a music outsider, has given rap another tool. And in return, rap artists have helped Cher record a rap song….for Christmas even. It’s pretty amazing.

There are some fine points being made here about how communities merge and how one song can culminate after 25 years of influence on a genre of music.

Appearances & Interviews

I’m not about to watch all the Hallmark Christmas movies this season but Cher songs have made there way into many of them: https://www.hallmarkchannel.com/christmas/cher-and-countdown-to-christmas

Chehttps://www.hallmarkchannel.com/christmas/cher-and-countdown-to-christmasr and Countdown to Christmas (All Season Long)

  • “DJ Play A Christmas Song” can be heard in “The Santa Summit” starring Hunter King and Benjamin Hollingsworth.
  • In “A Merry Scottish Christmas” starring Lacey Chabert and Scott Wolf, listen to the original song “Home” performed by Cher and Michael Bublé!
  • In “Christmas on Cherry Lane” you can catch the classic Christmas song, “Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home)” performed by Cher and Darlene Love.
  • In “Holiday Road” listen for Cher’s performance of the joyful song “Run Rudolph Run.”
  • Finally, don’t miss the unforgettable song “Angels in the Snow” by Cher in the original Christmas movie “Friends & Family Christmas.”

22 November – I Heart Radio Special
https://www.iheart.com/live/holiday-season-radio-9608/?autoplay=true&pr=false&fbclid=IwAR0AK5Bxcrg28Tcqc2XcbHqhAjVILlRYI6c1bMD1A2eGnaw_1VhxcUE6L_E

https://wnci.iheart.com/calendar/content/2023-11-22-iheartradio-holiday-special-cher-elton-john-meghan-trainor-more/

23 November – Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade starting on NBC at 8:30 am (all U.S. time zones)

https://www.macys.com/s/parade/lineup/?lineupaccordion=Performers&lid=parade_primarycta-lineupperformers

The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon NBC 11:35e/10:35c
https://www.nbc.com/nbc-insider/how-to-watch-cher-on-the-tonight-show-starring-jimmy-fallon

29 November – Christmas at Rockefeller Center with Darlene Love

https://people.com/christmas-in-rockefeller-center-performers-cher-keke-palmer-barry-manilow-8401862

Barry Manilow is another listed guest. I love the rare times those two coincide in a cultural product.


1 December – at Odeon de Luxe, Cher in Conversation

https://www.nme.com/news/music/cher-announces-live-london-in-person-interview-event-3537716

This event is also offering a Cher Christmas magazine in combo with the LP or cassette tape but order fast (you have until Nov 23)

https://shop.thisisdig.com/gb/dig/artists/cher/?ref=direct

1 December – Cher on Graham Norton Show

https://www.digitalspy.com/tv/reality-tv/a45824179/graham-norton-show-julia-roberts-tom-hanks/

 

 

Keep up with the news on further Christmas-related appearances and chart info: https://twitter.com/TCherUniverse

 

Little Richard, Cherlato and Cher Specials

Little  Richard:  I Am  Everything

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

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

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

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

But she was.

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

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

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

Cherlato

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

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

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

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

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

Here are Coolia’s pics:

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

Cher on TV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Then the Thing Was Done

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Mythology of Cher Breaking Up Rock Bands

So I’ve been in a bad mood lately. My job has turned into a mess of chaos. And in the past, when work turned difficult, something else good was happening to distract me. And visa versa, if my life was, for a while, a trainwreck, work would be solid and fulfilling. One part could always carry me through the other.

Well, not so much right now. And it seems when you’re in a bad place, grumpy ideas seem to come to you you’re like a big, grumpy magnet. So over the weekend I started thinking about the ways Rock Music Culture has slighted Cher over the last 60 years (not to mention some of her fans).

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

What is that even? What is the trumped-up scarcity of yearly-open induction spots even about? My friend Coolia just visited Cleveland for some Cardinal baseball games, visiting my parents and going to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She recently sent me a photograph of an electronic, daily voting board there where visitors can vote for their favorite artists and it shows the top ranking votes (Cher was #8 that day between Soundgarden and Weird Al) but what is that board even doing? Except manufacturing controversy between fans like the scam it is? Either the place is a serious museum to rock and roll (by which there would be no formal inductions of anything, just the facts of a music genre) or it’s a circus. It has chosen to be a circus.

The Sticky Mythology of Yoko Ono

When I was in third grade, some boys in Mrs. Hopson’s class were so stoked about the new band KISS. Why eight year old boys fell for KISS in the first place I will never understand; but I overheard them saying how much they hated Cher and how she was going to break up the band.

Now, I was in on the downlow about Cher at this time so I just fumed in silence. But my brother was a Beatle fan so even I believed in the Yoko Ono Myth at the time. Still, I thought, maybe Cher was performing a public service here. (My friend Coolia is a KISS fan too, so I can’t tread too far here). The point is I’ve come to learn a few facts about how the Cher entourage, (which is not quite so large as to produce the kind of shock-and-awe the Elizabeth Taylor’s entourage once did but is still probably significantly big),  became embedded in three bands over the decades, The Allman Brothers Band, KISS and Bon Jovi.

In the first case, Allman Brothers band fans were just as upset about the new presence of Cher in their lives as the KISS fans were. And to be fair, little Cher fans were none too pleased about the situation either. But Cher spent a lot of time with that band and according to the book, Midnight Riders: The Story of the Allman Brothers Band by Scott Freeman, everything Cher learned from David Geffen about extricating from bad music contracts she passed on to the Allman Brothers and they directly benefited from this and appreciated it. Oh and Dickey Betts married Cher’s personal-assistant-slash-best-friend Paulette. So if a band wanted to spend less time with Cher, would it marry her BFF?

Nobody from the band has spoken particularly poorly about Cher over the years, if you discount Gregg himself who has publicly said Cher has no talent but was “good in the sack.”

And as a sidebar, in times like these you have to give it to Sonny, who’s heterosexuality a plethora of women could attest to. Most heterosexual men don’t really get Cher although they may find her attractive. This seems a pretty average response from straight men. But Sonny was different. He saw what Cher fans see. You have to give him some kind of super-sensory credit for that. Sexist Italian guy that everyone agreed he could be, he thought Cher was more talented than anybody else did. And he gets a star for that.

Moving on to KISS, shortly after Gene Simmons started dating Cher (and the third grade boys lost their KISS-loving minds), Paul Stanley started dating Cher’s sister, Georgeanne, who went on to marry actor Michael Madsen and after that a man who was the head of Cher’s security team. So even small companies could find themselves enmeshed in the dating life of the Cher entourage. Turns out Cher is extremely likeable if you believe anyone who talks about her. Beside the point, because the determining factor was always Cher’s perceived coolness. She wasn’t cool enough to be dating Gregg Allman or Gene Simmons.

Now we can skip Les Dudek because nobody even knew they were dating anyway, or were in a band together, or that Les Dudek was between bands when they met, or where  anyone would go to overhear Dudek fans kvetching about Cher. I guess you could argue that Cher broke up the band Dudek was in with Cher, but that would still not be a Yoko-Ono-breakup per se in the sense that fans everywhere worldwide were deeply unconcerned.

Moving on to Bon Jovi, Cher dated Richie Sambora sometime after Jon Bon Jovi produced “We All Sleep Alone” and her 1987 remake of “Bang Bang.” So Cher was not quite the anathema to members of this band either. I honestly don’t remember what Bon Jovi fans thought about this. I should ask my friend Christopher who wholeheartedly believes Jon Bon Jovi is the most attractive man ever to breathe earthly oxygen. He also likes Cher so…I don’t imagine he was losing his mind at the time. But I’ll follow up on any concerns he might have had. At least Cher was moderately more cool in the late 1980s than she was in the mid-to-late 1970s vis-à-vis rock-music fans, at least cool enough to have her videos appear on MTV and not to have been relegated to the decidedly-un-hip VH-1.

But we should take comfort because I feel there is still time for Cher to break up a rock band. In fact, if she waits for when she turns 80 years old to do this, preferably with a young band of twenty-somethings I would be very pleased. Because it would hit a lot of rock’s stereotypes at the same time. And ironically, it would feel very rock and roll.

Cher Scholar’s Ultimate Cher Comp

So when Robrt Pela and I were finishing our Quagmire of Comps project, we talked about our dream Cher comp. I have probably made about ten mix-tape Cher comps in my lifetime (not including new YouTube and steaming mixes). I mean the olde timey cassette tapes. This was back in the day when there was not a single comprehensive, across-the-many-labels compilation to be purchased. My last cassette mix was made in my late 20s and even had a fold-out of liner notes written by me in a moment of prenatal-Cher-scholaring.

By now, we’ve had a few good comps out there and it’s no longer a matter of wanting to see all her hits represented in one place. I’ve also done my share of sharing what I thought were the best songs (see the links above). So lately I’ve been creating thematic comps, like Love Songs, Philosophical Songs, Girl Power Songs.

As Robrt and I were talking about the Ultimate Comp I was thinking about songs that define Cher in some way, like personally. Which is very tricky. Somewhat newb interviewers since “Believe” have had a tendency to try to ask Cher what certain songs mean to her personally and she invariably responds like the person has just landed with that question from Mars. This line of questioning inevitably tanks. This is not an artist trying to reveal biography in her music (at least when taken as a whole). Her roots are too vaudevillian, too show-biz, variety-show for that.

But…fans like a little peak into the psyche of their stars from time to time, even from artists who don’t traffic in such disclosure. So it took me about ten minutes to come up with this ultimate bio mix. Then I was reminded of Biograph, Bob Dylan’s 53-song Box Set comp from 1985. In my mind, that was the first box set I ever saw on the shelves and I immediately pined for the Cher! Box! Set! And as you might recall, about a zillion box sets did get released, so many that they had to devote a special bin for those things. But that box set of Cher’s best/rare/popular songs never did come through (although we did get a cool wooden box up-sale with lyrics on tarot cards for the Love Hurts album in 1991).

Although my biographical  framework is a risky premise for a compilation list because album (and TV show) producers like Sonny and Snuff Garrett controlled her song selection for decades, there is much we can learn from the songs Sonny wrote for Cher, (some based loosely on their biography),  songs they both selected for her to sing,  songs she’s revisited over and over again through the years and songs Cher actually wrote, (what few there are). I didn’t include all of the songs Cher wrote in my bio mix, but you can see good summaries of those online:

A lot of my cassette mixes were called “This Is Cher” in a kind of a Whitmanian Leaves of Grass repurposing.  That title has always felt jazzy and back-door to me, a bit snooty so it works in both in a post-modern, wink-wink kind of way and yet still pretty earnestly (which is Gen X perfection in tone right there). But there have already been a few “This Is Cher” comps on the market and so I’ve appended “(For Reals)” to mine with the idea that this song list is a bit more of a personal peek into Cher’s inner life.

And lastly, I’ve broken the list of songs down by decade segments to wishfully indicate separate vinyl chapters, like those old, coveted multi-album box sets with their vinyl-cover-sized liner-note booklets. Oooh! That was nice!

The mix can be found on YouTube, the only streaming platform that includes Cher’s TV performances and her self-re-released Warner Bros albums from the mid 1970s.

1960s

  1. Baby Don’t Go
    Right before Sonny & Cher, as Caesar & Cleo, launched their recording act, Cher’s mother, disturbed by Sonny’s advanced age, physically extricated the underage Cher from Sonny’s apartment. They were basically just roommates at that point but this separation allegedly marks the point where Sonny began to miss Cher and began to see her as a girlfriend. This song and Sonny’s choice to sing Bob Lind’s “Cheryl’s Going Home” (not in my mix) possibly reflect this time of separation.
  2. I Got You Babe
    Sonny always spoke of this song as mythologically personal, referencing their time trying to break into show business. He casts himself as “young” like Cher which served him well until it didn’t seem so plausible anymore. Cher still calls it “my song.” When Sonny introduces the song on their first live album and in various television performances, he counsels her to, “Sing your song.”
  3. Hello
    Extremally personal, this is Sonny’s attempt to pull back the veil and show “the people” who Sonny & Cher really were, just everyday people. But in doing so, he has to draw Cher out of her shell and she seems highly uncomfortable with their improvisational conversation.
  4. Sunny
    The is 100% re-textualizing as Sonny with an innocent but truthfully reverent delivery.
  5. Just You
    You have to switch their roles here but Sonny has written a song about their relationship and gallantly given Cher the prettier part. We now know from various sources (including both Sonny and Cher) that Sonny didn’t find Cher very attractive or smart and she found him very attractive and very smart; and although it’s hard to believe, Sonny was the one making eyes at girls more his type (big-breasted blondes) and Cher was, in reality, the jealous partner. Very telling this one.
  6. You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me
    Cher sang this song with both Sonny and Gregg Allman, like two husband bookends. She must have revisited the song officially on vinyl for a reason.
  7. Why Don’t They Let Us Fall in Love
    The romance of Sonny & Cher was hindered by a big naysayer, Cher’s mother, understandably upset by the fact that her underage daughter was living with a man 11 years older. This song puts an innocent spin on that story but there’s a little grain of truth in there, at least from the perspective of an innocent teenage girl in the throes of a massive love obsession.
  8. But You’re Mine
    See “Just You” and “I Got You Babe” above. All the same things. I don’t love this song, tbh, and I keep wanting to take it off this mix. 
  9. Little Man
    Sonny wasn’t very tall and talking about this was a schtick in their act for 12 years. 
  10. It’s the Little Things
    See “Just You” above. All the same things.
  11. Don’t Talk to Strangers
    Sonny’s portrayal of Cher as innocent doe.
  12. Trust Me
    This one is interesting in light of the fact that Sonny asked Cher to trust him in all aspects of their business and personal life. Cher didn’t put up any resistance to this idea and unfortunately Sonny was cheating her in both regards. Both ironic and true.
  13. Just a Name
    See “I Got You Babe” and also a reference to  their propensity for unique names, their own and their children’s. Sonny on TV claimed that Cher picked out the name for their child Chastity but all of Sonny’s own children’s names (before and after Cher) begin with ‘ch’ and three of the four are also unusual names. They say Cher was allegedly as unenthused about making this movie as her self-character seems to be. Closeups on their wedding rings.
  14. Ma Piano (Per Non Svegliarmi)
    Someone recently posted a video on Tic Tok showing how Cher still remembers some of the lyrics to this song. Kind of interesting, that.

1970s (Part 1)

  1. Danny Boy
    Cher says in the introduction to the song on her first live album that this song is her favorite song. She gives it a pretty emotional delivery (for her anyway).  
  2. Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves
    Although this fictional song become Cher’s second signature song, there’s a bit of the gypsy, tramp and thief in her, too, which is why the femme-fetale trope keeps recurring in her movies, television skits and music.
  3. United We Stand
    By the end of the 1960s, Sonny & Cher did in fact have their backs against the wall and they stood by each other, despite an almost-bankruptcy, infidelities and retaliatory infidelities and a career nadir. 
  4. Vamp (The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour)
    Cher pulled off the ultimate portrayal of history’s vampish heroines and villains on the 
    Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour. It felt a bit natural.
  5. My Funny Valentine (Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour)
    Although if we look to “Just You” and “It’s the Little Things” as an example, we could very well transpose the parts again, but by now Cher has redefined what it means to be beautiful in America, especially for brunettes and raven-haired ladies. Sonny can’t be anything but the also-ran from now on, a role that didn’t sit with him as well backstage as it did on-stage. 
  6. You’ve Got a Friend/Where You Lead (The Very First Glen Campbell TV Special)
    I don’t know why I included this one except that it indicates something personal in their relationship in the way they sing it, like Cher’s way of singing nasally like Sonny when they get to “Where You Lead” because where Sonny led, Cher would follow.
  7. Living in a House Divided
    And then the shit hits the fan. The year this record was made they imploded behind the scenes. Snuff Garrett might not have chosen the song for that reason, but its drama mapped perfectly to the situation. Except that nobody out in the Nielsen audience knew. It was a big secret for a year and a half. No one wanted to see it coming, even as Cher was already singing break-up songs.
  8. David’s Song
    Unknown to her fans, this was a song for Cher’s new love, David Paich. The song was also written by him (which is kind of weird and indicates he was trying to hint at her continued dependency on Sonny, if not professionally, a bit emotionally as well).
  9. Chastity Sun
    Cher’s re-wrote the lyrics to the Seals and Crofts song for Chastity and her version describes some sweet feelings of new-motherhood.
  10. The Greatest Show on Earth
    Truth be told, Sonny & Cher were putting on a master-class of acting every week on their variety show. Barely speaking offstage, they seemed perfectly fine on the air. 
  11. Mama Was a Rock and Roll Singer Papa Used to Write All Her Songs (Parts 1 and 2)
    Sonny’s mean-spirited kiss-off song about Cher’s leaving him. The fact that he got Cher to sing these lyrics still blows my mind. If that doesn’t prove to you love is blind (and deaf), what could?
  12. Didn’t We (Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour)
    Cher’s heartfelt farewell song to Sonny in return.
  13. Rock and Roll Doctor
    Cher wants to sing rock and roll already….like since the psychedelic era!
  14. Love Hurts
    Cher will return again to this one. It’s a rare soul-baring moment.
  15. Stars
    Fame can be challenging. Cher sings about it here in a remarkably intellectual Janis Ian cover.

1970s (Part 2)

  1. Love Song (Cher)
    Cher’s relationship to Elton John has been interesting and semi-personal since the mid-1970s. She records his songs, he sings like her sometimes and writes songs about her. They also wrote a song together and have appeared together on Divas Live and Joan Rivers.
  2. All Is Fair in Love (Cher)
    Cher’s first torch-song choice after starting her new solo show. Possibly a reality-check message to America.
  3. Resurrection Shuffle (with Tina Turner) (Cher)
    The whole reinvention thing. 
  4. Keep the Customer Satisfied (Cher)
    Cher solo is getting more criticism now that she’s a single lady. It’s hard to keep everyone satisfied on and off the stage.
  5. Two of Us/We Can Work It Out (The Sonny & Cher Show)
    Sweetness in how Sonny & Cher can pick it up years later. Professionalism? Affection? They keep revisiting this medley on their variety show episodes so they must like it. “Two of Us” also harkens back to their early relationship and Cher’s description of how creative they were together at home.
  6. I Love Makin’ Love to You
    Cher described sex with Gregg Allman as “hot.”
  7. Island
    But Cher’s intense fame and Allman’s pharmaceutical habits made their relationship rocky.  Cher picked this song thinking maybe a bona fide island would help.
  8. You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me
    Cher revisits the song with Allman. Totally different style and tone. Interesting evolution of relating.
  9. A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes (Cher…Special)
    Cher delves into her childhood in this 1978 special and this Disney song describes a facet of her somewhat dreamy childhood self.
  10. Guitar Groupie
    Cher loves guitars, btw. Gene Simmons can be heard singing a line in the song.
  11. It’s Too Late to Love Me Now
    At the end of her second marriage, some heartbreak.
  12. My Song (Too Far Gone)
    More specific, Cher-co-authored heartbreak.
  13. Ain’t Nobody’s Business (Cher and Other Fantasies)
    This song comes up and up again.  “If I want to put my tits on my back…”
  14. Shoppin’
    Originally this album was written to give audiences a behind-the-scenes, reality-album version of Cher. The label wanted her to dance; she wanted to rock. This album happened as a tug-of-war. Cher loves to shop. Some nice Luther Vandross bopping to Cher’s shopping. 
  15. Mirror Image
    Cher compares CHER to Cher.  And laments the tabloids.
  16. Outrageous
    See “Aint Nobody’s Business” above. Also contains a nod to Bob Mackie. “God, my mother told me I was outrageous and she was right.”
  17. Hell on Wheels
    Cher was all up into the late-1970s roller-skating craze that had even me flying around Coachlite skating rink as often as I could. She had famous, exclusive skating parties at which costume malfunctions happened to her.

1980 – 1990s

  1. Young and Pretty (Black Rose)
    Getting old in Hollywood for women. The pressure of staying pretty.
  2. Take it to the Limit (Celebration at Caesars)
    Cher also calls this one of her favorite songs.
  3. Out Here On My Own (Celebration at Caesars)
    Although Cher had launched a solo-TV show without Sonny, she credited this tour/concert as being the point where she really felt alone out there for the first time as a solo performer.
  4. More Than You Know (Celebration at Caesars)
    This song comes up again and again and again on TV variety shows, TV specials and concerts. That could indicate she really feels this one.
  5. Heart of Stone
    Getting jaded in life. Cher follows politics and it can get depressing.
  6. After All
    Cher really fought to record this song as a demo so I feel it had some resonance for her. She always includes it in her live shows and never cuts it out after the first leg like she tends to do with the show’s other ballad, “The Way of Love.”
  7. I Got You Babe (with Beevis & Butthead)
    “We need a chick that used to be married to a dork and so now she’s all wild and stuff.” To be honest, Cher admitted she was kinda wild before Sonny. The fact that she left home at 16 and already had a sexcapade with Warren Beatty under her belt….kinda wild already one could argue. Cher is also distancing herself here from an earlier incarnation. At the end there’s a reference to Cher’s tendency to date younger men.
  8. Tougher Than The Rest (Heart of Stone Tour)
    Cher is one tough cookie…
  9. Many Rivers to Cross (Heart of Stone Tour)
    …but also vulnerable too, moving through the world with some humility (and pride). 
  10. A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes (Pediatric AIDS Benefit)
    See same song above. The child is strong in this one!
  11. Nature Boy (Sonny’s Death Special)
    Cher’s chosen homage to Sonny after his death. Some people were upset about Cher’s tributes and lamentations when Sonny died due to some previous slurs (see Beevis & Butthead above) but honestly their relationship was very, very complicated and probably not easily understood by everybody.

Fin de siècle

  1. Sisters of Mercy
    Cher wrote this song based on her mother’s stories of Cher’s time at a Catholic home as a baby and how the church tried to remove Cher’s mother’s custody due to their poverty.. It also ties into Cher’s own experiences with nuns at Catholic school. 
  2. When the Money’s Gone
    Cher has a big entourage and staff. This would make anyone wonder about their role as Sugar Mama.
  3. Human (Stuck on You)
    Humility.  Yeah.
  4. You Haven’t Seen the Last of Me (Burlesque)
    Not ready to retire.

Starting on The Sonny & Cher Show and Misty Water-Colored Memories

DefaultI’ve started to work on the last leg of our major project. It’s hard to believe but I made the first post on the first Comedy Hour show all the way back on January 15, 2019! At this rate, I should be finished in late spring of next year (minus a sprinkling of TV specials we can do).

I’m actually happiest reviewing these post-divorce shows. These are the shows I remember watching in 1976 and 1977. After we moved to St. Louis from Albuquerque, our time zone changed and Sonny & Cher tv now fell after a pretty strict bedtime of 8 pm. At the time I petitioned for and was granted a weekly exception, an exception that lingered after the cancellation of the show and enabled me to watch Solid Gold every Friday night with the delightful Marilyn McCoo.

To watch Sonny & Cher, I would go back into my brother Andrew’s bedroom (I didn’t yet have a TV in my own room) to watch the show all alone. He had a little color portable green TV my mother once received as a work bonus. I remember the hour would go by incredibly fast. Sonny & Cher always looked so good, I thought.

This was also right around the time my family staged an intervention on my Cher obsession. It happened at the kitchen table one night (and this is going to turn shortly into a sentimental story about my Dad).

I recall sitting at the table while one of my brothers, my mother and  grandfather Stevens all tried to talk me out of liking Cher so much. My Dad was sitting at the far end of the table, but I don’t remember him saying a single word that night.

I do remember my mother telling me I shouldn’t like Cher because her teeth were crooked. And by the way, you can always ID an old Cher fan because we invariably say things like we prefer Cher’s old teeth. I’m sure I immediately dismissed this argument as beside the point. Then my grandfather said I didn’t even know what political party she belonged to!

This was not a surprising tactic on his part because he pretty much had his own two singular obsessions, (possibly this is a genetic problem), which were (1) extoling the greatness of British shipping history and (2) notifying anybody and everybody about the tragic demise of American labor unions. (As an aside, when he found out I was interested in poetry, he told me I should read the 1930s labor poets and I was like I don’t even know where I would find those people and he said go to the library and I said well, that’s not gonna happen. Fast-forward to today and I found those people and am reading them as we speak.)

But his suggestion that I know Cher’s political affiliation was completely disingenuous anyway because the current opening segment schtick for The Sonny & Cher Show was an argument about Cher supporting Jimmy Carter in the impending presidential election and Sonny still supporting Gerald Ford. This might even have been when Sonny “came out” as a conservative. My family should have known this. And in fact, Ford’s eventual loss to Carter was all the more misfortune in Sonny’s slow slide into the shadow of Cher’s phoenix-rising and his own impending designation as a “flash-in-the pan.”

But at that moment my only response to my grandfather was “I dunno” because I didn’t even know what the political parties were…and that was because I was seven years old.

Yes people, this all happened when I was seven!

So anyway, my Dad is sitting at the table conspicuously not saying anything during this completely shocking intervention and so this leads me into a story I’ve been meaning to tell for quite some time, (me wanting to tell it while my Dad is still with us).

So fast forward 33 years later and it’s my wedding. Now my Dad is not someone who wants to be doing anything in front of a crowd of people. So a speech from the father-of-the-bride was right away just not going to happen And honestly, a lot of the wedding traditions I felt very ambivalent about, but the one thing I had fantasized about for many, many years was the father-daughter dance. And I remember in early conversations my Dad was not wanting to do this. He kept saying he wasn’t a big dancer.

It took some working from my mother to convince him to even consider doing a father-daughter dance and even then there was a separate round of negotiations around what that song would be. My first choice was “Take It To the Limit” because my Dad was a late-adopting but relatively new fan of the Eagles and the song kind of reminded me of him in a distantly, Western kind of way. But then my brother Randy convinced him that the song was essentially a love song (an interpretation I still disagree with) but then as it turns out my Dad would never want me to ‘take it to the limit’ anyway so the whole thing was a moot point. Bad idea on my part. As was the, in hindsight, misguided suggestion to use Lee Ann Womak’s “I Hope You Dance.” There is probably not a single line in that song my Dad would agree with. Not a single line.

So after months of back and forth and finding nothing, I suggested the song “Turn Around” and I sent him Cher’s version with the caveat that I didn’t like it. I rather preferred the Harry Belafonte version or the version that was on that Kodak commercial in the 1960s. Unfortunately in 2009 other versions of the song were nowhere online or in new or used record stores that I scoured for weeks. And that ended up being a moot point too because my Dad said he was only interested in dancing to the Cher version. End stop.

I was surprised by this, kind of moved and also a little dismayed (it’s really not a great version; Cher’s barely had time to “turn around” herself). But that was just too bad, because that was the only song he would consider. And as I recall he still didn’t commit to anything fully until pretty much right before the event, the night before which we spent with my former-dance-teacher mother showing us a simple waltz.

0230_McCray-LoRes-WEB_20091114And we did the father-daughter dance to Cher singing “Turn Around” and it went off without a hitch.

Later, my wedding reception was basically a mix-tape project with the DJ and I organized slow-dance numbers in two-song blocks because haven’t we all been at weddings where you find yourself in the bathroom when a slow song comes up and by the time you find your date and drag him out to the dance floor it’s all over?

And I didn’t use many other Cher songs at the wedding. I used the instrumental version of “I Got You Babe” as part of the arrivals mix and a fun radio mix of “Song for the Lonely” as part of the dancing reception…

…and my favorite version of “I Got You Babe” during one of the slow-dance two-fers (the Westside Room version to which I edited out all of Sonny’s preambles because what poor guests need to hear that?).

And when that particular song started playing my own date was off hobnobbing with some of our guests and I was a little disappointed (missing a dance to “I Got You Babe” during my own wedding and all). But then I turned around and my Dad was standing there and he said, “I’ll dance this song with you.”

Oh my.

This was one of the unforgettable moments of my life, I have to tell you. I don’t even know why really. Probably it was his willingness to dance to this iconic Sonny & Cher song with me at that moment. To this day it gets me very verklempt. I mean after all the protracted negotiations about dancing at all and then the history of my family vis-à-vis the Cher thing. And now I cannot extricate my memory of my Dad and me dancing from this version of the song itself, which every time I hear it has come to mean a sort of moment of acceptance and connection. If I had to do it all over again, I would probably pick this song for the father-daughter dance in the first place. It was probably the real one, unbeknownst to anyone there, which is just like the most awesome thing.

 I mean.

The other slow song I paired with it was Wilco and Billy Bragg’s cover of Woody Guthrie's “California Stars,” a cover which my Dad really liked by then too and so…

 …we kept on dancing.

 

"Good night everybody. God bless you. Thank you for being so cool. Good night and thank you very much."

Cher Shows Completed

Fashionweek2022Cher just made a big splash (or two) at Fashion Week in Paris:

Rolling Stone
The Guardian
People

Fashionweek2022-1

I’ve been keeping my nose in projects lately. On top of that, ICANN had a meeting in Kuala Lumpur so it was the nightshift for me last week. And now cleaning furiously for a visit next week from my friend Natalie (the real Lion in this story) is visiting and we’re taking a scenic train trip on the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic from Colorado to Chama, New Mexico. We’ve been trying to plan this trip since Covid started. Sigh.

And I’ve been continuing to work diligently documenting Cher TV shows. Recently I finished the tour through the solo show. As part of that I watched the Bob Mackie interview in the Cher TimeLife DVD set. Here's a summary of that:

Mackie said he started working with Cher when she would ask for him whenever Sonny & Cher did early 1970s TV specials and Cher liked working with him because he was young. She was intimidated by old people in show biz, Mackie said. “I’ll never be older than 30,” she told him. “I’d be old then.” Mackie added, “look as us now.” Turns out death is kind of more intimidating that old age.

Anyway, Mackie says he saw S&C as a novelty group back then and that after the Beatles arrived they weren’t really getting booked anymore so they transitioned to a nightclub act.

He acknowledges Sonny & Cher were the same height, but that Cher had “a tall look.” He said for the first season of their variety show the network gave them no money and so Mackie had to recycle Carol Burnett dresses (they are the same size and measurements) and keep using the same basic white dress made over with embellishments. He said Cher always looked better than the models in his clothes. He said Sonny and Cher had a good PR agent and Cher was getting a lot of magazine covers.

Mackie says he was there for the first variety show planning session and he remembers the writers didn’t really know what to do with Cher. Was she like Keely Smith? No. Mackie could see Cher had something nobody else had. “She looks like nobody in show business.” Was she American Indian, Middle Eastern, Hispanic? He reiterates that he thinks her armpits are her best feature. He said she had a nice “soft six pack.” He said once the censors saw the show’s huge ratings, they relented on the belly button thing.

Mackie says they were always running late and pulling all-nighters on sewing outfits. Dresses would be hand-beaded and take hundreds of hours to finish. Cher was always very happy with bugle beads, crystals, feathers and rhinestones. Mackie’s favorite dress was the Time Magazine/Met Gala dress. “It looked like you could see something but you couldn’t.”

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He says Cher outfits have been experiencing Internet nostalgia recently and he sees copies of his dresses on young celebrities and drag queens everywhere.

He says their outfits were never vulgar, never trying too hard. Cher was “never posey” and could rock a t-shirt and jeans as easily as a historical costume dress. He said she was fearless with outfits and unlike other glamour girls wasn’t afraid to look silly. He said Cher was really laid back and easy and full of energy.

As we know, Mackie was doing the full suite of costumes for The Carol Burnett Show and only had the bandwidth to do Cher’s outfits on all her variety shows. Ret Turner took over, working with Mackie, on the rest of the cast including Sonny and Chastity. Turner and Mackie had worked together on lots of shows, Mackie said.

Of the Tina Turner, Kate Smith, Cher Beatles medley, Mackie says, “you will never see that again” and “you have to see it to believe it.”

He says the Laverne character is the complete opposite of Cher. He says he worked with Teri Garr earlier when she was a dancer on Hullabaloo. He said the 1970s was the Golden Age of Variety (which surprised all of us, Mackie said, “because we thought were at the end of the road.”) But never again would networks spend that kind of money on a big orchestra, couture-level costumes, sets and all-around glamour.

Mackie said in the recent Broadway show think-tank sessions Cher’s likeability kept coming up as a phenomenon. Cher wins you over, Mackie says, and people have an “odd fascination” with her. People “always wanted to know what Cher was doing.” He said it was “tough for the girls playing her. Nobody’s quite like her.”

ChershowI really enjoyed re-evaluating the Cher episodes in chronological order this year and I came to have more respect for what the show was doing: more overt feminism, trying to present Cher in her own right, a stronger focus on musical guests. There were a few cringy moments but there were just as many, if not more, really fabulous, history-making moments the show doesn’t get nearly enough credit for. It’s the show I was probably the least familiar with going into the project, having never seen any episodes before VH-1 re-aired some in the 1990s. I definitely could see a continuation of the cultural work the Comedy Hour was doing but with a bigger bang.

In some sense, the next incarnation of the Cher TV with Sonny would seem like a regression. But it wasn’t. After sweating it out on her solo show, Cher could now hold her own side-by-side with Sonny and it shows.

And any tension underscoring their post-divorce reunion may have turned America off (as the show’s ratings didn’t stay high), but looking back the show was nonetheless interesting in some entirely new ways.

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