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Cher in Literature

October 9, 2023 / Cher Scholar / 1 Comment

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

La Morena and Her Beehive Hairdo

1965-1970

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

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

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

2000

Cher is Cookin’

September 20, 2023 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

Christmas is Coming Early This Year!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Darlene Love and Cher through the years:

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

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

Recent Interviews & News

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

On Music and Movies:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Elephants, Ukraine:

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

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

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

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

On Twitter:

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

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

On Cherlato:

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

On Her Life Stories:

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

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

That’s a good answer.

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

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

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

Her House:

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

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

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

Cher’s Tuna Pasta Salad

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

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

The recipe tasted….well fat free.

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

Cher….and Other Fantasies

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

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

Little Richard, Cherlato and Cher Specials

August 22, 2023 / Cher Scholar / 2 Comments

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

July 18, 2023 / Cher Scholar / 1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Records in The Man’s World

July 17, 2023 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

Dollhouse Records

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big People Records

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Latest Record

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

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

The 1995 UK and 2023 Warner Bros listing:

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

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

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

My Mix-Tape Version

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cher Went Public Again With a Boyfriend

July 10, 2023 / Cher Scholar / 2 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think she’s got this.

But just incidentally Danny Glover is single again.

Dolls and Records

July 7, 2023 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

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

The Dolly Parton Rockstar Album

I almost titled this post Dolls and Dollys.

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

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

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

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

Man’s World Reissue on CD and Vinyl

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

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

Funko Pops

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

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

Ho Ho Ho! It’s Cher Bitches

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

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

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

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

Believe and Restructuring Pop Songs

June 20, 2023 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

I woke up Monday morning to Mr. Cher Scholar first thing telling me about Richard Thompson’s compelling cover of the Britney Spears’ song “Oops I Did It Again” from his live album 1000 Years of Popular Music.

Mr. Cher Scholar knows I love cool reproductions of derided pop songs. I’ve even started cobbling together a list on YouTube which now includes the following:

The Baseballs doing an Elvis-esque rendition of Rhianna’s “Umbrella”
Ike and Tina Turner drawing out the eroticism often overlooked in The Archie’s misleadingly sappy-sounding “Sugar Sugar.”
Ben Folds fierce cover of Kesha’s “Sleazy”
Cake’s making practically a thesis defense of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive”
Ray Charles taking on Melanie’s “Look What They’ve Done To My Song, Ma”
Shonen Knife doing a Japanese punk version of The Monkees “Daydream Believer”
Red Hot Chili Peppers revisiting the funk disco of “Love Rollercoaster” by The Ohio Players
Ten Fé doing an indie cover of TLCs “Waterfalls”
Richard Thompson’s historical cover of Britney Spears’ “Oops, I Did It Again”

There are a plethora of other reinventions of the maligned. Just spend a bit of time on any indie-covers channel on your chosen streaming service. A lot of interesting and creative things often happen in the instrumental bridges. See “Waterfalls” example above.

And this inspired me to take another spin through the covers of “Believe:”

MNEK’s house music version (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbrYaCK-nOI)
Robbie Fulks’ country version (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yB4GG979qnw)
Mida’s indie version (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYkKjtHkQfQ)
Pomplamoose’s indie version (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GI5IuaORFmI)
Hannah Trigwell’s singer-songwriter version (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8Dyfg3CjDw)
Me First and the Gimmie Gimmies’ punk(ish) version (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svSg-i7xRTc (including an autotune spoof)
Macha Loved Bedhead’s experimental post-rock version (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZYkrY9yxC0)
Janet Devlin’s singer-songwriter version (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOE_-Rk5RBY)
Manchester Orchestra’s indie version (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6unXb9BAFk)
Aaron Richards’ melancholy dance version (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9g5nOcFWyV4)
Jake Owen’s country version (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbcprCxvHzI)
Ellen Henderon’s X-Factor version (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTbcO9qaE5g)
Jeffrey Austin’s searing The Voice version (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-xc12YiwmI)
Adam Lambert’s sweet yet intense Kennedy Honors tribute version (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PzQHZLiUPs),

Enjoy!

Programs for The Cher Show

June 14, 2023 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

I keep hearing rumors that the US traveling-version of the Broadway musical The Cher Show is set to launch. Fall 2023 is the latest story. But the show’s own site still lists the old start date of Fall 2021!

The Broadway version of the show opened on December 3, 2018 with Stephanie J. Block, Teal Wicks and Miraela Diamond as the three Chers, and when I went to see it in January of 2019, the programs weren’t available yet. Which seemed incredible since any fan would want a program to a Broadway show, at minimum.

And then I forgot about it. So it was a long time, (maybe even after the show closed), that I ordered my copy from the online store.

When the traveling UK show started up in 2022, their program was ready right away and I mailed away for a few of their show’s artifacts.

These programs are very different. The shows were different. Different cast, sets and costumes. And I think their programs reflect those differences.

The Broadway program has a beautiful design, the three stylized Cher drawings, very colorful incarnations. There’s a emoji-strewn message from Cher inside. The program is maybe a little too much like a Cher concert program; it has the mandatory two-page collage of her record album covers. Always impressive to see, but not entirely germane in this book. There are shots of the cast, with quotes and song titles to situate them in the show. There’s a big centerpiece, fold-out of the Bob Mackie costumes. On the one hand, this almost puts too much emphasis on the clothes, (Mackie here calls the costumes “get-ups”), but in light of the dead, old critics view in the 1970s that Cher was “just a clothes hanger,” this doubling-down feels alright.

There are lists of Cher’s hits and awards, Bob Mackie sketches for the show, (little art pieces themselves). One-hundred costumes were created for the show, including a recreation of the hole-fit which Mackie always calls Swiss Cheese. Mackie retells the story of meeting Cher and what a young “sprite” she was back then. How daring she has always been.

There are some great shots of the sets. But one of the best things about this programs is the list of accolades about Cher.

TV producer Flody Suarez talks about germinating the idea 17 years prior. (Didn’t the Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour producers Chris Bearde and Allan Blye once try to mount a Sonny & Cher musical back in the 1980s or 90s?)

Suarez went to New York and met people who knew people on Broadway who got the show hooked up with stage producer Jeffrey Seller and Rick Elice of another successful jukebox musical Jersey Boys. He says Rick Elice demanded great performers and nice people. With Cher involved, it was easier to get Bob Mackie involved.

And what about Cher? Suarez talks about her power, her vulnerability, tenacity, kindness and originality.

In Rick Elice’s notes, he talks about a visit from Cher in the summer of 2015 when his life was at its lowest ebb due to the death of his long-time partner, how Cher helped him through it. He talked about Cher as “a minister” who is “attentive to people.” Someone who is kind, thoughtful, fun, generous, surprising, full of variety.

The choreographer Christopher Gattelli talks about Cher as an inspiration, her confidence, strength and resilience. He sees her as a kick-ass singer and actress and a goddess warrior.

Music supervisor Daryl Waters talks about hearing “Gypsies Tramps and Thieves” as a young music nerd and dissecting it. He calls Cher caring, funny, poignant, irreverent.

(These are some good words.)

Director Jason Moore talks about trying to create an old variety show set and how they tried to pick the songs that would tell Cher’s life in less than six hours. He felt the theme of the show was about facing fears in order to grow and be stronger. Oh, and glitter. Glitter with intimacy and authenticity, how they tried to embody Cher’s essence without impersonation.

He sees Cher as “a beautifully complex woman, larger than life and a deeply authentic human being, spectacular, extravagant, intimate and emotional.”

Set designers Christine Jones and Brett J. Banakis talk about wanting an over-the-top look of glamour (because we want to see Cher big and strong) but also intimate sets (because we want to see her up-close and vulnerable). Cher has covered so many years and so many mediums, they said. She’s “fierce.” They wanted to use mirrors to highlight the multiple Chers, sometimes struggling through the fragmentation of the world. They needed flexibility with the lighting and they didn’t want to upstage the “get-ups.” They call the show a “kaleidoscopic ride through a psychological closet.”

Lighting designer Kevin Adams talks about bringing together a contrast between the dark-haired Cher and the big bright spectacle.

It often seemed the US show struggled to show Cher’s legitimacy (or a jukebox musical’s legitimacy for that matter). The UK show never seemed to face such a struggle, more willing did their press seem to just just let go and have some Cher-fun. This might be because the UK show traveled and the US show was ensconced in the Great White Way.

As I’m working on a Katharine Hepburn project at the moment, I can’t help but be reminded of the differences between her Broadway and London Shakespeare reviews similarly. You’d think if anyone would be overly serious about Shakespeare…except the US critics couldn’t get over Hepburn’s New England accent doing Shakespeare and the London critics couldn’t care less. They loved seeing Hepburn do Shakespeare.

So it was much more pleasant to watch the UK show publicity unfold. And I love the Broadway Chers but casting people of color was brilliant. (The three UK Chers were Millie O’Connel, Danielle Steers and Debbie Kurup.)

Their program has ads in the front and back advertising jukebox musicals about The Osmonds, Tina Turner, an unfortunate musicalization of Pretty Woman, and the choreographer Oti Mabuse’s own show. This program goes more into the biography of Cher (because maybe they’re not as familiar with it?) which calls Cher a “rock and roll survivor…a prize fighter.” The bio goes into Sonny’s unfaithfulness and how he absconded with all their money . It states Cher’s freedom cost her over a million dollars.

There’s a page of movie highlights where Cher talks about being a bumper car (“I won’t stop.) This program also talks about Cher’s iconic impact on LGBTQ, her struggles with alienation, mistreatment and marginalization. They talk about her sass and style, how she tells it like it is, her survival. They point out her role as a lesbian in the movie Silkwood, her relationship to her son Chaz and how she supported drag queens back to her 1979 show that brought the art of drag into the mainstream, the influence of her style on people like Kim Kardashian and Miley Cyrus.

There’s a page of celebrities praising Cher: Gwen Stefani (who credits Cher for making us strong and true to ourselves), Beyonce, Sarah Paulson, Christina Aguilera and Rob Halford, whose comments are the best and most specific. He says she has the “most beautiful voice…beautiful, beautiful texture in her voice.”

The production notes in this version talk about the show’s color palette, how Rick Elice made a visit to Cher’s own closet to generate ideas about the story, (and being in the closet is such a wonderful metaphor here). Set designer Tom Rogers talk about wanting to avoid making the show “a soulless presentation of her songs.”

What’s great about this program is the 4 pages of behind-the-scenes rehearsals, it gives list of acts and numbers, longer credit pages (like a Playbill), all the actors and dancers, everyone’s Tweet handle, 5 pages of the creative bios and 1 page of production credits.

Although I love the design of the Broadway program, it’s very slim in information and beyond words, doesn’t take you behind the curtain. It feels bare bones compared to the thicker, more outgoing UK program.

I’m looking forward to what the traveling US show programs will look like. Fingers crossed that even happens.

Information about both shows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cher_Show_(musical)

The Mythology of Cher Breaking Up Rock Bands

June 12, 2023 / Cher Scholar / 0 Comments

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.

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