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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

 

More Records in The Man’s World

Dollhouse Records

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big People Records

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


The Latest Record

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

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

 

The 1995 UK and 2023 Warner Bros listing:

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

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

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

My Mix-Tape Version

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cher Went Public Again With a Boyfriend

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think she’s got this.

But just incidentally Danny Glover is single again.

Proust and the Fan Squeal

ProustIf I’m cocky about anything in this life, it’s my nerdiness. I can’t really be out-nerded. I don’t have a stamp collection and I don’t spend my time solving math or science puzzles; but I do plenty of other lit-nerd things, like slog through JStor essays and some very dry, academic books. You can’t out-nerd me by dropping titles like Gormenghast or authors like Proust.

Yeah, maybe you’ve read Proust. How cute. I have a Proust shelf. I have two sets of the Moncrieff translation, (the Vintage edition and the Modern Library Paintings in Proustedition), the Quarto Gallimard edition in French, Eric Karpeles’ Paintings in Proust (which I perused concurrently with the novel). I’ve read the first volume, Swann’s Way, three times, (once at Sarah Lawrence College, once in a book club and once reading the full epic with someone who had previously read it in French) and along my journey I have the collected The Paris of Marcel Proust, his biography by George D. Painter, lighter fare like How Proust Can Change Your Life and his Letters to His Neighbor,  the book that traces the origins of all the characters called A Proust Souvenir (in English and French), and two actual human students of Proust!

And let us not forget the two books of poems based on the novel, Proustiennes by Jean Fremon and The Albertine Workout by Anne Carson.

I have also visited the cork-lined bedroom of Proust at the Musee Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris in Paris, at the suggestion of one of those aforementioned Proust students, Ann Cefola, and I purchased the Lydia Davis translation of Swann’s Way so that Cefola and I could compare the paragraphs of the Davis edition with the Moncrieff edition with the original French novel in a month-long email and phone project to see which translations was more faithful to the original vocabulary of Proust.

It was great!

But none of this is to say I’m a Proust Scholar. That shelf is probably a small fraction of the Proust universe. Actually, I would say I am no Proust expert at all. I only understand In Search of Lost Time in fragments, kind of like I understand the poems of Anne Carson.

And, in fact, after five years of high school French classes, I can’t even speak French! So some of the books on this shelf (like the French ones, for example) are my husbands, a former French major. But I’m still buying and reading essays on Proust and he is not. And I think this is because I am what you would call a fan of Proust, and a pretty flamboyant fan at that (judging by the cock-a-hoop paragraphs preceding).

But even so, it took me a very long time to decide to read Proust. It seemed a pretentious thing to do, even for a lit major. Faulkner, Pynchon, okay; but Proust?

And when I did start reading the world’s most famous novel, I realized it was what we used to call, (in less PC times), very, very gay (as in that is so gay!). Which just means the novel has a queer sensibility and this is most likely because Proust himself was a gay man, a fact I didn’t know and if I had known I would have read the books decades earlier. Because I too have a kitschy, campy sensibility that is very closely aligned to queer culture. Is this because I am a life-long Cher fan? Or am I a life-long Cher fan because I instinctively appreciate camp? It’s a mystery.

In any case, when I describe Proust’s In Search of Lost Time as having a gay sensibility, it’s hard to explain to people what I mean. I keep saying Proust has a kind of exuberance you don’t normally see in straight male writers.

It’s not that certain straight men don’t go on and on about a subject like Proust does but that they might do so in ways like pontificate or lecture. You might hear someone talk about a particular thing they are excited about with words like ‘awesome’ or ‘great’ or, if they’re feeling really compelled, ‘so cool.’ But that’s as hyperactive as they may allow themselves to get; the remainder is at an emotional reserve, intellectualizing, doing what fan-scholar Mark Duffett calls distancing.

And I must say here that when I reference straight males, this is not at all exclusive. Some straight women, gay women, gay men and non-gendered people I know have a tendency to restrain a grand enthusiasm just as much as anybody; but usually they do it for the same reason.

I started putting it all together, myself, very recently while I was reading yet more Proustian analytics, the triad of Living and Dying with Marcel Proust by Christopher Prendergast, The New Yorkers’ May 10, 2021 article “Peripheral Proust,” (where Adam Gopnick ponders why “secondary works on Proust continue to appear in manic numbers”), and the textbook Understanding Fandom, An Introduction to the Study of Media Fan Culture by Mark Duffett.

Today, we have such a plethora of things to be fannish about: tv shows, movie auteurs, music artists, authors, whole food genres. Proust didn’t have many of those things. He had sights (architecture and painting), sounds (both ambient and music), and ideas (books, articles, the Dreyfus affair). Oh, and the Guermantes. He had nobility (which was the celebrity obsession of his time).

In Understanding Fandom, Duffett talks about hierarchies of fandom. All of Proust’s pleasures are high brow, for the most part respectable pursuits. The Proust novel is itself a respectable thing to be a fan of. However, Proust had plenty of what we now define as guilty pleasures including the theater, one of those things that has flipped from low to highbrow for us.

Mark Duffett explains one of the basest of fan gestures is considered to be the fan squeal. It immediately signifies lowliness. And the squeal is most often applied to “girls” because they do it with such lack of inhibition. And by definition this marks these girl fans as a lesser kind of fan because they are offering up an emotional versus intellectual response.  And further, any object that elicits the girlish fan squeal will become quantifiably downgraded in the hierarchy of subjects.

You can easily picture this, girls circled together in a bedroom verbally expressing shrieks of delight over handsome pop objects. At its screechy worst, it becomes a public scream, Beatlemania. When boys were Beatle fans, it means one thing. But when the girls arrived, it got screechy.

Steve Miller explains this repeatedly and unapologetically in his book Detroit Rock City. When girls start offsetting the audience ratio at any heavy metal rock show, the band is no longer cool.

Because bitch, please…

You should be a connoisseur not a sentimentalist.

Girls defy this edict, but so do a certain segment of the gay male population, men who also squeal performatively in public. ‘Flaming’ was once the derogatory term used for this type of very effervescent man.

And some gay boys were probably squealing themselves over John, Paul, George and Ringo…behind closed doors. Squealing is actually a highly acceptable practice within most circles of girls and girls hanging out with gay boys. And I believe this is partly why certain types of girls, (equally reactive ones, I would argue), develop such close friendships with them.

I, myself, do the very act of of distancing Duffett describes as a Cher fan. I do this very likely because I had two disparaging, older straight teenage boy music aficionados in my house growing up. Your ideas about music would be discounted otherwise.

Duffett quotes music critic Caroline Sullivan as using the word credibility in her book about the Bay City Rollers. As a fan of boy bands, your ideas lose credibility.

But there’s something absurd about that. And this was part of my original joke, Cher Scholar. But then when I actually began Cher scholarin’ there was respectability inherent in the endeavor. And I appreciated that. It was helpful to me and to the ways we speak about Cher. There’s nothing innately wrong with intellectualizing. But I was probably doing it just as subconsciously as consciously. So I would include myself as one of the straight females who tends to “tone it down,” to downplay my own version of the flaming squeal.

Another thing I notice that I do, and I noticed it while writing this essay and the one on Philip Levine, is that when I talk about poetry, I tone down my academic vocabulary and sentence constructions and when I talk about music I rev it up.

But I actually do love exaggerated enthusiasms and so it annoys me that I self-protect myself in this way. And so I try to offset my reticence with the occasional, politically-willful, calculated squeal. It’s not hard to find the object that will do it. Usually, it’s a Cher doll. In fact, I can remember my first Cher doll squeal all the way back to Christmas 1976. I can get plenty squealy about the dolls.

Because I can.

Dolls!Speaking of dolls, I am revamping the nativity of the Christmas Cher doll tree.

I finally bit the bullet and bought the Val Kilmer action figure from the movie Willow.  Then I found a hip, online paper doll artist from Perth, Australia, for our new nativity member, Alexander Edwards, and we had no Robert Cameletti! How did that happen? And while doing that, I decided to upgrade the paper dolls for Gregg Allman and David Geffen.

Anyway, we can see that there are strict boundaries around fandom all the time. And here we come back to Proust. He can go on for pages and pages of happy exuberance about a madeleine in a cup of tea, the passages of the moon or a flower patch. He uses words like bliss and glorious over things like train timetables, steeples and trees.

And although arguably he doesn’t squeal in volume, I would argue he does squeal in the amount of ink dispensed and the emotional particularity he demands from that ink.

Even if you didn’t know Marcel Proust was a gay man, you might consider the long, meandering Proustian sentence feminine just as you may consider the brief, single-syllabled Hemmingway sentences as masculine.  That’s the dichotomy, although it’s inherently unfair (and inaccurate) to both Proust and Hemmingway. Hemmingway famously had his own feminine side and as for Proust, as feminine as any gay man might seem he is still a man.

The dichotomy is false but easy to digest with our primitive ‘othering’ instincts. And intellectual distancing is an armor, which makes straight men particularly good at it. It’s a masculine effort. Women and gay men tend to have less armor, by design or by choice.

In any case, this is my somewhat distanced yet attemptive emotional fan squeal about Proust’s own fan squeal. And such as it is, I value it more dearly than all the nerdy academia of Proustlandia and you’ll have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands.

Taking On Cher Compilation Albums

I am very excited about this unveiling.

A few years ago, Robrt Pela suggested we compile a list of all of Cher’s compilation albums for the Cher Scholar site. So we did that. And it was quite a mind trap, I must say. Part of the project was culling out what was NOT a comp, like the three albums you see to the left, little imposter stowaways on the massive freighter of Cher comps.

We’d like to take you on the fantastical journey of our compilizing . So first we will summarize the experience of the toil and trouble.

Robrt: Here’s my postmortem paragraph about being a Cher Comp Wrangler. (Where’s my hazard pay?)

So, first of all, I have to thank you for your enthusiasm for this project. It would have been fair of you to say to me, “I think your desire to obsessively list all the Cher compilations is mad, and I don’t want to be friends with you any more.”

Also, thank you for letting me maniacally copy-edit this list.

So, a couple of things I noticed: One is that there are variations of variations of variations in the Cher Comp World. And also that I didn’t find it much fun tracking down some of this stuff. Like, knowing the difference between the Malaysian reissue of the seventeenth iteration of the Outrageous bootleg and the UK import of the original reissue of Holdin’ Out for Love, (which originated in Denmark as a repackaging of a Cher hits package from Canada) didn’t improve my life.

Here’s another thing: The Cher Comp Universe exploded in 2000, for obvious reasons: “Believe” was a monster, and every label, label subsidiary, and bootlegger wanted to cash in. All those annoying Holdin’ Out for Love comp variations started up around then.

Finally, all the similar comp titles and the variations on cover art made me want to jump off the balcony—and we live on the 14th floor. I mean, all those Golden Greats and Golden Hits and This is Chers were bad enough, but when they started swapping covers with one another, I thought I was going to burst into flames.

Which is pretty much what happened when I discovered that this already-weird Imperial/Casablanca mishmash comp called (of course) All I Really Want to Do has a variation cover that features two photographs of Cher THAT AREN’T REALLY HER.

After that I was like, “I’m done.”

Mary: I do feel your pain. While I was finally setting this all up in HTML I was losing the thread of my existence a little bit.

And as I remember it, you suggested this project and I was all like “I dunno…that seems hard.” And you were like,  “We’re doing this!” And I was like…”Okay. ”

But once we got going, it was a lot of fun (and very funny). I am still surprised it took us so long to complete the project but then I didn’t imagine there would be so many comps, so many details to track and so many life things that would intervene.

Parsing through my own collection was sobering. Why did I buy all these? Then looking for the photos was particularly maddening because many of the titles from different labels were duplicated. These aren’t respectable artifacts summarized on Wikipedia. I thank Discogs Music Marketplace for their very helpful database of details and photos.

The most fun for me was tallying up the statistics and organizing them (why so many German comps? Why do the Germans love “Holdin’ Out for Love” as a title so much? Because they love the song?).

And it’s worth mentioning, a compilation cataloguer’s work is never done. There are still a few comps in here that will need further research and I’m interested to see how streaming comps will evolve.

So without further ado:

The Cher Compilations: The breakdown by year, country, era depicted, hits, oddities, sound quality and our ratings.

Spoiler alert: there are 147.

The Discussion: Robert and I spent an evening talking about the Comp albums, our favorites and what makes us crazy about some of them.

Goodbye to Georgia Holt

FSIKCl-X0AEk4a5I still haven't sorted out my websites due to a few setback this winter. So I haven't been able to blog about Cher's new perfumes or her new boyfriend (Quel scandale!); but the loss of Cher's mother, Georgia Holt, at 96 could not go without a moment of tribute.

Cher's mother lived a very interesting life, starting out as a country singer with Georgia's father at age 6 and at age 10 playing with Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys. (Wills actually has a mural in my family seat of Roy, New Mexico…Harding County has gone a bit mural crazy the last 20 years). 

Bobwills
Georgia Holt then came to Los Angeles to try to break into acting and she got by with modeling jobs. Although she never "made it big" she seemed to know many movers and shakers. She was friends with many people (or at least their wives) who would go on to play a big role in Cher's career, including Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic Records who she spoke to about Cher before Sonny & Cher signed with Atco Records and also Robert Altman's wife who she notified about Cher's attempts to break into acting which led to Robert Altman's "discovery" of Cher as an actress in the early 1980s. Georgia did score some small roles in the 1950s and 60s, but her best role was probably that of Cher's elegant mother, a role which had its ups and downs (she wasn't at all on board with the Sonny thing at first) but a performance which seemed to end with love, grit and style.

How many mother's of celebrities have their own Wikipedia page? Or have their obits in The Guardian, People Magazine and Rolling Stone

Here are some pictures of Georgia with Cher's father, John Sarkisian, and Georgia with the closest thing she ever did of a book about Cher, Star Mothers, which she organized in conjunction with other celebrity moms of the 1980s,

Cherparents Starmothers

 

 

 

 


Anyway, ever since Cher has been tweeting about the precarious health of her mother this year I've had this poem rambling around in my head for Georgia and her girls…

Threepeas

Three Peas

Three peas in a pod were living in the grass
at the edge of the yard where the street flows by.

Three peas sitting in a pod like a green canoe
with a swanky soft-top the peas could open and close.

These peas could pose in their pod or unwind
or hole up in the rain or wind or sunshine.

Three peas brushing their hair, painting
their nails, singing with their pea mouths.

Three peas in a pod sitting in the grass
as the whole world floated by.

Fast cars came by with handsome men,
other cars brought even more interesting men,

and girls of every kind strutting down the street
in sequined suits. There were mustached ring leaders

and twirling disco balls, long parades with harlequins
on stilts, jugglers in spotlights and water in the gutter

that glittered for three peas who sat by the curb
where the world seems to come to you.

Three peas in a pod would dance and sing
and dress-up and gossip. And then

one day the oldest pea left the pod
and two peas were left alone 

and there was too much space and so they floated
and spun in slow motion until the time passed

and they could settle back in the pod
near where the world flowed by on the street.

And fast cars drove by with handsome men,
girls of every kind and the grass sparkled with dew.

There are two peas in a pod now in the grass by the curb
where the world seems to come to you.

 

Georgia-at-graumans

When I created this blog back in 2008, I jokingly created a tag for all non-Cher posts called "peripherals" (for news about family members, co-workers), but this is like The Peripheral, literally the origin peripheral and a person who had a very interesting life in her own right.

What always struck me about Georgia was her effortless regality. This is my favorite late-era photo of her because it represents the way she held herself. That swell of hair! This was taken the day Cher placed her handprints in Grauman's Chinese Theatre. 

As the t-shirt above says, "Bitch, please. I made Cher."

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.

Cher and Black Rose

ImagesThe Twitter Cher scholar at Cher Universe mentioned on August 21 the anniversary of the release of the Black Rose album 42 years ago.

I'm always impressed by young social-media Cher fans who for the last few years have been finding the most amazing, never before seen Cher pics hidden out there on the Internets. I've been combing through Cher pics for 45 years now and I've never seen some of these photos.

I first saw this Black Rose picture below from Victoria Shell's YouTube great YouTube bios of Cher (part 1 & part 2) from last year. Never saw it before that.

And the photo was shocking in its silliness. I commented on Twitter this image might have been part of the band's credibility problem. 

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Allegedly, Black Rose was rejected from opening for the tours of every popular 1980s band except Hall and Oates. That might be an exaggeration but they were not a popular band.

2hde5a1This anniversary reminded me that I've been meaning to blog about the remastered Black Rose Import CD (which came from Ireland I think and during Covid it took months to arrive in the mail). The liner notes were worth the long wait because they include an extensive interview with Les Dukek about the experience, which is valuable. He was the main driver of the band, aside from Cher; and during the project he would also become her boyfriend of three years.

The liner notes call Cher's career "varied and unpredictable" and introduce Dudek from his work with the Allman Brothers ("Ramblin' Man"), Steve Miller, Boz Scaggs, 3 solo albums and a member of DFK (with Mike Finnigan and Jim Krueger).

A-1280394-1349896448-9317Dudek calls this project a big mistake but also adds that Cher was not part of the mistake. He says he has very fond memories of his relationship with Cher. He says, "I totally lost my identity but I had a great time." The band itself, he says, was just a bad move for his career. 

He says he was approached by Cher to help put together a band. She took him to dinner at Nick's Fish Market on Sunset Boulevard. Cher said she was working with a few producers but no one she liked. Dudek suggested James Newton Howard. 

After working with them on her 1979 Prisoner album, Cher probably brought in the two members of Toto, David Paich and Steve Pocaro. Interestingly Jeff Pocaro is missing, a stalwart member of Cher's studio bands since the early 1970s). Dudek brought in Mike Finnegan for keyboards and he and Cher held auditions and jam sessions to assemble everyone else.

Other members included Ron "Rocket" Ritchotte, Mike Finnigan, Michael Boddicker, Trey Thompson and Gary Ferguson.

They recorded the album at Sunset Sound, Westlake and decided not to use Cher's name or photo in any early publicity materials, only to list her as a player with the rest of the band on the back album cover. (Eventually this changed.)

CcLqDfAUUAAN7vaBlack Rose toured with Hall and Oates and appeared on Merv Griffin, Tom Snyder (focusing on Cher) and The Midnight Special. There was a Central Park concert. 

Although Neil Bogart was "a sweetheart of a guy," Dudek says there were issues using Cher's current music label, Casablanca Records; but Columbia Records had passed. Not only was Casablanca primarily a disco label, but with Bogart dealing with terminal cancer the label would soon fold. Due to lavish spending "the record company fizzled," Dudek says and was bought out by Polygram. Only 400,000 records sold. Cher became depressed. Dudek claims it was he who encouraged Cher to try acting again and to "go for the Oscar." He went with her to New York City to meet with Robert Altman.

Blackrose_albumAnd the rest is Hollywood history. But I do like the front cover they came up with, its anklet of thorns and also Cher's attempt to downplay her Cher-ness on the whole thing initially.

I hated the album when I first heard it, then years later I thought it was okay, then years later I didn't like it again and now I like some of it.

It's a mystery why the band wasn't writing their own material, especially considering Cher and Dudek did write a song together. 

"Never Should've Started" was written by David Foster, David Paich, James Newton Howard and Valerie Carter. Cher sings the intro well but then her vocal becomes swallowed and the whole thing seems hyper, screechy and empty. Not an auspicious beginning. A live performance.

"Julie" was a Bernie Taupin/Mike Chapman song and Cher's vocal is completely indecipherable here; but I do like to send the song periodically to my friend Julie and pretend the opening lines are "She-blips lie in the hungry ears" because yeah, of course they do! When I was eleven (1981) I also made a mix tape of all the swear words spoken or sang by Sonny or Cher strung together and this song was very helpful in that project. 

"Take It From the Boys"  was written by Carole Bayer Sager/Bruce Roberts and I'm trying to think of something snarky to say about using David Foster and Carole Bayer Sager songs on your debut rock album, but thinking about it just makes my brain fog up. I have no idea what Cher is singing here in the verses and although Cher sounds convincing, I shall not be taking it from the boys in the street, whatever that entails. I do like the end though. You go Carole Bayer Sager!

"We All Fly Home" – This is just another way to say "We All Sleep Alone" but Desmond Child, Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora wrote it better. This song also produced a gem for the cussin' tape. I would have been eating Dial soap tout de suite if my mother had found that cassette tape. Cher sings swear words really well, I will say.

"88 Degrees" – a song about LA on a hot day. I do remember the People Magazine album review taking special umbrage about all the vowels Cher uses to sing the word "split." (And no, the word 'damn' did not make the cut for the damn mix tape of Cher expletives.) This song really plods along. 

"You Know It" was written by Les Dudek and I actually like this duet, more than any of the Allman duets. 

"Young and Pretty" is the best thing on the album and the most likely song to be anthologized. Cher's still a bit muddled sounding but there's enough here to hang on to.

"Fast Company" – this was the song I most liked when I was 10 or 11 years old. It was challenging to sing along when I had no idea what words she was singing but I gave it a good go anyway. Like Redd Foxx told Cher on her solo show in 1975, you can get pretty far just on attitude. That's what this song says to me.

The liner notes say the album was mistakenly promoted as New Wave [which is pretty bizarre] instead of hard rock. The notes also maintain that the musicianship was high with quality songs and that Cher sounds "convincing as a rock vocalist" and "slots in with the rest of band…sounds like a proper band not a collection of session talents brought together to fulfill the aspirations of one person."

Except that is kind of what it was. Just having to say that…is kinda…the problem. 

R-3567371-1335637415.jpegI actually don't think Cher was ready yet for this project. And the fact that she was bi-furcated between this band and her big circus Vegas act of pop songs was more of the same brand confusion fans experienced during the Gregg Allman years. I'm sure the proceeds of the Vegas extravaganza were bankrolling the personal projects but maybe that was playing it too safe. In any case, the result skewed more toward a Hollywood idea of what a rock band was (see the back cover for example), or a hodge-podge, over-orchestrated attempt to create one out of thin air.

That said, I do think this whole endeavor was practice for the more simplified and cohesive Geffen years.

An aborted second album allegedly included the Frankie Miller song "Aint Got No Money," "Dirty Old Man," and "Don't Trust that Woman," the song Cher and Dudek wrote together. 

Mask-bikersInteresting to note there are two versions of this song: the version Cher wrote with Dudek and he recorded on his solo album Gypsy Ride (1981) and then the version Elton John re-wrote with Cher later and recorded on his Leather Jackets album (1986). In 1985 Cher also got Dudek a role in the movie Mask as one of the bikers. "I did an album and a movie with Cher and I'm proud of it, so there," Dudek says, "She has a great work ethic. She's real dedicated to what she does." 

Little timeline of Cher recording with men she was sleeping with:

1977: Allman and Woman, Two the Hard Way with Gregg Allman

1978: "Living in Sin" with Gene Simmons

1980: Black Rose with Les Dudek

And for a palette cleanser, Youtube served this up to me this morning, a Toto song I had completely forgotten about (thus giving me a K-Tel record flashback): https://youtu.be/rQysrhYnWHg. If only Steve Lukather from Toto had been in Black Rose too in order to give them songs like this.

And a shout out to Hall and Oates.

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