a division of the Chersonian Institute
And we’re back! Oy. That was a painful hiatus.
I have missed deconstructing these shows.
We pick it up again with episode 8 from The Sonny & Cher Show in 1976.
Keep checking back to the TV Variety Shows and Specials page for more episodes in the coming weeks.
Full disclosure: when I was eight years old, I found Sonny & Cher's final record at the local library. This album seemed totally crazy (even for an eight year old) and yet I still proceeded to develop a nine-minute dance routine to Sonny's confounding title opus.
Now, every time the song "Mana Was a Rock-and-Roll Singer, Papa Used to Write All His Songs" comes up on my music app shuffle, I can't help but compare it to the song Cher chose to sing to Sonny during one of the final episodes of their TV variety show.
Sonny's song is particularly venomous and disingenuous, full of bitterness. What's most shocking is that he got Cher to sing it.
"Damn you girl, you went and messed up the world" is really its prime motivation but includes attacks on Cher's alleged promiscuity, her looks, her treatment of him, and mysterious manipulations that allegedly led to someone getting jail time! Although Sonny does admit Cher is "super fine and blows people's minds."
The song then oddly floats into a reflective set of movements which take up two-thirds of the running time and proclaim a false modesty repeated over and over only to disprove the adage that if you repeat something enough times people will believe it.
The last two thirds include a full production with children's chorus, agitated strings and horns, a gospel singer, and a guitar solo which you don't even notice right away because so much is going on!
It's really something. Why is Cher involved in this again? Oh yeah, because even when she was pissed off at Sonny and he was being a complete dick, she still loved Sonny. And then, just when you think it's over…
In contrast, Cher's fare-thee-well song to Sonny was Jimmy Webb's "Didn't We." Spectators to her performance of it, one of the final taped solos of the 1971-1974 series, say there wasn't a dry eye in the house, including Cher's.
Every time she sings, "And this time we almost made that long…hard climb," that emotional part always makes me sad.
Sonny also wrote a solo song called "Last Show" but it was mostly about losing the shows, not about losing Cher. And don't get me started on the grammatical uses of she and her. That song just makes me tired. I actually prefer the crazy opus if I had to choose. And, luckily, this world does not require that of us.
Excuse my title up there. I really didn't know how to tie all these disparate stories together.
First off, fans have been delighted to see Cher fighting for the U.S. post office in recent protests, phone calls and Twitter pics.
I hope if she starts volunteering for the post office, Bob Mackie designs her some "sensible shoes."
Months ago someone was requested photos of celebrity needlepointers like Dinah Shore and Rosey Grier. I found as many as I could but one photo I remembered proved elusive to locate. Then Cher scholar Drew asked me a question and I went searching for the answer to that but instead found the missing needlepoint pic. Maybe someday I'll locate the answer to Drew's question while I'm looking for something else.
Anyway, Cher once did lots of needlpoint. She did so much she joked, "Then I took up needlepoint—my God, I needlepointed everything. I could have made a needlepoint stove!"
Cher needlepoints on airplanes:
Cher needlepoints circa 1978/9.
I also captured an image of Sonny pretending to needlepoint in episode #49 of The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour:
And here are some needlepoints of Cher:
The Time Magazine pillow belonged to Bob Mackie and sold for $448 on Julien's Acutions.
You can buy the Moonstruck needlepoint pattern on Etsy with a companion Nicholas Cage!
For the Chersonian Institute, I was filing old magazines and found something interesting. Remember when Entertainment Weekly did a Bullseye pieceon the last page? Do they still do that? Anyway, one I found had a disparaging arrow regarding a rumor that Bret Michaels and Miley Cyrus’ mom were dating. ET says the rumor has sent them “running for a Silkwood shower.” Ok, that's a big rude. And I wondered if that was like…a saying. Apparently it is. Urban Dictionary has a listing for it with this example:
“I had to take a Silkwood shower when I got home from that party since I smelled like an ash tray cooked on an open flame BBQ grill covered in hot sauce.”
So "snap out of it, Moonstruck eggs and the Jack speech are not the only iconic references from a Cher movie.
Here are some shots of a Silkwood shower. It's a pretty serious and scary thing and Meryl rocks it (as did Sudie Bond earlier in the movie).
Cher Concert ReviewsConcert reviews have changed. I've learned this lesson over the last year from various sources from current reviewers and from the deceased reviewers. Is this overwhelming evidence of capitalism taking over PR? Probably. Which is no such a great thing. Buyer beware, there are no objective reviews in the land of corporate conglomeration.
So it’s good to look back at a positive review and interview from 1999 (when bad reviews still existed) and this one was by T’cha Dunlevy at the Montreal Gazette is one of those. She was 30 when she reviewed the Believe-era concert and said she
“regularly feels aversion to refuse-to-die ‘60s rock acts. I had no convulsions of revulsion at the Camp Queen’s coup. Maybe it’s her synthetic, timeless beauty or her go-with-the-flow versatility, but Cher has somehow kept her proverbial cool over her three-and-a-half decades in the spotlight…a repetoir of personae, including pop-ditty princess, serious actor, 'I’m-in-love-with-a-man-half-my-age' bachelorette, reactionary mother of a lesbian [remember this was 1999] and, in her 50s. back to the top of the pops without coming off like a circus side-show act.”
“…'How many fingers and toes have you got?’ she asks, queried about whether she’s ever thought of giving up. ‘(It happens) all the time. It’s frustrating. I’m a very mercurial, emotional person, more childish sometimes than grownup. I’m not very calculating. But it’s the only think I know how to do and really love.’”
The end of the interview also notes that both Cyndi Lauper and Wild Orchid were opening for Cher at the time, the same Wild Orchid that produced Stacy Ferguson a.k.a. Fergie Duhamel a.k.a Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas.
In the beginning, Sonny & Cher were managed by Brian Stone and Charlie Greene (pictured at left and below with Sonny & Cher), who also managed Buffalo Springfield.
This is what Stephen Stills has to say about Stone and Greene in an interview:
"We had Charles Green and Brian Stone, who basically were hustlers. They kind of got people in the studio and let them do their thing and if it happened to be a hit, they'd take all the a credit even though it was really Sonny Bono. [Green and Stone also managed Sonny & Cher.] They just stood around and made phone calls. It led to such things as Tom Petty cutting the telephone wire in that great documentary. I felt like doing that so many times."
So think about that when you re-read the Rolling Stone article about Sonny & Cher in 1973, a much more mean-spirited and overwrought piece than I remembered it being. But anyway, in the piece Charlie Green is interviewed and he makes MANY accusations about Sonny ripping off other songs from the era. You can listen track by track below to weigh in.
I read this eBook about folk-rock two years ago called Jingle Jangle Morning: Folk Rock in the 1960s. It's a tome of material about a very small subject. But Richie Unterberger, the author, is very disparaging about the part Sonny & Cher played in the genre. He depicts them as posers and calls the Byrds version of "All I Really Want to Do" “immensely superior” to Cher's version but the Byrds lost to Sonny's games of promotion. Remember The Boston Globe only in 2019 called Cher’s version better, "The Byrds come off as detached storytellers, Cher’s version has true heart."
Anyway, Unterberger points to Sonny’s age (30), their subsequent glamour-TV show, Cher’s movie career and Sonny’s Republican political career as reasons why “it can be difficult to comprehend or acknowledge that Sonny & Cher, for just a few brief months in the summer of 1965, we considered folk-rockers.”
In the meantime, while digging around my Cher stuff, I found a printout of a page from the website of Playboy immediately after the death of Sonny Bono in 1998. It catalogs everything anyone said about Sonny in the pages of Playboy, including excerpts by Steve Martin, Bob Dylan, Cher and James Carville (Sonny attended his wedding to Mary Matalin).
And interestingly enough Bob Dylan (King of folk-rock himself) comments about pioneering the genre and who the scene included in a Playboy interview in March 1978:
“Those were exciting times. We were doing it before anybody knew we would—or could. We didn’t know what it was going to turn out to be. Nobody thought of it as folk rock at the time. There were some people involved in it, like the Byrds, and remember Sonny and Cher and the Turtles and the early Rascals. It began coming out on the radio…and it was exciting, those days were exciting. It was the sound of the streets. It still is.”
I'm also reading Lillian Roxon’s Encyclopedia of Rock, 1971 edition, which is surprisingly full of Sonny & Cher mentions about their legacy in folk rock (as seen from the year 1971):
"Los Angles Sound: It started as Sunshine Dylan—that is, New York protest folk married to California sunshine rock—the Byrds and the Turtles rocking Dylan and getting the sound and themselves into the charts and the national eye. That was 1965, after the Beatles but before San Francisco and acid rock. It was the first faint indication that American was not about to take the English invasion completely lying down. Sonny and Cher were the Los Angeles sound with "I Got You Babe" and other early folk rock…The Byrds, Love, The Beach Boys, Jan and Dean…later came the California sound of the Mamas and the Papas.”
"LOVE…one of the earliest of the Los Angeles rock groups…until then Los Angeles has produced only the Byrds and Sonny & Cher and the Raiders…"
"LOVIN’ SPOONFUL: “And in California there was a burgeoning folk-rock scene with the Byrds and Sonny and Cher."
So here are the alleged rip-offs according to Charlie Greene. Give them a listen and post your comments.
1. I Got You Babe vs. Donovan's Catch the Wind, which Cher also covered. A Record Mirror reader once called "I Got You Babe" a combo of "Catch the Wind," Dylan's "It Aint’ Me Babe" and "Chines of Freedom."
2. Just You vs. Baby It's You by The Shirelles.
3. Bang Bang vs. Zorba the Greek
4. The Beat Goes On vs. Donovan's The Trip
5. Baby Don't Go vs. We'll Sing in the Sunshine
6. But You're Mine vs. You've Got Your Troubles I've Got Mine
Not to be confused with the Newport Folk Festival of 1965 (where Dylan went electric and blew out a lot of mental amps) which occurred in Newport, Rhode Island or the Newport Pop Festival v.2 of 1969 (see below), we're talking about the first Newport Pop festival taking place in Southern California in 1968.
Dave Swanson wrote a good article about it, opening with “The era of the big rock festival is littered [punny!] with the legendary, the local and the forgotten. Woodstock [1969] and Monterey [1968] may have the cache, and Altamont [1969] the tragedy, but among the ruins of the rock-festival era sits an interesting curiosity know as the Newport Pop Festival. On August 3 and 4, 1968, the all-but forgotten festival took place at the Orange County Fairgrounds in Costa Mesa, California.”
Here are some of the factoid bullet points I've curated about this festival.
The festival had an amazing lineup in which Sonny & Cher did not mesh with at all, and shows how quickly music was changing between 1967 and 1968. Here it is:
Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Country Joe and the Fish, Eric Burdon and the New Animals, Iron Butterfly, James Cotton Blues Band, The Butterfield Blues Band, Canned Heat, Electric Flag, Steppenwolf, among others.
The newbies at the festival were Tiny Tim (kinda out of place if you look at him as a novelty act but Swanson claims at the time he was a “genuine troubadour” and the crowd loved him) and a band called Alice Cooper with its headliner then known as Vince Furnier.
Swanson writes about Sonny & Cher, “whose star had been fading fast” and “were repeatedly booed by the crowd.” Swanson says, “the duo’s last hit, ‘The Beat Goes On,’ was more than a year old.” (Yikes! One whole year?) Swanson is disdainful of Sonny’s then attempt at psychedelia, a song called “Circus.” With that I would have to agree. Sonny, steeped in 1950s rock-and-roll and R&B was completely not suited to be a southern, Chicago or British blues songwriter and was lost in the field of psychedelic music. As expected, “it went nowhere,” Swanson says and although he's writing in 2015 you can't help but hear it as “nowheres-ville” and “it went nowhere, man!”
In another article about attendee reminiscences, Marsha from La Habra remembers Sonny & Cher “playing and no one paying attention; I think they were booed at times.” Susan from Santa Ana remembers Sonny & Cher circling overhead in a helicopter as “so exciting!” When Canned Heat left the stage and Sonny & Cher came on, Terry from San Dimas remembers leaving with his friend and his mom. Terry says Alice Cooper opened the show without any response or attention, even boos.
According to Swanson's article Sonny told the L.A. Times around this time, “I know we’re not considered the ultimate in hipness anymore.” Which is quite the understatement when swallowed up by that lineup.
Swanson ends his story with, “it remains a mystery as to how, or why, they were part of the event.” I'd also add my own question here about why this was billed as a "pop" festival and not a blues festival or a psychedelic rock festival. And if you look at some of these poster assets, Sonny & Cher are listed pretty high up in the marketing space.
That would be the real story. Why were they included here? But there are other unanswered questions: how did the bands backstage treat them? Did they play a shortened set as a result of the audience response? What was their set list eliciting these boos?
Newport #2 was called "Newport 69" and took place June 20-22 in Northridge, California. 200,000 attended that one which ended becoming the more famous of the two. The lineup included Jimi Hendrix Experience, Ike & Tina Turner, Joe Cocker, Taj Mahal, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Credence Clearwater Revival, Eric Burdon and War, Jethro Tull, Steppenwolf, Booker T & the M.G.s, The Grass Roots, Johnny Winter, Marvin Gay, Poco, The Byrds, The Rascals and Three Dog Night among others.
Why do we go into such a not-so-pleasant piece of Sonny & Cher's history? Because this is an interesting part of 1960s history and exemplifies the dramatic changes happening in rock music and also illustrates how publicly painful that incident probably was for other pop and folk acts at the time.
And also, it illuminates an irony: how many of those bands are still around and touring in arenas? The world is a capricious and wily place.
Links:
How the Newport Pop Festival Brought Together a Diverse Lineup (by Dave Swanson)
Readers reminisce about Newport Pop Festival of 1968
The Newport Pop Festivals (Wikipedia)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newport_Pop_Festival
I went out looking for collages of Cher through time and turns out there are a ton of them! This was the best.
Anyway, I have a bunch of random thoughts today and couldn't figure out what umbrella to put them under. This is all about Cher in show-biz.
The Pop Star Crisis
My friend Christopher sent me this older article from 2017 from the Wall Street Journal. It's about an identity crisis with today's female pop stars. The article contains interesting statistics about what’s selling on streaming these days (R&B and hip-hop) and what’s not selling as well (rock, pop and even country is declining).
The article gets under my skin a bit when it talks about “the pop playbook” being unpredictable (you think?) and when it mentions that women are criticized for hosting hip-hop artists on their albums but male artists are not. (And the difference would be?)
And it confounds me that in the post-Cher and Tina Turner era music execs are still saying things like Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and Miley Cyrus “may simply be past their hit making primes.” My friend Christopher tells me that female artists still disappear at the ticking time bomb of middle age! Oy.
The 1% of Touring Acts
Here is another older Wall Street Journal article from Christopher about how large arena acts are eating up all the concert $$$. And due to the fact that streaming is making record-making less lucrative, smaller acts depend on concert revenue.
It feels so much like large corporations swallowing up their competition.
In any case, to consider Cher in this 1% list is downright bizarre. If you would have told me back in 1980 that Cher would be one of the 1% of popular touring acts in the late 2010s, I would have thought you were a crazy person. This is the artist who has been on a zillion record labels with a disproportionate amount of bomb albums and a bad reputation with just about everybody from hipsters to squares. Which is why it drives me nuts when people accuse Cher of being a mainstream artist. Where is this mysterious stream?
And yet, the people do come out to her shows in those ginormous, block-sized buildings.
How. Did. We. Get. Here???
Although Cher is not listed as one of the highest grossing acts of the 2010s, she is named as #11 for highest grossing in 2019, ahead of Mumford & Sons, Michael Bublé, Paul McCartney, Garth Brooks and Ariana Grande. And I'm sure all of those acts are more popular than Cher is.
But why am I complaining. This is great. Finally, right? I’m actually very conflicted about it. Popularity: good. Monopoly: Bad.
Evil Geniuses
I recently came across a clip of Gary Lewis (of Gary Lewis and the Playboys) and his father Jerry Lewis singling together on the show Hullabaloo. That prompted me to look up what kind of relationship they had. As it turns out, Gary and all his siblings from Jerry Lewis' first wife were all disinherited (as a group!) and Gary has called Jerry Lewis "a mean and evil man." I don't know how Cher really felt about Jerry Lewis but I've read he was always nice to Cher on her variety shows and she seemed to like him. She's never came out with any trash talk about him in any case. Mr. Cher Scholar, like a large population of the country France, considers Jerry Lewis a comedy genius.
Likewise, Cher had no rough encounters with the homicidal Phil Spector, holding her own against his in-studio verbal taunts. Many consider Spector a producing genius of the early 1960s.
And that reminded me that Sonny’s running mate for the Palms Springs Mayoral race once called him a “mean little Italian.” Others have mentioned difficulty working with Sonny too, but Cher enjoyed working with Sonny. She even seemed to forgive him for his egregious business scams involving Cher Enterprises. Her beef with him concerned mostly personal marital and control issues. And on a recent Good Times movie DVD, the director William Friedkin called Sonny an unqualified genius. And although this is maybe not a popular view of Sonny, I would argue he was probably a promotional genius of the scrappy kind. A lot of his ideas about career longevity and independent/guerrilla promotion were before their time by at least 30 years.
And all these things taken together, you might wonder if Cher has a high tolerance for dysfunctional male geniuses.
When I checked off the tags for this post, they were 'music' and then 'television." I also wished I had a tag for "reality television." Because Sonny & Cher were early music-television and reality-tv before its time. And reality TV with all its baggage of falsehoods. "Seemingly real" is what it is. And the more real it seems, the better its reenactors are.
Cher Scholar is suffering, dear friends, Cher chickadees and zombies. This is a high Cher tide and I'm so woefully behind with it. This whole year has been quite a shit show. First my department reorganized and the work seemed insurmountable. Then I hit a season of traveling that won't end until the end of July. And on top of all that, I'm spending the majority of my free time preparing the new book of poems, which involves endless rounds of editing, cover design work with an art designer, getting my photo done in a tintype theme, and taking care of all the business aspects of the book.
Meanwhile, Cher is out there with concerts, planned tours, a Broadway show, TV docs, a new album in the works, a new movie and new publicity around all that. So much stuff I would love to indulge in and can't fully. So, so frustrating.
But I will drop everything for a Cher documentary. And one came on last Sunday on the Reelz channel. I wasn't expecting much. It's the Reelz channel after all, full of shows like "Autopsy: [enter celebrity name]. Salacious and thin shows that seem exploitative.
This was the first documentary on Cher that sprung for re-enactments, which was very funny. And reinforced for me why Cher and Sonny re-enactments always fail, and fail for all the same reasons. Bad impersonations. Bad outfits.
Let's start with the clothes. Seemingly a simple and innocuous thing. However, with Sonny & Cher these things are crucial. All of their cool cred was tied up in their clothes. You could say this is true for any music personality or band. The only difference between rock outfits and pop outfits is that rock singers try to play it off as authentic and organic and pop singers freely admit to using the device. The clothes on these impersonators, as in all Sonny & Cher re-enactments, looked cheap and ill-fitting. Save up all the money you would spend on a set and put it into the outfits. In comparison to these impersonators, you can see just how good Sonny & Cher looked.
The second issue is the faulty impersonations themselves. This is more complicated. Why is Cher, and surprisingly Sonny, so hard to impersonate well? They always cast for a 60s Cher and then expect her to be able to pull of 70s, 80s, 90s, etc. Cher. It's never been done. Not even professional Cher impersonators try this very often. And this is why the new Broadway show on Cher has split them up.
And then there's Sonny: he's always cast as a doofus. Just compare the Sonny re-enactor to the photos of Sonny in the documentary. The serious, competitive, intense Sonny staring back at us bears no relation to the impersonated buffoony Sonny, which tries to cast his TV persona (admitted dim) into their private scenes. The problem is the enactments are always cartoony, a caricature of the TV show characters.
Maybe I'm just overly sensitive to a celebrity I know more about. Maybe all impersonations are bad everywhere. But I think the difficulty in impersonating Sonny or Cher (and often the discomfort we sometimes feel watching it) proves how multifaceted Sonny and Cher are as performers and people. This goes against the common critique of them since day one, that they are shallow and fluffy. But the problem of impersonation exposes problems in that theory.
The show also had some great new talking heads:
I learned a few new things too. I didn't know, for instance, that Cher's unhappiness around their TV show was anything more than the quality of the music they were singing or the conditions of overwork. That Cher called herself Queen of a Mediocre Medium and wanted to be as big as the Rolling Stones is surprising. What boy-girl duet could ever have a shot at beating a rock band? It's inconceivable. But if anybody could have make a couple duo look cool, maybe it would have been Cher. But is she even that all-powerful?
The show also provided good commentary on what changing Cher's look and sound might mean to her soul, and her ability to grow out of Sonny, and how Sonny was smart enough to be aware of this. I was also surprised Cher offered to stay in the act for a deal of 50/50. We all know Sonny thought Cher's career would tailspin without his guidance. And we all know how wrong he was. Gary Chowen's comments were good reinforcements around the idea of Cher’s growing up and standing up for herself. This is fresh new narrative that makes mince meat of the idea that Cher outgrew Sonny for ambition.
Chowen also illustrates an iconic irony about Cher when he comments how private Sonny and Cher were around their relationship struggles. Here they were pretending to be a reality-TV like open book onstage and in interviews, but that was all smoke and mirrors, not just their relationship status, but the entire facade of being candid performers to begin with. It was a fake intimacy Sonny had cultivated since their early days. And it's the same fake-frankness, or rather the "strategic frankness that distracts " which you can see Cher practicing even today.
Inexplicably, the show kept calling David Geffen’s LA club On the Rox. On the Rox was the private lounge on top of his club, The Roxy. There's the club and the lounge within the club.
Check Reelz channel for future listings. Here's the trailer.
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