Oh, Sheryl

Seems like you can’t really escape a certain Ms Sheryl Crow right now, no matter how hard you try. Her unmistakable tones blare from the radio any number of times throughout the day. Then there are those videos, the album cover in the record shops, the face on the newstands. Sheryl Crow is everywhere.

She was the preferred bargain-hunting soundtrack for the entire duration of the Christmas shopping spree, no matter what kind of store you were in. And now, in a major coup, coming from nowhere last year, she has by-passed Kate Bush, Madonna, Tori Amos, Annie Lennox, Chrissie Hynde and a dozen other well-established names to top a number of the critical categories in the HP Reader’s Poll as well. Has the whole Western World gone stark, raving Crow-mad? Apparently. Sheryl Crow: Love of the Year.

The singular ascent of the same Ms Crow is as fine a success story as you’re likely to encounter – and fuck the begrudgers. Some say it’s those sultry Native American looks, that mischievous curl of the lip or the whiskey’n’cigarettes inflection that lends an edge to her clear voice. Others argue it’s the new-country, almost-retro flavour of the record, when Wynonna Judd is too Nashville and Nanci Griffith a tad too serious for the mainstream big time.

In fact, an intrinsically cross-over sound isn’t that surprising from an artist born in rural America, who trained classically and graduated with a degree in music, suffered the cut-throat vagaries of trying to make it in Los Angeles and endless stints as a back-up and session singer for some major powers in the business. Her debut’s laid-back mélange of country, rock, funk, loose-edged ballads and even a little throw-away rap comes from a woman who has run the gamut of styles and drawn influences from all of them – the result, a sparkling, original debut that seems to satisfy an astonishing range of record buyers and critics alike.

Newsweek called the album "Exile On Main Street meets Thelma And Louise”; Details dubbed Crow “alternative classic rock”. Both are pretty close to the mark. However, despite an initial veneer that might be suspiciously too easy on the ear, it’s Crow’s refreshing talents as a no-punches pulled, blue collar yarn-spinner that eventually stand out. Her milieu is not as tough as Tom Waits’, but it does have that lovers/losers/gypsies feel, with enough craft to deliver a solid, memorable song and the nonchalance to throw in a little street wisdom to draw you right into it.

For the characters in Sheryl’s songs, “nowhere is far enough away.” You’ll find cheatin’, down’n’troubled women seeking redemption from their man (or men); fugitive girls with bleeding hearts, drinking problems and brothers on smack; drifters on the run from banality, spending their last dollar with strangers in the backs of army jeeps, and more.

Then again, you’ll discover songs as down-home as ‘No One Said It Would Be Easy’, with its deep rural guitar twang , and theme of impoverished co-habitation. Soulful without whinging, she has a knack for registering details that speak a multitude, like the telling line about a partner “who can’t seem ever to fold up a shirt.”

While Crow seems to be a natural songsmith, she has identified fellow Tuesday Night Music Club man David Baerwald as having given her the vital encouragement to write auto-biographically. “I would tell him these stories about this or that and he’d tell me that I should write them down. It opened things up for me in songwriting,” she told writer Phil Sutcliffe. This new turn is perhaps most movingly heard on ‘We Do What We Can’, a cross-generational ballad that starts with a kid in her room listening to her father playing jazz, moving onto the failed hopes and regrets of the older man. The song expands to view his life and achievements within the wider context of developments in society and changes in the music since he was a young, hopeful jazz player himself.

The bluesy theme is embellished by the trumpet of her father, Wendall Crow, who had not performed for fifteen years before agreeing to come along and play on the album . . .

Sheryl Crow was born the third of three children in a small dot on the American map called Kennett, Missouri just north of Memphis. It’s a town between borders – not Deep South, not quite Wild West. Highway 55, the nearest major transport vein, seems almost deliberately to steer clear of it. But Crow had a far from isolated childhood. She grew up savouring regular Saturday night jam sessions in the house, since both her parents were amateur musicians. She listened to a broad range of music, encompassing Bessie Smith, The Stones, classical, big band, Dylan and The Beatles.

Her pianist mother Bernice, also a singer with the big band she and her husband played in, taught all the kids piano, at which Sheryl excelled from an early age. The atmosphere in the house, if not totally bohemian, was liberal. Her father Wendall Crow (an eighth-blood Native American) was also the town lawyer. She particularly remembers him going up against the Ku Klux Klan, who were charged with rigging ballot boxes in a local election. During the trial, Wendall Crow ended up most nights sitting in the front room with a shotgun in his lap, and his kids had to be chaperoned to and from school by their own personal cop.

Otherwise life went on in what Crow refers to as a simple, “three stoplights town” where, in her teen years, she began to play and sing in school bands. After graduating with a degree in music from the University of Missouri, she taught and played in local outfits in St Louis for a while, before packing it in and moving to LA in 1986. There, the typical 22-year-old blow-in with a carload of stuff and just enough money to get through the first few months, she began working as a session singer. A short while later, she crashed a closed audition and landed a job as back-up vocalist on Michael Jackson’s Bad tour.

The tour gave her an opportunity to see a different side of the business. While Jackson sold out giant stadiums and lodged her in five star accommodation, she was still a “chick” in the background – she claims that she had to fight against a nasty bout of sexual harassment, an incident which gets mentioned in The Tuesday Night Music Club on a couple of occasions, the best one rhyming ‘Frank Dileo’s dong’ with ‘I might have had a hit song’. Dileo, Jackson’s former manager, denies Crow’s allegations (she never formally charged him). However, after listening to the bone-chilling scenario in ‘What I Can Do For You’, you can draw your own conclusions about whether Sheryl Crow has been there for real or not. My own gut feeling says that she has . . .

Back in Los Angeles, with no record deal and a serious case of burn-out from a year-and-a-half’s touring, she experienced a bout of deep clinical depression, during which time, she says she ‘didn’t get out of bed for six months’. “Some people never think about suicide,” she has said. “I think about it every day.” The dark side of Crow is reflected in tracks like ‘Strong Enough’ (“When I’m broken down and I cannot stand/Are you strong enough to be my man?”) and ‘I Shall Believe’.

However, a combination of Prozac and therapy, to her surprise, cleared things up and she finally, as she put it, “got my sense of humour back.” This resilience is evident on the album: ‘Can’t Cry Anymore’ is about just such a springback, an earthy, guitar-driven-no-regrets anthem that starts with the one-liner “I took your car and drove to Texas” (so there . . .). But probably the best “I’ve got the cheap-bar-room-blues-but-hey-what-the-fuck” song in a long time has got to be the irrepressible ‘All I Wanna Do’. While the original idea for the song came from a piece by Vermont poet Wyn Cooper (he is credited on the track), Crow turns it into an alk-drenched, slacker celebration.

At first, it seems like just a catchy tune, one that will stand out from the usual radio dross. However, zoom into the matinal bar room (“I like a good beer buzz early in the morning”) and you hear Joe Soap striking up a typical line with an anonymous female, who isn’t letting him away with anything: “He says his name is William but I’m sure he’s Bill or Billy, Mac or Buddy . . .” After x-number of beers, Billy is amusing himself by spinning empty bottles around the floor and the singer stares out into the busy carwash across the street and decides that the world is theirs, whatever the fuck: cars, day, night, sun and moon.

As a piece of devil-may-care blue-collar romanticism, it’d be hard to surpass.

Back on her feet again, Sheryl got to work and toured as a vocalist with Don Henley, Joe Cocker and Rod Stewart among others. Having written her own songs for many years, she then began to sell some to performers like Eric Clapton and Wynonna Judd. She cites Don Henley, with whom she was singing back-up on the End Of The Innocence tour, as having encouraged her to get back to her own material and start performing it herself. When she finally landed a deal with A&M records, however, things did not go as planned.

Disastrously, some time towards the near completion of her first album with producer Hugh Padgham, she realised he had come up with a light-pop, dance oriented sound, far from what was close to her heart. In a move that reshaped Crow’s pessimistic view of corporate rock policies, A&M agreed to scrap the first shot (at the cost of over a quarter of a million dollars) and let Crow start over – the way she wanted.

The Tuesday Night Music Club was the result of a spontaneous get together. Musicians David Baerwald and Kevin Gilbert were hanging out at the LA studio of producer Bill Bottrell, and called up Crow. Jamming and throwing around ideas that night, they came up with ‘Leaving Las Vegas’, and decided to continue the sessions, opting for tricks like switching instruments, trading styles etc. to vary the sound.

The overall looseness was infectious and Sheryl began developing songs appropriate to the sessions. Eventually they pieced together The Tuesday Night Music Club.

“I realised about halfway through making it that we’d make a country-flavoured record,” she says with a laugh. “I had brought in the records that had influenced me the most – Let It Bleed, Derek & The Dominoes, Dylan’s Nashville records – and the one thing that runs through all of them is that they’re very country-influenced. When we figured that out, we celebrated: we rented Coal Miner’s Daughter and I made all this fried chicken . . . When we started telling people that, they’d say, ‘don’t say the C word!’ – but country has always had a profound impact on rock.”

The pay-off wasn’t immediate. Despite enthusiastic reviews all round, Crow needed to make her solo presence felt via a stint on the road. Since the band who had co-operated on and recorded the album comprised musicians already locked into other commitments, she put together a new line-up and began touring extensively. Over the course of a year, she would open for The Black Crowes, The Eagles, Crowded House and John Hiatt.

Meanwhile, audiences wanting their MTV were also getting plenty of Sheryl – with the videos of ‘Leaving Las Vegas’ and ‘All I Wanna Do’ getting heavier and heavier rotation on the music stations. She gained more fans when two tracks (‘Strong Enough’ and ‘No One Said It Would Be Easy’) were featured in last Spring’s minor cult hit movie, Kalifornia. Then in August 1994, came her appearance in front of 400,000 people at Woodstock II, an event which was simultaneously broadcast in America on pay-per-view TV.

Album sales shot up, the press caught on and there wasn’t one paper or magazine last Autumn Stateside that didn’t feature Crow. Between October and November, The Tuesday Night Club sold four million copies. In October she opened for Bob Dylan (who uncharacteristically raved about her) and in November, she duetted with Mick Jagger at another mammoth gig in Florida.

Back in Europe, the record was fast rising up the charts in England and Ireland, with increasing play of her four videos/singles on TV. Now, just one month into 1995, Hot Press readers have placed her in no less than seven categories, including number one debut album, number one female singer and number one – sigh – ‘Love Of The Year’.

Just what is it that makes Sheryl such a Love? Among recent contenders, she’s eclipsed both Sophie B. Hawkins’ assertiveness and Tori Amos’ soul-scorching. It may be down to her immediately catchy hits from Tuesday Night, or her girl-in-your-class glamour. Or perhaps it’s just that crossover thing again . . . she’s taken the best of the contemporary country sound, blended it with some LA cynicism, comes out on-stage looking like a babe and delivers with loads of attitude.

On the question of sex appeal, you can’t deny that Crow has it. Let’s face it, nine out of ten young males will stop channel-surfing upon a chance encounter with a Sheryl Crow video. And some young women too, of course. Those curves, curls and choppers can’t hurt, especially when the girl has a taste for a certain ballroom glitz in on-stage wardrobe choices – in the very best theatrical tradition.

In feminist terms, the argument that she’s just playing Barbie to the aforementioned channel-surfing brigade doesn’t really stand up, either.

“I wanna be Madonna but the price is too high,” goes one of her lyrics. No full body make up and fuzz filters for this woman’s videos. Rather take her as part of that wonderful revisionist wave – those who couldn’t be bothered peroxidising their hair, but who’ve seen their mothers make-upless and wearing baggy jumpers and said, ‘fuck that!’.

We happen to like a little make up and frilly stuff. Don’t for a minute believe we’re not wimmen too, but we prefer to look like women, thanks. And Sheryl Crow does, in a very haphazard and often natural way – without baggy jumpers.

On her album sleeve, she’s pictured holiday-snap style in jeans and a tank top, or a plain white tee and cotton pants, and she’s sexy as hell. She makes no bones about being thirty-two and, just to prove it, she uses what certainly looks like an unretouched photo for the cover shot – almost unheard of in these days of computer imaging – and she still looks fabulous.

As a face and a voice, fans of both sexes see her as a free mix of post-hippy, third wave feminist, country-tough female who’ll wear a wonder-bra and lipstick, but drink you under the table, and who’ll tell you, laughing, that she’s “been on the road for most of my child-bearing years.”

As a person, she’s a little more elusive, a blend of easy-going, tattered-chic confidence and a bundle of nerves. She almost pulled the video for ‘All I Wanna Do’, with the worry that it didn’t correctly represent her. She’s concerned that the tracks on Kalifornia were allowed on the soundtrack of such a violent film. And then there’s the story of how she missed her dog so much that she had him flown over from LA to do a stint on tour with her, and had a special “All Access” laminate made to fit onto his collar.

She lives in West Hollywood, is single, has a penchant for dangerous musician types and drives one of those old, customised ’60s convertibles. But to find out more, I guess you’ll have to wait for the next album, on which she’s working at this very moment.

Crow is currently ensconced in a studio where, despite all potential distractions (“what are you gonna do when they ask you to open for Bob Dylan?”), she’s determined to stay until February. One expects that she’ll tackle the dreaded “second album” challenge with aplomb.

Because the feeling is that Sheryl Crow’s time has come. And a good thing it has, too.

So help me God! Clearly Sheryl Crow is the big winner in this year’s Hot Press readers poll. On the strength of just one album – the highly radio-playable and infectious Tuesday Night Music Club – she has lifted not just the prestigious No.1 Female Artist crown but she has also crossed over into that intense area of fan adulation, topping the Love Of The Year category.

This is an unprecedented achievement. More mainstream pop artists like Madonna and Boy George have featured in this category when they were at the height of their popularity and powers. U2, with their enormously committed fan-base here, have also featured. But never before has any artist come from nowhere in a matter of months and topped the poll in a category where readers can vote, literally, for anything – from Ray Houghton’s goal that lit up the World Cup stage to the ceasefire declared by paramilitaries in the North in the latter half of ’94.

Otherwise it was a year in which consensus was less evident than at any time over the past decade. The number of votes was up – the spread, however, was far wider, and if anything this signalled a confusion of priorities. A strong level of support for dance music was evident – but fragmented into so many sub-genres, it lacks that element of concentration that creates stars. Ideologically this may be a good thing, reflecting as it does the way in which dance has opened the doors afresh to garage – and bedroom – artists, but the effect is that new(er) rock acts like Suede, Blur and Oasis tend to dominate the international section.

With one exception, of course. If 1994 was the year of Monster, 1995 will be that of REM live and we can expect the one band to seriously rival U2 in popularity on a global scale to consolidate even further. There is no doubt about the respect in which they are held by Hot Press readers – they have been there or thereabouts in the poll for the past seven or eight years, slipping only slightly during periods of inactivity. That is as good a measure as you can get of their fans enduing loyalty.

In Ireland, U2 again polled very strongly. But, in a rest year for them, The Cranberries spurted ahead in categories which the fab four have dominated for years. Dolores O’Riordan has clearly won the hearts of a huge number of Irish fans as a singer, songwriter and sex symbol – but the music is of the essence as the intense support for No Need To Argue confirms. Sharon Shannon, Altan and Sinéad O’Connor all polled heavily – there was no surprise in that. And among the new acts, Blink staked a deserved claim to immortality. The band may remain somewhat anonymous but their debut album A Map Of The Universe proved a strong calling card in a year when dozens of good Irish albums were released.

The phenomenal success of Riverdance saw Bill Whelan emerge as a leading player. Shane MacGowan received a ringing endorsement as No.1 Songwriter, with only Bono coming really close. And bands like Ash, The Mary Janes, Wormhole, Scheer, Sunbear, Pet Lamb, 4th Dimension and Schtum, as well as artists like Alec Finn and Sean Tyrrell, registered their first placings. But the real breakthrough in Ireland was achieved by Revelino, whose superb eponymous debut came in at a mightily impressive No.2 in Album Of The Year, behind only The Cranberries. Featuring in nine categories and lifting the coveted No.1 slot for Most Promising Act, this was the year when they established their presence in no uncertain terms.

Pulp Fiction was Film Of The Year. Dave Fanning – for the umpteenth time – DJ. And No Disco flourished, improving substantially on its previous position, coming in as Best TV Programme.

And your Loathes Of The Year? Albert Reynolds, paedophile priests and Harry Whelehan in that order. Let’s face it: no one else stood a chance.