Tori Amos: Piece by Piece (36 page)

ANN:
Amos doesn't use the phrase “fashion victim” lightly—she has lived it. During her first stab at stardom, in the band Y Kant Tori Read, Amos convinced herself that she could take on the “rock chick” image popular in 1980s Los Angeles. Gallons of hair spray, a leather bustier, thigh-high boots, and porn-star makeup turned Amos into everybody else's archetype, but she was clearly suffering beneath the glamour. Trying to please the music-biz “experts” who seemed to control her fate at the time, the budding virtuoso and composer was nearly smothered within heavy-metal cliché.

If I had grown up wanting to do cock rock, if that were my aspiration, then maybe it would have been different. I would have been happy in fishnets. But you see, I was brought into music with Bartók. I was brought up in a tradition of musicians. I did not think I was a bimbo when I first heard Led Zeppelin at age five. I could see and hear how deep it could be. But clearly I got it very wrong in the 1980s. I think when you chase somebody else's notion of success, you're bound to fail.

I thought if I didn't succeed, the consequences would be deadly. How many girls have had a dream of who they really are and been rejected so many times that they can't believe it? If there are not people to catch you at that point, you're lost. I had my father, but he was driven. So was I. I thought,
I have to succeed at something here, no matter what it is.
You go after what you think the record companies want, and you change the music, you get the dicks hard, you find a way to do it. And you know what? You're sitting there puking in the back. My good friends will tell you—I was the angriest dog on the block back then. Didn't know why. Or wouldn't admit it.

What was most difficult was that some women had been able to keep their integrity while I was sacrificing mine in the name of getting cocks hard. When I was making
Y Kant Tori Read
, my executive producer was David Kirshenbaum and across town he was producing somebody called Tracy Chapman. He exposed me to her, and I couldn't understand—wait a minute. Wait a minute. How come I'm the cheap hooker and she's the poet? Then I looked at myself in the mirror and I said, “Well, you look like a cheap hooker.”

It all culminated in an incident I've talked about a lot—my accidental epiphany. The record had been reviewed in
Billboard
, and I had been called a bimbo. [The exact quote was, in fact, “Unfortunately, provocative
packaging sends the (inaccurate) message that this is just so much more bimbo music.”] I was at Hugo's restaurant in Hollywood, and I overheard someone I knew slightly talking about me—“Oh, that's that girl over there with a review in
Billboard
magazine this week where they called her a bimbo.” The humiliation of that. This was the very moment in my private life when I'd started to play piano again, and I'd met some women who were turning me on to all sorts of poetry about sexuality, stuff that captured how people could burn inside, and I was burning, too, I was burning alive. That night I realized that when it comes to sexual expression, unless there's a certain initiation, it's like a woman dancing in a strip club and saying she's liberated. Maybe she feels liberated, but she will also have to be clear that she is an object for most of the onlookers. Not the subject. Now can you hold the duality of being an object for many while being the subject for yourself? If you fool yourself and you are not able to hold the duality—which is extremely difficult to hold—then you will become just another object in their subjugation of women. What I'd been doing with my image was more akin to degrading sex … that's no way to honor the Sacred Prostitute.

ANN:
The failure of Y
Kant Tori Read
's debut album, which sold only about seven thousand copies, revealed to Amos that success was inseparable from self-governance. Still, Amos would have to find the songs that became
Little Earthquakes,
leave Los Angeles, and meet the inimitable stylist Karen Binns before she could capture a public way of being that felt real.

I had to change, but at first I didn't know how. Obviously the music was the easier piece of the puzzle to change—I just reached out for my piano and she was there. My outer appearance, as I remember at the time, became
very plain in a way. No makeup, no hair spray no tight Lycra … I got rid of all of it within a few days after that
Billboard
article. I was doing demos with Eric Rosse for what would become
Little Earthquakes.
We're talking 1988, when I started writing all this music on the piano— “Silent All These Years,” “Crucify,” etc.
Little Earthquakes
didn't come out until 1992, so as you can see, I spent a few years just playing the piano and writing these songs.

Yes, this album was written from a deep catharsis, but also there was a reclaiming of the five-year-old little girl I had been at the piano and her view of music. I finally started to figure out that the “public image” issue would have to be addressed when I came to properly record
Little Earthquakes
in the studio with Davitt Sigerson. He was one of the album's producers; he's real music-industry sage material. He said to me, “People can feel it when an artist is wearing clothing that isn't hers, literally.” It's like claiming a false lineage. He got me back to my lineage. That was his greatness. He reminded me. We would talk and he would ask, “How can somebody with your pedigree as a musician end up where you did?”

By this time I was in London, and I was already in my metamorphosis. Lee Ellen Newman, head of press at East West Records UK, became my first friend, my compadre, and partner in crime on the U.K. side of Atlantic Records. Because of our deep friendship, she was able to talk with me in a way that no one else could, thereby getting through. By the time Elyse Taylor was brought in as head of marketing at East West in 1991, Lee Ellen and I were confident enough in our friendship to open our circle to her, thereby making a triad. With Elyse we created an equilateral triangle: Lee Ellen presented to the world what Elyse and I spent months developing. This was the original creative think tank under the watchful eye of Max Hole. Lee Ellen and Elyse knew that we would need to pull in visually talented people who understood what I was pushing sonically
First I would meet Cindy Palmano (a photographer brought in by Elyse), who changed how I saw imagery and she, in turn, turned me on to Karen Binns, with whom I've worked ever since.

We didn't have a lot of money at that time. It was exciting, though, and you're seeing what's out there and trying to figure out what you're doing and who you are. We would pick stuff up from the open-air markets in London. Karen still does that every weekend. It's great, because what you find is one of a kind.

When I met Karen I couldn't understand a word she was saying. She's a professional now. In those early days she was not. She was doing weird art stuff; she'd been involved with the downtown art crowd around Michel Basquiat in New York. Cindy had suggested her, though, and I trusted Cindy. I don't know why, exactly, but I just said okay. And the great thing is, Karen and I developed the look together and then Karen had other clients and her look became influential for them. She'll say to me, “Girrl, you're my muse,” and I'll just laugh. I'll laugh my head off, because everybody else is my muse when I write songs.

I was living in London, having moved there from Brooklyn, where I grew up. Cindy Palmano contacted me about this new singer. Don't ask me why Cindy called me—maybe because I wasn't at the top of my field at that time, so I would be available for someone new. Cindy said, “This is a girl you can grow with. I know you have something in you that can work with this girl.” I have to give it to Cindy, for her to see that I would connect with Tori was a shock, because nobody else in the fashion field would have imagined us as a pair. I mean, just look at us. Tori's style at the time was different. She was obsessed with Patagonia, that outdoorsy clothing line out of California. I became obsessed with Patagonia too. To the point that
I had André Walker design her a glamorous fleece Patagonia-like gown for the 1994 Grammys, which was stunning. Could you believe it? André made fleece look sleek.

Coming to England did change Tori's style. The record company wanted to style her as this English rose type of girl. Tori told me she listened to Led Zeppelin. She wanted to look like Robert Plant. So she got to wear jeans, but with something more exciting, like a vintage swimsuit, on top. I think I started her off with vintage clothes and jeans—with a flare leg, of course. Which was a good place to start in 1992.

ANN:
The impact of
Little Earthquakes
not only allowed Amos to define her own style; it established her as a pop icon. Though the look she explored in partnership with Binns, beautifully recorded in Cindy Palmano's album photographs, was thoroughly modern and bohemian, many still called her a “fairy princess.” The crystal-clear artwork for her second album
, Under the Pink,
reinforced her dreamlike image, though on a deeper level it reflected the introspection of her art.

Under the Pink
was a record Tori made, metaphorically, inside her room. I had to show the purity of what she was trying to do. The purity of her work, of her music, and where it comes from. White, of course, is the best color to convey that essence, and as you remember she had really natural makeup for
Under the Pink.
The designers she was wearing at the time were quite earthy and ethereal. Which was what was happening at the time.

I remember Cindy, Karen, and I having long, long talks about how to represent emotional danger. Cindy came up with a glass world with a lone
woman—Tori—having to navigate it with bare feet. Karen came up with the idea of white. I dug it because if the lone woman missteps, then there is nowhere to hide all that blood on such a pretty white dress. I found that expression more in the vein of Artemis, if you're looking for an archetype. Artemis—the lone huntress, who finds other women to help her achieve what must be achieved as she tries to protect those creatures that she cares for.

ANN:
Though she remained a musician first, by this time Amos fully recognized the value of approaching her public image as another aspect of her art. Her next album
, Boys for Pele,
leapt into fiery territory utterly removed from the relative calm of
Under the Pink,
and Amos and her partners in style devised a new visual approach to match its intensity. The photo session for that album's cover produced the most controversial image of her career: Amos, in southern belle dishabille, apparently suckling a piglet. In another shot, she brandished a rifle and a coolly defiant gaze. Amos has anything but regrets about this session, though many found it utterly distasteful.

I've said it before—that was a Christmas card for my dad. It came from a real place for me. It's not What can I do to shock you? It started with the fact that my dad was really getting on my case; he was asking how I could stray so far away from Christianity and my roots that I couldn't even do a Christmas song. I told him he could get me to do a Christmas card. And this was it. Maybe it was me saying,
I'm going to give all the good Christians something to think about.
People didn't get that image, because most aren't raised as intensely Christian as I was. Those who were might have understood that this was a Madonna and child, but one that brought in the non-kosher, the unacceptable, back to the fold.

I don't really think that everybody involved in the shoot necessarily got what we were trying to achieve. Obviously Cindy understood the necessity of a photograph that forced the question to Christians: Do you truly practice the Golden Rule, “Love Your Neighbor As Yourself”? “Judge not that you be not judged. For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the same measure you use, it will be measured back to you.” “First cast out the plank in your own eye; and then you shall see clearly to cast out the stye that is in your brother's eye” … I'd been noticing a shift away from a liberal way of thinking, heading toward where we are now. It was the beginning, just on the periphery. I was experiencing the hypocrisy of people who would say they were liberal thinkers but were making comments about “bitches” and “fucking faggots.” The backlash from an open-minded culture to a mob mentality—with no regard for another human's basic rights—was hard to take.

I took a lot of heat for that photo, I guess, but I didn't care. I was laughing my head off. I knew the power of that image and exactly how it would hit.

For
Boys for Pele
, Tori was a witch doctor. Cindy did all those great photographs. New Orleans is where it went down. I mean, with the pig and the drama of that shoot. We talked about it. Tori said, “What do you think works style-wise for this music?” I said, “Let's take it back to the range.” But it wasn't a Western thing; it was more of a
Gone With the Wind
thing. You know how those Southern belles had to hold on to their homes after the disaster was over? We all go through a Civil War in some way. So we just took it to the Civil War theme and made it trendy. We noticed afterward that the trend stayed at least for a few years. The Edwardian thing. Going back, getting the heirlooms that your grandmother actually wore, bringing them
into modern society, making them hip, which is quite Gothic. You can always move in and out of the Gothic scene, because at least you're understood by the kids. Once you start going the other way, if you start wearing pretty dresses and trying to be like the nice wife thing, then you lose the kids. Gothic is strangely flexible. It's quite a classic rock look.