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From: jody_ferguson.asw.navairtestcen%pcgate@NATC-FW.NAVY.MIL
Date: Thu, 30 Apr 1992 13:54:00 -0700
Subject: TORI STUFF
To: "love-hounds" <love-hounds@eddie.mit.edu>
Hi all,
While I realize some people here have had a bellyful of Tori Amos, I
have just received two pieces of Tori info from a friend of mine who is
the PD at the local radio station. I say "the" because there isn't much
else around here. The first piece is the following article. If it gets
cut off, contact me through e-mail and I will send you a copy. It's
pretty long. If you are sick of Tori, you know about the PgDn key. For
those who are left, here goes...
(Washington Post Sunday, March 22, 1992)
Finally, A Prodigy Finds Her Song
Tori Amos, Back Home With a Haunting Album.
By Richard Harrington, Washington Post Staff Writer
NEW YORK -- When Tori Amos flew to New York from London recently to
showcase songs from her "Little Earthquakes" album for an industry and
media crowd, she included an a cappella song, "Me and a Gun." Sitting
cross-legged on a piano bench, staring straight into that jury, Amos
expressed with nearly emotionless but harrowing detail the jumbled
thoughts of a young woman being raped in the back of a Cadillac Seville.
"I sang `Holy Holy' as he buttoned down his pants...when there's a man
on your back and you're pushed flat on your stomach it's not a classic
Cadillac...me and a gun and a man on my back but I haven't seen Barbados
so I must get out of this..."
Things got so uncomfortably quiet you could have heard a pin drop.
And perhaps a few jaws too, among those who might have remembered Amos
from four years ago, when she served up a disastrous debut album, "Y
Kant Tori Read." Its cover featured her with teased hair, leather duds
and a push-up bra, holding a sword behind her head--Tori as Heavy Metal
Babe!
The new, improved, real Tori Amos was a frail, henna-haired, porcelain-
skin beauty who seemed to have stepped out of a Botticelli painting.
After a year in England, she was coming home with a clean slate, a new
record, a planeload of sterling reviews, the impassioned backing of her
record company and a foot ready to jam in the career door slammed shut a
few years back.
At 28, the Tori Amos coming home to America--to Potomac, where her
father is pastor at the United Methodist Church on River Road--is
already more than two decades into a quest that started when she was a
piano prodigy (at 5, she was the youngest student ever accepted at the
Peabody Conservatory) and included teen years spent playing in
Georgetown piano bars.
After a number of stylistic diversions and changes of address--she lived
in Los Angeles for seven years before the London move--Amos seems to
have found herself. "Little Earthquakes" showcases a gifted singer,
songwriter and pianist with a penchant for spare, beautifully crafted,
soul-baring songs in the tradition of Kate Bush, Laura Nyro and Elton
John. In songs like "Silent All These Years," "Winter" and "Me and a
Gun," she exorcises lovers and other authority figures and digs into
familial plots rich in spiritual and sexual conflicts.
Not surprisingly, Amos displays killer piano chops, a knack for melody
that hints at both classical and pop underpinnings, and a tainted
angel's voice that wouldn't be out of place in a confessional. In
England, Amos's emotional nakedness has stopped people in her tracks.--
"Little Earthquakes" opened in the Top 20, selling 100,000 copies.
The New York showcase led to some immediate commitments: Soon she'll be
in Vogue, Interview and Rolling Stone (Entertainment Weekly had already
picked her as a new star for '92) and on Thursday at 9 p.m., MTV will
present an hour-long special on Amos. Her "Silent" video has been given
the "breakthrough" status accorded only one video each month. Pretty
good results for an artist who has yet to dent the American charts.
"I'd tried to do a dance thing, I tried to do the rock thing, and at a
certain point you go, `Well, what _is_ my thing?'" says Amos. "`Who am
I? What am I all about?' And out of that searching and agony came
`Little Earthquakes.'"
"We're stretching boundaries with her," says Doug Morris, CEO of
Atlantic Records. "These songs are very provocative. She's on her
journey."
It was Morris who weathered Amos's disastrous, formulaic debut album and
who encouraged her to be as intense and personal as she needed to be in
her future songwriting. Still, Morris admits, "I was shocked when I
heard `Little Earthquakes' because it was _such_ a departure."
Morris sensed it might be difficult to promote and market the album
because it was so eclectic. How then to get people to hear what Amos
had to say in a huge country with a fragmented music scene, rigid radio
formats and, perhaps, memories of her ill-fated first album?
Morris decided to send Amos to England, "where there's one major radio
station and where the press blankets the entire country. Since Tori
could really captivate people, she could work in small clubs, people
would create a buzz and she would have a better chance of being
accepted."
"I needed a change," Amos admitted a few hours before her New York
performance. "Even though I'd written the record, I was emotionally
drained after living in Los Angeles for so long. I needed a new
perspective on things, new sights, new sounds. And I needed to get that
thing in your belly that says `I want to play now.'"
The label arranged for a West London flat five minutes from its offices--
and close enough to ferry critics there for private performances. "The
music press there has a lot of power," says Amos. "They can see
something in London and in a couple of days everybody in the country
knows about it."
And embrace Amos they did, painting her as "an American eccentric, a
boho who writes confessional songs undercut with a species of shock
tactics that seem reassuringly British in inspiration," according to Q
magazine.
London also put some distance between the future and Amos's L.A. past,
which included an album of dance tracks recorded with Narada Michael
Walden (never released) and steady work in classy hotel lounges ("paying
the rent, playing something for the martini drinkers to make deals
over").
There also was a band--it included drummer Matt Sorum, now with Guns N'
Roses--but, says Amos, "it didn't make a whole lot of appearances. We
spent most of our time making demo tapes." But Amos was not focusing on
her strengths. Songs were co-written and overproduced, her vocals often
overwhelmed. She didn't even play the piano; instead, she would "tickle
the synth."
"Billboard called me a bimbo," Amos recalls in her soft but intense
voice. "They didn't mean to be mean about it. They were actually quite
accurate. That's the look I was sporting in those days and I was in
better shape--I was pumping then. There was a part of me that really
wanted to be a rock chick...and I _failed_at_it_.
"And that's a bit hard, to go from prodigy to bimbo...though it saved me
a lot of hair spray bills. But I had to crack before I was willing to
strip....I could not have written `Little Earthquakes' without skinning
my knees."
When "Y Kant Tori Read" stiffed, Amos went back to the lounges but
stopped writing. "If I had to whore around, why did I do it with this,
the thing that I have so treasured?" Amos asked herself. She didn't
even keep a piano where she lived. "And then one night I went to a
friend's house--she had a piano--and as she sat away in the dark, I
played for hours....There was a feeling of `Who am I without you? Am I
_anything_ without you?' And then it was like--"
She unlooses a radiant smile.
That experience reawakened a sense of disciplined craft that was both
disconcerting and liberating, as evidenced on "Little Earthquakes."
"Everything is there because it wants to be," Amos says, pointing out
that on her first album, "I wasn't talking about the `Me and a Gun'
experience, I wasn't talking about my religious views, I wasn't talking
about how I felt about myself much at _all_.
"On the first album, I was trying to defend myself, trying to make
myself not so vulnerable," she adds. "And what happened? I got
completely _ripped_ to bits. So then you think, `What can happen to me?
Get off on something for once in your life. You _used_ to get off when
you were 4....'"
Or even 2. Tori Amos--then Ellen Amos--was humming melodies before she
was talking. An older brother and sister took piano lessons, and she's
always be cheerfully underfoot, her mother recalls. "As soon as she
could reach the keys, she'd toddle over and start picking out the
melodies that they were playing," says Mary Ellen Amos. "She could play
_everything_ she could hear--it was a complete ear gift."
Piano Prodigy
-------------
Amos's parents--her father is Edison Amos, pastor of Potomac United
Methodist Church--were not musical and didn't really take notice until
visitors expressed amazement at the toddler's skills. Some advised the
Amoses that the longer their daughter followed the musical track of
memory rather than reading, the more difficult it would be to train her.
And so at age 5, she auditioned at the prestigious Peabody Conservatory
in Baltimore, where the Amos family was living at the time.
The youngest ever to audition, Amos in 1968 became Peabody's youngest-
ever student, starting there at age 6, surrounded mostly by men and
women in their late teens and early twenties.
"So much that I got from that place had nothing to do with what they
were teaching me," Amos suggests. "I was picking up on everything then.
...It was fascinating!"
But Amos age and temperament proved a challenge to her teachers and her
parents, with Amos rebelling against mechanics when memory seemed the
easier path.
"They didn't know how to teach that _kid_," says Amos. "To try and
break a kid's ear so that they'll learn how to read--and you _have_ to
read to be a classical pianist--the way that they went about it made me
hate it....I was a disappointment, and at 7 it became very clear to me
that we had different plans."
Peabody's curriculum at the time was strictly classical, and though Amos
studied there for five years--"she resisted but she stayed with it," her
mother notes--things came to a head at 11 when she auditioned again and
swung her Beethoven with a Beatles beat. Amos's scholarship was not
renewed, though she continued private instruction when her father moved
his ministry, first to Silver Spring, then Rockville, and eight years
ago, to Potomac.
At Eastern Junior High and Richard Montgomery High, Amos was involved in
chorales and madrigal groups, and led the children's choir at her
father's church. By her mid-teens, she was also a veteran of the
Washington piano bar circuit thanks to her father's intervention.
"At 14, I felt Tori was losing interest," says Ed Amos. "Music was her
entire life and we wanted to help her however we could. She wanted a
job and so I chose to direct her into a profession at a young age, which
was not an easy decision for me to make."
"My father wanted me to get a craft," says Tori Amos. Indeed, she was
soon developing it in a series of Georgetown cabarets, first at Mr.
Henry's and later at Mr. Smith's Tiffany Room. Both clubs were
supported by a largely gay clientele, and Pastor Amos--clerical collar
and all--would chaperone his daughter on weekend nights until the early
hours.
"You play to people and you don't judge them," he says. "You share your
gift and talent."
By now, Tori Amos's repertoire had grown to embrace the popular
standards not only of her day, but of her parents'. She was learning
the sturdy craftsmanship that allows songs to stand the test of time.
"I wouldn't give up those years for anything," Amos says, while
conceding that high school was a challenge. Still, she managed to be
elected homecoming queen at Richard Montgomery ("just remember Laura
Palmer was _also_ a homecoming queen").
Often she'd return from work after midnight, unwinding by writing songs
at the basement piano. "I used to love going to sleep listening to her
down there," says her mother Mary Ellen. There are cabinets full of
songs and tapes in the basement.
Seismic Change
--------------
"Little Earthquakes" is very much a coming-of-age album. The first
American single is "Silent All These Years," where longtime passivity in
a relationship comes to an end in a cascade of sly and supple lyrics
("so you found a girl who thinks really deep thoughts/ what's so amazing
about really deep thoughts/ boy you best pray that I bleed real soon/
how's _that_ thought for you...").
Ed Amos, who seems to be his daughter's biggest fan--he'll be biting his
tongue in the pulpit today, wanting to let his parishioners know about
Thursday's MTV special--says "Silent" is "about the structure of a
culture that has encrusted your soul to where you are not who you should
be....There's no ephemeral writing from Tori, it's all out of experience
or meaning. As a philosopher and theologian, I think there's a lot of
great wisdom about life in her songs."
There is also an undercurrent of spiritual confusion and conflict
coursing through the album, including the struggle with authority of
"Crucify" (I'm looking for a savior beneath these dirty sheets"). The
spiritual and the physical circle each other throughout "Little
Earthquakes."
"They have to get equal time," says Amos. "Once I wouldn't talk about
these things, but now...I'm giving no quarter. But I'm not into blame.
I had Victorian parents, but loving and supportive; they have their
beliefs and they happen to be a bit different from mine and it's okay."
Then there's "Me and a Gun," the truly harrowing song about rape based
on a Los Angeles experience that Amos had blocked out for many years.
After a show at a hotel lounge, she agreed to drop off someone who'd
been a regular customer and he attacked her--though amos was able to
escape before a rape occurred. She discussed the incident with her
mother--who flew out to comfort her--but never talked about it again.
Then, while playing a London suburb, Amos killed some time by going to
see "Thelma & Louise," and the film triggered the memory. Riding the
underground to the show, Amos wrote "Me and a Gun" in her head,
performing it that night a cappella. It has stayed that way.
"I don't talk about the details because I can't, but it's freeing to
sing that song," says Amos. "I have to go in a trance to sing it....It
gets exhausting singing it. But there's so much going on that nobody
talks about, and I just found that out with myself after so many years
of not talking."