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SPIN magazine by Charles Aaron Sex, God, and Rock ‘N’ Roll A jarring mix of good-girl hair and bad-blood confessions, Tori Amos offers
up songs so profane and sexually charged they could only come from a minister’s
daughter. Charles Aaron loses his religion. God may not play dice with the universe, but He sure runs a convincing
grift, so you take what you can get. And when you’re a spiritually and sexually
beggared teen growing up in an environment where “denial” isn’t the last word
in a dead pop star’s biggest hit, you take and take, particularly from
strangers, often in the lamest, most sterile places. Welcome to the North Carolina Performing Arts Center. Situated next to
Founder’s Hall, a mall in downtown Charlotte, this four-tiered dud of New South
theater design looks like what would happen if Orange Julius joined forces with
oral Roberts. Opera boxes trimmed in rust and teal carpet hover above genial
white-haired ushers who sport crisp green blazers and look thrilled that they’re
not ringing up Happy Meals at McDonalds’s. If anyone in pop music could transform this would-be evangelical snack bar into an intimate refuge for blunt desire, it’s Tori Amos. And the sold-out
auditorium, full of fresh-faced, well-mannered white girls - boyfriends in tow
- is flush with expectancy. The audience knows that the 31-year-old
pianist-singer isn’t the least bit bashful about bashing the genteel,
guilt-driven culture that still prevails in middle-class mall America.
And remarkably, her parents still like her. In fact, they’re in town for the
show and easily recognizable about ten rows back in the orchestra section.
While Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused” fades into a spaghetti-western,
dance-beat fanfare and Amos takes the stage, the only sixty-something clerical
couple in the house beams proudly. But about 20 minutes later, those same
smiles are through gritted teeth. Introducing “Icicle,” a shorthand concerto
from Under the Pink about a girl who masturbates in her bedroom while the
family sings Easter prayers downstairs, Amos goes off. “I had two families growing up,” she
begins, referring to her father’s (both parents were Disciples of Christ
ministers from Virginia) and her mother’s (part Cherokee from North Carolina). “I always thought of them as the ‘bad’ and ‘good’ sides
people. It’s like the concept of the mango-dry and juicy, you know. “Some people get baptized with sprinkles, well,
I had my head down in the water for 25 years. I learned some really tuneless
hymns to sing in the shower” - she drones a dirge of obedience - “and then I started listening to Robert Plant and Jimmy
Page and you know what?” She breathily exhales Zep’s “Rock and Roll.” “I realized Jesus wasn’t downstairs. But I’d like to
thank my dry side, because without it I’d have nothing to write about.” This wasn’t Sinead O’Connor’s blindly raging rejection of her abusive
upbringing or even Madonna’s sweetly awkward meeting with her dad amid the
spectacle of Truth or Dare. Instead, here was a woman, alone onstage, virtually
face to face with her entire past, making her case with no hemming or hawing,
no reassuring glances or knowing winks. Simply, she was saying, Your way of
life was a bad joke, and now, I’m delivering the punch lines. It wasn’t some
dramatic fuck you. Just a reasonable statement of sexual purpose anybody could
understand. And the hometown girls convulsed with cheers.
Later, after her hour-and-fifty minute performance ended with a standing ovation, Amos flops into an armchair and anxiously awaits her room-service
pick-me-up - a Coke float (soda and vanilla ice cream). In a stretchy striped
dress, hiking boots, and that hair, she’s uniquely pretty by anyone’s
standards. But when she starts talking - funny, cynical, earnestly grasping -
she’s something more, the cool big sister you saw on TV or in the movies, but
never at home.
Tori: They’re on their way to
Florida. They just retired and they’re going down to live there. SPIN: That was pretty harsh what
you said about the “good” and the “bad” sides of your family, what with both
sides sitting right there in front of you. Tori: Yeah, but I don’t believe
in censorship for my shows. If anyone chooses to come and it makes them
uncomfortable, then they shouldn’t come. I can’t change it for them. SPIN: Still, it must be weird for
them to sit there and be called Mr. Dry and Ms. Juicy. Tori: I think my mother loved it.
SPIN: She doesn’t get ruffled
easily?
Tori: She gets ruffled at the
grocery store when somebody is overcharging her for her tomatoes. But the
apocalypse could be coming and she’d want to know what syrup you’d like on your
biscuits. And my dad - there is a side to him that secretly wants to be James
Dean. Of course, he is incredibly conservative, but at the same time - I think
he always wanted a tattooed Eve with a serpent on his arm. There’s a hidden
personality there, so I think he can handle it. As a writer, with the material
I do, I can’t worry about it. I’m not going to be all careful because my
parents are a little uncomfortable. For my whole life I heard their point of
view, day in and day out. Masturbating was the M-word, m-m-m. it was “doing
that thing with your hand.” Good girls don’t. SPIN: What about the “good” side
of your family? Tori: My mother’s father, the
storyteller, who was part Indian, had the biggest influence on me. He had the
stories and he died when I was nine. My mother’s side didn’t have, shall we
say, “communication” with my father’s side. Until his later years, my father
was very rigid, very dominating. But over the years, he’s had a few brushes
with death, quite a few strokes; he fell off the steeple of the church once
while he was tinkering. I mean, my father’s almost died like six times, so it’s
lightened him up a bit. But when I was a kid, it was will of iron, no sense of
humor, no Richard Pryor videos. SPIN: Your parents were hard-core
Pentecostal ministers. Were you exposed to their services? Tori: I remember going one time
and seeing them speak in tongues. I don’t really remember my grandmother
speaking in tongues, but every time I saw her she was always praying,
devotions, always. That was her life. She was a very smart woman. She graduated
from the University of Virginia in the ‘20s. She could interpret Byron and
Shelley like nobody’s business. That’s why she was so dangerous. She’s the type
of person that I worry would have burned the witches. I think she would have
been able to justify just about anything, in her mind, for Jesus. You know,
there’s so much sexual guilt in Christianity it’s unbelievable. SPIN: Yeah, the ultimate American
goddess figure is a virgin, for chrissakes. Tori: Maybe she just needs to
swallow, right?
SPIN: Do you ever go over the top
craving attention from the audience? Tori: (long pause) A good
storyteller has a conversation with the listener. I’m very direct when I play.
A lot of people don’t like emotional directness. They say, “Why don’t you just
turn away and sing it and we’ll digest it in our own way.” But you came to my
show to trust me. When I sat down on the porch and listened to my grandfather,
I wasn’t giving him a fax first on how he should tell the story. SPIN: You’re good at insinuating
yourself and then making the listener fidget. Like that line in “Silent All These
Years” - “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?” I can’t imagine too many guys sitting still for that. Tori: You know, whatever hang-ups
somebody has with what I’m talking about—say I’m in a Danielle Steele mood or I’m
being aggressive and catty, that might remind you of something a woman’s done
to you that’s really pissing you off, so you’re mad at me. That’s fine. There
has to be that moment where the audience says, “Fuck you, you cunt,” or I’ve
done something wrong. That’s what telling the story’s all about.
At two and a half years, Ellen Amos (she renamed herself Tori when she left
home at 21) started playing the upright piano in the living room and jaws
dropped. At four, she was doing Mozart and by six the family had moved to Maryland
and enrolled her in the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University, one of
the country’s most prestigious music programs. By age 11, she was rebelling by
composing. The Peabody exam board was not receptive, and Amos left. “The Peabody was at the concert the other night
in Baltimore,” she says with a grin. “The
dean comes up to me and goes, ‘I’m so sorry.’ But he also says that I wouldn’t have
the sense of experimentation that I have now if I hadn’t left. “When I was 11, I was like, “You’re wrong.” And
I still fight for musical decisions like nobody you’ve every seen fight. And
musically, you can be very broken in certain conservatories and schools and not
know your own mind, not develop your own opinions, and, you can never be a
force if you don’t do that. You can be technically proficient but so what? You
want to go with me tomorrow, we’ll walk down the halls of a conservatory and
you’ll see loads of the technically proficient - and they’re all playing the
same damn thing. They’ve got that Opus XII up and they’ve got it down, but who’s
writing Opus XII, know what I mean? For Amos, the conservatory was just another religious dead zone, where
complex figures were treated as one-dimensional sacred texts, and the students
were reduced to genuflecting geeks. “The people who play so called classical music
are sterile. The people who wrote it were imbued with life. They were the
revolutionaries, and now their music gets played at stinky-cheese parties with
expensive wine. It’s ridiculous. Debussy is played by people who’ve cut off their
own dicks. Debussy had syphilis - he was very aware he had a dick.” To keep his daughter from developing fallen-prodigy syndrome. Amos’s dad
took her to the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C. and got her gigs playing
in piano lounges and gay bars. Amos toiled on the “Feelings” circuit for years,
building her play-me-a-song-Ms.-Piano-Women nerve. At 21, she bailed for Los Angeles, but it was wildly unsatisfying rebellion.
Her first band Y Kant Tori Read, was Streets of Fire without the nifty
soundstage and silly villains, and, after a 1988 album on Atlantic (featuring Guns
N’ Roses drummer Matt Sorum) stiffed, she tottered away in her plastic
thigh-high boots. Having bombed at both extremes as classical darling and Nerf-metal tart - she
continued to play piano bars enduring the usual routine of cheap sentiment for
sad suits. Then her luck turned from bad to brutal - she was raped by an acquaintance.
Eventually, after therapy and almost out of desperation, she began writing the
songs that would make up Little Earthquakes. Atlantic exec Doug Morris heard
Amos’s demo and convinced her to move to London (where she still maintains a
home) to restart her career in 1990. Club performances won her a devoted
following, but more importantly, such songs as “Crucify” and “Me and a Gun,” an
a cappella account of the assault, allowed her to finally purge long-suppressed
resentments she felt as a result of her family’s unyielding religious
convictions. SPIN: Did you feel sexually
messed-up by the church? Tori: It’s all about draining you
of your passion. That’s what religion is about - cutting off the physical from
the spiritual. They’re disconnected, love is over here, lust is over there. For
someone to say, “Oh, you can’t think those thoughts because they’re bad,” that’s
just fascist. There’s so much I cut off and numbed over the years because I
wanted to be respected by my father because he was part of the patriarchy. If
you ask most women what’s important to them, they’ll say respect more than
anything, more than love. SPIN: Did your father ever
respect you as a woman with both a physical and a spiritual side? Tori: Look, it’s about Magdalene
and the Mother Mary—the whore and the virgin. It’s either one or the other. It’s
not about a balance and a merging of the two. Of course, nobody wants to talk
about the fact that Mother Mary had kids after Jesus. She did stuff later.
Nobody wants to get into the fact that Mary was makin’ bacon too. SPIN: Yeah, somebody knocked up
Magdalene and she became the Whore. Tori: Right, of course, I think
Mary Magdalene was simply what we call a single parent. Oh, it’s all so damn
silly. What, like we’re supposed to believe Jesus didn’t have sex? Come on. And
his teachings are supposed to be less valid because his dinky had a sleeping
bag somewhere. It’s ridiculous. SPIN: It’s using fear to control
people.
SPIN: What if there could just be
a discussion instead of this atmosphere of guilt-tripping and interrogation? Tori: I can’t have discussions
about it anymore, I just can’t. When someone asks me if I’ve found Jesus, I
say, “Yeah, I saw him at a Nirvana concert a couple of years ago.” It’s like,
Jesus has got things to do, he’s got a ten o’clock. He’s not going to fix
things for me, I have to fix things for myself, so I try and have a sense of
humor about it and nobody finds my humor very amusing. We’ve just got to
lighten up on the savior bit, folks. You know, get off the cross, we need the
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