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The Enchanted Forest Tori Amos inspires an almost religious devotion among her fans, who build
totems in her image and covet her castoffs as relics. How can a goddess show
her love without bleeding herself dry? by Maureen Callahan Photographs by Mark Alesky Pat Kochie has transformed the living room of her tiny house in New York’s
Hamptons into a shrine to Tori Amos. But it’s not decorated with the usual
concert posters, ticket stubs, or fanclub tchotchkes; it’s crammed with dolls.
Some of them are small and childlike, with disproportionately big heads
sprouting thick manes of curly red hair; others are long and lanky, with fairy
wings and haunted expressions. All of the dolls, though, look like idealized
visions of Amos. Kochie calls them her “girls,” and she made each one by hand. Kochie is not the tormented teenager you might expect, but a 46-year-old
mother of two. With her unnaturally black hair and suburban-mom outfit - a
loose blue oxford shirt worn over black leggings - Kochie looks like a former
rock chick who refuses to totally surrender to a life of laundry and car pools.
Referred to as “The Doll Lady” in Tori-land, she makes her living selling her
girls for $1, 800 and up; her collectors range from rabid fans to amatuers like
Gwyneth Paltrow and Demi Moore. Kochie makes the dolls out of clay, artificial
tresses, cloth, and wire, and she is always careful to include a little piece
of herself - blood, mail clippings, hair, saliva. “It started when I
accidentally got my blood in one Tori doll, and then I figured it was meant to
be that way,” she says. “But I’m not a freak!” She made her first girl, “The Muse,” in 1994 and presented it to Amos after
working her way backstage. But it was “Echi,” a replica with bound hands, that
sparked a more intimate exchange. “When I showed it to her, I told her I felt
like the doll,” Kochie says. “And Tori said, ‘I need to talk to you! Amos
promptly took her aside and offered some counsel, suggesting Kochie buy the
book A Woman’s Worth by New Age guru Marianne Williamson. “Tori told me
it was all about possessing the goddess,” Kochie says. She soon bonded with Amos’ parents over the “Raven” doll, another mini-Tori,
and now speaks with them often by phone. One time Amos was visiting when Kochie
called and chatted with her for 20 minutes; incredulous, Kochie and her
Tori-loving husband checked their phone bill to confirm that such a momentous
event had really taken place. “I have lots of letters from Tori’s mom, but I
don’t have any notes or anything from her,” Kochie says. She’s laughing, but
her consternation is evident. “I think there’s a bit of rock-star barrier now.”
Tori Amos is curled up in the back of a Lincoln Town Car. Her driver, a
gruff, tattoed Brit named Dave, has been with her for years. He ferries her
everywhere, and this afternoon he’s taking her to the London Aquarium. Dave
keeps a watchful eye on his charge, although Amos will go largely unrecognized
during her three-day stay in the city (she spends most of her time hours away
in the Cornish countryside, where she’s had a house for several years). Doing
press for her new album, To Venus and Back, she’s dressed down in a faded-denim
jumpskirt over a gray scoop-neck T-shirt, her wavy hair a bit frizzy and back
to its natural brown shade. “I used to chase people down the road when they
would cut in front of me at a light,” Amos says in the long-ago days
when she used to drive herself around Los Angeles. “They
would be in, like, a pickup truck, and I would chase them-I didn’t care if they
had shotguns.” She looks out the tinted window at the slow-moving
rush-hour traffic. “I was 23,” she says. “I didn’t appreciate life then like I do now.” The aquarium is closed by the time she arrives, so Amos decides to sit by
the Thames for a while. She perches on a balustrade and dangles her legs over
the river. She’s known for provacative interviews, and today she does not
disappoint. “What would happen if I fell in?”
she wonders aloud. “I’m so nervous that my skirt
would lift up. Like your mother says, always wear clean underwear in case
you’re in an accident.” She sits for awhile in silence. “People just
don’t know grace,” she says, unprompted. “You
know, they don’t know how to give back. I think music has really been my way of
doing that.” She swings around and faces the aquarium’s promenade,
making furtive eye contact with passersby “But
sometimes people want me to give them what their human value is,” she
continues. “I can’t do that; it’s a bottomless pit.
I could never pay you in fruit, land, money, or blowjobs what your worth as a
human being is. And I’m not going to start opening up my veins and bleeding
until they cry enough - because they may never cry enough!” Tori Amos is the ultimate cult artist, the fervor and devotion of her fan
base far outweighing things like album sales or radio play. She has never had a
bona fide hit single, yet all four of her records have gone platinum, pretty
impressive for challenging, piano-driven music full of twisted religious and
sexual imagery. MTV relegates her to the 120 Minutes ghetto, if it plays her
videos at all, but the channel has devoted two specials to the Amos phenomenon,
as well as a recent episode of Fanatic. A live phenomenon known to play 200
dates in a single year, she’s a guaranteed sellout and recently upgraded to
arenas. There are thousands of fan sites and chat rooms devoted to her on the
Internet, and the singer receives truckloads of letters every month, often
filled with incredibly personal disclosures and pleas for help. “Tori goes to levels of emotional rawness that most people don’t like to go
to, ever,” says Ron Shapiro, executive vice president of Amos’ label, Atlantic.
“She wants to stir things up, but most people are not looking for that heavy a
trip.” “The kids that come to Tori are the outcasts,” says celebrity makeup artist
Kevyn Aucoin, one of Amos’ close friends. “She offers them solace and
understands them on such a deep level.” He pauses. “I know it sounds New Age-y,
but Tori loves to give and to heal. She’s about feelings, and she’s willing to
share her path with people who are open to that.” Not that only Web-crawling
teens and twentysomethings can relate. The Doll Lady claims that Amos’ song
“Silent All These Years” pulled her through a midlife crisis. “The most
important thing I have learned from Tori,” says 36-year-old Melissa Caldwell of
the Tori-zine Really Deep Thoughts, “is that I have a voice. Even if no one
else wants to hear it, I have to listen to it.” Amos has resonance for guys, too, although they’re often teased mercilessly
for it. “If I had a dime for all the Tori Anus’ jokes I’ve put up with over the
years,” says 17-year-old Alex Pearlman of New York City. Aucoin, 37, talks
about Amos so zealously that “people think I’m brainwashed.” For the most part,
there’s no such thing as a casual Tori fan. People either dismiss her music as
pretentious and twee, or they cover their entire body in Tori tattoos. Really.
Amos met one man inked in them from neck to feet. (She gave him a hug and
gently suggested that he stop.) It’s no wonder misfits are drawn to her: Amos’ early life is worthy of a
three-part Behind the Music. Born Myra Ellen Amos to a Methodist preacher in
North Carolina, she was a piano prodigy who enrolled in Baltimore’s prestigious
Peabody Conservatory at the age of five. At 11, Amos was kicked out for
preferring Led Zeppelin to Chopin. At 13, she was playing Gershwin tunes in gay
bars. At 17, she was a homecoming queen who dabbled in blasphemy. At 21, she
was raped at gunpoint by a man who’d come to see her play in L.A. At 24, she
was a washed-up rocker buried in bad reviews for the hair-metal fiasco Y Kant
Tori Read. And at 27, she was living in London, recording the groundbreaking
girl-and-her-piano opus Little Earthquakes. On that record, and her stunning follow-up, Under the Pink (1994), Amos came
off like the kind of deep, troubled, arty gal who furiously scribbles in her
journal as she listens to Kate Bush. Her penchant for best-friend-only
revelations about masturbating in church (“Icicle”), self-loathing (“Crucify”),
and rape (“Me and a Gun”) made listeners feel like privileged confidantes. When
she founded the advocacy group RAINN (the Rape Abuse & Incest National
Network), she showed a feminist can-do streak. But part of Amos’ appeal is the
way she balances the pensive with the wacky. She’s a proponent of fairies,
pagan gods, and loopy New Age philosophies, one who’s currently reading a book
that claims the ancient Sumerians were descended from an alien race. She once
posed for a photo with a baby pig suckling at her breast. “Tori’s always been like that,” says ex-Guns N’ Roses drummer Matt Sorum,
who’s known Amos since her Y Kant Tori Read days. “I saw her after one show
years ago, and she said to me, ‘I knew you were in the audience, I felt
you’-all the Tori-type shit,” he says, laughing affectionately. “Tori was a
star before she was a star, if you know what I mean.” But she is also the rare rock goddess to seriously question the traditional
star/fan relationship, keeping the gulf between her and Tori-land as narrow as
possible, whether it’s responding to a note from a 13-year-old girl with a
six-page letter and a stack of books or spending hours in online Web chats.
Before every show, she reads ten pre-selected pieces of fan mail so she can
feel closer to her audience. In fact, Amos won’t even use the word fan because it “doesn’t feel like you’re part of the party” (it also makes her
think of serial killers). She prefers “the People
That Come to the Shows.” “I relate to a lot of them,” Amos says. “I get letters
from kids who are just so exhausted from trying so hard that they don’t even
know what they’re trying for anymore. They don’t know where to find their
essence - they’re not getting anything from drugs or parties. And they realize
where I go with my music.” Yet over the past few years, as she moved into her mid-30s, Amos has become
far less able, far less willing to leave herself open. “I’ve
really begun to value not spilling the beans on every playing field,”
she says. “I don’t go to parties, and I don’t
socialize much, even with people I know.” She spends most of her time in
her Cornwall farmhouse, working with her husband/engineer, Mark Hawley. She has
learned, she says, to speak in “Chinese whispers”:
“Every word is loaded, so you find ways to avoid subjects altogether.”
This extends to her once-confessional lyrics, which have become abstract to the
point of incomprehensibility. One of her New Age buddies might say she’s
building a bit of a “psychic wall.” “I do love playing for the People That Come to
the Shows,” Amos says earnestly, clasping her hands to her chest, “but it’s very intense, and people are emanating all over
the place. And there are also those who come to wound - I’ve seen people
actually bite each other. So I have learned how to simultaneously protect
myself and be the person onstage who loves to give. It’s a paradox that lives
within me that I’m just beginning to understand.” Simultaneously a fan totem, a bid for the mass mainstream success that has
yet eluded her, and a further retrenchment in her enchanted forest, the
double-CD To Venus and Back is the closest Amos has come to articulating that
paradox. Tori-philes have been clamoring for a live album for years, and one
Venus disc features songs recorded during her 1998 “Plugged” tour, the first
time she was backed with a full band. Amos and her crew sat down with hours of tapes, rating renditions to come up
with a line-up. “It got quite Wimbledon,”
Amos says, laughing. “Someone made the daft
suggestion” - Amos favors British slang and speaks in the slightly
clipped tones of that other Anglophile, Madonna - “to
put some of the live tracks at the end of the new record. It’s like, ‘Why don’t
I just walk up to your painting and paint on it?” The other disc was to be a collection of B-sides and rarities, but it
morphed into an entirely different project once Amos’ friend Marcel Van Limbeek
heard some new songs she had been fiddling with. Amos adores Van Limbeek, a
Dutch physicist, nudist, and conspiracy theorist, and asked him for advice. “The nudist said to me, Sonically, this cannot live in
the world of B-Sides,” Amos says. “It will
be separate thoughts.” So instead she focused on all the fresh tunes
that had “grabbed me by the throat.” Neither as precious as 1996’s Boys for Pele, which was recorded in a church
and ornamented with bells, bagpipes, and harpsichords, nor as experimental as
last year’s From the Choirgirl Hotel, Venus includes a few songs that rival
“Cornflake Girl” in pure catchiness. “Tori is a very savvy businesswoman, and I
think she feels that now is the time to aggressively make choices,” Atlantic’s
Shapiro says. Some of those choices included coheadlining a tour with Alanis
Morissette (“Why not get someone else’s fans to pay attention to her?” Shapiro
asks) and selling the atmospheric “Bliss” as a downloadable commercial single
on the Web - a first for a major label. In another marketing twist, both
“Bliss” and the spare, mournful “1,000 Oceans” single were released at the same
time to alternative radio and adult contemporary radio, respectively. “The goal
is for Tori to cross over,” Shapiro says, “and 1,000 Oceans’ is as accessible
as anything out there.” But aside from writing a radio-friendly track or two, Amos made few artistic
concessions. Venus is as beautiful and weird as anything in her oeuvre, full of
all-over-the-map song structures and elusive melodies that take several listens
before they lodge into your consciousness. And on a lyrical level, it’s as
inscrutable as ever. A line from “Bliss” reads “A hot kachina who wants into
mine/ Take it with your terracide.” Then there’s the love vs. lust debate “Concertina”: “I got my fuzz all
tipped to play/I got a dub on your landscape / Then there’s your policy of
trancing the sauce without the blame.” The eight-minute-plus “Datura” named for
a potentially lethal hallucinogen, is a florid, distorted list of herbs that
Amos grows in her garden. The elegiac “Jaurez,” dedicated to the hundreds of
working women murdered in the Mexican border town of its title, is written from
the point of view of the desert. It may be Britney and Ricky’s world, but Amos
refuses to slum in it. Unlike such thematic records as Little Earthquakes (sexual trauma) and Boys
for Pele (bad breakups), Venus is hard to peg. Amos claims there is an
underlying concept. “It’s a shape. It’s circular,” she
says, launching into a very-Tori explication. “And
it’s not like you take a trip - it’s more, like, in constant orbit. And I like
the idea that there’s this camera that orbits around the heart and sees things
she can’t see - yet. And then they form themselves into songs and they can work
as a reflector, and then she can hear it through the image but not necessarily
as the camera sees it.” “She” being? The woman who would once begin interviews by launching into the emotional
repurcussions of her 1997 miscarraige now prefers to talk about her life mainly
in the context of the Work. “I think my marriage
has changed me a lot,” she says. “I don’t
really throw myself into situations like I used to. I would just go and observe
as I was writing this record, and observing makes you write different things.” Amos and Hawley were married last year in a traditional Church of England
ceremony. It was perhaps the ultimate act of insurrection for a woman who said
she would never get married because she “didn’t
want the church in my bedroom.” The choice, Amos says “was instinctive. Going to a justice of the peace doesn’t
do anything for me. It wasn’t about marrying into belief. It felt very legal,
and it was how people got married hundreds of years ago.” Amos narrows her
eyes, her voice gets flinty. “You know, I didn’t
get married trying to defend anybody’s history. And I don’t feel like it’s fair
that people analyze why I made my choices.” It would be a valid point, were it not for Amos’ own tendency - no matter how
well-intentioned - to lean toward the pedantic. She is very sweet about it, but
her conversation can sometimes make you feel like you’re taking an impromptu
course in spirituality. “How do you get your own source?”
she asks, rhetorically. “There’s no ticket you can
buy. There are books you can read, but the truth is, only you have an access-all-areas
pass to your realm.” The more impenetrable her lyrics become, the more distance she puts between
herself and her cult, the more obsessed fans become with cracking her code.
Amos has transformed from humble empathizer to diviner of truth, one who feels
that the People That Come to the Shows need her to enlighten them, that she can
take them someplace better if they follow her music’s metaphorical map. And
many of them now relate to her the way housewives relate to Oprah: Disciples
studying at the feet of a secular leader who has read all the right books and
found a higher wisdom. Amos would rather liken it to being a “pied piper.” “I enjoy being inspiring,” she says. “There is no drug that’s like that - when somebody comes
up to you and opens their heart up. There is no drug.” Pat Kochie is explaining her “birth ritual.” First she bakes the doll heads
in her oven as she plays the Amos song “Mother.” Then, when they’re hard, she
puts on “whatever feels appropriate.” Visiting Kochie today is her friend Shana
Young, a 20-year-old singer/songwriter she befriended after hearing her do some
Tori covers in a local bar. A shy, soft-spoken woman who looks like Claire
Danes, Young says she’s surprised Kochie took to her, given “how particular
Tori fans can be about people covering her songs.” As Kochie plays Young’s demo
tape of original music, the singer curls up into a ball, hiding her head in her
hands as her voice blares from the speakers: “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” “Tori’s been a real inspiration,” Young whispers. “Before her, I wasn’t so
comfortable with my anger.” Kochie plans to give the demo to Amos at her next show. Even now, weeks before
the concert, Kochie is wracked with anxiety about getting an access-all-areas
pass. She says she was given the all-clear to visit after a recent Amos show,
then drove for hours only to endure many security-guard rebuffs before working
her way backstage. “It wrecked it for me to go through that,” Kochie says. “You
really would expect to get a little respect, but I guess it’s too much to hope
for.” Other fans are much more philosophical, seeing their role in Amos’ dilemma.
They realize there is only so much of her to go around. Really Deep Thoughts’
Caldwell thinks that “Tori, if allowed, would spend more time than she can
afford talking to her fans. She has a staff that she trusts to draw the line.
She may not always agree with their decisions, but she understands that someone
else needs to make that call.” “I don’t have any illusion about what my
responsibility is,” Amos says. “I understand
that when you write emotional work, it can bring things up, and I genuinely
have time for people when they are opening that heart-space.” But what
is her responsibility really? Has she taken on more of a burden that anyone
could manage? Are her fans too dependent Or is this still one of the best
relationships rock’s got going? Tori Amos strides through the lobby of her swank Notting Hill hotel, ready
for an interview-inspired trip to London’s Serpentine Gallery. As driver Dave
waits outside in the car, her twenty-something personal assistant hovers over
her, breaking down her morning itinerary like a protective mom. When Dave drops
her off at the entrance to London’s Hyde Park (no cars allowed), he cautions
her to be careful. Amos leads the way through an array of trails leading to the Serpentine, a
squat, unassuming brick building tucked away in the middle of the green. Amos
is amazed she can even find it, though she used to spend entire days in Hyde
Park when she lived in London in the early ‘90s. She laughingly admits she is
disoriented and worries she’ll never remember where Dave is parked. She just
doesn’t walk around alone much anymore. Inside the gallery, she moves impatiently from one postmodern piece to the
next, stopping only to study a canvas filled with rows of gray ovals. “I love gray,” she says, sighing. “I really feel like I live my life in shades of gray.” True, she wants to be regarded as more than a cult artist but has reservations
about making her music more commercial. She wants to stay approachable but has
grown fiercely protective of her privacy. And she realizes she needs her fans
as much as they need her. “The side of me that
wants to be liked, my husband knows her, my friends know her, but you can’t
expect...” Her voice trails off. “You know, it literally makes me weep when I see
artists looking for love from the public,” she says. “You just can’t expect it. Everybody’s looking for love -
even when they’re acting like they don’t need it.” October 15: Spin.com shows its video interview with Tori Amos. |
