Tori Amos Feature

Published in Albuquerque NuCity, 1994

Tori Amos' performance Thursday night at Pope Joy Theatre

will not just be another anonymous stop on her extensive one

woman/one piano tour of the U.S. It will be a homecoming, spiritual

reunion, rendezvous with an old friend, cause celebre and second

coming (though Amos, hopefully, has enjoyed a few more "Little

Earthquakes" than that). The date will mark Amos' first return to

Northern New Mexico since last year when the region inspired her to

create her best work yet.

When Amos and her co-producer/confidant Eric Rosse got off

the plane in Albuquerque in December 1992, they were ready for an

eight month sabbatical. After all, Amos deserved a little rest. She'd

just been through more than a year of hell. She'd recorded her first

LP, Little Earthquakes, then toured in its support. But most grueling

of all, before the LP was even released, she endured a series of

skirmishes with a handful of jefes at Atlantic Records who were

certain the album was too "quirky" for mass consumption. Amos

fought tooth and nail to save the LP from certain death. She came

within a hair of being dropped from the Atlantic roster. But when all

was said and done, she'd proven that record execs wouldn't know

what the public wanted if it crawled into their lower intestines and

gave them roses. Little Earthquakes went Gold (500,000 copies

sold) in a matter of months and humble pie a la Tori wound up on the

dessert menu at 9229 Sunset Blvd.

But she became restless once ensconced in a little hacienda

outside Santa Fe dubbed "The Fishhouse." Ideas were coming to her.

The same air that had inspired D.H. Lawrence, Georgia O'Keefe and

countless other artists known and unknown was now conspiring with

Amos' muses.

The vacation was over before it had started. Amos began

writing down the slew of songs popping up in her brain. As soon as

they were finished, she and Rosse immediately laid down the two

primary tracks: voice and piano, then wrote the arrangements for

strings and other instrumentation. All Amos and Rosse have to show

for their hiatus is a Gold Record, Under the Pink.

Under the Pink is a triomphe d'esprit. Like the mountain ranges

of this state rising from the desert, Amos' new LP ascends

majestically out of the desolation of a record industry hellbent on

milking discordant cynicism for every last drop of fuzztone. Amos

has again taken the abject pain of self-exploration that fueled Little

Earthquakes and transmutated it into something accessible and

exquisite.

Once more, Amos shoots out the gate with Christian

iconography as symbolism for her inner struggles. "God" picks up

where "Crucify" left off. "Icicles" is her ultimate statement on the

subject.

Despite the similarities to the first LP, Amos comes off

sounding smarter and more confident this time. What's even more

impressive is that in addition to ripping open her soul, she's

managed time for fun. "Cornflake Girl," hands down, has the coolest

piano riff since Elton John's "Honky Cat." It's even sweeter after

being layered with a spaghetti western-like whistle Amos borrowed

from a Macintosh computer. It has an eerie "ride in the desert at a

purple sunset" feel that raises goosebumps.

Though this reporter spent more than a week copiously

scribbling notes about every word and every musical note ever

written by or about Tori Amos, he was totally unprepared for the

sheer force with which he would be called to reckon.

I'd heard the stories about how she could talk for hours about

giants, talking frogs and vampires and how she'd confessed to having

frequent conversations with fairies and long-dead historical figures.

I know New Music Express called her a "24-Karat Fruit Loop." Still,

I'll never be sure where Amos took me.

When I hook-up with Amos, she's having breakfast in a New

Orleans hotel room.

I ask her if she's had her coffee, and she responds in a rather

superior tone.

"I don't drink coffee."

I'm taken aback. The hair raises on the back of my neck and I

sense impending doom. I wonder if I've met the vampire.

"But I do have blueberries," she confides, her tone softening.

I breath a bit easier and ask how she has cultivated such a

devoted following.

"I'm willing to expose stuff that they want to expose also," she

responds, "I think my songs unveil a few layers in myself that all

people have. I'm showing a place that I hide from myself. I am like a

mirror for those people who are hiding that part of themselves, too."

But before I can pose another question, Amos is off to the

races. I am no longer an interviewer. I'm a gynecologist of the psyche

watching a woman with an aversion for exclamation marks perform

a cervical self-exam of the soul. She's inserting that cold metal

cylindrical device and cranking it open for me to peer in. I'm not sure

what I see.

She takes on an astute tone, not unlike that of a psychiatrist

picking apart a situation and exposing the motivations for a patient.

"A conversation is never about what you think it's about," she

says as though she's just been possessed by Dr. Freud himself.

"Let's say I'm having dinner with you. If two people are out on a

date, a lot of the time they're protecting themselves. There are few

people who can sit across a table from you and really have a

conversation. Most people bring their whole militia with them.

They've got body guards. Real conversation doesn't happen because

people are too busy protecting themselves."

I feel like I've been hit by a bus. I'm ready to call out my

National Guard.

Amos admits she has her guards. (Amos has a literal body

guard, too. He's this big scary blonde guy who looks like an ex-

Marine. When Amos greets people backstage, he watches over her

like a hawk, giving everybody within twenty feet the Dirty Harry

eye.) But her explanations aren't the most conventional. She reveals

a penchant for internal dichotomy into which she will soon delve

even further.

"I've got this internal war going on. There is so much

judgement between my 'good girl' and 'bad girl' sides that it's very

hard to hold any semblance of conversation without one of these

attacking the other."

I want to tell her that I think her guard is down. I want to ask

about her old glam rock band, Y Kant Tori Read, that she formed with

Guns and Roses Drummer Matt Soren. I want to hear how she and

Soren used to have contests to see who could get their hair to poof-

up highest. I want to hear the juicy irony of how that band's one and

only LP was a total disaster, but commands a hefty sum of bucks

among collectors now that Amos and Soren are household names. I

want to tell her I think she's still a "rock chick" because she still

wears spandex, grabs her crotch onstage and talks to her audience

about doing it with Christ. I can't. I want to keep this runaway train

on track.

I thought about the bunch of religious fanatics who had sent

Amos death threats over "God" and "Crucify" because they were too

dense to understand that the references were not literal.

So I ask the girl born Myra Ellen Amos on August 22, 1963 in

Newton, North Carolina how having a father, grandfather and

grandmother who were all Methodist ministers has effected her life.

"I know theology very well. I understand what this culture is

based on. The only way you can go into the darkness is to understand

the mythology behind it. This way you can understand how patterns

are formed and why people are stabbing themselves in their own

hearts and not taking responsibility for it. They're running around

like little children going: 'Look what they did to me. Look what they

did to me.' People in this society act like they have no power over

what happens to them. But you call forth what comes to you."

I keep seeing the image of the young girl from "Icicles"

masturbating upstairs while pappa is downstairs leading the prayer

group. She says " I think the good book is missing some pages" and

I want to hear about its autobiographical context, but Amos

takes off in another direction, cranking up the promised diatribe on

her internal dichotomies. She talks about what most people would

call "light and dark" or "good and evil" in terms of "Vampires and

Nightingales." The conventional terms aren't specific enough for her.

She speaks of internal balance between these two dichotomies as

the most important thing in her life.

"If you cannot have your Vampire (the bloodsucker) and your

Nightingale (as in Florence- the nurturer) switching veins with each

other, you're not in balance. You're missing half of yourself. This is

what being your own savior is about. Being whole."

I'm feeling crucified, bloodless and way out of balance.

I ask her if she has found balance.

"Of course not," she scolds me gently like a first grade teacher

reproaching a slow student, "This is what I've been talking about.

Don't you see? I have that division. I'm in absolute chaos right now. I

don't know if I'll ever achieve balance. I just know that there's going

to be lots of bloodletting on the next record."

A buzzer rings. I'm thrown from my chair. My time's up, says

the publicity guy from Atlantic. "Wrap it up, please."

I ask Amos to succinctly sum up her life. The simplicity of the

answer, vis a vis what I've just heard Amos spew, knocks me for a

loop.

"I'm really, just here, hangin' out, having a milkshake."

But the question unasked is: "Are you having that with the

Vampire or the Nightingale?"

..................

Joseph Mitchell