Rosanne Cash - Until the Real You Shows Up

 

 

When I was a kid, my dad brought me to New York City many, many times. He loved the city and so did I. We always stayed at The Plaza and we took carriage rides in the park. We had dinners at Trader Vic's and ice cream at Rumpelmayer’s. We went to the last remaining Automat in the city. We saw Lauren Bacall on Broadway. I spent many happy afternoons shopping at Bonwit Teller. [audience chuckle] It was a city of magic and wonder.

 

When I was 15 years old, he took me to Greenwich Village to a hippie shop that made custom leather and suede jackets, and he had me fitted for a green suede jacket. And I stood in front of that full-length mirror in this shop and I looked out at Bleecker Street and I looked back at myself in the mirror and I thought, "That's the real me. I belong here. This is my city." And it seemed a long way from where I was growing up in Southern California, but I kept it right here at the edge of my dreams. And the jacket still fits. [cheers and applause] Kind of almost. [laughter]

 

Twenty years later, I was living in Nashville and I had just come off a really big record called King's Record Shop, and it had four number one singles on one album. It was the first time a woman had ever done that. And it was a very sexist industry in Nashville at that time. So, it was a big deal. I garnered a lot of respect and even leverage with my record company. So, I asked them if I might produce the next record myself. And they were sufficiently impressed with me that they said “Yes.” They thought that I would repeat the prior formula for the successful record, but I decided to go another way. I wanted to make something that was really the real me, really authentic. So, I made this dark, spare, lyrically troubling acoustic-based record that I called Interiors, unrelated to the Woody Allen film, but it was an apt title for this dark, reflective record. So, I finished it and I was so proud of it. I thought, "This is the most authentic thing I've ever done. This is the real me."

 

I was in the studio waiting to play it for the head of the record company for the very first time. I was so proud. He came in and he sat down at the recording console and we played the album start to finish. He didn't say a word in between songs. And I thought, "He's speechless with [audience chuckle] the sheer beauty of this record. He is stunned into silence.” As the last note faded away, he turned to me and he said, "We can't do anything with this. What were you thinking? Radio's not going to play this." And I was taken aback momentarily. It's the little minds who don't get the masterpieces right at the beginning. He'll come around. So, when he left the studio, I turned to the engineer and I said, "He's wrong. I'm going to prove him wrong." Well, he was right. [audience chuckle] Radio wouldn't play it. The marketing department at the record label dropped it after a few weeks. They wanted nothing to do with it.

 

I was devastated. It turns out they didn't want the real me. They wanted the successful me. I was somewhat heartened by the reviews. There was a review in Rolling Stone that said it was a deeply troubling record, [chuckle] but they gave me four stars. The Village Voice said it was a divorce record. It turns out he was also right. And the next year I got divorced. [audience laughter] It was then that I started to think about New York, was still right here. And it wasn't long before I packed the green jacket and moved to the city. That was 1991.

 

So, far from being the city of magic and wonder of my youth, Bonwit Teller was closed. Automat was gone. Everything fell apart in my life in the most spectacular way. An unscrupulous sub-lesser scammed me out of a year's rent. I was mugged in the Jack ‘n Jill deli on Carmine Street. A homeless guy threw a rock at the back of my head and hit me square in the back of the head. But the worst part was that my kids weren't doing well. My 3-year-old daughter in particular was very anxious. She was so anxious that I had to go to nursery school with her every day and sit there all day long so that she would feel comfortable enough to stay. It was mind-numbing. [scoffs]

 

They had a musician come in once a week to nursery school to play songs for the kids. Songs like "Peanut, Peanut Butter, Jelly" [giggles] [audience laughter]. And I would sit there glazed over. And one day, he came in and he couldn't get his guitar tuned. And I felt my old self kind of rising up in me, the musician self who knew something about something that was going on. And I said, "It's your D string. If you'll just turn your D string, you'll get--" And he looked up at me as if to say, "Who the hell are you? You're just some mom who goes to nursery school." [audience chuckle] The truth is, [in a sobbing voice] I was thinking the same exact thing.

 

Not long after that, I got in the subway. I got out in midtown, walked up the stairs to the sidewalk into a torrential downpour, which I had not expected. So, I reached in my handbag to get my wallet and get some money so I could go into a deli and buy a cheap umbrella. I realized I had left my wallet at home. And I realized at that same moment that I had also just used my last subway token. So, I was standing there, drenched, penniless, humiliated, looking at a really long wet walk home, when at that moment my cell phone rang. So, I hoisted my early 90s 5-pound cell phone [audience chuckle] out of my handbag and said very miserably, "Hello?" And this cheerful voice on the other end said, "Rosanne, hello, it's Al Gore." [audience laughter] "Mr. Vice President, hello, how are you? Nice to hear from you." He said, "I know it's last minute, but I'm in the city. I'm at the Regency. I just wondered if you had time for lunch. I wanted to ask you if you'd perform for my environmental group as we head off to South America. It was so great at the conference you did last time. Do you have time to come over and talk about it, do a few songs at that conference?" And I thought quickly. “Could I walk to the Regency, get there before mid-afternoon without looking as if I had drowned?” [audience chuckle] I could not. I briefly considered asking the Vice President to meet me on the street and pay for my taxi. [audience laughter] I thought it might be inappropriate. So, I made up an excuse to avoid having lunch with the Vice President of the United States to talk about saving the planet. [audience laughter]

 

And after I hung up, it was then that it hit me. This was my New York. This was the New York who would kick your ass until the real you showed up because it really wanted the real you and it would keep at you until it got it. This was the New York who would give you humiliation in one hand and a tremendous gift in the other. And you had to take them both. You couldn't have one without the other. This was the New York I wanted and didn't even know. This was the New York where you would stand penniless, drenched, with the Vice President of the United States [audience laughter] on the line.

 

So, some weeks later, I got in a taxi and the taxi driver, as he pulled away from the curb, without even looking at me, very matter-of-factly, he said, "Rosanne Cash. I reviewed Interiors for Rolling Stone." [laughter and applause] And there it was again. [laughs] This was my New York. My taxi driver who wrote these words that I had clung to, that meant so much to me about a project that meant so much to me. And here we were in our New York together. And then he glanced at me in the rearview mirror and he shook his head and he said, "It should have been the lead review." [audience laughter] Thank you.