Although the ladies of the Grand Hotel were eclipsed by late '70s punk, designer pop and the awful boys' pop rock of the mid-'80's, they emerged in 1987 when a slip of a girl with a long face from New York City made female acoustic songwriting Big News again.
I first met Suzanne Vega in 1992 in an impersonal record-company office. MTV flickered on a screen in the background, while she sat almost demure, dressed in loose, beige clothing - very calm, very Buddhist, very yin-and-yang. Her image seemed to be reflected in her music: considered, precise. lyrical, literary, but with a smart pop sensibility. A year later she inadvertently admonished me for coming to conclusions about her supposed serenity. "People don't bother to probe beneath the surface. Usually there's all kinds of things going on."
The second time we met it was a hot August afternoon in 1993. In the lull between touring and the next album, she was taking a break, holed up in a London flat, observing life and waiting for the muse to overtake her. We arranged to meet in Kew Gardens. The trains had been delayed and I was half an hour late; as I rushed up to this impatient sylph-like figure, I was struck by her incongruity amid the lazy, bright, bee-crammed flowerbeds of Kew. Fully made up, dressed in a black designer suit, Filo-fax in hand, she looked very New York, very professional. It reminded me of something she'd said before: "I went about my career like a business."
Sitting in the shade of a secluded summerhouse, Vega tackled this thorny question of "women in rock". In many ways Vega is a good spokeswoman. Articulate and imaginative, she is an intellectual with a keen appreciation of "the street." She came to prominence in 1985 with the hit single Marlene On The Wall and self-titled debut album, her success ushering in a new wave of record-company investment in women singer/songwriters. This was a Good Thing, especially considering the low point women performers reached in the early '80s, when after the collapse of punk, the vacuum was filled with commercialized video-friendly pop/rock acts such as Pat Benatar or Madonna. Vega offered new hope for women who wanted to express themselves through the integrity of a new kind of urban folk.
Growing up in New York City with her mother and Puerto Rican stepfather, Vega saw herself as half Puerto Rican, imbibing the rich, frenetic multicultural vibes of the city, yet creating in the midst of that an oasis of calm for herself. A former dance student, she went on to Columbia University and majored in English. She could have carved a path as a straight writer, but chose instead to channel her talent in songwriting. Vega's musical career began when, as a child, she was picked to sing at Pete Seeger's knee in Carnegie Hall. By sixteen she was playing downtown coffee houses, establishing herself on the early-'80s New York Village folk circuit.
Acknowledging the generational influence, she recalls her grandmother, the late Helen Grant, who played drums in a '30s all-female boogie-woogie band that was described on posters as "the hottest band this side of Hades." "I never knew her," says Vega. "But it's ironic that I picked her way of life without meaning to. I thought I was being original and clever picking this lifestyle for myself - then I found out that she did it fifty years before."
In her determined way the teenage Vega sought out the best venues to play
"Someone told me if I went down to The Other End Cafe in the Village, that was how I'd get my start. From The Other End you eventually work your way up, if you're really good, to Folk City. I got turned down from The Other End; the auditions were horrible. The guy would sit there and eat his dinner while you were playing. You'd sing three songs while he ate pork chops and drank beer. At the end he'd say, No thank you. It hadn't occurred to me to go somewhere else. The plan is, you start there and end up at Folk City. After two years of being rejected, it dawned on me that maybe I should just go over to Folk City. I left a demo tape; they liked one song and gave me a Sunday afternoon."
Vega's thirty-strong following for her first date impressed Fok City, who gave her regular work on a scene that was then small but vibrant. "To us it'd never gone away. The real world wasn't paying any attention, it was into punk and New Wave - but we were all thrilled, writing a lot, influencing each other." After associating with prime movers like Jack Hardy, Vega came to the attention of A&R woman Nancy Jeffries, then at A&M. It took a woman to realize the potential of a female singer/songwriter, flying in the face of fashion and signing Vega to widespread record-label opposition. She effectively launched the next wave of the genre. "I wasn't sure at first; I'd been sent a tape through a friend in the company and thought she was just another folk singer," recalls Jeffries. "Then I went down to see her and realized that there was something different about her, something interesting."
Vega's downbeat, street-level approach won her a deal. "Nancy really took a chance on me," she says. "She felt it was too good to pass up. I owe her a lot. She was great at seeing me through the whole thing. 'Sfunny, when I heard an A&R person was coming to see me, I was expecting a big fat guy with a cigar, and here was this long, skinny woman with a delicate stomach. She was fascinating - a real kinship there."
Despite record-label scepticism ("maybe she'll sell 30,000"), Vega's debut album sold over a million, and her second, Solitude Standing, sold three million, with follow-up albums 1990's Days of Open Hand and 99.9o, in 1992, also charting well. Despite unlikely singles success with Luka in 1987, a subtle song about child abuse, and the dance-floor rap of 1990's Tom's Diner. Vega is more the archetypal album artist. Working in a field where women are encouraged to explore their emotional range, she covers every topic from transsexualism to love in Liverpool. Vega's success showed how female singer/songwriters could reinvent themselves. Although their relative disappearance after punk gave the impression that they went away and came back, they had been there all the time, writing, constructing and commencing on their lives, regardless of music-industry hype.
"I don't like to think that women can't understand larger issues or express them. But if a woman did do a "larger" song, I don't know if it would be preceived in the same way. I've always felt like the character form Notes From The Underground, sitting in a small room, identifying in a Kafka-esque way with people who work in day jobs. I then realized that as a woman I am an anti-hero. There are no women heroes. The only one you really have is Joan of Arc, and she's a martyr, not a hero. I find this frustrating. How can I take my anti-hero stance if I'm already considered to be an anti-hero because I'm a woman? That's not fair. Once women learn how to write in that broad way without losing their individuality, it'd be a good thing for everyone. If you were to write a song called Pride In The Name Of Love, it might not feel real to a woman singing it. Love to a woman means other things like sacrifice or caretaking, n ot necessarily pride."
Thirty years earlier, Peggy Seeger had grappled with the same issue.
"A woman's territory is much smaller than a man's. Women seem satisfied with less, which is probably why we've gotten less. It was traditional for women to be involved with children and family - I see nothing wrong with that. What is more universal than love, than the domestic? As a Marxist, I saw that one of the purposes of [Marx's] philosophy was to decentralize. The concept of a "brotherhood of man" is hightly centralized. I don't think universal is a good idea. Universal is what creates multinationals - pop music that's the same whether you're in Rio de Janeiro or Iceland. If that's universal who wants it?"
Submitted by Paul Murphy
VegaNet@aol.com
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