On the 20th of December 1987 Suzanne Vega waved farewell to a packed house at the Brighton Centre. This was the moment the curtain finally fell on the *Solitude Standing* World Tour and represented the climax to what had been the most successful year in her career to date.

Beyond any shadow of doubt 1987 was the year Suzanne found a place for herself on the world's musical map. Her tour, which had begun the previous April, at the Veteran's Memorial Theatre in Providence, Rhode Island was certainly the most intensive and the most exhausting Suzanne and her band had ever attempted. Save perhaps for the odd week's rest in-between continents Suzanne could be found on the road for eight consecutive months touring as far afield as the United States, Japan, Australia and ultimately Europe.

The hard work paid off, of course, and Suzanne was handsomely rewarded. *Solitude Standing*, her second album release for A&M, has at the last count notched up some 2 1/2 million world-wide sales. In the UK and across Europe she comfortably consolidated the success she had earned for herself in the previous twelve months; the LPentering the UK charts as high as number two. Most significantly, however, Suzanne enjoyed her first taste of commercial success in her native America. The album peaked at number 11 in the Billboard chart, whereas *Luka* became a surprise summer hit, reaching number three in August when it was prevented from reaching the top spot only by Los Lobos (*La Bamba*) and Madonna (*Who's That Girl?*).

In the light of all this, one could easily be fooled into thinking that Suzanne's rise to stardom was a meteoric one. However, this is not the case. As Terry Wogan succinctly put it when he talked to Suzanne on his TV chat show back in May 1987, "So, you're not an overnight success.....it's taken you ten years to become one of those!"

To begin at the beginning: Suzanne Nadine Vega was born on the 11th July 1959 in Santa Monica, a few miles north of Los Angeles on the Pacific coast. At the age of two, Suzanne moved with her family to New York City and apart from a brief return to California at the age of eleven, New York has been her home ever since.

Originally settling on New York's East 109th Street before moving on to West 105th on the outskirts of black and Spanish Harlem, Suzanne grew up as the eldest of four children. Her German/Swedish mother works as a computer systems analyst, and her Puerto Rican emigre step-father, Ed Vega, variously tried his hand at being a teacher and a social worker before finding his true vocation as a novelist and short-story writer. Hence while both of Suzanne's parents went out to work she had the job of looking after her two younger brothers and sister. Growing up in a tough and often violent neighbourhood, Suzanne felt protective towards the other members of her family and was no stranger to fist fights. A number of later songs can be seen to mirror the harsh city way of life. As well as her immediate environment a major turning-point in her life was the surprise discovery at the age of nine that Ed Vega was not her real father. Her natural father had left home when she was just six months old.

Amid the turmoil and chaos of city life, the household was always filled with music. Both of Suzanne's parents play the guitar, and her mother also plays the piano. One of Suzanne's earliest childhood memories is of her father and her uncles sitting round the house playing and singing Leadbelly and assorted Blues songs. In addition to these frequent live performances Suzanne was allowed access to her parents' record collection which in part was devoted to Jazz artists like Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto, but in the main revealed tastes which leaned heavily towards Folk, with names like Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston, Pete Seeger and later sixties artists like Simon & Garfunkel and inevitably Bob Dylan.

At the age of eleven she began teaching herself to play guitar and by the time she was fourteen she was writing her first songs. These earliest songs clearly illustrated Suzanne's grounding in the US Folk tradition. As Suzanne herself later disclosed, "Discovering Folk music was another way of finding a place that wasn't violent or noisy or threatening as so much of New York living can be. I was attracted to Folk music for its simplicity, its timeliness and a means of putting things together." By the age of sixteen, Suzanne had written forty-five minutes worth of material, and her first ever public performance was given in a church basement on 2nd January 1976.

Alongside her songwriting and growing interest in music a parallel development at this time was Suzanne's love of dancing as an alternative means of expression. She began studying to be a dancer as early as nine years old, enrolling at the age of fourteen at Manhattan's High School of Performing Arts (later to be immortalised as the setting for the *Fame* movie and TV series). However, after a number of years of ballet classes it began to dawn on Suzanne that she wasn't really likely to excel as a dancer.

The next step was Barnard College where Suzanne studied and graduated with a degree in English Literature. She found in her English studies that she had far more freedom than she ever enjoyed in her dance classes where she was constantly having to do as the choreographer instructed.

While her college friends were following the latest trends, going to concerts by the likes of Patti Smith and the New York Dolls, and dressing up to see the *Rocky Horror Show*, Suzanne remained obstinately unfashionable, practising her guitar playing in her room and listening to records by favourite artists Leonard Cohen, Laura Nyro and Paul Simon.

Suzanne had initially developed an interest in theatre whilst studying at Barnard College. It was while helping out as a wardrobe mistress for a series of medieval pageant plays that she found herself in Glastonbury towards the end of 1979. This first visit to England allowed Suzanne to experience the UK punk explosion at first hand. This was a far cry from the experience back home where punk had been reduced to little more than a fashion parade. In the UK the punk scene was very real; a genuine spontaneous outburst by frustrated young people. Suzanne found she could relate to the anger expressed and the energy given off by their music.

At almost the same time Suzanne attended her first ever rock concert, a show by Lou Reed. She was fascinated to hear Lou singing songs that mirrored life on the New York streets; songs that she could relate to and identify with. Moreover the actual structure of Reed's songs seemed to disobey all the rules which Suzanne had previously believed it was important to adhere to. "For the first time it occurred to me that you could write a song using only one chord and say anything you wanted to over it. Before that I always felt that songs had to make sense, having some kind of narrative, be somehow traditional in structure." The effect upon Suzanne was dramatic. The next batch of songs were very different from anything she had written previously, and included *Cracking* and *Neighbourhood Girls*.

Having graduated from Barnard, Suzanne next ventured into New York's Greenwich Vilage in search of a place to play and sing and an audience who would receive her songs sympathetically. For four years Suzanne went round the Village clubs-the coffee house circuit-looking for places to audition. She had read in Anthony Scaduto's 1971 biography about the legendary Folk City and how Dylan had made a name for himself there. Suzanne was initially so in awe of the place that she shied away from Folk City, prefering instead to play lesser-known venues like The Bitter End and Speakeasy. Eventually Suzanne found the courage to approach Folk City. She made a tape of herself performing several songs and left this with the management. They invited Suzanne to play and in 1980 Suzanne gave her first paid performance at Folk City.

At this point, Suzanne was not making enough money from her club appearances to be able to concentrate on her singing and songwriting full time. Hence, for a while, she continued to play the clubs and coffee houses by night, whilst taking a variety of jobs by day in order to support herself. Initially she worked as a credit clerk in the advertising department of a publishing company, later moving on to become a receptionist for a local typesetting firm.

After a couple of years playing the Greenwich Village circuit, Suzanne found she was making quite a name for herself. Towards the end of 1981 a group of musicians, including Suzanne, got together under the editorial auspice of Jack Hardy to form *The Co-Op*, later to be known as *Fast Folk Musical Magazine*. Their idea was to put out a magazine, together with accompanying record once a month to showcase each of the artists who took part. The inaugural issue appeared in February 1982 and marked Suzanne's debut appearance on vinyl with the song *Cracking*. Suzanne continued recording for *Fast Folk* at regular intervals until late 1984 when she finally signed to A&M.

The story of Suzanne's deal with A&M begins in 1983. In February of that year Suzanne was introduced by a mutual friend to Ron Fierstein-a lawyer who was about to leave the firm at which he was practicing in order to form AGF Entertainment and to manage his brother Harvey Fierstein (author of *Torch Song Trilogy*, the musical *La cage Aux Folles* and other works). Ron also wanted to find a musical artist to develop with himself as manager and Steve Addabo as producer (Ron and Steve had gone through university together in the sixties). At Suzanne's invitation, Ron and Steve went to hear her play at Speakeasy. Ron takes up the story...

"I brought Steve and our wives down. We saw her and recognised that she was a very special songwriter. We agreed to sign her, and Steve then set about working with her in his living room studio to develop her sound (both live and on record) beyong the solo/folk style she had used up to that point.

"He brought in Jon Gordon and he and Jon began backing Suzanne live. This was the real turning point, for it was this new live line-up that changed her image and showed the people what we already knew-that there was much more depth to her music than had been apparent. The first demos we made [*Cracking*, *Knight Moves* and *Undertow*] were not just solo guitar-they included Jon Gordon and Sue Evans, and were essentially the same sound and approach as were used on the first album.

"The labels weren't interested, mainly because the singer-songwriter phenomenon had been dead for quite a while, and because despite the sound on tape, they couldn't get beyond the 'folksinger' tag. But as the press improved as a result of her new live presentation, we were finally able to convince A&M that she was more of a female Peter Gabriel or Sting, than a Joan Baez."

On September 28th, 1984 an article by Stephen Holden appeared in the *New York Times*, in which Suzanne was described as "The freshest and clearest new voice on the New York folk music scene." This glowing review actually helped to close the deal with A&M, which was finally signed in November 1984.

The rest of the story is now, as they say, history. Suzanne went into the recording studio to lay down the first tracks for her A&M debut whilst Lenny Kaye, probably best known as one-time guitarist with the Patti Smith Group, was recruited to co-produce with Steve Addabbo. The album, simply entitled *Suzanne Vega*, was released in the United States in April 1985.

Although not a great success in the States, despite critical acclaim, it nonetheless spent 27 weeks on the Billboard Hot One Hundred, selling over 250,000 copies.

More significantly, when the album was released in the UK and Europe not only was it greeted with similar enthusiasm by a majority of critics but it also went on to become a substantial commercial success, attaining double gold status (600,000 copies) in the UK. This success was partly due to a series of visits Suzanne made, when she toured with a four-piece band initially in October 1985 (her British debut was at the London School of Economics on 24th October) and again in April and November of 1986, the latter seeing Suzanne play two sellout shows at the Royal Albert Hall.

Perhaps the ultimate recognition of her new-found star status came five months earlier when on 20th June, 1986 Suzanne found herself performing as part of the all-star Prince's Trust 10th Birthday Concert at Wembley Arena; certainly this was a far cry from the humble church basement in New York City where Suzanne first played as a teenager some ten years earlier.

What follows is a quick at-a-glance, easy reference listing of Suzanne's A&M album and single releases here in the U.K., 1985 to the present. No attention is paid here to all the various single formats such as 10" and 12" releases, cassette singles, CD singles etc. as these will be dealt with and discussed at length, as will the various demos, promos and the multitude of overseas variations, in future articles.
[B. McCready]

SINGLES
Marlene on the Wall/Neighborhood Girls (AM275) August 1985
Small Blue Thing/The Queen and the Soldier (AM294) January 1986
Marlene on the Wall/Small Blue Thing (Live) (AM309) March 1986
Left of Center/Undertow (AM320) May 1986
Gypsy/Cracking (Live) (AM349) October 1986
Luka/Straight Lines (Live) (VEGA1) May 1987
Tom's Diner/Left of Center (VEGA2) July 1987
Solitude Standing/Ironbound/Fancy Poultry (VEGA3)November 1987

ALBUMS
Suzanne Vega (AMA5072) July 1985
Solitude Standing (SUZLP2) May 1987

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