Legendary singer, songwriter and recording artist Sheryl Crow returned to the Stern Show on Wednesday, where she wowed listeners with a two-song concert and discussed her fascinating life and career. Sitting down with Howard just days before the release of “Sheryl,” her career-spanning rock documentary, the 60-year-old luminary was happy to reflect on many of the most incredible moments of her storied career, whether it be watching television with Michael Jackson and his chimpanzee or throwing up before doing it with the Rolling Stones on stage.
Crow, who has 9 Grammy Awards to his name and has sold more than 50 million records, also spoke candidly about his legacy as a rock star and crossover artist. His visit to the exhibition coincided with the inauguration of the class of 2022 of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (which includes female recording legends Dolly Parton, Carly Simon, and Pat Benatar, among others). Sheryl, who has been eligible for her own Rock Hall induction since 2019, has yet to be nominated.
Howard wondered if she felt slighted or insulted that she hadn’t made the cut yet.
“I feel like I was always kind of an outsider and [by] having songs like ‘All I Wanna Do’ and ‘Soak Up the Sun’ define me, a lot of people write me off,” said Crow, explaining that fundamental misunderstanding about his music and backstory eventually became a driving force behind his decision to collaborate with director Amy Scott on “Sheryl.”
“When they came to me and told me if you want to make a documentary, I said only if the story of the person is told and not the rehash of the awards and… all those things,” he recounted. “I was 30 years old before my first record came out and I had real jobs: I was a school teacher, I waited tables for years and years. There’s a whole life there that isn’t just ‘All I Wanna Do’ and upbeat songs.”
“Those songs aren’t the ones that define your career anyway. Those are just the ones that are ear candy,” she continued. “The ones you write that are never heard are the ones that tell the story.”
Participating in the document turned out to be a double-edged sword. “Sitting and being interviewed for hours and remembering all these things and remembering the harshness, in some situations, was very exhausting,” she told Howard. “Also, it was liberating, in a weird way, to finally talk about it. A lot of these things I’ve never talked about.”
One of those stories involved watching old sitcoms with Michael Jackson and his misbehaving chimpanzee.
It was the late ’80s and she was a backup singer on the King of Pop’s “Bad” tour. One night, he invited her up to his room to watch TV with Bubbles the chimpanzee. Apparently, Michael was tapping him to try and get him online. “This poor chimpanzee who could have picked him up and thrown him out the window,” Sheryl recalled.
“I’m just trying to stay in my body because Michael is laughing at ‘Amos ‘n’ Andy’ and throwing popcorn and poking Bubbles in the chest, and I’m just this girl who just moved to LA seven months ago and I used to be a school teacher,” she continued. “It’s so weird.”
A bad ‘bad’ tour
A much more serious story from her “Bad” tour days involved Sheryl being sexually harassed by Jackson’s then-manager, Frank DiLeo. She told Howard that her experience made her bitter in the industry.
“I was pretty disappointed,” she said. “You work hard, you’re a good person, you put one foot in front of the other… I thought good things would happen.”
With unfounded rumors about Sheryl and Michael in the tabloids going around: “[I] they paid her $2 million to have her baby,” she joked about a rumor: the singer found herself part of a machine she didn’t want to be a part of.
“There’s a whole backstory to that with her manager taking the notoriety that I was building up and, you know, trying to engineer a pop career around me and I didn’t want to be a pop star,” she explained. “And then sexual harassment was involved in all of that and then the threat of ‘You’re never going to work’ and me going home and putting bands together and playing my music and having everyone in the industry say, ‘Well, we don’t know what to do with the blue-eyed soul singer… I have a lot of excuses and I felt like it all came together.
After the tour money ran out, Sheryl went back to being a waitress. “It was hard, it was very hard,” she admitted. “I mean, it’s hard to get off the road and sink back into your own life no matter what, but that was another kind of hardship.”
Sympathy for the digestive system
Sheryl has a decades-long relationship with the Rolling Stones, having performed with the iconic rockers on stage and collaborated with them in the recording studio. She even built a lasting friendship with frontman Mick Jagger and guitarist Keith Richards.
When Crow was starting out, the music scene was dominated by grunge and alternative rock. “I was just a stranger, and it was the Stones who got me out of there. [that] and said, ‘Hey, welcome to our scene,’” he recalled. “That was the scene I always wanted to be in anyway. I always felt that I was born too late.”
Despite the warm welcome the Stones gave her, Crow was nervous before performing with them for the first time on stage. “I vomited all day. She was so terrified,” she told Howard. “Just before leaving, [their saxophonist] Bobby Keys… handed me a bottle of tequila and said, ‘here’s a little nerve,’ and he kind of got me out.”
“I can remember exactly what I was thinking when I was six inches from Mick’s face,” he added. “’Oh, this is the guy whose zipper… I unzipped on that record [‘Sticky Fingers’].”
Since then he’s become a superstar in his own right, of course, but Sheryl said she still gets dizzy when talking to Jagger. “I texted her recently and asked if she would play the harp at [a cover of the Rolling Stones song] ‘Live with me,’” he said. “While she was texting him, she was just thinking, ‘Oh, God, I can’t even believe I have her phone number.'”
On dating musicians and the mystery man behind ‘My Favorite Mistake’
Despite opening up about several different topics in her new documentary, Sheryl walked into the studio on Wednesday and is still harboring a big secret: Which ex-partner was she singing about on her steamy 1998 single “My Favorite Mistake”?
“It’s about Warren Beatty,” Sheryl told Howard with a smile, poking fun at the old rumor that Carly Simon’s classic song “You’re So Vain” was perhaps about the “Dick Tracy” actor, with who came out in the early 1970s
Howard went ahead, but Sheryl remained shy.
“I couldn’t reveal that… [but] I’ll give you the stage,” Sheryl replied. “When I met this person, I was with someone at a radio event. Then before we left, I saw him making out with another famous girl, one was an actress, the other was a singer, and I was like, ‘That’s so gross.
“And then what happens?” She continued. “Much later, we ended up at a handful of concerts together, and I was hooked.”
“You couldn’t help it!” Howard said.
“You love who you love who you love,” Sheryl responded, quoting rocker John Mayer. “I felt bad about [the ‘mistake’] for 8 or 10 months, and then I never thought about it again.”
Considering that Crow has dated famed guitar legend Eric Clapton in addition to, perhaps, her musically inclined “mistake,” Howard wondered if she had a thing for musicians.
“No, I like fun people… I’ve dated famous people, I’ve dated athletes, I’ve dated non-famous people,” Sheryl said, explaining that she is now at a point in her life where she is ready to do some things. more mistakes “It’s an open opportunity for anyone to be in the category of my next ‘favorite mistake,’” she laughed.
Changes in relationships that did you good
Mick and Keith aren’t the only rock titans who went out of their way to collaborate with Crow. The one and only Prince was also eager to work with her after first hearing “Everyday Is a Winding Road”.
“These men go absolutely crazy for you. They do,” Howard noted.
“Because I’m hot. Even at 60, I’m hot,” Sheryl said with a smile. “How am I not married? How is that?”
Although he has never been married, Crow has been engaged on three different occasions. His ex-boyfriends range from a musician who put religion first to cyclist Lance Armstrong, whose career-altering doping scandal broke out while the two were dating. As Howard listened, it was then, at his lowest moment, that the beleaguered athlete asked the question.
“That’s happened twice,” Sheryl told him. “I always say, ‘Don’t wait until the relationship is over to ask me to get married because you don’t want me to leave.'”
Still, he assured listeners that he doesn’t hold a grudge. “Everyone eventually grows up and realizes who they are. I give people a lot of freedom if it evolves,” she concluded.
Reference-www.howardstern.com