LENE LOVICH AIN'T SO STRANGE
It's a bleak day, full of uneasy coincidences. The low-budget rigors of Lene Lovich's first real U.S. tour have caught up with her in a series of mishaps. It's been a successful five-week swing; Lene's growing cult audience - many of them bought her records as imports after "Lucky Number" became a British hit - hasn't seen her in person since the Be Stiff Tour in 1978, and this time around she's hitting most cities for the first time. The demand for tickets caused shows to be added around the country, and the band has barely had a day off. Now, three days from the end of the tour, Lene's nearly flat with exhaustion - when she isn't up on stage.
In Philadelphia the other night a balky microphone caught her in the mouth; yesterday at the Mudd Club - where hundreds of fans queued outside in the rain - she stepped through a hole in the makeshift stage extension. Today she's fighting the flu and a quick-march schedule - thus the helicopter, an extravagant one-shot. "It was outrageous," murmurs Lovich, "totally unreal...." Sitting at a table in an acoustic-tiled classroom, Lovich holds herself with dancing-school correctness; exact, shoulders-back posture, hands folded in her lap. She coughs politely into a fist, dabs with a tissue at her blue-green eyes. Dark purple makeup - to match her mouth - makes her eyebrows stand out like bruises.
Touch-Tone of Quality
Like her appearance, Lene's songs (written with guitarist/boyfriend Les Chappell) are the perfect blend of intuition and construction. Whimsical but not random, crafted but not gimmicky, they stack up musical signposts around what Lene calls a "pure idea." On Stateless, Lovich's 1979 debut eventually picked up by Epic Records in the States, the smart, adult love songs augured a thousand different kinds of romance by piling up recognizable pop touches, doubling and tripling them into musical puns - like Lene's own Touch-Tone beeping on "Lucky Number." The songs on Flex, her new album, still use production touches - and the whoop and sway of her voice - to convey ambiguity, fanning out possible interpretations like a peacock's tail.
But where the first LP held stories, Flex offers lessons and exhortations; if Stateless showed Lene quivering on the brink of actions, Flex shows her halfway there - wherever there is - extending a hand to stragglers and confidently pointing out obstacles like an Alpine guide. With romance no longer the central metaphor, the songs have a different feel - less hooky than textural, less pop than seductively rhythmic (a sound, I realized while watching her in concert, that's perfectly designed for her new, young band).
It's still the small touches that count in Lene's songs, the telling details. By changing just one word, she turns "The Night" (a 10-year-old Frankie Valli song so rare, she laughs, that the publisher didn't remember it) into her song. Instead "beware of his promise," Lene sings "beware of their promise," giving the song a characteristic tinge of ambiguity and a three-quarter turn into darkness. Seduction becomes abduction, mistaken conversion, or just a self-deluded cast of mind.
A lot of Lovich's songs are concerned with misleading temptations - the apple, the stranger, the lure of complacency, the inviting path that twists into shadow. In "Home", you were never sure whether she was running to or from something; in "Angels," the single off her new album, the burst-of-faith chorus, "the Angels watch my every move," has overtones that are almost sinister. "Many people have taken that song totally superficially," Lene says, "and not seen the ominous side to it. There is a scary side, as far as I'm concerned. A lot of people find themselves in that situation - and not just with the literal angels. You could talk about the police in the same way... or," she adds, "you could talk about your parents. Anything that's meant to be protective but at the same time is constricting and could strangle you."
Motown Menace
Lene herself left home at 15 after a turbulent, traumatic childhood. Raised on the south side of Detroit (her accent is British-clipped with American vowels) she has a British mother and an American father, the son of a Yugoslav immigrant. Her father - who had a history of mental troubles - was given to outbreaks of violence that made home life intolerable; when Lene was 13 her mother left him and took the children to live in Yorkshire. "I had to be fairly good on survival generally," says Lene soberly. "I was quite a tough little kid - but at the same time, there was a lot of mental torture at home which left me insecure, quite unconfident, and I had to gain a bit of confidence. You have to be tough to survive school life and things like that and also the emotional ups and downs at home. I think because I survived those two things, I'm OK. I mean, if I hadn't I'd probably be some psychopath." She gives a laugh. "Really, I'd probably be a menace to society."
When her family returned to the United States, Lene enrolled in art school, where she met Les Chappell. She quickly grew disillusioned with sculpture ("fine for therapeutic reasons") and, before finding her niche in music, ran through a staggering set of oddball jobs: she played in a series of bands with Les, dabbled in movies, dubbed screams into a French horror film ("it's hard to scream on cue"), wrote the lyrics for a disco album, played sax in an all-girl trio and worked as an Oriental dancer. "It's such a long list because I was always experimenting," says Lene. "I never did any of those things very long; it was always in an effort to come to a better understanding of what I really wanted to do."
Now that she knows, her songs reflect the search, praising self-sufficiency, differentness and the courage of conviction. "Joan" is an explicit statement of purpose: eerie verses with scourging-of-Christ moans in the background alternate with a chorus fanfare (from Lene's own tenor sax, double-tracked).
"It's meant to be thrilling," states Lene. "It's meant to be inspiring. I just want to encourage people to be brave enough to trust their own ideas. Sometimes even your best friend will try to dissuade you from doing something that may seem a little illogical. I think that 75 percent of the time you know what's good for you. And you've got to go through those things in order to sort yourself out. You can't just sit in your room all the time and say, "I'm not going to do that because it might be a bit dangerous." I'm against negative attitudes, basically on principle.
"You could take the story of "Joan" literally," she adds, "and say that's me talking to myself. I had so many knockbacks about my voice - so many people told me I couldn't sing - that if I had really listened to them, I'd be working at Woolworth's now."
The fact that she'd stayed strong without growing cynical - even in the face of the music business - has a lot to do, says Lene, with "having a partner to work with. Les and I care enough about each other that there's never any ulterior motive in what we do. What we do is for the good of each other. Sharing that, the problems you come across are not that hard." Lene shifts in her seat, smooths out her skirt. "I'm lucky, I'm very lucky," she admits. "I don't know if it's just natural greed in people, that they always think they have to find something better.
"I suppose that my feelings towards finding partners," she adds thoughtfully, "were distorted in many ways by my family life. I guess I always looked beyond conventional good looks for some kindness in the heart, some kind of sincerity. I think I've always kind of ignored appearance - I just get a feel from people. Quite often appearance is a distraction. That's why I like to do shows - maybe people get a strange feeling, a strange idea of me if they just see a photograph." Lene's face turns quizzical, then indignant. "I get a lot of stupid song tapes sent to me - things I would never do in a million years. They're on weird subjects - about chopping up your parents or something - or some kind of deliberately spooky thing. I never sing about anything that I don't have personal experience with. I hate it when bands to that - it's obviously very shallow." She sighs.
"It's difficult to convince people that - you know - not everybody is the same. It appears to be quite logical to me: people are different. But they think, if you're different, there must be some motive behind it. They can't believe that you're just normally like you are. But if people come to see the concerts, I think they get an understanding of what I'm trying to say - a feel for what I am."
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