Cyndi Lauper’s Farewell Tour: A Journey Through Her Career

When I did a tally, I realized that, including this interview, I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with Cyndi Lauper nine times since 1997. Of course, that doesn’t match the number of times I’ve been fortunate to see her perform live—that would be 12, beginning in 1984. And now, as I prepare to see her for a 13th time, it’s with a touch of sadness as Lauper embarks on her farewell tour.

One of the best friends the LGBTQ community has ever had, Lauper’s multi-artist True Colors tours (which ran from 2007 to 2010 and raised funds for the Matthew Shepard Foundation, PFLAG, and HRC) and the subsequent founding of True Colors United in 2008 (which continues to help homeless LGBTQ youth) are just a couple examples of her activism.

Lauper is a lifetime musical trendsetter. She recorded a duet with the late Tony Bennett more than 10 years before Lady Gaga’s Bennett collaboration, and she also released dance-oriented and country-music albums 14 and 8 years, respectively, before Beyoncé. When it comes to her legendary personal style, social-media fashion critic Nicky Campbell recently declared Lauper an icon in his review of the 2024 VMA fashions.

Now, as Lauper prepares to say farewell to the concert-tour circuit, she generously made time for an interview with OutSmart before hitting the road.

Gregg Shapiro: In preparing for this interview ahead of your farewell tour, I pulled out my 12 ticket stubs from your concerts I’ve attended since 1984, beginning with two that year in Boston. Do you remember what that first headlining tour as a solo artist felt like for you?

Cyndi Lauper: I just wanted to make sure I had places to go. I wanted the sound to be really great. I don’t know if I accomplished that, but I did have those big speakers that I used to run up on. That’s me! I loved that. Because I saw all those wonderful English groups, the ska bands…

You mean Madness and The English Beat and The Specials?

The Specials! I thought they were extraordinary. The singer, Neville Staple, I don’t know where his family was from. I guess he could have been Jamaican English. He was so fierce, singing so great, and he climbed up on top of the speaker and put up his fist and he’s singing his guts out. I’m thinking, “It’s Mighty Mouse!” When I was a kid that was kind of my favorite show, I don’t know why [laughs]. But it always influenced me, and I remember in ’84, ‘85, I was still free. When ‘86 came, then I became a prisoner of the system.

Being on a major record label, and all that.

I wasn’t allowed to touch anybody. I wasn’t allowed to go out to the audience or have them come to me. It was totally different, and I totally hated it.

Did you ever imagine that 40 years later you would be embarking on a farewell tour?

Well, at some point, sure. I think that for me this is the perfect time, because it’s a kind of bucket list of what I always wanted to do. In the beginning, it was roughneck style. Whatever I could jimmy-rig, I did, when I got to a certain point. Like we were doing the live “Money Changes Everything” video. I had fantasies of a cherry-picker. Because of our budget, everyone said, “Well, you can’t get a cherry-picker but we’ll give you a garbage pail and a pulley system.” I thought to myself, “Oh no, like Oscar the Grouch?” I had a friend who was a great interviewer, and she used to interview everybody from a garbage pail. So, of course, that’s what my people gave me to go up in the crowd. I thought it was a pulley system. The pulley system was actually 10 men with rope holding it. When I started to shake while I was singing, I started to slip out of their hands. They brought me right in. That could have been the reason that the lawyer made me sign my will before I left.

Are you planning to sing songs from each of your albums?

I’m really trying. I didn’t get anything from the blues album in there—2010’s Memphis Blues—because there’s too many songs. I usually get to the point where I say, “Hey, guys, if the visuals look good for this, can we switch the songs?” What I did was I wanted to do visuals on the tour. I wanted to do performance art. That means you have to be on a click. Like when I went out on the Rod Stewart tour and we used the lyric video of “Sally’s Pigeons.” You can’t do that and not be on a click, because the guy running visuals has to be on the click. If nobody’s together, it’s like, “Hey, what the hell—now the words are there, now they’re not.”

It’s like a badly dubbed movie.

Yeah. But this time I got this wonderful visual director, Brian Burke, who worked for years with the creative director of Cirque Du Soleil. In the beginning of all that, that was my fantasy! I wanted to fly through the air, and all I got was a cherry-picker. Not a cherry-picker, but a garbage pail. It wasn’t going to happen for me. Now, I’m 71! I’m not gonna go flying through the air. It’s a mixture of collabs with artists and art. Art and music. The whole thing is an artist collective, any time you go out on tour. It’s not just you. You’re with other dance artists if you’re a dancer, or you’re with musicians. Or you’re with lighting designers—that’s art, too. We did these collabs and I’m excited to present a show like this because it’s something I always wanted to do. Fingers crossed that it all works out. I’m even going to do costume changes this time, which you know I’ve never done because it’s so bothersome. But I can do it in a way now that I’m comfortable with. I just want to be able to do this as a gift to all the people that followed me through all my crazy twists and turns. I did all those twists and turns because I kept hitting brick walls. You keep hitting the gatekeeper, so you gotta find your way around that gatekeeper.

Earlier this year, Let the Canary Sing, Alison Ellwood’s documentary about you, received a theatrical release. After having your memoir published in 2012, did it feel to you like the documentary was the next logical step—a continuation of sorts?

Well, not for me. I didn’t want to have a documentary. It was the pandemic, and everyone was saying, “Everybody’s doing documentaries now, Cyn! Come on, what are you doing?” I was like, “I’m not dead!” Then I started watching documentaries on the streaming services and I saw Laurel Canyon. I felt it was an extraordinarily captivating documentary for me because it was the history of music. All of the people and players in that story were very much influential for me as a growing artist, especially in the ‘70s. I looked and saw who directed it…

Alison Ellwood!

When they came at me again, I said, “I want a film, not a TV special. So, how about Alison Ellwood? She makes films.” She wanted to do it! I think she did a good job. It’s not your typical story. I don’t think anybody’s story is typical, right? We think we know people but I guess we don’t. You think, “It’s typical! You start a band.” Which is always my theory! If something’s wrong, start a band, start playing out, you’ll feel a lot better!” [Laughs] It doesn’t always go that way.

With the end of touring in sight, is there a possibility that you might do more film work for a potential Oscar to earn your EGOT status?

Listen, I happen to love independent films. For that, I would write. I wrote “Unhook The Stars” for…

The Gena Rowlands movie.

Right! Usually, I like an independent movie because then you get to talk to the director and then you have to understand what their vision is. That’s interesting, because each director is a different personality and a different kind of artist. You have to listen and see what story they’re trying to tell and then have a couple of different suggestions. When we first wrote “Who Let In the Rain,” I wrote it with Allee Willis.

Oh, the late Allee Willis.

Allee Willis was a great songwriter.

Did you see that documentary?

No, I wish I had because I miss her so much. I guess I was talking to the director, and we didn’t have a band, so I just sang “They fall like rain,” and in between, her dog, Orbit, would bark. I was like, “OK, the dog is musical,” and everyone laughed. Then I described it to the director as “Chinese Motown.” That would scare most people. To me, I hear influences of every culture in American music. That’s how I make my music, with different influences. Like cooking, like spices. I feel grateful that I was brought up in New York City because I was exposed to so many different cultures.

On a final serious note, when I saw you perform in Boca Raton in 2016 in support of your Detour album, you asked for a moment of silence to honor Christina Grimmie, who had been shot and killed in Orlando the night before. The next morning, after your concert, many of us woke up to the news of the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. With those tragedies in mind, and this upcoming election which is so terribly important, especially for women and LGBTQ folks, is there anything you’d like to say to your fans?

Absolutely! There is an organization called Vote411.org. Taylor Swift finally put that up recently. You go online and you find out all the questions and all the people that are running and what they voted for so that you can make an intelligent decision on who is going to represent you, not them. This war against women has been going on since the ’60s. It’s just been going and going, and we need to stop it because we are half the population. As far as the LGBTQ people, you have to vote. You have to be informed. Every time you have to vote, you vote! Don’t say, “Oh, it doesn’t matter for this one.” It matters! Because they put laws in there. There are community people that represent you, and you need to start on a community level, a grassroots level to ensure that there are people that are going to speak for you as a human being. We are all human beings here. As I said, women are half the population and LGBTQ people, I venture to bet, are a pretty large part, too.

    This country was founded on the separation of church and state. Separation! I don’t want anybody to have ownership over my body. They say they want local communities in charge but yet they have SCOTUS making federal laws about what you do in your bedroom and what you do with your body and who you are, and nullifying families. Oh, I have a lot to say about that. You need to vote! You vote on every occasion you can vote. You can’t just lie down and get rolled over. This is our country, too. And always share your stories. Because people who work with you, that you’re friends with, sometimes they don’t understand. They don’t know. What’s really interesting now, from when we started with True Colors United, I think that people do not understand gender identity, which is a whole different thing. If you want people to listen to you, you’ve got to listen to them. Just because they’re different from you,doesn’t mean that you have to be like them. You have to learn about both sides of the fence. Knock the fence down, because we’re all human beings. Everybody’s different, that’s all.

WHAT: Cyndi Lauper
WHEN: November 16
WHERE: Toyota Center
Info: tinyurl.com/5n9arae5