More With Patti Scialfa

More With Patti Scialfa

Rock singer Patti Scialfa revisited her formative years to create her new solo CD, 23^rd Street Lullaby.

Scialfa was forever changed musically and personally during her 20s, when she was a starving musician living in New York's Chelsea District. She honed her craft while playing clubs like Kenny's Castaway and Dr. Generosity's and was immersed in the music community, where she relished spending time with other like-minded musicians.

"I was just so caught up in the culture of making music," she says. "For awhile, I just kind of let go of trying to get a (record) deal. It was good and an absolutely healthy thing."

23^rd Street Lullaby serves as a musical photo album of these years. "It's an isolation of past experiences," she says. "Past and present experiences affect how you view the external world, your morals, your faith, how much hope you have and how you can hold onto that in the face of disappointment, and the tenacity in finding that core of yourself, the good part of yourself."

It was also the time that the small-town New Jersey girl came into her own as a woman. "It allows you to reinvent yourself, not in a fake or contrived way," she says. "Even if it's something they think you're great at, but you don't think you're great at and you need to find something else.

"When you are growing up in a small town, people already have an idea of you and it doesn't leave much room to expand from that. Sometimes you feel foolish having a big dream. But coming to New York and having a big dream, you can have it and it's OK. People don't move from cities to small towns to find their dreams. It just seemed like a natural thing to come to New York.

"You have to move away to really find out who you are. I don't think everybody does, but I certainly did. I had an idea of who I wanted to be and I had an idea of the kind of music I wanted to make and I had an idea about the kind of people I wanted to make music with. The people who were playing on my (new) record, I met 20 years ago and they were really nice people. I was lucky enough to be able to find them. I felt very lonely until I moved to the city. I had really great friends that I had grown up with, but I was lonely for the kind of community that reflects back your own ideas to you that might be a little bit left of center."

The daughter of an electronics store owner turned real-estate entrepreneur, Scialfa was raised in the small towns of Deal and Oakhurst, N.J. Girls were not encouraged to pursue careers, she says, and there were few female rock singers who served as role models for the aspiring singer-songwriter. "I was in the generation still where you felt the confines of being a woman," she says. "When I was young, it felt like it was a very insidious message because it was all about presentation: how to present yourself as intelligent but not too intelligent, capable but not too capable.

"That was the environmental cloud that hung over women's heads at that time, then the 1960s came and it was liberating. I didn't find it liberating because of the sexual revolution, because I was pretty young at that point. I couldn't fathom it, much less take advantage of it." But she did notice the emotional openness and gender equality the new decade brought. "My parents had grown up in the 1950s, when people hid their emotions and tried to fit into a certain mold," she says. "That was very liberating to me because it felt like ultimate equality to me."

A crucial part of the changing times for Scialfa was the music made by Bob Dylan and the Motown Records artists, especially the all-female groups. "When people started writing in a deep way about what they were feel right at that moment, it really meant something, whether it was about politics or love or relationships," she says. "Now, I'm in a world that's opened up and there's no hiding going on. People are exploring ideas and that's what hooked me. It wasn't just in music; it was in books and people. Music was a thread that helped broaden your sense of humanity.

"For me, music represented a counterculture," she says. "It meant you didn't fit into the norm. You were looking for a place to express yourself and your ideas might be a little different from everything you're hearing or seeing around you. You were looking for a place of comfort where you could see your humanity reflected back to you."

Although Scialfa was determined to sign a record deal by age 19, her mother insisted that she first get a college education. "That was very important to my mom," she says. "She didn't get a chance to go to college. She was a very big propelling force behind all the kids getting a solid education. You don't really see the value of it when you're young."

So Scialfa enrolled in the prestigious music program at the University of Miami. After two years, she was ready to move on. "When I was in Florida, I said, 'I'm going to New York now because I'm writing and I want to get a record deal,'" she recalls. "And she said, 'You've got to finish.'" Understanding her daughter's passion, Scialfa's mother researched colleges in New York and discovered New York University, which offered a less traditional curriculum. Scialfa transferred to NYU and graduated in 1973.

She then began her quest for a deal by taking her demo tape to numerous labels. "You would just go right up to the record companies," she says. "I was so scared. You could just drop off your stuff into the huge pile. I got called back from Atlantic Records and they took me into the studio to do some things." Mary Martin at Warner Bros. also took an interest in Scialfa's music. "I had this really nice demo and she gave me some time in the studio and money," she says. "I should have had a manager. The songs were in an odd direction. I have to say, they weren't necessarily the right group of songs. I recorded them and she said, 'This isn't what your demo was about.' I said, 'I'm doing something new.' I was so naïve and not thinking, 'Stay focused on what you're doing to try to get your deal.'"

Martin gave Scialfa a part-time job in the label's artist and repertoire department because she realized how serious Scialfa was about a career in music. In her free time, Scialfa formed a band and began playing at local clubs, which is where she met close Soozie Tyrell, who remains a close friend and musical collaborator today. "She is an incredible writer," Tyrell says. "When I first met her, I saw her at Dr. Generosity's and she was performing all of her own original music and playing piano. I was blown away by her writing, musically and lyrically. When she joined the E Street Band, that was not imparted to the audience at all. She became known as a background singer. I wished people would know more about her as a writer because she is extraordinarily talented."

The two young women lived a free-wheeling existence. "We played in the streets in Greenwich Village every weekend," Tyrell says. "In the early years, we didn't care to play in clubs because it was just too confining. We had this anarchist outlook. We (later) ended up playing different clubs in the village.

"When we first started, we only had two songs, then we expanded our repertoire. We never wanted to play more than 15 or 20 minutes. You fill up the attention span of the crowd going by. You are lucky enough if they stop, much less put money in the violin case. The crowd would disperse and we would start up about 15 minutes later. We were able to make a living and pay our rents, which is pretty extraordinary."

While living in New York, Scialfa would frequently come home on the weekends and play at the Stone Pony in Asbury Park, N.J. It was during one of these visits that Springsteen saw her perform. "She was very striking because she had a little bit of Dusty Springfield and a little Ronnie Spector, but she also just had something of her own that was going, you know?" Springsteen says.
In the 1980s, she recorded or performed with such groups as the Rolling Stones, Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes, and Buster Poindexter before joining Springsteen's E Street Band in 1984. She was offered a solo record deal three years later, but Springsteen invited her to join his upcoming tour. The two married in 1991 and quickly began a family.

"My whole youth I spent in bands and then I went out with the E Street Band," she says. "In the professional world, I was singing back-up. That always felt like a part-time job for me. I go do this and come back with the money. Once you're aligned with a band that's that big, and I'm married to Bruce, it becomes a little harder for people to separate you from that.

"Working for somebody is a great thing because your part is finite: here's your part, here is what you are doing," she says. "If something is difficult, you go home, learn how to do it and bring it back. The way I've always viewed the E Street Band is that it culls from a percentage of what I have to offer because that's just what they need. Sometimes it's a smaller percentage or sometimes they'll need more so it's a larger percentage, depending on serving Bruce's music.

"It sounds impersonal, but that is how it runs and that's how I like to do it. Being married to someone in that position and being involved in all the other areas is just too much. I always look at it as a professional job. I was hired before we were involved. We're certainly a couple, but now when I go onstage, I try not to bring that couple aspect up there. I wouldn't want somebody else to do it. If somebody else did it, I would go, 'Oh, that's weak!'" she says with a laugh.

"Of course, I have my perks. I can come to sound check late, but once I'm up there and singing, I don't want to play that card. I would want somebody to do that for me too. It would be like an albatross around somebody's neck if they played the partner card. And it works for us. We've found a way to make it work."

Scialfa and Springsteen have one of the most enduring marriages in rock music. They've traveled the world to perform his music in front of millions of fans, then they return to Rumson, N.J., where they are able to lead a relatively quiet existence. "It may look very romantic from the outside, and it is romantic," she says. "But then on the other hand, it is work. When you're in the band, you have to put yourself in a working situation with your husband. If you see yourself as a very independent person, you can rattle under it a little bit because you can go, 'Who is this person telling me what to do?' What good woman wants that?" she asks with a hearty laugh. "We're lucky because my mother worked with my father, so I never saw it as a bizarre thing. I worked for so many years as a musician that I would never want to think I had disrespected myself onstage by bringing anything personal onstage."

Although Scialfa remains one of the most respected female figures in rock music, she remains best known as Mrs. Bruce Springsteen. She's always handled the spotlight, as well as the pressure that comes with the attention, with a quiet strength and grace. "Being married to someone well-known lends itself to people having a tremendous array of pre-conceptions about me," she says. "Some can be better than you are. I'm always thinking they are worse," she adds with a laugh, "because I focus too much the other way. Certainly for a woman in that place, you are probably going to be devalued a bit. Probably my husband will get mad at me if he heard me say this.

"I always find it a little uncomfortable, to tell you the truth, and you don't want to apologize for it, certainly. It's a funny position, especially if you have real focus to begin with. I think my records show a tremendous part of who I am. "

Scialfa took center stage in 1993 to release her debut solo CD, Rumble Doll. The album hit the streets when she was 6 months pregnant with her third child, so she was not able to fully promote the CD by traveling to performances and TV shows. It took more than a decade for her to release her second CD, 23^rd Street Lullaby, because her solo career was placed on the back burner, behind her children, husband and the E Street Band.

So she's enjoying the current opportunity to sing her music and tell her life story through her lyrics. "It's a little frightening because I don't like exposure," she says. "Basically, I'm a pretty hidden person, even though my writing is so open. I can look friendly, but I'm more comfortable being hidden at the end of the day. The thing that is nice about doing your own music is that once you get past the exposure part, you get to know all of yourself. You get to use all of it and more.

"You get to express yourself beyond what you're normally asked. In the band, you're expressing yourself because you have to rise up to a really high level professionally. But musically when you are doing your own thing, you have to do everything and it's a beautiful thing to test yourself like that and get everything humming.

"It's funny because it took a long time to make. I made another record before this one. I thought, 'You know what? I'd better make this record because I will regret not doing it.' I would regret not testing myself that way and not exploring that part of myself. Bruce knows how much I like to be hidden, and he was very, 'Do it! You'll love it. Get out there and have the experience. Now is the time to have the experience. It's beautiful music. Get out there.' He was very good."

This fall, Scialfa will do a small solo tour, as well as perform with the E Street Band on the Vote For Change Tour. As she's done for more than a decade, she'll schedule all of her work obligations around her children's schedules. "We took them on the road when they were babies, but the last tour we did, they asked to stay home," she says. "I said, 'OK, you can't stay home during the whole tour. When we go far away, like Australia and Europe, you have to go. But certainly when we are playing things on the East Coast, you can stay home because we can fly home at night.' So we found a way to work a tour around everything and got it down to three or four days where I would fly home and you just make it work. Basically, my mother and my cousin moved into the house and they were fine."

She says she hopes to instill in her children a real understanding of human emotions. "I want them to have an idea of what makes people tick and to be kinder," she says. "To treat people well and to treat yourself well. I want them to find things they are interested in. Just because you can't make a living out of it doesn't make you can't pull it through as a thread in your whole life that you'll have for yourself.

"I'm not real success-based at all, in monetary terms of publicly. The things I'm trying to instill in my children are things that are more internal, like internal goals. They'll be OK as long as they have really good guidelines and morality and fairness. Hopefully they'll be able to make good judgments, because it's the bad judgments and feeling bad about yourself that make you make the bad choices."

Scialfa has begun working on songs for a new CD that will likely be released in two years. "I would like to do what Loretta Lynn did," she says. "To have an allowance of where you can make music and not have your age interfere with your desire to make popular music is ideal," she says. "Who still feels strong enough to have the passion about the songs. It's sexual, it's playful, it's sad. Women have obviously done it, but she's done it in a way that's very current and I really love that.

"I want to see my family and my husband healthy. I want to be who I am at that age and enjoy what's around me. But that is a privilege because life is very hard and not many people get to do that and I understand that. I would like to have the spirit to be creative and just keep going on making music, helping my family and being a good member of the community."

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