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Details (US)
March 1996
 
Magical Mystery Tori
by Gavin Edwards
She was born a piano prodigy, did time as a
metal chick, and then turned herself into a poetry babe. But now Tori Amos
wants to become something even stranger: an adult.
If Tori Amos had her own TV show, it'd be "Cooking
with Tori." She'd share her recipes for huevos rancheros, salsa, and her mom's
fried chicken with lots of drippings. She'd reveal the secret ingredient in her
spaghetti sauce (maple syrup - she wanted something with three layers of taste:
savory, but with a tart little bite and a sweet aftertaste). Food holds a
powerful attraction for Tori. She falls in love with chefs all the time, "even though they're three hundred pounds and they're
saying Bella! Bella! Bella!" At moments like that, she has to have a
friend remind her: She's not in love with the man, just his marinara sauce. And
if they got married, he wouldn't want to be always cooking for her, just as she
wouldn't want to play piano for him first thing in the morning in her bunny
slippers.
When Tori writes songs, she sits down with her
Bosendorfer piano and just listens to what it tells her. Lately, the songs she
hears have been about her experiences with men. Her new album Boys for Pele, is
not just about her romantic attachments, but all the men who are important to her,
from her sound engineers to Jesus Christ. On vacation in Hawaii, Tori decided
that she had spent to much time in her life looking to boys for passion. "I hit bottom with my male relationships," she
confides. "I mean, I could not put one more fishing
line in one more boy's pond." So she wrote them and offered them up to
Pele, the Hawaiian volcano goddess. Originally she intended to push the boys
into the volcano, but once she summoned up the imageof them standing on the
brink of molten lava, she decided to give them a party. (Tori was never a fan
of the soccer star Pele, although she says, "Any
gorgeous man with calves, means something to me.")
Last year, Tori and Eric Rosse - her producer
and boyfriend - ended their relationship of six years. Tori is careful to
emphasize that Boys for Pele is not a song cycle lementing the end of their
relationship; nevertheless that melancholia colors the album. Asked what the
best way to break up with somebody is, Tori grimaces. "Everybody
knows there's no good way. Oh God, if there were a good way, I don't think I
would have written this record." She blinks, staring off into space,
holding her lips closed. "You remember sitting in
that restaurant after it's over, meeting up again just because you have to, and
you're crying at the table. You can't help it. He's sitting there, looking
beautiful on every level - and yet you know not to reach across the table and
touch his hand." She falls silent, playing a painful movie inside her
head.
Tori was born Myra Ellen Amos, the daughter of a
Methodist Minister in North Carolina. She was a piano prodigy who dropped out
of Baltimore's prestigious Peabody Conservatory at age eleven to perform at gay
piano bars - with reverend Dad as chaperone. At twenty-one, she headed to Hollywood.
There, she fronted a heavy-metal band in the Pat Benatar mode, Y Kant Tori
Read, which flopped. Shattered, Tori rediscovered her first love, the piano.
Alone with her keyboard, she recorded a handful of songs about her life and
dreams, and at twenty-seven move to London.
Those solo piano songs became Little
Earthquakes. Emptying out her diary, Tori made an intimate record that found a
large audience. She followed up in 1994 with Under the Pink. She wasn't ready
to talk about boys yet, so she dealt with the girls: sisters, best friends,
rude waitresses. "Under the Pink is like an
adolescent girl who's growing her breasts and needs to hide them," Tori
says now. She's cast herself as the antic elf for so long that Tori's not sure
whether to call herself a woman or a girl. "I don't
think one supercedes the other, but being thiry-two, it'd be quite helpful if
the woman showed up." Tori's latest step toward maturity: She stopped
dyeing her hair with Clairol Torrid's Touch Chrimson and started going to a
salon.
Where Little Earthquakes was emotionally and
socially naked, Under the Pink dressed up her music: jangling mandolins in "Cornflake
Girl," bossa nova rhythms in "God." Boys for Pele strips it down again, with
songs broken hearts and boys in dresses. Much of Tori's music is gently mournful,
a hand reaching out that never quite brushes somebody else's fingertips. But
Pele expands on that tone in every direction, from the raw (the song about
sucking of congressmen) to the twee (the one where she talks to Mr. Zebra).
Tori's fans respond to her music's unclothed emotion with utter devotion, and
she tries to return the favor. She's lamented that her growing popularity means
she can no longer speak with every member of the audience after a concert.
When she was singing with Y Kant Tori Read, she
wore plenty of spandex and sequined bustiers purchased at L.A.'s Retail Slut
boutique. "It was a good time to be a metal chick,"
she reminisces. Now all of those miniskirts and push-up bras are locked in a
trunk at her parents' home in suburban Maryland. Today in New York City on a
break from the mixing of Boys for Pele. Tori is sporting what she calls her
librarian look: a gray-and-brown sweater, blue jeans, and a pair of Hot Tuna
sneakers. But we're on a mission to upgrade Tori's footwear - we're heading for
the shoe department at Barneys New York.
"Shoe shopping is a real art," Tori says, and skips up the escalators of the swank departement store. On the
forth floor, Tori wanders amid the creations of her favorite shoe designer,
Manolo Blahnik, holding up various pumps and sandals for me to admire. "When I'm in geometrically sound shoes, I feel like I'm
part of the physics chatter." She wriggles out of her sneakers to try on
nine or ten pairs, revealing that her toenails are painted bordeaux red.
Ultimately Tori rejects glam options like lemon-gold high heels, reasoning that
she needs sedate shoes for mixing her record right now; she settles on four
pairs of Manolo Blahnik flats. She heads over to hosiery ("Socks and mittens are my friends," she says),
leaving the shoe salesman to put the $1,700 charge on her American Express
card.
When explaining themselves most people take you
from point A to point B. Tori's method
is to stand on point B, waving her arms, saying, "Hey! Can you guess how I got
here?" Witness her explication of the new "Muhammad My Friend": "I'm having a cup of tea with Muhammad and saying that
there are as many belief systems as there are people; to not acknowledge that means
chaos, really. Of course, I had to bring Gladys Knight into it. She's a bit of a goddess."
Since Tori's not afraid to share these diffused
ideas, she's gotten tagged as something of a flake. "If
you speak of love, you're..." She stops, searching for the right term to
belittle herself with. Finally she remembers one: "a
New Age waif shivering in the forest." Tori's thought processes are
authentic in that she does see the world at a peprendicular angle from the rest
of us, but what seems like free association sometimes recurs verbatim with
different journalists. During interviews, she likes to steer questions into
long, predigested chunks of Tori-thought, like a White House press secretary
getting out the message of the day. After every interview, Tori hugs the
journalist. this may be more manipulative than it's meant to appear, but it's
also rather sweet.
"I use innocence in my demeanor
like a Venus flytrap," Tori says. Her prim librarian clothes
may be meant to reassure the world that she doesn't bite, but this is a woman
who has Cleopatra fantasies and who sings about shaving off all her pubic hair.
In concert, she humps her piano bench. She's taken generous helpings of shrooms
throughout her life: "I'm definitely a
hallucinogenic girl." In Little Earthquakes' "Leather," she sings "Hand
me my leather," while in Boys for Pele's "Hey Jupiter," she sings "Took my
leather off the shelf." When I ask Tori whether thoses leathers are clothing or
some other object, she declines to answer, blushing.
Tori spent too long at Barneys, trying on every
hat in sight. Now she needs my help packing her bags if she's going to catch
her plane to L.A. to finish mixing the record. In two days, she's made a mess
of her hotel room rivals the results of the Kobe earthquake.There's notebooks,
empty bottles of Diet Pepsi, packages of Donna Karan petite nude hose, and a mountain
of clothes and shoes. Heading into the bathroom with a fresh outfit, she makes
meowing noises behind the door as she changes, while I stuff her shoes into
voluminous duffel bags.
When she emerges from the bathroom (Animaniacs
T-shirt, blue zipped jumper), I sneeze loudly. Tori has a way of dealing with
this situation - she points at me and cries "Herr
Sneezer!" Once I recover from the surprise, we discuss the physiological
similarities between the sneeze and the orgasm. Tori smiles - she's figure out
what to do if she ends up pushing all the boys into the volcano. "Just in case I'm ever down on my luck," she says, "I'll get some black pepper."
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