Sheryl Crow’s new doco
devastating to even think about.’’
One of the highlights of the tour for her was dueting with Jackson on I Just Can’t Stop Loving You, although if performing ‘‘in a tight mini-skirt and a massive wig’’ wasn’t bad enough, the choreography was so intimate it inevitably gave rise to ‘‘outlandish’’ tabloid speculation that they were a couple.
What I Can Do For You? was inspired by someone in particular
Track 8 on her wildly successful 1993 debut album Tuesday Night Music Club, What I Can Do For You? detailed Crow’s experience with sexual harassment as a result of her Jackson connection.
His manager Frank DiLeo also desperately wanted to be hers. Guaranteeing that her album and single would come out in the Top 10 if she took him on, he told her she had to attend every event with him. ‘‘That’s when the harassment started,’’ she says. ‘‘He was all over me – and it was a constant battle to keep him off me.’’
And, as one of her colleagues recounts in the documentary: ‘‘Frank was a gangster – he wasn’t cast in Goodfellas [as Tuddy Cicero] for nothing.’’
Crow says it got so bad she contacted a highpowered music attorney, but was told that if she blew the whistle, she would never work again. ‘‘You can come out ahead if you just stick it out,’’ she says she was told, ‘‘There are people who would love to be in your situation.’’
That situation saw Crow sink into depression – ‘‘the darkest place’’.
One talk show interview led her to an even darker place
As part of her burgeoning popularity after the release of Tuesday Night Music Club, Crow was invited to make her first appearance on the popular The Late Show with David Letterman in 1994. However, after performing Leaving Las Vegas, a nervous affirmation to the host’s query as to whether the song was autobiographical caused her a world of pain.
Not only did it strain her relationship with the song’s author David Baerwald, she was also accused of contributing towards the suicide of novelist John O’Brien, whose 1990 semiautobiographical book of the same name (which was adapted into an Oscar-winning movie in 1995) Baerwald had drawn from – with O’Brien’s consent.
‘‘I carried that weight for a long time,’’ Crow concedes, admitting that the resulting media storm and headlines also made her not want to be ‘‘accessible’’ any more.
She got into a stoush with US retail giants Walmart
After the triple Grammy-winning success of her debut, you would think everyone would have been keen to stock her 1996 self-titled follow-up. Everyone was – except for the thousands of Walmart stores across the US.
That’s because their head office objected to one of her songs – Love is a Good Thing – and the line: ‘‘Watch our children kill each other with a gun they bought at Walmart discount stores’’.
Crow alleges they wanted the song removed, or the lyric altered to a different retailer ‘‘like Kmart’’ or she’d face the prospect on missing out on an awful lot of potential sales, especially in places where Walmart were the only music retailer in town. She, though, was determined to stick to her guns.
And then there was Lance…
‘‘It was a relationship I wanted to give time to. I was ready to get married, I was ready to have a life,’’ Crow says of her high-profile, three-year relationship with record-breaking (and later disgraced) cyclist Lance Armstrong.
She now admits that ‘‘having to dim your own light to be in somebody else’s wasn’t healthy’’ and the ‘‘win-at-all-costs’’ attitude of the man almost 10 years her junior wasn’t something she shared.
Recalling their engagement in September 2005, Crow says it was ‘‘a nightmare’’. ‘‘We had a giant blow-up and then a five or six-carat diamond showed up a couple of days later. Sadly that’s what I wanted, but I didn’t want it that way.’’ The pair parted ways just months later.