Sheryl Crow lets documentary get close
Sheryl NASHVILLE, TENN. —
Crow is not going to read this story.
She confirmed this with a genial wince, but it wasn’t a surprise (or a bluff ). Crow’s career began in the 1990s, when success was hitched to behemoths like major labels and radio, and the most direct line to fans came via MTV and the often sexist press. While she has done hundreds of interviews and been the topic of plenty of other coverage, she stopped looking at most of it around 1996, when she released her second album.
She gave into temptation once, on an airplane. A Rolling Stone magazine was on the seat next to her, and she discovered an “ugly” article about herself. “It killed me,” she said, her voice rising an octave. “I felt myself sinking. And after that I was like, you know what, nothing is worth that. I’ve already made the record. And I am who I am.”
And so Crow, who has spent three decades gamely relaying her story to others, has never known for sure how it’s been told. That will change today, when “Sheryl,” a documentary directed by Amy Scott, arrives on Showtime.
It’s the latest in a wave of music films — some made by artists, others by more objective outsiders — that serve as correctives, uncovering the chauvinism and other challenges that plagued musicians during eras when women couldn’t speak openly about harassment and mental health. Crow didn’t have creative control over the project, although her manager is one of its producers, and she seized her opportunity to forcefully answer questions that have long tailed her regarding authorship and ambition, and explain just how hard she has had to fight in a music industry where she didn’t fit into a neat box.
On a gloomy April afternoon, the singer-songwriter welcomed yet another interlocutor to the recording studio she built atop a horse stable in Nashville, with a palette stretching from tan to brown and vintage signs advertising gasoline and perfume hanging above the wood and leather.
“When my manager came to me and said at the beginning of the pandemic, I think it’s time for us to make a documentary, I’m just like, I’m not dead,” she said. She devoured docs during lockdown, though, and said the Go-Go’s one “made me rethink who they were.”
“There are a lot of people that have preconceived notions about who I am based on some very happy-sounding songs,” she added in a video call a few days later. She wants viewers “to see that there’s a person behind all of it,” and that “a woman in a business that’s predominantly run by men has a lot of stories that still resonate.”
By almost any metric, Crow is a titan of rock ‘n’ roll. She’s landed 19 songs on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, with four in the Top 10; eight of her 10 original studio albums have reached the Top 10, and five have gone platinum. She has nine Grammys. Her crystalline voice has a soulful side, and while Crow often keeps it in a holster, she’s a quick draw.
“I describe people like her as ‘made out of music,’ ” country star Chris Stapleton said in a phone interview before Crow joined him for a stadium show in Kentucky lin late April. “I think she’s one of the best that we’ve ever had, and may ever have.”
Yet Crow has also always seemed slightly out of step with her moment: She released crisp, classic-sounding records when rock was trending grungy or entering its 2000s “revival.” Her persona has been folksy rather than mysterious. Over the years, she’s become an artist who so thoroughly wove herself into the tapestry of American
song that she eventually became part of the pattern. In some ways, her omnipresence, longevity and genre fluidity has led to underappreciation. But Crow, now 60, has young female songwriting devotees, demonstrating that she’s a vibrant thread connecting music’s past and future. The world, and even Crow herself, just may need to be reminded of that sometimes.
Linked to MJ
Bonnie Raitt was the first woman Crow saw holding a guitar and leading a band, “And that changed the way I saw myself,” she said.
Music had been a constant since her childhood, in a home she described as “just shy of being the Partridge family.” Crow taught music to elementary school students in St. Louis, singing advertising jingles on the side. With a small windfall from a McDonald’s commercial, she drove to Los Angeles to pursue a performing career. She was struggling to stay afloat when she showed up uninvited at an audition for Michael Jackson backup vocalists and sang her way into a spot on the “Bad” tour. Between late 1987 and early 1989, Crow shared the spotlight on a duet of “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You,” her hair teased into a vast mane. She learned how to step out in front of an audience and met her manager, Scooter Weintraub,
there.
But the tour was also a crash course in the industry’s dark side: Tabloids falsely linked her to Jackson, romantically. Young children were in the entourage. “I witnessed some things I thought were extremely perplexing,” she said. “And when it did all come out,” she noted, referring to the 2019 documentary “Leaving Neverland,” which accused Jackson of misconduct, “it made me feel extremely sad because I only knew those men as little boys.” Jackson’s manager, Frank DiLeo, promised to make her a star, then made unwanted sexual advances, she said. After consulting a lawyer whose takeaway was, “There are people that would die to be in this situation,” she says in the documentary, she plunged into a depression.
Her determination eventually yanked her out of it. Crow hustled and impressed her way into a chance to record an album for A&M, but the slick result didn’t feel authentic, and it was shelved. Ultimately, her debut came from a more organic place: She’d been playing with (and dating) a musician named Kevin Gilbert, who brought her to his friends’ hard-partying and high-minded jam sessions called the Tuesday Night Music Club. The get-togethers became a laboratory for her first album under the direction of one of its members, Bill Bottrell.
They freestyled “All I Wanna Do” with Crow speak-singing poetry by Wyn Cooper. “Leaving Las Vegas” borrowed its title from a book by a then-unknown author, John O’Brien, who was friends with one of the musicians. When the song took off, and Crow performed it on David Letterman’s show, her off-handed response to a question about whether it was autobiographical infuriated some of her collaborators, who implied she was taking too much credit. Weeks later, O’Brien died by suicide.
“I just went into a hole,” she says in the film, breaking into tears. (In a 1996 Rolling Stone story, O’Brien’s family absolved Crow of any responsibility.)
There could be no question about the authenticity of two “Tuesday Night Music Club” songs inspired by the sexual harassment she said she’d endured on the Jackson tour. “The Na-Na Song” referenced DiLeo by name. “I thought nobody in heaven or earth will ever hear this record,” Crow said. DiLeo threatened to sue, and Crow braced for the worst. He never did, and died in 2011. The album would go seven times platinum and at 31, Sheryl Crow finally arrived.
Her third engagement, to star cyclist Lance Armstrong, ended in 2006 amid his doping scandal. Almost immediately after their split, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Fame turned toxic. “There were paparazzi shooting into the house and I really lost total faith in humankind,” she said. “There was a shift after that, where it was like, OK, everything’s back in perspective now. And it was the first time I felt like an adult. You can be a rock star and never grow up.”