New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
Hitting the Stage
Connecticut’s music history features Milli Vanilli, The Doors, a festival flop and Tracy Chapman
CORRESPONDENT
Due perhaps to its many syllables, Connecticut doesn’t feature in many song lyrics, but the state has been home to a surprising number of important, fun and just plain strange moments in music history. From the original lip-syncing scandal to a famous rock “concert” without music and infamous New Haven arrest of a music icon, Connecticut’s history is brimming with high — and occasionally dissonant — notes.
Here’s a list of some important, interesting and quirky moments in Connecticut music history.
Milli Vanilli gets caught lip-syncing
On July 21, 1989, during a performance at Lake Compounce in Bristol, the German pop duo Milli Vanilli’s backing track began to skip, continually repeating the line “Girl, you know it’s…” from their hit song "Girl You Know It’s True," Rob Pilatus — one-half of the Milli Vanilli duo — ran off the stage in embarrassment. It was the first major crack in exposing what is considered one of the biggest entertainment frauds in history. After the Lake Compounce incident, people began to question who was really singing Milli Vanilli’s songs. Though they won a Grammy for Best New Artist the following February, the Lake Compounce incident is cited as the beginning of the end for the duo. In November 1990, producer Frank Farian admitted to fabricating Milli Vanilli by fronting music created by studio musicians with two charismatic dancers — Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan. In the years since, the duo’s name has become synonymous with inauthenticity, but lip-syncing has become more common and almost accepted at major televised performances. While Pilatus and Morvan didn’t actually sing a note on their record, they weren’t the first or the last performers to use backing vocals during live performances. This irony wasn’t lost on contemporary observers. As The New York
Times music critic, Jon Pareles noted in 1990, “The record business seems to hope that by throwing the duo to the sharks, it can somehow create the impression that while Milli Vanilli was a fake, the rest of what pop fans hear on records and see in video clips is a documented repository of innate talent
and artistic integrity.”
Jim Morrison’s New Haven arrest inspires classic song
On December 9, 1967, The Doors were scheduled to perform at the New Haven Arena. Before the show, Jim Morrison was kissing a woman backstage. A police officer hired to provide security for the band, but who didn’t recognize Morrison, told Morrison and the woman to leave. During the argument that followed, Morrison was maced by the officer, according to Ray Manzarek, keyboardist for The Doors. Later on stage, Morrison started singing and complaining to the crowd about police abuse. The concert was stopped and Morrison was arrested. The crowd grew angry and spilled out into the streets, but according to Today in Connecticut History, a website maintained by the Office of The State Historian, “initial descriptions of the scene as a ‘riot’ were overblown, since no violence or injuries were reported.” After an ionic mugshot of him was taken, Morrison was released on bail and the charges against him were eventually dropped. The incident made its way into rock history when Morrison included the ominous line, “Blood on the streets in the town of New Haven” in The Doors song “Peace Frog,” which is believed to have been inspired by the singer’s experience in the city.
The second Woodstock that never was
In July 31, 1970, The Powder Ridge ski area in Middlefield was set to host a massive concert that some said would rival Woodstock and feature performances from Fleetwood Mac, James Taylor, Little Richard and Janis Joplin. Due to the tumultuous politics of the time, the shooting at Kent State had occurred three months earlier, townspeople wanted the concert canceled and a judge agreed to issue an injunction against it. The performers, for the most part, stayed away but as many as 30,000 people showed up for the concert anyhow and held a riotous three-day party that lives on in Connecticut lore. “The ski slopes were slathered in dangerous drugs, nonchalant nudity and non-stop partying the likes of which Middlefield, and quite possibly Connecticut, had never seen before or since,” Mike Wollschlager wrote for Connecticut Magazine in 2020.
Tracy Chapman goes to high school
Tracy Chapman is enjoying a well-deserved resurgence thanks to country star Luke Combs’ award-winning cover of her 1988 hit “Fast Car.” In February, Chapman joined Combs for a performance of the song at the Grammys in a rare public appearance. Long before she became a household name, however, Chapman was a high school student in Danbury. Born in Cleveland, Chapman attended the Wooster School, a private school in Danbury, through donations by a nonprofit. Chapman has said in the past that she didn’t relish her time in the Hat City.
"Even though almost everything was paid for — my books and my transportation to and from vacations — you’d end up on shorter vacations where you couldn’t really go home and you couldn’t stay at the school,” Chapman told Rolling Stone in 1988. “So you’d have to go
to someone’s house, and often they were people I didn’t know. And you did get the sense that they felt like they were doing charity work.”
Icons of classical music find a home
While this list has focused on rock n’ roll, Connecticut is no slouch when it comes to classical music. Charles Ives, one of the first American composers to gain international renown, was born in Danbury in 1874 and lived in New Haven (he attended Yale) and Redding. Iconic composer, Leonard Bernstein, had a home Fairfield, he and his family split their time between there and New York City. After his death in 1990, the home was passed on to his family and was one of the filming locations for Bradley Cooper’s 2023 film, Maestro, about the composer. Bernstein’s music continues to be popular while work composed by Ives remains semi-obscure among the general public.
“Charles Ives remains an enigma,” noted Libby Van Cleve in an article about the composer in Connecticut Explored. “Performances and recordings have become more common, increasing public awareness of his work, but his music is still not considered mainstream.” Cleve added that unlike Bernstein’s West Side
Story music, Ives’ compositions are not for everyone. “Ives remains an acquired taste, and as with such tastes, those who have it are passionate about it, while those who do not are in the
majority.”