Money Changes Everything: Cyndi Lauper’s She’s So Unusual at 40
Looking back on the album that made her a sensation
Cyndi Lauper was an overnight sensation 10 years in the making.
Born in Brooklyn and raised in Ozone Park, Queens, Lauper left home at the age of 17 to escape her abusive stepfather. In the early ‘70s, she began singing with a variety of cover bands, performing disco, Janis Joplin, Led Zeppelin and everything in between.
When she damaged her vocal cords in 1977, she took a year off from performing and was told she’d never sing again. She regained her four-octave voice with the help of a vocal coach and before long was lead vocalist for a band called Blue Angel. They released an album in 1980 (watch them perform “I’m Gonna Be Strong”), but it sold poorly and the band broke up.
Bankrupt and again without a voice due to an inverted cyst on her vocal cord, Lauper worked in retail and as a hostess and waitress at IHOP. When her voice returned, she started singing in clubs and bars. While singing in a local New York bar in 1981, she met David Wolff, a music producer and manager and longtime wrestling fan (more about that later) who became her boyfriend and manager and signed her to Portrait Records, a subsidiary of Epic.
Lauper’s life changed profoundly on October 14, 1983, when She’s So Unusual was released. So much about it was so absolutely perfect, it’s almost impossible to imagine that it could have been anything other than the massive smash that it was.
Lauper’s quirky image and radio- and MTV-ready songs were a refreshing fit into a musical landscape that included the likes of Billy Joel’s An Innocent Man, Huey Lewis’ Sports, Loverboy’s Keep it Up and Journey’s Frontiers. The album soared to #4 in the U.S. (it’s since been certified six times platinum) and #1 in Canada.
The skids were greased about six weeks before the album’s release with the September 6 release of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” an irresistible cover of a Robert Hazard song that Lauper made absolutely iconic. The equally irresistible video introduces her to the MTV audience with carefree dancing (the mood of which the album cover photo, taken by Annie Leibovitz in Coney Island, captures perfectly) and joyous humor. Her parents are portrayed by her real mother and pro wrestling legend Captain Lou Albano, and the video recalls the classic stateroom scene from The Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera (yes, that’s Steve Forbert in the room, too).
VIDEO: Cyndi Lauper “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”
The pro wrestling connection was not insignificant: 1983 and 1984 were watershed years for WWF wrestling, and Lauper found herself at the epicenter of their explosion in popularity. If you’re an old school fan, you might recall Albano and Lauper on this episode of “Rowdy” Roddy Piper’s segment, Piper’s Pit. Albano bad-mouthed women, Lauper beat up Albano, and the stage was set for The Brawl to End It All, held July 23, 1984 in Madison Square Garden. The main event, aired on MTV, saw the Lauper-managed Wendi Richter take on the Albano-managed Fabulous Moolah and win the WWF Women’s Championship that Moolah had held for 28 years.
The match drew a 9.0 Nielsen rating, making it the most-watched program in the history of MTV according to the book Ringside: A History of Professional Wrestling in America.
Lauper’s involvement in pro wrestling continued: February 18, 1985 was The War to Settle the Score, and March 31, 1985 was the first WrestleMania. Pro wrestling was solidifying itself in the national pop culture consciousness and Lauper went along for the ride.
It all helped make She’s So Unusual a monster success, though it surely would have been massive even without the rock ‘n’ wrestling connection that Wolff helped engineer.
VIDEO: Cyndi Lauper “Time After Time”
The album’s second single, “Time After Time,” was released January 27, 1984, and became Lauper’s first #1 hit in the U.S. (“Girls” came close, peaking at #2). Co-written by Lauper and album keyboardist Rob Hyman, a founding member of The Hooters, it shows Cyndi’s more tender and romantic side. By this time, it wasn’t just MTV and pro wrestling audiences who couldn’t get enough of Lauper, she even crossed over to Johnny Carson’s late-night audience.
And the hits kept coming: “She Bop,” co-written by Lauper, was released July 2, 1984, and reached #3 in the U.S. – not bad for a song about masturbation. Next up was “All Through the Night,” released September 3, 1984, which covered and reimagined the original by Jules Shear and went to #5. Lauper re-recorded the synth-heavy version on her 2005 album, The Body Acoustic.
VIDEO: Cyndi Lauper “She Bop”
Lauper became the first female singer to have four top five singles from one album on Billboard’s Hot 100.
The next two singles off the album were both covers: “Money Changes Everything,” the album’s leadoff track, was originally on The Brains’ 1980 debut album and “When You Were Mine” is a tune from Prince’s third album, Dirty Mind. While Lauper’s covers on this record typically blow the originals out of the water, Prince’s version still reigns supreme.
“Witness” and “I’ll Kiss You” are two more tracks co-penned by Lauper, and while both are solid, they suffer from living in the shadows of the record’s megahits. The former is a bouncy track with a slight dose of ska, ala the Specials, while the latter is a more hard-driving drum-propelled track that’s lyrically a sequel to “Love Potion No. 9,” the Lieber & Stoller classic: “Went down to the local gypsy / And I handed her the same line / ‘You know what I want from you / So honey, won’t ya gimme number 9?’ “
The penultimate cut on the album is the sorta-title track, another cover. “He’s So Unusual” was released in 1929 and originally performed by Helen Kane. It was the inspiration for the character Betty Boop – who, of course, had some obvious influences on Lauper’s 1980s persona. In fact, Betty’s influence on the record extends beyond this one track: American Songwriter noted that the line in “Time After Time” – “Lying in my bed, I hear the clock tick and think of you” – refers to a Betty Boop clock that Lauper once owned.
As fresh today as it was four decades ago, She’s So Unusual kicked off a career that has been as multifaceted (she has a Tony and an Emmy sitting alongside her two Grammys) as it has been fascinating. Lauper saluted the album in 2013 with a 30th anniversary tour on which she performed the album track for track, and in 2014 the anniversary reissue included a bonus CD with nine tracks. Five years after that, the Library of Congress selected She’s So Unusual for preservation in the National Recording Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
Not too shabby for an overnight sensation.
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40 years?!? Yikes!