Archive

Sugarbutch Says: Happy 15th Anniversary, “Boys for Pele”

It’s one of those events for me, like when Kennedy was shot or when the Challenger exploded: I know exactly where I was on the day that Boys for Pele, Tori Amos‘ third major album, was released.

It was January 22, 1996. It was a Monday.

I was in a particularly tumultuous transition, as my high school boyfriend had just two months before gotten into a colossal car wreck, while driving from his home state of Colorado to my home in Alaska, that shattered his left femur (among other injuries) and left him on crutches as his bone healed for more than a year. He had moved in with my family, staying on the extra bed we had in the living room, since Thanksgiving. His workman’s compensation from his insurance company came through around New Year’s and he immediately found his own place. I was still technically in my home life, but being called by my “adult” life, my life after my family, my life on my own as an autonomous, personally responsible person making my way in this world.

I was 16 years old.

When I got home from school, I convinced my dad to take me out the road to Fred Meyer that evening to pick up a few things. It was one of those rare family trips where all of us – my mom, my two sisters, my dad, and me – piled into the family car, the silver Dodge Colt Vista, body rusted through in various places from its years in the rainforest, and filled our shopping cart with various necessities.

I bee-lined for the music section. I resisted tearing open the wrapping in the store, and instead dug through the shopping bags in the back on my way home and tried to make out the cryptic lyrics in the CD’s booklet. It was dark out already. I remember squinting, holding it up to the car’s back window, hoping to catch the light of the street lamps as we drove slowly home on the icy roads.

I listened to it immediately when I arrived home.

In March, Tori Amos began her Dew Dropp Inn tour, the same month I moved out of my parent’s house. I turned 17, graduated from high school, and moved with my boyfriend to the college town in Colorado where he grew up.

“Obsessed” is the right word, meaning “haunted: having or showing excessive or compulsive concern with something.” I was haunted by Boys for Pele. I was excessively concerned with each and every lyric, each and every note on her Bösendorfer piano. I had all the lyrics memorized. I joined mailing lists that analyzed the obscure references: “Cut out the flute from the throat of the loon” in “Blood Roses” was from a Michael Ondaatje poem, “chickens get a taste of your meat” (also in “Blood Roses”) was a nod to Alice Walker‘s novel Possessing the Secret of Joy, “does Joe bring flowers to Marilyn’s grave” in “Father Lucifer” is a reference to Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe, “too sons too many too many able fires” in “Doughnut Song” is a reference to Cain and Abel, “pretty hate machine” in “Caught a Lite Sneeze” is a clear reference to the Nine Inch Nails album of the same name.

And it’s not just the references – the artwork, too, had endless interpretations. The famous photo of her suckling a piglet was called her “Madonna and child,” and she joked, “My father [a preacher] always wanted me to do a Christmas card.” The cover showed Tori with bare muddy feet and a ripped skirt with a dead cock hanging on one side and a live snake curled around the chair she’s in, a shotgun casually laid across her lap.

The title of the album refers to the Hawaiian volcano goddess Pele, and the boys she was tempted to sacrifice to her, but instead focused on these songs, which she calls “girls,” to do the sacrificing for her. It is a take-no-prisoners album about self-discovery and self-creation in the wake of failed heterosexual gender dynamics: “I didn’t want to play seductive little girl or ballbuster any more. With this record I played all those roles until I got to my heart. To find your fire as man or woman you have to take your torch and go to the shadows.”

And go into the shadows she did – and I eagerly followed her, desperate to find some way to make sense of my coming of age, my transition into adulthood, my gender, my sexuality.

I started a Tori Amos fan site, called A Watercolour Stain, a lyric from “Father Lucifer,” my favorite track on the album and still one of my favorite songs of hers. It resided on Geocities for three years, until 1999, where it moved to 189 shows.

Jason Elijah, another Toriphile from that time period who still runs yessaid.org, recently put forth dozens of digital recordings from that tour on his personal blog. Of the Dew Dropp Inn tour, he notes: “She let her voice go wild, belting out the most dramatic and intense performances of her career – hisses, moans, wails, wild improvisations and raw screams. This was a Tori Amos unlike anything you’d ever heard on record or in concert before, and it’s something you’d never hear again after this tour. Tori has even admitted that she is somewhat embarrassed by these intense, wild performances.”

But I wasn’t embarrassed by these intense, wild performances: I was enthralled. It was touching something deep in me and waking up.

See, this album is about men, and women’s relationships with men, and, as Tori herself put it, stealing fire from men: “The album is […] about the way I’ve stolen fire from the men in my life. And I got tired of doing that ’cause I have my own. But I couldn’t see that for a very long time. And now I can respect them without needing to suck their blood.”

Sure, the many different references to the men in her life having failed her (“shave every place where you’ve been, boy”; “he likes killing you after you’ve died,” “I run and then I run from him and then I run”) spoke deeply to me and my increasingly failed heterosexual relationship, but it was two key lines that squirmed their way under my skin and wrapped around my heart:

“you think i’m a queer / i think you’re a queer” (“Blood Roses”)

“so are you gay / are you blue / thought we both could use a friend / to run to” (“Hey Jupiter”)

At first, they were just fun, poetic lines that spoke to my budding inner bisexuality. But then, I didn’t really want to listen to those lines. They stuck with me. They trailed after me, after every thought I thought and every line I wrote and every quarrel I had with my boyfriend. I needed this album to leave a bad relationship. I needed this album to come into my queerness.

Gradually the homosexual and specifically lesbian references in this album became everything to me, and every reason to listen, over and over, to the tracks for just one more “a ha!” moment of recognition. Each day it was a different line. Each listen brought new meaning somewhere. I got to the point where I would feel a little off, like something was just not right, if I didn’t listen to the full Boys for Pele album every day.

It was about the time that I noticed this that I realized my obsession needed a little taming.

And it was about this time when a friend said to me, “I don’t understand the heavy obsession with musicians or artists. I think people are taking all of their original creativity and funneling it into someone else’s art – think about how much more original work we’d have in the world if we allowed ourselves to be inspired instead of obsessed?”

It didn’t feel like a criticism, more like an observation, and it resonated. I was funneling my energies into the wrong places. I was not creating, I was piggybacking. And so my own work was born. My own personal online writing projects began, journaling and writing myself into a new life, and, eventually, into my adult queer butch self.

This album came along at a time when I needed guidance, needed language for my suffering, and needed context for my struggles. When I needed to come out, to find a new sense of myself. I would say this album was the “guiding light,” but really it was more like the shaman who took me into my nightmares such that I could confront them with their guidance and support. It took me into the shadows to illuminate the demons with which I’d been struggling. It explained my life to me in a new way.

Happy 15th anniversary, Boys for Pele. Your sonic novel changed my life.

Lesbian Apparel and Accessories Gay All Day sweatshirt -- AE exclusive

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Back to top button