Cher by Mark Bego Read Free Book Online Page B

Centro. There were about ten truck drivers per room. Really heavy bull dykes. I was introduced to a few of them my first night there. One girl, Alex—I don’t know what her real name was—she told me about this guy she loved and I told her about Sonny. I don’t know what happened to her” (33). Anyway, Cher discovered that nothing could keep her and Sonny apart, and back to him she fled. “I was kind of impressed with Sonny,” she says. “He was the first guy to ever treat me well, to hold doors open for me. He took me to nice little places, like this little pizza place” (34).
    While Cher was out of town with her mother, Sonny had a one-night stand with a woman named Mimi. Sonny was lonely, and thought nothing of it at the time. However, a couple of months later, Mimi informed Sonny that she was pregnant, and it was his child. Sonny made a financial settlement, and Mimi gave birth to a son named Sean. According to Sonny, he told Cher the whole story, and she wasn’t upset. “It wasstrange,” claimed Sonny, “Our relationship wasn’t overly physical anyway, so maybe she felt some of the pressure was off her to perform” (35). Yet, they were still very much in love.
    Meanwhile, back at Phil Spector’s Gold Star Studios, in Hollywood, California, the producer was busy pumping out classic pop records by the Ronettes, the Crystals, Darlene Love, and Bob B. Soxx & the Blue Jeans. The interesting thing about the Crystals was the fact that although there was a group of girls known as the Crystals, there could be any number of different girls on each record. Frequently, the lead vocal would be sung by Darlene Love. According to her, “My voice was on mostly all those lead songs. Spector put the Crystals name on them, Bob B. Soxx & the Blue Jeans, Darlene Love, nobody knew the difference” (13). Recording under several different names, including her own, Darlene Love is responsible for being the sound of more different acts’ hits than any other star in rock and roll.
    Darlene recalls first meeting Cher at Gold Star Studios: “Sonny started bringing this girl with him. She was tattered-looking with straight hair and really dark make-up” (36). It wasn’t long before Cher was a permanent fixture at the studio. As long as Sonny was there, Cher was there too.
    Songwriter Ellie Greenwich (“River Deep, Mountain High”), who worked with Spector, explains of Phil Spector’s operation, “He also owned most of the names, so he had the right to make whoever he wanted to be the Crystals” (13). This demonstrated very clearly to Sonny how any one performer or group of performers could actually have several different personas—like he and Cher eventually did.
    When Cher returned to Los Angeles, she and Sonny resumed their unconventional but very strong love affair. Sonny was driven by a desire to turn Cher into a singing star. Although at times she was painfully shy, she kept telling him how much she wanted to be a huge star one day. He was determined to make her dream come true. It became his top priority.
    Together they completely meshed. Sonny and Cher were like two misfits who somehow fit together. Recalls Cher of their chemistry, “We were both very strange people, very unmainstream, and when we came together, we weren’t freaky anymore for each other. We fit each other. We both had the same kind of dreams, and we liked the same thing. We thought the same thing was cool” (28).
    One night at the recording studio Cher was hanging out with him and watching all of the activity during one of Spector’s sessions. That particular evening Phil was working on a new song by the Ronettes called “BeMy Baby.” According to legend, Darlene Love didn’t show up to record her background part of the song, and they needed another voice on the record. As Cher recalls, “Somebody said to me, ‘Can you sing?’ I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Well, can you carry a tune?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ And he said, ‘Well, get out