Authors: Mark Bego
The album containing “You Better Sit Down Kids,” 1968’s
With Love, Cher
, was Cher’s fourth solo LP for Imperial. Buoyed by her second Top 10 solo hit, the album reached Number 47 in America. It included her controversial classics “You Better Sit Down Kids” and “Mama (When My Dollies Have Babies),” which set a pattern for her biggest 1970s hits. She excelled at songs that were little soap-opera stories set to rock music. These were truly the precursors to her later hits “Gypsys, Tramps and Thieves,” “Half Breed,” and “Dark Lady.”
With Love, Cher
also included Phil Ochs’s “There but for Fortune,” Sonny’s “But I Can’t Love You More,” and—naturally—Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” Many of rock stylists were discovering the classic songs of Richard Rodgers & Lorenz Hart during this era, including the Mamas & the Papas, Bobby Darin, and the Supremes. Not one to miss a musical wave, on this album Cher covered the songwriting team’s “Sing for Your Supper.”
Cher quickly followed it up with her second solo album of 1968,
Backstage
. The cover of the album depicted Cher looking at her reflection in a dressing-room mirror, as though pensively psyching herself up for a performance. She is made up in her most Cleopatra-like fashion, with her distinctive dark bangs and shoulder-length straight hair. Musically, she ran the gamut of current songs that were hot at the time. On it she covered the Moody Blues hit “Go Now,” Tim Hardin’s “Reason to Believe,” Bacharach and David’s “A House Is Not a Home,” the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Do You Believe in Magic,” Miriam Makeba’s exotic African-rhythmed “The Click Song,” and naturally a Bob Dylan tune, “Masters of War.”
The album, which features some of Cher’s strongest 1960s singing, failed to produce any hit singles and never made the charts. She stretched out into a diverse number of musical directions. On “Carnival,” Cher is cast in a Brazilian jazz setting, and she delivers a wonderful string-laden rendition of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “A House Is Not a Home.” Especially jarring was Dylan’s scaldingly bitter antiwar protest song, “Masters of War.” In the song Cher denounces the bureaucracy of war. To hear Cher sing “I hope that you die” to warmongers on this Dylan cut one minute, and then jump into the Lovin’ Spoonful’s lilting
song of love, “Do You Believe in Magic,” the next comes across as a bizarre musical transition to say the least.
Much of 1968 was spent on the preproduction and production of the film
Chastity
. Against the advice of everyone he asked, Sonny decided to finance the film himself, which turned out to be a huge mistake. Sonny and Cher went to New York City that year to see what they could do to help raise the funds necessary to finance this project. While there, they checked into the St. Regis Hotel and planned meetings with Francis Ford Coppola and William Friedkin. In residence at that hotel was surreal artist Salvador Dali. When Dali ran into the oddly dressed singing duo in the hallway, he invited them up to his suite for dinner. Sensing that they were making a potentially helpful contact for their film project, they accepted. However, Dali had other things in mind for them.
When they arrived at Dali’s suite, they were dismayed to find women lounging in see-through blouses and openly gay men being affectionate with each other. Sonny surmised that they had been invited up for some sort of kinky sex scene, which in no way interested them. After an hour of nonsensical talk with the famous painter, finally the party got ready to leave for the restaurant next door to the hotel. However, in the middle of the evening, Dali excused himself and left, never to return. If Dali thought that he was going to get involved in some sort of a sex scene with Sonny AND Cher, he was sadly mistaken. In spite of their revolutionary unisex clothes, Sonny and Cher were quite “square” when it came to sex and drugs.
Ultimately unable to find anyone to invest money in the movie folly that they wanted to produce, Sonny took the couple’s savings account, and even hocked their furniture, to raise the funds.
Chastity
was filmed in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1968, and proved to be an exhausting ordeal. They hired director Allesio de Paola and a leading man by the name of Steve Whittaker. During filming, Sonny found that Cher was getting just a little too close to Whittaker and suspected that they were having an affair. Although he didn’t corner her and demand her to stop, he did emphasize that their entire career was pivoting on the success or failure of this film, and that he loved her very much. After that she and Steve cooled it. During the time their movie was filming, one night Sonny and Cher made love and woke up the next morning, convinced that Cher had conceived. They were thrilled to find out that they were correct and determined that Cher would not miscarry this time.
Throughout much of 1968, it seemed that Sonny & Cher were scrambling not to lose touch with the young audience that had made them stars
in the first place. In June of that year, Sonny & Cher were among the stars of the “Soul Together” concert at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Their costars included Sam & Dave, Aretha Franklin, Joe Tex, King Curtis, and the Rascals.
On August 4, 1968, Sonny & Cher were one of the top acts headlining the Newport Pop Festival at Costa Mesa, California. They appeared alongside Canned Heat, Steppenwolf, the Grateful Dead, the Byrds, and Jefferson Airplane. This was the antithesis of what they were really all about as a duo. Those other five acts represented the height of the drug culture Sonny Bono claimed to abhor. This was really the opposite of what their personal life together was all about.
By the end of 1968, Sonny and Cher weren’t hanging out with the Rolling Stones, Joni Mitchell, or Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. They were hanging out with the old guard of Hollywood, like Lucille Ball, Johnny Carson, Mitzi Gaynor, and Rosalind Russell. On the night of the November 1968 presidential election, Cher and Sonny were invited over to comedian Jack Benny’s house to watch the election coverage with him and his elite guests. Apparently there was a difference of opinion between the guests when Richard Nixon gave his acceptance speech that night on television. Cher recalls that when Lucille Ball made comically disparaging remarks at the television screen while Nixon spoke on and on, she aggravated
Tonight Show
host Carson. Cher, Rosalind Russell, and Lucy were reprimanded and sent to the den since they couldn’t stop giggling and making rude jokes about Nixon. Such social evenings were indicative of how square and out of touch Sonny and Cher’s life really was. Here they were trying to remain “hip” and in-touch with the young record buyers who had made them stars, yet they were ensconced in the establishment of old Hollywood.
As Cher was to put it in her 1998 book,
The First Time
, “By 1968, Sonny and I had fallen off the charts. . . . Son’s straight-ahead, upbeat music started to sound simplistic and corny. . . . Son and I became so old-fashioned so quickly” (25). According to her, they went from being hip and in to becoming part of the “Geritol” geriatric vitamin set—seemingly overnight.
On March 4, 1969, Cher gave birth to a daughter, whom she and Sonny named Chastity, after the movie they had just completed. Chastity made her debut to the world at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles, California. The birth of their daughter was a very happy event for the couple. Unfortunately, their film of the same name was a huge failure.
Although
Good Times
was no
Gone with the Wind
, the experience somewhat went to Bono’s head. By investing everything in the film
Chastity
, Sonny surmised that Cher would surely become a major movie star and he would become a dynamic force in the film business. Unfortunately, the plan backfired, and they found themselves in hock right up to their ears.
The 1969 release of the film was meant to bring Sonny & Cher back to their young audience. The film was all about a young girl who runs away from home to discover the world and, more importantly, herself. As Chastity, the character in the film, Cher hitchhikes from one soul-searching experience to another, finally ending up in a whorehouse having a lesbian affair with the madam of the brothel. According to Sonny, the film was about “the increase in frigidity and the increase in lesbianism . . . the lack of manhood. The independence women have acquired but don’t necessarily want. So many young girls are just spinning their wheels” (13).
Their manager at the time, Joe De Carlo, claimed that
It was a brilliant movie. But, Sonny wouldn’t let anyone finance it, because he didn’t want any advice from anyone. And you know you should never put your own money into anything. Sonny is a creative guy, but he has a tremendous ego. He thought the picture would make Cher a great movie star and make them a ton of money (13).
Aside from the film, Sonny & Cher were paying for the thirty-one-room house they had purchased, which was well over their means—especially if anything happened to compromise their income. It was located on St. Cloud Drive in Bel Air and had been sold to them by Tony Curtis for $250,000. According to Sonny, it was purchased on a whim: “Cher would pine for that house. She’d say, ‘God Son, I want to live there’ ” (17). So he bought it for her. In other words, they were really counting on the film
Chastity
becoming a huge hit.
As Cher tells the story,
Sonny decided he wanted to make this movie,
Chastity
. He wrote it, and it was one of the best scripts I’ve ever read—especially compared with all the scripts I’m seeing now, which are mostly shit. But he shouldn’t have had me do it. Because it was me, his wife—and he’s very Italian—he just kept changing it to make things less rough for me. Basically, I wasn’t ready. So he spent a whole year and all of our bread on this movie. And then I got pregnant in the middle of it and I couldn’t work during the pregnancy. So, when Chastity was born, we owed the government, I don’t know, something like $190,000 (18).
The reviews were mixed. Just about everyone hated the movie, but only some of the critics hated Cher’s acting. According to the
New York Post
, “Nothing happens. . . . the performances are devoid of acting presence. Cher is such a non-actress that her performance [does] work, or at least it is inoffensive” (50). Said William Wolf of
Cue
magazine, “Cher has a marvelous quality that often makes you forget the lines you are hearing. Her manner can be described as a combination of tough, disinterested, unhappy, self-critical, and deadpan, offset by sudden jaunty movements of her flexible body” (51).
Sonny and Cher reportedly lost $500,000 of their own money, and ended up owing the government $270,000 in tax debt. “I fought him all the way,” claimed Cher of her husband’s filmed folly. While her opinion of
Good Times
was “I didn’t want to do it, and I was terrible in it,” her opinion of
Chastity
was “That was terrible, too. But I got some good notices” (52).
Cher released a single from the movie
Chastity
, which was written by Elyse Weinberg and produced by Sonny. The song was called “Chastity’s Song (Band of Thieves)” and it was also a huge flop. Sonny & Cher were dropped from ATCO Records, and Cher was dropped from Imperial Records. However, ATCO was willing to sign Cher for a solo album, but only if Sonny wasn’t producing. In the eyes of the record industry, “Chastity’s Song” and the duo’s recent string of misfires proved that Bono was totally out of touch with the record-buying market and was a bad judge of what would and would not sell to teenagers.
A heavyweight trio of the best producers from Atlantic/ATCO Records took the helm of Cher’s 1969 album
3614 Jackson Highway
. The album title was the address of the famous Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where it was recorded. The producers—Jerry Wexler, Tom Dowd, and Arif Mardin—were all known for their hit-making successes with Aretha Franklin and a host of other Atlantic recording artists. The songs that they chose for Cher should have made this album a rock and roll classic. The album included Stephen Stills’s “For What It’s Worth,” which was a hit for the Buffalo Springfield; “(Sittin’ On) the Dock of the Bay,” which was a huge smash for Otis Redding; and “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man,” which was an Aretha Franklin classic. Just for good luck, they even threw in three different Bob Dylan
songs, including “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You,” “I Threw It All Away,” and the recent Dylan hit, “Lay Baby Lay” (originally “Lay Lady Lay”). Compared to the Spector-esque sound of her Bono-produced 1960s solo albums, the sound here seemed very flat.
Jerry Wexler was later to say of Cher’s talent, “I don’t think Cher has a conscious, sophisticated, head appreciation of music. She’s not formal or academic. Just flows, you know? No sense of propulsion, it’s a sublimation of personality and suppression of the personal musical signature in favor of complete surrender to music” (33).
Unfortunately,
3614 Jackson Highway
was classified as an instant “bomb.” It sold few copies, and only made it to Number 160 on the album charts in America. The music and arrangements are very stripped down and low-keyed. While trying to emphasize her hit-making track record as a hippie chick–Dylan interpreter, the producers also removed her pop sparkle.
The liner notes to the album were written by Cher in her own handwriting. She penned these sage words of wisdom to her fans:
I want to write something that when you read it you’ll say “Yeh [sic] that’s really groovy,” but all I can tell you is what’s in my heart, and if you can dig it then I’m happy and if you can’t then I’m sorry. Music sets me free; it makes me feel all the things of life. Sometimes when I hear a groovy song it makes me want to get in my car and just drive and sing at the top of my lungs, other times when I hear a song it makes me cry. I don’t know if I’m sad or happy but it really doesn’t matter. Music can take you away from the bad and bring you closer to the good in life, I really hope the music in this album brings you closer. Peace. (53)