By Tracy Rasmussen 

In September, singer/songwriter Graham Nash re-released “Songs for Beginners,” a compilation of music that is just as politically poignant and hard-hitting as it was when it first dropped 35 years ago.

It’s a fact that both pleases and annoys Nash.

“The songwriter in me loves it,” he said “It’s part of the art of songwriting to take an incident and distill it down to its essence, hoping that it will be around for the long term. But quite frankly it pisses me off that these songs are still completely relevant. It’s pathetically disappointing.”

Nash said he came to writing songs with depth and meaning after a successful career writing pop songs for The Hollies.

“I was bitten really early,” he said. “I was practicing my autograph when I was a 13 year old kid. I honed my craft with the Hollies and it was there that I started to realize that really a lot of money was to be made in writing and publishing.”

Once he knew that he wanted to write songs, he started with pop songs, but soon got bored with it.

“They were great pop songs,” he said. “But they were rather shallow, the sort of moon June type and I got a little tired of it. David (Crosby) and Steven (Stills) were writing songs that were introspective and thought provoking and I wanted to do that.”

He said he learned from Crosby and Stills that the best songs are reactions to what’s going on around you.

“They’d just react to their lives,” he said. “I wanted to write about what was happening to me personally. It could be a political song or a human tragedy or a love song. I’ve had a wonderful life with many talented, beautiful women and I pour my heart out.”

It was, in fact, his relationship with Joni Mitchell that led him to the most significant collaboration of his life.

Nash was visiting Mitchell when she was also hosting Crosby and Stills, whom at that time Nash only knew casually.

“They sang the song “You Don’t Have to Cry” in two-part harmony,” Nash said. “At that time I was very unhappy with the Hollies. So I asked them to sing this song again. They looked at each other and sang it again.”

They obliged a third time at Nash’s request, and this time Nash joined in with his own harmony.

“We had to stop singing in the middle of the song and start laughing,” Nash said. “When those notes blended in the air for the very first time a magic door opened on my soul. I wanted that sound. I thought it was incredibly joyful.”

Crosby, Stills and Nash was born in that moment.

“It didn’t really take any time at all,” he said. “It took about seven minutes.”

The show at the Sovereign Performing Arts Center will include some of Crosby and Nash’s favorite songs from the collaboration that began in the 1960s and grew to include Neil Young as well as solo efforts.

“We’re going to do this tour a little differently,” Nash said. “Usually you start with gangbusters rock and roll to get it started, and they you do a couple of things, then a hit, then a couple more things and another hit … but Crosby and I this time want to do it a little differently. We want it to be the absolutely best and most interesting piece of music. We’ve got a great band, too. We’ll be doing the hits, sure, but also some other things that are interesting, musically.”

At this point Nash said he and Crosby are to in tune they have an almost psychic bond, which enhances the music. He said that a couple dozen times Crosby has messed up a line of a song, and Nash has been able to anticipate, know it and mess up the same line in the same way, so that the audience is none the wiser.

“We’re doing really well,” he said. “David is feeling phenomenal. You know he’s trashed himself beyond belief over the years and needed a liver transplant. Most of them last about 8 years, but his has been working 15 or 16 years. He’s lost weight and he’s looking good.”

And the harmonies are still as sweet and joyful as ever.

“It’s been 40 years,” he said. “And we’re still alive and kicking. I love these guys. I never had brothers, but it’s really very much like family for us. I can’t wait for this tour. I’m lucky enough to do what I want now. And we can still sing.”

By Tracy Rasmussen

Meat Loaf doesn’t exactly sound like the name of a Renaissance man, but that’s exactly what the man born as Marvin Lee Aday aka Meat Loaf, is.

“I didn’t want to be called Meat Loaf,” he said, of the nickname he used early in his music career. “I tried to stop it in 1972 before the records came out. I was doing “As You Like It” with Joseph Papp and it’s this big Shakespeare show and I said to him, that maybe I should use my real name.”

Meat Loaf said the Papp’s response to him was basically that if Shakespeare was alive in 1972 he’d probably use the name Meat Loaf, too.

“I was a performer,” he said of that early foray into Shakespeare. “I’m still a performance artist.”

And he’s still Meat Loaf.

On Oct. 24, the man himself, and all that means, will perform at the Reading Eagle Theater at the Sovereign Center.

His performance will include the songs from “the record” that came out shortly after his time on the stage and on screen in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” (where he played Eddie).

“Bat Out of Hell” was released in 1977 and with more than 37 million albums sold, continues to be one of the top selling albums of all time.  It changed Meat Loaf’s life and made sure Meat Loaf, both the name and the singer, were here to stay.

With anthems “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” and the title track, Meat Loaf found the bridge between his work as an actor and his love of music. His show, he said, is as much performance art as it is music.

“I have to win over the audience every night,” he said. “They come expecting to hear me sound like I did 30 years ago. I don’t sound like that.”

He said sinus surgery in 1996 added to the normal changes of aging vocal chords, made him sound different, but that technology back in the 70s really made it impossible for him to ever sound like him, on stage.

“Bat Out of Hell was sped up to get it on the vinyl,” he said. “I never sounded like that. To me it sounds like Alvin and the Chipmunks and it drives me crazy.”

Usually though, he doesn’t listen to the album.

“I haven’t listened to it in a long time,” he said. “I hear it live every night, and 82 percent of the time it’s better now than it was then. I get tired with the three high C’s in the end. They’re not as pure. But it usually sounds better.”

Music, though, is just one part of Meat Loaf. In fact, during a discussion about evacuating for California wildfires, Meat Loaf didn’t mention the Grammy that he won 1994 for “I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)”  on the short list of items he’d take with him.

“I’d take my art,” he said.

Meat Loaf is a collector of both American Impressionist Art, as well as Pulp Art (original paintings used as cover art for pulp fiction) and spoons.

“A lot of that stuff is very rare,” he said of the pulp art. “If I had to leave quick, that’s what I’d take.”

His wife though, who actually did the evacuating, took the Grammy anyway.

Meat Loaf won his Grammy after years of triumph and tragedy. He’s been at both the top of the heap and the bottom of the barrel and is now happy with the way his career is going.

The ups and downs have never steadied him, though, as he’s not confident that he could come back from another failure. He said he still gets horribly nervous before shows and remains a perfectionist about what goes on, onstage.

“I’m always changing things on stage,” he said. “(The band needs to) watch me like a hawk because I’ll extend. It’s all in the moment for me. I live in the moment as an actor, too. If a director says to me, we’ll do seven takes, they’ll all be different. I can’t remember what I did before.”

Yet when he’s back in his hotel room after the show, he’ll play the show over in his head and pick it apart.

“It’s like a video tape in my head,” he said, “And I tell myself what to do to improve, or never let me do that again. I’m a bit of a nut. I’m not crazy but I’m wacky, like a performance artist.”

He doesn’t worry too much about the music either.

“I just try to stay in beat,” he said. “I try to start on time and end on time, but what’s supposed to happen in those bars in between is mine. You won’t hear the album from me.”

But the work that he does in between shows, and the genuine care he takes with both his music and his persona makes him promise that the show will be memorable. He’s lost weight and sees a vocal coach three times a week to make sure his voice stays in shape to hit those high C’s.

“I win over 90 percent of the audience every night,” he said. “I’m so worried about doing a bad show that I get so nervous. If I have a bad show I’m crushed. But I think on this tour we’re doing some of the best shows we’ve done in the past 16 years.”

By Tracy Rasmussen

Country superstar Dolly Parton has had to work a lot longer than “9 to 5” to achieve her multi-pronged success, but she really wouldn’t have it any other way.

Most recently, she’s been touring for several months in support of the recently released “Backwoods Barbie,” and will bring her show to the Sovereign Center Nov. 7.

“It’s all a part of me,” she said of her work in music and in movies, and most recently as writer of the stage version of “9 to 5” which is expected to hit Broadway in 2009. “I just love the business end of it. If you’re going to create something, you’ve got to think about how you’re going to market it.”

It was, in fact, that type of thinking at created Dolly Parton as much as her music.
“I had this product that I wanted to sell,” she said. “It was my performing. I try to think of it as the music business and you can’t just throw it out to anyone and then move on to a new product. So I got involved. God created me, but he gave me the go-ahead to do what I could with it.”

So in her case, Parton created a character that was at its foundation herself, but with enough embellishment to make her a brand, long before branding was a normal part of the entertainment business.

“I created this look from a serious place,” she said. “It’s in the song (“Backwoods Barbie” that I wanted to go from rags to wishes, and I was trying to make my dreams come true. Frederick’s of Hollywood was a country girl’s idea of glamour and that’s how I wanted to look.”

In addition to being the title cut from her newest CD, “Backwoods Barbie” is also a song from the musical version of “9 to 5.”

In addition, she said, she augmented what she perceived to be her shortcomings.

“I was short, so I wore high heels,” she said. “If my fingers were short, I’d have long fingernails. I just kind of made everything work for me because I wanted an outlet for my talent. I think of myself as a showgirl and I’ve never been bashful about being in the public eye. I’ll see a plastic surgeon. I just do whatever I do to make me confident. The fact that I’m overexaggerated means that I can always look like me.”

Although the big hair, big bust and big nails are easily identifiable, Parton’s talent both for music and for business are what have actually driven her career for the past five decades, first as a duo with Porter Wagoner and then as a solo act.

Her first solo single charted at number 17 on the country charts in 1968, and during the past 40 years she’s topped those charts more than two dozen times with more than 100 charted songs. Hits like “Coat of Many Colors,” “Here You Come Again,” and “Jolene,” have brought her fame (and you’ll likely hear them at Friday’s show), while her sharp business acumen has allowed her to expand her work into movies, her theme park in Tennessee, Dollywood, philanthropy, music publishing and even a water park.

She’s been nominated for two Academy Awards (for writing “9 to 5” in 1980 and “Travelin’ Thru” the theme from “Transamerica” in 2006), earned seven Grammy Awards and is one of a handful of women to win the esteemed Entertainer of the Year award from the Country Music Association. She’s got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1999 and was given the National Medal of Arts for excellence in the arts in 2005. She was a Kennedy Center honoree in 2006 and last year earned songwriting’s top honor, the Johnny Mercer Award.

In between all the accolades she finished a musical version of “9 to 5” which has already been produced on the west coast and is looking to open on Broadway in April, 2009.

“We’re excited about that,” she said. “I got to write all the words and music and that was a first for me. I really enjoyed the process of it. We’ve gotten some good reviews and I just hope that our luck holds.”

Writing the musical has taken five years, Parton said, adding that it wasn’t difficult, but did require a lot of tinkering through the years.

“It doesn’t take me long to write a song,” she said. “I get in my God zone and let the inspiration come to me. Sometimes it’s the title, sometimes the music comes first, sometimes the words and music come together. I just do it all different ways.”

She does need some time alone to write songs, though.

“I love to have time aside and go to my old home or my lake house and just sit and kind of just open myself up,” she said. “I’m more relaxed when I’m at home, but I usually put on make up and put in a few hot rollers to look nice. I don’t always look exactly like the cartoon part that I sometimes do on stage, but I like to be comfortable and who I am.”

Music has come easily to her since she was a child, she said, but she’s never taken it for granted.

“I love to rhyme and I love to write, just like all my mother’s people,” she said. “I’m just an open book.”

By Tracy Rasmussen

Mia Farrow has dueled with devils both real and simulated since she was a child and the battles have strengthened her convictions as much as her sense of humor.

She talks about the struggles, the missteps, the embarrassments and then remembers that her life is not really at all about the tragedy.

“Oh my, it sounds like all I’m going to talk about are the ruminations of an aging person,” she said, of her upcoming Town Hall lecture. “My speech is also funny. I can look at a lot of the things that happened to me and, in hindsight, they’re funny.”

Farrow, 59, will speak about “Embracing Our Future,” on Oct. 5 and 6 in Reading, in the Town Hall Lecture Series that benefits the programs of the Reading Junior League.

“I think I’ll talk about the mutual search for meaning in life,” she said. “It’s certainly been an issue for me. I had early successes and an early family but I still had to find the meaning.”

The lessons have not always been easily learned, but now she said she thinks it’s all sinking in.

“I think that what I’ve learned is that what I’d been looking for my whole life wasn’t really what I needed,” she said. “I think that we really all need to find a way to contribute meaningfully … it’s extremely important.”

It took a long time and a lot of mistakes, she said, to really open her eyes to that.

“I was always barking up the wrong tree,” she said. “And getting myself into messes.”

Farrow’s lived nearly all her life in the unblinking public eye.

As the daughter of director John Farrow and Maureen O’Sullivan (Jane to Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan) she made her acting debut at a teen-ager in one of her father’s films, but found notoriety as one of the stars of the television soap opera Peyton Place and then super-stardom as the unwitting wife of a Satanist in Rosemary’s Baby.

When Farrow was nine years old she beat polio; when she was a young teen she was sent to Europe to attend a convent school (her father was a devout Catholic).

She was married to Frank Sinatra, who was 30 years older than her and two years later served her divorce papers while she was on a movie set, and she parented six children with director Andre Previn  whom she divorced in 1979 after nine years of marriage. She remained friends with both of those husbands after the marriages ended.

And her lionized and vilified affair and break-up with director Woody Allen is still fodder for gossips.

Farrow watched as Allen, her lover for more than a decade, had an affair with and married one of her daughters (Soon Yi Previn, who was eight years old when Allen and Farrow began their relationship). She’s loved and she’s lost. Farrow buried her 19-year-old daughter Tam in 2000, when the young woman died from a heart defect.

Now, though, when much of the chaos has subsided and she’s able to feel happiness and hope in her life, Farrow finds herself working in places that a celebrity doesn’t need to go.

Yet, Farrow is not the average celebrity. As a special representative for UNICEF, she travels to sometimes war-torn and always destitute countries to bring awareness to the tragedy of life there.

“I’ve been to Nigeria and Angola,” she said. “I go and I listen and I observe. It’s fact-finding and I want to do it. I do it for the children.”

She said, in fact, that she couldn’t refuse to participate.

Farrow tells the story of a baby drowning in a river.

“If you’re walking by and you see a baby drowning, of course you’d jump in to save the child,” she said. “Well, there are children drowning. They may be an ocean away, but they are drowning. We have a responsibility to help them.”

Farrow’s own children know the depths of their mother’s love. As mom to 14 (some biological, some adopted) Farrow has shown that she’s got the stuff to open her home as well as her heart to children who have had a rough start in life.

“Some of them come from profoundly bad situations,” she said, adding that she’s now a grandmother three times over. “I have children from all parts of the world. It’s a mini United Nations.”

But it’s impossible for her to adopt every child who needs help.

“Really it comes down to bringing things like basic health care to them,” she said. “Clean water. Education for women. These are children in need and it’s really a matter of extreme urgency.”

When she’s done with her fact-finding mission, she comes back to this country and reports on all that she’s seen.

“I do the best I can to tell what I’ve seen,” she said. “But it’s just a very different feeling to think that I can be on a plane and be away from there and be in my own home within hours, yet they live in such a dangerous place.”

Farrow hopes that her visit brings as much as it takes.

“I want to offer them some comfort,” she said.

Farrow has started to feel some comfort herself, these days, too, she said.

Her children are still growing (she has a 10-year-old and three 16-year-olds still at home) and all happy. She’s going back to Broadway in January in James Lapine’s Fran’s Bed, in which she plays a dying woman trying to impart wisdom to her children.

And once in a while she even thinks about dating.

“I think I’m the happiest I’ve been,” she said. “There are things in my life that I’d really rather not have experienced, but I have learned how to move on. Sometimes it’s the only decent thing you can do: regret something and move on and try to have better insight.”

Farrow said learning the hard way isn’t always the best way, but at least it’s learning.

“I’ve learned that the man I’m with really needs to have a moral center,” she said. “You can’t be lonely in a relationship. If you don’t share things, then the person you’re with could be capable of anything.”

And, she offers this advice to other women.

“Don’t marry anyone who doesn’t respect his mother,” she said. “In the end, that’s how you’ll be treated. No one told me. Now I know.”