“I
may not win,
But
I can't be thrown.”—“Out Here On My Own,” lyrics by Lesley Gore, music by
Michael Gore, sung by Irene Cara on “Fame”:The Original Soundtrack From The Motion Picture (1980)
It’s
hard for me to believe that Lesley Gore
died in Manhattan of lung cancer at age 68 a year ago today. As a child, I grew
up with her hits of the Sixties—“It’s My Party,” “Judy’s Turn to Cry,” “You
Don’t Own Me”—constantly on the radio, and recall her guest appearances on The Donna Reed Show and Batman. She was a special source of
local pride as well, growing up in Tenafly, the town just north of me in Bergen
County, N.J.
Lou
Christie, who started out when Gore was at her teen zenith, recalled his friend
in a blog post written last year by Scott Mervis for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
“Lesley
was a protected new star who seemed way above it all until you had some time
alone with her. She was fun, smart and talented with a sense of humor that was
her secret glory. Her taste in music surpassed any teen angel that was on the
charts at the time. Raised on jazz, show tunes and standards, Lesley could sing
them all and did. The smokey timber of her unforgettable sound was hers and
hers alone. I loved her independence, loved signing with her, loved every hit
record she had.”
And
then…It seemed that she dropped off a cliff. When she went off to Sarah
Lawrence College, she might as well have been dead to the record industry that
couldn’t get enough of her work just a couple of years before. Folk music was
in vogue at that point. Pop music—especially her kind, released in her teens
and increasingly regarded as childish—was not a favorite of deejays.
But
Gore would not be “thrown.” She re-emerged over a decade later, this time as a
creator of songs rather than just an interpreter of them, with her work on the Fame soundtrack.
“Out Here on My Own,” co-written with her brother Michael, is an excellent example
of how an artist can create mainstream music, within the context of a song
meant to serve the plot of a film, and yet still spring from the deepest
wellspring of experience.
The
Oscar-nominated song begins tremulously, with lyrics filled with loneliness and fear—not just
what a youth hoping to find herself might feel, or even (as in the film) what a
student at a demanding performing-arts school might experience, but also what
Gore, a lesbian, would have felt when her orientation was not widely accepted
by the public and needed to be hidden. (“Make believing is hard alone.”) It
ends at the most realistically hopeful point—not with conquest, but with
survival, in itself a form of victory. (For Gore's own fine rendition, see this YouTube clip from 2011.)
Songwriting
assured that Gore would indeed survive, broadening her audience even as it
enabled baby boomer fans to see that she was not simply an oldies act, frozen
in time. That is part of the reason why I chose this particular photo of her.
An image from her Sixties heyday would have been more instantly recognizable, but
would have not reflected the hard-won creative and personal triumph she gained
in adulthood just for being herself.
A
concert Gore gave at the College of Staten Island in 2009 somehow seems
symbolic of her career. Midway through a well-received set, she was
interrupted by the smoke alarm. She resumed with an equally fine second act,
telling her appreciative audience, "Sorry for the inconvenience, but
nothing can really stop me from singing."
Nothing,
as it turned out, but death itself.
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