If you find yourself rocking out to three hot little 20-something lesbians at OutFest, you have Linda Lewis to thank.
As booking agent extraordinaire, she is bringing a hot new group, Hunter Valentine, to entertain the folks next Sunday. The Canadian trio is so in demand, they just got signed with TommyBoy Records and toured as the opening act for Cyndi Lauper earlier this summer. PGN spoke with Lewis about her passion for music and dedication to promoting independent artists.
PGN: Are you a Philly gal? LL: Yes, I was raised in Center City, Philadelphia, until I was about 10, then my mother got remarried and we moved to New Jersey. PGN: What was growing up in the city like? LL: It was fun. I lived right in the heart of things, on Clinton Street, right between Pine and Spruce. My biological father passed away, and my mother became a single parent, so when she had the chance to go to the suburbs, she went. She and my grandmother thought it would be best for two girls to grow up with grass and trees and open space.
PGN: Siblings? LL: One, I have a younger sister. We didn’t get along growing up. She was the goody-two-shoes and I was the rebel. I’d be out marching and protesting with Jane Fonda and she was a home-economics major, cooking and hoping to meet a nice Jewish boy. She’s very bright but we’re very different.
PGN: Where did you go to school? LL: I went to University of Miami in Florida as a theater major. Ray Liotta was one of my classmates. At the time, though, I was just becoming aware of my sexuality and was more interested in partying than schoolwork. I was hanging out with a lot of the gay guys in the theater and they took me to my first gay club. I later transferred to Temple, where I graduated with a degree in theater and communications and with a minor in art history.
PGN: What was your favorite role? LL: Well, I didn’t last long as an actor. I had one professor who quite bluntly said, “Is there something else you might rather do?” I said, ‘No, I can’t think of anything else.’ And he said, “Well, you should because you’re bloody awful!” Ray Liotta told me that my classmates enjoyed me when I did my little monologues on stage because I was so bad I was funny. I went into stage managing and directing from there.
PGN: How did you get into the work you do now? LL: When I moved back to Philadelphia, I got work as a production stage manager for Philadelphia Theatre Company, but I’ve always had a huge passion for music. I started going to concerts at a very young age and started meeting people in the business. They all told me that because I loved music so much, I should get into it. I started reading up on the business end of things and worked part-time in the music industry. Then I fell in love with a band called Antigone Rising and it changed my life. I invested my own money in the band and took them on tour. I had Michelle Malone open up for them and they played a number of dates on the East Coast. I had a mentor who taught me what to do: I rented out the venues, booked radio interviews, handled the hospitality and paid the band. It can be a risky business, but I learned from my mistakes. Now I’m a full-time booking agent. My company is called Left of Center Productions and I also work with Creative Entertainment Agency. I work with a lot of groups and artists of all kinds, not just in the LGBT community. With CEA, they were booking acts like Joe Piscopo and Tony Bennett and asked me to come on board to help start a department for smaller independent artists. They had an act called the Lesbians of Laughter, and since I was also gay, they thought I’d be good to help out.
PGN: What’s the hardest thing about being a booker? LL: Organizing your day and finding time for things. There’s so much to do in so many areas. I’ll get a call from a group in London saying, “I’m coming to the States: Can you book me for an eight-day tour on the East Coast or Nashville?” All the artists have different needs and business is usually not their forte — which is how it should be; they should be concentrating on creating and performing — but there’s a lot to do. Since I work with a lot of rising artists, the money isn’t there yet either. Some of them may be well known within the indie community, but they haven’t gone mainstream yet. For example, I work with Anne McCue, who is amazing. She’s a singer-songwriter and one of the most kick-ass slide guitarists this side of Bonnie Rait, maybe even better. She’s very talented, but not a lot of people outside the business know about her yet. I don’t think people know how much the artists sacrifice for their music. They’re on the road over 200 days a year. I’ll have an artist arrive on my doorstep after driving 15 hours to do a gig and they’re appreciative that I let them sleep on my couch so they don’t have to pay for a hotel. They might make $200-$300 from a gig, but by the time they pay all their expenses, they are not usually making anything themselves. For me, 10 percent of nothing is nothing — but I can’t help it, I’m just so into what I do.
PGN: What about music gets you excited? LL: Hearing it live. My friends say, “You have all the CDs in the world; you don’t need to leave your house.” But there’s nothing like the live experience. My group Hunter Valentine is a lot of fun live. In addition to OutFest, I’m also hoping to have them at Tin Angel and at Triumph Brewery in New Hope. It’s really great that even though they are not gay venues, they are both clubs that are really open to hosting LGBT artists. And, of course, I really appreciate Franny Price and the folks at Philly Gay Pride for giving Hunter Valentine and so many new musicians a chance to perform.
PGN: When did you come out? LL: Well, I decided to tell my mother when I was about 20. Having raised us for a time as a single mother, she thought at first that it was her fault, but I told her that she raised my sister Karen just the same and she wasn’t gay, so it had nothing to do with her. It was really sweet. She decided to go to the library and learn all she could about it. She went to one of the PFLAG meetings and asked me to go. She said, “You’re coming out, but I am too, as a mother of a gay child. I want to learn all I can so I can help you and be supportive.” At the time, I thought I was too cool for PFLAG, but my friends ganged up on me and said, “If your mother is that cool that she wants to do this, you’d better take your uncool self and go with her.” So I did. I was very lucky that she was so supportive. My sister has a hard time with it. I was popular in school and, in her mind, I wasted the fact that I was pretty and feminine and well liked by doing something she considered perverse.
PGN: Relationships? LL: I tend to go for longterm ones. I was in two relationships that lasted seven years and I was with my last partner for almost 18 years. Unfortunately, my partner was in the closet and told me from the beginning that she would be, so for 18 years we kept it hidden. Not from my family and friends, but from everyone else. I worked at a car dealership for those 18 years and they all thought I was straight. She worked at a major opera company and they didn’t know anything about us, her family didn’t know — it was crazy. When I got back into the music biz, I started to come out again and that’s when we broke up. I came home one night and told her that the Lesbians of Laughter might be getting a TV show. She started crying and said, “That would be cruel of you, because if you come out then people will know about me. How can you be so selfish?” That was the beginning of the end. She’s with a man now and no one has a clue that she was in a relationship with a woman for 18 years.
PGN: Do you represent people other than musicians? LL: Oh yes, I have Katherine Brooks on my roster. She’s the director of the film “Loving Annabelle.” She’s on everyone’s list of hottest lesbians! She started out doing reality television and helped make it what it is today. “The Osbornes” was her first gig, then she worked on Jessica Simpson’s show “The Newlyweds” and also “The Real World.” Right now, she’s working on a film about Julie Krone, the female jockey who is known as one of the greatest horse jockeys of all times, called “The Boys’ Club.”
PGN: What can the community do to support our artists? LL: We really need to get out there and support the people who support us. The other company I work with, CEA, is the only mainstream company that has a division devoted to LGBT artists. We have to make it worth their while to do so. If you are in college, have your school reach out to me to book people you want to see. When you go to a concert, buy the CDs there: Don’t wait until later and order it online. When you buy it online with a mainstream seller, they take a big cut from the artists. Buying a T-shirt or CD directly from the artist might pay for their gas home or a new mic cord. Have a house concert. Get 10 friends to pay $20 each and have the artist perform right in your house. Find ways to support out musicians and artists. I hope that the readers of PGN will get more involved in the movement and think of LGBT artists when there’s a gig opening or when a new artist is coming to your town. It’s all about the music.
To suggest a community member for “Professional Portraits,” write to: Professional Portraits, 505 S. Fourth St., Philadelphia, PA 19147 or [email protected].