It’s hard to categorize Storm Large. And she likes it that way.
The singer, who describes herself as “sexually omnivorous” (ahem, bisexual), has spent most of her career as a singer and performer doing whatever inspires her with no regard to what anyone might think — whether it’s her own brand of rock music, her one-woman show based on her recent memoir “Crazy Enough,” touring with jazz/pop group Pink Martini or appearing on the reality-TV competition “Rock Star Supernova.”
So what will happen when Storm Large takes the stage June 19 at World Cafe Live is anyone’s guess.
“It always turns into a one-woman show,” she said. “I tell stories, especially when it’s just me and a piano. It’s an intimate space. I kind of veer off the track and talk about the songs and tell stories about my recent adventures or misadventures on the road. But it’s unscripted. It’s going to be an off-the-cuff fun cabaret performance.”
Large is full of stories. One we were interested to hear is how she ended up singing for Pink Martini. It turned out Pink Martini singer and friend China Forbes had Large in mind when she had to sit out some performances for medical reasons.
“I get this panicky phone call from [Pink Martini pianist] Thomas Lauderdale begging me to please, please come to Washington, D.C., to sing at the Kennedy Center for Pink Martini because China has been ordered to stay on vocal rest,” Large said. “I of course said, ‘No, just cancel the show. You can’t throw me in there. I don’t know any of your music.’ He said, ‘You can learn it.’ And the concert was in five days. He begged and begged and finally China wrote me an email saying I’d be doing them a favor and I didn’t have to know it by heart. So I learned 10 songs in five languages in as many days. The next thing I know, I’m at the Kennedy Center with Pink Martini for four sold-out shows.”
Those four shows resulted in a semi-permanent gig for Large.
“She needed surgery and they had huge tours booked,” Large said. “So we worked it out with my band and I toured with Pink Martini all last year and we all had such a good time. China has a little boy at home and she was kind of enjoying time with her family, so now we’re at a happy situation where China tours half the time and I tour half the time with Pink Martini. It’s mutually beneficial and we love it. It’s turned into a great situation for everybody.”
Large said that even though she never envisioned herself as the kind of vocalist Pink Martini would be interested in, she relished the opportunity to stretch her creative legs and perform with the group.
“China is very elegant and she is classy and beautiful,” she said. “Her visage on stage is much more elegant and classic. My energy on stage, whether I’m talking or just standing there, is kind of a va-voom big blond American energy, an old Hollywood kind of deal. That was an adjustment for audiences. But they knew the story that I was doing everyone a favor and that I wasn’t some whore that came along and stole the post. It’s cool. It’s made me a better musician and singer because it’s so different than what I’m used to. But it’s classical-style singing. So my voice has gotten stronger. I’m very happy about that.”
Large’s ability to take on a number of different genres of music may have been exciting and fulfilling for her creatively, but she said it has also proven somewhat confusing to music-industry officials whenever they started sniffing around her and her career.
“When I started playing music, the resounding call that I always heard from labels was: ‘We don’t know what to do with you,’” she said. “So I’ve been independent for 20 years. Labels have never given me a shot because I don’t fit in a box. They’re like, ‘You’re kind of hot but you’re kind of old’ [Large is 42] or ‘Your lyrics are smart.’ ‘You want to sing rock ’n’ roll but you’re kind of pretty.’ I just didn’t fit anywhere. I fit more in a theatrical cabaret world where the scope is much more open and inclusive — so long as you’re entertaining and you’re not a complete douchebag. People appreciate quality and hard work in that world.
“I’ve always stymied music-industry people but they don’t even know I exist anymore because they’re pretty much dead. The Internet has really changed the landscape of all forms of expression and business of selling those expressions. Which is great because the old way was so stupid. They were looking for the lowest common denominator. They just love mediocre stupid shit. Whereas audiences have always preferred to find their own new thing and champion it.”
Given her experiences with the music industry, it seems kind of odd that Large would participate in a TV show like “Rock Star: Supernova,” a 2006 reality-show competition in which music-industry insiders searched for a singer to front a rock band featuring ex-members of Motley Crüe, Guns n’ Roses and Metallica. She didn’t win, but she said the exposure she got from the show was worth it.
“That was a really hard decision,” she said of the experience. “I was like, ‘I’m going to lose all credibility if I go do this.’ I figured come fame or shame, this will be, for as long as I am on television, a Storm Large commercial that I didn’t have to pay for. The most expensive aspect of being an independent artist is advertising and getting your brand out there. Television is the way people shop for products and things and personalities. [“Rock Star Supernova”] was about music. It wasn’t about the drama. There was some drama but it was more about music and performing than it was about who was sleeping with who. I knew whatever happened, it would get my name out there much farther and faster than I would be able to do on my own from my little corner of Portland.”
Large’s name definitely got out there enough to generate interest in her memoir, “Crazy Enough,” which was released earlier this year. In it, she talks about her childhood and visiting her mother in mental institutions and psych wards dealing with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, multiple-personality disorder and depression. When she was 9, doctors told Storm her mother’s condition was hereditary and she would end up like her in her 20s.
Storm spent her teenage years diving headlong into sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. In her 20s, facing a growing heroin addiction, she accepted an invitation to sing with a friend’s band and rediscovered her love of music, which inspired her to get her life back into some kind of order.
But the doctors’ predictions were mere words.
“That wasn’t so much the molding factor of my emotional development as a girl and a person,” Large said. “Looking at it in a large scope, everyone wants to be loved, and a mother is the first physical manifestation of love and that you’re going to be OK in this life, and it was taken away from me very quickly. So I was brought into the world with a lot of hope and dreams and suddenly I’m cut off and isolated. So I think that had a lot to do with who I am today more than what anybody said. My sexuality was formed out of desperation and neediness and loneliness, the hungry hollow ghost that I was.
“I think my life has been more about seeking the love that was absent from those early years and filling my life up with as much of it as I possibly can. And now it’s in a much healthier way than it was when I was a teenager.”
Large said that writing her memoir provided moments of revelation that surprised even her.
“Writing anything is just brutally lonely,” she said. “I’m sitting there going, This is the stupidest thing ever. I’m an idiot. Why do I think this is interesting? One revelation was deep, undying respect for writers. God bless them; I understand why so many are terrible alcoholics. Another revelation was the way we remember things when terrible things happen in our past. Most people remember them in a snapshot. And there might be feelings associated with that. In exploring it and putting the skin I was in back on, I realized that a lot of the terrible things that I experienced were my own fucking fault and my own choices that I was making. I suffered mightily in my quest to be tough and be cool and to be a man. Really, I wanted to be a man. I thought women were weak. My mother was the only representation of a woman in my life and she was weak and she wanted to die and she was small and she wept and hid and medicated and ran away. And I thought she was the weakest thing ever. So I thought being like a man would make me happy, strong and safe. In an effort to do that, I did a lot of hurtful things to others and to myself. So, realizing you had a hand in your misery is a healthy thing, but it’s humbling.”
Storm Large performs 9:30 p.m. at World Cafe Live, 3025 Walnut St. For more information or tickets, visit www.stormlarge.com or call 215-222-1400.