| Morissette's band, sans their frontwoman, swarms the stage, launching into a ferocious Zep-like groove. For all their offstage goofiness and Sunset Strip hairspray residue, the four Muppets are ear-poppingly good musicians, with the kind of enthusiasm that results in lots of flying drumsticks. Guitarist Jesse Tobias, formerly of the band Mother Tongue, came recommended by the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Flea and Dave Navarro, who backed Morissette on "You Oughta Know." The rest-drummer Taylor Hawkins (a self-described "cross between Brad Pitt and Animal"), bassist Chris Chaney and one-time King Swamp guitarist Nick Lashley-"all just showed up and worked out," says Morissette. "If I wasn't in a band with them I would probably have dated each one of them already, except Nick, who's married. But it's too sacred for us to jeopardize our professional relationship." When Morissette finally races onstage, flinging her tresses from side to side before ripping into "All I Really Want," the crowd whoops like an Arsenio audience. The sleeves of her button-down shirt flapping at her sides, Morissette looks like she's taking orders from some other planet. With her eyes practically rolled back in her head, and her left arm waving spasmodically, it's clear that Typical Girl has been left behind at the hotel gym. After a few impressive tosses of her hair, Morissette begins to resemble those terrifying teen starlets of '70s horror films-pig-bloodied Sissy Spacek in Carrie, Linda Blair growling "Your mother sucks cocks in hell" in The Exorcist. You'd best believe that all she really wants is deliverance-"a way to calm the angry voice." Morissette isn't all revenge fantasies and spewed split-pea soup. The flower child with the light-blue nail polish emerges in the lilting singalong "Hand In My Pocket," which finds Morissette exploring the central dichotomies of her existence: her private life versus her stabs at reaching out, apathy versus engagement with the world. "I'm high but I'm grounded / I'm sane but I'm overwhelmed / I'm lost but I'm hopeful," she drawls. Astonishingly, her cult following at 7th House has developed a little routine for the song's chorus. In the lyric, one hand always remains in the aforementioned pocket, while the other goes through a series of easily imitable functions-hailing a taxicab, giving a high five, flicking a cigarette-which our feathered friends demonstrate at the appropriate moments. In perfect unison. Sure it's cheesy, something you'd expect of, say, Hootie & the Blowfish fans-and you know there's gotta be some overlap-but the entire audience partakes, without any prompting from the stage whatsoever. Sometimes cheese is Brie. Morissette doesn't have a clear-cut explanation for the song. When she tells me that she never watches TV, reads nothing but books-she's presently plowing through Marianne Faithfull's autobiography-and that fun for her is climbing a tree with a friend and not speaking for four hours, I suggest that said concealed hand symbolizes the Glenn Gould-like depth of her self-imposed isolation. "Sure, that could be what it's about," she hedges. "Most of those songs were written so quickly that I would write something and sing it, and the next day not remember doing it. It was just exactly the way I was feeling at the time." Morissette has a dark secret, several even, but she's not showing her hand for nothing. She's keeping it in that damn pocket. The following afternoon, Morissette and I commandeer the tour van and spend a Zen-like afternoon on the campus of the Cranbrook Academy of Art, home to more beautiful sculpture gardens than you can shake the Venus de Milo at. We sit in the sun, by a reflecting pool filled with multicolored carp and water lilies and flanked by spitting cherubs, and talk, ironically, about pain. Morissette speaks wisely and authoritatively about her fans' connection with the hurt and anger of her music, recognizing both their need to identify and her own need to purge. "Everybody has to release it somehow," she says. "If you don't, it'll take its toll on you, and it'll either be a physical thing, or all your relationships will be really negative and full of conflict or something. So you have to deal, whether you go through therapy or get into relationships, or music, or write it out in diaries. Smoking cigarettes isn't enough. There's no way around pain. That's part of the charm of being alive." Indeed, Jagged Little Pill's calculatedly eclectic pop-a hip-hop beat here, a folk guitar there, a little extra feedback on the bridge-gets its power from Morissette's willingness to push a little harder emotionally and lyrically than any woman currently working the Buzz Bin. Her voice goes from quirky punches at the ends of lines and awkward, expressive breaths to high piping siren territory, and is all the more impressive for her lack of formal training. "Never had a singing lesson," she beams. "I'm getting a vocal coach, though...." Taking cliches like "you live, you learn" and exploding them into painful conclusions-"You bleed, you learn / You scream, you learn"-Morissette mines the nitty-gritty too often relegated to mere subtext in pop music. Grrrls can't be girls because the media defines them through their anger, and that just makes them angrier. The way in which Morissette carves out space for a broad emotional range is more typical of men: She simply assumes it. "Being able to express both your masculine and feminine sides is a great advantage," asserts the former tomboy. Morissette's gentler (but not necessarily "feminine") side, as heard on "Hand In My Pocket" and the sympathetic "Mary Jane," nestled alongside rants like "You Oughta Know," effects a sea change in pop music by affirming that "angry" and "woman" don't have to add up to "angry woman." "The day that there's no need for feminism, this society has truly woken up," she says. She hasn't even heard Throwing Muses or PJ Harvey. Her career, however, began long before either of theirs, despite her just having turned the legal drinking age last June. Alanis Nadine Morissette, the only daughter of military high school teachers Alan Morissette and Georgia Feuerstein, respectively French Canadian and Hungarian-born, spent most of her first few years in Germany before being whisked back to Ottawa, along with her twin brother Wade and older brother Chad. At nine years of age, before you learned three-place multiplication, she took up piano, and at ten she began to write songs and act, landing a recurring spot on Nickelodeon's wacky kids show, You Can't Do That on Television, where she unsuccessfully dodged falling buckets of green slime for the 1986 season. Back when you were a big Kajagoogoo fan, the determined Morissette took all the money she made on You Can't Do That and recorded the self-penned single "Fate Stay With Me" with help from a couple of Canadian music biz veterans. She had 2,000 copies of it pressed on her own indie label, Lamor Records, and MCA Publishing was impressed enough to snag her a contract with their Canadian division at age 14. You'd just popped your first zit. Because of her ample confidence, not to mention the cross-legged Buddha posture she's assumed, it's easy to forget that Morissette has only walked the earth for 21 years. Her precision masks her unruly sentiments. When she says she believes in "that whole concept of having to hit rock bottom in order to make any changes," I remember that she's dealt with her problems in the past-realizing that her heart wasn't in the music she'd become so successful performing-by dropping everything and moving to Toronto at age 18, and then again to Los Angeles at 20. She explains: "You have to reach a point that you're so consumed by whatever it is that you can't take it anymore, and until you reach that point you just coast along like a bottom-dweller." |
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