Finding Amy
The guys outside the Mod Club want a hundred bucks for a ticket, and this is after the show’s already started. Really, it’s already halfway done. I offer one scalper sixty, and he tells me to wait around, that if he can’t get ‘his price’ for the ones he’s selling I’m in. I can’t imagine what he means by this. Once the show’s over? I resist telling him what he can do with his ticket, and wander back behind the club, where I can hear big brass pounding through the steel fire door, and above that the voice of the woman I’m here to see: Amy Winehouse. She’s in there, and I’m outside, and this won’t do at all.
Doe-eyed and irresistibly stylish, Winehouse is a 23 year-old Jewish girl from North London. She is famous for being a reckless drunk, having a turbulent personal life, and an unstoppable voice. More or less in that order. It is a voice that inspires earnest comparisons to Aretha Franklin and Etta James. It booms and growls, dark, seductive, and sweet, with a jagged broken whiskey bottle edge beneath. It’s the kind of voice that makes you weak in the knees, makes you wish Motown was still the thing, makes you can’t help but fall a little bit in love with the girl behind it. So there it is: I am enchanted by her.
I came here with no ticket and no real plan to get inside. All I know I that I need to meet her. It is an unlikely event, granted, but I have planned it out in full all the same. I will ask her about her childhood, and what she’s listening to right now, and if she really enjoys being on tour or just wishes she was back home in London with her friends. She will give me the long, incisive answers she has denied the other journalists. She will open up to me, because I understand her and nobody else does. We will talk for hours, and it will be wonderful, and she will probably fall in love with me. But, failing that, I will settle for a picture of the two of us to put on my Facebook.
This time last year almost no one on this side of the Atlantic had heard of Amy Winehouse, but since Back to Black, her sophomore album went multi-platinum in the U.K., and her big single, Rehab, started playing everywhere, she’s become a full-on superstar. The album is 35 minutes of raw bared soul, packed tight with tormented songs of booze and boys, drugs and self-doubt, set to Wurlitzer and horns. If The Supremes sang songs about how much it sucked being a depressive alcoholic, this is something like how they’d sound. Mick Jagger and Prince want to work with her. Jay-Z is a fan. Rehab comes on at a party and Lindsay Lohan rips her top off. Allegedly.
So that’s why I can’t get inside this club for under a bill. And that’s why I’m pounding on the fire door, hoping that someone will take pity on this lovelorn, cash-strapped Jewish journalist, stuck outside the biggest show of the summer. And then someone does. The door opens and some girl pulls me inside. This almost never happens.
Shortly I’m stageside, a few steps from the feet of Lady Winehouse herself, and I can barely believe it. She is dressed in tight black jeans and a tank top, black trainers, and her signature enormous beehive, which she strokes and prods like some exotic eyeless pet perched atop her dainty head. She is downing a glass of red wine and working her way through Me and Mr. Jones, her backup dancers burning it up stage left, the band swinging hard. Winehouse is wailing and drinking, drinking and wailing, and the crowd cheers with every massive swig.
That’s so Winehouse. After a few well-publicized incidents of debilitating onstage intoxication, we know what to expect from this singer in this regard: She will be drunk, it is understood. The hope is that she will be sober enough, at least, to remember her words, and not have to rush off mid-song to vomit, as she has in the past. To love Amy Winehouse, fans understand, for better or worse, is to love Amy Winehouse drunk. It is in keeping with her booze-soaked lyrics, and not being one to let down the people, she is fully tanked. It wouldn’t be the same show if she wasn’t, but as her set progresses, watching her zone out sporadically, struggling to finish a sentence between songs, I wonder if that might not be a bad thing. She glances offstage as she sings, as if looking for the exit, squints into the overhead lights, picks up a towel, fumbles with it and kicks it aside. Taking another slug from her cup she looks out at us, smiles her sly, sexy smile and says, “I love Shirley Temples.” We cheer, because we’re in on the joke, and maybe all of us a bit in denial about what this means longterm.
When she hits Rehab, the big finale, the crowd is in a frenzy. “They tried to make me go to rehab,” Winehouse sings, “but I said ‘No, no, no.’” The irony is surely lost on no one, but we still sing along, loving this woman with all her tragic beauty and attitude, because of it, and because, really, nobody else can rock quite like she rocks.
When the show ends, and the club starts to empty, I focus on getting backstage. I am not sneaky by any means, not used to being where I don’t belong, but infatuation makes people do strange things. I dodge a bouncer, run up some stairs, and, navigating by instinct, soon find myself in a backstage room with Amy and her band. A few of them are watching a basketball game on TV. Billie Holiday plays quietly on a stereo somewhere. I look around for a second, taking this in, very much in shock that I’m here, that this is really happening. I pour myself a drink and try to look like I belong.
Across the room Amy is talking to some people and sipping Jack Daniels from a plastic tumbler. In the fluorescent lights she looks much smaller, frail, her makeup thick. She looks tired. As she moves towards the drinks table to refill her cup, I intercept her.
“Hi,” I say, “I’m writing a story about you for this magazine, and I was hoping we could sit down for a minute or two…”
Her face falls at my question, “It’s really not a good time right now,” she says, glancing over her shoulder.
I persist. “How did tonight go for you?”
“It was great,” she says, “And I love Toronto. How’s that?”
“Sure.” I say, “That’s great.”
I find someone to take a picture of us, thank Amy several times, and she disappears, resuming her search for the bottle of Jack. Her fiancČe, a wiry guy in a fedora with AMY tattooed behind one ear, glowers at me from a corner.
So things did not quite go as planned. But I got into the show. And I talked to Amy. And there’s still a chance, admittedly a slight one, that she fell in love with me. I got my picture, anyway.
