Cidny Bullens

He sang backup for Elton John. And cut multiple solo albums. But that's only the tip of the iceberg of Cid's amazing story. You need to hear it.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sets podcast.
My guest today is Sydney Bullet. Sid tell me about
seeing the Stones in nineteen sixty six.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Oh, he starts right in, all right, Yeah, I was young.
I was about fifteen, and my brother dropped me off.
He was supposed to go with me, of course, and
my older brother and said, nah, you go, and I'm
going to go see my friends. And I, like all

(00:42):
other teenagers back in the day in the mid sixties,
was totally enchanted by the Stones. I was taken over
by their music, their energy, their grit, you know, the
whole pack just to me, spoke to me, and I

(01:05):
really and and I had this thing where I I
like to call it the hips and lips. I had
the lips, and I had the the moves, and I
just wanted to be Mick Jagger. And so when I
they were coming to Lynn, Massachusetts, which was on their
first ever tour of the US. I think I may

(01:27):
be wrong about that, but I think it was. And
H and I went and I wandered around in the crowd.
It was all kids. There were very few adults. It
was on this muddy field outside and Lynn Massachusetts, and uh,
the story which I described in the book in my memoir,

(01:50):
I did work my way up front, and a kind
police officer let me into that forbidden zone between the
wooden horses, remember those bob the wood absolutely back then
that that provided whatever security was going to be, like
they were going to hold anything back, and the stage

(02:14):
between the sawhorses and the stage. So I was right there,
feet away from Mick Jagger watching him. And as the
story goes, there was a terrific thunderstorm and it started
raining really hard, and for some reason in my in
my imagination or in my view, the electricity just you know,

(02:39):
infused the crowd, and the crowd and the stones were
infusing the crowd, and suddenly there was this burst of
eight thousand kids toward the stage, toward me, and uh,
I got caught up in it, and the stones ran
off the stage. Uh. You know, the limos were parked
right to the side of the stage. Back in those days.

(03:01):
We didn't have all the security, as I said, And
I got swept up into the crowd and there was
tear gas and it was pouring rain with lightning, and
it was a movie scene. And I got pushed up
into the limbo right there with Mick Jagger's face looking

(03:24):
at me. It was just wild. It was great. I
loved it. That was to me. It was all I
needed to know that this was what I wanted to do.
It was rock and roll. It was the mud, it
was the grit, it was the music, It was the fans,
it was the the electricity of it. Loved it.

Speaker 1 (03:47):
So did you grow up? Was there music in the house?
Did you play an instrument?

Speaker 2 (03:53):
I did. I started playing guitar when I was about ten.
My brother already, who's five years older, already he was
playing guitar. By that time. He was doing you know,
folk music and stuff, which I wasn't really into, but
of course I did. My first song I learned was
a Bob Dylan song like the Times They Are Changing?

(04:13):
Or where have all the Flowers Gone? Or something like that.
But and my parents were not musicians, but they loved jazz.
So we had everything from Benny Goodman to Miles Davis
to Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson. They loved jazz for which

(04:35):
I'm really grateful because even though I don't play jazz,
it was a wonderful education on you know music. And
they weren't classical people they didn't like I mean, my
parents were middle class from Boston, you know, they didn't
listen to classical music. However, I will put this caveat on.

(04:58):
My mother made all five kids sit down and watch
Leonard Bernstein.

Speaker 1 (05:03):
Of course, so.

Speaker 2 (05:06):
Every whatever it was, Saturday morning, Sunday morning, whenever it
was on, I don't remember, but she used to make
us sit down and watch it. So that was like
her concession to Okay, I'm going to broaden my kid's,
you know, views on music. So there was music in
the house all the time. And every time my parents

(05:27):
had a party, somebody one of their friends played piano,
and there was always there was always music in the house.
So even though they didn't play.

Speaker 1 (05:36):
Okay, I'm your contemporary just a few years older than
I am, and Elvis was before my time. I remember
the Four Seasons and the Beach Boys, but the Beatles
hit in January sixty four. The Way's Party. It was
never the same, was that your experience?

Speaker 2 (05:54):
Absolutely? Absolutely, The Beatles came on before the Stones. They
kind of people think about it at the same time.
But the Beatles, it really they really did, as they say,
sweep the nation you know, I mean they came. Everybody's
who's into you know, the music of the sixties has

(06:17):
seen the pictures of them coming down the from the
plane and in at Kennedy Airport where whatever it was
at the time in New York, waving to you know,
throngs of fans and all the girls crying and everything.
And yeah, they were a phenomenon and they did change

(06:38):
forever and ever the landscape of music and pop music
and maybe other music. And yeah, I was swept up
into it as much as anybody else. I wasn't one
of those girls screaming and crying and doing all that,

(06:58):
and you know that gets into the other part of
my story. But I loved the music and what I
loved about the Beatles. So there's two things, the Stones
and the Beatles. What I loved about the Stones, I said,
you know, the grit, the rock, the beat the influence
of the blues and so on, R and B. What

(07:20):
I loved about the Beatles was the melody and the harmonies.
Because I was born, I believe with a sense of harmony.
You know, I love to harmonize. Even when I was
a little kid, somebody would be singing on the radio
or whatever, or in our house, and I would start harmonizing,

(07:42):
and my sisters and brother and I we would sing
and I would be the harmony, and and so it
to me. They were the melody, they were the music,
and the Stones were the beat the grit. And I

(08:02):
loved them. I loved them both for those different reasons.

Speaker 1 (08:06):
You were infected by the sound. At what point did
the switch flip and you said, I want to do this.

Speaker 2 (08:13):
The switch flip before the Beatles and the Stones. And
it was when I heard when I was, you know,
in single digit numbers of age, when I heard Little Richard.
When I heard because I had an older brother and
a sister who was eight years older, and they listened.

(08:35):
They were into the music of the day of the fifties.
And when I heard Little Richard's two Dy Fruity, and
I was about four or five six, I said, that's
what I want to do. And it just I just
got You used the word swept before I got swept

(08:57):
into that rhythm, into that and I keep using the
word grit because that's what I felt. It was this energy,
of this kinetic energy, which of course became you know,
the anathematic people who didn't want who thought rock and
roll was the devil's music. Well that's what back in

(09:18):
the day, right, That's what infused me. So I had
already decided on some level that I was going to
be in music. I mean I used to imitate I
was six years old, imitating Elvis Presley and for my
parents at their parties, you know, and lip syncing. And

(09:39):
you know, I started playing piano. I'm not a piano
great piano player. I'm a still in novice fifty sixty
years later, but I did start making up my own
songs and the piano I started, you know, air guitar
playing before I even started playing. And so I was

(09:59):
infused with the music at an early age. But the
Beatles and the Stones when I was a teenager or
what put me over the edge. And I mean I
started writing songs even when I was about twelve or thirteen,
but they were more of the folky kind of things
until the Beatles and the Stones came along. So they
are what put me on the track of real rock

(10:21):
and roll.

Speaker 1 (10:21):
Okay, when you were in high school, did you sing
in bands?

Speaker 2 (10:26):
I did, but yes I did. I tried to put
together my own bands and I did sing in some
other bands I was. I played my guitar a lot solo.
I used to go to this. If anybody's from Massachusetts,

(10:47):
who's north shore of Massachusetts, who's listening. There was a
club in Ipswich, Massachusetts, called the King's Rook, and everybody
came there. I mean all the old blues guys, you know,
John Lee Hooker, you know Sunny Terry and Brownie McGhee,

(11:07):
you know, all the people who played at like Club
forty seven in Boston would come up to the King's
Rook and play there as well. And I used to
go there and do the the hout Nanny night and
you know Monday nights. You know, I'd play my guitar

(11:29):
and I did that kind of thing. So, yeah, I
played in high school.

Speaker 1 (11:35):
Okay, while you're in high school, you run away to
New York. Tell us that Steward.

Speaker 2 (11:42):
Yeah, I'd had it with my I was fifteen. It
was January of nineteen sixty six, and I had had
it with my home life, with school. My parents had
moved from one town and northern northeastern Massachusetts to another.

(12:03):
I was not happy. It was the middle of my
sophomore year. I was leaving my friends in my community
that I had grown up in in West Newbury, Massachusetts,
and I was not a happy camper. I had, you know,
I had started smoking weed, you know, and doing all
the things that we did back then in the mid sixties,

(12:27):
and my home life was chaotic at best, and I
just said, I'm out of here. And my thought at
fifteen years old, because I had this fantasy about Greenwich Village.
Greenwich Village was the place to be, you know, it
had all those folk clubs that were now they had

(12:51):
some other stuff going on with the music and with
rock and all that, and I just said, that's where
I'm going. So a friend who said I'll go with you,
who was a year older and had twenty dollars which
I didn't have, so and so I ran away. One night,

(13:12):
I told my mother I was going to the library
with Jane, my friend, and I walked up to her
house from my house and then we walked onto Route one,
which we both lived near, and caught walked down to
the gas station wherever the bus from where Greyhound came

(13:35):
from north to south, and took a bus into Boston
and then switched and took a bus and arrived in
New York City at about two thirty in the morning
into a port authority and there we were fifteen and
sixteen year old girls, even though nobody knew whether I
was a boy or a girl, because that's the way

(13:57):
I liked it. And you know, not knowing a thing,
never having been in New York, not knowing what to
do or where to go or anything. And a very
after a couple of attempts of guys trying to pick

(14:18):
us up, this very attractive, tall black man approached just
and said, do you need a place to go? And
I looked him in the eye and I knew that
he was safe. And he grabbed Jane's bag, which was
very heavy, and my I only had a backpack, and

(14:43):
he walked us side of the Port Authority down eighth
Avenue or whatever it was, and into a YMCA on
the thirty fourth Street YMCA, and that's where we stayed
for the first night. And then we found a hotel,
a flea bag I like to say, a flea bag

(15:04):
hotel in Washington Square and for two fifty a night,
two dollars and fifty cents a night, and you know,
it was a flea bag hotel, and now, of course
it's still there, it's just not a flea bag hotel anymore.

(15:28):
And we were there for a while, about a week
or so, and then I started getting hints that my
mother was looking for me. I had a friend who
was at Ris, not Rizstie, that was in Rhode Island,
Pratt in Brooklyn, Pratt Art School, the art school, an

(15:51):
older friend from high school, and my mother had contacted her.
This little bit is not in my book, but it is.

Speaker 1 (16:01):
Just to stop for a minute. Yeah, Sid has a
book called trans Electric My Life is a Cosmic rock Star.
It's a fascinating quick read that will hook you and
two days you'll be done. You'll hear all of these
stories in many Moore, although I'm sure we'll cover some
stuff that's not in the book like this, So continue

(16:21):
your tale.

Speaker 2 (16:23):
Yeah so, and thanks for the promotion. Yeah. So, I
had this friend who went to Pratt and my mother
had contacted her, and of course my mother had the
police with her. They had the FBI out looking, you know,
and they had a fifty state alert out for me,

(16:46):
and my friend was finally because she refused to tell
them at first, and finally, of course, you know, she
was just a freshman in college, and you know, they
coerced her into saying where I was. So a few

(17:07):
days later there was a big knock at our door,
our hotel door, and then they busted in. We hid.
It makes me laugh now, you know. One of us

(17:27):
went under the bed, one went in the closet. You know,
there was no place to hide. It's a hotel room.
Where are you going to hide, you know, And and
a small one at that. And they came in and
dragged us out. They told us, and know un certain
we had befriended. Let me back up a little bit.

(17:47):
We had befriended a couple of drug addicts who were
in the hotel, and they were nice guys older than us,
and they had entered one of the guy's rooms and
beaten the guy up. We didn't see him, We never

(18:08):
saw him, but they told us it was it was
a scene again, another movie scene, and dragged us down
the stairs. And there was my mother and my aunt,
her sister who lived in New Jersey, who was the
socialite that I talk about in the book. And I

(18:32):
was not happy. I did not want to go home,
in fact, because I knew that my mother was looking
for me, and the police were out looking for me.
I had decided that I was I don't even know
why I was. One of the guys who we were
talking to in the hotel had a friend in Philadelphia

(18:53):
or something. I don't quite remember, but we were going
to be on our way to Philadelphia the next day
because I knew my mother was in town, so I
had no intention of ever going home again. At fifteen,
I did not want to go home, and in that,
you know, I don't What I do talk about in
the book, which we haven't talked about here, is that

(19:15):
I did think, before I knew my mother was in town,
that I could get some kind of work as a
musician in one of these folk clubs or something. And
I went around, knocked on the doors during the day,
went in, you know, talked to the managers, you know,

(19:35):
trying to get some connection of how I could, you know,
get some work, even if it was, you know, passing
the hat, which I, by the way, did later when
I went back to school in New York City, I
did work at the folk clubs passing the hat. So

(19:57):
that was the runaway story. They did take me back
to Topsfield, Massachusetts and My mother was a force to
be reckoned with, with all her issues, and she convinced
the school board, who wanted nothing to do with me,

(20:18):
to not expel me. They did. They did expel my
friend Jane, and they didn't expel me. And I went
back to school unhappily. But that was the story of
my running away. But I did run away after that again,
but not it wasn't quite as dramatic.

Speaker 1 (20:44):
Okay, but you do graduate and go to the American
Academy of Dramatic ORIGS in New York City. How does
that happen?

Speaker 2 (20:52):
My mother, as I said, was a force to be
reckoned with. And I did graduate from high school, not
with honors, but I did get out of there. And
I said, you know, I had no intention of going
to school after I didn't apply to any colleges. I

(21:16):
was going to be a musician. That's what I was
going to do. Or maybe I thought, in the back
of my mind an actor, you know, because I was
in plays and stuff in high school. Mostly I was
not actually that's not true. I was in some musicals
and stuff. But anyway, and then my mother said, no,

(21:36):
you've got your going to school, so pick a school.
You're going to go to and that's what's going to happen.
And I ended up going to New York to the
American Academy of Dramatic Arts. So back to New York
I went. And it was a great experience for me
actually to go to the Academy. It was taught me

(22:00):
a lot. I still have you know, a couple of
my best friends in my roommate from those days is
still my closest friend. And it was a great experience.
I actually learned a lot. I got rid of my
Boston accent, which I can bring back in any time
if you want to hear it. In fact, whenever I

(22:22):
get within one hundred miles of Massachusetts or you know,
New England, it comes back automatically. But you know, I
learned some great life lessons there. I had a great time.
I started doing more drugs and drinking a little bit,
but which I talk about in the book later what happened.

(22:43):
But my mother was right, you know, I needed that time.
I needed that experience to be in a I'm going
to say in a controlled environment, although I'll say not
controlled structured environment.

Speaker 1 (22:59):
So did you actually go to school?

Speaker 2 (23:02):
Two years I graduated the American Academy at Dramatic Arts.

Speaker 1 (23:06):
Okay, and since it is an acting school, to what
degree did you try to be an actor?

Speaker 2 (23:11):
Yeah? I tried. I stayed in New York for another
year trying to get roles. But because I didn't look
like a normal girl back then, I did grow my
hair the last year of the Academy just so I could, like,
because I always had short hair, so I could look

(23:34):
more like a girl and try to get some parts.
But I just didn't have that ingenu look I They
just I couldn't get work. I mean, I did get
called back for some you know, for not Jesus Christ Superstar,

(23:57):
I've forgotten the name of it now, but I got
called for some things that were musicals because I did
sing and play guitar and so on, and I did finally,
after many, many, many rejections, and I hated auditioning, by
the way, but after many rejections, I got cast in

(24:19):
a Broadway show because I played guitar quote like a guy,
Oh ask me. And I get cast in the band
of the musical Lisistrata, which is a Greek play with

(24:41):
Molina mccurree. For those of you of a certain age,
She was the lead in a movie called Never on Sunday,
and she was a big Greek star and it was
directed by Michael Kachianus, who was a great Greek director
and both of whom had made their way into American movies,

(25:04):
and so it was a big deal. I was. So
I was put in the band, but then they gave
me three lines because they liked me. I was the
youngest member of the cast. There was all these big
Broadway show stars in the cast, you know, and so

(25:25):
I did that. It flopped, so it wasn't a big thing,
but but I made money. I made some money. I
you know, was living in Greenwich Village in a you know,
apartment with three other people, and so I got that.
But then I decided that acting really wasn't what I

(25:46):
wanted to do. But I'd keep it in my back
pocket and I'd go to LA and I'd see if
I could find some work there, either as an actor
or a musician. And that's when my career started. When
I went to La.

Speaker 1 (25:59):
Okay, you go to LA and you stay with Diane Bennett.

Speaker 2 (26:04):
No. I stayed with a woman named Helen Gorman, who
was a friend of Diane ben Right Helen Gorman, that's
her maiden name. And she was a friend of a
friend of a somebody I had met in New York
who was a producer for ABC Television, who I met
on a bus. You know, you know, it was just

(26:27):
one of those random things. My life, as you will
read in the book those of you choose to read it,
is a series of coincidences of who I meet and
how it leads me to one thing and the other,
which is why the title the Cosmic rock Star applies,
cosmic being the operative word, meaning you know, I'm not

(26:48):
a rock star on earth, but my life was lived
like one. And anyway, so Helen Gorman, this guy who
I had randomly met in New York City, and we
became acquaintances, and he liked me, you know, and and

(27:11):
he called his friend of a friend who called another
friend who happened to be Helen Gorman. And Helen Gorman
turned out to be the the producer of the Johnny
of the Jay Leno Show. And you know, she went
on to do great things. But at the time she
was writing for The Hollywood Reporter, which still is in

(27:31):
existence today. Weekly rag out for the for the show
business and she was friends with Diane Bennett, who also
wrote for The Hollywood Reporter. So Helen Gorman let me
sleep on her couch and for a long time actually,

(27:55):
until she kicked me out. And you know the stories
Bob go, you know, they weave into each other. So
you know, I can stop, I can go, I can,
you know, well tell us about meeting Bob Crue. Yeah. So,
so the Diane Bennett reference is because one day I

(28:22):
got a job in a gas station on little Santa
Monica Boulevard, which is no longer there. The gas station
Jerry's Phillips sixty six, you know, and I had worked
in a gas station in high schools. I loved pumping gas.
These were before self serve, and I loved working on cars.
I can't couldn't do much, you know, oil changes and stuff.

(28:43):
I'm not a mechanic, but anyway, I loved being around
that atmosphere and getting dirty and all that stuff because
I was really not that. Women don't like that too,
and women aren't great mechanics. But in those days, you know,
I it was just to guys thing to do. So
but Jerry I went around to try to find work,

(29:05):
and Jerry gave me a job and working at the
gas station. So I came home to Helen Gorman's one afternoon,
all right from work, and she said, change your clothes,
get your little three inch reel to reel demo tape

(29:26):
which I had recorded in New York before I came
of a few songs I had written. And you're going
to go to this house in Beverly Hills, to Diane
Bennett's house, and she's having a dinner party and Bob
crue is going to be there.

Speaker 1 (29:44):
Diane ben In covered music quite powerfully for the Hollywood Reporter, just.

Speaker 2 (29:50):
Yeah, and she was a she was well known at
the time. She was high powered, and her husband, Peter Bennett,
was a very high powered attorney at the time, and
he was Bob CRUs attorney. So Helen said to me

(30:11):
go to that because I had no car. I was
hitchhiking back and forth to my work and wherever I
had to go. And she said, take my car, take
your clean up, take your tape, and go to the
servant entrance at Diane Bennett's house and give the tape

(30:34):
to whoever opens the door. And under no circumstances for
you to go into that house. Do not go into
the house. Said okay, So I get in her car.
I find the gate, you know, gated gated, big house
in the flats, but it was gated and it's starting
to go up Cold Water Canyon or something. And I

(30:57):
go in and I go to the entrance and I
knock on the door or ring the bell, and after
a few minutes, this guy opens the door and it's
this very handsome charism I could tell that charisma was

(31:19):
oozing out of him, very flamboyant, you know, with a
low cut bell bottoms with the big belt buckle and
a shirt open and blonde hair kind of almost toewish
shoulders and opens the door. And I was a little

(31:39):
stunned because I thought somebody who was a servant or
a maid or something was gonna housekeeper was going to
come to the door. And I said, I'm here to
give Bob, to give this tape to Bob Crue. And
he said, well, I'm Bob Crue, and he literally reached

(32:03):
grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into the house.
And I was like, oh, no, you know, because I'm
telling you, Helen Gorman must have told me a hundred
times do not go into the house. Do not go
into the house. So I'm like, oh, shoot, you know,

(32:26):
I'm in trouble. So he drags me, and it was
the servants enterest So we go through the kitchen and
into the living room, which was kind of like a
living room, and then there was a dining area with
a step above in another area of the house, but
they were conjoined, and and here's all these people standing

(32:52):
around and and Diane Bennett gives me the devil's look,
and Bob goes set an. We hadn't even talked nothing.
He drags me by the arm into the living room
and says to Diane set another place at the dinner table.

(33:14):
It was really something, and so Diane was really agitated
and mad. But of course Bob Crewe had say over everything.
He was the star of the evening. And so I
sat down to dinner and with I don't know eight
or twelve people, ten people, and it was just that

(33:38):
a wild you know, another coincidence where one of the
people at the table had said, you look familiar. He
looked at me, and it turned out that we had
sat beside each other on a plane going from New

(34:00):
York to Los Angeles, and he was the road manager
for Frank Sinatra and fly in the family Stone, And
I mean, how does that happen? You know? And there's
another part of that where they, you know, I wasn't

(34:21):
supposed to be in first class and that that flight,
you know. But here I was this young kid, and
I had somehow they bumped me up to first class.
I don't even remember why. And and I sat beside
this guy and here he was at this dinner table
months later with Bob Crewe and Diane Bennett, and he

(34:42):
gave me his phone number, took me to some studios
and blah blah blah. But that's where I met Bob Crewe,
who becomes and still is a part of the rest
of my life, you know. And and Bob Crewe I
got kicked out of. I guess I'll go on with

(35:02):
the story I got. I went back to Helen Gorman's.
Of course, I got kicked out because I had done
the one thing I was supposed to do, which was
go into the house. So Helen Gorman kicked me out
of her apartment. And she should have anyway, I was
there for like a month, you know, And so I

(35:26):
only number I had in my pocket was Bob crue.
And I called Bob from a phone booth the next
day and said, I'm I need a place to stay.
I had no money, no place to stay. I was
making like two bucks an hour at the gas station.

(35:47):
And he said, call me back in an hour, and
so I did. I called it. And there's other parts
of the story which you'll read about in the book.
But I called him back in the meantime. I had
found a place to stay with some runaways in that hour.

(36:07):
So I called him back and I said, I found
a place to stay. He said, good, be in the
studio at ten o'clock tomorrow morning. I want you to
sing backup on a record I'm producing. It's just I mean,
I'm pausing because even my own life, you know, when
I think about these things, how things happened, how interconnected

(36:31):
things were, the coincidences. If you believe in coincidences, you
know how the connectors of my life just keep going
and going and going. And from that moment where I
went to the studio the next day, I took the
bus to I can't I think it was hit Factory
or one of those places in LA in the middle

(36:52):
of Hollywood, and sound factory one of those and Hit
factories in New York. I think it was sound fact
And I walked in and started singing backup vocals for
Bob Crue, and I never stopped. I didn't stop just.

Speaker 1 (37:08):
For a second. Do you know if he actually listened
to your demo tape?

Speaker 2 (37:12):
No, No, nobody's ever asked me that question. Nobody in
my whole life has ever asked me that question. I
don't know. I never asked him if he listened to
that demo tape, because.

Speaker 1 (37:27):
I've had someone where you had to do demos and
the guy offered me a job. You go, Do you
read what I wrote? He goes no, They said, well
read the first says no, come to work. So this
is when I was a lawyer for ten minutes. But
in any event, you sing background, tell us how it
plays out from there.

Speaker 2 (37:46):
Well, that begins the rest of my life, as they say,
because I did end up becoming what this is the
way I frame it. I became Bob Crue's gopher protege,
and after my time living staying with the runaways, and
then I ended up staying in the house with the

(38:08):
other people who were putting up the runaways for a
few months. Then Bob asked me to move in, and
I moved into his storage unit on which was actually
like a basement apartment or little studio apartment done in
the basement of his penthouse, a building on Appian Way,

(38:32):
not Appian Way. That's where he lived later in Hollywood,
West Hollywood. And so I moved into his storage unit
and I started really being his gopher protege. I went
with him everywhere. I drove him around, I did tasks
for him, I did errands for him. I answered the

(38:56):
phone for him, and in return say it like that,
because to me, it was in return what I got
was an education in the music business as well as
production and studio work, because I sat beside him when
he worked with Hank Sakala, the great you know engineer,

(39:21):
and Tom Dowd another great engineer. You know, look these
people up, they've they're on every album from from those days,
the sixties and the seventies and onward. You know, I
got to meet Jerry Wexler and Joe Smith, you know,
and people who in the business. I mean, Jerry Wexler

(39:46):
and I became friends. I'm still friends with his wife
Renee today, and you know, sit in the rooms when
deals were made, I got to I just he just
took me everywhere I was. I was like almost like
a fly on the wall. And I sat beside him

(40:07):
at the consoles with those great engineers, and I looked
and I learned, and I asked questions, and I got
to do an input. You know, I got to have
input in these things, not without asking or not without
somebody asking me. I didn't interject myself where I wasn't involved.
I was a sponge. So Bob Crue, for all his

(40:30):
craziness and as a you know, as a human, he
was brilliant and a genius. He invented pop music basically
with Four Seasons and Mitch Rider in the Detroit Wheels.
He invented Frankie Valley. Frankie Valley didn't sing in Falsetto

(40:52):
before Bob Crue got to him. You know, I was there.
I was there when they did My eyes doored you.
I was one of the background singers, you know, and
and swearing to God and in the later for it,
Frankie Valley hits and I was there. I watched Bob

(41:13):
Crue go into the studio and sing frank Frankie Valley's
part for Frankie Valley, and then Frankie Valley would go
in and imitate Bob Crewe. Not that Frankie Valley didn't
have his own voice. He did, but it was you know,

(41:36):
I owe Bob Crewe a lot, and he was not
a perfect person, you know, he was a very flawed person.
But he gave me my the foundation of my career.
And and then as the story goes, as you will read,

(41:58):
I ended up marrying his brother and my two children,
you know, are from Dan Crewe and Bob Crewe was
the uncle. And the story goes on from there.

Speaker 1 (42:20):
Okay, you're Bob Gopher. To what degree are you in
the studio? And how do you end up singing the
songs on Greece.

Speaker 2 (42:29):
I was in the studio, as I said, all the time,
with Bob Crewe.

Speaker 1 (42:32):
I guess what I mean is performing.

Speaker 2 (42:34):
Yeah. He had me do my first single, which is
I talk about the book. My first single that I
ever sang on was called My Happy Birthday Baby, and
it was a single with me and Kenny Nolan, who
was his writing partner at the time, who wrote Lady Marmalade.

(42:56):
I was in the room when that song was written.
Lady marmalade, and he wrote my eyes Adore You and
swear to God and all that with Bob and uh.
So Bob, I sang a single uh and and I
started uh. But that wasn't the beginning of my personal

(43:21):
career because that song was a Bob Crue production and
I sang on you know, I say, I was in
disco Texas. If somebody really does their deep dive into
me and asks me about disco texts and the sex,
so lets I know they've done a deep dive into me.
And so I was on those records too, and uh
and Bob. This is a bone of contention for me

(43:46):
because the one thing Bob did which I kind of
regret in my you know, in my career, was that
he encouraged me to sing in a high voice. And
it started with that single My Happy Birthday Baby, which
if you can find I doubt anybody can. It was

(44:09):
on twentieth Century Fox at the time, the album the label,
and he said, you've got to sing in a high voice.
You've got to sing in a high voice. I had
an alto naturally low voice, not quite as low as
it is today, but I had a naturally low voice.
If you find the bootlegs of the Rolling Thunder review,

(44:30):
which I did, you'll hear me sing in my natural voice.
But he said, you got to sing in a high voice,
you know, like Frankie Valley. It has more energy, it
has more oo, you know, people relate to it or whatever.
So I started singing in this I you know, I
didn't want to, but I did. And then you know

(44:54):
the end of that story is is that I sang
my first two albums in that high voice, which I
can't listen to still today. The good songs, but the
high voice. Nah. So but Bob was an influence on
me and I started that started off my career and
through Bob, I met Bobby Newarth through you know and I,

(45:16):
as I said, Jerry Wexler and other people, and through
Bob Newarth, I ended up doing some of the Rolling
Thunder review and meeting those guys who are still friends
of mine. And you know, it's it's multi layered.

Speaker 1 (45:34):
Okay. I have to ask Desmond Child was a protege
of Bob Grew at one point. Yeah, and he would say,
start with the title, come up with a good title.
Did you have that experience with Bob?

Speaker 2 (45:46):
Yeah? And I still use it to this day. You know,
I mean the title is the you know for me.
Uh yeah, I learned obviously, I learned a lot about
songwriting from Bob Crue, even though my style is not his.
I'm not I'm not a commercial writer. But yeah, he

(46:11):
started with the titles Lady Marmalade, you know. You know
they were talking about you know, and I can't remember
now whether Kenny had come up with a riff on
the piano or whether Bob just said, I want to

(46:31):
write a song about a hooker in New Orleans, you know.
And but that's what he did. He started, and and
Bob didn't play an instrument. He didn't play an instrument.
He didn't He he sang the melody. He made up beats.

(46:55):
You know, he clap his hands or stomp his feat
and you know, you know, snap his fingers. He was
a big finger snapper. And he would sing the melody
and he sometimes it was nonsensical words, which I still
do today as well, just to get the flavor, the
feeling of what words would be fit into those points

(47:19):
in the song. And he was brilliant, and he was
just brilliant. And yeah, Desmond Child, I met Desmond in
nineteen eighty, I think, and we became friends back then, and.

Speaker 1 (47:37):
Okay, touch. You make a big point in the book
that Bob gets you seriously into drugs and more or
less pushes you into this lesbian relationship.

Speaker 2 (47:51):
Well, yes, I started. I mean I had smoked marijuana
and uh stuff from the time I was a teenager,
as I said, but I was never into hard drugs
or and I didn't drink much because my parents drank
and I didn't really want to be like them, and
I didn't want to drink. I just didn't like what

(48:11):
alcohol did to people. And Bob drank, you know, and
I didn't like what it did to him. But being
in that environment living with him, and you know, I
can't blame it all on Bob. I have to make
my own choices, you know. But it was available then
with Bob all the time, and he, you know, he'd

(48:33):
make himself a drink and make me one, you know. Well, okay,
you know, and he started, you know, he was into cocaine,
and so I got into cocaine and which was my downfall.
And he didn't push me into a relationship with this woman,

(48:56):
but he encouraged things. I mean, I was very very naive,
you know. I mean, you know, I look back and
I just put my head in my hands, you know,
because I was very gullible. I was very naive. I

(49:16):
you know, I just didn't think through things and didn't
see behind the curtains, and so Bob encouraged me into
this relationship. But you know, I mean it was my
choice and I didn't really have a relationship with this woman,

(49:38):
although she wanted one. But it was where I started
my hard drug uses because and this story is in
the book and it still gives makes me kind of
sick to my stomach. When it was hard for me
to write that in the book. It was hard for
me to really be honest about how how far down

(50:05):
I went and what happened, and you know, taking responsibility
for my own choices in getting into drugs. But this woman, Sue,
shot up cocaine and one night she invited me to
do that and I had had enough to drink, and
for whatever reason, I said okay, And that was my bottom,

(50:31):
you know a few months after that, because I continued
to do it, and luckily I got sober, you know,
not long after that.

Speaker 1 (50:41):
Okay, just going back, how did you end up singing
on the Grease soundtrack.

Speaker 2 (50:46):
Oh yeah, you asked me that. Sorry, I didn't get
to that. Bob Crue in nineteen seventy seven, so I
was sober by this time. By the way, I got
sober not long. I only had a very short drug
career about years with Bob two and a half years.
And I did get sober and clean and sober in

(51:07):
nineteen seventy six. So in nineteen seventy seven, Bob Crewe,
who was also sober at that time, called me up
and he said, you're going to get a call from
a guy who's gonna you know who. I recommended you
because they wanted somebody who could sing in a young
woman's voice, a young girl's voice. And I suggested you

(51:32):
just ironic when you know my whole story, And I said, okay.
And I assumed that it was background vocals for a
movie soundtrack. That's all I knew. I had dead, no
name or nothing. So this guy called me Lewis Saint Louis,

(51:52):
and he was one of the producers, and he said,
I want you to come in and sing, you know,
just be at the studio. Again. I thought it was
background vocals, and I was going to get paid ninety dollars,
you know, which was the going rate for three hour
session back then. So I was thrilled. And I walk
in and Lewis says to me, we'd like you to

(52:12):
sing lead on this song. And I was like lead, okay,
But it was unexpected and it was Freddie my love
on the Grease movie soundtracked. So after I did that one,
he said how about this one? And it was raining
on prom night and I said great, and then and

(52:33):
then I sang a duet called Mooning with Lewis. So
I did three lead vocals on that album, all because
of Bob Crue, which people still come up to me today.
Go the Grease movie soundtrack, you know, it's still one
of those things that people hang on to.

Speaker 1 (52:53):
Okay, you were not in the movie. The movie was
a juggernaut, as was the double au them that accompanied it.
And you do mention once in the book about getting
a big royalty check would help you with the time.
To what degree has that been a profitable experience?

Speaker 2 (53:10):
Yeah, that was a mistake on their part, And there's
some side tentacle stories to that, but we won't we
won't go into all of that. But I didn't expect
to get royalties I did. I just sang the songs.
I went home. I got a call. I don't know
how long later, a week later, a couple of weeks later,

(53:32):
I'm not sure, and the guy says to me, we
forgot to have you sign a release. Will you come
in and sign a release? And this is absolutely a
true story. There was a voice. Now, I knew very
little about business. I'd been in on some of these

(53:53):
conversations with Bob Crue and stuff, but I was naive.
I was happy to get paid whatever I was getting paid,
and I worked for Bob for basically nothing, so, you know,
except a place to live. So I but this voice

(54:14):
in my head said say no. So I said no,
and the guy went what And I said no. He said,
let me call you back. So a day later, I'm

(54:34):
not sure how long, another guy calls and he says,
we'll give you thirty thousand dollars in cash if you
sign a release. And I was not stupid. So I
might have been naive, but I was not stupid. But

(54:57):
I had no real money. I mean, I'd done a
couple of gigs with Elton John and I had some
I had a nice apartment. I was living in Hollywood Hills.
You know, I got a car. I was sober. I
was doing a sessions here and there. You know, I
was okay, but I didn't you know, I wasn't rich.
I didn't have a lot of money. So thirty thousand

(55:19):
dollars back in nineteen seventy seven was a lot of money.
It's still a lot of money. And that little voice
inside my head said say no, and so I said no.
And at the time, this manager, Tony Defreese was courting me,

(55:42):
who I had not met yet. But Bobby Newarth had
talked to Tony. He was doing a project with Tony
and said, Tony, you got to talk to Cindy Bullen's
you guys should get together. So Tony had heard some
stuff that I'd done and knew what I had done,

(56:03):
and he was courting me. So I told I just
happened to be on the phone with him. He was
in New York. I was in LA and I said,
you know, I've got this thing where they you know,
the Grease movie santre He said, let me take care
of it. So Tony Defreese doesn't have the greatest reputation,
but he did me that favor, and so I got

(56:27):
a royalty, a royalty from that Grease album. And like
I said, there is there are tentacles. At the time,
I did make a lot of money. Now I was
naive and stupid and young, and the money was spent
without me knowing, and we're not going to go into
that story. And I invested in some things that I

(56:49):
was told to invest in, which I made no money from,
so that money didn't last a long time. I didn't
spend it. I bought a car, That's what I bought.
I bought a Jeep Cherok wagon and which was twelve
thousand dollars in cash. And that's what I did. But
here's the tentacle I want to talk about. Can I

(57:11):
do this? Can I Okay? Years later and we'll get
to this. I'm sure we'll get to this, But I
want to say how these things weave together. Years later,
after the death of my daughter, my younger daughter, Jesse,

(57:31):
who was eleven, and I was writing. So I know
I'm jumping ahead, but I have to tell this. I'm
jumping ahead. I was writing. I had written some songs.
I didn't know it was going to become an album
from nineteen ninety seven in ninety eight.

Speaker 1 (57:49):
And.

Speaker 2 (57:52):
I at the time, I had written enough songs. And
that's a whole story in the book. It's a whole
big bunch of chapters in the book. And I wanted
to I now knew I had enough songs to make
an album, and I wanted to make an album in
honor of my daughter. But I didn't know how to
do it because I didn't have the money. And I

(58:16):
won't go into the whole thing, but I found out
through my sister who had no no no, my older
sister had She was a housewife and Darienne, Connecticut. She
had no business in the music nothing, knew nothing. She
kept asking me if I had received grease from movie

(58:37):
soundtrack royalties, and I'm like, what are you talking about.
I don't know. I didn't I was in grief. My
daughter had died. I was not thinking about anything. She
kept asking me. She was like, she had this thing
from heaven or wherever, the universe or whatever. Anyway. I
finally said, Okay, Nancy, I'll find out. So I asked Dan,
who's my husband, who was in the music business, this

(59:00):
and new publishing and everything. He found out that I
hadn't been paid for seven years. So that money that
came in the accumulation of seven years royalties paid for
my album Somewhere Between Heaven and Earth, which became my

(59:23):
signature album. It's my legacy. So that's a little tentacle
from the Grease movies.

Speaker 1 (59:28):
Just to stay on this one point, do you still
own those royalties? Do you still get payments?

Speaker 2 (59:35):
Very little because there are mechanicals, you know, I mean
I didn't write the songs, you know, I get you know,
I get a little bit from Paramount Pictures, but I'm
talking like two figures, you know, and I get twice
a year. I get mechanicals, but it's very It's not

(59:55):
a lot, not a lot of money, but I still
get them.

Speaker 1 (01:00:04):
Okay, let's go back to the seventies. How do you
meet Elton John?

Speaker 2 (01:00:08):
Yeah, I, uh, I had hutzpah back then. I had
some Like I said, I was young and naive, but
I was not stupid, and I had some hutzpah. And
apparently I had some charisma too, because that's that's uh,
you know, I guess what pulled people into me. But

(01:00:31):
I was at Cherokee Studios where a lot of stuff
went on I met the guys who owned Cherokee, the
Rob Brothers, excuse me, through Bob Crue, because he recorded
there as well. And I would hang out at the
studio and you know, I'd get coffee for people I did,

(01:00:52):
you know, just hang out with the guys. And I
loved hanging out at Cherokee Studios. When they moved to
Airfax Avenue, I just loved it, and I was friends
with them, and people would come in and I would
just be there anyway. So one day I was rehearsing

(01:01:12):
with Bob Crue for a project that he wanted to
put together, and it was stupid. It was not something
I liked, and I was mad at him, and because
he was not yet sober, and it was lashing out,

(01:01:33):
and so I left that rehearsal and went to Cherokee Studios,
where I knew they were doing a press party for
Neil Sedaka, who was a hit songwriter and singer in
the sixties who had signed with Rocket Records and was
having a comeback single in nineteen This was nineteen seventy.

Speaker 1 (01:01:57):
Five, Rocket Records being Elton's record.

Speaker 2 (01:02:00):
That's right, And so I knew that Elton was going
to be there at they were doing this press party
at Cherokee Studios in the big room, and I was
a fan of Elton like everybody else, and I thought, oh,
I'm going to go and and I had no intention

(01:02:23):
at the time of meeting him or doing anything, just
going to hang out with the rob brothers. So I
walked into the control room and all they're all the
three brothers and the father were all you know there,
and there probably was a couple other people. And I'm
in the control room watching this press party what I

(01:02:43):
call like looking into a fish bowl of all these
press people and publicists. And Neil Sadaka was in there,
and so there wasn't stars or anything. It was all
press people and there was Elton standing in the corner.
And for I don't even remember what I was thinking.

(01:03:05):
I just turned to the guys and I said I'm
going in. I'm going to go in there. And they said, no,
you're not, you can't go in, and I said, yes,
I can. I opened the door and walked in and
headed straight for the food. This is the absolute truth.

(01:03:26):
I didn't go right up to Elton. I didn't have
that much hutzbah, you know. I walked to the food.
I got a glass of wine or something and some
carrots and crew de tee or whatever, and I'm like
standing there hoping that something, you know, I don't even
know what. Anyway, I started talking to this one guy.

(01:03:49):
I can't remember who it was or what he did.
And I said, yeah, I work with Bob Crewe, and
of course everybody knew Bob Cruise, so I was, you know, valid,
you know, and you know, I'm a background singer. I
sing with Bob Crue. I had not yet sung in
the Grease movie contrac This is nineteen seventy five, and

(01:04:11):
I had, you know, met Bobby new Earth and stuff,
so I knew some people and I said that, and
so we started talking and I expected to be kicked out,
but I wasn't. And out of the corner of my
eye he went away, that guy I was talking to,
and I'm standing there again, and out of the corner
of my eye, I see Elton walking toward me. And

(01:04:33):
my first thought was he's going to kick me out,
which is stupid because Elton wouldn't be the one to
kick me out, but that's what I thought. And he
walks up and he says, verbatim I'll never forget it. Hi,
my name is Elton. I don't believe we've met yet.

(01:04:55):
And I went completely black, you know, I said, Hi,
my name is Cindy, but I really don't remember anything
else we said. And but we talked for a few
minutes and until one of his people came up and

(01:05:21):
kind of dragged him away, and nobody kicked me out.
And then so I'm like, okay, I'm here. I start
talking to some other people, and then a woman walks
up to me, a young woman, and she asks me
what I do, and I said, well, I'm you know,

(01:05:43):
I'm a singer, you know, like with all the you know,
whatever I could put into that. And we talked for
a minute. She goes away, and I hang out for
a little while longer, and I'm just about to leave
because I'd met Elton by this time. What else am
I going to do? And I go up to her

(01:06:10):
hold on a second, just and I mean, she walks
up to me, and it turns out her name is
Connie Pappus and she works with Elton and in his
management with John Reid. She works with John Reid Management,

(01:06:31):
And she says to me, what are you doing for
the next two months, and I thought, uh oh, and this,
I'm going to tell the whole story because it it
is it. I did know what I was doing for
the next two months. I was supposed to go on

(01:06:51):
the road with the Rolling Thunder Review with Bob Dylan.
That's a whole nother story that's in the book. But
I said, I don't know why, And she said, Elton
wants to know if you want to go on the
road with him. Now this isn't an hour later from

(01:07:16):
when I met him. He hadn't heard me sing. He
The reason for him to walk up to me, you know,
was I think to see if I was a boy
or a girl, a man or a woman, because I

(01:07:37):
had a very androgynous look. So here's what I think happened.
So this was a Wednesday night. It was September seventeenth
to nineteen seventy five Wednesday. The rehearsals for the road
started Friday, two days from when. So the next day,

(01:08:02):
so I so I was like, what do I do.
I've got to choose between Elton John and Bob Dylan
because the Bob Dylan Rolling Thunder Review is going to
start like in two weeks from then, and they were overlapping,
so I couldn't do both. I had to choose between

(01:08:22):
Bob Dylan and Elton John, and I chose Elton, much
to Bobby Newris's Chagrinny never forgave me. And so the
next day on Thursday, and I was living in a
little hovel on Honey Drive in Hollywood, on the bottom

(01:08:45):
of Laurel Canyon, and a limo pulls up and drops
off a stack of Elton John records, even in those days,
and I had a turntable on the floor. I had
no furniture except a couch, no table, no coffee table,

(01:09:07):
no nothing. I had a single bed and a couch.
So my turntable was on the floor of this hovel.
And I'm supposed to learn these songs before the next
day when I go to rehearsal. But anyway, my feeling
on how I got that was two is twofold. I

(01:09:30):
think Elton liked the liked me. I think he liked
the way I looked. But Connie Pappis sister is Renee Pappis,
who is married to Jerry Wexler, So I think that

(01:09:53):
con somehow they had to I'm sure somebody said to
Elton you know, you can't just hire this kid because
you we got to find out if they can sing.
So I think what happened? I should ask Renee because
she and was that somebody said to Elton, you got
to find out, So Connie, I don't know. Probably I

(01:10:16):
think Jerry Wexler probably said, yeah, I go for it.
You know, they probably got, you know, through those circles.
So I ended up on the road rehearsing with Elton
john in two days after I met him.

Speaker 1 (01:10:30):
Okay, you end up working with Elton for years. During
that time, you are, as they say, partying, but unlike
a lot of the people on the road, you're actually
hanging without Elton. So what was the experience of the
Blue Moves and all that other stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:10:52):
Yeah, Elton and I became really close and I adore
him to this day. The best part of all this
story is that we are still friends, and he wrote
the little forward for my book, for my memoir, which
he did not have to do. I mean, we're still
friends to this day. And but going back, yeah, I

(01:11:19):
we he kind of took me. He took me under
his wing. He didn't kind of he did take me
under his wing, you know, kind of like Bob Crue
and Bobby Newarth, those three people. If you look on
the back of my first album, Desire Why, you'll see
it's dedicated to three people, three men, Bob Crue, Bobby
Newirth and Elton John Because those three guys really and

(01:11:44):
they each saw different things than me. But whatever they saw,
they brought me into their worlds and they elevated me
to a different plane. They educated me the elevation, They
taught me things. They they allowed me to, you know,

(01:12:06):
become more of who I was and as an artist
and uh and as a human. So being with Elton
was an education first of all about what it was
like to be the most famous person on earth at
that time. He was the Taylor Swift of the mid seventies,
you know, and it burst my bubble of to understand

(01:12:35):
what happens when you're that famous personally to someone. But
it was also fun. It was it was he was
so kind and loving to me. He he brought me everywhere.
He took me to England. I had, you know, so

(01:12:59):
many private moments with him. He took me. I mean,
I went to dinner with Shirley Maclain and you know,
I mean, and it wasn't just about the famous people
that he introduced me to or the places. It was
the intimate moments that we had together in talking or

(01:13:19):
just being together. And I will cherish those for the
rest of my life. And singing on the you know,
being asked to sing on the Don't Go Break in
My Heart, I sang all.

Speaker 1 (01:13:30):
The woo's nobody knows.

Speaker 2 (01:13:31):
You know, all that stuff, you know, Don't Go Break
in my Heart, the Blue Moves album, being invited to
be a part of those. But more than anything in
my relationship with Elton, it is those quiet moments and

(01:13:53):
the moments you know, and he'd sit at the piano
and play me song, you know, and just he and
I in the room, you know, or just talking about
things and he he It wasn't all about Elton all
the time. You know. I don't know what conceptions people

(01:14:14):
have about Elton John, but he is one of the
most kind, loving people I've ever known, and he cares.
He cares. He cares about people both individually and of
course we all know what he's done with the AIDS
Foundation and more things like that, raising millions and millions

(01:14:39):
and millions of dollars for those in need. And yeah,
is he complicated. Absolutely, you can't not be and be
that famous. You can't. You can't navigate in the world
without having some defense systems and so on. But I him,

(01:15:02):
I absolutely adore him.

Speaker 1 (01:15:04):
But you in the book say you had a breakup,
falling out when something happened on stage you weren't happy about,
and you confronted him in his dressing room. Yeah. In
the book, you do not talk about a reconciliation. You
say that it's basically over between you and Elton. So

(01:15:28):
tell us, really what happened to the aftermath of you
cursing him out in front of a bunch of people backstage,
and how you reconnected.

Speaker 2 (01:15:37):
Yeah, you know, I regret because a couple of people
have said to me, you don't talk about reconciliation. And
I thought I had covered that when I said after
the end of the and I'll go back into that incident.
But when I said at the end of that, when
he said to me at the end of the tour,
he gave me a big hug instead, it's your turn now,

(01:16:00):
And it was basically that that was the reconciliation. I mean,
I made amends when I got sober, I made amends
to him for it, and you know, and he said,
you don't owe me any amends but the incident itself.
And to be perfectly honest with you, I really didn't

(01:16:20):
want to write about that incident at all because it's
a blip in our relationship. The reason I wrote about
that incident where and it was me. I mean, he
he had his part in it, but it was my
reaction that that was the issue. But I wrote about

(01:16:51):
it because it led to my my looking in word
at myself and saying, what the heck are you doing
and why? And you got to get your shit together
to myself. But anyway, so the incident was that we

(01:17:13):
were on stage in Greenville, South Carolina, Greensboro, South Carolina,
and some one of those anyway, uh, And it was
at the end of a long two tours put together.
Everybody was exhausted. We it was just everybody was exhausted,

(01:17:40):
and you know it was there was a lot of
drug usage, there was a lot of I'm speaking for myself,
you know, I was out of control on a lot
of levels. And this one night, something happen in one

(01:18:02):
of the songs and toward the end of the set
and the music kind of hung there, and the background vocalists,
of which I was one of three, could have could
either make come in at the time we were supposed
to come in or let it just play out. And

(01:18:24):
we came in and at the time we were supposed to,
and of course we should have waited for the for
Elton to do whatever he was going to do. And
Elton turned around and gave us the finger, and I
went ballistic and I the song finished. I mean, it's

(01:18:49):
in much more detail in the book. The song finished,
and I went off stage and went into the dressing
room and it was crowded with people, and I put
my finger in his face and I said, don't to
ever do that to me again. I took it. You know,
it wasn't about me. He wasn't even given their finger
to the three of us. But I was so you know,

(01:19:09):
I was doing a lot of cocaine. I was drinking.
I was My ego was out of control at that point,
and uh, you know, I I so, I you know,
I went in and put my finger in his face,

(01:19:30):
and he was stunned and started to you know, we
started to get into it, and I, of course was
as I talk about in the book. I was pulled
away by everybody who was around, taken by the bodyguards
out of the room, and thrown into a shower stall

(01:19:52):
somewhere down the hall. And I knew I had completely
screwed up. I knew because you know, I don't know
if you've ever had this happen, but you know, when
you're doing something and you can see yourself doing something
and you're going, what the heck am I doing? I'm not,
you know, you're kind of outside your self doing something.

(01:20:15):
And that's the way it was. As I'm pointing my
finger in his face, don't ever do that to me again,
I'm going, what the hell are you doing? You know?
And anyway, he didn't speak to me for the rest
of the tour, and it was it crushed me, and

(01:20:42):
I knew I was wrong. And I don't blame him.
I mean, he was hurt. I know. I know a
lot of the details that I don't put in the book,
the private details about what happened after, you know, and
how he felt. But I say in the book I
had betrayed as trust and I did, you know. And

(01:21:09):
it was a turning point for me in terms of
looking at my own self and my own actions and
my own what I was, where I was, and I
it was the beginning of the end for me in
terms of my drug usage and my alcohol usage. It

(01:21:32):
took another two months for me to get sober, but
it was it was the beginning of the end. And
that's why I bring it up in the book because
it's not really relevant, I mean, to anything else in
my mind. And and Elton and I we reconciled right

(01:21:53):
after the tour, you know, and there was no no
harm done. And when I did, when I did get
sober and made an amends, I wrote him a letter.
He wrote me back, and you know, making amends for that,
which is one of the steps in alcoholics anonymous. And

(01:22:14):
I'm breaking my own inanimity, but I can do that
after forty seven years, and you know, I had to
make amends to him, and I did, and to other
people who are on that tour. He never he said,
you don't owe me any amends. You know, it just

(01:22:35):
just happened. And but it was the incident that was
kind of the last Neon sign for me. You're in trouble, Cindy,
get it together. You're going down the wrong path. And
because I had heard him so badly. Let's jump forward.

(01:23:08):
You end up marrying Bob, who's brother who you say
in the book from the beginning is gay. Yeah, you
also say, although it's not really clear that you are gay.
But at that time, were you only with women or
were you with men too, or what? So? I had

(01:23:29):
very few relationships, in fact, almost none, because I didn't know.
I mean, I kind of thought, well, maybe I'm gay,
you know, because I'm attracted to women, but I'm also
you know, have some attraction to men and so on.
But I always felt like I was a guy. I

(01:23:50):
always felt like I was a guy from the time
I was three years old and I told my mother,
I'm a guy. I'm a boy. Don't call me Cindy,
I'm a boy. So so, but growing up in puberty
and then beyond and then not knowing, you know, nobody
knew anything about the word transgender wasn't even in the vocabulary.

(01:24:10):
There was no word transgender back then. It was transsexual
if anything, and it was kind of a pathological, you
know condition. And so yes, Dan, Dan, and I I
was I did have some attraction to men and and

(01:24:30):
but I didn't have a lot of relationship Bob. I didn't.
I avoided them like the plague because I didn't know
who I was. I didn't feel like I was in
the wrong body. So I didn't really want to, you know,
I just it was I just wanted to stay away
from physical contact as much as possible with anybody. And

(01:24:53):
but I did have a couple of short relationships with women,
one in high school and one afterwards. But I I
didn't consider myself gay, although I thought, well, that's what
I must be. Anyway, I met Dan through Bob, obviously,

(01:25:17):
and he was completely gay, had never had a relationship
with a woman before. And when he was older. He's
older than me, He's sixteen years older. And we met
and we had an attraction to each other, and we
had a little fling for about eight months, and then

(01:25:39):
we didn't and then we after we both got sober
in AA. Bob got sober too, he and we were friends.
He said to me, I think we should get married,
and I said, you're crazy. I don't want to get married.
I met in the middle trying, you know that I
was recording my first album, and this was in nineteen

(01:26:02):
seventy eight, and I was, you know, on the road
and doing my thing and trying to become a rock star.
He said, we have the same values. We have, you know,
we should get married. And you know, finally, after a
while I said yes, because I was getting beaten up

(01:26:26):
in the record business. And you know, I love Dan.
I still love him today. I'll see him next week.
But you know, I I just thought, well, if I'm
not going to be able to be a rock star,
because in nineteen seventy nine, a lot of stuff started

(01:26:49):
happening and I and you know, I was nominated for
a Grammy and good stuff and all that, and then
the record companies folded, and you you know all the story.
Plus yes, I was being told to be more feminine
if I wanted to get ahead in the music business.

(01:27:09):
And I said, no, not changing who I am, I can't.
And that didn't go over real well. And so I
married Dan and we had two kids. We moved back
East and we had a monogamous relationship. It wasn't an

(01:27:37):
arrangement like somebody think, oh, well, okay, he's gay and
you're trands and you know whatever. But we didn't. We tried.
I don't even know why, but we tried to be
a normal couple. And of course we weren't, so it
led to a lot of issues, but we had two

(01:27:57):
beautiful children and we're still friends.

Speaker 1 (01:28:02):
Okay, you don't have children immediately. If I remember correctly,
Bob suggests having children, What did you think about having children?

Speaker 2 (01:28:12):
No, I don't think Bob's I don't remember Bob suggesting
having children. Dan was the one who suggested.

Speaker 1 (01:28:18):
That that's what I meant to say, I said, Bob,
I meant.

Speaker 2 (01:28:20):
Dan, Yeah, yeah, Dan, And we sat down and we
talked about it very honestly one night. I talk about
that in the book, because we looked at each other,
and you know, he was gay and I was who
I was. And I was still in nineteen eighty one
trying to even though we'd moved to New York by

(01:28:41):
that time, but I still wanted to have some kind
of career. Now for those younger people, I was thirty
years old, and I and you were old to have
a career when you were thirty years old back then,

(01:29:06):
and so time was running out for me. But I did,
in the back of my mind somewhere want to have kids.
And I thought, Okay, if the music business isn't going
to happen for me, then you know, I want to
have kids. And Dan and I did discuss the fact

(01:29:27):
that we weren't normal. I hate that we use the
word normal. We weren't typical male, female, married couple having children,
but we both wanted kids and we did.

Speaker 1 (01:29:46):
Okay, you end up moving to Connecticut, you're a suburban
mom prior to your younger daughter than getting ill. Were
you happy the circumstances you were under or was it
a struggle?

Speaker 2 (01:30:00):
It was a struggle. It was always a struggle for me.
It was always a struggle for me. I felt like
I was living out of my own body. I felt,
you know, we really did, honestly try to fit in
in Westport, Connecticut because we moved out of New York.

(01:30:23):
We had a lot of gay friends, a lot of
friends in the LGBTQ community in New York and in
LA and when we moved to Westport, Connecticut, that kind
of fell away. And here we were going to preschool
with you know, the Montessori school and all these you know,
straight couples and you know, living in Westport, Connecticut, and

(01:30:47):
we both Dan and I really tried to fit in
and do you know all the things that parents, young
parents do and with the kids, and I listen, I
loved having children. There's nothing about having children that I regret,

(01:31:11):
even with the death of my younger daughter. And I
loved being pregnant. I loved breastfeeding. I loved being a mother.
I still love I love being a grandparent. But that

(01:31:31):
wasn't what the struggle was. The struggle was presenting as
a straight couple, even though we didn't lie, we just
were and trying to fit the square peg of a
relationship or a couple into the round hole of Westport,

(01:31:52):
Connecticut and what that meant. And it was a struggle.
And I was still I still had some creativetivity left
in me, and I still had the desire to write
and perform and record. So that presented its own struggle
for me because I had kids.

Speaker 1 (01:32:12):
Your daughter tragically dies of cancer. A you work out
your grief ultimately in the album that you referenced earlier,
that you made with the Grief Royalties. As time has
gone by, to what degree does that metabolize, to what
degree can one get over it? Or is it always

(01:32:35):
a hole that can't be filled?

Speaker 2 (01:32:37):
Yeah, I my belief, and I've talked to thousands of
brave parents because I worked with them for fifteen years
with that music from Somewhere Between Heaven and Earth.

Speaker 1 (01:32:49):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:32:52):
My experience for myself and for anyone I've ever talked
to who's a brief parent, is that you never get
over it. There is no such thing as getting over it.
You can get through it. And even that, I say
with some kind of caveat, it's a hole that never
goes away. There's never I mean, Jesse's birthday is this month,

(01:33:15):
you know, she would have been thirty nine years old.
Her death day is next month, and it's complicated for those.
So grief, grief has a has a life of its own,
and it and it and it grows and changes and

(01:33:37):
shifts and sometimes it metastasized in the early days and
and and then it kind of shifts around to different
places in your life. It's an entity all its own
and it's always there. And so Jesse's death presented me

(01:34:06):
not only with abject grief, which I had to go
through and did go through, but it also gave me
a different life on a bunch of levels. It gave
me a different life because you're never the same person

(01:34:28):
after the death of a child. It affected my relationship
with my older daughter. Of course it affected her, her
sibling died. It affected my relationship with life, but it
also now looking back, and it's going to be next month,

(01:34:51):
it'll be twenty seven years since her death. It's a lifetime,
actually be twenty eight years. Twenty eight years, and her
death gave me a new life. I can only say

(01:35:11):
that now and have only been able to say that
for the last ten years, let's say, or fifteen years,
because she gave me a different life. She made me
a more compassionate person. She gave me the gifts of
those songs from somewhere between heaven and Earth that were
all channeled from and I'm using that word loosely from

(01:35:35):
a different place in me that before that album and
after that album. Nope, those songs that I wrote before
and after do not have the same depth or weight

(01:35:57):
of those songs. They didn't cut those songs before and after.
It didn't come from the same place those ten songs
from that album came from. And that's that album continues
to this day. I get emails from people, you know,
messages from people. I have to answer one today. I
just got, you know that about somebody listening to that

(01:36:20):
album after the death of someone a loved one. Mostly
it's children, but it could be anybody saying how profoundly
it affected them to this day. That album is my legacy.
There's other things to the book and one person show
and another show, you know, things like that, But that

(01:36:41):
album is my true legacy. There is and that would
not the horrible thing about it. And it brought me
back into the music business, to that album. So I
I would much rather have a tall, redheaded adult standing

(01:37:04):
in front of me, who's my beautiful daughter, than I
would all the rest of the life that came in
the last twenty eight years, but her gifts to me
in her death, I would not have the same life.

(01:37:24):
I would not have been the most more compassionate or
would have had my legacy. I would have just been
another struggling whatever. And so it's a complicated issue about

(01:37:47):
the death of a child. But does the grief go away? Nope,
it doesn't. And there are choices to be made when
a child dies. You either live or you die figuratively
or live or physically. Because I know parents who have
physically died from the death of their children. So somehow,

(01:38:12):
in some way I chose to live and I can't
take credit really for somewhere between Heaven and Earth, that
album and those songs, other than the fact that I
was compelled to show up to do them, to write them,
and to record them, and then the powers that be

(01:38:36):
took over and took it in a direction and took
it out into the world that I had no intention
of doing myself.

Speaker 1 (01:38:44):
Now, do you still think of Jesse every day? Does
the number of times you think about her fate over
the years.

Speaker 2 (01:38:55):
No. I think about her every day. She's with me
every day. If you talk to a bereef parent, more
than likely they will have some kind of symbol that
represents their child. To me and to many other people
who've lost loved ones, it's a cardinal. Jesse had red hair,

(01:39:16):
really red hair, this beautiful auburn, thick hair, and the
stories about cardinals that appeared to people when she died
and they knew she had died, and so the cardinal
became symbol for her. I have tons of cardinals in
my yard, you know, And but I think of her
even beyond the cardinals and stuff. I think of her

(01:39:40):
all the time. I've got her pictures right here. I've
got pictures right here. She's become a part of me
in you know, she's become a part of my own being.
I feel like I'm walking around and that part of

(01:40:03):
my mission here on earth is to let people know
that she lived and that she was important, and that
part of my gifts come which I just said, are
from her. And so she's always with me at all times,

(01:40:26):
and I never there's not a day that goes by.
I don't know that she's not a part of my day.

Speaker 1 (01:40:37):
Switching gears at this late date, can you be totally
comfortable being a trans man in society, both internally and externally.
Do you feel comfortable inside and do you find the
perceptions of others or such that you can feel comfortable.

Speaker 2 (01:40:57):
Yeah, that's a great question. I feel comfortable within myself.
If I didn't have to deal with transphobia and the
outside world, I would be very happy about that. It
really is. So it's such a shame that a certain

(01:41:22):
group of people are targeting trans people. People don't understand,
and I don't expect people to understand that it's a
real thing. That it's not, you know, some crazy whim
you know, or some psychological problem or anything like that.

(01:41:45):
It is a physiological condition. And I mean I have
known since I was three years old. As I meant
before that, I was a boy at that time, a
boy in a girl's body, and one of There is

(01:42:08):
a spectrum of transgenderness too, I mean people transgenderness. That's
not even a word, but there is a spectrum, and
there are people who feel differently than I do. There
are people who are on a different part of the spectrum,
who feel that they're gender fluid or something like that.
I am on the real side, you know, flat end

(01:42:30):
of the spectrum where I never in my life felt
like a female. I don't relate to women, never did
relate to women. I loved being a mother, I loved
being pregnant, I loved breastfeeding. But I even then, even
at nine months pregnant, I didn't relate to being a woman.
I was just a vessel carrying a baby. And I

(01:42:56):
I just so sociologically it's difficult, I look even though
no one. I mean, I've been, Believe me, I've been
in men's rooms in Fenway Park and Jillette Stadium and
Titans Nissan State. You know I've been. I've been in
men's room and gas stations out in the middle of Nebraska.
You know, no one will ever look at me and

(01:43:19):
say there's something about that guy that looks like a woman. Nobody.
But I still look over my shoulder. I am still
aware of where I am at all times in public,
you know, and what's around me. If I go into

(01:43:39):
a restroom and into a stall, if you want to
get personal about it, I make I have to, you know,
I make sure that I'm safe. It's a shame that,
as I said, that people don't and don't want to understand.

(01:44:00):
They don't want to believe that this is just a
human condition, just like other human conditions. I say at
the end of my book in the epilogue, you know,
if we are indeed the most advanced species on Earth,

(01:44:21):
then wouldn't we by definition be the most diverse. And
we are diverse, you know, we are. We don't look
at whatever that fish is or whatever that bug is
where the male gives birth and say that's an anomaly

(01:44:42):
of nature. We say, oh, that's a male fish who
gives birth. Wow. You know. It's the misinformation and the disinformation,
as people like to say about trans people that bothers

(01:45:02):
me the most. And that's why I'm an advocate, and
I try to speak out loud about being trans. Now,
we could get into a whole political discussion about why
there are bathroom bills. Guess what, there's not a bathroom
bill because somebody's afraid that I'm going to walk into
a men's room. Nobody knows. I could stand washing my

(01:45:24):
hands beside Mitch McConnell or you know, one of the
red wing, red wing I was gonna say, red neck,
right wing, one of the right wing politicians. I could
stand beside any one of them in a restroom washing

(01:45:45):
my hands and they wouldn't know. Why do they have
bathroom bills? Why is it illegal for me to walk
into a restroom in many states? Even though I do anyway?
Because it's the trans women who they're afraid of. Men

(01:46:05):
are afraid of trans women. It threatens their masculinity for
some reason. And yeah, I could go on a whole
diatribe and I won't, but it, you know, we have

(01:46:27):
to educate. That's the only way we can do it.
And the only you know, I'm out. I'm an out
trans person, you know. And do I worry every once
in a while that some person's gonna say, uh, you know,

(01:46:48):
Sydney Bullens is a trans person and doesn't deserve to live. Yeah,
I worry about that sometimes, but I can't live my
life doing that. What I can live my life doing
is talking about it, writing about it. You know the
thing about my story, Bob, which you got when you

(01:47:11):
wrote about it, you got it. It's a human story.
It's not about being a transgender person who happened to
have a career in rock and roll or happen to
have kids, even though that thread runs through the book
along with the music. It's a human story. My story
is human. I lived as a woman for sixty one years.

(01:47:34):
I had two babies. I watched one of them take
their last breath. I have four beautiful granddaughters, grandbabies, two
granddaughters and two grandsons, four beautiful grandchildren. You know, I'm
a grandparent. I act like a grandparent. I'm not a

(01:48:01):
freak or an anomaly or a deranged person. I contribute
to my community, and that's what we really That's what
my book is about. It's about a human story. So
that maybe if somebody chooses to read it, although it's
got trands in the title, maybe they'll have a different view.

(01:48:22):
Maybe they'll get a different perspective. Maybe they'll say, you
know what, maybe I can learn a little bit from this.
And I don't want to start pontificating, but it bugs me. Yeah,
And I'm afraid for the trans people. And know I'm
not always comfortable in the world, but I'm comfortable within

(01:48:42):
myself and I don't regret making the decision, even though
let's get honest here, it's harder for me in the
music business. It's harder for me out in the world.
It's harder for me to meet people. It's harder for

(01:49:04):
me to tell my story. Somebody says, what do you do? Well?

Speaker 1 (01:49:06):
I do this?

Speaker 2 (01:49:07):
Oh what have you done in the past? Ah. I
sang with Elton John. I sang on the Grease movie soundtrack.
Guess what Cindy sang on the Grease movie soundtrack. Cindy
sang with Elton John. So now they go and look
me up. I had this happen the other day with
a guy with the Trump. I was in a store
and he had a Trump, you know, cut out, a

(01:49:28):
life sized Trump cut out, and I mistakenly said to him,
you know, I was doing a transaction, and he I
mistakenly said, yeah, yeah, he said, what do you do?
I said, I'm you know, I'm one of those songwriters
in Nashville. He looks up my name and I had
to turn to him and I said, wait until I

(01:49:49):
leave before you look me up. And I laughed and
he put his phone away. So it's harder for me
to live in the world as a trans person. But
do I regret it, No, because I am being the

(01:50:12):
person that I am meant to be and part of that.
When when my siblings didn't want me to transition, when
I told them I was going to one of my
sisters said why, why, why why? And I said, well,

(01:50:33):
there's a couple of reasons. One is I I want
to see what it feels like to be in the
body it was meant to have, minus a few things. Two,
if I can, because I'm a known person in certain communities,
maybe not a household name, but I'm a public figure.

(01:50:56):
If I can change one person's opinion about what a
transperson is, then it's worth it to me. Just like
I did with the death of a child, I affected,
not me, that music affected a lot of people in
a positive way in expressing their grief, in knowing they
weren't alone, whatever it was so with somewhere between heaven

(01:51:20):
and Earth. So now it's this. Now I'm a transperson.
If I can affect anybody to maybe take it just
a little bit of a deeper beak into what it
is to be transgender, or to empathize a little bit
with the fact that this is a human condition, then

(01:51:49):
it's worth it to me.

Speaker 1 (01:51:52):
Okay, you transitioned a little over a decade ago. In
that time, although I have a friend who has a
brother who turned into as she would say, his sister,
and I've known that person for thirty five years. In
the last half a decade, this has become more of

(01:52:12):
a public issue.

Speaker 2 (01:52:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:52:15):
Has this been better or worse for you?

Speaker 2 (01:52:19):
Oh, it's been. It's been worse that it's been a
public issue because, as I said, you know, I look
over my shoulder. Look. I transitioned in Portland, Maine. I
lived in Maine. You know, I'm a big fish in
a little pond in Portland, Mainor I was you know
where I you know, I was known to a lot
of media people. I've done a lot of charity work.

(01:52:42):
I've done a lot of things there. When I started transitioning,
the local networks did stories on me as like, oh
you know this, you know this person is transitioning, and
what a great story this is and great for them
and me, and you know, little did I know, and

(01:53:05):
its been twelve years that the world that we would
become trans people would become the number one targeted group
of all the vitriol, that the violence that trans people

(01:53:34):
encounter is off the charts. So, as I said, it's harder,
and especially living now in a red state, even though
Nashville is a blue city, and having all these laws
passed and everything else, it's much harder. One of the

(01:53:59):
reasons I moved back to Maine. Not that there aren't
people who disagree in Maine too, you know, every place
has its as it's you know, divisions, but uh yeah,
it's it is harder. It's much harder, Okay.

Speaker 1 (01:54:20):
In the seventies, mid seventies, I lived in Salt Lake City.
Utah is not the same state it used to be.
It used to be very heavily Mormon. Not that there
aren't a lot of Mormons there, but they really dominated.
And within a month seemingly every Jew in Utah found
me and I wasn't looking for them. Okay, is their compassion.

(01:54:46):
Is there I hate to use the word network's got
a weird connotation. Is there a community that strengthens each
individual in the trans world.

Speaker 2 (01:54:57):
There are many communities that are are out there, and
I list a bunch of resources in the back of
my book for people. I mean, every city and some
towns have their own LGBTQ organizations that help people. Obviously,

(01:55:22):
there is human rights organizations all over the place, so
there are places to go and places that are safe
for people, and certainly online there's a ton of ton
of them for trans people. I'm not going to name
them all, but yes, and we need every single one.

(01:55:46):
We need every single person. I'm privileged. I'm lucky. First
of all, I have support human support for me personally.
My family, my friends, my colleagues, you know, support me

(01:56:09):
in what I've done in terms of transitioning and who
I am now and who they want me to be
and how they want me to be. So I'm supported.
I also am invisible two people who don't know me.
Like I said, I can walk down the street and
no one's going to be the wiser. No one ever

(01:56:32):
raises their eyebrows at me. I'm just a guy. I'm
an old man. You know, I'm just another old white guy,
you know that's wandering through the world. And so I
have privilege in that I'm now seen as an older
white male, and believe me, I have I'm like a

(01:56:53):
fly on the wall. I'm like a spy because i
was a woman for sixty years and now I've been
a guy, and I there are believe me, there are
big differences. But I'm privileged. Not everybody is. And my
concern now more than anything is the trans youth. And

(01:57:17):
there are a lot of organizations out there for trans youth,
but it's the youth who are being punished now more
than anything with the laws that are being taken away
about trans care. And people can have their opinions about
this stuff, but you know, you don't have the right

(01:57:37):
to take away what someone needs to live their life.
There's going to be and I hate to be so
crass about it, but each state Ohio being the last
last week that takes away trans care for youth is

(01:58:00):
causing the death of kids. There are kids who will
commit suicide because they don't think they have any options
left in becoming who they feel they are. And that's
not a joke. There's no fun in that. You know,

(01:58:25):
there's no you know, people who you know, they brush
off trans people. You know, Oh, they're just crazy, you know,
blah blah blah, there is no there's only two genders
and all this bullshit. You know, you don't know. They're ignorant.

(01:58:48):
If you were inside my body, you would know. You
can't be inside my body any more than you can
understand what it's like to lose a child. If you haven't,
you can't understand what it's like to be transgender. And
I don't expect anybody to understand. What I expect is

(01:59:08):
that you let me live and that you don't make
decisions and assumptions about my life. For me, it's the
same with Roe v. Wade. But we could get into women,
you know, we could go into all of that stuff too.
Don't you who don't know anything about me make decisions

(01:59:30):
about my life. Believe me, it's not just the trans
youth medical care that's going to be taken away. These
people in these states want to take away all transcare
for all trans people, which means I take testosterone. You know,

(01:59:53):
they want to take that away from me. They don't
Florida the law or Texas. I can't remember which one,
but just in the last week or so, you can't
have your name. My name is Sydney now right, I
have a license it says Sydney Bullens mail my birthday,
all of that now. I think it's the state of Texas.

(02:00:17):
I couldn't be wrong, so I don't want to. But
in some state, just in the last week or two,
it is now illegal to have my I couldn't have
Cindy on my license, Sydney. I'd have to have Cindy
Bulloans on my license looking like I look, you know,

(02:00:40):
don't take away my right to exist. And that's what
I have to say about it.

Speaker 1 (02:00:52):
What might you say to someone who is struggling with
feeling that they're born in the wrong body and are
contemplating transition.

Speaker 2 (02:01:06):
Well, it depends if if they're a youth or an
adult or what or whatever. But there are lots and
lots of resources out there, there really are, So I
would go online or find your local LGBTQ community and

(02:01:28):
or talk talk to anybody you can. I have people
emailing me, you know, telling me about their son or
their daughter, their brother or sister, you know, and sometimes themselves.
You know who I've chatted with about it. It's a

(02:01:48):
serious consideration. There are differences between transitioning with trans women
and trans men. There are different procedures, different costs, so
it's not a one, one size fits all decision. I

(02:02:13):
know people who feel that they are transgender, who have
never transitioned and who will never transition because they don't
want to go through the hardships of transitioning, or they
don't have the cost of doing it, or they're afraid
for their lives and their livelihoods. Because many trans people

(02:02:37):
lose jobs or don't get jobs because they're trans. They're
a transperson. We're discriminated against. So there's so many considerations
that it's not just a one sentence or a one
even a one paragraph answer. But the but what I
would say is talk to people. You know what I did, well,

(02:03:02):
I read every book I could get my hands on.
I went on I did find some books written by
trans people, and I read every one of them that
I could, and I watched YouTube videos of trans people
there were I had no idea there was so many

(02:03:23):
trans people out there who were transitioning, and and I
did a lot of I went to my doctor, I
went to a gender therapist in Boston so that I
could because I never talked about it. I never I

(02:03:44):
put it so far back in the back of my
mind that I didn't keep up with it. I didn't,
you know. I mean, I read Chaz Bono's book before
I decided to transition, just because you know, it was there.
But I never. If you had told me a day
before I decided that I had to look into it,

(02:04:06):
that I was going to look into it, I would
have told you were crazy. I was living my life.
I was Cindy Bullen's I had grandchildren by that time.
I was in the refugees and doing some gigs and
you know, hi, but I had to do it. So
there's a lot to consider. And I would just say,

(02:04:28):
find as many resources as you possibly can before you
move forward with it. But let me just tell you something.
Once I knew it was possible for me, there was
no going back. There was no going back, even though
I talk about it in the book that yes no, yes, no,

(02:04:49):
yes no. But all the while I was transitioning, even
though I was afraid at certain points.

Speaker 1 (02:04:57):
And how do you feel about the piction of trans
people in the generically called Hollywood. We have the show Transparent,
We've had other transactors. Do you feel this is fair
or they're not getting it right?

Speaker 2 (02:05:16):
To be perfectly honest with you, I don't watch much
TV and at all I know obviously I watched a
few episodes of Transparent a few years ago. The general
statement I have, I'm really kind of neutral about trans

(02:05:43):
people playing trans people. I think, if at all possible,
if there's a trans character, it could should be played
by a trans person. But that's not always possible, like
in Transparent. You know, I'm not a militant trans person.

(02:06:05):
I think there are circumstances that you have to weigh
about depicting trans people. And my hope was and I
actually developed a TV pilot with a writer in Hollywood.
We haven't sold it yet, but we're developing a TV

(02:06:28):
pilot about a trans character.

Speaker 1 (02:06:30):
And my.

Speaker 2 (02:06:38):
View, what I'm trying to put into it is the
reality both internally and externally. Like you asked me, how
comfortable am I? How happy I am I internally and externally?
So there's an internal thought process with being trans that
people don't think about, like going into to a restroom

(02:07:00):
for example. You know, And so I'm trying to interject,
you know, little incidences and idiosyncrasies about being trans, and
so I think that Hollywood needs to educate themselves as

(02:07:22):
much as possible so that those idiosyncrasies and the reality
of being trands, not just the violent part and not
just the horrible parts of what happens, and not just
making you know, comedies about us, but really having an

(02:07:42):
in depth view of what it is and in a
character and the pathos of it.

Speaker 1 (02:07:51):
Okay, there's a lot of stuff going in the wrong direction,
the hate, the laws. You know, I tend to be
a glass half empty person. But is there any sunlight
in this situation, anything positive happening?

Speaker 2 (02:08:08):
You know, I'm I think I become a class half
empty person too, Bob. But here's my hope. My hope
is with the young people. You know, I'm an old
guy right now. I'm you know, I'm I try to
be as helpful and as informed as I can be
on this in this world until the day I drop

(02:08:31):
dead or get hit by a bus or whatever is
going to happen. But my hope is with the young people,
because they don't care about your pronouns. I have a
sixteen year old and fourteen year old granddaughters. You know,
they don't care. What's your pronoun them? Okay, you know,

(02:08:57):
all right, they don't care. They don't care if you're
a trans girl or a trans boy, or you're you know,
a they or you know, they don't care. Now, if
you're brought up by somebody who is vitriolic and and

(02:09:18):
doesn't understand as a young person, then you're going to
have your parents' viewpoint more than not. But there are
more people. But you know, evolution goes on whether we
like it or not, and sooner or later, all of
us old white guys are going to be dead, and
the younger people are going to bring us up. If

(02:09:39):
we can live that long, if we can retain our democracy,
if we can retain our planet, then these which is
really the critical question, these young people will show the way.
I have great faith in the young people. I have
a twenty six year old step You know, I have

(02:10:02):
great faith. My daughter is forty, but she's you know hip,
you know, she's she knows, she doesn't care, she doesn't
care for her kids are gay, straight, whatever they are.
You know. It's so the hope that I have is
with the young people, and we do have advocates, and

(02:10:29):
that beyond the young people, and I hope to be
one of them. I hope that people will hear my
story and ask me questions and understand that I'm just
a human being. You know, I'm a human being who
has lived a full, complicated, not easy life with lots

(02:10:53):
of bells and whistles, and that there's more about us
that you know. You've heard this term before, but it
stands true here too. There's more about me, you know,
us all being alike, trans people and non trans people

(02:11:15):
being alike. Then there are differences because we're all human.
So I have hope, but I go into the glass
half empty thing a lot. I have to pull myself
out of the bottom of the glass.

Speaker 1 (02:11:33):
Well, Sid, I want to thank you for being so
open and honest with my audience today. You know, this
is not a plug, but the book is fascinating. It
certainly fleshes out a lot of these stories. It talks
more about Sid's musical endeavors. But we only have so
much time today, So in any event, Sydney, I want

(02:11:56):
to thank you so much for speaking with my audience.

Speaker 2 (02:12:00):
Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Bob Great
to be with.

Speaker 1 (02:12:03):
You until next time. This is Bob left sets