I typed in this article from the...

EAST BAY EXPRESS, September 16, 1994, Page 22

...without permission [and with my comments in brackets].


IN CONCERT
TORI AMOS with BILL MILLER
At Zellerbach Hall, Saturday, September 10

By Josh Kun

     It was hard to sit and listen to Tori Amos during Saturday night's
sold-out performance and not think about her sexuality.  Her music --
both irresistibly beautiful and structurally difficult -- is a private
confession gone public, the soundtrack to a once-locked diary.  Not
entirely unlike her contemporaries Polly Jean Harvey and Liz Phair,
Amos works through primarily vocal and piano arrangements to articulate
a raw, exposed and highly poetic and personal vision of a hurting but
incredibly hungry female sexuality that bursts the bubbles that boys
continue to blow. While Amos's work can be playful, flirtatious, and
naughty, it usually ends up being brutally emotional and painful as she
explores the line between the woman who does and woman who gets done.

     [I get his point, but, pardon me, PJ Harvey and Liz Phair (two of
     my favorite artists) work primarily through _PIANO_ arrangements?]

Amos's 1992 debut, _Little Earthquakes_, was an impressive mini-epic of
victimization and liberation that introduced her search for a personal
voice that refuses silence -- one that she could proudly call her own.
The songs on _Little Earth quakes_ explosively released a tension that
had been years in the bottling.  The daughter of a Methodist preacher,
Myra Ellen Amos was born in North Carolina and grew up in Washington,
DC, where she began nurturing her love affair with the piano.  Playing
at the age of two and composing by four, this rebellious child prodigy
began shaking the foundations of stodgy classicism at an early age when
she found herself admitted and then expelled from Baltimore's
prestigious Pea body Conservatory.  For the next fifteen years, Amos
and her music found temporary homes in DC's piano bars, playing for
audiences of gay men, horny politicians, and congressional hookers.

But Amos's first foray into the recording world was a denial of those
early years: Y Kant Tori Read, an atrocious and critically slammed
glam-metal band, was Amos's first and, thankfully, last attempt at
commercial formula and mainstream success.  _Little Earthquakes_
debuted Amos's trademark sound: a mezzosoprano that is as convincingly
sacred as it is profane (and that is doomed to be forever compared to
Kate Bush's voice), an idiosyncratic style of piano playing that bears
the residues of classical training, and consistently introspective
lyrics that take on sexual abuse, organized religion, and, yes, even
the world of fairies and hobgoblins.  If _Little Earthquakes_ was Amos
laying her musical and emotional cards on the table, then this year's
_Under the Pink_ is Amos reading those cards and trying to figure out
what to do with them.  _Under the Pink_ is even more of a strictly
voice-piano record, and its lyrics are Amos's most imaginative, albeit
cryptic, to date.  The more recent songs' lack of distinctive structure
and more coded treatment of intimate subject matter left most
listeners beyond Amos's cultish fan base [hi!] a bit bewildered, if not
wholly disappointed.

     [Actually, I think that her second album is generally _more_
     accessible to new listeners, and I haven't heard anyone tell me
     they were disappointed with it.  I think the reviewer is
     projecting here]

     While it has become quite clear just how deeply growing up as the
daughter of a minister affected Amos's growth and development as an
artist, little noise has been made about her maternal Cherokee
heritage.  This might explain the audience's initially cool response to
opening act Bill Miller, a Native American singer-songwriter who
remains unknown despite a major league signing to Warner Brothers.
Accompanied by acoustic guitar, bass, mandolin, and Native American
flute, Miller entertained the crowd with humorous and friendly
between-song chatter and a lengthy set of acoustic-folk compositions
sung in both English and Menomini that run the gamut from a chilling
tribute to Crazy Horse and some home-brewed "Indian blues" to a
hilarious rendition of the Ventures' "Pipeline." Singing direct and
urgent lyrics in his warm and versatile voice over acoustic guitarwork
that echoed equal parts Michael Hedges and Pete Townshend, Miller had
no problem capturing the attention and admiration of the audience, and
was a welcome addition to Saturday night's bill.

When Miller told the audience that he has found Tori Amos crowds to be
some of the best listening audiences he has ever encountered, he wasn't
kidding.  Greeted by thunderous applause, Amos made her through the
pitch darkness of the stage, but as soon as the first finger touched
the first piano key in "Past the Mission," the audience sat in rapt
attention, hanging on every word and savoring every note.  A visually
striking and moving geometric grid of multicolored lights revealed
Amos's lone frame in her standard, unconventional position at the
piano: legs spread, with her body turned away from the piano and facing
the audience.  With the contours of the piano fading into the stage's
darkness and the blankets of lights moving around her and billowing
clouds of smoke blurring her image, Amos looked like a perverted angel,
kept aloft by the opening and closing of her thighs.

     Throughout the performance, Amos used her legs as teasing stage
props, crossing and uncrossing them strategically, as she did so
effectively in her playful version of "Leather," to offer naughty
subtexts to a particular word or verse.  Amos maintained an erotically
charged presence -- offering well-timed grunts, raised eyebrows,
pregnant pauses, audible inhales, lip-smacks, hairflips, arches of her
back, and pelvic thrusts -- that, combined, with the expert and
beautiful lighting, turned each song into a musical and emotional
striptease.  But in true Amos fashion, this eroticism at times gave way
to a dorky wave to the audience [actually, she was waving to GregB in
the front right] or to a discussion with the stuffed Eeyore that sat
atop her piano.

     As she began "Precious Things," Amos thanked "all the gay boys" in
the audience.  She said that when she was younger, straight boys
used to tease her about her full lips but the gay boys "knew what these
lips could be used for" and gave her a lesson on proper technique with
the help of a cucumber.  "If I left any teethmarks," she said in cutesy
child voice, "I didn't get a milkshake."  All a perfect preamble to the
intense drama of "Precious Things," on which Amos worked every ounce of
innuendo she could get her hands on.  She looked the audience head on
and smirked as she sang, "Just because you made me come/doesn't make
you Jesus," garnering screams and hollers from the crowd's female
contingent and making the man behind me moan, "Oh God, I love her."

     [Doh!  The line is actually, "So you can make me cum/
     that doesn't make you Jesus"]

     But a heavy deferential silence fell over the crowd as the opening
lines of Amos's moving reading of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" were
heard.  In Amos's stark interpretation, Kurt Cobain's angry
generational anthem became a song of mourning and reflection, a gothic
hymn to the dead and the dying.  Determined to prevent any particular
mood from dominating, Amos then switched gears into the dark humor of
"The Waitress," where she imagines herself offing an inattentive
waitress.  On one of her more conventionally structured and well-known
compositions, "Silent All These Years," Amos bucked audience
expectation by singing in awkward hesitations, stretching pauses,
slowing tempos abruptly, and interrupting phrases.  And even though
she left the devilishly playful take of goosing nuns in "Happy Phantom"
relatively intact, it lost something in the transition from studio to
stage.

Amos's rendition of "Me and a Gun," amidst the divine glow of a single
beam of white light, offered an unnerving example of how she has
effectively used her voice to break the oppressive silences of sexual
victimization and abuse.  In this wrenchingly honest and startling a
capella narrative, Amos details her rape by "a man on my back,"
exposing herself as a woman still in the process of healing, still
negotiating between the strength of resistance and the incredible pain
of loss.  The song has resonated strongly with many of Amos's female
fans, who continue to approach her with their own stories of abuse,
survival, and healing.  Response to the song also led to the July
founding of the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), the
nation's first national sex-abuse hot line, of which Amos is a founding
member.

     Next to "Me and a Gun," Amos's renditions of "God" and "Girl"
[Doh! He means, "Cornflake Girl" of course] felt out of place and
pointless.  [Although she almost has to do them, since they're the
singles.]  By beefing up both songs with prerecorded tracks of drums,
keyboards, and backing vocals, Amos completely disrupted the intimate
mood that she so ably created on her own.  After moving through the
stunning "Baker Baker," Amos left the stage only to return to an
extended series of encores and uproarious standing ovations that
included re strained, almost awkward, readings of the Police's "Wrapped
Around Your Finger" and her own "Winter."

     Saturday's performance, despite the occasional intrusion of
prerecorded accompaniment, left no question that Tori Amos's words
and music fill a sizable gap in the lives of her fans.  By really
listening, we heard Tori Amos do just about all that anyone can ask
from a performer these days: she offered up herself by offering up her
music.

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Sorry for the length, hope you enjoyed that.  There was a nice picture
too, someday it will be on my home page.   

The only thing that I want to add is that during SLTS, I started seeing
horses and mountains and other random images because of the way the
laser effects and the smoke were interacting.  -- E. Stephen