Patti Scialfa: Redheaded Stranger
PATTI SCIALFA HAS ALWAYS BEEN A mystery. As a member of the E Street Band alongside husband Bruce Springsteen, she’s a familiar but enigmatic presence, and her one solo album, 1993’s Rumble Doll, yielded few biographical clues. “When you’re married to someone famous,” she says, “people know you, but they’re not really seeing you.”
With her deeply personal new album, 23rd Street Lullaby, Scialfa has decided it’s high time she opened up. She is sitting in a New York recording studio, where she’s tweaking songs for a pay-per-view special. The epitome of a sexy rock chick, Scialfa is long and lean in her stovepipe jeans, and she kicks off her high heels to lounge barefoot, her red hair spilling down her back as she leans over the board. She is a down-to-earth Jersey girl, funny and likable. (“I’m fifty,” she says at one point, moving her face under a light. “This is what fifty looks like.”)
On 23rd Street Lullaby, Scialfa delves into her starving-artist years in Seventies and Eighties New York, a richly creative time both for the city and herself. Scialfa is a born storyteller, and her evocative rock songs perfectly conjure the wild hopefulness of youth, when you knew everything and stayed up all night talking, talking, talking about life and philosophy and music.
Scialfa is backed by a solid band of old friends, including E Streeter Nils Lofgren and drummer Steve Jordan, who coproduced the album with her. “I’ve always loved the way Patti sings,” Jordan says. “She has a little Ronnie Spector in her voice, but she can remind you of Emmylou Harris.” He pauses. “You know, the person she’s married to casts an extremely long shadow, so there’s a tendency to get lost in the sauce. But if you’re making good, timeless music without the pyrotechnics and helicopters and the bombs going off, it doesn’t matter when you do it.”
Springsteen, her husband of thirteen years, agrees. “Patti has only been able to use a small portion of her talent onstage with the E Street Band,” he says. “She’s always been a beautiful songwriter, and on this record people will get the chance to hear what she can really do.”
Scialfa’s life is, essentially, a love story – not just between her and Springsteen, although there is that, too (they grew up ten miles from each other). It’s really the story of a girl and her music. She was raised in the Jersey Shore town of Deal, the daughter of a successful entrepreneur. As a teenager at Asbury Park High School, she hung out at the beach and cruised the streets, blaring music in a Firebird repossessed from a racecar driver. (Who else could Springsteen have possibly married?) Sometimes she and her girlfriends would cut class and hitchhike into New York. “We’d tell our art teacher we weren’t going to class, and that we needed to borrow markers to make hitchhiking signs,” she says. “He’d go, ‘Oh, don’t tell me this. The world’s not as nice a place as you think.’ And you’re that age where you’re just thinking, ‘Oh, please.”‘ She laughs. “And we’d walk out the door. We’d get lost on the subways, drunk on red wine. I just wanted to go out.”
Scialfa’s interest in music sparked when she was twelve and envied her older brother Michael, who played in local bands. At fourteen, she joined her first group, the excellently titled Ecstasy, which played, among other places, Catholic Youth Organization dances supervised by nuns.
After high school, she attended the University of Miami’s well-regarded music school, whose alumni include Pat Metheny and Bruce Hornsby. At the time, Scialfa was the lone girl in the jazz department, and she immersed herself in the local music scene, “You’d go see your friends play, or your teachers, or your teachers would see you play, and sit in,” she says. One memorable course was the Listening Class. “You’d listen to Charlie Parker or John Coltrane straight from six to nine,” she says.
While at Miami, she started shopping around her demos. One day, she received a call in her dorm room from Atlantic Records honcho Jerry Wexler, who produced Bob Dylan and helped launch Aretha Franklin’s career. He asked if he could give one of her songs to Franklin. When she agreed, he met with her in Miami at Criteria Studios (nicknamed Atlantic South). “He said, ‘If you change one verse of this song, I guarantee you’ll have a big hit,’ ” Scialfa recalls, With the hubris of a twenty-year-old, she refused. “I remember Jerry just shaking his head and saying, ‘Well, you think about it,’ ” she says.
