By Marc Allan
The Indianapolis Star | April 26, 1994
It’s jokingly said that relationships have two parts. Part one is finding the perfect person. In part two, having found the perfect person, you try to change them.
The relationships between bands and record companies is like that. Record companies sign new acts, then spend months or years trying to mold them into something else.
Lisa Germano ran into that last year when signed a contract with Capitol Records. And she didn’t like it, not one little bit.
That’s why Germano, who’s best known for playing violin in John Mellencamp’s band, is no longer with Capitol. (She’s no longer with Mellencamp, either, but more on that later.)
Today, Germano’s major-label debut album, Happiness, gets rereleased on 4AD Records, the substantially smaller, but cutting-edge label that’s home to the Breeders and Frank Black.
The disc has undergone a significant face lift since its release last July. The sequence of songs changes, as did the jacket art. Germano added two songs, Destroy the Flower and The Earth, and cut the cover of These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ and the brief instrumental Breathe Acrost Texas. She remixed the songs Puppet and Energy to sound rougher.
But perhaps the most important change is the rewrite of the single, You Make Me Wanto Wear Dresses. It’s now called The Dresses Song and, instead of being a charming little pop number, it’s a quirky, darker song structured around five Toby Myers bass tracks.
Why the fought
There are two bottom lines to this story. The first is that Germano says she now has the record she hoped to make in the first place. The second is that Capitol wanted to change Germano, and she didn’t want to be changed.
“Normally, a person would put a record out and if didn’t do well, they’d just get dropped,” Germano says. “This record was such a fight from the very first day—about sounds, about Dresses, about singles, about videos. They just wouldn’t let me do what I wanted to do.”
Germano argued that she should have the chance to showcase her vision of the music. She says Capitol argued that she should make a record that radio programmers would like. (A Capitol spokesman did not return a call seeking comment.)
You Make Me Wanto Wear Dresses and the accompanying music video were the key differences. She agreed to release a pop-oriented recording of the song as a radio single while insisting that the version she likes appears on the disc.
“I kept telling them, ‘If you make it too perfect, the song’s not going to work,” she says.
They worked out that compromise but were unable to agree about the video, which featured her changing outfits in a kind of fairy-tale atmosphere.
Germano “couldn’t stand what the (director) did.” She says she told the label: “This is ridiculous. They’re presenting to the public a completely, totally wrong version of me. So anyone who would that would not like my music.”
The song is about vulnerability, not knowing yourself and wanting others to take care of you. She didn’t want to be pictured as “a cute little girl just unzipping her shirt.” After leaving Capitol, Germano spent $2,500 of her own money to add footage and re-edit the video to reflect her lyrics.
In the end, both sides lost. Capitol delayed the release of the disc several times, and when Happiness finally did come out., it sold a piddling 16,000 copies. Germano says Capitol President Gary Gersh didn’t like her songs anyway and offered to let her leave the label and take the record with her.
She appreciated his honesty and his offer. And she took the disc to 4AD.
At first, she planned simplify to rearrange the songs and remove These Boots Are Made for Walkin’, she never wanted on the original.
“But as I started working on it,” Germano says, “I starting thinking: ‘Man, you have an opportunity to take out some of the crap you didn’t like.'”
A five-song sampler from the new disc already has sold 8,000 copies in Europe. And that’s where Germano is now, for a two-week tour.
When she gets back home to Bloomington, she’ll do whatever can be done to promote the new version of Happiness and write songs for her next record.
She will not, however, return to Mellencamp’s band, where she was a mainstay for nearly 10 years. Her violin strokes made songs such as Paper in Fire and Cherry Bomb standouts in the Mellencamp catalog.
“He was supposed to go on tour in May,” she says. (The tour now begins in July.) “I thought: ‘This is ridiculous, to work on my record 2 1/2 years, put it out and go tour with someone else.’ You have to promote your record. I called John and everything was cool. He really understood.
“When I work with him. I think my songs are dumb. When I work on my songs, I don’t understand this big rock entertainment thing. It’s so different. I don’t really know if it’s good to do both anymore.”
