Sweet little rock'n'roller
Richard Burnett
rburnett@hour.ca
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Jordan is the real deal
photo: Courtesy of Sass Jordan
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When I first met Sass Jordan briefly a couple of years ago, it was at the opening bash of the gorgeous Nelligan Hotel in Old Montreal after too many glasses of Moët & Chandon champagne. I kept yakking away while Sass took off her shoes and told me, "My feet are fucking killing me."That's all I remember.
But when I interviewed Sass this week, she actually remembered me. "You were awesome!"
Mm-hmm. Awesome might be a tad overstating it.
The U.K.-born, Montreal-raised Jordan is one in a not-very-long line of female rockers who have triumphed in a business that is still very much an old boys' club.
I love my female rock'n'rollers: Joan Jett, Stevie Nicks, Tina Turner, and the first woman rock star, the iconic Janis Joplin. Jordan actually played Joplin in the off-Broadway play Love, Janis. "It was the hardest goddamn thing I ever did," says Sass. "It was four nights a week for three months. It was exhausting. I was never a fan of Janis until I did [the play]. Singing [like] Janis isn't an easy thing to do but I did really, really well."
At the time she got the Joplin gig, Jordan was singing in a travelling revue called - wait for it - The Voices of Classic Rock, singing alongside such veterans as Spencer Davis, John Cafferty and Glenn Hughes. "We used to call the show 'The Voices of Massive Cock' because it was all men!"
While things have improved for female rockers since the days of Joplin, Sass says, "The business is also entirely different than it was 25 years ago. It's fucking gone.
No one sells CDs anymore. There are no record stores left. All that's left is a pale shell of what once was."Which is why the American Idol phenomenon - Canadian Idol is but one franchise in a global strategy - has been embraced by record companies. Like Streetheart used to sing, "Eat 'em up, spit 'em out and then you just throw them away!"
"I can't be the bitch from hell," Jordan, now 45 and married with a nine-year-old daughter, says about her role as one of the judges on Canadian Idol. "But I love the gig. It can get very tedious watching asshole after asshole. So many [contestants] suck and try to be famous for nothing. I'd say 98 per cent of contestants just want to be famous. For me, it's hard to take anybody on [such] a TV show seriously. But if you're the real deal, it's not a bad way to get started."
Jordan also thinks that an openly gay kid can win Canadian Idol - unlike Justin Timberlake, who recently said of 2006 American Idol winner Taylor Hicks, "If, God forbid, he's gay, and all these people in Mississippi who voted for him are like, 'Oh, my God, I voted for a queer!' - it's just too much pressure."
"A Canadian Idol contestant would not be encouraged to stay in the closet, absolutely not," Jordan says unequivocally. "[Canadian Idol executive producer] John Brunton is all about celebrating who you are. End of story. It doesn't matter in Canada. Besides, half of our crew is gay."
I tell Jordan that singer Alannah Myles, the one-hit wonder who won a Grammy for her 1989 number one hit Black Velvet, once told me, "I was up for that [Canadian Idol judging] job, but I'm glad Sass got it because she could use the work."
Sass rolls her eyeballs. "Everybody in Canada has told me they were up for that part. I can guarantee you that she wasn't. Alannah, bless her heart, she's bananas. We call her Banana Myles."
Jordan's appropriately titled new album Get What You Give is, to my ear, her best record since 1992's multi-platinum Racine, the album that won her the title Rock's Top Female Artist for 1992 from Billboard magazine, the music biz bible.
Which means at least one real artist has benefited from being on Canadian Idol.
"It got me a record deal. Now I want the album to go to number one in every country in the world. But it's not going to happen!" Sass laughs, just happy to be back in the saddle. "I just hope it opens up live [concert] possibilities. What I really want is to sing live again."
oooEssential buttplug Check out Janis Janus: A Celebration of the Music and Spirit of Janis Joplin, starring critically acclaimed actress Jan Kudelka, dubbed a "vocal dead-ringer for Joplin." At the Corona Theatre (2490 Notre-Dame W.), Nov. 18 at 8:30 p.m., $29. Special dinner package also available for $75. See you there!
I think the real question is .. not whether or not American Idol or Canadian Idol would support shooting out a gay pop idol onto the public, it's whether or not the public would accept a very young pop star out of the closet. I truly think if the public accepted it, you'd see Clay Aiken on stage with a glistening cock ring while RuPaul blew him kisses, but I don't think that day is coming soon. I think Sass' comments about Canadian Idol being more accepting, should be more about the Canadian public being more accepting.
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Rob Postuma
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