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ALL THE HOARY CLICHÉS: THE MARY CUTRUFELLO BIO, SUMMER 2007

Texas honky-tonk stalwart turned Minnesota heartland rocker Mary Cutrufello is back! Seven years after moving to Minnesota, and three years after being sidelined with vocal nodes, Cutrufello returns with "35," a taut and rockin' collection of songs showcasing her writing, her guitar playing, and her once-again powerful voice.

"Believe me when I tell you," says Cutrufello almost breathlessly, "Nobody is happier than I am that this record even exists!" And while it is a welcome return to the microphone for the multi-talented and articulate singer/writer/guitarist, it also stands on its own as her strongest collection of songs and performances to date. Guitars chunk, wail, chop, and make all manner of surprising sounds. The vocal chorus of Andra Suchy and Twin Cities legend Mark Lickteig offers daring takes on the traditional backing vocal role. And above it all is Cutrufello's rehabbed and rejuvenated voice, at turns proud and pleading, telling her stories of desperation and redemption, wonder and resolve.

35 is a long road, or a long time, or a point in life when it's a daily fight against the ossifying forces and the leaden pull of comfort. F. Scott Fitzgerald claimed there are no second acts in American lives; 35 is when you find out if that means you.

BACKSTORY

Connecticut-raised, Yale-educated Mary Cutrufello spent the 1990's in Texas, where her hard-driving honky-tonk style won her a loyal following, as well as kudos from the local media (cover stories in the Dallas Observer and Austin Chronicle, the first of 2 appearances on "Austin City Limits"), and such Texas legends as Willie Nelson, Billy Joe Shaver, Joe Ely, and Johnny Bush. Her first CD, 1996's live-to-tape "who to love + when to leave," showcased her gritty take on the honky-tonk tradition, and was hailed as "quite simply one of the sharpest, most essential country albums of the last decade" by Matt Weitz in the Dallas Observer. (Mary reissued "who to love" in 2005, on a single CD with her 1992 cassette "...and the Havoline Supremes.")

After that came a stylistic move back toward the rock that Cutrufello grew up on. While it left a few Texans confused, Cutrufello reminded them that "rock and roll is where I'm from, and as much as I love country, I have to give that part of me its voice too." In 1998, she released the critically-acclaimed "When the Night is Through" on Mercury Records. A spot on the "Tonight" show followed, as well as another "Austin City Limits" appearance and tours with the Allman Brothers and Gov't Mule, among others. But Mercury was swept away in the 1999 merger of Seagram's and PolyGram, and Mary's album was one of many casualties of that cataclysm. After some rambling and soul-searching, she ended up in Minnesota in early 2002.

"I'd moved to Texas to delve into honky-tonk music, and I guess in a way I moved to Minnesota to delve back into that straightforward midwestern rock sound I've always loved," she says. "I'd always had a great time when I passed through the Twin Cities on tour, and with the strong musical energy here, and the world-class players, I knew it'd be a great next place to be."

She put together a band and booked some gigs. "It was definitely starting over. But I had so much experience, so many miles, that it was actually kind of cool. We went to (ex-Prince keyboardist) Dr. Fink's studio and cut three tracks as a demo, which appear on the new album because I didn't think the performances could be improved upon. That band was that good. Those were the last recordings I made before the nodes. We were just starting to build up a head of steam when my voice stopped working."

"The nodes were awful," Cutrufello avers. "They didn't hurt or anything, but I had to shut down the band, basically stop talking for several months--let alone singing--and then do extensive rehab. I can't tell you what a scary feeling it is to open up your mouth and have nothing come out. I mean, my singing was always the most natural part of my game. I'd had some lessons to learn to breathe, but basically what you're hearing is hand-honed emotion. Not being able to sing...well, I'd say my head was messed up even more than my throat."

THE MAKING OF "35"

"'35' is the record I was about to make when the nodes happened," she continues. "I had a great heartland rock band, a strong bunch of songs, and the timing felt right." But the band disintegrated when Cutrufello's voice failed her, and the recording project was shelved for a year and a half. When she finally did enter the studio in early 2005, she found that a few things had changed.

"I used some new musicians, some old, and some I'd always wanted to work with. Actually, not having a working band at the time worked to my advantage. For the first time, I went into the studio NOT thinking about how the songs would be recreated live. That was a conceptual leap I'd never been able to make before, and I think it really freed me up to try different guitar textures, more complex vocal arrangements, and even the odd random noise!"

Working with Minneapolis drummer/producer Greg Schutte, basic tracks were recorded over 2 weeks, and overdubs over the next year. "That was another new process for me," says Cutrufello. "Since I couldn't sing, I had a job driving a delivery truck for FedEx Ground, and the only time Greg and I could get together was usually Sunday afternoons. We would work intensely for 5 or 6 hours, then burn everything to CD and I'd listen to it all for a week. I was surprised that the thing was able to hold together with those long gaps, but I found that I was very focused when I was in Greg's studio, and having time to listen really gave me time to think, too. A lot of times, I'd have an idea percolating all week, and then we'd just pick an amp and a guitar, set up mics, and roll."

For the vocal performances, Mary turned to Merel Bregante, a long-time friend and collaborator. Bregante produced 1996's "who to love + when to leave," as well as several songs for compilation CD's, and the two had remained close. "Merel has the ears and the gear, and he really believes in me. He knows how to get great vocal performances out of me, and I felt that was going to be extra important because of what had happened with the nodes and all. So Greg and I flew down to Austin and did the vocals in a long weekend. Merel and Greg really hit it off--knowing them both, I pretty much knew that would happen--and when we needed a larger setup for the mixes, we went right back down to Texas."

Recording was completed in April of 2006, and a first round of mixes took place in early May. After more listening, final mixing and mastering took place in September, and "35" was a reality.

SO WHAT'S IT ALL MEAN?

"This is not a concept record," Cutrufello states rather emphatically. "Not that my other ones were per se, but they all did kind of work as song cycles, strings of narrative in a very self-conscious, 70s, golden-age-of-the-LP kind of way. That's kind of my home, musically. That and cast albums, which were what my parents listened to. And I still respect the hell out of records that do that. But this time, I wanted to just make 10 great songs and maybe let them talk to each other, but not try to make any larger collective point about the 10 of them."

It didn't start out that way. "The original idea was to call the album "American Rain," which was a song I wrote in the wake of the Columbine incident. It tells the story of a kid who wouldn't go so far as to do what those two kids did, but who can relate with an almost creepy completeness to the darkness that brought them there. And then you have things like "Sonic Girls," which is considerably lighter, but which still speaks to a level of teenage restlessness. You know, after "Jack & Diane" but before "Jody Girl." And I had this grand unified theory, and it was gonna all run together like "Racing in the Street" runs into "Promised Land" even though they're on side A and side B of [Springsteen's] "Darkness [on the Edge of Town.]"

"And I thought that was cool. But then I had some other songs that were working pretty well for me that had nothing to do with any of that, and finally I said WHY does it have to be grand or unified? I mean, "If You Don't Want Me No More," which I wrote with Kevin Bowe, is kind of a resigned kiss-off song, and "Out of the Fire" is way beyond what any of my teenage protagonists would have been ready for, as is "Down to the River"...and suddenly the light went on and I thought, well maybe this is a GOOD thing. And I think by just letting the songs be, they have their own worlds, and it's more like a city block of characters as opposed to an extended family...or an ensemble sitcom cast..."

Perhaps. But certain themes do come to the fore here, as they do in much of Cutrufello's work. There's the body-count desperation of "Bring on the Night" and her cover of Springsteen's "Take 'em as They Come," featuring a searing top-of-his-range vocal performance from Reckless Kelly's Willy Braun. There's the knowing sadness of love found and lost in "(I'll Still) Love You Forever"--which Mary says was actually written about the relationship of the Tobey Maguire and Michael Caine characters in the movie "The Cider House Rules"..."but nobody believes me when I tell them that!" There's the world-weary sexual outlaw driving through the stark badlands of western Nebraska in "Panhandle Wind," thinking about all the good men she's pushed away, and what the final cost of that might be.

If there is a grand unified theory, it might be that life is full of lose-lose situations, and bad ideas that spring from moments of inattention, impetuousness, or shortsightedness...or sometimes, from good ideas. "Down to the River," which closes the album, speaks to that. It first appeared in acoustic form on 2001's "Songs from the 6." Of all the songs on that record, Cutrufello says, "that was the one that really cried out for a band treatment. When I moved to Minnesota and put the rock band together, that song took wing right away." If there's any sentiment that ties "35" together, it may well be the last verse of "Down to the River":

well it's the promise
and the pain
and the faith that makes you strong
pay the price
take the blame
face the doubts that dog you all night long

With "35," Mary Cutrufello has found her voice...again...faced her doubts, and made the best record of her career.

BEFORE THE ARBITERS DEFLATE COMPLETELY: A SAMPLING OF PRESS

Omaha World-Herald, May 29, 2008

Singer Says Adversity has Made Her Stronger
Niz Proskocil, Omaha World-Herald, May 29, 2008

Mary Cutrufello knows what it's like to start over.

Mary Cutrufello says her influences range from Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seger to country singers Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson. In 1998, the singer-songwriter scored a hit with her major-label album "When the Night Is Through." She performed on "The Tonight Show," appeared twice on "Austin City Limits" and toured with the Allman Brothers.

Then things came crashing down when she was dropped by her record label, Mercury, after it was absorbed by another company.

"After that, I took about a year and a half off to figure out what happens next," she said.

She traded Texas for the Twin Cities, started a band and forged a new career as an independent musician.

Things were going well until 2004, when her career took another turn. She was diagnosed with vocal nodes.

"I could speak, but not very loud," Cutrufello said during a recent phone interview. "Having a conversation, my throat would get tired. It was just sore. My neck muscles were killing me."

If you go! Mary Cutrufello and Greg Place, 9 p.m. Saturday, Mick's Music & Bar, 5918 Maple St. Cover: $7. Information: 502-2503 or micksomaha.com After undergoing rehabilitation with a speech therapist for six months, she regained her voice to the point where she could sing again.

"I was lucky enough that I did not have to get surgery. If your voice is your calling card, you don't want to mess with it."

Born and raised in Connecticut, Cutrufello, 38, graduated from Yale University with a degree in American Studies. She moved to Houston in 1991, and formed a country band before "reintegrating the rock music I grew up with."

After living in Minnesota, she returned to Texas last year and settled in Austin, a city known for its music scene.

"I figured that would be the best to place to restart my career."

Last fall, she self-released her latest album, "35."

"It has a real Midwestern rock 'n' roll feel to it," said Cutrufello, whose influences range from Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seger to country singers Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson.

She also has returned to performing live, which she'll do Saturday night at Mick's Music & Bar in Benson.

Though she's unable to hit some of the higher notes and can't hold notes as long, her struggle with vocal nodes left her a "stronger" person, she said.

"I feel an amazing sense of gratefulness when I open my mouth and music comes out."

Austin American-Statesman (XLEnt cover story) Jan. 31, 2008

Mary Cutrufello rolls with life these days
Michael Hoinski, Austin American-Statesman, 1/31/08

If Mary Cutrufello were hosting a release party for her latest CD, "35," 10-plus years ago, she would have had her pick of local venues. But a lot can happen in 10-plus years or, in Cutrufello's case, a lot can not happen.

Nevertheless, there she was, the dreadlocked and disheveled curiosity with the gasoline-coated voice and Telecaster-shredding skills, standing on the deck in the backyard of a house in North Austin, trying to cut through a shoddy P.A. as an audience of maybe 15 absorbed her gut-wrenching passion from the comfort of their folding chairs.

Suddenly, snap, crackle, pop, the P.A. went out.

Chances are most rockers who host release parties in backyards would be wrecked, but if the past decade has taught Cutrufello anything, it's how to roll with the punches, so while the owner of the house toyed with the circuit breaker, Cutrufello made a ho-hum sales pitch for "35," copies of which were available at a makeshift merch table: "The ones you don't buy, I'll throw on my bed and just look at," she teased, and then let out a husky laugh.

Finally, power was restored. Cutrufello didn't miss a beat.

"Let's start all over again," she said, before her bassist and drummer kick-started "Black Maria," a classic from the old days, the honky-tonk days, the days in the '90s when Cutrufello, a Connecticut-born former Yalie, was playing the country circuit in Austin and Houston and the Big D, with Jesse Dayton and Jack Ingram and Dale Watson. Of course, she was talking about her set starting over, but her declaration also applied to her career.

See, 10-plus years ago, Cutrufello, now 39, was the novelty of the day: a half-black woman playing good ole boy music as good as or better than good ole boys.

On the strength of a demo cassette and self-released album titled "Who to Love and When to Leave," she scored serious ink in The New York Times, Rolling Stone and USA Today, and the rights to release her major-label debut, "When the Night Is Through," escalated into a bidding war. Mercury Records ultimately won out, and not because it was the home of John Mellencamp, one of Cutrufello's idols, but because of the freedom it offered.

Only Mercury got bought out right after the album was released (Cutrufello sensed trouble when Mellencamp jumped ship for Universal), and reformed as Def Jam, enlisted acts like DMX and Jay Z, and severed ties with Cutrufello. Translation: "When the Night is Through" was through.

And still things got worse.

In January 2004, while living in Minnesota, Cutrufello was diagnosed with vocal nodes. The bump on her vocal cord was a byproduct of too many smoky clubs and too much rowdy singing off-mike. Surgery wasn't required, but rehab forced her out of the game pretty much until she moved back to Austin last summer, started gigging across town, and self-released "35" on that September night in God-knows-who's backyard.

"It's not like it used to be," Cutrufello laments about her comeback.

It's four months later, and Cutrufello is nursing a mug of beer at Deep Eddy Cabaret, her home away from home as evidenced by the posters new and old promoting her shows. She has on black New Balance shoes, jeans and a long-sleeve henley shirt. A gnarly, phlegm-inducing cough has got a hold of her, but it doesn't kill her enthusiasm for the new album.

"It's my Minnesota record," she says, "but I think it also continues the story I've been telling with my characters."

By Minnesota, she means both geographically, as in she recorded it there, and musically, as in it favors the heartland rock she grew up on instead of the twang she moved to Texas to study.

As for her characters, they're perhaps more nuanced than in the past, but they're still just as marginalized, lovelorn and naïve. And while the songs that play out their lives may seem to unfold as run-of-the-mill jukebox fodder, they're really as emotionally intelligent and musically resonant as the narratives of small-town, working-class champions like Mellencamp, whose attitude you can feel; Bob Seger, whose voice you can hear; and Bruce Springsteen, whose passion you can sense (especially on her cover of the Boss' "Take 'Em as They Come," which includes powerhouse supporting vocals from Reckless Kelly's Willy Braun).

For an example of this duality, take "Sonic Girls," a track with an incredibly catchy hook and a groovy Hammond B-3 organ. It came to Cutrufello after many a stop at the Sonic in Columbus, where she often orders tater tots and a cherry limeade when she's passing through.

" 'Sonic Girls' is a singalong," Cutrufello says, before actually singing the refrain, Eeeeeverybody knows, eeeeeverybody knows, "but if you take it home and you spend some time with it, it actually paints a picture of a very different kind of 16-year-old girl, who gets off work at the Sonic ... her boyfriend shows up with a six-pack. ... It's got that 'Jack and Diane' vibe. It's like, we gotta get out but we don't really know what that means."

By now you've probably figured out that "35" has something to do with Cutrufello's age. Indeed, she started working on it when she was 35. But did you also know that it's Interstate 35 that runs through both Austin and the Twin Cities, where Cutrufello was working as a FedEx driver while putting together the album? And did you even have a clue that Cutrufello's Ford van drinks 35 gallons per fill-up?

In any case, "35" initially had a much darker theme.

"The original concept for this record was 'American Rain,'" Cutrufello says, "and have it be, you know, sort of this larger meditation on suburban anomie."

"American Rain" is an anthem Cutrufello wrote in the wake of the 1999 Columbine High School massacre. It reflects the self-absorbed, apathetic attitude of the type of suburban kid who never has to worry about a Wii not being under the Christmas tree, or who doesn't blink an eye over the tragedies made possible by renegade classmates. The lyrics express that kid's indifference: "I had everything I wanted/Never wanted nothin' too much."

Same goes for Cutrufello. She once had everything, yet she's not entirely bummed that it's mostly all gone.

"It didn't work out the way I wanted," she says of the Mercury days, "but it worked out all right. I learned a bunch. I got to do a bunch of things that people don't get to do. I was on 'The Tonight Show,' and I toured with the Allman Brothers."

Perspective has been crucial for Cutrufello ever since recovering from the vocal nodes. Now that she's been afflicted, she's more susceptible to a recurrence. It's a fear that consumes her each and every show.

"The trick," she says, "is to bring the abandon for which I am known, and the abandon that makes me want to go do it in the first place, with just enough control that I don't just go off into space and never come back. And it's tricky because the last time you want to think about things like that is the time when you need to think about them the most."

If the threat of resurgent vocal nodes that could take Cutrufello out of commission indefinitely isn't reason enough to catch her sooner rather than later - whether this Saturday at the Continental Club, where she's headlining Club den mother Dianne Scott's birthday bash, Chix Rock!, or one of her Havoline Supremes shows, featuring oldies but goodies from the honky-tonk days - then there's a chance you won't catch her at all, because Cutrufello always has the itch to just get up and go.

As she likes to say, "Have Tele, will travel."

San Antonio Express-News, Aug. 8, 2007

The Dallas Morning News, May 23, 2006

Pop: Cutrufello revisits her honky-tonkin' roots
Matt Weitz, The Dallas Morning News, 5/23/06

Singer-songwriter stomps back in time during show at Dan's Silver Leaf

DENTON - The Hot Young Kid is a music-biz archetype, and there was a time not so long ago when Mary Cutrufello was cast in that role for Texas music fans.

A doe-eyed Yale graduate who could play guitar like Buck Owens, jerk tears like they were Jamaican chicken and command a stage like Bruce Springsteen, Ms. Cutrufello seemed hot enough in the mid-'90s to beat Kinky into the governor's mansion.

Then came the other hoary clichés: the national deal; the compromises; the no-fault-of-yer-own label disaster; finally, the sound of the whistling wind (cue tumbleweeds).

Of course, that's just from our perspective. Actually, Ms. Cutrufello eventually landed in Minneapolis, in another region known for musical fecundity. Her rootsy music nowadays is singer-songwriter run through indie filters both personal and populist. Nary a honky-tonk in sight.

Until lately. Her joyfully raucous show at Dan's Silver Leaf on Saturday night culminated a three-day swing through her old stomping grounds celebrating the reissue of two albums beloved to any denizen of Naomi's or the Three Teardrops: the cassette-only Mary Cutrufello and the Havoline Supremes and Who to Love + When to Leave, from 1996.

For this Texas trip she reunited with upright-bass player Roland Denney and drummer Terry Kirkendall, of the original Who to Love band, and from the first notes it was apparent that the old magic hadn't returned, just re-emerged.

"It's just a one-off for now, for the reissue, and for the fun," Ms. Cutrufello allowed between sets. "It's miles away from what I'm doing now."

That didn't stop her from trotting out a number of "old, old" cuts like "Old Blue" (which didn't make either release) or the stomping "Thunderbird Town."

Her guitar playing was as direct and energetic as ever, able to twang with self-pity ("All the Millers in Milwaukee"), resonate with emotional power (her cover of Jim Reeves' "He'll Have to Go") or march along in storytelling cadence ("Black Maria").

Perhaps a couple dozen fans were there, some familiar faces, many new ones, but the audience never really affected Ms. Cutrufello's shows back then and still don't now. She growled and groaned her vocals and struck guitar-hero poses almost always on the correct side of the division between sentiment and sap, expression and exploitation.

It was a nice taste of the past. Perhaps next time we can get a taste of Mary Cutrufello's present.

Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Sep. 13, 2002

One-Time Texan Cutrufello Comes Back Strong
Pauls Felps, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 9/13/02

Mary Cutrufello's return to Texas isn't just a homecoming; it's also a reunion between fans and the many characters Cutrufello gave birth to while living here.

"People [in Minnesota] are receptive to the songs, but I know it will be completely different down there," says Cutrufello, who moved from Houston to Minneapolis in January. "Up here, Johnson Motel is just another song. But I can close my eyes and see people two- stepping to it at Naomi's [in Dallas]. In Texas, these songs have a history."

It's a history that Cutrufello began writing in 1991, when the fresh-from-Yale graduate replanted her Connecticut Yankee roots deep in the heart of Texas and began studying (and penning) country music. Sporting dreadlocks and singing cry-in-your-beer C&W made her instantly noticeable, while her gravel-on-velvet vocals and knack for turning a phrase made her memorable.

Before long, the grassroots whisper that followed her from one hole-in-the-wall club to the next had become a full-scale roar. She caught the attention of legends such as Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp, adding high-profile gigs such as Farm Aid and Willie's annual July 4 picnic to her résumé.

Patient fans were finally rewarded in 1996, when Cutrufello released her first full-length CD, Who to Love and When to Leave, and two years later she shifted gears with When the Night is Through on Mercury Records. Shedding her boots and getting back to her roots, the major label debut marked Cutrufello's return to the sounds she'd listened to growing up -- a sweaty kind of rock that embraces the same kind of hopeful desperation found in her repertoire of original country music. Her songs, she found, made the transition from country to rock as easily as the artist herself.

"We still play a lot of the old songs, only now they're a little faster and the guitars are louder," she says. "It's like what I was trying to do on Mercury, but I just hadn't evolved to where I could kick it that hard. It takes a while to ratchet it up to that level."

Her new material, which includes reworkings of a lot of old material, picks up where When the Night is Through left off. Although Cutrufello's music has always had plenty of teeth, her growl is deeper and her bite much harder this time around.

"This band has had a lot of time to get to know the songs, and each other. It's a real band. We hang out together when we aren't playing. I'm really excited to bring them to Texas and show them where these songs came from."

Last year, she released a self-produced disc, Songs From the Six, consisting of acoustic tracks recorded in her room at a Motel 6 in Tennessee. It was a time of reflection and re-evaluation, and she was surprised at the results.

"I realized that I'd spent half my life in Texas, and as much as I loved it there, I needed a change of pace," she says. "The music scene in Minneapolis is tremendous. I grew up in the North, and I missed the seasons. I really liked cold weather. I realized it was time for me to go north."

Even though she never doubted the wisdom of it, actually making the move was far more difficult than making the decision.

"I had to walk away from something I'd worked very hard for," she says. "Coming up here is like starting over."

Houston Press (article of record on the Mercury deal), May 17, 2001

The Art of Getting Broken (2001)
Brad Tyer, Houston Press, 5/17/01

Mary Cutrufello wanted to be a rock star. For a moment she was...

She was an American girl...

She says it's all about making the connection, and that's easy enough to imagine, even if this weren't a rock and roll story, even if rock and roll stories weren't always about connecting, about someone making music that stomps off a stage and into some fan's gut and somehow changes everything. Even without that, it's easy enough to imagine Mary Cutrufello -- a 13-year-old girl, light-skinned for a black kid, living in Connecticut with adoptive parents and a more popular younger sister -- with a powerful need to feel connected to something.

It's not unusual that she connected with Bruce Springsteen, either, driving through the airwaves on WNEW out of New York City, changing everything. Nor was she the first kid to mime a Tom Petty lick on a tennis racket and dream of feeling what it must feel like to be on the other side of those speakers, and she will not, presumably, be the last. That's what rock stars are for. She connected. She became a fan.

And she says it's about moving people, which is not about being a fan. It's the next step up. It's when you drop the Wilson and buy a cheap Telecaster copy and learn how to punch other people in the gut. Same connection, only better.

"The feeling that you get when you have a screaming PA, with major subs below the stage and you roll into that first song and people's heads snap around. And then by the time you're halfway through the set, people have let their beer get warm….I can do that with a rock band, and that's the only way I can do that."

This is what rock stars are for, and though it hasn't always suited her to package herself as such, or to say so outright -- what with the very concept of rock stardom falling in and out of contemporary favor -- Mary Cutrufello grew up wanting to be a rock star. She didn't want to mimic rock stars, or ironize them, or run around town acting like one. She wanted to be one. She wanted to make the music that makes the connection that makes the fan possible.

She didn't too much lust after the privileges and excess of the lifestyle, except for one thing. She wanted big audiences, and big stages upon which she would climb and do what rock stars do. There was no point in thinking small. There is nothing small about Springsteen, or Mellencamp, or Petty.

"The kind of music that I make, there's nothing niche or alternative or off-the-beaten-path about it, so why not try to move as many people as you can." It is not a question.

The interesting thing is, Mary Cutrufello got just about as close to being a bona fide no-bullshit stadium-moving rock star as talent, determination, smarts, a good angle and the modern recording industry can get you, without actually getting you there. She's like those near-death-experiencers that show up every sweeps week, floating in coma or cardiac arrest toward a bright light at the end of a tunnel that tells them they're dying, tells them everything is changing, and just before the chute loses form to encompassing bliss, a trapdoor swings open, for no apparent reason at all, and sends them hurtling back into some starched hospital bed, confused, blinking, not dead yet.

Almost dead. Almost a rock star. It's almost a joke. Knock knock, who's there, rock star, rock star who?

Mary Cutrufello ran into the light. And then -- ha ha -- the power went out.

Country roads, take me home, to the place, I belong...

Texas never quite Xgot Mary Cutrufello, because Texas never had the perspective, could never see the long view (could never even imagine a long view that extended beyond its self-congratulatory borders). And true, Texas was somewhat misled. Cutrufello arrived here in 1991, pit-stopping in Austin before settling in Houston, fresh out of the American Studies department at Yale, a dreadlocked black woman building a mythology on pickup trucks and honky-tonks and George Jones. She sold herself as country when country -- at least the insurgent/No Depression variety -- was cool, and it didn't hurt that she was good at it.

What Texas never realized is that Mary Cutrufello being good at country music was just Mary Cutrufello being a good student. Texas didn't know about growing up in a house where a mother's Stephen Sondheim musicals were the rule and classic heartland radio rock was a teenager's passion.

"I moved down here with the express purpose of learning about Texas music and country music, and I moved down here because I didn't come from a place where that was ever heard, or even given much respect. And I threw myself into it pretty hard. So it was natural for people to assume… I mean, that's all that anybody had ever heard me do down here….It was very self-consciously about learning something new. Where it would take me, I didn't know, and kind of didn't want to know. I kind of just try to roll with things and see where they take me."

For a while, from the outside, it looked like country music would take her to a solid spot in the Texas roots pantheon, a modest post where she could play the state as much as she liked, make a decent little living, and ride the Willie circuit with fellow up-and-comers like the Hollisters and Jesse Dayton. Texas would have liked that, but Texas didn't have Springsteen echoing through its head. Texas, used to thinking that Texas is as big as it gets, wasn't thinking bigger.

Mary Cutrufello was.

"And then all of a sudden I'm doing 'Darkness on the Edge of Town,' and what the hell is that about? That's what I grew up on. That's what I played for 12 years before I got here. That's why I picked up a guitar. Without the long view of perspective, there were a lot of people that thought I had kind of wandered off my path. If anything, the foray into country music was the experiment. And it was cool, and I'm glad that I did it, and I learned a bunch, and I made it work for me as a way to make a living. But what I do now, that was the sound in my head when I had my Wilson."

It's all part of my rock and roll fantasy...

"Here's what I believe Mary wants. I believe that Mary wants to play in hockey rinks. She likes big stages, she likes to run around, she likes the connection with people. And the more people she connects with, the more it feeds her. She's a true believer."

This is Holly Gleason speaking. Gleason runs a boutique media and artist-development firm called Joe's Garage out of Nashville. She spent 11 years as a music journalist, jumped the fence to work as a publicist for Sony Nashville in 1991, and started Joe's Garage two years later. Her clients, aside from Mary, include Rodney Crowell, Asleep at the Wheel, Lee Ann Womack, Patty Loveless and Brooks & Dunn.

"I midwife dreams for a living," she says. "And if you look at my clients, I'm not bad at it."

Gleason took Mary on around 1994 on the basis of a demo cassette and began the process of shepherding the country upstart toward a career.

"It was basically that thing of talking about music, and talking about why you do it, and talking about how hard it is, and talking about what to expect, and talking about what's realistic to expect. And Mary didn't know any of that stuff. She had no expectations. She knew that she was living in Texas, she knew that she could work as much as she wanted to, and she knew that she loved to play the guitar. That's what Mary knew."

Gleason heard more, even through the hiss of a cheapo demo tape. She told Mary: "I think you can have hockey rinks. I think you can change lives."

It starts with perception, buzz, heat. Getting the name out. Gleason made her big push in 1997, slipping Mary into a showcase during Nashville's Extravaganza.

It was not, Gleason says, a particularly sexy showcase, but "I know how to get people out," she says. "You get on the phone, you call people up, you pester them, you leverage them, you beg them. Sometimes you just invite them."

When Mary hit the stage, the room was packed with movers. Matraca Berg, author of "Strawberry Wine," among other No. 1 singles, was in the audience. Georgia Satellites guitarist Dan Baird was there. Journalist David Zimmerman from USA Today was watching. A&R reps from CBS and Arista listened, alongside the head of Madonna's publishing company.

"There was anticipation in the room," Gleason remembers, "because people knew that I know. But they weren't prepared for it. Mary got five standing ovations in a 40-minute set. Got an encore in a very strict no-encore scenario." Mary used the encore to debut "Love's to Blame," a song she had co-written with Steve Earle.

"Immediately we get her off the stage and we take her outside and it was like, people were lined up in the street." Arista picked up the dinner tab at one of Nashville's "big industry late-night hangs," and Gleason and Mary headed home, where Gleason prepared to jet off to the Grammy Awards.

"When I got home there were five messages on my answering machine: 'don't sign with anyone until you talk to us,' 'don't sign with anyone until you talk to us,' 'can't make a deal until you talk to us.' I'm changing planes in Cleveland trying to get to the Grammy Awards and it's like six more messages from six different labels."

And a message from Zimmerman at USA Today, asking if Mary could stay over in Nashville for an interview and photo shoot.

"I'm in Cleveland with all my fucking carry-ons, schlepping through the airport trying to write down names on the wall, and I've got Mary blowing up."

My mama told me, you better shop around...

"She and I had been talking for a long time about what the priorities are," Gleason remembers. "What is it you really want out of a record deal. And Mary's deal was, she wants to be broken. Because lots of people get record deals. Lots of people get high-dollar record deals, but it's not necessarily what's going to get you broken."

What will get you broken -- out of the pack, into the limelight -- is the full and wholehearted backing of a major record label. Not just one A&R guy who really loves your music. Not just the prestigious head of a label blowing smoke up your ass. You've got to have all the resources on your side: the sales department, marketing, promotions, publicity, video, everybody. It's a mistake, Gleason says, made by many fledgling artists: They don't think about a record company's "other" departments. "And if you want to be broken, then that's something you need to think about."

Mary and Gleason thought about it long and hard, shopping to a short list of three or four labels, playing showcases, "circuit-riding" through the various offices, meeting everyone, reading who "got" Mary and who didn't, "thumping" labels to gauge their "vibe," to get a sense of who they were and how hard they would work for her, "because it's like a marriage, you're in it for at least ten years if you're successful."

"There was always one or two really big disconnects at the different labels," Gleason says. "Just, you know, the vibe wasn't right. I know that sounds really nonspecific, but having worked at a record company, I think if you don't connect with people in departments, they don't get you, they don't know how to work for you."

One suitor, for instance, thought he could move maybe 100,000 copies of a Mary Cutrufello CD. "Pfft," says Gleason. "They were out."

CBS flew a team into Houston to watch Mary play at Rudyard's the night before her South by Southwest showcase in Austin. Geffen too was courting Mary hard. And there was someone else watching the Rudyard's gig to whom neither Mary nor Gleason had given much thought.

"There was this little guy standing next to her attorney, and two songs into the set he said, 'I'll sign her. Tell me what you want.' We had never really thought of Mercury as a contender. He came back and said, you know, 'I really want to sign you, I get you.' And we thanked him and went out to dinner with somebody from another label."

But Mary's attorney Seth Lichtenstein knew that the little guy from Mercury was Steve Greenberg, an up-and-comer at the label, the man behind Hanson, and he suggested that Mary pay him some attention.

So Mary and Gleason met with the departments at Mercury.

"The radio promotion guy was really great," Gleason says, "and he was very straight-up, and he said, 'I don't know what I can do with you.' And I'm like, 'Okay, well, this guy tells the truth.' "

Mercury's publicist was duly impressed by the fact that Zimmerman's story on Mary had run on the cover of USA Today, just the day before Mary's Mercury meetings.

The last Mercury meeting of the day was with marketing director Marty Maidenberg, who'd made his bones at Mercury with John Mellencamp.

"They had so much chemistry," Gleason says of the Maidenberg/Cutrufello powwow, "and he so totally got her. Watching her talk to him and leaning over his desk, I thought, 'These two people have a bond.' Marketing is incredibly important in breaking records. Because what you need in a world of nine billion records being released every year is a warrior, somebody that's so passionate about what you do that they go out and fight for you.

"So Mercury went from being another boy we're dating to No. 1 on the list of places we wanted to sign, with Geffen being the runner-up. Marty was the difference."

Sitting down with Mercury honcho Danny Goldberg the next day didn't hurt. The man who had managed artists as diverse as Bonnie Raitt and Nirvana made a compelling pitch to Mary's sense of artistry, and Mary and Gleason retreated to draw up their wish list: solid tour support money, control of imaging and advertising, a cap on independent promotion expenses, a video budget, etc.

Mercury agreed.

"We purposefully decided not to take the screaming, in-your-face advance," Mary says. "When there's a bidding war, you can drive the advance to astronomical proportions designed to overwhelm you with the sheer penis size of the label, basically. And we're like, 'Yeah yeah, whatever.' When you negotiate a deal, you can be in a situation where you don't have as much leverage to get what you need to make your record work. Commitments to tour support, or recording budgets, video budgets, whatever. Every negotiation is different and I can only speak for my own, but those were a lot more important to me than getting a huge chunk of money up front. It's like, 'Hey, you want to be a rock star? Check this out. Buy your Lexus now, we'll worry about it later.' Naw. You're talking about somebody who lives in a van for 50,000 miles a year. I wouldn't have enough room in a Lexus."

"So," says Gleason, "Mary has a record deal." Six records with an option after two. "She got a good advance and she got a nice fund to make her record. It was an A deal. She went to California, had all those hotshots on her record. And she had a really good royalty rate."

Mary signed with Mercury the day before the Country Music Awards. It was a big day. She did a photo shoot, and promos for Farm Aid, on which she had been booked, watched Patty Loveless, George Strait and George Jones sing, went to see John Fogerty play at the Ryman Auditorium, hung out backstage with drummer Kenny Aronoff, who would play on her record as well, and then went off to sit in with Jack Ingram at a late-night gig.

"That's one thing about Mary," Gleason says. "Mary has no problem hanging. You throw it at her, and Mary will just keep swinging. A lot of artists do not have that kind of work ethic or that kind of stamina."

She would need it.

So you wanna be a rock and roll star...

"I tried very hard," Mary recalls, "not to have any expectations. Because I think it's a good way to get off the path. You need to follow the path and go where it's taking you, and if you overburden yourself with expectations, you're likely to lose sight of the path.

"That said, I wanted to sell a bunch of records and play a lot. I wanted to rock. I wanted to be able to go out and support a record that I really believed in and play to a lot of people and move them. That look on their face when you look down and they're just like, wow. That's what I've always tried to do, and I was looking forward to being able to do that on a larger scale. And I thought I had all the tools in my arsenal to do that."

She recorded the record, When the Night Is Through, in Los Angeles. Mercury put the muscle behind her with producer Thom Panunzio (U2, et al.), drummer Kenny Aronoff (John Mellencamp, Bob Seger), bassist Bob Glaub (Jackson Browne, John Fogerty) and keyboardist Rami Jaffee (Wallflowers). The record was released on a Tuesday, August 25, 1998. Two days later, Mary played the first single, "She Can't Let Go," to millions on The Tonight Show, guesting with Rob Schneider and Halle Berry.

"Do you have any idea how heavy that is?" Gleason asks. "Stuff like that doesn't happen unless you have the elephant dollars behind you."

After the show, Mary flew back to Houston and hit the road with the two rock star indulgences purchased with her Mercury money: a used 15-passenger van, and a wireless rig for her blond Telecaster.

"It changed my life. It was really the only I-got-a-big-record-deal-and-I'm-gonna-spend-some-money thing that I bought, and it probably cost more than every other piece of musical equipment that I took on that tour. It really freed me up. That and adding a keyboard player, because all of a sudden I wasn't responsible for every single note in the mid-range, and those two things together really freed me up and let the live show take off. I loved playing the bigger stages, because I could spread out and fill them, which is what I always wanted to do."

She toured with Kenny Wayne Shepherd and Gov't Mule and Greg Allman and Susan Tedeschi and Screamin' Cheetah Wheelies.

There was an explosion of press. The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Interview, People, USA Today, Newsweek, The Washington Post, Boston Herald, Politically Incorrect, Austin City Limits, CNN.

"It was just ridiculous," Gleason says. And except for some grumblings in the Texas press, wondering where our honky-tonk queen had gone, "Everyone agreed that she was great."

Mary Cutrufello was breaking.

"One of my sicko pleasures," Gleason claims, "is to go into the Oak Bar at the Plaza Hotel, all these businessmen, it's very tight." One day Gleason took Mary there for a drink. "We're sitting there with our glasses of Jack Daniels, just shooting the shit….Just hanging out, our work was done. And these three very straight-looking guys are staring at Mary….And one guy goes, 'You play a white guitar, don't you?' And Mary goes, 'Well, it's a blond Telecaster, but yeah.' He goes, 'Oh, my God, I told them it was you.' And the guy does this whole rap about how he'd seen her on TV and she's just fucking amazing, and da da da. That's how far into the culture she's penetrated. Straight guys in the bar in the Plaza Hotel are staring at her because they know who she is."

"People were into it," Mary remembers. "All the breaks fell our way. It just felt really good and it felt really strong. I had a record that I could stand behind and go out and fight for every night, and a lot of people on our side, and everything was cool. Except…"

And the walls come tumblin' down...

"It's an amazing story," Gleason says. "It shows you how flawed the system is. Because when you think about it, a company that manufactures booze buys a record company, that company isn't enough, they sell their orange juice division and buy another company. I mean, that's like playing Monopoly. But the effect it has, and the lives it impacts, are insane. That's the story. The story of how you do almost everything right, and make no mistakes that cannot in other demonstrable circumstances be overcome, and end up stymied. It's uncommon in that she had a lot of success in spite of what happened. It's not uncommon in that a lot of artists are stillborn. Or barely born. That happens a lot. It happens way more than otherwise. But to get what Mary got done, and then kind of falter, that's pretty unusual."

The rumors had entered circulation before When the Night Is Through was even released in August 1998. Seagram would purchase Polygram, the parent company of Mercury. The music industry's Big Six companies would contract to a Big Five. Rosters would be shuffled, artists would be dropped, staffs would be laid off, or re-purposed. Or something. For months, nobody knew exactly what was going to happen. Nobody knew for sure what the industry would look like after the merger.

"I had heard rumors of it all through '98," Mary says. "I was already inexorably in the pipeline by the time the rumors started. I wasn't sure what to think of it when I first heard it. I wasn't sure what it would mean. But after I made a couple of phone calls, I was like aw, fuck."

What news of the merger meant, initially, was widespread uncertainty. Label department heads, once lined up in unison behind When the Night Is Through, were suddenly more worried about whether or not they would have a job come Monday. Promoting records suddenly took a backseat to job hunting.

"Finally around Thanksgiving," Gleason says, "they got the new team in. And people were just sitting down on the job. Danny Goldberg was a lame duck. He didn't want to do anything, and I don't blame him. He couldn't see any reason to lift a finger to help break artists that [the new regime was] going to get credit for. So he stayed in his office and just read the paper. Meanwhile, you'd walk through the building at Mercury and you'd see these poor people -- many of them had been there ten, 15 years -- getting the definite vibe that they were not going to have jobs."

Mary and Gleason met with the new team just before Thanksgiving.

"They look her in the eye and tell her she's the future of the company, 'this is the kind of artist we're going to build this label on, and we're committed to you 100 percent.' "

That was not, however, what Mary was seeing on the road. The tour support money was forthcoming, contractual obligations were being fulfilled, but the teamwork was gone, the new ideas weren't coming. Marty Maidenberg, a 14-year veteran at Mercury, was being reassigned to new jobs what seemed like every couple of days. When the Night Is Through wasn't being serviced to retail.

"Stuff that should be connecting just wasn't quite connecting," Gleason says. "So we roll along, and Mary becomes more and more despondent about the fact that the thing that she had was this guy who got her. Now she's in this building full of people who don't get her. She was getting a lot of boilerplate."

Finally, in April, as Mercury morphed into Island/Def Jam, Mary and Gleason reached an agreement with the new management. Mary, at her request, would be released from her contract.

"We just realized," Mary says, "that the moment for me on that floor of that building had kind of come and gone. The nice thing about it is we had a really good contract, and they owed me a bunch of money, which they paid, without a whole lot of arm-twisting. They were very straight-up about it. We're like, 'This isn't really the label that we signed with.' And they're like, 'No, not really.' " It was nobody's fault, really. Neither Gleason nor Mary wants to place blame.

"This," Gleason says, "is the kind of stuff that happens every time two big multinational corporations swallow each other. There was nothing special about what happened to her. There was no conspiracy about 'We're going to screw this guitar player from Houston, Texas.' It's just the inertia and paralysis that sets in…. It's a really helpless feeling. It's like your kid is running into traffic, they're going to get creamed, and there's nothing you can do."

Expectations or no, this was not the way Mary Cutrufello had hoped to get broken.

I get by with a little help from my friends...

After almost a year of hard touring, morning-show radio appearances and endless telephone interviews, the tour support money dried up. Mary's reaction was to take the Mercury payout and go back on the road. She hooked up with the Allman Brothers on their NASCAR-sponsored summer shed tour, road-managing herself to save money. It was a last gasp, wringing one more dream out of the record.

"I really wanted to do a summer tour in support of a big rock and roll record," she says. "It's kind of like one of those dreams you have when you're 13 and playing along with your favorite song on your tennis racket."

And then it was over. She ended up selling about 40,000 records.

"I was emotionally tired. I was physically tired. I was psychically tired. So at first I spent a lot of time doing nothing of a musical nature. I watched the end of baseball season. That was my main concern. I took several months and I just didn't want to engage the music business right then. In the middle of promoting that record I was just running on energy and the excitement of things I'd always wanted to do, and then all of a sudden it stopped and I realized what actually happened."

She was 29 years old. She was burned. And she didn't have anyone to help carry the weight. "I kind of cried on my own shoulder," she says now.

"One of Mary's greatest gifts," Gleason says, "is her ability to be self-reliant. She can road-manage her own tour. She can electrify the whole stage. She can carry a band that's not happening. In this scenario, she had to turn it over to a bunch of other people. She had to trust them with her dream. The check didn't clear the bank. Somebody who's self-reliant tends to take that on themselves."

Mary took it on herself hard. After the Allman tour, she dropped out of sight, retreating to Minneapolis, one of her favorite road cities, to regroup, and to see -- after perhaps too much self-reliance on the road -- about rekindling the kind of romantic entanglements that drive her songs.

"Since I didn't have a band, I figured I'd experiment with that social-life thing everyone's always talking about."

She also thought, for a while, about hanging it up.

"I went through a period when I just didn't know what to do. I was like, damn, this is all about how you walk through the 25th floor of the World Wide Plaza building in New York. It's not about the music. It's about working the label. It's about do the people that are in charge of your career have the good grace of the people in charge of their career. All of that stuff. And I'm like, this is not why I got into this. And I can recall more than one night sitting at my computer looking at grad school Web pages. Man, I was over it. I have a degree from a really good school, maybe I should just go do something else, where the difference between why I got into it and what it really is isn't so big. I love learning, I love the academy, I could probably be happy there.

"But then there's this guitar. I could never wrap my head around the idea of there not being that guitar."

But as tied as she was to the Telecaster, it took more than a guitar to get Mary's feet back beneath her. It took belief.

The day after her release from Mercury, Mary had been booked at a Voters For Choice benefit in New York City, and commiserated with headliner Bonnie Raitt, who had been through label woes of her own over the years. Raitt and Gleason talked while Mary played, and Raitt told the manager to keep Mary plugging, that she could hear the passion, that Mary was "the real thing."

"I heard that," Mary says, "and it kind of put the whole Mercury thing in perspective."

Then, toward then end of the Allman tour, came the call from John Mellencamp's people. His wife had seen Mary on The Tonight Show and wanted her to play her birthday party. That paycheck extended her NASCAR tour another week.

And finally, Mary -- whose touring band had included onetime E Street Band keyboardist Danny Frederici -- got a call from Springsteen himself, inviting her to a show in Cleveland. She was there.

"The show itself was just a complete validation of 'Just get up there and rock,' " Mary remembers. "And the rest of it can't stop that. But I also got to chat with Bruce for a while, and we talked, and he gave me a pep talk about keeping the faith….And you just keep writing. And you just believe, you know? Bruce is notoriously generous, there's no telling how many people he's given that speech to at one time or another, but it was exactly what I needed to hear, and he picked the exact right words to say. Between that and Bonnie Raitt just standing there and watching me….It's kind of weird, like fledgling-rock-singer-saved-by-famous-friends kind of thing, and I don't mean it to come across that way, but there is something to be said for people that have paid as heavy dues as those guys have, that come out and they look at me and they go, 'Yeah, that's the real deal, and that'll stand the test.' Or saying to me personally, 'What you've got is not something to be taken lightly, or thrown away and disregarded….' I mean, for a long time I was like, you know, who's got a good American Studies program? And then I was like, well, this is American studies. Maybe with a small s, but a capital A."

Ain't it good to be alive on a sunny day...

"Mary," Gleason says, "like many, many kids, was a fan. Mary sat out in the house. Mary had the connection. Mary knows what it feels like to be on the receiving end of the connection, when it's coming off the stage. Well, imagine what it's like when you're on the stage and it's coming back at you. You probably had that moment, didn't you? The oh fuck moment when you're a fan? Imagine if you've got everybody having those oh fuck moments right at you?….When Mary's ready to get back on the horse and go chase the dream some more, the dream is waiting for her."

After a year and a half of laying low, in Minneapolis and Houston, watching baseball, digging the cold weather, making some kind of sense of the wild ride in her head, Mary started thinking about that guitar again. She is 31 now.

She's started writing songs again, and has "the nucleus" of an album completed. She's booked a series of solo acoustic dates around Texas (including Saturday, June 23, at Rudyard's) to ease herself back in, and because "I want people to meet the new characters in the songs," she says. "They've been kind of living with me in my house for a year, and I want them to meet my friends, you know?"

And yes, she says, if she had it all to do over again, major-label dance and all, she would. "That," she says, "is the next step."

This is not the common response to "being spit out the back end." For most artists, one grind through the mill is enough to convince them to think small, to scale back, to avoid the machinery.

"And I know why," she laughs.

"I think I see the nature of it more clearly than I did three years ago, but it hasn't dissuaded me from the good things that it can bring. Everything's different now, but it's good. And it puts me in a really good position this time out, because I know all that stuff now….For all the things that didn't break the way I wanted them to break on the last record, the randomness of that is equaled by the randomness with which something cool might break. You work hard and that helps. A good setup helps. And a good team and a great contract helps. But random stuff good or bad can happen, and I think it's important to understand. It's not always your fault. It's not always your fault that you sell ten million records, either. There's a lot of serendipity involved, on either side."

http://www.houstonpress.com/2001-05-17/news/the-art-of-getting-broken/full

Dallas Observer (cover story), Mar. 27, 1997

Black Maria, Don't You Cry
Matt Weitz, Dallas Observer, 3/27/97

Mary Cutrufello's music is full of country heartache. But Texas' most unlikely honky-tonk star is about to become her own boss...

On a cold winter night, Poor David's Pub has undergone a transformation. Usually a listener's bar, this Friday it's the kind of place where people go to socialize, and the music is incidental--loud and shot through with the ebullience of alcohol. The woman alone on stage pays it no mind, her face intent as she bends over a cream-colored Telecaster that stands out against her black jeans and red plaid shirt.

She chops out thick chords and leans even harder into her vocals, her sense of song and husky voice holding the babble at bay, then slowly pushing it back. People turn and listen as she sings with forthright emotion, animated by a ferocious self-confidence.

That night, Houston's Mary Cutrufello put on a show that was full of skill, talent, aplomb, and something seen far too seldom in music these days--bravery.

For two lengthy sets, she pumped out songs like a weightlifter burning out bench-press reps. After just a few songs, you entirely forgot what an oddity the 27-year-old Cutrufello is. Clad in a flannel shirt, with her head topped off by a bush of springy black dreadlocks, she would seem to be a graduate of the Tracy Chapman songwriter's school. But the original music she's playing is definitely country--full of pathos, beer, regret, desire, and heartbroken delusion: the trysting cheaters of "Johnson Motel," the stubborn honor behind "A Promise I Made," or the simple desire behind "Need Somebody to Love."

If you're one of the few Dallasites who've seen Cutrufello's shows at the now-defunct Three Teardrops Tavern or more recently at Naomi's, the tiny bar at the east end of Deep Ellum that keeps a little bit of honky-tonk alive in a too-often slick entertainment district, you already know she's more surprising--and impressive--still. In a genre where women usually just stand around and sing or gently strum along on an acoustic guitar, she is the show, strutting the stage, snarling, moaning, and peeling out chattering, stuttering, wholeheartedly electric leads. Her playing is full of early Waylon-style chicken picking, steeped in the string-bending and double-stops of guitarists like Pete Anderson and Albert Lee.

Her style is honky-tonk power trio, encompassing all the classic country guitar tricks but obviously played by someone who'd worked from Jimi Hendrix back to Doc Watson. When not picking lead, her rhythms are big, fat chunks of chord that move as irresistibly as a safe falling down a flight of stairs.

Her stage presence matches her guitar's fire. Cutrufello moves about the stage in classic guitar-hero mode--caged panther division--accentuating high points of songs with a chop or a wave of her instrument, planting her feet wide as if facing a gale-force wind. It's a series of poses as stylized as Kabuki--and the bane of many a lesser talent--but Cutrufello makes it work through sheer enthusiasm.

When she goes uptempo, as in "Dallas" ("By the time you get to Dallas I'll be gone/There won't be no crawlin' back, there'll be no hangin' on") or "Thunderbird Town" ("You can't catch a girl in a V8 Ford")--she grins, roars, and growls like a cross between Koko Taylor and Wanda Jackson. When she turns morose or introspective ("Just the Whiskey Talkin'," the alter-ego address "Black Maria"), she frowns, scowls, and breaks her voice like a disappointed barfly stubbing out another broken-hearted cigarette. In between she yodels, whoops, and counts off songs with the infectious energy of a kid playing with his first train set on Christmas Day, and is likely to leap atop a pool table to make her point or wave her guitar like a magic wand.

"When Mary plays, it's a true celebration--a celebration of the love affair between her and her music," says Merel Bregante, a longtime music industry pro who--before settling down in Austin as a production engineer--was with Loggins and Messina for the entire arc of their career and played with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band for several years. Bregante engineered Cutrufello's latest album, the brilliant live-to-disc who to love and when to leave.

It's a love that encompasses both facility and depth. While a country sense of clever is a beautiful thing--just ask Junior Brown--Cutrufello can also dig deep into the emotional ruminations that have traditionally nurtured singer-songwriters, a territory Brown has pretty much avoided. That she can build a great song on simple wordplay is apparent from numbers like "All the Millers in Milwaukee," and "You'll be Over Her (Before I'm Over You)," but she can also write songs like "Black Maria," a soundtrack for that long, dark tea-time of the soul when one aspect of your character meets its opposite. "Black Maria comes to call/Whenever I get feelin' lonely," Cutrufello writes, telling the shadow that "...I'll let you look me in the eye/And I'll look back at you/Deep inside my mind."

Cutrufello embodies more opposites than might seem possible. Her deep, muscular voice is almost gender-neutral; her walloping stage style--combined with the fact that in an industry where most women go for tight clothes designed to show the goods or schoolmarm froufrou, she prefers jeans-and-T-shirt functionality--has led some to speculate about her sexuality. When you find out that she's Yale-educated and was raised in the C&W wasteland of Connecticut, it seems amazing that she's even here at all--at least until she starts to play and sing.

After that, it only seems natural that the last year has seen an entire industry falling over itself in a headlong rush to pin a medal on Mary. Last summer, she played guitar for Jimmie Dale Gilmore--a particularly credible plum--on his Braver Newer World tour. Seeing her onstage in Dallas at Deep Ellum Live in August in her Hendrix-style hussar's jacket, dreadlocks held up with a bandanna across her forehead, strutting through Gilmore's songs with apparent ease, was to watch every bit of the combination of rock imagery, entertainment value, and street cred that Bruce Springsteen had so desperately sought after dismissing the E Street Band--a quest in which he failed mightily.

It makes her a press agents' dream, while her command of bare-knuckle, high-octane honky-tonk has earned her accolades from such oughta-knows as Johnny Bush and Jesse Taylor. She's also labored long and hard on the Texas club circuit, generating good press that--until lately--hasn't really translated into anything beyond a great local rep.

Now this most unlikely of honky-tonkers--an African-American, a woman who can discuss music like a professor, play guitar like the devil, and sing about lust, loss, and love like a man--is poised at the edge of the big time, and it's not a question of if she leaps; it's a matter of when.

Little about Cutrufello has ever been conventional. She grew up in Fairfield, Connecticut, where she and her little sister Cecil were raised by Mildred Cutrufello, the state's first adoptive single mom and a teacher. A few years before, Mildred--contemplating the high expense of renting an apartment--had gone in on the purchase of a house with Mary Kehoe, a fellow teacher, and Mary grew up in a house headed by two women.

"It wasn't that big a deal," Mary--who refers to both women as her parents--says of the unconventional setup. "I mean, my Mom's straight, my aunt's straight, I'm straight. Did I miss the traditional 'strong male' presence in the house? I don't know; I never had it to miss. It all seemed very normal to me." It was a placid existence for the family, who lived about 50 miles from Manhattan. They were well-off, but in a subdued way. "It was very bland," Mary says. "You could leave your doors unlocked, and nothing ever really happened." She started on the guitar at age nine; later, she checked out records from the local public library. Her first love was musical theater and Stephen Sondheim.

At Yale she majored in American Studies, specializing in 20th-century transportation history (when discussing Fairfield over a plate of barbecue, she identifies it as being "right off the New Haven line, a four-track electrified commuter railway built about 100 years ago"). She also played guitar and sang in a local act that she describes as "our version of the Rolling Stones, with lots of jumping around...and never in tune." She laughs, the deep laugh of a sensualist, or at least a person who enjoys laughing.

As Cutrufello entered adulthood, she underwent two crystallizing experiences: a driving trip with her parents through the American West, and Dwight Yoakam's Buenos Noches From a Lonely Room. The trip occurred in 1987, right after high school. "With the exception of a ski trip, I'd never been west of Hershey, Pennsylvania," she says. "The further west we got, the more and more blown away I was by...just the space. Flat has always represented liberation to me, because where I grew up there were hills everywhere; that big, open, short-grass country--where you just crest a hill and the land just rolls away from you forever--was so intense.

"It was this trans-Mississippi, continental experience," she adds. "I was just overwhelmed. I felt like I'd come back to my home planet. We were at Mount Rushmore for the Fourth of July, and it was the 50th anniversary of the completion of Lincoln's face. They had this giant flag they pulled off of Lincoln--he's huge--and the Blue Angels flew over. Later there were fireworks, and the whole thing was just really great."

Although at Yale her studies were rife with musical touchstones--railroads, highways, cars--Cutrufello confesses that she "never really planned to do anything with music. I was focused on academia. What really turned me on was studying about railroads and highways. I was still writing songs, but songs like 'The Long Red Line,' which was about I-40 taking over Route 66."

Then came Buenos Noches. "Pete Anderson [Yoakam's guitar player and producer] was doing the most incredible things I'd ever heard," she recalls. Although she'd first been attracted to country when she'd watched Dukes of Hazzard and Hee Haw as a kid, there wasn't anybody around even to explain to her who Waylon Jennings was (he did the Dukes theme music) or what he represented; Yoakam and Anderson were her entree. "Around 1990, I started looking at second-hand record stores and cut-out bins, garage sales and stuff, and I started reading the backs of albums, noticing names," she says. "But I still didn't have anybody to put any of it in context for me."

The pull steadily grew. "I was really bored with rock when country came around. It was right before Nevermind, and Guns 'N Roses were the baddest thing on the radio," she says with a shake of her head. "Country just seemed so cool compared to that.

"I wasn't sure what I wanted to do," she confesses. "I was trained as a cultural historian, and gradually I came to look at [exploring] country music like a self-directed grad school, where I'd just see what I could learn." In 1991 she packed up her guitar and used records and relocated to Austin stone cold. "I felt brazenly unqualified to even be there," she says. "I went down to the Broken Spoke and saw Chris Wall there, and it was so overwhelming that I had to leave--you could feel the power of the tradition. I was like, 'I am so not ready for this!' I didn't come back for a couple weeks."

Gradually, Cutrufello began studying. "I bought used CDs, talked to players, watched them play, and practiced," she says. In Austin, she learned from masters such as Wall, Alvin Crow, Dale Watson, and the band Chapparal, and it was then that she ran into Bregante, who'd just moved to Austin and was drumming for Wall. "We'd [Bregante and his wife Sarah] heard of Mary--she'd been very highly recommended by John Inmon [former lead guitarist with the original Lost Gonzo Band], and that's nothing to take lightly," Bregante recalls. "We went to see her and just flipped out. Later, I'd see her when she sat in with Chris. Gradually, we got to know each other, and when she found out I had a digital home studio, we started recording. It was a lot of fun."

Her timing was unfortunate. Austin was already filled to the scuppers with earnest kids with guitars out to blend country and rootsy rock; also, to a certain extent, her attitude--focused, goal-oriented, and geared to achievement--went against Austin's fabled mellow vibe. Respect eluded her. "She just got hammered," Bregante says of her reception.

"Let me see," Cutrufello says slowly when asked about Austin. "I want to choose my words carefully, 'cause I really love Austin; I go there all the time. It's a very laid-back place, it's just that I think it's a bit too laid-back for me."

Family who lived inside the loop in a nice older neighborhood in Houston had a standing offer of a garage apartment, and in 1994--no longer willing to overlook that she was playing many more gigs in Houston than Austin--Mary took them up on it.

It's hard to see what took her so long. The desk in her upstairs pad--beneath a large calendar featuring two big diesel locomotives, with a laptop computer on it and a hardback copy of 6,000 Miles of Fence, a book about the famed XIT Ranch, nearby--overlooks a well-kept backyard full of plants, the resigned cooing of doves, and cats striding imperiously through the lush grass.

Since '93, Cutrufello had been generating a buzz outside of the Live Music Capital of the Known Universe, and the move interrupted nothing. She would play to two the same way that she would for 72--fiercely--and there was something about her even then that let you know it would be the same for 2,000. That she would be playing to 2,000 seemed a forgone conclusion.

Her voice was the one area for which reports weren't unanimously raving; sometimes she could manipulate it in ways that seemed extreme, but even then her songwriting was sharp and often allowed the indulgence. "My voice is terribly mannered," she admits with a laugh, throwing her head back. "You're just used to it." She laughs again and then pauses for a moment. "You've got to understand that when I was growing up, I just idolized musical theater." She points over her shoulder to the door of her apartment. "I've got like 200 records of that kind of stuff up there. I realize that I don't sing like anybody else. I don't work at singing a whole lot, so what you're getting is my natural ability."

In 1993 she personally released Mary Cutrufello and the Havoline Supremes, an eight-song cassette that started out as a demo. The Havoline Supremes represent the one time Cutrufello bothered to name her backing musicians, a fact that may have something to do with them quitting the day after the recording sessions wrapped. Cutrufello has since been through a number of sidemen, although her current bassist, Roland Denney, has been with her for about a year. All original, Havoline was a hidden gem that could keep you buying tapes from bands at gigs for the next decade, a blast of pure swingin'-door hardcore, flawlessly executed. It's tribute to Cutrufello's presence that the album's way-country steel and fiddle parts almost seem to get in the way.

Last September she released who to love and hit another bull's-eye. Stripped down and truer to her three-piece sound, the album found Cutrufello growing as a songwriter, paying less tribute as she explored country's almost Newtonian world of action and reaction on songs like "Johnson Motel," "The Man That He's Become," and "A Promise I Made."

"I'm really fascinated by the moral crises of country music," she says. "Country really presupposes a moral worldview where if you run around on your wife, it's gonna mess with your head. It'll resonate. Maybe you'll drink too much, maybe you'll leave, but you're gonna do something. Each person has compelling reasons, and there's obviously a lot of stress, but it's nothing anyone can get out of, and that's the sort of complexity and tension that I'd find over and over in country and not in rock. I like to let that flower. As a writer, it can help you tap into really intense emotional stuff."

Around the same time came the gig with Gilmore. "I think he wanted to start over completely from scratch with the band, because that was in keeping with the whole point of the album," Cutrufello explains. "Our managers know each other, and so one day I went over to his house; he had a rough mix of the new album and we listened to it. What really clinched it was that there was a lot of baritone guitar on the album, and I've got one that I never get to play, because it's too much hassle."

Cutrufello shone on the tour, getting rave reviews wherever she went; even the The New York Times responded warmly. When she left the band, there was idle speculation that perhaps she had shone a little too brightly, but Cutrufello says the real reasons were more pragmatic. "We ran out of money," she says. "I've always loved playing guitar for other people, but when you're a frontman you just don't get many sideman calls. I took care not to get in the way, and I toned it down as much as I could, but I think I was hired to be me.

"It was big fun," she adds. "Jimmie's a great guy, sweet and smart. You always had the sense with him that he was just discovering something, and that's a neat energy to have around. He let me sing a song, and we duetted on [Townes Van Zandt's] "White Freightliner Blues," but it wasn't like it was something I insisted on, that I get "my moment."

The six-month gig was a major educational experience to boot. "I got to do real promoting-a-record-for-a-major-label kind of stuff for the first time, without it being me, so when I had to I could just sit back and watch. I think I know how to pick a good road manager now." It may end up being an invaluable briefing; in the last couple of months, things have begun to heat up for Cutrufello. A song on who to love, "Love's to Blame," was co-written with Steve Earle, and she just put on a crowd-pleasing show at a Nashville music showcase last month, taped an episode of Austin City Limits, and more recently tore up the big stage at the Austin Music Hall for South by Southwest. She's currently being courted by more than a half-dozen major labels, the reward for two steady years of work with her manager, Nashville's Holly Gleason.

It's a jump Cutrufello is ready to make, and she's already changing stylistically. You can see it in her stage attire: In the early '90s she went for stage-y kicker finery--sequins, pearl buttons, even a big ol' cowboy hat--but she now appears more often than not in a black T-shirt and jeans. If Havoline Supremes represented her leaving her roots-rock past behind and becoming what she called "an Alvin Crow wannabe," and who to love was her mastery of the country form, then her Saturday-night show at SXSW was a glimpse of things to come. On what was perhaps the biggest stage she'd ever played on her own--certainly much bigger than any most of her fans had ever seen her on--Cutrufello got a big, fat sound that she rode like a tractor, and her stage persona expanded to match as she worked to fill a heroic space like old Bono, or even the Boss himself.

That, of course, is no accident for a girl who grew up a train ride away from Springsteen's home turf. "When I was growing up, Born to Run was the shit," says Cutrufello, who lists The River and Darkness on the Edge of Town as two Springsteen faves. "I've been listening to side one of The River, especially 'The Ties That Bind'--that's just such a great song, I'm even thinking about doing it. It seems to run counter to what I write about, but the bridge--where he sings "I'd rather have the hurt inside/Than know the emptiness your heart must hide"--that ties it in. Lyrically and musically, it sounds a lot like what I'm writing now."

Her South by Southwest show revealed a growing fondness for big moments, too--the musical equivalent of the giant flag and swooping jets over Mount Rushmore. "Darkness on the Edge of Town is such a great guitar album--the lead break in 'Candy's Room' is just so raw and intense that I just have to stand still when it comes on," she says. "In 1988 I saw Bruce in Philadelphia when he was on that Human Rights Now! tour, and I saw him make a connection with 100,000 people who were completely worn out, and he just turned that place into a zoo. They did 'Rosalita,' and the energy was just so intense, it was palpable. My faith in rock 'n' roll hadn't been shaken then--it certainly has since--but that show is what keeps me thinking it can work with huge numbers of people."

There's a potential for danger, though; even Springsteen eventually collapsed under the weight of his own heroic rep. And down in Austin, Cutrufello revealed a Boss-like tendency toward overstatement. On small stages--say, the corner of her beloved Naomi's, where she consistently turns in blazing shows--she's confined, and having to concentrate her energy gives a sense of almost incandescent urgency. On the large stage at the Music Hall, sometimes she seemed to be just jumping around. The coolest guitar move in the universe won't last through 2,000 exposures.

But she's definitely aiming high--at more than being just some exotic kicker guitar chick or a Springsteen clone. "What I want to do is take country music's moral intensity, the lyric complexity--that and the guitar playing--and mix it with rock 'n' roll. If there's not a place for it, maybe we can make one," she says, warming to the subject. "I think people have a need to connect and a need for narrative--an oral tradition that makes a certain kind of sense."

She trusts her longtime fans, like the crowd at Naomi's. "The people there are great, and I don't think they're that doctrinaire about their country. I've done my new stuff, and they're right there up with it. When we did songs like 'The Man That He's Become' or 'Johnson Motel,' like we did a few weeks ago in Nashville, what you end up with is basically a rock band playing these really intense songs that sound like the person who wrote them listens to a lot of country, and that's exactly where I want to be now." She pauses. "I probably shouldn't over-intellectualize things," she says, laughing, "although that is my forte."

All the new attention can be disorienting. "Sometimes I'm all but overwhelmed by it," she confesses. "It's really amazing--people are jumping up and down wanting to talk to me, take me to dinner, and it's freaking me out."

Even though it seems that stars and even artists are getting younger and younger, that provides little relief for the feelings of isolation and disorientation at the center of the hype. "Merel [Bregante] is the closest person that I can talk to who's been through something like this, with Loggins and Messina. He's telling me about the nature of the moment and what this requires. All I want out of this--whatever it turns into in the next few weeks--is the opportunity to see just how big a connection I can make. I mean, why not? It feels good to make a small connection, and every larger connection I've made has felt better, so it follows that I should try to make the biggest connection I can and see how cool that would be."

Bregante is glad to be of service. "From the moment I saw her, I knew she was going to be a star," he says. "It's like Steve Popavich [record company honcho who was with CBS and later president of Polygram] once told me--'If you bring me the best thing I've ever heard, I'll sign it right away; if you bring me the worst thing I've ever heard, I'll sign that right away; the only thing I'm not interested in is what's in the middle.' Mary's like that, she doesn't dwell in the gray."

Bregante has been the source of many little tips about life in the biz. "Just before she went on the road with Jimmie Dale, she called me and asked if I had any advice. I told her to get on the bus first and grab the lower left rear bunk. The torque of the engine seems to hold you in--you fall out of bed a lot less often--and once you get used to the road noise, it'll drown out any other sound like snoring. The fact that you're down low minimizes sway, and you'll be a lot more comfortable. She called me when she got to New York, and was like 'You're right!'"

There's more to making a living at music than knowing what bunk to pick, though, and the road can be a place where your Black Marias aren't occasional visitors but steady companions. "I see for Mary an incredibly rewarding and difficult time," Bregante says. "When she walks away from that first year, she's gonna be really tired. I hope the rigors of the road don't wear her down, because she's quite sensitive, and I don't think she knows how unique she really is."

"I'm just trying to stay focused and have the faith that I've had all along," Cutrufello says. "That if you do your thing, the only way you can fuck it up is to let it fuck you up. Right now I'm just having a great time with it, and I'm damn happy to be here. It's a beautiful thing, it's fun, and sometimes I just find myself bursting into spontaneous laughter."

Then, not surprisingly, she laughs.

http://www.dallasobserver.com/Issues/1997-03-27/news/feature3_full.html

Rolling Stone, Oct. 29, 1998

Newsweek, Aug. 31, 1998

USA Today (my 3rd time in that paper!), Aug. 31, 1998

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