ARTICLES & INTERVIEWS WITH DONNA SUMMER

She's gone from 'Bad Girl' to 'Ordinary Girl' By Rashod D. Ollison Sun Pop Music Critic Disco may be dead, with her old image, but Donna Summer is still 'Hot Stuff'   (from Sun Spot.Net website, November 23, 2003

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- When Donna Summer answers the phone at her Nashville home, her greeting is gravelly. The "hello" sounds almost muffled. It's around 9 a.m. and, apparently, her voice hasn't awakened yet. She won't be home too long, anyway, because there's more road work to do. For weeks, she's been traveling the country, doing a round of morning shows, daytime talk shows, a little radio.  Surely you've heard by now that the woman known in the '70s as the First Lady of Love and the Queen of Disco has published a memoir called Ordinary Girl: The Journey. And UTV/Mercury Records has released a two-disc career retrospective, The Journey: The Very Best of Donna Summer, featuring two new songs. She's in the middle of promoting both. In the book, written with Marc Eliot, the singer-songwriter details her path from poor Boston girl to international superstar. Along the way, she experiences abusive relationships, physical illnesses, suicide attempts, conflicts with fame, spiritual rebirth.  But we haven't heard much from the singer in a while. She scored a dance hit in '99 with "I Will Go With You (Con Te Partiro)." The record wasn't heard much outside the clubs, though. Her last gold-certified smash was "This Time I Know It's For Real," which climbed into the Top 10 in 1989. She Works Hard for the Money, a million seller 20 years ago, was the artist's last hit album.  However, there was a time when Donna Summer was everywhere - on Midnight Special, on Soul Train, on the Tonight Show, on the radio. (Remember that ubiquitous 1980 hit? On the radio/whoa-o-o-o-o ... It was one of Summer's biggest.) In '75, she fueled the sexual fire that ignited disco. With "Love to Love You Baby," a nearly 17-minute, lushly pulsating track over which Summer pornographically moaned the title over and over, the singer became an instant pop sensation. But gay clubs were already hip to her, embracing "Love to Love You Baby" first and other sexy Summer classics such as "Spring Affair" and "Try Me, I Know We Can Make It."  By 1978, though, Summer had truly arrived, hosting American Bandstand (the only person ever to substitute for Dick Clark) and hitting No. 1 with "MacArthur Park," "Bad Girls" and "Hot Stuff." The most versatile singer the disco era produced, Summer is the only artist to score three consecutive No. 1 platinum albums. She owns five Grammys, 11 gold LPs, 12 gold singles. The pug-nosed girl from Boston gave us fever consistently.  Now, disco is no more. When the '80s dawned, it fell and splintered, leaving sharp pieces in hip-hop, techno and house. Summer, who turns 55 on New Year's Eve, has been relegated to the occasional nostalgia show. But don't count her out. There's more "music coming and more projects," she says.  As for Ordinary Girl, "it just seemed like an appropriate direction to go in," Summer says. "People keep asking me, 'Why now? Why the book?' I needed to do the book at some point to go with the musical I had written also called Ordinary Girl [which hasn't been produced yet]. I needed to do something creative, but people were asking for an autobiography, anyway."  The tell-all evolved from a novel Summer was "in the throes of writing, a book about a girl and her adventures in Europe in the '60s," she says. But the story mirrored her own. When she started exploring her life, revisiting the past and all its joys and pains, the performer found the process to be cathartic, freeing.  "It made me feel that my life had a purpose," Summer says. "When you plop those things together, you see the pattern. All of these things happened for a reason."  Spiritual awakening  Summer's story begins on Dec. 31, 1948, when she was born LaDonna Adrian Gaines in Boston. Her father, Andrew, was a jack of all trades: a butcher, a wallpaper hanger, a TV repairman, a fisherman. Her mother, Mary Ellen, cared for Summer and her four sisters and one brother. The book opens when Summer is 5 years old and she realizes God's presence for the first time. (Throughout the book, Summer, who became a born-again Christian in the early '80s, recounts various spiritual awakenings.) She stood alone in the courtyard of a school near her home and "all of a sudden I became acutely aware of my surroundings for the first time," Summer writes. "The whooshing leaves, the gentle wind, and the uneven ground beneath my feet touched me in a profound way."  Although the tone is a bit melodramatic at times, Ordinary Girl is personal and vivid. After nearly drowning in a neighborhood pool when she was 8, Summer realized a new sense of creativity. Not long after that, she sang in church for the first time. She knew then that she would one day make a living as a vocalist.  "The message was clear," Summer says. "I asked God to let me sing, to show me how to sing. And He did."  Summer's deep insecurity during her adolescence didn't deter her from her passion. She worked on her technique, teaching herself breath control by listening to Mahalia Jackson records. She eventually joined a local, all-white band called the Crow. ("Guess who the crow was," Summer quips.) And the group performed throughout the city.  At 19, Summer abruptly left Boston for New York after witnessing an attack on an elderly woman, who later died from her wounds. Summer knew one of the three boys involved in the beating, and she testified at the trial. When the boys were found guilty, Summer received threats from folks connected with the group. So she fled. With the Crow, she settled in Greenwich Village and became a part of the folk-rock hippie scene. She wasn't there too long before she met Broadway producer Bertrand Castelli, who offered Summer a role in the German production of Hair, a wildly popular show at the time.  Summer accepted, and on Aug. 28, 1968, she left for Munich, Germany. It would be seven and a half years before she returned to the U.S. A fluke of a song would bring her back.  Accidental hit  "The best parts of the book are my years as a black woman in Europe," Summer says, her voice warm and open now. "I started to blossom without the stigma of color. I was free over there. My color was an accent. People thought it was a great thing, and it wasn't just lip service, you know. They welcomed me into their homes."  After Hair ended, Summer performed in other productions and sang in clubs around Munich and Vienna. In 1972, she married Helmuth Sommer, a blond, blue-eyed Austrian actor. The next year, her daughter Mimi was born. But for several reasons - conflicting work schedules, Sommer's emotional distance, the singer's infidelity, the marriage didn't last. By '74, the two were divorced and Summer (her name was later changed when she launched her career in the States) concentrated on performing.  She had been doing backup work at Giorgio Moroder's Musicland Studios, and the two had formed a relaxed creative relationship. In early 1975, Summer approached Moroder with an idea for a song intended for another singer. All Summer had was a line, "Love to love you, baby," which she sang in a breathy style inspired by Marilyn Monroe. Moroder dug it and, with his partner Pete Bellotte, immediately worked up an undulating, Barry White-inspired arrangement. Summer laid the vocal down. And a copy made its way to Neil Bogart, president of Casablanca Records in Los Angeles, the label that recorded Kiss at the time. Legend has it that Bogart played the three-minute demo at a party and people requested it all night. The next morning, the label president called Moroder and asked that the song be extended to 15 more minutes, covering an entire side of an LP.  A few months later, Love to Love You Baby, the album, hit the streets. When Summer returned to America, she was already a star. Clubs and late-night radio had been wearing out her record, which swiftly sold a million copies.  The single hit No. 2 on the pop charts. But the singer wasn't prepared for the demands of the success: the constant touring, appearances and concerts. Casablanca promoted her as a sex goddess, an image that unnerved her. The Cleopatra-like wigs, the elaborate makeup, the oohs and aahs on the early records - none of that, Summer says, was a reflection of who she was.  "I put myself in the situation, though," the artist says. "I have to take the responsibility and put it on my shoulders."  But there was no time to slow down. Summer was huge. Between '75 and '83, she scored 10 gold and platinum albums. Her masterpiece, the two-LP set Bad Girls, came out in 1979 and folded in elements of styles that would explode in the next decade: electronica, new wave rock, country pop. In the '80s, though, Summer concentrated on her personal life and retreated from the pop landscape. She married Bruce Sudano, an Italian singer-songwriter, and gave birth to two daughters, Brooklyn and Amanda.  Today, the girls are grown. Mimi, an aspiring songwriter, lives in the Baltimore area and has two children. Brooklyn, an actress and model, stars on the TV show My Wife and Kids, and Amanda is a senior communications major at Vanderbilt University. Sudano and Summer spend the bulk of their time in Nashville, where they have three homes, including a farm.  "For the past 10 years, I haven't really been that career-minded," Summer says. "I've worked here and there; you probably just didn't hear about it."  The cover of Ordinary Girl features a glamorous Essence magazine-style shot of Summer, who looks as if she hasn't aged a day since '75. On the back is an old picture of the pop legend circa 1979: Ink-black hair rains past her shoulders; her lips are parted and candy apple-red.  "People hadn't seen me in a while," Summer says, "so I wanted a new picture on the front. But when you put the book down, the 'bad girl' is on the bottom. All of that is behind me now."  Copyright © 2003, The Baltimore Sun