by Shania Twain
Maybe a little too grown up. Some of the guys would comment that they had kids my age at home and that I seemed so much older in comparison. I sensed that my maturity caught them off guard, and although they took me seriously once I started to sing, I could tell that some of them didn’t feel that performing in the bar scene was appropriate for a kid. They were kind to me, but they would sometimes remark on how awkward it was to hear a ten-year-old sing about divorce, love, betrayal, seduction, and temptation in songs like “Golden Ring,” “Blanket on the Ground,” “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town,” “Somebody’s Knockin’,” and “Help Me Make It Through the Night.”
The charts worked well for country music because the chord progressions were usually pretty simple, which suited my basic-level guitar playing and music theory. But when I was about nine years old, my mother brought me to my first disco band audition. That one didn’t go so well. First of all, neither of us even knew what disco was, only that there was a goofy duck somewhere in the mix of its image, the “Disco Duck.” It was a new danceable style being played more and more in the clubs, and my mother thought there could be work there for me, so she pulled an ad from the paper for a disco band looking for a lead singer.
I remember we walked into a basement apartment in Sudbury, where a guy sat waiting for us at an electric keyboard, fiddling with synthesized sounds and preprogrammed drum rhythms that were very foreign to me. He seemed a bit taken aback by my age, but he humored us and asked me what songs I knew and if I could sing something for him. I didn’t know any disco songs, as it was still so new. Even if I had heard disco songs on the radio at that point, I didn’t associate them with a genre specifically called “disco.” Much to my embarrassment, I actually asked him, “What is disco?” He couldn’t believe that I hadn’t even heard of it. He was polite, but the audition ended quickly. I never did sing for him.
Although my mother was always backstage, she had no musical ability, so I was totally on my own once I walked out there with the band. A guitar bigger than me was strapped around my shoulder with the neck balanced in my one hand and my charts clutched in the other. I wasn’t a performer at all in terms of stage presence, like dancing or chatting up the audience. I simply walked up to the microphone and introduced myself in a very rehearsed and almost rigid way: “Hello, my name is Eilleen, and the song I’m going to sing for you today is called ‘Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain’ by Willie Nelson.” Then, looking back over my shoulder, I’d gesture to the band to set the tempo with my strumming, turn back to the mic, my eyes focused above the audience’s heads, and start singing.
I was petrified being up there, and often it was all I could do not to pee myself just before I’d start to sing, or worse, as they’d call me to come out onstage during my introduction. It was incredibly hard to hold in my pee while walking from the side of the stage out to the center; much easier if the pressure was on when I was already standing at the mic and able to squeeze my knees together. Just the thought of this makes me sweat. I’d heard of people vomiting from stage fright, but for me it was my bladder, shakes, and sweats. Still is.
If I was doing a whole night’s worth of three sets, I had the chance to warm up as the night went on, but if I was a guest singer with a band that already had a female lead vocalist, I would do only one song. It was scary being so on the spot, the do-or-die feeling of having just the one shot. I don’t know if it was my mother’s nervous edge rubbing off on me that made me feel as though I was singing for my life, but my understanding was that you never knew who might be watching. There could be a talent scout in the audience, and if I was good enough, he might take me under his wing, as my mother put it. I wasn’t sent up onstage by my mother to have fun and enjoy myself—I was out there to impress people, to be noticed, and maybe discovered.
I had the feeling that I was singing for my mother’s life more than for my own. It was her happiness, her dream I was trying to fulfill. I was uncomfortable under all this pressure and much preferred playing music in the backyard by the fire, but I put on a brave face for her. I also believed in her conviction that I would make it, because she was my mother, and my mother had to be right. I wanted to make it so that we didn’t have to struggle financially anymore. This is what I saw success bringing us: enough to pay our bills, feed the family, and ease the tension in our home life.
I came across very few other child music artists during this early phase of my career. It wasn’t a child’s world. In fact, it was highly inappropriate a lot of the time, since the music world education system meant being around drinking, smoking adults, many of whom flirted openly among themselves. Understandably, many places didn’t allow kids. My mother got around that most of the time and even managed to get me a Social Security card when I was just eleven. This allowed me to legally work underage, and it came accompanied by a formal letter of sorts granting me permission to work in premises that served liquor. I was now a real “professional.”
I went through a long period where I lived some of the time in an adult world and some of the time in a child’s world. But other kids my age wouldn’t have understood a lot of the things that I experienced in the clubs and bars, surrounded by grown-ups, so I never shared with them. These worlds were separate and didn’t belong together. Adults go to bars where they are free to do adult things, after all, behavior they save for when their kids are not around.
Over the years, my mother pulled me out of school on the odd Friday when I had a weekend gig, as well as for a full week every few months. Then there were the one-off gigs for television or a festival, where I would miss only one day of school. I was in and out of school throughout the year but never enough that I had to be pulled out for an extended period. When I got my license to play where liquor was served, my mother explained to the school principal that I was a professional singer and asked for their cooperation to help me balance both school and “work.” I never sensed resistance from any of my schools, and, in fact, the principals and teachers seemed more enamored by the fact that I was a performer than by the fact that I would miss a bit of school here and there. I do remember being asked to talk about my career voyages in the principal’s office upon returning from time off school, which I felt was partly to ensure that I was actually doing what my mother told them I was doing—out pursuing my career—and also out of curiosity for what it must be like being a stage performer.
As you can imagine, being in bars exposed me to a lot of drinking, naturally. Now, my parents weren’t drinkers—they’d pretty much drink only on holidays and other special occasions—so there was rarely alcohol in the house and no casual drinking at home. I think it might have been Easter the first time I ever got drunk. I was twelve. My parents were aware that I’d become curious about drinking. A friend of mine up the street had a fifteen-year-old brother who snuck his parents’ homemade wine from the stash in their basement on weekends. He told us stories about how he and his friends had so much fun drinking, staying up all night, laughing, playing pranks, and skinny-dipping while camping at a nearby lake. I wasn’t intrigued by adult behavior when they drank, as there wasn’t much mystery left in that for me by the age of twelve, but based on the bragging of my friend’s older brother Steve, I was unfortunately more tempted to try it. Since I was exposed to it all the time in bars, I guess they thought it would be better for me to experience it under their supervision; my mom and my dad knew that it was probably just a matter of time before I would take the plunge and indulge my curiosity.
One night Kenny and I were sitting around the kitchen table playing guitars and singing, and my parents were nursing their whiskey and Cokes. “Could I have a taste?” I piped up.
My father smiled, almost to say, “Okay, Sharon, we need to let her dig her own hole and find out what it’s all about. She wants to drink, we’ll let her drink.” “So,” he said to me, “you want to see what alcohol tastes like? You want to have a drink of your own?”
“Okay!” How cool was this!
He
poured me a whiskey and Coke, which didn’t seem to amount to much: a couple of caps of whiskey to a whole glass of Coke. “That’s it?” I pouted. “This is mostly Coke!” But since this was my first time drinking alcohol, I hadn’t paid attention to the proportions of a powerful alcoholic drink; nor did I understand the potency of even one cap of whiskey and that a couple were more than sufficient to get me drunk.
“You want a bit more?” asked my dad. Feeling brave, I said, “Sure!” And he topped off my glass.
I was having a great time laughing, singing, joking, and generally acting like a total idiot. By the time I began stumbling around uncontrollably and bumping into things, my parents decided to put me to bed. My dad hoisted me up to the top bunk. I can still remember how the second my head hit the pillow, the room began to spin until I was dizzy. That’s when I heaved a gush of warm, sugary liquid. I didn’t feel it coming. I was just lying there on my back, trying to work out how I was going to stop the room from whirling around. The fountain of vomit pulsed up into the air before surrendering to the effects of gravity and splashing right back down all over my face. It soaked my hair and dripped into my ears. I called out meekly to my parents till they finally heard me, thank goodness. What ran through my spinning head were stories I’d heard over the years of people choking to death on their own vomit while drunk. From that experience, I can see how this can easily happen. If I’d eaten anything too solid just before, this could very well have happened to me, because I wasn’t even able to turn myself over on my side, from what I can remember. I was only twelve years old and was at the mercy of my parents hearing me call out.
In hindsight, I’m pretty sure my parents had an ulterior motive in letting me have a drink at such a young age. What better way to check the lure of alcohol by allowing me to experience the pleasurable sensation of inebriation only to suffer payback in the form of getting sick. I have to say that their strategy was pretty darn effective. I felt horrible the next day, with all the classic symptoms of a hangover. I now knew what it was like to be intoxicated and to feel the effects of the morning-after headache, dehydration, and overall yuckiness. Drinking alcohol was not something I wanted to do anytime soon after that. Although that experience didn’t prevent me from ever drinking again, it really did make me aware of the regrettable effects of overdoing it. I believe that as a direct result of that first exposure to too much alcohol, I remained more cautious throughout my teens and aware of what a reasonable limit was for myself. I understood how it felt to have no control over my own body and behavior, and that it was dangerous not to know when to quit.
With Jill and Kenny now gone from home, the whole world felt as if it had landed on my shoulders. I was overwhelmed and angry that I was on my own with all the responsibility of the house. In earlier years when the boys were still in diapers, if my mom was in a depressed state, it was Jill and I who changed the diapers and wiped the dirty bums. When one of the younger kids needed a dentist or a doctor, again, it was often one of us girls who took them. Much of the basic, parental care of the younger kids was shared between us. Now with Jill gone, I was on the brink of teenhood, and with the curious anticipation of being a teenager, I wanted to socialize more and be with friends. I didn’t want to babysit, clean the house, and do the laundry because my mother was too depressed to get up. I resented having to get out of bed on Saturday mornings to feed the younger kids and forage the cupboards for something to cook, during the times when there was so little. Why did I have to wake up an hour earlier on school mornings to iron my dad’s clothes, be his alarm clock, make his coffee, and then get the other kids ready for school? All this responsibility was too heavy for me as an adolescent, and I didn’t want it. But I did it anyway because I had to. Who else was going to do it?
Sometimes lying in bed at night, I’d say out loud, “I hate my life.” I’d speak to time very deliberately, asking it to please pass as quickly as possible so all this could just be over with and behind me; it would tell me not to worry because it promised to keep moving forward. I spoke to time like this as if I were speaking to God Himself. I was pleading with something greater than me, a force I knew I could rely on as the one in control. I knew that tomorrow really was another day, that change meant “different,” and even though different didn’t necessarily mean better, change was a relief in itself. I’d heard countless songs refer to time in the same way that I saw it: that “time is a healer,” “time heals all,” “it will all be good in time,” and “time changes everything.” Those phrases had found their way into many songs that I knew, with prolific lyrics that spoke of how we can count on time to change and for it to change things. These songs were proof that I was not alone in my thinking. Others also had the same confidence in time, and so time was like a supreme essence, something I could pray to for change.
I spent every free moment listening to, playing, or writing music as a way to escape my home life. Music became my passion, freedom, discovery, comfort, and savior. I needed it. It was my drug. We had a turntable and a radio in the house. I also had a small cassette player, and although all these systems were inexpensive and of poor quality—often secondhand, given to us, or something we picked up at the dump—they allowed me to listen to the music just the same. It was almost as important as my mom having her cigarettes, so my parents made sure there was music in the house.
Very soon after first learning to play guitar, I developed thick, discolored calluses on the fingertips of my left hand. That’s the hand that caresses the neck of the guitar and forms notes and chords by dancing over the frets. At first I didn’t like these ugly, hard things on my fingers and would chew on them to keep them from getting too bulgy. I didn’t realize that calluses protect the fingers, enabling you to press down hard on the metal strings without pain. One time I decided to trim one of the thicker calluses with scissors. I cut off the top, which left a circular area of tender, pink, and sensitive flesh exposed underneath. It was raw and sore, and it took a week for it to heal so that I could get back to playing. Needless to say, I never cut my calluses again.
Even with calluses, sometimes I’d practice for so many hours straight that my fingers would bruise purple anyway. It’s amazing how much I played, yet I never became any good. Perhaps it was my lack of desire to become a great technician on the guitar; for me it was strictly a tool for composing songs. I was a singer-songwriter who used the guitar to accompany myself, not a guitarist per se.
I’m grateful for music and the many roles it played during my childhood and teen years. As much as I gave to it in terms of time and effort—exemplified not only by bruised fingers but well-exercised vocal cords and pages upon pages of lyrics—it gave tenfold in return and even saved me from getting caught up in trouble during a time of adolescent vulnerability.
My mother’s wary eye also helped in that regard. She constantly reminded me to never leave my glass of soda untended, to prevent anyone from slipping something in it. (Or drinking out of my glass and giving me something else!) I was pretty safe from being exposed to anything harmful other than the thick secondhand smoke that clouded up the barrooms I frequented on weekends or the slobbering drunks tripping over me. As for the usual hazards, like bar fights that inevitably erupted around closing time, I just stayed out of the way. Besides, license to perform or no license, I wasn’t allowed to hang in the bar between sets, as I was under the age of eighteen. Many of the places I played featured female strippers between band sets, and I felt uncomfortable being around that. I only saw strippers dance to recorded music and was never in a band that played live during the stripper set. I guess my mother or the bar manager would have drawn the line there in allowing a child to sing while the strippers were taking off their clothes.
I was ushered out after my set and would cross paths with the half-naked girls on their way to the stage. I remember thinking how beautiful they were: fancy, feathery costumes, sparkling necklaces, bright, shiny shoes, and amazing figures. My first impressions of a woman dressing up for a
man’s sake came from movies like Cinderella, where the concept was for the girl to look as pretty as possible. I didn’t connect that strippers stripped as a profession, not to find a husband. I was confused as to why a woman would get herself all dolled up and looking so attractive if she wasn’t trying to attract someone. Why would a girl try to look so good if she didn’t want the man to be with her? In fact, while a dancer was stripping, she often came so close to the men at the edge of the stage that they could slip bills under the strap of her thong.
In my waiting area between my sets, I could often still see the stage from an outside hallway or a room off to the side that was officially not in the lounge but had a view of the stage from a distance. Sometimes I’d hear a dancer lash out at the men, “Don’t touch me, you bastard!” The men were allowed to place money in her underwear but not touch her in any other way, and this confused me. It was hard for my child mind to understand why this was such a one-way street. The girl gets attractive only to be paid, not for the men to actually be attracted to her? This was not at all why the ladies in Cinderella dressed up so pretty. They were all looking to be asked to dance and to be kissed by the prince. “Look as close and as long as you want but don’t touch” was part of the grown-up world I didn’t understand. I felt very much out of place there, which, of course, I was.
6
The wrong Train
Even though I was independent and very mature for my age, there was one time when my parents certainly overestimated my ability to be on my own. At around the age of eleven, I was booked on one of Canada’s national lottery TV shows that featured live guest performances. It was either Wintario or Lotto Canada— I can’t remember which one—but it was being shot in Toronto. Gas was expensive—at least for us it was—so my mom and dad decided to have me travel by Canadian National Railway. It was an overnight trip, but it sure beat spending thirteen hours on a bus each way.
