For recording artist Lennon Murphy, two phases dominate her still nascent career: “before metal” and “after metal.” “Before metal,” Lennon’s voice was richly emotional, an arresting combination of strength and fragility. In full-on piano-balladeer mode, 17-year-old Lennon Murphy was touted as the next Tori, Sarah or Fiona. Pictures from the era show Murphy in flowing hippie dresses, standing with her electric keyboard, sometimes with an acoustic guitar and a cello behind her. Lennon’s lyrically expressive songs—smooth and lightly soulful, if somewhat lacking in strong melody—justify the excitement generated by her mother, who began wrapping her daughter’s earliest tapes in yellow legal paper (with a handwritten bio) and delivering them personally to members of the press and the record industry.
Fast-forward two years to summer 2001: Lennon Murphy gets introduced to the world by Arista Records via an advance of her debut album, 5:30 Saturday Morning. The disc, which is packaged in a folding cardboard sleeve and stamped with glowing quotes from major media outlets, features photos of Lennon (no “Murphy”) in half-Goth, half-white-trash-sexbomb duds. The first track on the record is titled “Property Of Goatf♦♦♦er,” a formless maelstrom of grinding heavy metal guitars and primal howls. It’s not only far removed from the music with which Lennon first made her name; it’s far removed from what some would call music.
Now, it’s fall 2002 and Lennon has been released from Arista at the behest of herself and her manager, Jeff Pringle. She’s in the midst of an extended session of recording at an Orlando, Fla., studio, promising to employ fewer loops and effects on her new record, but pledging also to keep on rocking. “I’m doing everything myself,” she says, referring to her current independence from a label relationship. “I’m finishing what I started.”
But when did she start and what is she finishing? Who’s responsible for her transformation from sensitive shrinking violet to ballsy headbanger? Is Lennon Murphy’s story a case of major label packaging gone awry, or of an artist chasing her muse too far into the shadows? More to the point, does the artist in question have the skills and the desire to step back into the light?
The story of Lennon Murphy, rock star, is the stuff of press clippings legend.
Born on Long Island in 1982, Lennon Murphy was named for John Lennon by her mother, Kathleen, who moved herself and her daughter to Hendersonville in 1986 to pursue her own career as a songwriter. But as the young Lennon began to help her mom with her music, Kathleen spotted a prodigy and subsequently put her own dreams aside, working overtime at grunt jobs to give Lennon her shot.
Lennon took piano lessons from age 4 to 17, and voice lessons at 14, hoping to make herself marketable to theatrical casting agents—an experiment that, according to Lennon, “lasted about a week.” In 1997, the 15-year-old made her stage debut in a small Hendersonville bar, performing a four-hour show of originals. She continued to appear wherever her mother could book her, playing everywhere from jazz clubs to punk dives, with over 30 different bands.
Due in part to Kathleen’s efforts, the teenager drew the attention of the music business right away. The curiosity intensified after Lennon was given development deal money by RCA and recorded a couple of demos with heavy metal producer “Spider.” Visions of a harder-rocking Alanis Morrisette brought plenty of suitors. Arista Records, reportedly under pressure to sign more rock acts, won the day.
Remarkable enough already, The Lennon Murphy Story immediately gained a cruelly dramatic twist when Kathleen Murphy died suddenly of an allergic reaction in April 2000, a few days after Lennon’s 18th birthday and a few days before she signed her contract with Arista. Much of the next year of Lennon’s life was tied up with coming to grips with her grief, recording her album, understanding her new financial independence and fighting a custody battle to retain guardianship of her adopted sister Mariella (who’s also, in a complicated bit of family business, her niece).
The publicity department at Arista picked up where Lennon’s mother left off, making sure that every major music journalist knew her tale of triumph and woe. The result, according to Lennon, was an exhausting, depressing string of interviews in which, “everyone wanted to talk about my dead mom.”
The media blitz of the summer of 2001 focused on Lennon’s youth, her tragedy and her sexy look. She made Rolling Stone’s “Hot Issue,” where the magazine called her “every hard-rock-loving dude’s wet dream.” She was named one of Entertainment Weekly’s “New Faces of 2001,” appeared in New York magazine’s Fall Preview Issue, was included on Details magazine’s “Next Big Thing” list and was cited in a similar article in Mademoiselle. For the inside of the advance CD package, MTV newsman and Rolling Stone critic Kurt Loder offered, “It’s incredibly refreshing to come across a teenage performer who: 1) Isn’t blonde, 2) Writes her own songs, 3) Actually plays an instrument, and 4) Kicks ass.” Loder also hosted a half-hour MTV2 special about Lennon in the fall of 2001.
For whatever reason—and some speculation is forthcoming—5:30 Saturday Morning stiffed. But Lennon’s name and face got into the public eye. She has a pile of press clippings now, even if they mainly salivate over her fashion sense and backstory rather than her actual music. She’s even got a role in indie filmmaker Lee Madsen’s upcoming Nevada high school drama Pledge of Allegiance. It’s all consistent with something Lennon wrote about herself for the New York art magazine Issue back in 2000, before the hype machine got rolling. “I did not enter the music business for the money,” she proclaimed, “but for the recognition.”
Recognition Lennon has. Whatever the reason for her high-profile entry into the business—“Arista has a great publicity department,” Lennon concedes—it’s undeniable that she earned her fan base. Anyone who doesn’t understand the appeal of Lennon’s music should talk to Miranda Gillian, a Seattle high school student who started a Lennon fan Web site after she heard her music at a friend’s house and fell in love with her lyrics. Gillian is one of several site managers behind Lennon’s cause. “I like music that has more meaning to me,” says fellow Seattle teen and site manager Aimee Hilliard.
Chattanooga native Derek Tatum heard Lennon’s single “Brake of My Car” on a college radio station, then saw her picture in Rolling Stone, then started yet another Lennon fan site when he met her after one of her concerts. “I wanted to do my part,” he says. “Her voice is so strong.”
All of the Lennon site managers communicate with each other, via e-mail or AOL Instant Messenger, just about every day. And Lennon stays in touch with them all. In an e-mail interview she conducted with one of her fan sites, Lennon wrote, “It still surprises me when people come up to me and you can just see how much [it] means to them for me to sit there and talk to them. It’s a great feeling.”
Lennon’s earliest advocates in the media speak of her warmly as well, even the ones who were disappointed when her music made the transition from sweet to sour. And her current champions rush to her defense. Reached by e-mail, Kurt Loder comments, “I liked her voice, really liked her songs and liked the fact that her music was heavy but not stupid. She can also really play, and of course she’s pretty too. I don’t think her record company promoted her right with her first album. [She] deserves a better label and more support. She’s an unusual talent.”
So what did happen on the way to stardom? Why didn’t 5:30 Saturday Morning make as much of an impact after it came out as it did before its release?
Prior to the Spider demos and the subsequent deal with Arista, Lennon recorded some of her enduring songs—“Brake of Your Car,” “I Hear,” “Thank You”—in their softer form, and released them on a CD included with the aforementioned issue of Issue. There she wrote that “the problem is the way the songs are currently arranged is not radio-worthy material...a happy medium was reached, but not the true goal.”
The “true goal” explains her evolution as an artist, about which Lennon says, “What you can do in the heavier rock kind of music with an emotional song is nothing you can do with any other kind of music. I knew how I wanted them to sound, I just couldn’t formulate how I wanted it done. I told Spider: 'Nine Inch Nails, Rob Zombie, anti-Britney Spears.’ ” She says that her mother—a country and folk songwriter—found the change to hard rock “a little bit of a shock at first, but she noticed how the songs became more alive. Piano vocals are great, but sometimes they’re just so linear. They all start to sound the same even though they’re completely different.”
The Spider demos got into the hands of Arista A&R man Ken Krongard, who had been aware of Lennon for a few years. “I got a tape a long time ago from her mother, and then another one a year-and-a-half after that, and then I got one from Jeff (Pringle), who’s an acquaintance.” Krongard was the one who signed Lennon a few days after her mother’s death. Asked whether Lennon could’ve made it with her earlier sound, Krongard hesitates. “It would’ve been very, very difficult. It didn’t point to where she wanted to go.”
Around the same time that he signed Lennon, Krongard signed Avril Lavigne, whose single “Complicated” and album Let’s Go were unavoidable this summer. But despite that coup and six years at Arista, Krongard was dismissed last year shortly after Antonio “L.A.” Reid took over the label from Krongard’s mentor, Clive Davis. Krongard chalks up the weak performance of 5:30 Saturday Morning to a couple of factors, but begins by saying, “Her A&R man was fired, that didn’t help.”
Lennon fumes. “Arista has never broken a rock act before, and didn’t have the desire to break a female act,” she insists, ignoring Lavigne’s success (which, perhaps, could’ve been hers). Lennon’s manager Jeff Pringle is equally livid: “We’ve been trying to get out of Arista Records for, shit, six, eight months now. You go and ask for a release from the record company and the president of the label jumps up and down on his desk, 'Oh, you’re a star, I can’t let you go. We’re gonna do this, we’re gonna do that,’ and then he doesn’t return your phone calls.”
Lennon elaborates: “L.A. Reid tells me I made a shitty record. But the funny thing is, he puts 'Executive Producer’ on the back, except, [he] didn’t listen to the record until it was already mastered. You signed me on two songs that are actually on the record and now you’re telling me I have no hooks and the stuff sucks, just because your departments couldn’t get their shit together? I’m working my ass off, getting great reviews and they only shipped 25,000 records.”
Or maybe it was something else? Maybe the record was too abrasive for the stressful fall of 2001? “Whether or not the public was ready for that, I don’t know,” answers Krongard. “I submit that on modern rock radio formats, there’s not one female getting airplay. I also submit that the record was released on Sept. 11.”
Maybe it was all of these things. Maybe it was just bad luck. Or maybe the record really wasn’t all that good.
Lennon’s own hometown paper, this very own Nashville Scene, kickstarted her career when former music writer Michael McCall, after hearing one of her tapes and seeing her perform, wrote somewhat presciently, “fans of unfiltered natural talent will want to catch her early, before she begins to be shaped by so-called experts.” But just after the release of 5:30 Saturday Morning, the Scene published the following pre-show preview:
“It’s possible that she’ll be best experienced live, where her genre-hopping psychodramas will have a physical presence. Lord knows her record is tough to bear. The whole enterprise is calculated to provoke, from the thudding album opener 'Property Of Goatf♦♦♦er’ to the piano-backed torch song stylings of the title track; it’s all meant to place Lennon in the context of a versatile, bracingly honest performer, in step with current trends and unafraid of her own sexuality. Instead, it mostly sounds manufactured, with a dissonant clang.”
I know the text intimately because I wrote it. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have bothered panning a record by a first-timer, but the media blitz made me suspicious. And though I have more respect for Lennon after working on this story, I have to admit that I still don’t like her debut album much.
Not so Ken Krongard, who, exiled from Arista, now shops insider tips as the co-founder of themusicconsultant.com, where he touts his discovery of Avril Lavigne. And he holds out hope for Lennon. “I still say she’s going to happen. It’s just a question of time.”
Lennon claims Ayn Rand as a major influence on her thinking, which explains her insistence that from the moment she started cranking up the volume, she’s never compromised. Despite the decision to tone down the slickness in her recent recording sessions, Lennon says she’s “happy as hell” with the sound of the first record. She has said in the past that she’s been in search of the almost scary power that an artist like Trent Reznor can summon, and she wasn’t getting there by trying to be a bleeding heart earth child.
And yet, even before her cultivated edginess, Lennon sang songs full of frank sexual imagery. “Those are the fun things,” she laughs. “My mom encouraged that shit. There’s nothing more sellable than shock value, and nothing funner for a performer.”
All of which means that—“sellable” comment aside—critics of Lennon (myself included) who accused her of being manufactured and packaged by Arista were off the mark. Lennon’s clearly not unaware of the marketing power of provocation, but her sound and her approach are her own. Even if she hasn’t yet gotten where she wants (or needs) to go musically, her intentions appear to be honorable. Lennon’s next record will be key, proving whether her talents really lie in soul-shredding hard rock, or whether she’s wandered into a blind alley and has gotten by so far because people in power are taken with her look and personality and think they can sell at least something about her, even if they can’t pinpoint what it is.
If her next label—and there will be a next label—is looking for a hook, they should look to her fans, who respond to Lennon’s refreshing honesty, her approachability and her angst-y overtones. They might not want to look to the artist herself, as Lennon, barely out of her teens and a performer nearly all her life, doesn’t always seem to know whether it’s just attention she craves or attention for doing something substantial.
She told Alternative Press magazine that she’s baffled by “people who watch TRL and buy...Limp Bizkit, Korn, Backstreet Boys, Kid Rock, ♦NSync and Britney.” And yet Lennon is friendly with Kurt Loder, who shills for a network that blurs those genre distinctions, making all music into pop. Lennon also calls her own taste and grasp of rock history into question when she admits to not liking the diverse, seemingly pertinent music of her namesake, John Lennon. (Not even Plastic Ono Band, which practically established the framework for the bruising rock confessional?)
Asked if she has some final statement she wants to make, Lennon pauses for some time, then says, “I don’t know what I gotta say. I never really knew what I wanted to say. I’ll say this: I think people need to take the music from a different perspective. You know how it is when you hear a song that reminds you of something important in your life? I think music needs to make a statement again. A lot of people bitch about it but no one does anything. That’s the biggest detriment in modern rock. People write stuff that has no meaning.”
Is that what she’s trying to do? To bring meaning? Lennon deflects the question, and in her voice is a mixture of humility, unease and the full measure of her youth and inexperience. “I’m not really trying to do anything,” she whispers.
