Tuesday Night Smash — Part IV: Leaving Las Vegas | The fallout after Sheryl Crow’s debut Tuesday Night Music Club and how it shaped her next album.
Post recording the album, the collective would separate from Crow as tensions rose to a boiling point between them and her. One of the beginnings to this was her choice to choose a different touring band from that of the group of songwriters that she had collaborated with on the album. This snippet from SFGate shows how the group of songwriters felt about this decision:
After nearly a year of working together, all for one and one for all, the Tuesday Night musicians were shocked to learn they didn’t figure into any more of Crow’s plans. Bottrell got the news when he met her to hand over the finished master in a Sunset Strip coffee shop. Although there had been much talk of hitting the road together to promote the record — bassist Dan Schwartz even bought a new bass for the tour — “she essentially told me to get lost,” Bottrell said.
This gets further muddied by another source stating that Crow was trying to save money by using a smaller touring band. Bill Bottrell would also go on tour with Crow during the promotion of the record. At the same point in time, her relationship with then boyfriend Kevin Gilbert was dissolving quickly. Another confusing bit of information comes from the same source as the one above.
The members did play one guest appearance with Crow at an out-of-town club, but the record company made it clear they would not be included in the more prestigious Hollywood show.
This only adds another layer complex issues that seem to be out of Sheryl’s hands. Seeing that she was already half a million dollars in debt to A&M for her first outing of recording a debut, I could see where that could play a bigger role in her decision making. The above “Leaving Las Vegas” controversy would be the nail in the coffin for almost everyone involved in the collective. It appears that David Baerwald burned bridges with some major labels for his antics at Polygram. He told the Austin Chronicle this about his meltdown:
“I declared war with Polygram. I had the worst breakup with them of any I have ever heard of. I personally insulted a bunch of the people that worked there. They wanted me to be Sheryl Crow’s slave and I didn’t want to do that.”
This seems to have blacklisted him for a bit in the industry. Crow and Bottrell would continue to work together on her follow up to Music Club in spite of their strained relationship. Some of the tracks would be released on her 2009 deluxe edition of the record: “Coffee Shop”, “Killer Life”, and “Essential Trip of Hereness”. They also co-wrote several tracks that did make it onto her sophomore release: “Hard to Make a Stand”, “Maybe Angels”, and “Oh Marie”. The unreleased tracks sound much more like the what came off of her debut. In the end, Bill would drop Sheryl and she would go on to produce her 2nd album herself. Bottrell notes the experience in her 1996 Rolling Stone piece:
“‘It’s amazing we were still trying to work,’ he says, ‘but we both said to each other, ‘We write the best songs with each other.’ I said to her, ‘Look, we’re really not getting along, you and me, but I like the songs a lot.’…They decamped to New Orleans, where the seams in their relationship took just 24 hours to rip open. ‘The second day,’ says Bottrell, ‘we had a fight out on the side street with great hollering going on. It was a fabulous scene. Then I left.’”
Even some of his words around her their past partnership seem caustic through Bill’s interview segments:
“‘I now know,’ says Bottrell, ‘why Padgham [Hugh Padgham who originally produced her shelved debut in 1992], the most successful producer of the ’80s, missed the main point of this chick whom he was working with.’ And? ‘Well, she’s fucking hopeless. She’s obnoxious. I mean, she was probably needling him to death, you know, nagging him to death.’
In 1996, Crow’s ex Kevin Gilbert would be found dead due to autoerotic auxphiation. She would attend the funeral to pay her respects, but even this seems to be an extremely abrasive experience for her and the Music Club team as seen from this exhert from SFGate:
On an afternoon this summer, several hundred of Gilbert’s friends and associates gathered for a memorial service at the Bottrells’ Glendale home. Wilson, dressed in white, sat next to MacLeod as Crow walked up to say hello. “I barked at her,” Wilson recalled. Wilson knew the titles of the album’s songs well enough. “Run, baby, run,” she yelped at Crow, who fled in tears.
She would pen an ode to his loss that would show up as the country tinged b-side “Sad Sad World”. During her tour for her debut album, she would begin playing some of the tracks that would go on to appear on her follow up album, the eponymous Sheryl Crow. The tracks “Hard to Make a Stand” and “Love is a Good Thing” were both played during some of her live shows. The latter I find to be much better than the more subdued funky version on the album (see video below of Sheryl performing this on MTV’s unplugged).
Some other tracks would also be played that would not see an official release such as “Rodeo” and “I Feel Happy !” as well as “Coffee Shop”. Sheryl’s follow up album would be a huge success. It would go 3x platinum, become a Billboard top 10 smash, and garner her 2 Grammy awards. Crow would go it on her own producing and co-writing her smash follow up to huge success. The album would put two more Grammys under her belt and cement her as a household name in Alternative and Adult Contemporary music. She would also under go a persona change. Gone was the sweet, country girl on the cover of Tuesday Night Music Club, and in was a sultry ,angst ridden woman ready to rip the world a new one.
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