Ravinia 2019, Issue 2, Week 4

L B L ike millions of others listening to the radio in the mid-’60s, Melissa Etheridge remembers when she first heard The Beatles. But she wasn’t a lovestruck adolescent dreaming about dating John, Paul, George, or Ringo; she was a tod- dler experiencing an epiphany. Unsurprisingly, it’s not just one of her earliest memories of music, but one of her earliest memories, period. “I was about 3 years old, and I remember standing in the driveway of my friend’s house,” recalls the rock star, who plays Ravinia Sunday, June 23, on tour with her new release, The Medicine Show . “I was holding a transistor radio and hearing angels’ voices coming out of it, singing ‘I want to hold your haaannd!’ you know? I have a distinct memory of going, ‘What’s this gorgeous sound?’ ” (The timeline tracks: Etheridge was born in May 1961; “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” which kicked off the so-called British Invasion, began a long reign atop the US charts in February 1964.) The youngest of two children born to a Leavenworth, KS, couple, Etheridge grew up surrounded by “a lot of really great music.” For one thing, “My older sister had all The Beatles’ records,” she says. Meanwhile, her parents’ album col- lection complemented the new pop-rock that began ruling the airwaves. The next step in fulfilling her fate came around age 8, when she first picked up an instrument. “My father brought home a guitar for my sister, and they said I wouldn’t be able to play it,” Etheridge recounts. “I begged and pleaded, and my fingers bled, but I did play it. So it was guitar first. Then I wanted to learn drums, but they said girls couldn’t play drums, so I had to learn the clarinet. And it went from there.” The prodigy, now 58 years old, says she only plays a few well: “I play saxophone, but I’m never going to put that in front of anybody. The guitar, the piano, the harmonica, the drums—those are the ones I’ll play in front of people.” Her musical growth came more through determination and hard work than through formal education. She played with a few bands as a teenager; after finishing high school, she then moved to Boston to study at Berklee College of Music, but only briefly: “The rest has just been life!” Just as she would later promise in one of her biggest songs, she has indeed ridden destiny’s trail—all the way into two marriages, four children, and strong public advocacy for LGBT people and for cancer survivors. Professionally, she blazed her way into earning multiple platinum albums, two Grammys, an Oscar, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and international success. And all in a field that, in the 1980s, wasn’t exact- ly welcoming to women as headlining rock ’n’ rollers. B y the metrics of exposure and sales, Etheridge has al- ways seemed blessed. She hit it big from the start. Her first, self-titled release spawned the hits “Like the Way I Do” and “Bring Me Some Water,” which earned her first Grammy Award nomination in 1988. She notched two more noms in ’89 and ’90 before winning her first Grammy in 1992. But of course, the real dividends came from doing what came naturally to her: matching the grind of the road with the high of thrilling an audience. Concert by concert, she built a dedicated fan base like few women in rock have done. “Chicago was always there from the very beginning,” Etheridge says. “One of the reasons I have such a great following in Chicago is because I had great radio support from XRT and, eventually, from The Loop. They’ve played all those songs from the beginning.” [WXRT continues to be a strong supporter, and will be broadcasting live from Ravinia on the night of the concert.] Within the span of two years, she went from booking the Park West—where hundreds could thrill to extended jam versions of “Brave and By Web Behrens Melissa Etheridge makes her life a lyric for the public ethic JUNE 17 – JUNE 30, 2019 | RAVINIA MAGAZINE 11