Is This Her Farewell Tour?

Story: Eirik Knutzen  
Photography: Michael Lavine and Frank Micelotta

Reinventing herself at twice the speed of sound, Cher repeatedly hit gold or platinum jackpots, including the album Cher (’87), Heart of Stone (’89), Love Hurts (’91), Grammy Award-winner Believe (’98), and Living Proof (’02). Her acting career received a huge boost when she appeared in the Broadway and film versions of “Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean” (’82), earned a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination for “Silkwood” (’83) and did respectable box office with Jack Nicholson in “The Witches of Eastwick” (’87). “Moonstruck” (’88) with Nicolas Cage earned her a Best Actress Academy Award and she made another strong statement as the director of the HBO dramatic film “If These Walls Could Talk” (’96); her HBO special as a performer, “Cher: Live In Concert” (’00) garnered three Emmy Award nominations.

The list of credits seems to go on indefinitely. The impish artist jokingly admits that about the only thing she can’t make work is marriage, but she has had “a wonderful time with all the wrong guys” while waiting for the right man to come along—including ace record producer David Geffen, Kiss band singer Gene Simmons and actor Val Kilmer. Happy and confident, she plans to keep on ticking—alone if necessary.

Okay, how many farewell tours will there be after “Living Proof”?
I’m not going to tour again because I think there’s a time when you should stop doing certain things, and I think this is the time for me to stop doing this thing. Sometimes when people quit something that they were great at, they come back not so great. I still can do it well, so I want to quit while I’m ahead.

In live concerts, what are you trying to give your audience?
I just want to give ’em two hours of not having to think about anything that they normally have to think about and just taking them out of themselves and just making it be pure enjoyment, because enjoyment is hard to come by, you know. It’s about being taken out of yourself and not having to think about anything, your daily problems or anything that’s bothering you and I think that’s the thing that I do best.

Do you prefer to work with a small television studio audience or an enormous live audience?
I like big audiences—the bigger, the better. In a huge room like the MGM Grand Garden Arena, the people provide a certain energy. And I can probably see the faces of a thousand people from the stage. We connect. The larger their energy, the better my performance—and the more I get back.

What do you feel is your own greatest contribution to the whole music industry?
Gosh, it’s just music. I don’t think about it as any huge legacy. I think it’s tough enough to just stay in the business this long. Music is just supposed to make people feel something and that’s what I’ve done.

Do you have a master plan for the future?
No and I never did. Things come to you then it’s just a matter of making a decision. But I’m never sure what I want to do next.

Are you ever surprised at how far you’ve come to reach this level in the entertainment business?
You don’t really think about it until you see a retrospective, like in my show there’s lots of retrospective film and video, but I’m usually busy on stage and don’t really see it. But because I have a TV monitor in my dressing room to make sure that I’m on stage on time, every once in awhile I will look over and think, “Oh yeah, that was 30 years ago.”

What is the worst nightmare you ever had on the road?
There was one night in Detroit three years ago where nothing went well … my wig fell off while I was dancing and I walked upstage and almost knocked myself out when I ran into a piece of equipment. It was a total mess. I was no good and it was just horrible. That’s when you just stop the show, have a moment with the audience, then just pick it up and go from there. Like during the tour in Sacramento recently, I dropped the microphone. It bothered me for about a second, but I just kept going. Something like that happens once out of 100 shows.

Are you keeping fit away from home?
You know what, at the end of the tour everything kind of goes to pot. But for the majority of the tour, it’s doing yoga to keep limber on one day and weight training on another day just to keep up my strength. Because you’re doing aerobics every night on stage running around for two hours, you maintain pretty well. So that’s it for the majority of the tour, but now I’m pretty much tired out … all I can do is do the show.