CHRIS: Right.

LAURA LOVE: And then he got it together.

CHRIS: So he set that up?

LAURA LOVE: Yeah. That was his show, the Carnegie Hall show.

CHRIS: Dan Storper put together the Carnegie Hall concert?

LAURA LOVE: Yeah.

CHRIS: And that was sort of your showcase, wasn't it?

LAURA LOVE: It turned out to be the biggest night of my life, you know.

CHRIS: Because it was a turning point?

LAURA LOVE: Yeah.

CHRIS: A lot of people saw you...

LAURA LOVE: Yeah. I had never been to New York City. David Wilkes, Danny Goldberg, all the Mercury people saw me, and from then everything's been different. Overnight everything just changed for me, you know, in this huge way.

CHRIS: You had never performed in New York at all?

LAURA LOVE: I'd never been to New York. I was scared to death to even come here, and I was so intimidated. I just kept thinking, they're going to know I'm from Nebraska and they're going to say, "You're from Nebraska, get out." But, no, everything was cool. It was nice. I was scared. I was scared of the room itself, the hall, you know.

CHRIS: Lincoln, Nebraska, that's where you grew up then?

LAURA LOVE: Yeah, I did. I grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska. For a little while we lived in Omaha. In 1969 we lived in Omaha, and it was right after the riots, after Martin Luther King got shot. And so the whole place was just burned to a crisp. I mean, there were riots in every major city. I don't know, people would argue that Omaha wasn't a major city--

CHRIS: I was going to say, you don't really think of Omaha as the center of--

LAURA LOVE: Yeah. But it's a big city. It was one of the few old Midwest big cities. I mean, from cattle days. But yeah, they were just-- they were angry. It was like you could just feel the tension. I mean, any second, any kind of a confrontation between someone black and someone white could erupt. It could erupt into something huge. And it did. I mean, people would just burn down blocks. You know? And then, they'd have to go live back there, 'cause there was no place else to go.

CHRIS: Yeah.

LAURA LOVE: So it would be, like, yeah, we burned our house down, we burned our store down, and we're open for business and we still live there. You know?

CHRIS: Yeah. That's generally how it happens. I mean, the anger implodes within the community and--

LAURA LOVE: Yeah. Yeah.

CHRIS: But your first performance, the way the story goes, was at a penitentiary? At Nebraska State Penitentiary?

LAURA LOVE: Yeah. Nebraska State Penitentiary. [LAUGHS]

CHRIS: How does that happen?

LAURA LOVE: Well, it was kind of weird.

CHRIS: A 16-year-old performing at the penitentiary.

LAURA LOVE: I was 16. Yeah.

CHRIS: And you weren't incarcerated?

LAURA LOVE: No, no.

CHRIS: Okay.

LAURA LOVE: Not yet. [LAUGHS]

CHRIS: Not yet.

LAURA LOVE: That was much later. [LAUGHTER] I was tabula rasa then. I had no record. This guitar player came to my high school and said he had a grant to do some gigs in the prisons and he was looking for a singer. And he didn't have much of a grant, 'cause he wanted to hire somebody for cheap. And my glee teacher said, Oh, Laura over there, she'll play.

CHRIS: Your glee teacher?

LAURA LOVE: Glee. They called it glee.

CHRIS: Oh, is that like singing club?

LAURA LOVE: It's like chorus. They called it glee, girls glee. We'd sing these really sad songs, you know. But so yeah, so I did that gig in the Nebraska State Penitentiary. I got 50 bucks for it and I was, like, music is it, man.

CHRIS: You were a pro.

LAURA LOVE: I was a pro. I could work a month, you know, at Burger Chef for that. [LAUGHS] Or I could work for, like, a couple of hours at the state pen for that. And leave when it was over.

CHRIS: You left home about that same year, didn't you?

LAURA LOVE: Yeah, I was living on my own.

CHRIS: But it had nothing to do with this?

LAURA LOVE: No. I mean, one of the reasons I was available to do the gig, I think, was 'cause I lived out on my own and my mom kept a tight house, you know, and I don't think she'd have let me out to even do that if I'd still been living in her house. But I had my own apartment. As a matter of fact, I went through high school, the last two years of high school, pretending like I had a mom and dad and that I was living at home. 'Cause I didn't want to go back to foster homes or orphanages like my sister and I had been in. So I started getting straight A's. I never was late because I didn't want them to say, well, Laura was late and so we'll have to call your mother and get a note from her. I didn't want to attract suspicion, so I became a model student, just because I didn't want them to know I was living on my own at 16.

CHRIS: Wow. That's one way to get kids to perform well.

LAURA LOVE: Yeah.

CHRIS: I don't think it always works that way.

LAURA LOVE: Yeah.

CHRIS: I get the impression that you had a very independent spirit as a kid.

LAURA LOVE: Yeah. I wanted to have a tight family and lots of brothers and sisters and just, you know, have the Waltons thing going on. But my mom had a lot of problems. She was in and out of mental institutions and she hung herself in front of me and my sister when I was six-and-a-half. My sister and I got on a chair and held her up to try to keep her from dying, you know. My mom just was going through this bad depression, you know. Her diagnosis was paranoid schizophrenic and manic depressive. She had it all, you know. So yeah, she hung herself and my sister and I got up on the chair and were trying to get her down, and then we screamed and the woman that lived upstairs was having an open house. She ran a little day care during the week. And we were screaming so loud that, you know, she came down to just tell us to shut up. And then, there was my mom hanging from the rope, a pipe, you know. And me and my sister screaming and hollering. And they came down and they cut her down the rest of the way, and we were just freaked out and everything.

CHRIS: Well, you make a very tender, appeal in your liner notes of your record, to your mother.

LAURA LOVE: Mmm.

CHRIS: You don't even know if she's still alive, or you don't know whether she is--

LAURA LOVE: [OVERLAPPING] No, I don't.

CHRIS: Have you had any kind of response from--

LAURA LOVE: I've had some people e-mail me and they'd give me lists of Winifred Mae Joneses, but none of them have been my mother yet.

CHRIS: You're actively looking for her?

LAURA LOVE: I'm looking for her, yeah. People have said, well, you know, I hear she lives in Denver, or she's living in Omaha. And I follow up on it. But then things happen sometimes. Like, one I called and the man had just lost his wife, Winifred Mae Jones. And it wasn't my mother. And he was so sweet. He started crying and telling me how much he missed her. It was so big for me that I decided not to cold call anybody again and just to write first. You know, 'cause it was so huge. I ended up feeling worse. So I try to write now first, you know. But I'd love to see her. I mean, she's just kind of disappeared since 1983. I haven't seen her. And I would love to know what became of her, and if she's alive I'd like to take care of her if I could, and help her out. 'Cause the thought of her being in an institution again where people wouldn't love her is hard on me. I'd like to know that she has love as well as physical care, you know.

CHRIS: You met your father when you were a teenager.

LAURA LOVE: When I was 16. That was a big year.

CHRIS: Sounds like a big year.

LAURA LOVE: Yeah. I moved out of the house, I met my father, and I got my first gig. My mother raised me with the story that he was dead.

CHRIS: Really?

LAURA LOVE: Yeah, that they'd been married and had this idyllic kind of life and that he had died in a car accident when I was a baby, and that's why I didn't have a father. That's what her story to me was. But she told me his real name, and she mixed a lot of fact and fantasy and kind of wove it into this story, and it sounded pretty plausible. And so, I grew up my whole life, you know, thinking I had this wonderful father who just died too young, but that he would've have been a great father had he been alive.

CHRIS: How did you run into him?

LAURA LOVE: Well, my boyfriend and I were looking for a movie to go to and there was a big article about a world-renowned jazz saxophonist returning to the Midwest, playing gig tonight at the Zoo Bar. [LAUGHS] I lived in a college town and the Zoo Bar is in Lincoln, Nebraska. It's a local college hang. And so, I talked my way into the bar. The legal drinking age then was 19 and I was 16, and I talked my way in there by saying, I want to come wait for my dad in the back room. [LAUGHS]

CHRIS: So you saw his name in the paper?

LAURA LOVE: Yeah, I saw his name in the paper, and I didn't even believe it until I saw him, that he was alive. I thought maybe the band kept his name. And so, I waited in the back room. And then, the place really filled up and then I came out to the bar, just kind of hid there and looked at him. And I was just amazed, 'cause his hands looked like mine, you know, and the way he carries himself, you know. And his form and the way he laughs and his teeth and his butt, and his legs, you know, he has big legs, a big butt like me. So, you know, I just went up to him on his break and I said, are you Preston Love? I can't believe I said that 'cause, of course, he was Preston Love. He'd been saying all night, I'm Preston Love. But I had to hear it from him to me. So he said, yeah. And I said, well, I think I'm your daughter. And he said, Wow! Are you Laura or Lisa? 'Cause my sister's name is Lisa. I said, well, I'm Laura. And he starts rattling off my birthday and my sister's birthday and my mother's birthday, just to let me know that he knew all the stuff. He was really sweet and nice, and I enjoyed talking with him. And then I came to find out I had brothers and sisters all over the country, and met a few of them. And you know, there's Portia Love and Richie Love and Preston Love, Jr. And I was like, oh, there's all these Loves.

CHRIS: Octoroon, it's the name of the album; it's also the name of your publishing company?

LAURA LOVE: Yeah. Before I signed with Mercury, I had my own label, called Octoroon Biography. An octoroon is probably what I would have been called in slave times. An octoroon is someone of one-eighth African ancestry. So the auctioneers, when they would be auctioning slaves, the price and the kind of work they did would depend on, you know, how black they were. And so, the lighter the slave, the lighter the duty they got. And so, I would have been called an octoroon. They just would have looked at me and thought, yeah, she's light enough. And my sister, we have the same mother and father, but she's quite a bit darker than I am, and so she would have been called a quadroon. And then you have maroon and--

CHRIS: So it's just on a visual thing?

LAURA LOVE: Visual assessment. It's a pretty crass way of doing business, you know what I mean?

CHRIS: Yeah. But you've put it on the name of the work that you do as an artist.

LAURA LOVE: Yeah. Well, it just blows my mind that slavery only ended 130-some years ago. I mean, it's like a heartbeat--

CHRIS: A wind.

LAURA LOVE: Yeah, it's a wink. It's just like a hiccup in time, you know. And the legacy is so huge. I mean, just me growing up a light-skinned black woman, where a lot of darker black women couldn't stand me. They'd be so mad at me. When I was in first, second and third grade, I went to an all-white school, Catholic school. My sister and I were the only blacks in the school. And they would just say nigger, nigger, nigger, every day. Every day they would remind us. They used to sing songs like "Daniel Boone was a man, and a brave man, but the bear was bigger, so he ran like a nigger up a tree." Every five seconds something would come along and it would just hit you. You know? And you would just not even get how they could say that. But often they didn't know that I was black, especially if I wasn't with my sister. And then my mother went through another breakdown and we moved to Omaha, Nebraska, in the ghetto, an all black neighborhood. And then I got my butt kicked every day by black kids 'cause I was too white. So I was going from too black to too white. And we were really poor. We were so poor, we were poorer than the kids in the ghetto. And I just remember stuff like, "You ain't got no Easter clothes," [LAUGHING] Stuff like that. 'Cause no matter how poor you were, you had to have some kind of Easter clothes.

CHRIS: Yeah.

LAURA LOVE: It felt like it was really bad and hard then, but now I just feel like, man, if you look back on it, I still lived better than probably 99 percent of the planet over all time. I mean, God, at least I wasn't born an indentured servant in the sixth century or something. You can see people walking down the street that are worse off than I've ever been and you know, it just doesn't do. It doesn't do. [LAUGHS]

CHRIS: Your love of music. I mean, it spans from Sly Stone through folk music, all styles of music.

LAURA LOVE: Yeah.

CHRIS: Tonight you're doing a Kurt Cobain song.

LAURA LOVE: Yeah.

CHRIS: Why that particular song?

LAURA LOVE: Well, you know, we all live in Seattle. I was in a grunge band when all that grunge stuff was happening and, you know, Nirvana was playing down the street and in all these little dives that I was playing in, and you could go see them all night for a couple of bucks. And there'd be more people on stage than in the audience and I was thinking "Ah, I don't need to see that crap." I just dismissed it. And then when he died, when I heard that he died, it just hit me. I'm not ever going to have a chance to go down the street and see him, and maybe I should check this out before I completely close my mind. So I did and I heard MTV Unplugged and I listened to Nevermind, and I just became a huge supporter of him and his music, and I just fell in love with him posthumously. I should have been listening all along. You know, it's like when I hear people say, I hate rap. It's like what do you mean you hate rap? There's good rap and there's rap.

CHRIS: Yeah. There's great music of all styles.

LAURA LOVE: You've got to listen to the message, you know.

CHRIS: Yeah.

LAURA LOVE: So. But the band that I'm working with is really great. You know, I love all of them, and we're like a family and been together for some time. Rod and I have been playing together about seven years. And Julie and Chris have been with us just over three years now, and so they help to create the sound that we have, too.

CHRIS: The various backgrounds...

LAURA LOVE: Yeah. I see this happen sometimes, where I see the lead singer get to the gig and never really see the band, or pick up different players wherever they go. And for me, a lot of the joy of touring is touring with people that you love, and that you care about and that you have fun with on the road. With us, we just act stupid all the time, you know, and [LAUGHING] that keeps us happy, you know. We just make up games like little kids on a big road trip or something. We think of things like names of children that we'll never have: like Trivia and Latrina and Acetaminophen. [LAUGHTER] You know.

CHRIS: Why do you play the bass? When did you pick that up?

LAURA LOVE: [LAUGHING] It seemed easy, man. Four strings.

CHRIS: I guess so. Four strings.

LAURA LOVE: [LAUGHING] Four fat strings and far apart.

CHRIS: [LAUGHING]

LAURA LOVE: Shit, man, if you can't play the bass, you can't live in the world. [LAUGHS]

CHRIS: This was the path of least resistance, the bass?

LAURA LOVE: What could I play without having to take no lessons. [LAUGHTER] Something easy, man. Something where you can't really even hear the note. In case it's wrong.

CHRIS: That's right. The one instrument that you can just phase out by turning down a little knob on your radio.

LAURA LOVE: Yeah! Oh yeah!

CHRIS: Can totally eliminate the whole instrument.

LAURA LOVE: Oh, for real. Like the piano or something like that, you've got to play it. [LAUGHING] Bass, doesn't matter.

CHRIS: Do you write on the bass?

LAURA LOVE: Yeah. I just like all those funk bands, you know. I like Sly and the Family Stone.

CHRIS: Absolutely.

LAURA LOVE: I like them a lot. I mean, God, you know. I remember just hearing that for the first time and thinking, that ain't a bass, what is that?

'Cause it was a whole different thing when you started hearing that poppy thing, you know.

CHRIS: Yeah, the slap back.

LAURA LOVE: Yeah.

CHRIS: On that note.

LAURA LOVE: On that note.

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