Storm Large: Like Sinatra, an American Original


The singer-songwriter-memoirist-performer-author-rocker Storm Large is a sort of gaudy cruise ship that has sailed exotic, dangerous and, naturally, stormy musical (and probably personal) waters for a number of years. Large — her given name is Susan Storm Large — is a star to anybody who’s encountered her, and a legend in places like San Francisco and Portland,
Oregon, where she lives and performs.

But Storm Large and Frank Sinatra? The combination hardly seems likely for someone who quite successfully fronted a rockish-punkish-and-beyond band called The Balls (as well as other bands including “Storm and Her Dirty Mouth”), who was a contestant on “Rock Star Supernova,” who blogs on her website in blunt and honest terms and has written and performed her harrowing, affecting memoir “Crazy Enough.” She is an American original.

But then, so was Sinatra. Large will be part of “Let’s Be Frank: The Songs of Frank Sinatra,” organized by NSO Pops director Steve Reineke. The tribute will feature Reineke and piano man Tony DeSare conducting — and what Reineke terms his own “rat pack” of swell singers, including Ryan Silverman and Frankie Moreno, in addition to Large. The show will be presented in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall June 5 and 6 at 8 p.m.

“I always liked the whole idea of the Rat Pack and Frank Sinatra, all those kinds of very cool atmospherics,” Large said in a telephone interview. “I have an enormous amount of respect for him as a singer. I think he was the kind of guy who was always prepared. He trusted the lyrics, he made sure that he got the emotional truth of the songs. That way, his approach was blue-collar, which is where he came from.”

It’s not the first time Large has been at the Kennedy Center, a huge venue when compared to places like the popular Joe’s Pub in New York and clubs in Portland and San Francisco. She was here in 2012 with the eclectic pop group Pink Martini and the NSO Pops, performing to sold-out audiences.

“She was remarkable on that occasion, and she’s a remarkably talented singer,” Reineke said of Large. “Back then, she had to appear, on very short notice, for the group’s lead singer China Forbes who was ill.”

“She’s a fantastically gifted singer, and she’s grown so much—from rock to jazz to cabaret,” Reineke added. “She’s brave and tough and very sweet.”

She’ll be singing duets, songs like “Come Rain or Come Shine,” as well as solo numbers, notably “My Way” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”

“I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” by Cole Porter song is about obsessive love. “I don’t do it like most people. It’s usually upbeat, confident, buoyant. Mine is a little different — it’s more like you have this big love that you can’t get rid of. It’s like you can’t stop thinking about it. It’s like a woman who sits in her car in the rain watching her lover. She’s a little like a stalker.”

“I’ve Got You Under My Skin” is also part of “Le Bonheur,” a remarkable album which she produced last year with Robert Taylor and musicians James Beaton, Scott Weddle, Greg Eklund and Matt Brown. It’s almost a natural flow from her rocker days to Pink Martini to this album, which astonishes with its selection of songs, from Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart tunes to “Unchained Melody,” a longing song which the Righteous Brothers turned into a megahit, “Saving All My Love for You” by the iconoclastic Tom Waits and the charming, puffy-go-lightly “Satellite of Love” by Lou Reed.

There are also two songs written by Large herself, “Stand Up For Me,” a straight-up inspirational anthem, and the moving “A Woman’s Heart,” somewhere between a love song and a rueful lament.

Songwriting is yet another aspect of this queen of creative multitasking. She’s a great storyteller, intelligent and cogent in her opinions, awfully funny and often profane.

Large comes from Southborough, Massachusetts, attended a famous private school, where her father Henry was a history teacher and football coach, and went to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. “I think sometimes my parents weren’t sure when I went out the door where I was going — to school or running away with the circus.”

You can track her career and persona erratically on the Internet. On YouTube, watch her in a club in Mill Valley doing not just the song but the lead-up to “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” a 1983 super-hit which shows off Large’s playful, rocker side, as she tells the story of a song written on a napkin. She’s a natural-born clown; she loves making faces. And she’s hard to ignore as a presence, a dazzling, six-foot, hard-striding blond woman whose voice is as big as her shadow.

“I think you grow up a little as you go along, the things you can do, what you want to explore,” she said. “You go deeper into the music. You live your life more. I’m 46 now. You can’t do 300 shows a year all of the time.”

Listening to her talk, reading hair-raising parts of her memoir, seeing her on YouTube and listening to that voice, you get how she relates to and is at home in the deepest part of Frank Sinatra’s songs.

Her voice — like her walk and talk — is rangy, and in its push to put emotional truth out there is marked by her persona, her experience of the sex, drugs and rock-and-roll life, as well as the highs and lows of vocalizing. Her voice really gets up there, but it’s hard to say whether it can break a wine glass. For sure, when Susan Storm Large sings, she can break your heart.

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