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At the lowest moments of Phoebe Legere’s life, she could always be found on a beach, somewhere on the East End.
There, the ocean soothed her. The clouds comforted her. The animals kept her company. And nature as a whole, in all its majesty, put her feelings into perspective. It made her sadness feel small—insignificant, even—and that reassured her.
Even her first visit, when she was 16 years old, was an escape from reality.
“I’ll never forget that trip on the Jitney. It was the first time I experienced the ‘Hamptons high,’” she said during a recent interview. “That’s the feeling you get when you’ve been in the city too long and you are stressed, depressed and out of your mind. Then, the minute you get to the Hamptons and you smell the air, you suddenly feel, ‘Oh my God, I’m so happy! Let’s go swimming!’”
Larry Rivers picked her up from the bus station in Southampton. The artist was her friend and mentor, and he had offered to help the budding musician record a demo tape to bring her one step closer to landing a recording contract.
“I have a piano, come to my house and we will record,” Mr. Rivers said to a young Phoebe, she recalled.
It was her first day on the East End, and by the end of it, she had made a tape in Mr. Rivers’s painting studio on Little Plains Road.
“We recorded two of my original songs, ‘Dance of Death’ and ‘Trust Me,’” Ms. Legere said. “All around me on the wall, I could see Larry’s beautiful paintings. Larry improvised on tenor sax while I played piano and sang.”
Ms. Legere has since come a long way. First and foremost, she is a songwriter, but has added quite a few more talents to the list: artist, actor, filmmaker and a well-rounded musician who composes, arranges and plays accordion, guitar, cello, Native American flute and synthesizer, as well as piano.
But nothing compares to playing in a great live band—“It’s like old-time religion,” she said—and she will make her return to the stage with her signature Cajun-contemporary sound after a decade-long hiatus with a “Locals Only” show on Saturday, May 14, at 8 p.m. at the Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett.
“Music is at its very best when you gather a great group of people together in the room and everybody is smiling and clapping and singing along. That is magic joy,” she said. “We are lonely, isolated, alienated individuals living in the prison of our cars, our homes and our computers. It is hell being apart.
“Ecstasy is when we can forget ourselves and feel like we are part of something greater. When we gather to hear good music, we become one. We can forget the hell of the individual ego,” she continued. “The ego can never be satisfied. It is only when you abandon yourself to the greater cosmic rhythm that you can find true happiness.”
A product of New England, Ms. Legere has always marched to her own beat. She was a tomboy—“In fact, I thought I was a boy,” she said—who would climb to the top of the tallest pine tree in the neighborhood and belt out a Tarzan cry to let her friends know it was time to play.
She wanted to have fun, run through the woods and laugh all the time, but from an early age she understood life and its difficulties and learned how to pitch in.
“Mummy was bone tired by the time she got home from her job. I did the cooking. I love to cook,” she said. “Bless Mummy’s heart. I lost her two years ago. I took care of her for the last 10 years. That is why I didn’t tour during that time. I have a song called ‘Mama’ about Mummy. She was the most beautiful woman in the world.”
But it was without her parents’ consent that she began playing piano. She was 3 years old, and she could finally reach the keys.
“I was lucky because Mrs. Clark, a piano teacher, lived across the street,” she said. “As soon as I learned how to walk, like the next day, I crossed the street and knocked on the door. I stood there crying and begging her to let me in. I could hear her playing the piano. I caught hell from my nanny the first time I did that. I was wearing diapers.”
By age 5, she had completed her first oil painting.
“Daddy was a painter. He used to paint in his studio in the basement,” she said. “Daddy listened to jazz while he painted—Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, [Antônio Carlos] Jobim. He liked the folk singers, too—Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell. It was so beautiful: the colors, the energy trails left by his brush, the voices, the lyrics, the arrangements.
“I had my little child’s record player, too,” she continued. “I would play ‘Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’ over and over and over, and paint on my little child’s easel while I listened.”
A year later, she wrote her first song, “Grasshopper Willie.”
“My mother said, ‘Where did you get that song?’” she recalled. “I said, ‘A grasshopper gave it to me.’”
“This is where my art comes from—from the heart of the nature. My skill comes from practicing many, many, many hours. My inspiration comes from the amazing human beings who cross my path every day … [And] love. Pure and simple. Music is made of love.”
Early in her career, Ms. Legere would learn this was not enough for the mainstream music industry, most notably after she wrote “Marilyn Monroe,” a song that came to her in a dream about a romance with the platinum goddess.
“I presented the song to Nat Weiss, the head of my record label,” she said. “He said, and I quote, ‘You will never have a hit with a song about kissing a girl.’
“I said, ‘But Nat, I had a vision and in this vision I become known to a wider audience singing my song ‘Marilyn Monroe.’ Nat hated women. Long ago, 1986, people did not realize that women are equal to men. Women can make money, be world leaders and even write, produce music and play instruments. Duh.
“After that conversation with Nat and all the harassment at Epic, I realized that the devil had taken over the music business, and the devil wanted what he always wants: my soul. I don’t roll that way, so I left.”
She left for the Hamptons and found herself at Bobby Van’s Steakhouse in Bridgehampton—broke, desperate and hungry. She hadn’t eaten in days. They needed a piano player. And just like that, her life turned around.
“I said, ‘I will play if you make me a sandwich,’” she reminisced. “As I began to get famous the old-fashioned way—not with 60 million dollars of radio promotion, but from grassroots word of mouth—you might think Epic Records would say, ‘Phoebe, we were wrong, you were right.’
“And as my song ‘Marilyn,’ which I recorded in my bedroom, on a TEAC tape cassette, broke out of college radio and became the anthem of a generation, you would think somebody would say, ‘Phoebe, you were right. Come back and make the albums you were born to make.’”
That day never came, but it never stopped her from writing and recording. Her hits have traversed the globe and appeared on the silver screen, and she is in the planning stages of a new double album in both French and English. Her next world tour will kick off in 2017, and she is working on two commissions for a pair of plays.
And whenever she needs the East End, it will be waiting.
Phoebe Legere will play a concert on Saturday, May 14, at 8 p.m. at the Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett. Tickets are $20 and available for ages 21 and up. Call (631) 267-3117, or visit stephentalkhouse.com.
on May 9, 2016