Sheryl Crow discussed her incredible career in a tell-all interview with “The Howard Stern Show”.
The singer, who has been promoting “Sheryl”, her career-spanning rock documentary, spoke about joining the Rolling Stones onstage around the time of the release of her first album Tuesday Night Music Club in 1993.
She said of first moving to Los Angeles: “I was just an outsider, and it was the Stones who kind of plucked me out of [that] and said, ‘Hey, welcome to our scene.’ That was the scene I kind of always wanted to be in anyway. It always felt like I was born too late.”
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Crow recalled being a nervous wreck ahead of her first performance with them onstage.
“I vomited all day. I was so terrified,” she told Stern. “Right before I went out, [their saxophonist] Bobby Keys … handed me a bottle of tequila and said, ‘Here’s a little courage,’ and kind of shuffled me out.”
“I can remember exactly what I was thinking when I was like six inches from Mick [Jagger’s] face,” Crow added. “‘Oh, this is the guy whose zipper … I unzipped on that record [Sticky Fingers].”
She said of Jagger, “I texted him recently and asked him if he would play harp on [a cover of the Rolling Stones song] ‘Live With Me’. As I was texting him, I was just thinking, I can’t even believe I have his phone number.”
Crow also spoke about being a backup vocalist on Michael Jackson’s “Bad” tour and enduring unwanted sexual advances from Jackson’s manager Frank DiLeo.
“I was pretty disappointed,” she said. “You work hard, you’re a nice person, put one foot in front of the other … I thought good things would happen.”
Crow shared, “There’s a whole backstory to that with having his manager take that notoriety that I was accruing and trying to architect some pop career around me and I didn’t want to be a pop star.
“And then the sexual harassment was involved in all of that and then the threat of ‘You’re never going to work’ and my going home and putting bands together and playing my music and having everybody in the industry say, ‘Well, we don’t know what to do with the blue-eyed soul singer’ … I got a ton of excuses and I just felt like it was all tied together.”
Plus, Crow discussed her night with Jackson and Bubbles the Chimp, why she’s glad she never got married the three times she was engaged, whom she wrote “My Favorite Mistake” about, and more.
