Sheryl Crow received a "crash course in the music industry" when she was sexually harassed by Michael Jackson's manager.
Sheryl Crow
The 'All I Wanna Do' hitmaker joined the late 'Thriller' singer on tour when she was just 25 but recalled how the "incredible" experience was tainted due to the unwanted advances of Frank DiLeo - who died in 2011 - and threats he made to ruin her career if she didn't give in to him.
Speaking about the 1987 tour, Sheryl said: "It was incredible in every way, shape, and form for a young person from a really small town to see the world and to work with arguably the greatest pop star. But I also got a crash course in the music industry."
After the tour ended in 1989, Sheryl, now 59, fell into depression, particularly after the lawyer she'd hired told her she should have submitted to Frank's advances because of what he could have done for her career.
She told the Independent newspaper: “You move to LA thinking you’ve done all your homework. You’ve practised your whole life, you’ve listened to the greatest artists, you’ve played in coffee bars, and then you get out there and you learn: ‘OK, this is how the music industry works: a corporation buys so many records. It puts you in the top 10. We take your publishing.’ It was disillusioning.
"I think when your dream bubble is burst you either go: ‘OK, well, I’m going to forget that dream,’ or you do what I did, which was wallow in it for about a year, and then you pull your bootstraps up and you get back to work.”
The 'If It Makes You Happy' singer spoke about the harassment for the first time in her audiobook memoir 'Words + Music' last year and though it made her "uncomfortable" to address the topic, it was also an "empowering" experience.
She said: "It was the first time I’ve ever talked about it and it felt really uncomfortable, but it felt, to me, so much more empowering to be able to talk about it and then play the music that was inspired by it. Isn’t that what music is really for? To help us work through whatever our experiences are, and hopefully for the collective to find their own situations in your music too?”
In her 1993 song 'The Na-Na Song', Sheryl sang, "Frank DiLeo's dong / Maybe if I'd him I'd have had a hit song."
And Sheryl is looking forward to further confronting the harassment she was subjected to in her music.
She said: "To be able to play that stuff about the long bout of sexual harassment I endured during the Michael Jackson tour and to talk about it in the midst of the MeToo movement, it feels like we've come a long way, but it doesn't feel like we're quite there yet."
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