January 16, 2005

A Star Isn't Born

N a Monday evening not long ago, dozens of hopeful young performers, guitars in hand, streamed into the Sidewalk Cafe in the East Village for the club's weekly open-mike night, the Antihoot. Among them was a 34-year-old singer-songwriter named Ruth Gerson, a striking, dark-haired woman with a rock-and-roll belter's voice.

Ms. Gerson performed a bluesy number called "Evil Sex Queen," a scathing and darkly humorous swipe at the sexist way women are portrayed in music videos, and her throaty, growling voice reminded some listeners of such rock heavyweights as Chrissie Hynde and Sheryl Crow.

Compared with the dozen other singers performing that night, Ms. Gerson seemed almost too powerful, too commanding, for the tiny, makeshift stage at the Antihoot. And in a very real sense, she was.

This, after all, was someone who, within months of graduating from Princeton in 1992, had attracted the attention of major record company scouts, a string of admiring critics and even Bob Dylan, who asked her to perform for him privately.

When she sang at the Newport Folk Festival in 1994, the critic for The Boston Globe singled out "the stunning social commentary of newcomer Ruth Gerson." That same year, reviewing a concert of hers at Cafe Sine, a New York Times critic noted that she was receiving "the sort of heady word of mouth that young performers dream of."

The city is filled with talented strivers, homegrown and transplanted; the fabled New York story tells of the ambitious, starry-eyed ingénue who yearns for the big time - and makes it. Far more rare is the tale of what happened to the performer for whom stardom seemed tantalizingly within reach, yet for complicated reasons, including personal choices, ended up on the sidelines.

Ruth Gerson is such a person. Despite her early success, she ended up forging a modest career fueled largely by her Web site. She has released five CD's on her own, and most of her appearances are at places like Arlene's Grocery, the same small clubs she started out in; her next performance, on Thursday, is at the Bowery Ballroom.

Ms. Gerson says she walked away from trying to make it at the major labels because she was disappointed by the music business and never found the dream manager or producer. She also admits that a traumatic childhood in a family plagued by alcoholism and drug addiction left her conflicted as to whether she deserved stardom.

"I've had some fear about fame and success," she said the other day, sipping a cappuccino at the Alt.Coffee bar near her East Village apartment. "And yes, they may stem from my childhood." Still, she pointed out: "I'm also happy with the choices I've made in life. Fame may be great. What I care about is making music."

A Soaked Pillow

As with many New York children raised in culture-rich households, Ruth Gerson grew up on the Upper West Side, in a five-room apartment on 86th Street near West End Avenue. The apartment, which is still home to her parents, looks much as it did when Ruth and her three older brothers were growing up there; it overflows with paintings and sculpture, some hung properly, but most jammed against the wall. The dining room is so crammed with art, it's hard to have a meal there.

Her mother, Cheryl, who is now a psychotherapist, used to be a professional violinist. Her father, Michael, an independent art dealer, regularly took his four children to museums. He worked for a time with Salvador Dali, helping him make editions of his bas-reliefs; Ms. Gerson recalls admiring Dali's famous cape.

Family and friends remember Ruth as a New York golden girl, a straight-A student starting from her days at Public School 166. At age 7, she began taking the subway alone to study and perform at the First All Children's Theater, a repertory troupe for young people. Later, at Intermediate School 44, she sang in the school's acclaimed gospel choir, a group that has traveled to locations as far away as Venezuela.

Those who saw her perform in those years still talk about the impression she made. "Ruth sang 'New York, New York' when she was in seventh grade, and brought the house down," recalled Jo Morris, the veteran music teacher who directs the I.S. 44 choir. "She is someone whose name I will never forget."

Ms. Gerson went on to graduate near the top of her class at the High School for the Performing Arts (later renamed La Guardia), the city's competitive performing arts school, and then headed, on a scholarship, to Princeton, where she wrote her senior thesis on Jewish existentialism.

But the external success masked a sometimes nightmarish home life. Two of Ruth's brothers were crack addicts. One of the two also attempted suicide. Presiding over the household was a father who was a serious and sometimes dangerous alcoholic. When asked if he was ever physically abusive, Mr. Gerson is reticent. "I had my moments," he said, though he claims to have forgotten specific instances of any violence because he was so drunk most of the time.

"I'd back my station wagon up to the liquor store and load up," he recalled, sitting in the living room of his apartment. "I didn't buy bottles, I bought cases. They were stacked up all over the house, under the bed. I'd usually pass out drunk every night."

Ms. Gerson's brothers fought back against her father, sometimes coming to blows. Ms. Gerson retreated into the safety of her bedroom closet and wrote songs. But when it came time to go to sleep at night, her real feelings surfaced.

"I remember being in first grade and crying every night into my pillow until it was soaked through," she said matter-of-factly. "Then I'd turn it over and soak the other side. By then, the first side would be cool."

Penny Smart-Ludlow, a friend from high school who also came from an alcoholic home, remembers how Ms. Gerson coped. "They talk about the roles played by the children of alcoholics, like the hero, the scapegoat or the black sheep," said Ms. Smart-Ludlow, now a personal trainer in New York. "Ruth was the hero, the overachiever. If she got a 98, she got upset."

Ms. Gerson says she assumed the role of teacher's pet because she was looking for mentors and support. "Every year I had a great teacher who was amazing and loving and kind," she recalled. "Teachers weren't stupid. They knew what was going on. I was always under somebody's wing."

One mentor was Ms. Morris of I.S. 44. "I remember her saying there were concerns at home," the teacher said, "but I tried to connect with her through music."

Another was Jerome Eskow, the longtime chairman of her high school drama department, who said he was aware of the tumult in Ms. Gerson's home. "I tried to provide a place for her to talk to me," he said. "My door was open, and she came in every day."

By the time she was 16, Ruth was doing more than dropping hints. She described the situation at home to one teacher in sufficient detail that investigators from the city's Special Services for Children agency (now the Administration for Children's Services), showed up at the family's apartment.

Mr. Gerson found himself, with his wife, at a hearing at Family Court, where, as he remembers it, the hearing officer said, "If you don't stop drinking, we'll put you in jail." That threat, coupled with a realization that he might lose custody of Ruth, proved powerful. Mr. Gerson began court-ordered counseling and started attending 12-step meetings. Now 66, he says he has not had a drink in almost 19 years.

"We had difficult times," said Cheryl Gerson, who is more guarded than her husband but has remained fairly close to her daughter over the years. "I'm proud of everyone for surviving it."

Ms. Gerson, standing in the one-bedroom apartment near Tompkins Square Park that she shares with her husband, Josh Rosenthal, a marketing executive at Sony BMG, and their two daughters, ages 3 years and 2 months, winced as she recalled that period of her life. "In many ways," she said, "I have no memory for pain. I don't know if that's good or bad."

Right from the Start, Applause

However much Ms. Gerson was struggling internally, to the world she mostly presented a bright and confident face. And almost from the beginning, her career flourished.

Returning to New York after college, she began performing at clubs like CBGB's, with a repertory of songs that offered snapshots of a New York childhood and were thick with biographical detail. "Roof Jumping," for example, which touched on her family's struggle with drugs, alcoholism and suicide, included the lines: "I thought every day about my father in his bed, lying drunk in front of the TV set, all the strain that came every day from his lips, the pain inflicted by his clenched-up fist."

But reviewers knew little if anything about her background. All they knew was the music. And they were dazzled.

The Village Voice praised her "huge, flawless voice." Elle magazine proclaimed Ms. Gerson "the new poet of rock." The veteran critic Chip Deffaa, who wrote a long article about Ms. Gerson in The New York Post, began his piece by urging record executives to go to the Bitter End and check her out.

And they did. Respected industry figures like Seymour Solomon, the co-founder of Vanguard Records, expressed an interest in adding her to a roster that included singers like Joan Baez. David Massey, now executive vice president of international artists and repertoire for the Sony Music Label Group, signed her to a development deal that could have been the first step to a contract.

In 1994, she opened for Hootie and the Blowfish and the Dave Matthews Band. And her idol Bob Dylan, after hearing a demo tape, arranged for her to sing for him in a private room in Midtown. Ms. Gerson recalls sitting on a park bench across from the meeting place for an hour before her appointment, trying to calm her nerves by strumming her guitar. When Mr. Dylan invited her in, she said, there was some talk about her being signed to his own label at Sony, but nothing ever materialized. (Through a spokesman, Mr. Dylan declined to discuss the meeting.)

For reasons that remain elusive even today, Ms. Gerson ended up with a very different and far more modest career than most people had predicted. She attributes this in part to a distaste for the often harsh realities of the corporate music business.

"I'm not afraid to say that it's difficult to find people who are authentic and sincere in the record industry," Ms. Gerson said. "And finding those who happen to like what you do is even harder."

Her father insists that she held herself back. "She used to always say, 'I'm not ready,' " he said. "Those are her famous words. Seymour Solomon at Vanguard Records came to me begging. He said, 'I want to make Ruth a star.' I have seen her just turn away so many times."

His daughter does not deny this. "It was surreal," she said of the early attention. "I got frightened. It was like all these atoms bouncing around and coming at me, but it didn't come together in a way that made sense. I was scared of being taken over in some way and losing control."

She admits that her unwillingness to knuckle under to some of the industry's harsher realities was forged in her difficult childhood. "That kind of stuff makes you self-reliant and independent," she said.

In her father's eyes, the strength it took for her to stand up to him as a child may have worked against her as an adult. "Ruth is stubborn," Mr. Gerson said. "I should know. She got me sober. She certainly fought me, and I think she fought the music industry.

"She had to resist me to survive," he added. "But as I used to say to her, as an adult, you sometimes have to go with the flow and trust the people who are in charge of this world."

And even had she come from the most tranquil of backgrounds, the music world is a famously fickle place to make a name for oneself. "For many artists there's a window of opportunity, and for some of them, no matter how talented they are, it just closes," said Tom Vickers, a former A & R executive for Mercury Records who now works as a consultant at several major labels. "They're the artists that you've never heard of. But you might have heard of them, had fate and a million other variables gone in a different direction."

Modest Career, Mystified Fans

At least publicly, Ms. Gerson expresses few regrets. She has a full schedule ahead that includes promoting her latest CD, "Wake to Echo," issued in 2004, plans for two more albums, a series of living-room concerts in private homes around the country and a part in a new independent film called "Promised Land." The title comes from one of Ms. Gerson's songs; she plays the mother of a missing child.

"It's not like I failed," she said. "I haven't quit music or trying to make better records. Do I have moments when I wish I was playing the Beacon Theater? Yes. Sometimes I worry that I don't have the ego thing that says: 'I deserve this. I'm great.' But I'm happier now than I've ever been."

In fact, if she senses an injustice, she speaks out.

"Four years after that big New York Post article, there was this little blurb about me in The New Yorker," she recalled. "The headline was, 'The Next Big Thing That Wasn't.' I was so upset. I called the writer. I said: 'Do you know how old I am? I'm only 27. My grandmother is going to read that.'

"I don't want all the people who invested in me to feel I've let them down because I'm not famous," she said. "There's a difference between fame and success. That period when I got all that attention was no fun. I'm glad I'm not there."

Perhaps surprisingly, she and her father have come to a sometimes uneasy truce. He has attended her concerts, and wryly recalls audience members sometimes turning and staring at him when Ms. Gerson sang about the drunken father in front of his TV set in her song "Roof Jumping." And, in a moment reminiscent of one of her more pleasant childhood memories, she and he recently spent an afternoon with her daughters at the Metropolitan Museum.

The big-league industry retains an interest in Ms. Gerson, and vice versa. She has recently begun working with the Boilerhouse Boys, the London-based writer-producers who have been involved in the discovery of pop stars like Joss Stone.

Don Dixon, the veteran producer of groups like R.E.M. and the producer of Ms. Gerson's album, "Fools and Kings," remains an admirer. "She wasn't about doing whatever it took to be a star," he said. "To that degree, she may have gotten in her own way. Extremely talented people can be like that. They don't want to play the game."

Her father simply hopes that her music will find the audience he believes that it deserves. "She writes such beautiful stuff," he said. "I just hope she comes to appreciate what she can offer people while she's still young."

But many of her fans are still mystified as to why Ruth Gerson is not a bigger star. "I was a total believer right away, and thought it was just a matter of time before everyone else caught on," Mr. Deffaa said. "It's mind-boggling to me that she's still playing at Arlene's Grocery."