LEARNED A LOT SINCE ‘SEVENTEEN’ : After Divorce, Illness and Financial Ruin, Janis Ian Emerges From the Closet and Finds Reason to Sing Again

Janis Ian believes in long shots.

In the liner notes to “Breaking Silence,” her first album in 12 years, under the musician credits and the roll call of special thanks, Ian has included a plea that represents a leap of hope equivalent to the proverbial message in a bottle.

My 1937 Martin D-18 67053 has been missing since 1972. If you have information, please contact me. No questions asked. Post Office Box 121153, Nashville TN 37212.

Since the album, due out June 8, represents Ian’s gambit to re-establish her long-dormant performing career, she figured she might as well go all the way and try to get her stolen guitar back too.

At 42, Ian says she already has had two careers as a recording artist. Now she is trying for a third.

The first started when she was an under-age folkie, working the club scene in New York City during the mid-1960s. Ian was 16 when she scored a hit with “Society’s Child”--a folk-pop protest song about a black boy and a white girl who fall in love, only to have their romance sundered by the bigotry around them.

Ian couldn’t manage a successful chart follow-up to that 1967 hit, but she came back even stronger in 1975 as the still-young diva of “At Seventeen.” That rueful song about being in high school and feeling like a social reject struck a chord with the multitudes who didn’t enjoy a storybook adolescence. It netted her a Grammy Award as Best Female Vocalist, and propelled her downbeat, deeply introspective album, “Between the Lines,” to the top of the Billboard pop chart.

By 1982, though, Ian had abandoned her recording deal with Columbia Records, seeking to get out of a wearing cycle of touring and recording that she felt was sapping her powers as a songwriter.

The remainder of the ‘80s brought a financially costly divorce and a disastrous run-in with the Internal Revenue Service that Ian says took what was left of her money. But the late-1980s saw her establish herself as a Nashville-based songsmith, crafting ballads recorded by Amy Grant, Nanci Griffith, Kathy Mattea, Joan Baez, Marti Jones and Bette Midler, among others. Now Ian is ready to sing her own songs again (as she will at the Coach House on Friday, backed by a drummer and bassist).

The sense of renewal is evident in her new album’s title and in its artwork, which depicts Ian’s face obscured by shadows on the front cover but bathed in light on the back. It’s also there in songs such as “All Roads to the River,” a declaration of high artistic purpose, and in several fervent romantic ballads, including the hushed, literately erotic “Ride Me Like a Wave.” Ian plainly alludes to past setbacks and subsequent recovery in “Walking on Sacred Ground” and “This Train Still Runs,” wherein she declares herself back on track:

It doesn’t matter where it’s gone, this train still runs.

And though the baggage weighs a ton, we carry on.

Nothin’ is forever young, and I’m not done.

This train still runs.

Ian’s songs of committed love and high artistic hopes are shadowed by others about spousal abuse, incest and the Holocaust. In dealing with trouble and pain, she suggests on the album’s concluding title track, “breaking silence” is the first step to recovery.

In keeping with that notion, Ian has decided for the first time to broach her sexuality with interviewers. She has had relationships with men, including the five-year marriage that ended in 1983. But, she said in a recent phone interview from her home in Nashville, “I’ve normally lived with women. I would classify myself at this point as gay. Everybody in my family has always known. Everybody in the music industry has known. But it is something I didn’t talk about with the press, or evaded when I was pushed. One reason I didn’t want to address it for so long was that I don’t like that kind of pigeonholing (of) the music” under a gay-artist rubric.

While her new songs don’t deal with gay-rights themes, Ian hopes to use the media-attention that her comeback record might generate to try to diminish some of the social stigma against lesbians and gay men.

“In the age of AIDS and people going fag-bashing, it becomes a civil rights issue,” she said. “If people like me don’t start treating it normally with the press, people in America will think they don’t know any (gay people). It’s my personal life, but in most states I don’t have a right to live it. It’s hard to justify having worked for black civil rights in the ‘60s and not work for my own civil rights in the ‘90s.”

Ian said she is especially motivated by reports that “teens who even thought they might be gay had a three times higher suicide rate. Solving that is going to take people like me coming out, not stridently, but very vocally, so some 12-year-old can be watching ‘Oprah’ and see me saying, ‘I’m happy, it’s OK to be this.’ ”

Ian noted that the “outing” of prominent people who keep their sexuality private wasn’t an issue when she was last in the limelight. This time, “I’m sure if I wasn’t (coming forward concerning her sexuality), the question would have been raised.” But she said her decision wasn’t made under pressure from those gay activists who believe in the controversial practice of “outing” people against their will. “It goes with the whole ‘Breaking Silence’ thing,” Ian said. “To me, the safest place to be is to be honest. We all hopefully get to know one another and tolerate one another.”

In 1981, Ian decided that, far from breaking silence, she needed to impose it on herself.

“I walked away from my CBS contract and stopped making records,” she said. “I left because I felt my writing was going down the tubes. Since I was 16 or 17, I’ve felt this terrifying responsibility to my writing. I feel I’m a better writer than a singer or performer, and I’ve worked harder at it. When you’re in performer mode, you don’t have time to write. If I wanted to see my records sell, I had to go out on tour, and that’s real vicious for a writer. (So) I got rid of all my obligations, anybody telling me what to do.”

Falling back on a solid financial nest egg, Ian, who was living in Santa Monica at the time, gave herself the luxury of trying new things. She took acting classes from Stella Adler, the great acting theorist who died last December at 91. She also studied ballet.

“I was horrible at all these things. Totally talentless,” Ian said. “And that was a real freeing thing. All my life I’d been under this pressure from myself. I measure my piano playing against Chick Corea or Herbie Hancock, not myself. With ballet there were no expectations. I could just enjoy it. For the first six months (her ballet instructor) thought I was the least talented person she had ever seen. But I really enjoyed it, and because I did, I worked my butt off and got to where I looked passable.”

Studying under Adler, she said, was like pursuing the liberal arts education she never had. “I hated school. I’d left in the 10th grade, the day I turned 16. I got my GED when I was 19 or 20, because my mom was real unhappy. I think kids like me do much better studying one-on-one, and (with subjects) they’re interested in. Stella opened me to geography and history, all this stuff I didn’t want to do in school. I studied script interpretation, and her basis for it started with history. To keep up with Stella, I had to go back to the Greeks.”

Ian decided not to pursue any acting roles. “I don’t think I’m very good, and I saw no indication on Stella’s part that I was good. I’m not afraid of words or stages, but in terms of being an actor, I don’t want to do it if I can’t be that good--and I can’t. I have too much respect for the form.”

Even while she was away from the music business, Ian never stopped writing songs. “Even if I hate what I’m writing, it’s good for me to write, if only to get rid of the garbage,” she said. “My writing began pleasing me again in ‘86,” the year she signed a new song publishing deal and, at her publisher’s suggestion, began collaborating with Nashville-based writers.

Teaming with an established Nashville songwriter, Rhonda Kye Fleming, Ian began earning songwriting credits fairly regularly. Amy Grant recorded “What About the Love,” and Bette Midler made “Some People’s Lives” the title track of an album (Ian’s own versions of both songs appear on “Breaking Silence”). Kathy Mattea covered “Every Love,” and Ian, who continues to write for other singers, said that John Mellencamp has recorded “All Roads to the River” for his next album.

Still, she faced extra-musical difficulties. A near-fatal burst intestine laid her up for three months in 1986, and the next year her tax woes hit.

“This guy had been my accountant since I was 14. He kind of went south and didn’t pay the IRS for seven years. He died a couple of years ago, before I could get to him and kill him myself.”

To get out from under her tax debt, Ian said, “whatever I could sell, I sold,” including the royalty rights to her back catalogue from 1972 to 1980. Her payments “came to $1.3 million, with legal fees. It was everything I’d earned since I was 14, and I had been really conservative with my money.”

She had enough left for a down payment on the Nashville house where she lives with her lover of 4 1/2 years, a library employee at Vanderbilt University, and their two dogs, a Doberman pinscher named Collins (after Jackie) and a Teacup poodle named Murphy that Ian says “looks like a walking Q-Tip.”

Al Hagaman, the manager who had helped Ian unknot her tax bind, laid out her options. “He said that unless I became a totally commercial writer--and I don’t have that gift--the only chance I would have to be financially stable again would be performing.”

Ian put together a small band, waved her flag with a brief American tour in 1989 and some subsequent dates in Holland and Japan, and began looking for a record deal. Her business backers tried to persuade record executives that her brand of adult-oriented, folk-based pop would fit well in a marketplace that had accepted Suzanne Vega, Shawn Colvin and Mary-Chapin Carpenter--a troika whose work Ian’s new record resembles at times in production and vocal style.

After coming off as a full-bore, suffering-diva type in the mid-’70s, Ian now opts for subtlety and restraint in her singing.

“Maybe as you get older you don’t have as much to prove,” she said. “I also try hard not to get in the way of the song. Like Stella said: ‘When you got Shakespeare you don’t have to emote. When you’ve got a bad script, emote.’ ”

All of the major U.S. labels passed on Ian’s new batch of songs. “I was absolutely dead in the water. Too old, too many careers. To me, it was no surprise.”

Ian thinks that one label shied away because she is gay. Others may have balked at the prospect of trying to sell songs like “His Hands,” which she said is based partly on abuse she suffered in her marriage, and “Breaking Silence,” which rose out of talks with friends who confided in her about being sexually molested as children. “Tattoo” attempts to deal with epic horror in its account of a woman’s suffering at Auschwitz and the awful emotional emptiness that remains even after she is rescued.

Ian said she was motivated to write it after hearing Larry Cowan, a Nashville songwriter, perform a song of his own about the Holocaust.

“I thought, ‘Ian, here you are, a Jew, and it takes a blond, blue-eyed guy from a strip-mining town in West Virginia to write a song about it.’ I felt ashamed in front of my grandparents’ memories.”

Ian said she talked about the song with a friend of hers, Rabbi Beth Davidson. “She said: ‘You’ve met survivors (of concentration camps). There’s a part of them that is never coming back.’ Although they could survive and have families, they would never completely be here. It’s like a survivor of any kind of serious abuse. I think a part of your life is taken, your faith in humanity is taken--at least among the survivors I’ve known. I don’t think (the song’s ending) is downbeat so much as true. Life isn’t over for this person, but some things are cut into you that can’t be cut out.”

Ian’s chances of finding an outlet for her songs improved when labels in Holland and Japan showed interest in her new material. Using their cash advances, plus about $50,000 she raised when she reluctantly took out a mortgage on her house, Ian was able to complete her album, which she says cost $135,000 to produce. Earlier this year, she finally found an American label eager to release it: Morgan Creek, an independent record company whose stable includes veteran rockers Little Feat and young, college-rock contenders Mary’s Danish. Ian said the label hasn’t given her a budget for a video.

“Until the record stiffs, we can be heroes,” she said wryly. “We’ve got about a six-month window” to ignite sales. “There seems to be a feeling in the air it can do very well.” In the next breath, she invoked Tina Turner and Bonnie Raitt, patron saints to all pop figures attempting comebacks beyond the age of 40.

Ian is an upbeat and fluent talker, and as she moves enthusiastically from topic to topic during an interview, one begins to suspect that all 4 feet, 10 inches and 95 pounds of her are vibrating with hope--even about getting that long-lost guitar back.

“It got stolen in ’72 or ’71 in L.A. It must be owned by someone like me who has no idea that it was stolen. My dad bought it when I was 2, and gave it to me for my 16th birthday, so it has a lot of sentimental value. I’m hoping it turns up. I was talking to a policeman who said, ‘Why don’t you put (a notice about the missing guitar) on your record?’ It was the only way I can think of that I can ever get it back.”

As we said at the top, Janis Ian believes in long shots.

“I think amazing things happen,” she said. “I know this is a terrible cliche, but if I look at me in ’86 and me now, with a good relationship and a record coming out and a healthy body, that’s an amazing thing considering where I came from. Who knows? Maybe I can get a guitar back.”