Sheryl Crow’s songs tied for the most Grammy nominations. But it’s been a long road from singing back-up to playing small clubs to a surprise hit record. How’d she make it to Pop Star? : About As Fun As It Gets

‘I don’t look too great, but at least I don’t have to have implants. . . .”

It’s not what you think. Sheryl Crow has just gone under the surgeon’s knife a few days prior, for a painful procedure on her celebrated mouth, which, it seems, has gotten as good as it’s given. Her two beleaguered front teeth had been in such bad shape for such a long time that she stood the chance of losing one or both.

But, after four hours of oral surgery with three different dentists, “by the end of it they were high-fiving each other that they’d saved the tooth. All this bonding went on while my mouth was wide open.

“Anyway,” she reports, literally in stitches, “all is well.”

With her soul, with her choppers, certainly with her career.

The very night before her grueling surgery, Crow celebrated her L.A. homecoming by playing at KROQ-FM’s “Almost Acoustic Christmas” show at the Universal Amphitheatre, where she was the most commercially successful act on a wide-ranging, multi-artist bill--a capper to a year she began as a virtual unknown with a debut album dying on the vine and ended as a pop star.

The teeth trouble served as an ironic souvenir of struggle, a permanent record of the 32-year-old Missouri native’s dozen or so years of unheralded bar-band and backup work.

“I was singing in this club in St. Louis,” Crow recalls of what led her under the knife all these years later, “and it was really crowded, and one of the waitresses fell straight backward into me with three beer mugs in her hand and knocked my front teeth out. . . . I am serious Calamity Jane.”

As if she wouldn’t have reason enough to want to escape the club circuit.

It was a long haul, as the bird flies, on the way to wowing the masses last summer at Woodstock ’94 (where she got extra media attention, she points out, for being one of only two female acts on the bill) and, just this month, tying Bonnie Raitt for the most Grammy nominations, five (there probably would have been more if her commercially late-blooming album itself hadn’t come out before the eligibility period).

Perhaps Crow’s biggest professional strength-- and , as she relates it, probably her biggest personal weakness too--has been the Protestant work ethic.

Since shortly before her album “Tuesday Night Music Club” came out in August, 1993, she has been almost entirely on the road, moving from an opening act on small-hall tours to a club-headlining tour of her own to more warm-up gigs, including opening for the Eagles on Saturday at the Rose Bowl. (She also headlines the Ventura Theatre in Ventura on Friday.)

“The first seven months we toured and didn’t even have any radio play. And about the time the record exploded with ‘All I Wanna Do,’ that’s when we thought we were gonna have a month off or so; the record should’ve been dead about then. So we really haven’t had a chance to rest. We’re a little tired of each other,” she acknowledges in a Midwestern- bordering- on- Southern accent that’s just a bit shy of a drawl.

Not that she’s much of a complainer.

“It’s like Don Henley says: This is probably the best period of my life, or of my career, because it’s all new and exciting and not that complicated, and it’s the small things that make a difference. And after you’ve made a million dollars, I’m sure one hotel suite looks about like the other one, and you complain over the size of the soap or whatever.”

Eagle Henley-- who years ago had Crow sing backup on one of his solo tours, and who alone among her former superstar employers has remained a buddy-- confirms his advice to her to enjoy “the salad days, before you’re famous and ripe for crucifixion.”

“Sheryl Crow is the real thing,” he continues in a separate interview. “She’s got the goods, and she’s got the work ethic to go with it. After she made this album, she got in a van with a bunch of guys and drove across this country twice and played every dump and every (toilet) that she could.”

Not that any girl can work hard enough to be Sheryl Crow any more than any boy can grow up to be President of the United States. There is the gene pool thing.

But ironically, the good looks that have helped her earn an audience via MTV have also gotten her disparaged as a glamour girl by some alternative fans, a few of whom could be heard grumbling that she was too “mainstream” to belong on the KROQ bill. (Though that didn’t stop one of the queens of the college-radio set, Liz Phair, from just naming “Tuesday Night Music Club” one of her two favorite albums of the year.)

What defines Crow as a person and artist has remained slightly more elusive, at least if the disparate terminology used to describe her in the popular press is a gauge.

New York magazine, citing “All I Wanna Do” as one of pop’s 10 most shining moments in ‘94, described her as “the thinking man’s party girl.” She wasn’t sure what she thought of that but at least preferred it to Details magazine’s cryptic “party girl with a death wish,” whatever that might mean.

“Hippie chick” has popped up quite a bit too, for what it’s worth. “When the record first came out, it was ‘She’s Rickie Lee Jones-ish,’ ” Crow recalls. “Saying that I’m neo-hippie is less offensive, I think, than always comparing me to somebody else.”

Crow didn’t make the journalist’s job any easier (or her record company’s, initially) by recording a stylistically unpeggable album full of textural Beatles allusions, pedal steel on decidedly non-country songs, vocals that veer from girlishly off-key to womanly and soulful, themes that play on both tough-chick willfulness and feminine vulnerability.

The lyrics on “Tuesday Night Music Club” jump between specific, character-delineating verses-- redolent of the eccentricities of classic narrative singer-songwriters like Randy Newman and John Prine-- and universally relatable choruses of a more classic-rock vein.

Thus, as unlikely a tune as “All I Wanna Do,” an idiosyncratic adaptation of a poem about seedy bar habitues mocking the passing Joes who have actual jobs, can become a No. 2 pop hit-- and a Grammy nominee for best record and song of the year--by virtue of its sing- along- ready, anthemic refrain.

Crow calls it “an anti-routine, anti-stuck-in-a-rut song. Wouldn’t it be great if I didn’t have to show up at work today? Like getting in your car and just not showing up for months? Everybody thinks of it and nobody does it, and that’s pretty much what the character in the song does.”

If it might seem a bit perverse that the entire country is cheerfully relating to a song about people who “like a good beer buzz early in the morning,” peeling back their labels on Santa Monica Boulevard, of all places, Crow isn’t about to spoil their fun. “It’s like ‘Leaving Las Vegas’--that could be interpreted as a derogatory song, and people in Las Vegas loved it.”

The biggest question no one seems able to agree on is whether Crow is a traditionalist with Joplin and Jagger running through her veins or an alternative artist with all the modern quirks that tag would suggest.

The band Counting Crows has been in somewhat the same position in straddling that fence yet has an easier time being both. It would seem that “imaging” is more of a potential hang-up for women, and Crow’s tattered-jeans look-- a style closer to vintage Maria Muldaur than Courtney Love-- has already raised a hint of a backlash among the ironically image-conscious alternative set.

Raising this, it seems we’ve struck a tender chord.

“You know what, I just had a huge row with somebody at my record label recently about that,” she says. “He said, ‘Well, you’re gonna lose your alternative audience. You know, I see the way you are in your life--look at you.’ I said, ‘So what? This is how I dress. And this is what I wear onstage.’ Does it matter? For me, it’s like people are thinking too much. It becomes confusing, and really exasperating.

“My record can be considered an alternative record like Counting Crows and maybe a Blind Melon would. . . . But if I’m starting to analyze what it is that I should or shouldn’t be doing to maintain an alternative audience, then (expletive) that. It was never a concern when I made the record, so why should it be a concern now? It’s not my job to decide who my audience is.”

Crow grew up in Missouri with a trumpet-playing attorney father (whose retirement from music is documented in the song “We Do What We Can”) and a piano-teaching mother. At the University of Missouri, she earned degrees in piano and voice, and also fronted bar bands as a singer- guitarist, largely as a result of the life-changing epiphany provided by the Stones’ “Let It Bleed” album.

When her fiance, a born-again Christian, suggested that she might better use her talents “singing for the Lord” than belting out secular music, the ensuing split was the impetus that led to her to move to Los Angeles in 1986.

Her would-be big break wasn’t long in coming: A two-year slot on Michael Jackson’s “Bad” tour, including a nightly, passion-feigning duet on “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You.”

The exposure was more than she could have hoped for--most famously, her picture on the front of the National Enquirer, where it was announced that Crow had been designated by Wacko Jacko as the future bearer of his love child. In fact, the duet partners hardly ever exchanged offstage words, though she figures the tabloid story emanated from within the Jackson camp.

“I lived in fear on that tour,” she recalls, her fresh- out- of- the- Midwest insecurity compounded by the Jackson entourage’s strangeness and secrecy. But the aftermath was harder still on her psyche.

“I came off that tour and I had huge, huge amounts of press, and I had songs of my own, and nobody wanted to sign me on those songs. Because it was like, ‘Wait--she toured with Michael Jackson, everything’s set up for her to be a pop singer,’ like a Paula Abdul, but that wasn’t what I wanted to do.

“They all said ‘blue-eyed soul’ wasn’t happening; this was before Bonnie Raitt. And I let all my options go out the window, and within a couple of months, I went from having this notoriety and exposure to just being nothing. I mean, nobody cared.

“I went through a real period of depression--which I was always susceptible to; my whole life, I’ve fought with that. But for a considerable amount of months in there, I literally just didn’t actually even get up.”

Finally she sought the help of a clinical psychiatrist, who gave her a “jump-start” via intensive therapy and antidepressants. Coming out of her depression, she was able to get back to work on the songs that eventually won the attention of A&M; Records, though a record contract was by no means the light at the end of the tunnel.

“My getting a record deal didn’t provide me with, ‘Oh gee, my life is complete now.’ I was still sorting through a lot of demons. And I think part of that is being raised with a real staunch puritan work ethic, to believe that if you worked really hard and you were a really good person, then of course you’ll achieve whatever it is you want. And living in a place like L.A. and being in such a competitive field, it’s not necessarily like that.”

Crow had reconciled herself to becoming a side person and songsmith (and had tunes recorded by Eric Clapton and Wynonna Judd) when Henley, recognizing her talent, encouraged her to stop giving her material away to others and focus on her own singing career.

It was actually producer Hugh Padgham who helped get Crow signed to A&M; after they worked together on a Sting session, but the happy ending was yet to come. Padgham produced an entire debut album for Crow that she successfully lobbied A&M; not to release--feeling it was too slick to accurately reflect her--even after advance cassettes had already gone out to the media.

The decision to scrap that first stab at an album--and to send her back in with producer Bill Bottrell and a host of talented songwriter- musicians to collaborate on spontaneous and less outrightly commercial material in the studio-- was a costly one for A&M; but one that paid off in thoroughly unexpected spades, not to mention Grammy nominations.

“I think the older I get the more I cherish the good qualities that go along with being a woman,” she says. “I think for so long there, being a woman was almost synonymous with being a scrapper in this business. And a certain amount of that is really good; I think you do have to scrap to get your voice heard, and that forces you to commit to your ideals. . . .

“But I think I’m much more in touch with being a woman in this world than I was in my 20s. There’s sort of a graduation thing that happens when you get through that rough part of trying to figure out who you are. And when you reacquire your sense of humor, and realize that everybody’s not really actually out to (mess) you over, that it’s just part of life, then there’s some sort of emancipation that comes with that.”

* Sheryl Crow headlines Friday at the Ventura Theatre, 26 S. Chestnut Ave., Ventura . 8 p.m. Sold out. (805) 648-1936. She also opens for the Eagles on Saturday at the Rose Bowl, 1001 Rose Bowl Drive, Pasadena . 7 p.m. $35-$50. (818) 577-3100.

Hear Sheryl Crow

* To hear a sample from Crow’s album “Tuesday Night Music Club,” call TimesLine at 808-8463 and press *5720.

In the 805 area code, call (818) 808-8463.