What a Drag It Is Being Young

“Take my pants off?” singer Fiona Apple snaps disdainfully at a pocket of teenage testosterone near the front of the stage during her concert at the fairgrounds here. “Is that what you said?”

The 20-year-old performer had seemed oddly distracted during the opening minutes of the concert here before about 7,000 young fans.

As she tends to do on stage, she was searching for some way to connect with the audience beyond the music itself. She found it in a boy’s shouted remark, and she’s now on a roll.

“Do you know how depressing that is?” she says, staring intensely at the boys, as if challenging the guilty party to step forward.

The boys, who had been yelling suggestively as they ogled her belly ring and swaying hips, are suddenly quiet.

“You take your pants off,” she finally shouts back at them. She points out in X-rated language that women are more than their sexual organs. “. . . You don’t agree? Well, then, bye-bye.”

The boys are silent. Girls in the audience cheer. And a few moms in the crowd roll their eyes.

It’s a striking moment, and it reflects the spontaneous, frequently confrontational nature of Apple’s music and manner. Her instinct for dramatics helps explain why she’s gone so far so fast in the pop world--and why she is likely to continue to be a controversial presence.

Far from the spate of relatively polite female singer-songwriters that includes Sarah McLachlan and Jewel, Apple is more in line with the fiery school that stretches from Sinead O’Connor to Courtney Love to Alanis Morissette.

Only she adds a defiantly youthful perspective to the genre. It’s almost as if a teenager from O’Connor or Morissette’s audience suddenly took the stage and started relating her own experiences. Many of the sexually charged, nakedly personal songs on Apple’s hit “Tidal” album were either written when she was 15 or drawn out of experiences from that time. “Sullen Girl,” for instance, is based on the time she was raped at age 12.

Apple has substantial talent as a writer and singer. The best songs on “Tidal,” which is nearing the 1.5 million sales mark, combine the confessional images with solid craftsmanship.

In “Sleep to Dream,” the opening song on her album, Apple lashes out at a former lover:

I tell you how I feel, but you don’t care

I say tell me the truth, but you don’t dare.

Rather than the pop-rock energy of Morissette, with whom she is frequently compared, there is a brooding, almost torch-song tension to her music. Her vocals on “Tidal” have been compared favorably to such formidable artists as Laura Nyro and Nina Simone.

Apple is at her most haunting live, where she looks out on the audience with wise, soulful eyes and uses alluring body language that seems far too advanced for someone her age. Q magazine calls her “Kate Moss with songs.” The waif-like performer--she’s 5-foot-2, 102 pounds--exudes a woman-child sexuality that recalls Carroll Baker in “Baby Doll” or Jodie Foster’s teen streetwalker in “Taxi Driver.”

She says she may try acting. For now, though, she’s absorbed by her music and album.

“I hate it when people ask how you can talk about such ‘adult’ themes, how you can possibly know so much so young,” she says backstage before the fairgrounds concert.

“It’s very closed-minded and very naive. A lot of people who are saying that just don’t know today’s world. They probably didn’t have their first relationship until they were 18. I had mine at 14. I had parents who were splitting up all the time. I know a lot about relationships. I’ve been in therapy my whole life. And it’s the same with a lot of kids today. It’s not that I’ve just got an active imagination. These songs are my story.”

‘Lighten up, Fiona . . . Have some fun . . . You are taking it too seriously.”

Howard Stern may be the Butt-head of talk radio, but he is often in step with the public mood--and he was probably on target about Apple in the days after her much-talked-about acceptance speech at the recent MTV Video Music Awards.

On the telecast, Apple skipped the normal thank you’s when honored for best new artist. Instead, she quoted poet Maya Angelou and told viewers to think for themselves rather than look to pop stars as role models.

“This [show business] world is [expletive], and you shouldn’t model your life about what you think that we think is cool and what we’re wearing and what we’re saying. . . . Go with yourself, go with yourself.”

Apple tried gamely to defend herself on Stern’s show, saying that her comments may have been clumsy but that she thinks her fans understood what she meant.

But Stern, though a fan of the singer’s music, would have none of it. “You are too young to be reading Maya Angelou books. Do that when you’re, like, 50 and you’ve got no life. You think you’re depressed now? . . . Wait until you get to my age.”

You could almost hear much of the pop world going “amen.”

Traditionally, pop fans have been willing to let artists say anything they want in their music--sex, despair, misery, disillusionment, radical politics. But they’ve been far less tolerant when artists talk about the same issues apart from their music.

It wasn’t the despair in Kurt Cobain’s music that bothered people, but that he continued to speak about the despair in interviews after he became a wealthy rock star.

And it wasn’t criticisms of the Catholic Church in her lyrics that got Sinead O’Connor booed off the stage at the Bob Dylan tribute concert in 1992 in New York, but the fact that she tore up a picture of the pope on “Saturday Night Live.”

For millions, the bottom line is: Sing your song. Make your money. Accept your awards. Leave us alone.

In the words of a veteran pop music publicist who doesn’t work with Apple, she’s a “public relations Molotov cocktail.”

Even some of her backers in the industry worry about Apple’s outspoken manner, using terms such as “naive” and “young” and “loose cannon.”

Apple acknowledges some friends said the MTV speech was a mistake, but she disagrees.

“I felt bad afterward because a lot of people said I wasn’t articulate,” she says, looking back on the incident. “But then I heard a replay of the speech and I realized that I did a good job that night. I said exactly what I wanted to say, and I think the [teenagers] I was talking to understood.

“There’ll always be a part of me that doesn’t like what I look like and what I sound like and what I dress like because it’s not what the people I was looking up to [in school and on television] thought was cool. I feel so angry about all those years where I just wasted so much . . . I ached so much.”

It’s four days after the Fresno concert and Apple steps out of the elevator into the lobby of an upscale Santa Monica hotel in her full-length, beige satin nightgown. She’s not on her way to a video shoot.

The plan was to do the early-afternoon interview in a nearby restaurant, but Apple’s boyfriend, magician David Blaine, was in town and the couple had been up late the night before. She switched the interview to the hotel so she could get some extra sleep.

Apple is wearing a black cotton shirt over the gown, and heads turn as she walks through the lobby. She could go out on the patio, where it would be more private, but she picks a chair in a corner of the lobby and curls up in it.

Over the next two hours, hotel guests frequently stare at Apple as they pass. It’s not just the nightgown, but the intensity of her manner and her sheer beauty. It’s hard to imagine that she once hated looking in a mirror or going to school because kids would call her “ugly” and “dog.”

In fact, her fearless attitude seems in part based on her belief that nothing in her life can be any more traumatic than what she has already experienced.

She saw her first therapist when she was 8. The endless therapy was apparently so draining that her first thought after being raped at age 12 was, “Oh, no, this means I’m going to have to go into therapy again.” (The rape occurred late one afternoon in the hallway outside her mother’s New York apartment; the attacker was never caught. “I was unlocking the locks on the door when he came up,” she says. “He told me that I was going to be killed, there was a knife to my throat, but my dog was barking inside the apartment so he was afraid of going inside.”)

About the years of therapy, she adds, “I felt like everybody forever was trying to fix me. . . . Every other year there would be something. Then I’d be OK, then someone would think I looked depressed so I’d have to go back in therapy. I resented [the therapists] so I used to leave my house and then take a bra out of my bag and put it over my shirt and put three pairs of socks on one leg, just to provoke them.”

Her songwriting grew out of the letters she used to write out of frustration to parents and friends when she didn’t feel they were listening to her. She had such low self-esteem she claims she once skipped school 100 times in a single year.

Liberated by her pop success and the therapy she sought herself in recent years, she apparently believes it would be dishonest not to express her feelings frankly and publicly. She doesn’t even see danger signs when her actions are compared to those of O’Connor, a magnificent artist who felt so overwhelmed by the pressures on her that she reportedly suffered the equivalent of a nervous breakdown. She sees O’Connor as a heroine.

“I heard about the pope thing and I really don’t know anything about him,” Apple says. “He may be a wonderful man and she may be completely wrong, but I love her anyway . . . for doing what she believes in. Not all of us [in pop music] are there as just background music. Some of us are there to say something.”

About her daring, Apple’s manager, Andy Slater, says, “You do have to take a deep breath every so often, but I would worry more if I thought it was just an act because I think people would eventually catch on to that. But Fiona speaks from the heart.

“People who aren’t of her generation might have thought the comment on MTV was inappropriate, but people of her generation understood it. She’s very in touch with those emotions. Two years ago, she was one of those teenagers watching those awards and thinking of it as a club she could never join.”

It’s probably telling that Manhattan native Fiona Apple uses her first two given names rather than choosing between the last names of her parents, who were never married and separated by the time she was 4.

Her father, Brandon Maggart, is an actor who moved to Los Angeles in 1974 to pursue movies and television, while her mother, Diane McAfee, stayed in New York, where she has worked at a wide range of jobs, from singer to pastry cook.

Apple and her older sister, Amber, lived with their mother, who eventually remarried, but often spent summers with their father in Los Angeles. Miserable in school in New York, Apple transferred to Hamilton High School in Los Angeles for her sophomore year, but was equally uncomfortable so she returned to New York.

Through the troubled years, she found some relief in music--playing the piano and listening to albums handed down by her parents. They ranged from the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix to Ella Fitzgerald and Joan Armatrading.

Her piano playing “started as just something I could bang on,” she says. “I took lessons briefly around 8, but I didn’t like being told what to play. I enjoyed improvising. It was kind of an escape into my own little world.”

During this period, Apple’s other emotional release was pouring her frustrations into letters, some of which she’d share with her parents or friends.

When she was just about to enter her teens, Apple decided to combine the writing, which no one seemed to pay a lot of attention to, and the music, which was encouraged by her parents and others. It worked, she says. People listened to the songs.

But Apple was too shy to join a group or try to sing in talent contests, so she didn’t think of music as a career until her final year of high school, when she realized it was her only viable option. After having been so miserable in school, she didn’t look forward to going to college.

With encouragement from her father, she went into a recording studio in Venice in the fall of 1995 and spent three days making a three-song demo. It cost about $1,500, and she ended up with 75 copies of the tape.

“I had been hearing her songs since she was 11 or 12, and we used to even make little homemade tapes,” says Maggart, 63, who had a role in the Showtime series “Brothers.” “To me, the songs were exceptional . . . never just little kid things. They really told what it felt like to be growing up.”

On the issue of her frankness, he added, “That’s Fiona. Music and honesty have been like a safety valve for her. If it comes up [in her mind], then it comes out.”

All but one of the tapes would remain on Apple’s shelf.

It just took one to get her a record contract.

Kathryn Schenker, a high-powered New York publicist whose clients range from Sting to the Smashing Pumpkins, was getting ready for her annual Christmas Eve party in 1995 when her babysitter--a friend of Apple’s--stopped by with Apple’s demo tape, hoping that Schenker would pass it along to one of her friends in the record business.

Schenker was impressed by the sophistication of the voice and the maturity of the songs--and was surprised later in the day when the sitter brought Apple, back in New York for the holidays, over to meet her.

“I couldn’t believe that she was the same person who had made this tape,” Schenker says now. “There was this big voice on the tape, but here was this little girl . . . with those big blue eyes.”

At the party that night, Schenker gave the tape to Slater, who also manages the Wallflowers. He was so fascinated by it that he arranged to meet with Apple a week later.

Slater sent the tape to Jeff Ayeroff and Jordan Harris, who run WORK Records, a division of Sony Music. Ayeroff, who helped put together career-launching marketing and ad campaigns over the years for both Madonna and the Police, is widely considered one of the pop world’s great image builders. One might assume that Ayeroff fell in love with Apple’s striking image as much as her music.

“The truth is we signed her before we ever met her,” Ayeroff says now. “We just fell completely in love with the music.”

Once he met Apple, however, Ayeroff lost little time in putting together a striking visual campaign, including an album cover focused on the singer’s eyes in a way that conveyed marvelously the melancholy nature of Apple’s music.

Meanwhile, Slater spent nearly eight months in the studio with Apple, producing the debut album himself so that he could help guide the pop novice through the process of working with a band and framing arrangements for the songs. Reviews were mostly glowing when the album was released in the summer of 1996, but Apple’s popularity grew chiefly through the strength of her live shows.

Opening for such acts as Chris Isaak, Counting Crows and the Wallflowers, Apple generated strong word of mouth that got the album onto the lower rungs of the Top 200. The commercial breakthrough came in recent weeks with the seductive new “Criminal” single and video.

“Criminal” is a catchy song about a girl expressing guilt for having taken advantage of a love-struck boy just to help combat her own lack of self-esteem. It starts, “I’ve been a bad bad girl.”

In the striking “Criminal” video, a scantily clad Apple crawls all over male and female bodies at a party that could have been lifted straight from Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita.”

The song has helped propel the “Tidal” album into the Top 30, just in time for the lucrative holiday sales season. It has also pushed Apple from opening act to headliner. She’s on the road in the U.S. through December, then may spend the early months of next year in Europe, Japan and Australia before thinking about the all-important follow-up album.

Given the sexy nature of the “Criminal” video, it seems hypocritical for Apple to suddenly lash out at boys who get caught up in the sexual fantasy at her concerts.

Apple understands the contradiction, but maintains her goal in the video was to simply challenge her own poor self-image.

“I made that video because I hate my body most of the time,” she says during the Santa Monica interview. “It was incredibly difficult doing that video with all these supermodels walking around the set. But I like to tackle my insecurities. Besides, there’s a lesson here. A lot of people who saw that video think I have this perfect body.

“Well, I’m going to show them that it’s the same [expletive] that I was talking about on MTV. I’m going to do away [in a future video] with the makeup and hair stylists, and let people see what I really look like.”

Apple may have had trouble in school, but those around her give her good marks now for the way she’s adjusted over the last two years to the pressures of pop stardom.

“There might be this perception of Fiona being fragile, but I think she has a real inner strength . . . a strength of conviction more than anything,” says her road manager, Steve Brumbach.

About the pressure on the singer, her father says, “She’s the opposite of me. I can stare at a wall and meditate for six months, but she has to fill every day . . . so I think she thrives on the pressure and attention.”

The woman with the angry, self-obsessed image blushes when asked if one should apply the word “happy” to her.

“When I look back, there have always been things to be thankful for. I got a lot of encouragement with my music,” she says. “My parents did say I was very talented. It wasn’t all horrible.

“This whole music thing is 80% a personal mission and 20% a career. It was a mission to prove that I had something to offer. There is no way three years ago I could have gotten up on stage and said what I said [in Fresno]. I would have gone home and cried and written something.

“It’s a whole new experience for me to be able to be proud of myself and to stand up to the scrutiny of anybody, the press, . . . the audiences. It wasn’t that long ago that I couldn’t even stand up to the scrutiny of my high school.”

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Robert Hilburn is The Times’ pop music critic. He can be reached by e-mail at robert.hilburn@latimes.com