Quiet! Tori Amos Is Singing

When Orange County concert-goers first made acquaintance with Tori Amos six years ago, they met an exacting artist who wouldn’t brook any breaches of what she saw as the proper etiquette for a performance.

Amos prohibited the Coach House from serving drinks while she played that night--”the only time in our history” that an artist made such a request, says Ken Phebus, concert director of the San Juan Capistrano club, whose economic success is largely predicated on selling food and drinks during performances.

When she heard some commotion coming from the back of the room, Amos didn’t hesitate to quash the distraction.

“I cannot play when that cash register’s ringing. It’s driving me out of my mind,” Amos said in a daunting tone. “I know the people are counting the money, but you’re not going to have much to count if I can’t play.”

Amos triumphed that night, and, though she was wrong about the cash register ringing, she effected a small improvement in Orange County’s busiest concert environment:

“Somebody had put a dime in the pay phone,” Phebus recalled. “Since that, we moved the pay phone outside the building, so we won’t have to deal with that again. Those dimes can be really loud.”

Now Amos, one of the most distinctive (some might say weirdest) and forceful (some might say diva-tripping) pop-rock arrivals of the ‘90s, has graduated to her first arena tour. So what happens when she plays tonight at the Arrowhead Pond of Anaheim, and people start slurping sodas and beers, chomping on burgers, moving around and engaging in sundry other diva-antithetical behavior common to hockey arenas?

Simple, Amos said Tuesday during a brief interview from a hotel room in San Francisco.

“If you leave your seat at the arena, we chain you and strip and flay you.”

All joking aside, Amos, heretofore a solo-acoustic performer on grand piano, now has a sometimes-aggressive guitar-bass-drums backup team with her and is ready to realize some of the fantasies she had as a young Led Zeppelin fan. She can simply drown out any commotion.

But Amos says she remains willing to verbally flay anybody who gets rude during the pauses and the quiet moments.

“Absolutely. I stop the show and ask them what’s going on. I grew up [playing] in barrooms, so if you want to go that way with me, I get very bored and then I chuck you out. It’s not a democracy, my concerts. It never has been.”

*

Amos, whose four albums have sold more than 4 million copies in the U.S., according to SoundScan, said she weighed all the pros and cons before deciding to move from the theaters she had been playing to the hockey arenas and outdoor sheds of her current tour.

“My grandfather, who was part Cherokee, told me a long time ago there are some things that are just unexplained, and you either go onto the big ocean or you stay on the backwater. One isn’t better than the other.”

Having embarked on the big oceans of rock performance, Amos won’t be doing any surfing away from her trusty instrument. “I don’t dance around. It’s not what I do, anyway. I’m chained to the piano for good or ill.” (Amos at the piano, however, is a slinky, squirming, kinetic figure who works her own variations on the old showmanly keyboard tradition of Jerry Lee Lewis and Elton John.)

“I always was fascinated with different mediums and how you have to shift to make it work,” Amos said of her decision to step into the arenas. “More than anything, your container has to get bigger. It’s an internal thing, when you’re plugging in, to have a higher voltage. You can hold an arena or you can’t, and we haven’t seemed to have any problems. We get a little wild. Obviously, I’m into the Dionysiac frenzy and all that.”

Obsession With Myths

For all but perhaps her most committed fans, Amos’ 1996 album, “Boys for Pele,” was as impenetrable as the mysterious, secret Dionysiac rites of ancient Greece (in Euripides’ play, “The Bacchae,” the penalty for male eavesdropping on the all-female rites was getting ripped to shreds by one’s own mother).

The constant flow of obscure symbols and pop culture references on “Pele” made it a mystery unto itself, defying ready explanation and making one wonder whether Amos had gone off the deep end with her obsession with myths, fairies, pagan cultures and the like. Or, having made her mark with almost uncomfortably vivid narratives from her personal life--especially “Me and a Gun,” a harrowing, unforgettable and autobiographical account of the experience of being raped--was Amos just feeling the need to clothe her artistic nakedness and gain some protective distance between herself and the material?

Amos doesn’t think that’s what was going on. Some ideas and feelings can be communicated more vividly with symbols than with descriptions, she said.

“Sometimes symbols are really powerful in themselves. Word association is how you can get through to people. With my heart on my sleeve, sometimes it’s so personal that people can’t make it their own. Symbology has been used for thousands of years, where people can crawl in and make it their own.”

Amos’ new album, “From the Choirgirl Hotel,” successfully bridges her alternating inclinations to dwell among symbols and myths, and to divulge her most trying experiences with exacting specificity.

Late in 1996, she suffered a miscarriage; several songs on “Choirgirl Hotel” probe the resulting grief and guilt. Amos doesn’t go easy on herself, raising questions of whether her ambitious drive as an artist somehow led to the loss. In “Playboy Mommy,” she imagines herself as a vaudevillian vamp, apologizing, but also defending herself, to the reproachful spirit of the child she lost.

Amos sees “Pele” as an exploration of her inner psyche; hence all the disjointed, impenetrable symbolism. The new album speaks, if not plainly, then at least intelligibly, because, she says, it is directed to the missing baby.

“ ‘Choirgirl’ is trying to communicate with a spirit that has left the planet,” she said. “I was communicating with [another] being, so it’s a very different work” than “Boys for Pele.”

“The whole album is really an appreciation of the life force, which I gained out of the loss of the baby,” Amos added. And, she says, it marks a final breach with some of the remaining vestiges of her upbringing as the daughter of a North Carolina minister.

“It’s a farewell to needing any deity on my altar,” said Amos, who has a consistent history of challenging Christian iconography in her music. “You’re taught that if you pray and do X-Y-Z, the wolf won’t show up at the door. I learned that if it’s going to show up, it’s going to show up, and no deity can save you from that. If it’s your time to lose a child, it’s your time. I was brought up to believe the angels are looking after you. There was such arrogance [in that]. What about the girl who goes through something, and they don’t show up?”

Instead, in “Jackie’s Strength,” Amos turns to Jacqueline Kennedy--who in the space of four months in 1963 lost a 2-day-old son, Patrick, and her husband, President John F. Kennedy--as an icon of graceful suffering. The song also alludes to that husband’s damaging philandering: “If you love enough, you’ll lie a lot / Guess they did in Camelot.”

Does Amos, who lives in England now with her husband, think of Hillary Clinton these days when she sings those lines?

“No,” she said after a long pause. But she has her opinions about public and political outrage over l’affaire Lewinsky. “Everybody’s ready to throw a stone. I know I had an affair with a married man when I was a young girl. We all lie through our teeth.”

Competing Against Heroes

Amos got her professional start playing piano bars in the Washington, D.C. area, where she performed regularly from age 13 to 21. “I played a lot on the Hill, those watering holes where congressmen would show up. Let’s put it this way: The beautiful blonds on their arms were not their wives.”

By coincidence, Amos’ Orange County debut as an arena performer falls on the same night that two of her prime heroes, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, are holding forth cross-county at Irvine Meadows.

In the lovely ballad “Northern Lad” from “Choirgirl Hotel,” Amos sings: “I guess you go too far, when pianos try to be guitars.”

“There was a time when I really wanted to be Jimmy Page. It took me a long time to accept that I couldn’t be a guitar player, that the instrument didn’t make sense to me,” Amos said. “So it was really about having to accept who you are.”

And now, like the titanic Page and Plant, the girl at the piano has made herself into an arena rocker going head-to-head with her heroes. Said Amos: “It’s a small world, isn’t it?”

* Tori Amos and the Devlins play today at the Arrowhead Pond of Anaheim, 2695 E. Katella Ave. 8 p.m. $30. (714) 704-2500 (box office), (714) 740-2000 (Ticketmaster).