From: owner-jewel-digest@smoe.org (jewel-digest) To: jewel-digest@smoe.org Subject: jewel-digest V4 #179 Reply-To: jewel@smoe.org Sender: owner-jewel-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-jewel-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk jewel-digest Sunday, April 4 1999 Volume 04 : Number 179 * If you ever wish to unsubscribe, send an email to * jewel-digest-request@smoe.org with ONLY the word * unsubscribe in the body of the email * . * For the latest information on Jewel tour dates, go to: * http://jewel.zoonation.com and click on "TOUR" * OR * go to the OFFICIAL Jewel home page at http://www.jeweljk.com * and go to the "What, When, Where" section * . * PLEASE :) when you reply to this digest to send a post TO the list, * change the subject to reflect what your post is about. A subject * of Re: jewel-digest V4 #xxx or the like gives readers no clue * as to what your message is about. Today's Subjects: ----------------- In-depth Jewel article today ["Janadell" ] Concert in Belgium? ["Henk Lelieveld" ] Re: Concert in Belgium? [ABershaw@aol.com] Jewel tapes wanted [JEWELA383@aol.com] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 4 Apr 1999 22:06:27 +1000 From: "Janadell" Subject: In-depth Jewel article today G'day peoples! There is a huge Jewel article/interview in the magazine that comes with the Sunday Paper "The Sunday Telegraph" here in Sydney, which I hope you will all find most interesting. It has some insights from family members, and memories from ppl who knew her when she was little :o) It is also quite long (you have been warned) but worth reading. For those who aren't in Sydney, I've typed it out below. There were a couple of pics I havent seen before, including one with Nedra and a really cute one of Jewel and her dad when she was little. Unfortunately I dont have a scanner, so the article will have to do. Here goes...... THE BIRTH OF THE NEW MADONNA _____________________________ "IF THE VERSACE FITS, WEAR IT. POET, SINGER AND STARLET JEWEL HAS COME A LONG WAY FROM HER DAYS YODELLING IN THE WATERING HOLES OF SMALL TOWN ALASKA. BUT WHILE THE NEW-AGE DIVA GETS 'DRUNK ON LIFE', THERE ARE LAWSUITS, RECRIMINATIONS AND A FAMILY WHO CLAIMS SHE HAS GONE TOO FAR. BY CAROLINE GRAHAM. The first time Mossy Kilcher heard her then six-year-old niece, Jewel, sing, it was "a spiritual experience". The youngster, she recalls, was strumming a guitar almost as big as she was and singing a simple folk tune in her father's log cabin in the Alaskan wilderness. Mossy's eyes till with tears at the memory: "She had the face of an angel, and a voice to match. I knew she'd be something special one day." Something special indeed. At the age of 24, Jewel is one of the biggest singing hits since Madonna. And just as Madonna's brash sexuality personified the "greed-is-good" '80s, so Jewel's gently folk songs, child-like poetry and New Age musings sum up the caring '90s for a new generation. Her debut album, 'Pieces of You', a collection of 14 songs written when she was 18, sold a staggering 10 million copies and remained in the US charts for three years, becoming one of the Top 10 debut albums of all time. Sales of her latest album, 'Spirit', have already soared past four million. Her achievements don't end there. The soft-spoken, 168cm singer is dyslexic, yet her literary accomplishments include an unprecedented $3.5 million advance for a poetry book, A Night Without Armor. Though panned by the critics, it spent three months on the New York Times best-seller list following its publication last May. And, taking her lead from Madonna, Jewel is headed for the big screen this year in the American Civil War drama 'Ride With the Devil', directed by Ang Lee (Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm). The kid from Homer, Alaska, spearheads a multi-million-dollar marketing machine which has honed her image from jean-wearing folksy girl-next-door into sexy poet laureate for the feel-good generation. "Jewel has made her mark by being the first folk singer to regularly take the stage with her guitar in four-inch heels and a miniskirt," was the gushing report in 'Vogue' magazine. Her similarities to Madonna do not end with the way she directs her career. She even had a stormy love affair with the Material Girl's former husband, Sean Penn. The pair started dating in 1995 when Penn split from actress Robin Wright, now his second wife and the mother of his two young children. Penn gave Jewel the break she needed when he invited her to write a song for the soundrack of his film 'The Crossing Guard'. He also directed the video for her song 'You Were Meant For Me'. Jewel's advisors carefully crafted their budding star into a sex kitten. The girl who once professed she needed lessons to apply make-up was soon being primed by make-up guru Kevyn Aucoin, who tidied up her "innocent-but-sexy" look by highlighting her bee-stung pout and clear, green eyes. Then she trimmed off her remaining puppy fat with a watermelon and vegetarian diet and traded the dippy-hippie clothes for designer couture. She drew gasps from the audience, and ended up on front pages throughout America, when she arrived at the 1997 Grammy Awards wearing a $20,000 Versace gown that left nothing to the imagination. " I didn't know it was see-through," she later protested. 'Entertainment Weekly' summed up her new look as "Davy Crockett and Versace duke it out on the tundra", and 'Time' hyped her on its cover as "Pop's New Goddess". But back in Homer, a tiny fishing hamlet 400km south-west of Anchorage, the re-making of their small-town girl caused consternation. School teacher Brenda Dolma, who taught Jewel until she was 13, says: "I looked at the pictures and I thought, oh dear, girl, what have you let them do to you? We thought she'd gone too far." Jewel and her 48-year-old mother, Nedra Carroll, now live in a $4.5 million mansion in San Diego, California. But with the hits come the writs. Last November Inga Vainshtein, Jewel's first manager and the woman who discovered her performing at a coffee house, filed a $15.5 million lawsuit for breach of contract and loss of earnings against mother and daughter. The writ contends that Nedra forced Vainshtein out of her manager's role. It also alleges that Nedra ran her business ideas past a psychic channeller who "purportedly evaluated the advice by communing with some entity referred to as 'Z'." Caryn Brottman Sanders, one of Vainshtein's lawyers, says: "Its difficult to manage someone when your business decisions are being made by an ancient spirit. Let's just say my client believes she has been very wrongly treated. She discovered Jewel when she had nothing. Jewel has risen from obscurity and abject poverty to become one of the most famous and successful recording artists of the decade. Her commercial success is thanks to my client." Last month Jewel counter-sued Vainshtein, claiming that she acted illegally as "an unlicensed talent agent" and never had a legal and binding manager's contract. Problems also arose for Jewel on the set of 'Ride With the Devil', which Ang Lee puts down to her lack of acting experience. "I sort of underestimated the difficulty of putting her against experienced and talented actors," he says. Others, however, talk of her prima donna behaviour. One source told 'Entertainment Weekly': "She would do really distracting things. It was real 'Viva la Diva' time." But Jewel refuses to apologise for her transformation or her popularity. "I don't want to waste myself on what's frivolous," she says. "When I look back, I really don't think I'm going to care that I sold 10 million records or what people said about my poetry book. I don't feel successful, I feel accomplished. The part that doesn't sit well with me is that it seems a little arbitrary. I went from being homeless to being rich in four years. And granted, I am blonde and I am talented and thus the world feels it should pay me a lot. I am just damn thankful. And sure, sex sells." She believes she has perfect empathy with her legions of fans. "It's so easy to feel alone and to feel you are the only one going through what you're going through. You feel very isolated when you're young. If I can help, that's great. Why can't I be sexy 'and' spiritual?" She even talks of her boyfriend of the past year, rodeo star Chris Douglas, in terms of her sexual appeal. "He's a real guy," she says, "but I am coming to terms with my sexuality. That way kids can go: 'Wow! She's just as confused as I am!' " For Aunt Mossy and the rest of Jewel's family back on their homestead in Homer, the "Jewel phenomenon" is overwhelming, but not unexpected. Mossy laughs: "Jewel's plan was to conquer America. Now she's taking on the world, too. Good on ya, girl!" "She always had a fierce ambition to go with that God-given talent. I remember her looking at me, cool as you like, when she was about nine or 10. She told me: 'I'm going to be a big star, you know.' And I looked into her eyes and I never doubted her for a second, not a single second." For Jewel's millions of fans, mostly adolescent girls who avidly read her homespun philosophy - packed with gems like: "If I could tell the world just one thing, it would be that we're all OK" - her rise from backwoods obscurity is an inspiration. Her Swiss grandfather, Yule Kilcher, left Europe on the eve of World War II and struck out "in search of Utopia". He found it on a mountainside overlooking picturesque Kachemak Bay, at the tip of the Kenai Peninsula where the Cook Inlet meets the Gulf of Alaska. Yule, described by locals as "a tough-as-hell hippie", and his wife, Ruth, raised their eight children, giving them names like Sunrise, Stellavera and Catkin, in a tiny log cabin on 320ha of wilderness where the eldest, Atz, Jewel's father, still lives. Jewel and her two brothers, Atz Jnr and Shane, shared a freezing bedroom. The cabin had no heat, electricity or indoor plumbing - Jewel credits her flawless skin to washing in crystal-clear icy mountain streams. "We'd be canning salmon after school when other kids would be watching television," she says. "You'd get up at five in the morning and there would be frost on your eyelashes. I'd cook breakfast, milk the cows, walk three miles to the road, then hitchhike to school. It was a very poetic existence." Homer (population: 4133) still regards Jewel as its very own home-grown flower child. "She always had an inner drive to succeed," remembers Brenda Dolma. "She would walk through the snow to get to the road. But what you have to remember is that all the other kids from this area did it, too." The ever-expanding Kilcher family was known affectionately as "the Von Trapps of Homer" because of its shared love of music. Aunt Mossy says: "There was always music. We didn't have television so we would all sit around singing. Our family believed that if you played together, you stayed together. Some folk would call us dippy hippies, but music's in our blood. You can't live in a place as wild and beautiful as we do without feeling spiritual and wanting to express yourself. Jewel was raised in a family of musicians and poets. None of us thought her talent would change her. She was just a kid who could sing." But Jewel's parents had bigger ambitions for their daughter. From the age of six, she played with her parents at local bars. Jon Faulkner, manager of the Land's End Hotel which hired them, says Jewel's yodelling always brought the house down. Then, when she was eight, Jewel's parents divorced. She stayed with her father, whom she describes as a "mean" drinker, "out to lunch". Singing was the one thing they had in common. "So I sang my little brains out," she says. "He'd scream and curse and I'd be crying and I'd still sit there and practise." Things got so bad at home, Jewel spent increasing lengths of time with Mossy on her neighbouring farm. "She would hang out here and we would sing and talk and write poetry." says Mossy. "She was always a lovely girl. But she was also a dreamer. You felt she always knew there was something more out there. She had wanderlust in her eyes. She wanted to travel. She wanted to write. And, most of all, she wanted to sing." Jewel did all three. At 16, she left Alaska for San Diego in a battered, blue VW campervan to visit her mother. She worked as a waitress while Nedra encouraged her to follow her dreams and even moved into a van beside her. The two washed in McDonald's toilets and survived on peanut butter sandwiches. Jewel earned $100 a week playing at the now defunct Innerchange coffee house on the beach. She now says of those times: "I read Plato and Kant. I became spiritually aware. I began to believe I could do anything I wanted to do." Inga Vainshtein was at home in Los Angeles when a breathless friend called her. "He said: 'Get down here immediately. There's a girl singing at this little coffee shop and I have never heard anything like it in my life.' " Vainshtein says her jaw dropped when she saw Jewel perform. She contacted Atlantic records president Danny Goldberg, who signed the ingenue to a $500,000 three-album contract. The marketing machine geared up. Cheerful ditties like 'Do You Want to Catch a Cold With Me?' were replaced by earnest love songs such as 'You Were Meant for Me' and 'Who Will Save Your Soul', which became hits. Atlantic spent more than $1 million on an 18-month promotional tour, which promised a singer "who had the wisdom of an 80-year-old, the hope of a four-year-old, the compelling voice of a 20-year-old". Jewel repeated her New Age mantras to anyone who would listen. She told 'Rolling Stone' magazine: "I don't touch alcohol. I am drunk on life." She spoke openly of her belief in angels. To one interviewer, she said piously: "Talent is like newly seeded grass. If it's walked on or if it isn't nurtured, it dies." The 'Washington Post' dismissed her lyrics as "trite and hackneyed", but the CD-buying public, tired of grunge and gangsta rock, liked her wholesomeness and lapped it up. "She worked harder than any artist I have ever known," says Ron Shapiro, Atlantic's vice-president. "And the public just loved her." Jewel played 40 cities in 30 days. She gave interviews from dawn to dusk. Shapiro adds: "We invested heavily. When she finally broke, she broke big." But her success and new lifestyle grates somewhat with Jewel's family in Homer. Her failure to return last December for the funeral of the patriarch, Yule Kilcher, caused dismay. Yule, who was 85 when he died, was considered a local hero. Flags were flown at half-mast in Homer as a mark of respect. Jewel told her family that prior business commitments prevented her from coming. Some worry she may be forgetting her priorities in the pursuit of fame and money. One family member, who spoke on condition of anonymity, says: "There's business and there's family. Jewel should have made the time to come back and pay her last respects to her grandfather. It seems all this fame and fortune is turning her head. She's forgetting where she came from." Aunt Mossy is more restrained. "I won't speak ill of Jewel," she says quietly, "but I hope that she doesn't change too much. I hope she remembers the wind in her hair and the snow at her feet. We haven't seen or heard much from her lately. She couldn't make it back for the funeral because she's such a busy lady these days. That was real sad. There are so many people who want a piece of her time now. I wish she'd keep in touch more, I really do. "The last time I spoke to her properly was more than a year ago. She told me she carries a clam shell from Kachemak Bay with her everywhere to remind her of home. "I know she's still our kid at heart and hope people out there love and respect her as much as we do. Jewel is taking on the world. And we wish her the best. But one day, we hope she comes home to Alaska." " So there it is. Hope you found it interesting :o) By the way she is also on the cover of the magazine, and the caption says "JEWEL - From flower child to material girl" and she's got this red clingy single top with red lace round the edges - looking gorgeous as usual! Thats all for now... Jewelfully yours janadell *^*^*^*the barefoot angel*^*^*^* ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 4 Apr 1999 20:11:12 +0200 From: "Henk Lelieveld" Subject: Concert in Belgium? Hi there, I heard Jewel is giving a concert in Brussel, Belgium 19 april this year. I have nowhere found information on the official Jewelsite, but my friend in Belgium said she'll give a concert. Does anyone of u know if this is real? Henk The tomorow angel ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 4 Apr 1999 14:57:52 EDT From: ABershaw@aol.com Subject: Re: Concert in Belgium? In a message dated 4/4/99 1:38:12 PM, hlelveld@concepts.nl writes: <> Hi, It is not real. Jewel will not be in Belgium on April 19th. MrBB ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 4 Apr 1999 15:44:31 EDT From: JEWELA383@aol.com Subject: Jewel tapes wanted HI, there are a few tapes that i really need so i was wondering if anyone out there had any of these........the superbowl Jewel sang in, the VH1 special with Jewel , Melissa Ethridge and a few other singers and the first episode of Saturday Night Live she was in about 2 or 3 years ago....there are others but i cant think of them right now but anyways if anyone has these i would really appreciate it if you could email me privately with prices..........THANKS!!!! Heather ------------------------------ End of jewel-digest V4 #179 ***************************