Cidny Bullens on autobiography, Refugees’ CSNY flip side cover, Elton John, ‘Grease,’ more

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Goldmine spoke with singer-songwriter and now author Cidny Bullens about his new Chicago Review Press memoir TransElectric: My Life as a Cosmic Rock Star with a foreword by his long-time friend Elton John, who wrote, “I would never have known that Cidny was so troubled with who he wanted to be, his identity. That night he told me that he wanted to transition to a man, I just cried and cried and cried. I finally kind of understood.” His story covers years in the recording studio with Dr. John and others, on the road with Elton John, singing on the Grease soundtrack, the death of a young child to cancer, his post-transition 2018 marriage to coach Tanya Taylor Rubinstein and more.

Bullens is also part of the musical trio The Refugees with Wendy Waldman and Deborah Holland and they have released a collection of songs called California, a celebration of songs from the mid-1960’s through the early 1970s California music era, and we feature half of the songs from the collection.

Bullens released a new duet with Beth Nielsen Chapman today called “Not with You,” including a video we premiere near the end of the interview article. The song’s debut is ahead of his October 27 Little Pieces album on Kill Rock Stars records.

We end the article with another new song, “451,” by Jenn Vix whose music we have featured in Goldmine before including “You Are a Star” which she recorded with former A Flock of Seagulls drummer Ali Score.

GOLDMINE: Welcome back to Goldmine and congratulations on the new book and book tour. I saw the online coverage of the first day release event.

CIDNY BULLENS: It was a Nashville star-studded affair, standing room only, which blew me away. Lucinda Williams was there. Rodney Crowell did a conversation segment with me. I read and played a little bit of music, then he came up on stage. There were so many people, and I am emotional about it. It hasn’t been an easy road. Who knew what the world would be like eleven years ago when I transitioned? The book is getting great feedback, and this release was just a week after being in New York doing a fundraiser for the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund for kids. The connectivity with the book is starting to resonate with so many people. Most of my friends, obviously, are not trans people, just regular folks like you and your family, and the book is crossing boundaries which is exactly what I had hoped for.

GM: Like you, just a bit, I also don’t look the same way as I did in high school. I think I am probably the same person I was when I was nine, and along the way I wanted to be my authentic self. I couldn’t wait to grow up to hopefully be free to be who I wanted to be. I tried to grow up and get out of the house as fast as I could. I think readers can relate to your story, that we all want to be ourselves.

CB: I love that analogy. We all just want to be who we are and for some of us, it’s a little harder path, ha-ha. I do think it is the goal for all people.

GM: I mentioned age nine for me as a determining point in shaping the future goal for myself. In the book you mention an even younger age of three or four, that you wanted to be a boy like your brother and your mother acknowledged that you were more of a boy than a girl, with boy genes. This isn’t a recent development. This is all your life!

CB: Yes, all my life and it’s not just that I wanted to be a boy but that I just really felt like a boy. My mother didn’t force me to wear a dress that often except in social situations where you have to conform a bit more and I understand that. I didn’t want my kids to wear sweatpants to somebody’s dinner party. I used to pray when I would go to sleep that I would wake up in the right body. There was no ambiguity on how I felt, my confusion was what to do about it and what could I do about it. Eventually I said to myself, “What’s wrong with me?” That’s when I went to the New York Public Library in 1971, as a teenager, to find out what was wrong with me.

GM: Your book is a coming-of-age story in terms of gender but also of music. When you were in Cherokee Studios in California and had the opportunity to fill in for Joe Cocker at a Dr. John event, that was incredible and relatable. I also wanted to be part of the music scene in some way, and in my case, writing about and promoting music is where I found my fit. I have been a hardcore music fan since the age of nine in Cleveland where we used to have a weekly television show called Upbeat, like our own American Bandstand, and The Robbs were guests on it, with seven singles which charted below 100, so it was interesting to read about you at The Robbs’ Cherokee Studios, fitting in so well with the musicians.

CB: That is so interesting. Rodney Crowell made me tell that story, too, at the book release event. I did about 25 minutes of my own vignette readings from the book, mostly rock and roll readings and in the end how I transitioned. I sang a couple of songs that had to do with it, “Little Pieces” and ended with “Boxing with God.” I discussed playing drums with Ringo Starr, which I thought was the big deal. Then Rodney led me on, “And then what happened?” Then I told the story that I was on stage, and somebody took Joe Cocker off the stage, threw me his microphone, and I started singing. I didn’t expect that moment or chance. I don’t think anybody knew who I was. All of a sudden I had the vocal microphone in my hand with Eric Clapton playing congas, Ringo Starr playing drums, Steve Hunter playing guitar, Dr. John on piano, Bruce Robb of The Robbs was probably playing organ and more musicians, and then there was me, an unknown friend of the Robb brothers, fetching coffee for the studio musicians and maybe singing a group backup vocal on some song because I hung out there all the time. So, I sang a 12-bar blues song, making up lyrics as I went along. I walked off stage and got a record deal, which I didn’t end up taking because of my naivete. Later is when I met Elton at Cherokee Studios, at an event where I wasn’t invited, just like I wasn’t invited to the Dr. John party with Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr and Joe Cocker, but I walked in, because I knew the Robb brothers, I was always there, and they always welcomed me. Those are the bells and whistles of my book in the early days. The book is a rock and roll memoir with another thread.

GM: You fit in there and you certainly fit in on Elton’s Rock of the Westies tour which I saw in Cleveland when “Island Girl” was all over the radio in 1975 and “Grow Some Funk of Your Own” would follow. You are so happy in those photos, and you should be. 

CB: Rock of the Westies was my first tour with Elton, and I was ecstatic to be there with the biggest name in music in the mid-1970s and all those musicians. Elton personally took me under his wing. Those memories are just indescribable. 

GM: When I first interviewed you, it was for the 40th anniversary of the Grease film and soundtrack. Now it’s time for the 45th anniversary, so let’s go back there again.

CB: When I got off the road with Elton, I was in my apartment, writing songs. I was getting more opportunities with Cherokee Studios singing backup vocal on records. I didn’t have any of my own music out yet. I got a call from Bob Crewe, who was one of my mentors and one of the first people to pull me off the street and into the studio. He called me and said, “You are going to get a call from a guy named Louis St. Louis who is the supervisor of an album for a movie soundtrack.” I assumed it would be for background vocals because that is what I did at that point. Louis called me and soon after that I went to a big studio in Los Angeles. I walked in the door, and they said that they would like me to sing the lead vocal on a song. I thought to myself, lead vocal? OK. I believe the first one was “Freddy My Love.” They wanted an innocent young girl voice. I could conjure that up at the time. I had a very pure, non-deep, non-vibrato voice that I could offer. My natural voice was an alto, much deeper, not quite as deep as it is now with age and testosterone, but it was a deeper voice, even as a young person. Bob Crewe expanded my capability to sing higher and in a different range, which I was both grateful for and loathed at the same time. I did that on “Freddy My Love.” Louis said, “That’s great. How about singing another song? It’s called ‘It’s Raining on Prom Night.’” I did and then he said, “Great, we have one more song.” It was a duet called “Mooning” with Louis, so I ended up doing three lead vocals on the Grease soundtrack. It was just that magical time when things just kept coming to me. Also, during that time, I remember getting a call from Van Morrison, asking me if I could sing backup on a tour, and I couldn’t do it because I had something else going on. 

GM: You mentioned Van Morrison. At Peaches Records & Tapes in Cleveland in 1978 we were playing the Grease soundtrack, Van Morrison’s Wavelength album and your debut album Desire Wire. It was an exciting and fun time. We had three Peaches stores spread across our city and suburbs.

CB: I went to one of those stores when I was doing a tour of Peaches stores around the country. I remember going to one in Atlanta and cutting the ribbon and one in Richmond, Virginia promoting Desire Wire.

GM: You told me recently that Somewhere Between Heaven and Earth was your finest album. It is. When Susan Cowsill lost her brothers, just months apart, Barry due to Hurricane Katrina and Bill due to health reasons, she recorded an album named Lighthouse, and I loved her honest emotion. It was my favorite album of that year. I feel the same about Somewhere Between Heaven and Earth. The emotion that you deliver about your late daughter Jessie is so deep and you sound wonderful on that great tribute album. Lisa Burns, who I first wrote about a few months before Grease in 1978, recently released the four song EP My Boy when her son Dylan passed away and felt that four songs was all the tribute she could emotionally handle at that time. Your full album approach on Somewhere Between Heaven and Earth works very well, with the title song beginning with the line, “I cursed the night I watched you slipped away.”

CB: Thank you for that. The song “Somewhere Between Heaven and Earth” is the first song that I wrote, about three-and-a-half months after Jessie’s death at age eleven from cancer. The song emerged from my being one day. I hadn’t picked up my guitar in all that time. People who have lost a child know what I am talking about. I don’t diminish any other losses, like parents and siblings. That is devastating. Losing my child at such a young age was earthshattering and soul shattering. It reverberates to this day. I sat down to play my guitar to feel something that was familiar, and the song just came out of me, both words and music. I was horrified that I had just written a song about the death of my daughter, but the key was that there was this tiny spark of light or life, just knowing that this was something that would keep me alive. The Elton John, Bob Crewe and Dr. John days were all magical in another way. This was different. I didn’t think about magic after the death of my child because I had so much grief, but the way that album came to be was magical, as I feel I had nothing to do with it. I was just a conduit for whatever was supposed to come through me. I played the songs for just a couple of songwriter friends to see if I was off the rails and they offered encouragement. The inspiring part of it was writing these songs for me as a process of grieving the death of my child. I wasn’t doing it for a record deal, an audience, reviews or for my career. When it was all done, then I thought, maybe this could help somebody else who has lost a child. I met with Rodney Crowell to ask him to help me to do something with these songs. It led to the album coming out on Danny Goldberg’s Artemis Records as a charity record for a cancer foundation. Then it was released worldwide. For the next twelve to thirteen years, I got to go around the world and play these songs for bereaved parents, at colleges and universities, at sociology classes, oncology students, associations and I did regular gigs too. It made me an artist again. It brought me back from just being a songwriter, from what I call my failure at being a rock and roll star and going to Tennessee to become a Nashville songwriter for five years, to becoming a recording and performing artist again in this crazy life.

GM: Let’s talk about your other daughter, Reid. I certainly can understand your reaching out to her about your major life changing decision. I believe I would also reach out to my daughter Brianna before I would make a life changing decision like that, too. I shared with her and my wife Donna about Reid making a joke when you told her that you were contemplating transitioning and she said, “Nobody’s going to know the difference.” It brought a smile to my face.

CB: Reid was extremely supportive. I don’t think I would have transitioned if she would have said, “No, you can’t do that.” She had already been through so much in losing her sister. When a parent loses a child, they change. You are not the same person. Reid not only physically lost her younger sister, she also lost her two parents as they were. I had a whole separate grief for Reid. It is her story, not mine, but you have to navigate through a lot. We are very close. She was the only person who I felt I could go to. She had her own family by that time, too. She was almost thirty. She said that yes, she knew how I felt and said that I had to at least start looking into this and do something about it. After I started physically transitioning, she had to adjust to the new reality of me and that was difficult for her. There are always tentacles to these things. She went through the phase of losing her mother, too, on top of her sister. She knew she wasn’t truly losing her parent, but she had to go through a period of adjustment when I started to physically change. She has always been there for me.

GM: You wrote about having your FTM (female to male) surgery here in Florida a little over a decade ago. That is when Florida felt like diverse melting pot, long before the recent political and legal challenges we are seeing happen here and elsewhere across the country.

CB: The changes are frightening. Florida just passed the new law known as the “Protections of Medical Conscience Act.” As long as DeSantis is governor, I will not step foot there. With the new law, no health care provider has to give health care to anybody who they don’t accept, basically, by religion, by race, by gender, by sexual orientation, or what they determine would violate their conscience. If I were to go to Florida and get in a car accident and I am in an ambulance, and EMT discovers that I am a trans person, they can say, “Nah. I don’t think so” and don’t have to treat me by law. What happened to HIPAA? I know it is being challenged in court. The inhumane hate of the administration of Governor DeSantis’ Florida keeps me away from you, your family and others there. It is getting to the point where my life is in danger. I live in Nashville, a blue city in a red state, the epicenter of LGBTQ+ and civil rights. My wife Tanya and I have had a lot of discussion about whether we should leave a red state. We are both from blue states. She is from New Mexico, and I am from Maine and Massachusetts. We are here because it is our geographic midpoint between our families. We met here because we have a creative and active community here. Our friends in the arts community are active here. We discuss whether we stay and become even more active. We all know about the Tennessee Three and our state legislature and the two Justins which brought out so much protest. The young kids give me hope. My brother is in Florida, and I have many friends there and it’s a shame with what is going on with anti-black history and “Don’t Say Gay” in the schools. Teachers and librarians are being vilified. My book will be banned, and I know your daughter could no longer teach the way she would want to and be a champion for the students like she was when she lived and taught there. You can’t say the word freedom and start banning things and disallowing education. My hope for Florida is that the young people like Maxwell Frost in Congress will help to turn things around there. We are at a volatile time, a tipping point, determining which way we are going to go. My wife and I can walk down the street to go to a restaurant and you can’t tell that I’m a trans man and that she is married to a trans man but if you know who I am, and I am a public figure to a certain extent, then I’m a target. I, along with many like me, have to look over my shoulder to see what will happen next. My wife Tanya is a very optimistic person and is also a fighter who just refuses to give in to negativity or the dark side. We shall see how the protests turn out.

GM: Speaking about protests, your new Refugees album California ends with a protest song, “For What It’s Worth,” one of three Stephen Stills compositions on the collection. It begins with a Stills composition I didn’t know “You Don’t Have to Cry,” from the debut Crosby, Stills & Nash album, which I didn’t purchase as a kid and hadn’t heard on the radio either. It is a wonderful opener with Andrea Zonn’s violin and your mandolin.

CB: I love that song. I played that album until the grooves started disappearing. “You Don’t Have to Cry” was one of my favorite songs from that album and from that era. The part that I sing on our recording is the part I sang in high school when I was singing along with the record. The whole new California album is a great vehicle for The Refugees with our unique three-part harmony, even with my voice that has changed a bit. My tenor and tone are still the same, just a bit lower and rougher, and I like my voice much better now. We blend together as a trio in a magical way. The California sound of the mid-1960s and early 1970s was so powerful and is part of the cell of all three of our beings. We celebrate the bands with their songs and who they were culturally and musically.

GM: You included Buffalo Springfield’s biggest hit.

CB: With “For What It’s Worth,” I felt it is still so significant. As a transgender person with the gun violence that we are facing everywhere, with hate and division, it is an important song. There are different circumstances from the past but similar feelings are going on. Wendy, Deborah, and I all equally felt it was important to record this song.

GM: I did buy Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s Déjà vu album growing up, which opens with Stills’ “Carry On,” and was also used as the flip side of Nash’s “Teach Your Children.” The harmonies on “Carry On” are so fun.

CB: Totally! That’s the word. They are fun and fantastic to sing. 

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

Fabulous Flip Side: Carry On

A side: Teach Your Children

Billboard Hot 100 debut: June 6, 1970

Peak position: No. 16

Atlantic 45-2735

GM: There are also two Brian Wilson compositions on the album.

CB: Wendy’s first suggestion was “We’ve got to do ‘Good Vibrations’” and I said, “Are you kidding me?” Deborah and Wendy parsed out all the parts on the album and made the vocals true to the original on “Good Vibrations.” They did the preproduction while I focused on writing my book. For “Good Vibrations” and for “Sail on Sailor,” the other Beach Boys song we included, it was a challenge. 

GM: On “Sail on Sailor,” the rhyming four times in a row is relentless.

CB: Doing it was a treat because I really got to dig into it and do those lines. That is one that Deborah requested for the album. Stephen Stills and Brian Wilson songs comprise just half of the album and Goldmine readers can hear more about the making of the album at The Refugees podcast.

GM: Now you have just released the duet single with Beth Nielsen Chapman, “Not with You,” where you sing, “Love is a big chance to take.”

CB: Yes, that’s the new single released ahead of my album Little Pieces, coming out on Kill Rock Star records. Beth, who is a dear friend of mine and is a wonderful singer-songwriter who I know you and many of your Goldmine readers know, wrote the song “Not with You” with me, recorded it and made a video to go with it. It may be the first mainstream duet of a trans man and a regular woman, ha-ha. We love singing together. She was also at my book release event in Nashville. “Not with You” is about my wife Tanya, where love is off the table with most people, but not with you, honey, I’m going for it! I play acoustic guitar on it, Mark T. Jordan plays keyboards and Stanton Edwards plays electric guitar, who plays with The Wallflowers. Thank you so much for your interest in my book, music, and life. You have always been there for me and have always been interested in what I am doing. You have always come through as a wonderful ally and friend. I really do appreciate that over the years. An ally like you is needed more than ever. I am now calling for allies. I was with my two oldest grandchildren recently and the fourteen-year-old is an out lesbian now. She marched in the pride parade with her mother. The oldest is sixteen. I said to them, “You can’t be silent. You have to be active. You don’t have to go and bang down doors, but you have to be vocal and active.” I think the kids today are going to save us. I think there is no going back. I may be dead by the time its better, but I hope not. We need all the allies we can get. You are as important as I am in this fight. I love you and send my best to your wife Donna and daughter Brianna, too.

In our Cidny Bullens interview, he mentioned recent book banning. This also triggered a burning inspiration for the singer-songwriter Jenn Vix, whose music we have shared at Goldmine, for her new video single “451.” She sings, “Why do we obey all that they say? Why let them control our minds? Question their motive and we’ll find the lie.”

Related links:

cidnybullens.com

therefugeesmusic.com

wendywaldmanmusic.com

deborahholland.net

The Refugees 'California' podcast

bethnielsenchapman.com

killrockstars.com

eltonjohn.com

Goldmine 2020 Cidny Bullens interview

Goldmine 2018 Cidny Bullens interview - Grease 40th anniversary

jennvix.band

Fabulous Flip Sides is in its ninth year

goldminemag.com/columns/fabulous-flip-sides

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