Content area
Full text
DANIEL ZWERDLING, HOST: When rocker Mary Cutrufello performs onstage she looks and sounds like sheer joy. Dreadlocks flying, guitars screaming, a smile exploding on her face. And while we'd rather catch her live her new CD is not a bad place to start.
(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP -- MARY CUTRUFELLO)
We're on the road to Babylon UNINTELLIGIBLE
ZWERDLING: These days there is buzz about Mary Cutrufello, as they say in show business. After years playing on the road in tough Texas bars Cutrufello is getting hot. Critics are calling her the next Bruce Springsteen and they're comparing her to a man partly because there aren't many female performers around who transform a stage with Cutrufello's brand of raw passionate rock.
Actually, Cutrufello's stage persona seems about as far from her real life as you can get. By her own description, her main passions as a kid were holing up in her bedroom with a book and watching baseball.
MARY CUTRUFELLO, ROCK MUSICIAN: It was the late '70s. It was New York City. It was the Yankees man!
ZWERDLING: Wow!
CUTRUFELLO: Yeah! '77, '78 -- great teams now, but those teams back there were also teams for the ages and I was a kid, I was in elementary school and I was completely captivated. I was totally one of those obnoxious -- like, batting average, ERA-quoting kids that, you know, would walk into the party and correct people.
(LAUGHTER)
ZWERDLING: You were?
CUTRUFELLO: Well actually, Mickey Rivers' is like hitting .302 today. That kind of thing.
ZWERDLING: You were a baseball dweeb.
CUTRUFELLO: I was total baseball nerd (ph).
ZWERDLING: And then as I heard the story, and maybe it's apocryphal, please tell me if it is, along comes a big baseball strike of 1981 -- not the one a couple of years ago, the one in 1981 -- and somehow you discover guitar.
CUTRUFELLO: The big strike in '81 was just devastating for me. I mean, you know, in a -- baseball took up a lot of my life, you know, it was like the game every night, and the box scores, and trading of baseball cards and all that sort of thing, and all of a sudden there was like none of that.
And...