STORM LARGE
A rock star who blows away punk fans and yet croons with symphony orchestras. A memoirist who serves up her gentle soul and peppers the narrative with F-bombs. Storm Large is an artist who wears her heart in your face.
Storm Large — born Susan Storm Large — will come to The South Orange Performing Arts Center with her band, The Boners, Dec. 19, for “Holiday Ordeal,” her take on the season from the perspective of her tempestuous life. The show is being promoted as “jazzy holiday cabaret with a twist.”
Growing up in Massachusetts with a mother who struggled with mental illness, Large avoided her unsettled home, opting instead for the teenage thrill rides of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. “I felt like a turtle ripped out of its shell, thrown into a sandstorm,” she says. “Just everything hurt. Everything was so painful and so raw — or so brilliant and so bright and so exquisite — it killed me. Everything killed me. I felt too sensitive to be alive.”
One day, after she had overcome a heroin addiction in the late 1990s, she was called up by a rock band called Louder Than God to sing Pat Benatar’s “Heartbreaker” onstage. And just like that, she found her calling amid a delirious crowd.
“I felt pure glory,” she wrote in her 2012 memoir “Crazy Enough.” “The stuff in me that made me feel ugly and alone, sloppy and crazy, I scooped out of my insides and screamed it into the faces of strangers who ate it up, spat it back and howled for more. These people plugged into the nobody me, this big nothing girl, and got some kind of epic charge out of me, the me who was too busy screaming and burning to hide.”
The cover of Storm Large’s memoir, “Crazy Enough.”
Large went on to sing with a number of bands and created a one-woman show that she turned into her memoir. Along the way she earned national attention as a finalist on “Rockstar: Supernova” in 2006 and as a wildcard choice on “America’s Got Talent” in 2021. While living in Portland, she joined the world-touring Pink Martini, debuting with the National Symphony Orchestra.
Pink Martini “really elevated my profile,” she says, “and gave me kind of an artistic validation that has lasted me like almost 20 years now, because people are like, ‘Oh, Storm Large isn’t a monster with Tourette’s who’s gonna attack people.’ ”
As a hard-charging rocker, Large may seem like someone who would skewer the ubiquitous treacle of the holidays. However, she says her show “is very sentimental, but it’s sentimental based in reality.”
“The holidays are always an ordeal,” she says. “Traveling. What to buy somebody. How do you deal with your drunk brother who’s gonna say something awful to your new boyfriend? Or how do you deal with the poignancy of sweetness when you’re saying goodbye to an older relative, and it might be that last time. So it’s the ordeal of all those things … Grownups become kind of magical-minded, and people who hate each other will still sit and share a meal with each other, and kindness is kind of the rule.”
Wearing a Santa cap and a form-fitting red dress onstage, and cracking dirty jokes, Large is a singular messenger for holiday joy. She said she has a “strange gland” that identifies seemingly random songs as Christmas songs.
Although the young Large didn’t get the Hallmark stereotype of warm-and-fuzzy parenting, she says she has some lovely Christmas memories. “Recovering from childhood trauma, the most important thing is to have one charismatic adult give a shit about you — enough to make an impression where you’re: ‘Okay, wait, maybe I am valuable. Maybe I’m not a piece of shit.’ ”
STORM LARGE
She recalls that as a child, one Christmas Eve, she was frantic that Santa would get burned coming down the chimney, but her grandfather calmed her down and instructed her to put out cookies for Santa and carrots for his reindeer. On Christmas morning, he handed her a soot-covered note written in red ink:
Dear, Stormy. Thank you so much for worrying about me, but you never need to worry, because I’m magic, and fire cannot harm me. But you’re sweet to worry … P.S.: Next year, could you give apples to the reindeer? Because carrots make them fart.
“Christmas and Hanukkah and Kwanzaa and the solstice — they are all around the same theme of light overcoming darkness,” Large said. “Not conquering or getting rid of it, but just a glimmer. And that’s always been my kind of thrust in everything that I do, because I never imagined that I would live this long and have this much of a career and do this well.”
After spending her early life looking for love and acceptance, Large flipped the script through her work, finding her way to bring love — a fierce love — to her audiences.
“A lot of times, more often than not, people weep, even if it’s a funny show,” she said. “They’ll just cry, like ‘I needed that.’ And people who’ve read my book or seen my play, they want to talk about their experience with mental illness and addiction and family and loneliness, and really it’s just healing.
“Ninety-five percent of my time in this world is being peeled open to strangers so they can feel like someone understands them, so they will love me and trust me, and I can love and trust them, and they can love and trust themselves, and they see themselves in a story, in a song. That is some weird witchy work … It’s like a very disorienting, dysregulating existence. But I’m really fucking good at it, and it is how I am of service in this world.
“I keep thanking (audiences) profusely — more than usual — because it is a radical act of optimism right now to just throw your body in with a bunch of other people to be entertained by some like slutty, trucker-mouthed, rock ‘n’ roll person talking about love and feelings and hope. And, you know, some dirty jokes. But it’s a beautiful thing that I get to do, and it’s often met with a beautiful response.”
Storm Large will perform at The South Orange Performing Arts Center, Dec. 19 at 7:30 p.m. Visit sopacnow.org.
For more about her visit stormlarge.com.
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