Beth in Show

A new-style Melissa Etheridge with hairier armpits and a louder growl? Pink-meets-Divine in a rock 'n' roll trailer park? Ah, forget labels. The only label that makes sense for Gossip's wildly idiosyncratic lead singer Beth Ditto is the Delta Burke label emblazoned on some of her favorite undergarments. "I love Delta Burke panties!" exults Ditto unabashedly. And the only assessment the critics have uniformly agreed on is that Ditto is a human cannonball at the center of the group--a sizzling kettle of fish who defies stereotypes, trills and belts with passion and charms the panties (Delta Burke or otherwise) off an audience.

The woman is radioactive with personality-- and she's not bad in person, either. During our interview at MTV's studios, where Gossip (formerly The Gossip) was shooting a performance, the explosive Ditto burst into snippets of songs from Mary Poppins in between irrepressible outbursts, like suggesting, "You should ride me somewhere on the handlebars of your bike. That would be the best date of our lives. No sexual pressure!"

Instead, we concentrate on our interview-- or try to while Ditto eyes some of the outfits hanging on the wall rack and mischievously urges me to bag them. "I have a hard time not buying or stealing," she freely admits. "If I want something, I have to have it." Already, here was my headline: Beth Ditto is the new Winona! It's not just people's hearts she's after!

"But not anymore," she says, smiling. "The last time was three months ago--a dress from Marshalls. I used to steal more. I mostly stole from Goodwill. You know, 'Can't be bothered. The line's too long. Put it in your purse.'" She says this with such twinkly, charismatic eyes that I decline to call the authorities and go back to our interview.

The Beth Ditto story? "I don't make any plans in my life," she swears. "Things just happen. I feel lucky. I don't think I'm so talented that someone would have come to Arkansas and said, 'You!' like with Beyoncé. Though I think she crowds in too many words when she sings," she adds with a conspiratorial giggle.

Before luck hit her hard, the 29-year-old rocker--birth name Mary Beth Patterson-- was a plus-sized singing wannabe way down in the Bible Belt (in Searcy, Arkansas, to be exact). "There was a time when I was sleeping on the couch of my aunt who was dying of cancer. Then she died and I didn't have anywhere to go. How can you do your homework when that's happening? My teacher took some pity on me... But the whole point of me rambling about that is, I said to my teacher, 'I can't be a singer because I'm not pretty enough and I'm fat.' And she looked at me and said, "Tell that to Nell Carter, babe.' That changed my life forever!"

And suddenly it changes mine! I love that bit of homespun wisdom so much that I convince Ditto that Tell That To Nell Carter, Babe has to be the name of her inevitable memoir.

The teacher, of course, turned out to be spot-on because in '99, Beth and two friends launched Gossip in an Olympia, Washington, basement. (Talk about an underground sensation.) The band gradually developed a cult following, but that big break we all dream about seemed as out of reach as cha-cha heels for Christmas. "We were a band for so long," remembers Ditto. "The first time I ever saw the Yeah Yeah Yeahs was when they opened for us. Then they got signed to a major. We toured with the White Stripes forever and then they were signed to a major. And you look around and you're the only people that haven't been asked! We thought it was never gonna happen, and we started thinking it wasn't that we were too weird, but too shitty."

And then... magic. Having heard their third studio album, Standing in the Way of Control, the gay-artist imprint Twist/Columbia wanted some Gossip. Michael Ellis, who headed A&R for that label, says, "What sold me was not just their music, which is great and edgy, and not just Beth's powerful voice, but Beth's whole persona. She is a force of nature--really intelligent, outspoken, with a strong, progressive morality. Beth is everything a rock star should be." And after success in the UK came the big leap: the Rick Rubin-produced Music For Men, which came out last summer on Columbia, with songs like the pulsing "Dimestore Diamond" ("Homemade haircut/But she wears it well") and the defiant "Heavy Cross ("We can play it safe or play it cool/Follow the leader or make up all the rules"). The result is still hard to label, but it's as fresh and bracing as ever--if a bit more fancy-assed this time.

"If we would think about the money involved," says Gossip's drummer Hannah Blilie, "we'd get depressed. It was so much! 'Cure AIDS or make an album?' We have a sort of punk pride when it comes to our band. It was a weird threshold to cross. But we're really grateful to have had that experience."

"Yeah, it was more names and high profile," agrees Ditto. "But you wouldn't know it in the U.S., that's what's funny. You'd have no idea. I honestly think America has some of the worst taste in the world. It's just not in our culture to take a risk. We're the subjects of a commercial, corporate world. I don't think we know anything about art!"

All right, the big break didn't necessarily translate to massive record sales to knock Gaga off her perch. But it's in concert where Ditto goes off the charts anyway, so it's a good thing they're launching an American tour, starting at Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival on April 17th and closing the month in New York, which ritualistically adores them. On stage is where Ditto strides, struts and dives into songs with the ease of a true champion.

Her humanity, she says, helps her deliver "because it makes me a good performer. I don't care what critics think of the record and I don't care how much it sells, necessarily. But I really care what people at the show are feeling at the moment." She cares enough that when one person is ruining it for everyone else--like the guy at a recent New York concert who was loudly calling her the "C" word--she'll have him chewed up and spit out for brunch. "She's pretty good at turning it around and making them feel like shit," says Blilie, laughing. "But it never turns Oasis-style," chimes in guitarist Nathan Howdeshell good-naturedly.

"I can talk to anybody," Ditto boasts. "I can talk to a lamppost and make it talk back. There are not that many people I don't like. And the more I love you, the more I'll make fun of you, that's another thing." The person she seems to love most is her partner of eight years, Freddie, a bus driver in Portland, Oregon, where Ditto humbly lives. Is it true that Freddie's a man? "F to M," she explains. "It's so West Coast. There's a lot of people who started on testosterone or estrogen, and there's a whole movement of people who want to be trans but not take them. Also, it doesn't matter if you call him 'her' or he 'she.'" So what do we call Beth now? A straight woman? "Yeah," says the longtime out lesbian. "Here I am coming out as straight!" "That'll ruin your career," I snigger, and Ditto says she wouldn't be the least bit bitter if it all ended--she'd be thrilled to work as a hairdresser.

It's not surprising that this unpretentious kewpie doll, straight out of Steel Magnolias via John Waters, is a fetching mass of attention-grabbing personality quirks. She likes corndogs and was thrilled to see a pile of them at the party that Sony threw when they signed the group. "It's my favorite food in the whole world," she exults. "That and green olives."

"Would you want to be a pop tart like Britney?" I ask by way of provocation. "I would eat a pop tart!" she replies, beaming. But in truth, the world needs to know that Beth Ditto is by no means a sugar fanatic. "I don't give a shit about it," she swears. Well, she certainly doesn't live for it. "What's hard for people to grasp is, I don't eat sugar because I don't want diabetes. I eat sugar when I want to, like on special occasions. But my uncle, who was thin his entire life, got diabetes. My brother's the same way. So I don't want it. I have amazing control, it's ridiculous. And I'm the most active human being you've ever met. I have A.D.D. I haven't seen a movie since 1982 when E.T. came out!" No, wait, she did see Sister Act 2, which she's still so crazy about that she's desperate to reach Whoopi Goldberg and tell her. ("She just got a cell phone. I know that because I watch The View.") And there's another daytime star Ditto's been fixating on. She has a zany idea to do a rock opera about Susan Lucci. "The Susan Lucci Hoochie Coochie," I start humming off the cuff, and she chirps, "I just thought the same thing!" Really? Don't tell that to Susan Lucci, babe.