One recent night, Liza Minnelli and her husband, sculptor Mark Gero, went out to dinner with a friend. When they got home, the friend telephoned with a question for the singer.
Have you ever had a hit record?" asked Gene Simmons, formerly of Kiss.
"No," came Minnelli's response.
People think she has, Minnelli says, but "New York, New York" was a hit for Frank Sinatra, and "Cabaret" was a hit for Louis Armstrong. "It was way before I did the movie; I was doing `Charlie Bubbles' at the time, the first movie I did, with Albert Finney."
Simmons, who obviously didn't phone just to flatter, continued, "How did you get so far in your career without a hit record?"
Hard work -- going around singing and building an audience. And it's 1:30 in the morning. You got something in mind?"
Simmons did. He thought she should sing "today" music and he should represent Mininelli in her recording career, which he now does. He introduced her to CBS Records president Walter Yetnikoff, who signed her to Epic Records. The Pet Shop Boys' manager happened to see the signing memo and suggested they produce a couple of tracks on her album. A meeting was arranged.
So, while singers from Linda Ronstadt to Steve Miller switch on albums from rock to standard ballads, Minnelli is going the other way and trying out rock. "Results" is her first album in 12 years that isn't a Broadway cast album or a live concert.
She had heard "West End Girls" by the Pet Shop Boys. "I started to buy their albums. The Song that hooked me was `Rent.' It was this strange, beautiful little song, so bittersweet and ironic. It was almost like a Noel Coward lyric."
The first song the Pet Shop Boys (Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant) brought to her, she recalled in a recent interview, was "Losing my Mind," from Stephen Sondheim's score for "Follies." As they worked on recording it, they found out Minnelli knew more about rock than they'd expected, and she discovered they knew a lot about the Rodgers and Hart era.
"I kept saying, `I want to do your music.' They said, `You've got to leave us open if we find something that's good for you.' I said, `It's up to you completely.'"
There's a dance beat, which Minnelli calls "heartbeats," on the tune. "I sing it with anger," she said. "It's different from singing it as blues but just as valid. Obsession runs many courses and a lot of layers. After you get sad and sorry for yourself, you probably get angry. I do."
"Losing My Mind" already is a hit in Europe. She'd been busy with concerts, Broadway, TV and films and hadn't been yearning for a hit record. But when the album shipped gold in England, "I was like the `new artist of the week.' It was hilarious. It was wonderful." The album was released in the United States on Tuesday.
The Pet Shop Boys didn't want Minnelli to change her emotive singing style and stopped her once for a retake when she pronounced love "luv" as she thought a rock singer should.
"I had such fun working with them," Minnelli said, "just the three of us in this little tiny recording studio." They cut the album with Minnelli singing eight songs to completed tracks. "Rent" and "Tonight Is Forever" were cut live, with strings. "It's the first time they'd done that. They were so amazed. The musicians play, I sing and we go to dinner."
They worked 10 days. Four more sessions were done later while she was in London during her four-month tour with Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr.
"We'd sing in Royal Albert Hall and I'd come off stage and say, `Bye, guys, I'm going across town and work with the Pet Shop Boys.'" Some nights they went along and listened.
"I was going between two different styles of music. What it showed me the most is how alike they are," she said.
"As a dancer and somebody who moves to music, the Pet Shop Boys' tracks are so interesting. On top of that you have this almost floating, almost Gregorian melody and very poetic words. I'm passionate about lyrics."
"Don't Drop Bombs," which is a story about a relationship, not a war, will be the second single, and "So Sorry, I Said," about a woman who realizes she shouldn't be so self-deprecating, will be the third.
"Twist in my Sobriety" isn't about drinking. "A girl is talking to a guy, saying, `You're a little left turn in my straight-ahead life and that's all you can be. Don't get too serious.'
"Tanita Tikaram wrote it and performed it almost like a folksong. We do the psychotic version of it," Minnelli said.
"We were listening to the playback and Chris said, `Wouldn't it be funny if we said Liza with a Z on this, like a rap.' Neil said, `That should be heard. Half the people who buy this record won't have heard that.' I was amazed that they knew it." They were referring to Minnelli's 1971 TV special, "Liza with a Z."
In her only reference to mastering substance abuse, Minnelli cheerfully said she doesn't know what her next show-biz project will be. "I don't know and I love it. It kind of goes with my one-day-at-a-time life."