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The Art of Getting Broken

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"Stuff that should be connecting just wasn't quite connecting," Gleason says. "So we roll along, and Mary becomes more and more despondent about the fact that the thing that she had was this guy who got her. Now she's in this building full of people who don't get her. She was getting a lot of boilerplate."

Finally, in April, as Mercury morphed into Island/Def Jam, Mary and Gleason reached an agreement with the new management. Mary, at her request, would be released from her contract.

"We just realized," Mary says, "that the moment for me on that floor of that building had kind of come and gone. The nice thing about it is we had a really good contract, and they owed me a bunch of money, which they paid, without a whole lot of arm-twisting. They were very straight-up about it. We're like, 'This isn't really the label that we signed with.' And they're like, 'No, not really.' "

It was nobody's fault, really. Neither Gleason nor Mary wants to place blame.

"This," Gleason says, "is the kind of stuff that happens every time two big multinational corporations swallow each other. There was nothing special about what happened to her. There was no conspiracy about 'We're going to screw this guitar player from Houston, Texas.' It's just the inertia and paralysis that sets in…. It's a really helpless feeling. It's like your kid is running into traffic, they're going to get creamed, and there's nothing you can do."

Expectations or no, this was not the way Mary Cutrufello had hoped to get broken.

I get by with a little help from my friends...

After almost a year of hard touring, morning-show radio appearances and endless telephone interviews, the tour support money dried up. Mary's reaction was to take the Mercury payout and go back on the road. She hooked up with the Allman Brothers on their NASCAR-sponsored summer shed tour, road-managing herself to save money. It was a last gasp, wringing one more dream out of the record.

"I really wanted to do a summer tour in support of a big rock and roll record," she says. "It's kind of like one of those dreams you have when you're 13 and playing along with your favorite song on your tennis racket."

And then it was over. She ended up selling about 40,000 records.

"I was emotionally tired. I was physically tired. I was psychically tired. So at first I spent a lot of time doing nothing of a musical nature. I watched the end of baseball season. That was my main concern. I took several months and I just didn't want to engage the music business right then. In the middle of promoting that record I was just running on energy and the excitement of things I'd always wanted to do, and then all of a sudden it stopped and I realized what actually happened."

She was 29 years old. She was burned. And she didn't have anyone to help carry the weight. "I kind of cried on my own shoulder," she says now.

"One of Mary's greatest gifts," Gleason says, "is her ability to be self-reliant. She can road-manage her own tour. She can electrify the whole stage. She can carry a band that's not happening. In this scenario, she had to turn it over to a bunch of other people. She had to trust them with her dream. The check didn't clear the bank. Somebody who's self-reliant tends to take that on themselves."

Mary took it on herself hard. After the Allman tour, she dropped out of sight, retreating to Minneapolis, one of her favorite road cities, to regroup, and to see -- after perhaps too much self-reliance on the road -- about rekindling the kind of romantic entanglements that drive her songs.

"Since I didn't have a band, I figured I'd experiment with that social-life thing everyone's always talking about."

She also thought, for a while, about hanging it up.

"I went through a period when I just didn't know what to do. I was like, damn, this is all about how you walk through the 25th floor of the World Wide Plaza building in New York. It's not about the music. It's about working the label. It's about do the people that are in charge of your career have the good grace of the people in charge of their career. All of that stuff. And I'm like, this is not why I got into this. And I can recall more than one night sitting at my computer looking at grad school Web pages. Man, I was over it. I have a degree from a really good school, maybe I should just go do something else, where the difference between why I got into it and what it really is isn't so big. I love learning, I love the academy, I could probably be happy there.

"But then there's this guitar. I could never wrap my head around the idea of there not being that guitar."

But as tied as she was to the Telecaster, it took more than a guitar to get Mary's feet back beneath her. It took belief.

The day after her release from Mercury, Mary had been booked at a Voters For Choice benefit in New York City, and commiserated with headliner Bonnie Raitt, who had been through label woes of her own over the years. Raitt and Gleason talked while Mary played, and Raitt told the manager to keep Mary plugging, that she could hear the passion, that Mary was "the real thing."

"I heard that," Mary says, "and it kind of put the whole Mercury thing in perspective."

Then, toward then end of the Allman tour, came the call from John Mellencamp's people. His wife had seen Mary on The Tonight Show and wanted her to play her birthday party. That paycheck extended her NASCAR tour another week.

And finally, Mary -- whose touring band had included onetime E Street Band keyboardist Danny Frederici -- got a call from Springsteen himself, inviting her to a show in Cleveland. She was there.

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