Cher The Land

A brief ode to the pop goddess in the wake of her 80th birthday

May 26, 2026

It’s April 1979, and my sister and I are spending our spring break in New York City visiting our father, who has recently returned to his (and my) hometown after living for over a decade in the comparative cultural desert of Ann Arbor, Michigan.

We’re having such a fantastic time visiting local museums, landmarks, delicatessens and record stores that I don’t even really mind when our planned visit to Shea Stadium gets rained out. Hell, even riding the subway is an enormously entertaining adventure for us.

One afternoon, we exit the train and come face to face with an enormous ad for Cher’s new Take Me Home album, which features the singularly-named singer posed in some kind of “Sexy Valkyrie” ensemble. Under the words “Take Me Home,” some smart-ass has scrawled “Looking like THAT?!?” in black magic marker. My sister and I laugh hysterically over this, and will continue to do so for decades to come…

As tickled as I am by this tart dose of NYC waggery, I have to admit that I’m actually quite enamored with “Take Me Home,” her new album’s hit title track. I’m currently at the peak of my original disco infatuation — it’ll be another few months before sheer glut of dance-oriented hits and Saturday Night Fever-inspired fashions will make me consider that the “Disco Sucks” crowd may actually have a point — and “Take Me Home” definitely delivers the late-seventies disco goods.

Mildly funky, smooth yet propulsive, and so cinematically (or at least telegenically) arranged that I can almost envision the variety show choreography that will go with it, “Take Me Home” is also infused with the classic essence of Cher (Cheressence?) — i.e., she totally commits to the song without ever taking herself too seriously. Besides, it’s been six years (nearly half my life at this point) since Cher has had a Top 10 hit in the US, and there’s something really comforting about having her back on the radio…

Long before I ever really cared about music, I cared about television — and after Hee-Haw and The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour was the first primetime TV show featuring musical performances that I was ever obsessed with. My sister and I had no idea that Sonny and Cher were a pop duo enjoying an early-seventies comeback after their long run of sixties hits had dried up, but it didn’t matter; their chemistry, energy and willingness to be extremely silly struck enough of a chord in our six- and four-year-old selves to keep us riveted to the screen. The show’s musical numbers were just incidental fun, as far as I was concerned — and yet I retain a vivid memory of the stir it caused at the swingin’ bachelor pad shared by my dad and his friend Ted when Cher sang “Half-Breed” on the show…

My parents were the first couple I knew who got divorced; Sonny and Cher were the second. This made oddly perfect sense, as I already kind of saw them as my parents’ cathode-ray counterparts. Sonny, like my dad, had a brilliantly analytical mind yet often led with a goofy sense of humor; Cher, like my mom, had long, dark, center-parted hair, a quick way with a wisecrack and an almost palpable need to figure out who she was outside of her marriage.

And just as we never “took sides” with our folks (who, much to their immense credit, never asked us to), my sister and I remained loyal to both Sonny and Cher after their split, watching both The Sonny Comedy Revue and Cher’s self-titled solo variety show with equal degrees of commitment; they were, after all, part of our “family”. We were predictably overjoyed when they reunited in 1976 for The Sonny and Cher Show, though even we had to ultimately acknowledge that it never really re-captured the spark of their original TV pairing. Cher’s personal life — including her brief marriage to Gregg Allman and her ensuing pregnancy — was making more headlines than the show at this point, which didn’t ameliorate the awkward “divorced but back together onstage because the audience demanded it” vibe between her and Sonny at all.

(Side note: One of the more surreal lunchroom conversations I remember from elementary school revolved around the question of who the father of Cher’s unborn child actually was. I didn’t know the Allman Brothers from Lynyrd Skynyrd, but I was sure I’d read in the Sunday papers that it was Gregg Allman. For some reason, however, my friend Peter was absolutely convinced that it was Neil Diamond.)

Despite being two years younger than me, my sister developed an interest in records long before I did. The first album she ever owned was Sonny & Cher’s The Two Of Us, a 2-LP repackaging of their albums Look At Us (from 1965) and In Case You’re In Love (from 1967) released by ATCO in 1972 to cash in on the success of The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour. (By this point, both Cher and the duo were recording for Kapp/MCA.)

We wore Side One of that album raw, but I don’t recall ever hearing the other three sides; the first side’s 19-minute trip from “I Got You Babe” — still one of the sweetest, most heart-melting pop-duet paeans to love and loyalty ever waxed — to the soul-crushing breakup pleas of “Baby Don’t Go” seemed to uncomfortably mirror my parents’ story, and always left me too depressed to want to listen to the rest of the record…

Much as I dug “Take Me Home” at the time of its release, I didn’t buy it; my record budget was severely limited in those days, and at that point I was far more interested in adding Chic and The Commodores to my collection than I was in stocking it with figures from my childhood. It wasn’t until the 1980s that I really developed a greater appreciation for Sonny and Cher, both together and individually.

The penny dropped first with Sonny, once I learned that he’d been credited with co-writing “Needles and Pins” and had also penned songs for Sam Cooke, Larry Williams and Don & Dewey; getting introduced to Mott The Hoople’s searing cover of Sonny’s “Laugh At Me” didn’t hurt, either. But Sonny was out of the spotlight and thus easier to reconsider and reclaim; at the time, Cher was still seen as a walking, talking, Bob Mackie-draped punchline — thanks in part to Black Rose, her 1980 hard rock collaboration with then-boyfriend Les Dudek’s band of the same name, and the absurd, quasi-New Wave cover image of her flop 1982 album I Paralyze — which didn’t exactly make an image-obsessed teen like myself want to have anything to do with her.

What changed it all for me, Cher-wise, was her acting. After surprising critics with her solid supporting performance in Robert Altman’s 1982 film Come Back to the the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, Cher appeared in four more good-to-great flicks over the next five years: 1983’s Silkwood, 1985’s Mask, and 1987’s The Witches of Eastwick and Moonstruck, the latter of which remains one of my favorite films of the era. In every one of these films, Cher more than held her own playing self-possessed and self-reliant characters — tough, cool, thoughtful women who, much like herself, had made some bad decisions in the past but were determined to get it right going forward. (I must admit that I’ve never seen her other 1987 film, the legal thriller Suspect, though in fairness I don’t think too many other people have, either.) How could you not root for characters like that, or the person so effortlessly portraying them?

And if I didn’t particularly dig the records Cher made during her enormously successful late-eighties return to the music biz, I still gave her credit for leaning hard into the absurdity of it all. If she wanted to belt out a Diane Warren-penned rock anthem while straddling a battleship cannon and being lustily howled at by a horde of horny sailors, then god bless her — the video for “If I Could Turn Back Time” was certainly funnier and way more over-the-top than anything Madonna was doing at the time.

But when word got out that she was opening her 1989 concerts with a cover of Gregg Allman’s “I’m No Angel,” that’s what put me on Team Cher for life. Turning a recent hit by her notorious ex-husband into an unrepentant commentary on her own past? That’s strictly Badass Territory, right there…

Of course, by then I was already doggedly digging through her sixties and seventies back-catalog, exulting when I finally tracked down clean 45s of what Robert Christgau memorably termed her “Swarthy Trilogy” — “Half-Breed,” “Dark Lady” and “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves” — and marveling at such new-to-me gems as 3614 Jackson Highway, her woefully under-appreciated 1969 album with the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, on which she gave the likes of Buffalo Springfield, Bob Dylan, Otis Redding and Dr. John the full Cher treatment…

Throw in the fact that Cher was a tremendous sartorial influence on Jeff and Steven McDonald of Redd Kross — she gets name-checked multiple times in our book Now You’re One of Us: The Incredible Story of Redd Kross, including the explanation of how some record-store riffing on the I Paralyze cover inspired the title of their Third Eye album — has scored Number One singles in seven consecutive decades (along with selling over 100 million records), has long been a staunch LGBTQ+ ally, and has never been remotely shy about calling out the festering piece of shit currently occupying the White House and his bootlicking enablers, and it all adds up to my kind of pop culture icon. In light of all that, I can even forgive her for popularizing the use of aggressively Auto-Tune’d vocals with “Believe”.

The woman alternately known as Cherilyn Sarkisian, Cheryl LaPiere, Bonnie Jo Mason, Cher Bono and Cher Allman turned 80 last week, and her continued existence is just as worthy of celebration as that of such late-May-born heroes as Bob Dylan, Pete Townshend and Paul Weller. Happy (belated) Birthday, Cher — long may you walk on gilded splinters.

What’s your favorite Cher jam? Feel free to leave a title or link in the comments!

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