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Fueled By Family

Singer Lisa Lisa Opens Up About Her Mother’s Strength, Her Secret Fight With Cancer And Why Family Still Comes First

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Throughout her four-decade career, Lisa Velez — better known as Lisa Lisa of the 1980s hit group Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam — has been driven by two things: a love of performing and her family.

Velez’s mother, Monserrate López, a single parent, raised all 10 of her children in a three-bedroom apartment in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, then a hub for working-class Puerto Rican families.

“We all slept in bunk beds,” Velez, 58, who is the youngest, recalls. “And if you wanted to do anything, you had to move fast. If you sat at the dinner table and got up for any reason, your food was gone.” 

The apartment came with one bathroom, although eventually a second was built inside one of the bedrooms. As Velez got older, she figured the only way to get any real time in there was to be the first one up — she often woke up two hours early to use the bathroom, and, more importantly, to do her hair and makeup. 

Despite tight living conditions, it was a happy household. Velez’s mother, a teacher’s assistant, wasn’t paid much, but as a Puerto Rican immigrant, the job helped with her English. All the kids worked as well. Growing up, Velez babysat, bagged groceries at the supermarket and did other people’s laundry at the neighborhood laundromat. In between school and her jobs, she’d put a cap on the sidewalk and sing for spare change.

At home, her mother always had music playing, from Latin to Motown. She attended church regularly, putting Velez in the children’s choir, which is where Velez first realized she wanted to be a singer, upon getting her first solo at the age of 6. While performing “Ave Maria,” Velez looked over at her mom sitting in the pew, tears streaming down her face.

“In that moment, I knew that’s what I wanted to do: sing, make my mother proud and give her the life she deserved.”

After passing her audition, Velez enrolled at Julia Richman, a performing arts high school in Manhattan. At night, she snuck into the clubs looking to make industry connections.

In the early ’80s, a friend introduced her to Mike Hughes, who would go on to become the drummer for Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam. At the time, a group of producers was putting the act together and looking for a lead singer. At her audition, one of them handed her the music to “I Wonder If I Take You Home,” which later became the group’s first hit single. Velez landed the job on the spot. Freestyle — a new kind of music that was a blend of Latin and hip-hop set to electronic beats — was on the rise. Velez was a perfect fit.

Knowing the odds of a new band becoming a success, Velez’s siblings were against it. “‘Go ahead and try,’” she recalls them saying, “‘but you need a real career to fall back on.’” 

It was her mother who encouraged her. “She said, ‘If this is what you want to do, you should give it your all and do it.’”

Beating those odds, “I Wonder If I Take You Home” made Billboard’s Hot 100 and topped its Hot Dance Club Play charts upon its 1985 release, when Velez was just 18. Other hits from the group’s first album included “All Cried Out” and “Can You Feel the Beat”

Even as she quickly rose to stardom, she was terrified to quit her day job as a salesgirl at Benetton. 

“I signed a deal but I didn’t get any upfront money, and I didn’t know what would happen,” she explains. “I knew if I lost that job, there were still bills that needed to be paid, and I couldn’t do that to my brothers and sisters, so I kept working there. Finally, the store manager called my label and said to them, ‘You gotta get her out. There are crowds of people coming into the store just to see her.’”

Her mother didn’t approve of everything Velez did. At 21, she wanted to marry her then-boyfriend, John Yulfo. “My mom sensed it. She kept telling me I shouldn’t do it. She said, ‘I don’t trust him, I don’t like how I feel around him and, most importantly, you don’t know what he really wants.’ I married him anyway. I wanted to prove I was a grown-up.”

The honeymoon ended quickly. He tried to control her behavior and resented her career, pressuring her to pass on the starring role opposite Eddie Murphy in “Coming To America,” which she did. The couple divorced three years later.

The troubled marriage was nothing compared to a different struggle she was privately battling at the same time: a breast cancer diagnosis, specifically, ductal carcinoma. She told no one, not even her family. She was on tour at the time and convinced her doctor to let her do chemo on the road, discreetly hiding treatment packs under her clothing. Her signature teased hairstyle came from trying to hide bald patches. Makeup covered the eyebrow loss. 

“I didn’t tell the band because I was scared they were going to take this from me. I wouldn’t be able to work, and I’d stop making money,” she says. 

By then, Velez was receiving regular paychecks, which she handed over to her family. 

“It wasn’t much, but it took care of half the apartment and the bills and put food on the table. I didn’t tell my mom [about the cancer] because I didn’t want to scare her. She worked so much and my brother and sisters — we all worked so much. I was able to help take that burden off them and let them actually live their goals,” she says.

She even kept it from Toni Menage, Velez’s new handpicked backup singer, who became her confidant and closest friend.

She recovered, but concealing her condition took its toll. 

“I was sleeping a lot, and the guys would be like, ‘What’s wrong with you? Are you pregnant? We can’t have any pregnancies here.’”

Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam released their second album, “Spanish Fly,” in 1987, featuring the singles “Head to Toe” and “Lost in Emotion,” both of which hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and Hot Black Singles chart. They released their third album, “Straight to the Sky,” in 1989 and their fourth, “Straight Outta Hell’s Kitchen,” in 1991. Velez and her bandmates decided to go their separate ways that same year. 

Over the years, Velez kept performing. She also took the role of the lead character’s mother in the Nickelodeon show, “Taina,” the first season of which was filmed at Universal Studios in Orlando. Velez also decided to play her own mother in a film about her life, “Can You Feel the Beat: The Lisa Lisa Story” which premiered on Lifetime earlier this year. 

“We were doing auditions, and Toni was like, ‘You should do it — no one can do it better than you,’” Velez says. “I was like, ‘OK, I can do it,’ but I was nervous as hell. They did the hair and makeup, but once they put on the eyebrows, I tell you, she appeared.” 

The set, filled with replicas of the apartment and family photos on the wall, almost gave her a panic attack.

“When I stepped onto that set, I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to see life through my mother’s eyes. I need to represent her correctly.’ I was so emotional, but it ended up being a kind of therapy.”

Velez’s mother died of complications of Alzheimer’s in 2010. By then, Velez had two sons with a former partner who is now a friend and co-parent. The boys were young when their grandmother passed away, but they had a brief chance to know her.

“My kids are my biggest accomplishment,” Velez says. Following in his mother’s footsteps, one is a self-taught musician who also aspires to pursue a music career. Today, they live on Long Island, and most of her siblings are in the tri-state area. 

“Holidays are a bill,” she laughs. “I have 37 nieces and nephews.” 

She still performs with Menage, who is now Velez’s music director and manager. In celebration of the 40th anniversary of “I Wonder If I Take You Home,” they’re  on the “Take You Home” tour through November, having just played Fort Lauderdale in early August. Says Velez, “All I want to do is be on stage with a live band and do it as long as I can.

“My mother always said, ‘You gotta love what you’re doing.’ And music has always been everything to me.”