Crow's time on stage with Cashmere had lit a fire that hadn't died. In her heart, she didn't want to just teach music -- she wanted to pursue it as a career for herself. An acquaintance suggested she contact Jay Oliver, a St. Louis musician who had made a name for himself as a producer of commercial jingles, industrial themes, corporate music and demos.

Oliver, who now lives in Los Angeles, ran a thriving recording studio in the lower level of his parents' home in Creve Coeur.

Crow called him and he invited her to come by his studio. He remembers "a really sweet, very innocent girl" with effortless charm, good looks, and a brilliant smile. Although Oliver found her to undeveloped as a singer and musically naive in terms of the roots of rock 'n' roll, the two shared a jazz background and immediately hit it off.

Under Oliver's tutelage, Crow threw herself into an intense learning period. Within months, she had improved so rapidly as a vocalist Oliver began using her as a singer on jingles. Her first was a commercial for a back-to-school spot for Famous-Barr.

The local band P.M., which was signed to Warner Bros. for a time, was also auditioning for a female back-up singer. Oliver remembers the hardcore work ethic Crow applied to win the spot: "She took all the tapes home, learned them, the next day came in and kicked a--."

Although Crow enjoyed teaching, she considered her day job a temporary one. She asked Oliver if it was a smart move for her to quit her teaching gig and do music full-time. He said yes. "She was coming along so fast, man, this chick was going somewhere," Oliver said.

She worked eight hours a day for months on nearly every aspect of her craft -- learning her music history, perfecting her voice, performing with P.M., and recording a number of jingles for the likes of McDonald's and Toyota.

During a vacation, Crow visited a friend in Los Angeles who lived about 45 minutes from the city, in Redondo Beach. She was psyched by the sunny, party climate of the West Coast, and talked excitedly of moving there one day.

After a love relationship back in St. Louis soured, Crow decided to make the big move to LA to pursue her music career. She went home on a Tuesday, and told her parents she was leaving on Sunday.

"I just knew that I was going to have to make the leap and pursue the dream, or resign myself to not pursuing it," she says. "I just felt that was such a heavy weight to have to live with, wondering what would have happened."

In 1986, when Crow was 24, she lit out for Los Angeles, without any cynicism or pre-conceived notions. "At that point in my life I was really not jaded at all," she would later recall, "and was more wide-eyed and full of wonder at the possibilities."

But the city held immediate lessons for the small-town girl. She moved four times in six months, and at least one of the moves served as an eye-opener to the fact that this place wasn't Kennett.

She rented a house from an ad in the newspaper, and wound up living with a couple of strangers. It was a nightmare, her first taste of city girls who did drugs and ran much wilder than Crow. "They were actually nice people," she says, "but I hadn't been exposed to that, and to the fast pace of having people in and out of your house."

She moved into a one-room apartment, 500 bucks a month, a lot of money back then. Matt Collier, a Kennett native and Mizzou graduate who also lived in LA at the time, recalls the first time he visited Crow there. Serious musical equipment was scattered everywhere: keyboards, P.A., synthesizers. He knew at that point there was a heck of a lot of "something" to Crow's music thing.

Just beyond the door of her struggling, anonymous life, Crow could clearly see the great chasm between the haves and the have-nots, the winners and the also-rans. She could look out her apartment window and see Jaguars and Mercedes driving down the road. Huge displays of wealth. And she found it intimidating, as she was going through her money. "That's part of the plight of living in Los Angeles and part of the dues-paying, being bottomed-out and working really hard waiting tables," she says.

Crow might have gone to LA naive, but she was not unprepared. Jay Oliver had helped her put together a professional demo tape, filled with her commercial jingle work. She got a list of all the top session music producers in LA and inundated them with tapes and photos.

It was a pro package, and Crow was relentless in marketing her talent. If people wouldn't take her calls, she'd deliver her tape in person. She finally landed her first studio gig, word spread, and soon she was doing four to five jingle sessions a week.

It was during one such studio session that she overheard that Michael Jackson was auditioning for back-up singers for his upcoming 1987-88 "Bad" world tour. Crow, fueled by that naivete that knew none of the industry rules, crashed the audition and won a slot.

It was a high-visibility gig that took Crow around the world and kept her on stage for 18 months, done up in big blond hair and engaging in several bump-and-grind duets with Jackson every night. It was a gig that also landed her on the cover of the National Enquirer and other tabloids. Among other things, she supposedly was carrying Jackson's love child.

Crow found the spotlight more fearsome than appealing. At home in Kennett, the tabloids were camping out on her parents' front lawn. In LA, they were following Crow everywhere.

But the tour also introduced Crow to the music industry, and opened doors. After it ended, Crow did more session work with Sting, Rod Stewart and Don Henley. She was writing then as well, signed a publishing deal with Warner/Chappell in 1989, and eventually placed songs with the likes of Wynonna Judd while trying to get her own solo career off the ground.

During a back-up recording session, one of Crow's demo tapes made its way to A&M. The major label liked what it heard, and signed her, but the initial sailing was not smooth.

Crow recorded an entire album, but the highly polished pop sound left both Crow and the label cold. The recording was shelved, but Crow was determined to work, and keep on working, until she got it right.

With a recording contract but still no record, Crow started jamming with a group of musicians who hung out at producer Bill Bottrell's funky and homey recording studio in Pasadena. Dubbed the "Tuesday Music Club," or "TMC," the loose gang included the former David & David duo of David Baerwald and David Ricketts, as well as Crow's then-boyfriend, keyboardist Kevin Gilbert.

It was a casual party atmosphere in the studio, with all the musicians trading up instruments and collaborating on jams that began turning into songs. Out of those sessions, Crow emerged with the debut album, "Tuesday Night Music Club," which would eventually introduce her to the world.