When Cher attempted to blend in with the rock group Black Rose]

By 1980, Cher was one of the biggest successes in music. A pop icon, television mainstay, and Las Vegas headliner, she was reportedly pulling in around $300,000 a week. Her name and face were instantly recognizable in entertainment.

She’d done it all — except front a rock band, stalk the stages of sweaty clubs and make hard rock record. At 44, that was what she wanted more than anything.

It wasn’t an entirely unlikely ambition. The idea wasn’t completely out of character. Cher had first found fame in the 1960s as half of Sonny & Cher, the duo she formed with Sonny Bono. With hits like “I Got You Babe” and “The Beat Goes On,” they became fixtures of mid-’60s pop while projecting a deliberately off-center public image that set them apart from their peers.

Sonny & Cher circa 1966. (Image credit: George Wilkes/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

“You know, ‘Cher’ has so many connotations for so many people,” she said in 1980. “It’s like, ‘How could Cher do rock ’n’ roll?’ Most of the people that we have now are too young to really remember when Sonny and I started. Even though our music wasn’t called rock ’n’ roll, we were pretty outrageous.”

For her latest reinvention, Cher decided to erase her own name. The result was Black Rose, a short-lived hard rock project that deliberately kept Cher’s involvement out of the spotlight in an effort to see what the music could do on its own.

She said, ‘Hey! I didn’t invite all you people down here for a jam session. This is for my project, dammit!’”
— Les Dudek

It started in 1979 at the Rainbow Bar & Grill on the Sunset Strip. Guitarist Les Dudek — best known for his work with the Allman Brothers Band, including the lead electric guitar parts on “Ramblin’ Man” and “Jessica” — was there when he heard that Cher was putting a band together.

“One of my player buddies said, ‘Hey, did you hear Cher’s auditioning some players for a new project?’” Dudek recalled in a 2001 interview with .

Dudek arrived to find the room bustling with musicians that include Stephen Stills and keyboardist Mike Finnigan, who had played on Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland. The players quickly fell into a groove — until Cher walked in and changed the tone immediately.

“We got in there playing and turned it into a big jam session and Cher stopped it,” Dudek said. “She said, ‘Hey! I didn’t invite all you people down here for a jam session. This is for my project, dammit!’”

Dudek was impressed by her grit. By the end of the day, she had convinced him to sign on as lead guitarist.

“I said, ‘Hell yeah, I’ll help you do it!’” recalled Dudek, who soon found himself in the role of her boyfriend as well.

Cher, and her rock band Black Rose poses for a portrait in Los Angeles

The photo on the back cover of the Black Rose album made it clear this was a band effort. (Image credit: Aaron Rapoport/Corbis/Getty Images)

Taking the name Black Rose, the group rehearsed and played small Los Angeles clubs without leaning on Cher’s celebrity, testing whether the music could function outside the frame she’d spent two decades building.

Cher was signed to Casablanca Records, which agreed to release the project under those conditions. Her image was minimized: she didn’t appear on the front cover, and only surfaced in a group photo on the back of the sleeve alongside Dudek, Finnigan, Ron “Rocket” Ritchotte, Warren Ham, Trey Thompson and Gary Ferguson. With her hair cut in a punkish shag, she was barely recognizable.

Inside, the album leaned toward late-’70s polished rock — eight songs written in part by heavy hitters like Carol Bayer Sager, David Foster, and Bernie Taupin, shaped by producer James Newton Howard into a slick, guitar-forward AOR sound.

On paper, it had the components of a crossover moment. In practice, it landed in a no-man’s-land. Without internet-era visibility, Cher’s core audience often didn’t realize she was involved. Rock audiences, meanwhile, heard a record that felt too polished to carry much edge. And radio programmers, aware of the secret, tended to treat it less like a statement than a curiosity.

The critical response was blunt. People magazine wrote that Cher’s vocals were “quivering” and “over-mannered,” adding that the album would be improved if it were “rerecorded by the Group with No Singer.”

Cher and Les Dudek perform with their band Black Rose, circa 1981

Cher and Dudek onstage with Black Rose in 1981. (Image credit: Robin Platzer/Images/Getty Images)

Cher, unsurprisingly, took the reaction personally.

“The critics panned us, and they didn’t attack the record,” she told Rolling Stone. “They attacked me. It was like, ‘How dare Cher sing rock & roll?’”

Commercially, Black Rose did modest business—reportedly around 400,000 copies, driven largely by curiosity and word of mouth—but it never broke through as intended.

The group dissolved in 1981.

It was a bad mistake for my music caree I totally lost my identity, but I had a great time.”
— Les Dudek

Still, the experiment didn’t disappear so much as it echoed forward. The guitar-driven framework and harder sonic approach would resurface later in Cher’s career, when she returned to rock-oriented material with far greater success in the late ’80s, including “I Found Someone” and “If I Could Turn Back Time.”

For Dudek, the aftermath was more complicated. He later said his label, Columbia, hadn’t been informed of his involvement in a Casablanca-backed project and reacted accordingly.

“My record company was pissed,” he said. “Most likely, that Black Rose project sealed my fate with my record company.”

He was dropped soon after.

“It was a bad mistake for my music career,” he reflected. “Even though I have no regrets whatsoever about being with Cher… I totally lost my identity, but I had a great time.”