Comfort me

Dolly Parton requested it with her wig on. Jay-Z insisted they do it in the bathroom. Bruce Springsteen just wanted to be "petted."

Massage therapist Mary Lundberg -- Mother Mary to traveling performers and their roadies with sore shoulders, backs and feet -- accommodated all the idiosyncratic requests of those music gods.

Hip-hop superstar Jay-Z didn't want to chase his entourage from his dressing room at Target Center, so Lundberg squeezed her massage table into the tiny adjoining restroom. "While he got a massage in the bathroom, his entourage was hanging out in the dressing room playing video games," Lundberg recalled. "He was so appreciative, sincerely thankful."

With her spiky platinum hair, heartwarming smile and fingers of steel, Lundberg, of White Bear Lake, will transform knots, headaches and frustrations into yesterday's news so that the famous can give Twin Cities audiences a better show.

"It's very rewarding," Lundberg said over lunch. "To have Sting give you a big hug and say, 'It's Mother Mary.' To massage somebody like Paul Simon who is just so tired. To be able to really give them -- I'm going to get teary."

Sometimes words just won't suffice to describe the relationship between masseuse and massagee. It's all in the blissful smile and body language.

"She's great," said twinkly eyed country star Gretchen Wilson, reduced to an I'm-so-mellow-I-can't-talk state after a preconcert massage from Mother Mary last summer in Somerset, Wis.

Take it from Chicago promoter Andy Cirzan of Jam Productions, which presents dozens of shows annually in the Twin Cities. He's a big guy -- 6 feet 2 and 225 pounds, he says -- like lots of the husky rock 'n' roll roadies who lift heavy equipment and get too little sleep on tour.

"She can handle them," Cirzan says of Mother Mary. "You've got to be able to put in the elbow grease. She can do everything from the most subtle light touch to deep Swedish massage. I walk out of [her massage] and I'm delirious. That's how I want it to be."

Perks: parking, flowers

For a typical big event at Xcel Energy Center, Lundberg arrives up to four hours early, pulls into a rock-star parking spot inside the arena and unloads her massage table, oils and candles. Where will she be stationed tonight? Her own dressing room? Sharing a space with the touring wardrobe mistress? In a hallway backstage?

"I make it work," said Lundberg. The strangest setting may have been the coat-check room at the old Quest nightclub in downtown Minneapolis for Snow Patrol, she said. "There were hangers all over the place."

Besides country and rock stars, Lundberg has massaged such famous dancers as Savion Glover and Michael Flatley and members of the Lyon Opera Ballet and the Rockettes.

Pay is about $1 per minute -- if she gets hired. Often she shows up backstage at concerts without any guaranteed work. Massage appointments often get canceled because stars or their crew get pulled in different directions.

Despite the unpredictability, there are perks that go with the massage gig. Ravi Shankar gave Lundberg a bouquet of yellow roses in a black vase and she still has the vase. One night she went home with so many flower arrangements from the Rolling Stones' dressing room that she needed roadies to help her load her car. Teddy bears tossed at New Kids on the Block by fans ended up in Lundberg's care. She gave them to charity.

A dedicated music fan, she keeps her massage table in her car and sees live music three or four nights per week. However, when she's on Mother Mary duty at a concert, she might hear only a song here or there because she's often backstage massaging a manager or roadie when the star is onstage.

A Dead end

Lundberg was propositioned once by a household name and has never attended another of his shows. Mother Mary doesn't rub and tell. But she can discern which stars have had face-lifts, wear hair pieces or dye their hair (once her hands were covered with black hair dye after a massage).

But her lips are sealed. OK, she will spin a yarn or two without breaching confidentiality.

Tommy Lee: "The first time I massaged him, he was very gracious. We spoke a little Greek. The last time I massaged him, he'd just gotten out of jail. He was very quiet and reflective. It was a very special time with him; he's very different from the image you see on TV."

Stevie Ray Vaughan: "He came toward me at Riverfest on Harriet Island and he said, 'Mary, I'm having a healing crisis, baby.' "

Dolly Parton: "I massaged her right through her wig and got rid of her headache. She said, 'Girl, you have a gift from God.' "

In 1986, the Grateful Dead invited Mother Mary to Alpine Valley, a huge amphitheater outside Chicago, and she massaged three band members plus two relatives of other band members. The mellowed-out musicians proposed that the masseuse join the band on tour, but rules required the entire band to approve it.

"Jerry Garcia did not have a massage from me and didn't know me at all and voted 'no,' " she recalled. "I was disappointed. I loved the Dead."

Mother Mary had better luck with Johnny Cash and the Carter Sisters. She spent about a week on tour with them in the Midwest in the mid-1980s: "We were sitting in the breakfast nook on the bus and June [Carter Cash, John's wife] is cooking and John is in his navy-blue sleep shirt and his feet were up beside me and my feet were up next to him, and he was just chatting away. He was very funny, very dry wit."

The Carter Sisters were "like teenage girls getting ready for the ball. They would try on five outfits and they were borrowing each other's barrettes and combs and belts."

Then there was that other country legend, the working man's friend Merle Haggard, who suggested to Mother Mary that they start a massage business at truck stops. She passed on that proposition.

Lundberg grew up with six brothers on a farm near New London, Minn. She moved to the Twin Cities to study fashion design at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design. She waitressed at the Black Forest and eventually became a manager at the Coffeehouse Extemporé, a folk-music haven on the West Bank.

She also helped out with catering backstage at rock concerts and saw a need for shoulder rubs for the hard-working crew members.

In 1983, she took classes at the Minneapolis School of Massage and became a licensed masseuse; since then, she has studied with specialists around the country.

Lundberg, 63, does more massages in her office than backstage. She has clients -- unfamous ones such as fundraisers, professors, tri-athletes, a Minnesota Orchestra violinist (and this writer) -- who visit her serene second-story office in the Highland Park neighborhood of St. Paul.

One regular, St. Paul artist Marilynn Taylor, describes Lundberg as caring, curious and sincere.

The nickname Mother Mary came from a stiff-necked Met Center spotlight operator who burst into the catering room and, knowing about Lundberg's healing fingers, requested: "Mother Mary, comfort me." She got his neck unstuck, but the "Mother Mary" nickname stuck.

Taylor, a friend as well as client, thinks there is "definitely something maternal about her. It's like your mom knows when you're hurting or when it's really good."

Stars know her name

"Mu-tha May-ree, Mu-tha May-ree," Cyndi Lauper barks in her Brooklyn accent as she approaches the massage room at Target Center.

Because of her name and her magical fingers, the stars remember Mother Mary. "I can't say there's a massage person in any other town that I'm familiar with who comes to all the shows," said R.E.M. bassist Mike Mills. "It's always comforting to see her friendly face. And she's good at what she does. She's very sweet."