by Lucy O'Brien
Back in 1980, Madonna was hitting her stride as a musician. She moved in with Gilroy and his brother in an old boarded-up synagogue in Queens, and joined their band. Her dancer’s rhythm meant that she had a knack for drums, so for the first few months she played drums, occasionally darting out front to sing. They spent hours rehearsing, and she worked hard, picking up chords on guitar and learning enough to piece together songs. Excited about this new direction, she felt that rock music was the ideal place to express her individuality. Her dancer friend Angie Smit was recruited on bass. The foursome played a few gigs, but the chemistry wasn’t working, partly because Madonna felt ill at ease sharing the spotlight with another attractive female. Plus Smit was more of a dancer than a committed musician, and soon began to lose interest in the band.
She was replaced by bassist Mike Monahan, and when drummer Gary Burke took over, Madonna was promoted to what she now felt was her rightful place as lead singer. It was inevitable that the band couldn’t contain her—not with the Gilroy brothers writing all the songs and choreographing the moves. After some heated discussions, during which an exasperated Dan Gilroy shouted, “You’re all naked ambition and no talent!” (an accusation that went deep), Madonna left with Monahan and Burke to form the short-lived Madonna & The Sky. Tired out by his day job and frustrated by Madonna’s impatient criticism, Burke dropped out. Luckily for Madonna, her old friend from Michigan, Steve Bray, had just moved to New York and was looking for work. “She had a set of songs ready to go and at the same time needed a drummer. Naturally we started working together,” he said. When the musically confident Bray joined the band, Madonna swiftly moved into her next incarnation as part of The Millionaires, and then Emmy, evolving into a ska-meets-early-Pretenders sound.
She and Bray rekindled their romance, but he realized early on that being Madonna’s boyfriend was a difficult job. “Some people are very upfront and some are, like, you’ll find out eventually you’re not my boyfriend and that I’m seeing twelve other people. That was more her approach,” he said. “I learned…not to count on her in that area.” Although disappointed, the modest, self-effacing Bray sensibly decided to concentrate on the music he could make with her. It was a challenge, though, when she announced after a few months that the band would now be called Madonna. Bray protested that it sounded too Catholic. “And is everything about you? I realized far too late that, yes, it is all about you.”
Despite her bold move in the naming department, Madonna was floundering around. Though desperate to make it, she hadn’t evolved a distinctive style. She was yet to come into her own as a songwriter. And she didn’t really have a clue about the business. She sensed that she needed a strong professional eye, someone to help her focus, to bring out that emerging sound. And that person was Camille Barbone.
IN THE SPRING of 1981, Emmy were rehearsing on the tenth floor of the Music Building, a scruffy conglomeration of rehearsal rooms on West 39th Street. The only recording studio in the building, Gotham Records, was owned by a thirty-year-old Italian-American, Camille Barbone. She was a dark-haired, energetic self-starter, qualities that Madonna recognized in herself. At the same time, Madonna was a little afraid of the older woman, and wanted to impress her.
On their first meeting in the elevator, Madonna turned to Camille and said with a conspiratorial smile: “Did you do it yet?” Camille was amused. “She did that a lot—used non sequiturs to get people’s attention. Was she alluding to sex? I don’t know. She was always very flirtatious with me,” recalls Camille. “She knew I was a gay woman. She’d work it.” Madonna invited Camille to a gig she was playing at Max’s Kansas City, and after Camille didn’t show up, Madonna stormed into her office, haranguing her. Camille made sure she went to Emmy’s next concert, and was “blown away. She sparkled, in a very street way. Not fairy nymphet. It was hard and guttural and in-your-face. She very much typified the New York music scene.”
Camille offered to be her manager, but on one condition: that she ditch the band. Madonna was overjoyed. Although she felt loyal to Mike Monahan and Steve Bray, her career was more important. They were less than impressed with the news, but within a few months, she managed to win them back, and the musicians remained on friendly terms, even giving her advice.
The next thing Camille did was to move Madonna into a new apartment and give her a $100-a-week salary. “Madonna had a lot of peripheral trash going on just to get what she needed to do her job,” recalls Camille. “And she had a very hard time letting go of all the peripheral stuff. She was a street-savvy kid who’d pick up someone to go home with if she was hungry and needed a meal. That’s how she survived. She was very upfront about it. She justified her behavior, saying she wasn’t being victimized because ‘I let them take advantage of me.’ That’s a contradiction in itself. She was living in a hovel in a dangerous part of town. I wanted to give her a safe haven, because in a lot of ways she seemed wounded.”
After Madonna’s apartment on West 70th Street was broken into, Camille found her a new place, off Riverside Drive, and from this point, the two became inseparable, a kind of double act. It is interesting that it took a woman to see Madonna’s real potential. “I was one of the few female managers in a totally male industry. Men looked at Madonna as someone they wanted to bed as opposed to sign. That was a difficult situation to overcome—my whole vibe in managing her was, you don’t have to do that anymore. Let’s do it based on the fact that you have a unique personality, you’re an artist, and you have a lot to offer,” says Camille. “I brought her into the mainstream music business in a way that she didn’t have to fuck for. I brought her credibility. Word got around that someone was investing money in her, someone with a studio and contacts. As a result, within the industry, they began to take her seriously too.”
Like Madonna, Camille had worked hard to establish herself despite the old-boy network. The daughter of a New York City policeman and a housewife, Camille began her career at major labels before starting up her own Gotham management company and studio in the late 1970s. She remembers going to the monthly meeting of the East Coast Managers’ Conference in the New York theater district. “I walk in and there’s seven old men with pot bellies, smoking cigars. They were all managers for killer acts. It wasn’t just the old-boy network, it was old. I must have been twenty-four years old and 110 pounds. I didn’t wear a bra. No one looked at my face, just my chest. That was the first and last meeting I went to.”
Together, she and Madonna made a formidable team. In the early 80s there were very few successful mainstream female artists. Women were still seen as a novelty, and not taken seriously as long-term investments. This presented a considerable obstacle, but Madonna was the first of a new breed, fusing punk attitude with a high-glam sexuality and taking it one step further into the pop mainstream. “My role models were people like Debbie Harry and Chrissie Hynde, you know, strong, independent women who wrote their own music and evolved on their own,” Madonna said. “They essentially weren’t marketed, produced, or put together. They weren’t the brainstorm of a record company executive…Debbie Harry gave me courage.”
She took many of her early cues from Harry, a fact that clearly irked the Blondie frontwoman. “It should have been me!” she exclaimed years later, when Madonna was at the peak of her stardom. But in a sense, Harry had paved the way for Madonna. In the mid-70s, when Blondie were starting out, they were subject to an unofficial radio boycott in the United States. “An aggressive female frontperson had never really been done in pop,” she said. “It was very difficult to be in that position at the time—it’s hard to be a groundbreaker.”
With her bee-stung lips and cartoon peroxide style, Harry’s image was an ironic comment that celebrated the tradition of glamorous blonde while sending it up. She was the first Warhol-style pop-art blonde in pop music. Madonna said later: “I was hugely influenced by Debbie Harry when I started out as a singer and songwriter. I thought she was the coolest chick in the universe.” Harry’s response was: “
Hmmm. I haven’t thought of myself as a ‘chick’ in some time, but the universe is a good reference.” Madonna was to take that 50s Hollywood-blonde schlock one step further by welding it to a self-driven 80s global marketing. Dan Gilroy recalled how Madonna once heard someone say that the camera loved Debbie Harry. “That made a huge impression on her. She thought, ‘Yeah, the camera loves me too.’ Something clicked there,” he said. When she met Camille, though, that camera-friendly image was still a long way off.
“Most of the obstacles were broken down because Madonna was so unique. But you couldn’t tell that from her demos, only if I marched her into a meeting,” recalls Camille. “I realized early on that was the way to do it. She understood that. We made a deal. We always made a good impact.” Camille knew it was important to surround Madonna with strong musical collaborators. Was she a gifted musician? Camilla pauses. “Gifted? No. She was a meat-and-potatoes musician. She had just enough skill to write a song or play guitar. She had a wonderful sense of lyrics, however. She read pretty impressive books and that helped her lyrics-writing. But more than anything it was her personality and that she was a great performer.”
Madonna was given the opportunity to jam with session musicians like Jeff Gottlieb and David Frank, until the new lineup gelled around keyboard-player John Bonamassa, bassist John Kaye, drummer Bob Riley, and Jon Gordon on lead guitar. Madonna responded well to being given professional musicians with sturdy equipment. “If you gave this one the tools, she used ’em. As a manager you can spend a lot of money on someone and nothing happens. But she used it all. She’d pick their brains. They’d rehearse four times a week, and they went on stage tighter than hell. She didn’t have to worry about a thing musically. We took that stupid little guitar away from her. She had a mike in her hand and the freedom to improvise with her dancing.”
ONCE THE group was up and running, Camille stipulated that there were to be no affairs between band members. Riley fell victim to Madonna’s manipulativeness when he had an affair with her, got fired, and the preferred candidate, Steve Bray, was installed in his place. Having the talented Bray in the band undoubtedly added resonance to Madonna’s music, but it also meant there was constant tension, an irreconcilable pull between the genres of rock and dance.
This became apparent that summer, when she recorded her first Gotham demo at Media Sound, an old converted church on 57th Street that had once been home to the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók. It was also a favorite with many pop artists, from Frank Sinatra to The Beatles. Now twenty-three years old, Madonna felt she was finally on the way to realizing her dream. To Jon Gordon, a young aspiring producer and musical director of the session, committing her ambitions to tape was a challenge. “It was not the most organized session I’ve been involved with,” he remembers. “There was a certain amount of pushing and pulling between Madonna and Camille, regarding the stylistic direction of the music. Camille saw her more in the mold of Blondie downtown New Wave rock, while Madonna was at that point becoming very influenced by club and rap music. She and Camille didn’t see eye to eye, and there was a lot of back and forth.”
Camille disputes this, saying, “I often get the blame for the rock thing. But that’s what Madonna was doing when I signed her up. She didn’t want to change that, because she wanted to be Chrissie Hynde. The dance thing came by accident, and Steve Bray had a lot to do with that.”
In preparing for the session, Madonna gave Gordon tapes of songs she had been writing, and they would work on preliminary arrangements. She spent hours in Camille’s rehearsal studio, where she had access to the instruments. Gordon recalls that Madonna wrote most of the melody, lyrics, and chords herself. “She’d bang around on guitars, the organ, and the drum machine to get a structure, and then she’d put lyrics on top. She used all her personal resources. The tapes were good. They conveyed the essence of the song. She had a sound—and it was my job to translate that into the bones of an arrangement for the band. I didn’t have to invent something out of thin air.”
Over the next few weeks they recorded four songs, with Gordon acting as a kind of musical referee. At one end, there was David Frank—“a frighteningly talented individual who’d come up with amazing sounds”—and at the other, pared-down funky groove-merchant Steve Bray. “I wish I’d been better able to utilize that,” sighs Gordon. “I was more a rock ’n’ roll traditionalist at the time. I was trying to hold it all together.”
Of the songs, which make up the Gotham tape, each inhabit, as Gordon puts it, “their own domain.” There was the ska-influenced pop of “Love on the Run,” and “High Society,” which is more meditative and orchestral. “I was trying to model it on the T. Rex song ‘Get It On (Bang a Gong).’ It had a lot of odd sounds. We rented an electronic sitar for the occasion. And Madonna’s scratch vocal take ended up being the one we went with. It captured the energy of the moment.” Over the years many have criticized Madonna’s vocal ability, saying she is a weak singer. Gordon disagrees: “Technically, of course, there’re people who can sing rings around her. But she could grasp a song and present it in a catchy and intelligible way. She was very good at making her vocal limitations work for her. She’s a strong interpreter and she doesn’t over-embellish things.”
Another song they recorded was “Get Up,” a dance-oriented track that at one point included a rap by Bray. “There was a battle over how this one was going to sound—it represents where Madonna was trying to go,” says Gordon. The closing track, “I Want You,” sounded like Phil Spector on acid. “I was trying to make it sound like a big hit single and failed miserably,” he laughs. Despite the artistic disputes, Madonna had a clear idea of what she wanted, even if she wasn’t sure how to get it. “We were all taking direction from her,” he continues. “She was open to suggestion, but she’d speak up very quickly if she didn’t like the way things were going. I was a means to an end. ‘Gordie,’ she called me at the time. ‘This part isn’t working, I want it to be more like this.’”
Madonna’s band began to play regular gigs, from club venues like Cartoon Alley and The Underground to Max’s Kansas City and U.S. Blues on Long Island, as well as the college circuit. Slowly she was building up a following. “There was a group of fourteen-year-old girls who started following us around. I’d say it was a core group of four or five girls—they were the original wannabes,” remarks Gordon.
Madonna’s appeal lay in her earthiness, the sense that she was a normal pretty girl. Even though she had her hip New York devotees, when she started out, Madonna attracted a mainly teenybop crowd of enthusiastic girls. The early 80s fans were responding to “honest-to-goodness blood, sweat, and lip gloss” rather than some remote goddess. “Her hair was brown, all spiked up, and she wore the crucifix and accessories. She was a little plump, she wasn’t slender or chiseled in the way she became later,” says Gordon.
Camille remembers that the female fans were the key to Madonna’s initial breakthrough. “An element that was so important to her success was that women didn’t resent her. Normally, when women see their boyfriends riveted on a girl, there’s resentment, but the girls were riveted too. She emitted a kind of bisexual vibe. She was open and honest in her songwriting. No frills. They’re not mind-boggling concepts—they’re ones that every woman can relate to easily. That was why it was so easy to get the girls to dress like her—they were watching every move she made.” Girls started to imitate her, wearing a scarf in the same way, fishnet stockings with pumps, errant costume jewelry, or paint-splattered chinos. “They wanted to be like her because she was the free spirit in their minds. They admired what she was possessed by.”
The other factor that had everyone stunned was the way she turned the crowd into voyeurs. “She had absolutely no self-consciousness at all,” asserts Camille. “It was like what people do when they’re in a bedroom by themselves singing in front of a mirror. But she wasn’t in her bedroom, she’d do it in front of a whole audience. We talked about it a lot. She pretended her audience was a Peepin
g Tom. They weren’t there, they were sneaking a look. That’s a very unique way of thinking about performing!”
Early on, Madonna set up the subtext of pleasuring herself, planting the seed in people’s minds that what she was doing was somehow illicit and forbidden. Relatively innocuous sexual moves would be reinterpreted as lustful and daring, because of what was going on in her psyche. She exhibited a kind of narcissism that drew people in, because it was about relishing the self, and self-pleasure. This approach spilled over into her everyday life and her drive for stardom. Ken Compton, her boyfriend at the time, was a little bemused when she once asked frankly: “So what d’you like best about me?” Gordon remembers Madonna as being “clearly obsessed with herself and her career.”
But, despite her egotistical approach, Madonna could be overwhelmingly charming. “If it’s possible to be fearless and vulnerable at the same time, she was,” says Camille. “It was the thing that made her unstoppable. And very disarming.” There was a strong attraction between the two women, and Camille felt that Madonna would have made the relationship sexual to exert greater control. “I resisted it because it would’ve been my doom…and it was my doom anyway, because the relationship we had wasn’t physical but in every other way it was completely sexual.” Madonna would openly flirt with her, and the two had passionate arguments that were fueled by unexpressed sexual tension. It was all Camille could do to concentrate on the job.