by Lucy O'Brien
She circulated the Gotham tapes around various record companies, but despite a few talent scouts coming to gigs, no one was biting. Madonna became impatient. “When the Gotham tapes didn’t do well, it put a permanent strain on my relationship with Madonna and Camille,” says Gordon. Camille remembers it differently. “She had a great musical collaboration with Jon, but then he got a bad crush on her and that was the end of that. They had a huge fight onstage one night and she kinda shoved him, he shoved her back, but a bit too hard, and she fell. She came offstage and said: ‘He’s gone.’ All right. He’s gone.”
Madonna was never one to linger when a situation wasn’t working for her. “She’s fast. She gets it. She can look at a room and know who the power button is, as well as the person she has to steer clear of,” says Camille. But her ruthlessness was tempered by an intense neediness. Camille felt that the young star “drew out every maternal instinct in my body.” She wasn’t sure if Madonna got the kind of support and protection she needed from her family. “She didn’t care about her dad’s approval, and she had no strong woman figure. Her stepmom never did that for her.” Camille thought that Joan brought her own children up well, but was “less focused on Madonna and her siblings.” As for Tony, “He mourned a long time. She had him wrapped around her little finger. He was a typical Italian dad—hardworking, loved his daughter, would shake his head a lot and pray for her safety.”
As a result, the band became her surrogate family. They would joke and call her “the kid.” “Did somebody feed the kid today? She gets real grouchy if she doesn’t eat.” Although Madonna likes to imply that she’s always been a woman in control of her career, much of her life in those early days was chaotic. Camille found herself taking charge of Madonna’s dental appointments, cleaning up after her, and being on call during the night. “She’d call me at four in the morning: ‘I can’t sleep.’ She’d show up at my door: ‘Take me to a movie.’ If she was hungry, I’d get her something to eat.” At times, she behaved like a hyperactive child: “I had to drive her around after a gig just to get her tired. She’d get overtired, like a cranky baby, but wouldn’t sleep. She didn’t want to miss something. Very often I’d drop her off after a gig at three a.m. and she’d go back out.”
When she got bored, Madonna would delight in mischievous practical jokes, like the afternoon she spray-painted in block letters on Camille’s prize poodles the words “FUCK” and “SEX.” “In her mind, it rinsed off. What was the big deal? It wasn’t anything permanent.” She also specialized in belching at all the wrong occasions—like in a lunch meeting with talent scouts from a top agency. “She’d belch and cackle hysterically. She’d try to get your attention by misbehaving. She wanted you to chuckle and relish it. That stuff didn’t bother me,” says Camille. “It was the sexually exploitative stuff that did. I’d say, ‘Don’t add to the misogyny of this business.’ She was her own worst enemy. I had to convince her that she was entitled to her success, she didn’t need to denigrate herself.”
They understood that playing the bimbo got attention, but no one in the industry was ready yet to take a gamble and sign her. Madonna began to get impatient; she felt her career wasn’t moving fast enough. When it came to renewing her contract in September 1981, Madonna stalled, complaining to Camille that her promise of a record deal wasn’t yet fulfilled. A prestigious gig at the Underground Club had been scheduled for November; Camille threatened to pull it if Madonna didn’t sign. The latter renewed her contract and went on to have a successful gig, plus opening on New Year’s Eve for David Johansen, formerly of the New York Dolls. He escorted her that night to a party for the then-fledgling MTV cable channel, introducing her to many influential figures. Things seemed to be looking up, but behind Camille’s back, promoters and record executives were trying to lure away her young charge with better offers. Sensing betrayal, Camille tried to hold on even harder, and the two became locked into heated rows. This was exacerbated by the fact that Camille started drinking heavily.
“I didn’t have enough juice to get her to the next level. I was falling apart from it. I’d invested so much money. I basically had a meltdown. Because I was losing it, and I knew she was going to go all the way to the top. And it blew my mind.” In retrospect, Camille believes she should have gone to a major manager and cut a deal—“let them carry the ball and go in on the back end. It was my own pride that got in the way. I was young and as headstrong as she was.”
In February 1982, Madonna called Camille and her business partner Bill Lomuscio to a meeting with a high-powered music attorney, Jay Kramer, ostensibly to discuss her future. During the meeting, Kramer told Camille that they were terminating her contract with Madonna, and the singer no longer required her services. Camille and Bill left the room, stunned yet determined to take legal action. This led to years of wrangling that left copyright issues over the Gotham tapes unresolved. It wasn’t until 1992 that Camille secured a modest settlement.
Camille felt hugely betrayed. The years after the split were particularly painful, as Camille struggled financially while watching Madonna’s star rise. She went through an emotional crisis, finding it almost unbearable to hear Madonna’s music on the radio, or see her face in a magazine. She dropped out of the industry for a while, but then came back in the 90s. She now runs her own successful Winedark record label and lives on a ranch in New Jersey. Hindsight has made her wise and forgiving. “I was totally ill-equipped to have that kind of a hit. My philosophy now is, it wasn’t meant to be. I drank a lot then. I needed to mellow out the way she needed to mellow out.”
She is even amused at how Madonna has managed to keep her ever-widening audience throughout the years with that mischievous, debunking sense of irony. “Madonna has never turned into a cartoon character, like Cher. The Gaultier bras never clouded the fact that it was just Madonna, burping at lunch. In a way, she’s replicated that burp over and over again.”
4
JAM HOT
IN THE 1970S, NEW YORK WAS A CITY ON THE BRINK OF collapse. There were two eras of recession, 1973–75 and 1980–82, which produced some of the most creative genres of music—disco and hip-hop.
In the pre-AIDS world of the 70s, disco was the pulsating heart of gay culture, a phenomenon that spread rapidly after the film Saturday Night Fever, until at one point there were over a thousand discos in Midtown Manhattan. Alongside this sprang up the downtown punk scene, drawing lifeblood from disco, if only to satirize its commercialism and inject its bpm energy into the mores of white rock. Bands like The New York Dolls, Television, Blondie, and The Ramones expressed the tension of the time while celebrating the antihero. Rents in Manhattan were dirt-cheap, which attracted a new generation of musicians and artists. Both disco and punk scenes revolved around sexual experimentation, artistic flamboyance, and lavish drug use.
“It was a run-down city, it was like a war zone,” recalls Maripol Fauque, the stylist and fashion expert who helped to customize much of Madonna’s early look. “The parks were taken over by drug dealers. Look at Martin Scorsese’s film Mean Streets—it was just like that. But New York was also a magnet. Once you come here it’s hard to get out. You cannot find anywhere with this creative energy. I ran away from France in 1976, came here for three months, and never left. Manhattan is like a weird magnet, because you feel kind of trapped.” There is also a more prosaic evaluation of that time and Madonna’s place in it. “There was a downtown bar that everyone would go to, a real dive,” recalls an artist from that period. “There was a chef in the kitchen who also dealt cocaine. Everybody would hang out there, including Madonna. She was really annoying, and constantly in that kitchen.” While it is rumored that she wasn’t averse to experimenting, friends suggest that she was careful to give the appearance of being high while never, in fact, being high. “I saw her like she was drunk out of her mind when she was only drinking ginger ale with a cherry in it,” said photographer Michael Mackenzie. “She understood those people would see her as an outsider if she was �
��straight.’”
TO MANY of the “in-crowd,” though, Madonna was déclassé. “She seemed like this girl from out-of-state who wasn’t totally in-the-know yet,” said artist Futura 500, while another Danceteria regular claimed, “She was hideous. No one liked her. She’d do outrageously stupid things. Like there was a girl who worked at the Danceteria who had a really striking style and she wore her hair a certain way. One day Madonna came in with her hair cut and dyed the same way, an exact copy. We’d say, ‘Is she nuts?’ She says she ate out of trash cans, that she felt lonely—there was no reason to feel lonely, it was such a supportive scene, it was a community. But Madonna was so competitive.”
Madonna wasn’t totally accepted by the downtown scene (“She wasn’t underground, she wasn’t at the alternative art galleries,” says a local musician), but she didn’t care. She was happy to just to soak up the ambience and energy.
It was an environment unaffected by corporate branding, where the DIY ethic was at its most pronounced. “There was a new generation searching on their own,” recalls Maripol. “There was Pere Ubu at one extreme, The Lounge Lizards did their thing, and Jean-Michel Basquiat had a band called Gray. I remember going to the Mudd Club and seeing The B-52’s the first time they ever played. I saw Devo live, I saw Blondie live, I saw David Byrne…Nico playing the piano in a really small venue. Nothing was concrete, nothing was corporate yet, nothing was institutionalized and like ‘Oh let me call my PR please.’ It was much more natural.”
New York was an appropriate place for Madonna, because anybody could wind up being somebody. “I knew Debbie Harry when she was a mousey drug addict. She went away one day and came back as part of Blondie,” recalls a former scenester. “Madonna, too, was just one of many. Like a lot of people on the Lower East Side, she was jockeying for position, aware of it as a scene. Then she went away one day and came back as Madonna.”
AFTER SHE left Camille Barbone, Madonna was still “jockeying for position.” Negotiations she began at this time with the William Morris Agency failed to materialize into anything, and she was back to decrepit rehearsal studios and hustling for a deal. By this time, though, she had gained valuable live experience and had established for herself a vibrant network of club-going friends and industry contacts. Now she began to move to the center of alternative New York nightlife, which was focused first on the Mudd Club, and then on the Danceteria, a four-story club that had just relocated from West 37th to West 21st Street. By 1981, disco music was being superseded by “freestyle” dance music, hip-hop, and sounds from the United Kingdom. “The disco scene was dying. The whole glitter, getting into Studio 54, all that feeling-special shit was over. All the hip people got tired of the glitz, and the Mudd Club became the cool place because it was way downtown, at the bottom of Manhattan,” recalls Mark Kamins, the DJ who “discovered” Madonna.
Back then, Kamins was party DJ for the nuevo-punk band Talking Heads, and a roving A&R man for Chris Blackwell’s Island Records. When the Danceteria opened, he was there, with cult British DJ Shaun Cassette, mixing up the playlist with everything from The Pop Group to James Brown, Grace Jones, and Kraftwerk. The beautiful people migrated to the Danceteria, which featured live bands on the first floor and a third-floor video lounge. Kamins saw this as a pivotal time in the city’s history, a reaction to the grimness of the 1970s. “New York was so musically creative at that point,” he says. “The late 70s was a very bad time. The Bronx was burning. There was no work. We were political, but there was nothing to motivate us other than music. There were no rules for a while. Musically, everybody experimented and everyone wanted to try something new.”
For him, this was encapsulated in an act like James Blood Ulmer, who collided jazz with rock and punk. First-floor bands included the cream of alternative acts, from The Buzzcocks and Magazine to The Cramps, Birthday Party, and the B-52’s. “The Danceteria ran from eight p.m. to eight a.m. It was a very special place, like Warhol’s Factory,” recalls Kamins. Sade worked behind the bar, Keith Haring and The Beastie Boys were busboys, LL Cool J was the elevator operator. “It was one of those places where we lived. When the club closed, Keith went to the subway and painted his little figures until we opened the club at noon and started cleaning. He lived at the Danceteria, we all lived there. It was more than a club. Everybody there was doin’ something.”
Madonna, he remembers, was “just one of the personalities. She had a very unique fashion style. She was always on the dance floor, and when she danced, everyone would stand around her.” For Madonna, this club symbolized the freedom she’d been waiting for after the rigorous world of contemporary dance, and the time spent playing lackluster venues in marginal rock bands. It was the dance floor that suited her best. “You can dance for six hours and nobody will bother you and you don’t have to drink. I felt an incredible sense of liberation, and I felt happier,” she said. “There was nothing fun or glamorous about my life and I needed some excitement.”
One night she approached Kamins’s DJ booth with a demo of the song “Everybody” she’d been working on with Steve Bray. “She came without asking,” says Kamins. “But I’m a very spontaneous DJ and when promo guys I respected came to the booth, I knew they’d be giving me a really good record to play. It’s not like I had to take it home to listen to it first. I love spontaneity, I believe it’s the magic of life. Madonna had a cassette, I threw it on, and it worked.” He shrugs. “I’m not sayin’ the place went mad crazy, but it worked.”
Madonna became his girlfriend, and they moved into a small railroad apartment on the Upper East Side. “We had no money and we were sleeping on egg crates. She wasn’t a homemaker,” he remembered. There was only one thing on her mind. “I bought some lingerie for her one night and she wasn’t interested. To Madonna, a boyfriend was secondary. She knew how to use her sexuality to manipulate men, everyone from promotion guys to radio programmers.”
But Chris Blackwell, the head of Island Records, wasn’t easily swayed. A demo was sent and a meeting was arranged, but the record mogul passed on it. “He didn’t want to sign his A&R’s girlfriend, and she’d had a rough night, she hadn’t taken a shower, so Chris said she didn’t smell too good that day.” After Blackwell turned her down, Kamins brought Madonna to Seymour Stein at Sire. “He said, OK, I’ll give her a deal, not because he believed in her but ’cause he believed in me,” claims Kamins. Madonna was offered a $15,000 two-singles deal—nothing spectacular—but it gave her the opportunity she had dreamed of. She was so eager to get the ink dry on the contract that she visited Stein in a hospital after a heart surgery. “I think if I was lying in a coffin but had my hand out ready to sign, that would’ve suited her,” Stein said later, laughing. “She was very anxious to get her career going, she believed in herself that much.”
The recording session for “Everybody” and “Ain’t No Big Deal” took place in the summer of 1982 in Blank Tape studios. As a result of the deal, Bray was edged to the sidelines, while Kamins took on his first role as a producer, feeling his way into the job. Although Madonna could be brash, for this session she was almost humble. “This was the first time she was in the studio with real, real musicians. I’d hired top New York studio players, with Leslie Mink on drums and Fred Zarr on keyboards,” says Kamins. “She let me do my thing musically and when it was time for her to do the vocals, she just went off and did them. She was innocent. You lose that: after you have your first hit, you’re not innocent anymore. That was her only record where you can hear innocence in her voice.”
Kamins worked hard in the studio but was aware of his limitations as a producer. “I’m a DJ. For me it’s all about the vibe, the music. I can’t tell an A-minor from a C-minor, I’m not a musician. But I can tell you if it’s good or bad. If I’m not standing up and dancing, it ain’t happening, that’s my criteria. For ‘Everybody’ it was, yo, fuck the demo, let’s rock the house. Give me your bass.” Madonna did her vocals in one take. “She was pretty confident about her vocal. She’d been o
n tour with Patrick Hernandez, been onstage. She was also a little awed by being surrounded by the best musicians, four guys who’d played on every record in the top twenty. But she went out there and did it. She didn’t drink or do drugs, so it always came from the heart,” Kamins recalls.
“Everybody” has a youthful exuberance, combining Madonna’s irrepressible treble with simplistic but locked-down bass and drums. It was a song that Fab Five Freddy from Grandmaster Flash said he heard on a boom box hauled down the street by two Puerto Rican teenagers. It was hip. The track sets the blueprint for future Madonna songs, with its lyrics about sensing the rhythm and being guided by the music. Her voice is cajoling, directing, demanding. It’s as if she is on the dance floor, aware of everyone in the room—who wants to dance, who doesn’t, who’s about to, who’s shy and who’s not. She is the leader, taking everyone by the hand, drawing them to the floor where they can lose themselves. She invites people to play. She gives them permission.
At the time, another act produced by Mark Kamins—Johnny Dynell and New York 88—had a hit with the experimental hip-hop song “Jam Hot.” Dynell remembers: “Madonna and I were both East Village downtown people suddenly on the radio. It was a big deal. She didn’t have a lot of friends, she was very focused. She wasn’t really about hanging out with the rest of the kids. I remember being on the roof of some building talking with her about the future. She thought my record ‘Jam Hot’ was very weird, she didn’t really like it. It was about prostitutes, very street, very arty. When I first heard ‘Everybody,’ I thought it was catchy and hooky but the words were too simplistic. I offered to help her with the lyrics, but she said, ‘I know what I’m doin’. And twenty-five years later, they’re still dancing to it.”