by Lucy O'Brien
Betts recorded several tracks with Madonna, including “Dear Father,” which was chalked up to be “song four” on the record. “It was a song about her relationship with God. She was really loving it,” says Betts. But when it came to organizing the publishing, Madonna was dismayed to learn that Mic Murphy from pop/dance act The System had played a bass line, and she nixed the song. Rumor has it that she and Murphy clashed a few times in the early 80s and Madonna never forgot it.
Despite the hiccup with “Dear Father,” Betts took Madonna to more experimental places on Erotica, particularly with the crunchy hip-hop bass lines and low-slung groove of “Waiting.” This bluesy, acid meditation on loving the wrong man is filled with resentment and brooding anger. What happened? She sounds a million years old. This is the sound of disillusion, as she almost spits the words out. There is a forceful addendum to this with “Did You Do It?”—a later track that has a reprise of the “Waiting” melody line, and some brag-gadocio boytalk. Madonna utters only one or two quiet words (“I’m waitin’”), but throughout the track there is the sense of her glowering presence. You can hear the power of her listening and her silence.
This track began as a joke. It reflects the rapport that Betts and Madonna had in the studio. “It was getting close to the end, and that day we were drinking gin and champagne and doing a little celebrating and she showed this mole that was on her hip. We had names for each other. She’d call me Pothead, and because her last name was Ciccone I’d call her my Chick Homie. And like everybody was calling her Mo, so I was calling her Mo Gizmo, all kinds of dumb stuff.” Madonna had to go out for dinner, so she left Betts to finish work on some tracks. While she was out, he began to make up a rap. In a reprise of the provocative question that Madonna asked Camille Barbone all those years before, Betts recorded the guys in the studio saying “Did you do it?” while the music to her song “Waiting” was playing.
He improvised a rap over the top. “I’m talking about having sex with her. I’m doing this all over the ‘Waiting’ beat, the second verse I’m calling her a ho, all kinds of crazy stuff.” Picking up on the events of the day, he invented a lurid scenario where they drank gin and had sex in her limo and he kissed the mole on her hip and quickly split. When Madonna returned from her dinner with Ingrid Casares and “some guys from the book,” Betts couldn’t resist making mischief. “I know she’s Madonna but to me she’s no different, I mess with my friends like this. I’m not going to disrespect her, but I’ll be damned if I’m not going to have some fun.”
Madonna asked him to play them the song “Waiting.” “There’s these guys in suits and everybody’s all serious, so I cued up ‘Did You Do It?’ instead. I hit play, I’m facing the speakers, she’s standing behind me and I can see her in the mirror. So I’m sitting there and all of a sudden I feel her lean on the back of my neck and I look up in the mirror and her eyes are just full of water and the song finishes and she goes, ‘You’re out of your fucking mind.’ I go, ‘I’m sorry!’ She goes, ‘You’re crazy. Now can I hear my song?’ And I look back and the guys are like, ‘What the hell was that?’”
After the men in suits had disappeared, Madonna asked to hear “Did You Do It?” Nothing more was said until two weeks after recording was finished, when she called Betts saying she wanted the song on her album. “I said, ‘Hell no! Are you crazy?’” he recalls. “Maybe,” she said. “But I want to use the song on the album.” Betts took some persuading, but she managed to convince him. “This goes to show how fair Madonna is. On every other song I got 50/50, but for ‘Did You Do It?’ I got 75/25. She gave me 75 percent of that song, so the convincing part was over. And because of my nasty foul mouth, she had to have an EXPLICIT sticker on her record.” “Did You Do It?” fitted in with the gritty, urban sexual scenarios of early 90s rap. In calling his boss a ho, Betts was treading a fine line, but he did it with charm and an underlying admiration for her sense of daring. “The song was raw. It could’ve just been personal to her and she could’ve got a laugh out of it. But she put it out to the world.”
In opting for a bare, minimal production, Madonna was able to express frustration and numbness as well as more easily orchestrated emotions like sadness and joy. She’s left behind the dynamics of Pat Leonard’s fulsome, string-laden pop to tell it like it is. The reality for her is “Bad Girl,” a grungy tale of smoking too many cigarettes and seeking solace in lovers she doesn’t care about. Or it’s “Thief of Hearts,” a scathing piece of disco house fired by a jealous mind. Or the verbose, complaining “Why It’s So Hard.” This was a difficult record for people to appreciate, and it wasn’t until after the illumination of her later work that fans looked back to see how much this reflected her state of mind at the time. For her this was a concept album that explored the personal havoc of one’s dark fears and desires.
With the song “In This Life,” we get a sense of the other misery that propels her—the death of her friend Martin Burgoyne and the shadow that AIDS cast over her scene in New York.
“That was a touching song for her,” remembers Shimkin. “She was very moved, you can hear that in the way she sang the lyrics. It was very personal to her, and you could see she was lost in the moment.” But in uncovering that grief, she arrives at a new place, “The Secret Garden.” Coproduced by Betts, this song has that early 90s Knitting Factory feel, with its downtown New York jazz riffs and drumming on the offbeat. Amid its warm, languid loops, this final track shows her moving toward transformation. She sings, with a kind of beat poetry and inner knowing, that despite the damage, despite a hardened heart, she can still find hope and beauty and a sense of self that soars free.
ALTHOUGH SHE could act the diva when she wanted to, in the studio Madonna was resolutely down-to-earth and realistic. Here the straightforward Detroit attitude came out. Tony Shimkin remembers composing with her and Pettibone in an apartment upstairs from the studio. “Shep was more about appeasing her and saying yes to what she wanted. I was younger and had more of a sense of humor. I was at the keyboard and she was sitting in the room saying, ‘Are you done yet?’ A few minutes went by. ‘Are you done yet?’ By the third or fourth time, I threw my pencil at her and said, ‘No, I’m not fucking done yet. Go downstairs, get a bowl of popcorn, make some phone calls, and then come back to me. If I can’t be myself, I can’t enjoy what I’m doing.’ She understood and respected that.”
She was concerned about the tension between Pettibone and Shimkin. The young assistant felt he wasn’t getting proper credit, and one day stormed past her out of the studio. He was in a local gym working out, when the pay phone rang. “They said, ‘Tony, you have a call. It’s Madonna,’” says Shimkin. “I was so surprised. She said, ‘I feel bad for what’s going on, I’d like you to talk to someone at my label.’ It’s easy for people to say she’s a bitch, but she’s not that type of person. She’s very loyal.”
Totally absorbed by the project, Madonna wanted to keep a calm equilibrium in the studio. She was also open to taking musical risks. Keen to draw influences from unexpected places, she had Doug Wimbish play on several tracks. A pioneer hip-hop bass player, in the 1970s and early 1980s he was in the Sugarhill Records house band with Skip McDonald and Keith LeBlanc, playing on hip-hop classics like Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message” and “White Lines.” By 1984 he and his cohorts had moved to London and teamed up with dub producer Adrian Sherwood to create Tackhead—a funk-rock collision that stirred up the new “industrial” scene. Wimbish also did sessions with Mick Jagger and Living Colour, before his contribution to Erotica tracks “Where Life Begins” and “Secret Garden.” Although he and Madonna seem unlikely musical bedfellows, he saw a connection right away.
“The thing about Mo is that she’s always been linked to the underground,” he says. “I remember seeing her at Danceteria wearing a big, huge multicolored jacket. You couldn’t help but notice her. She was there with Bambatta, Grandmaster Flash. She was at the Roxy. She was really into the scene. She knew who I was and was curi
ous enough to wanna have me on her record. If she’s feelin’ it, she’s feelin’ it. It was a very interesting community of cats that worked on this Madonna record.”
Although the subject matter she was exploring was at times dark and difficult, Madonna still had fun. “She came into the studio with a box of old Playboy magazines, Hugh Hefner shit from the 70s,” recalls Wimbish. “I guess she’s researching the Sex book. I’ve met her before, I know her energy. I know how she is around men, how she can take control ’n’ shit. She knows it—in a good way. You just can’t be intimidated by it. Dre snatches one of the mags, looks at it, and goes, ‘Damn! Oh shit, these bitches look like this back then?’ I was like, ‘Let me have a look.’ Madonna says, ‘Nah, nah, nah. You gotta do some playing.’ ‘I’m not gonna do no playing until I see some tits and some ass!’ That’s how we started our conversation. She started laughing. She was cool.”
Madonna enjoyed the down-to-earth vibe that Betts fostered in the studio. “Dre’s just straight ghetto at times, which is what I think she kinda likes,” says Wimbish. “He’s a straight up-and-down kinda dude, he’s not frontin’—not gotta get all dressed up and get engaged in some shallow conversation for a few years and that becomes part of your character. No, he’s really raw and honest but in a comfortable way.”
Betts’s easygoing nature allowed Madonna to be herself. Despite her public image as a ball-breaker, she has a sweet side that comes out when she feels relaxed and at home. Betts recalls how his friend, aspiring designer Stephen Miller, used to come to see him in the studio. One day, Madonna asked Miller lightly: “What are you going to design for me?” A few weeks later, he came back with a jacket for her and a hat to match. “I’ve got something for you,” he said. “Oh God, thank you!” she answered. As Betts recalls, “She leaves, we didn’t know where she was going. She came back. She had taken her top off and put the jacket and hat on. She came in and sat down with what he’d just made for her, and that’s what she wore for that day!”
There was also the time Madonna had a party at her house and she was playing with a whip. Betts couldn’t resist wrestling with it, snatching the whip and using it to open her shirt. “She was wearing a bra but the whole thing was cut out, so her nipples were out, it wasn’t a real bra. So she left her shirt off for a while and went around the party like that,” he recalls. It was a raucous party with people playing the piano and singing, but Madonna didn’t want to sing. “I said, ‘What the hell’s wrong with you? Why don’t you want to sing?’ and she said, ‘No, I would rather sing in front of thousands of people than sing in front of a few.’ Madonna might get mad at me for saying it, but she’s actually shy.”
What Betts discovered is that once Madonna feels safe, her sweetness shines through. “I’d be honest with her and she’d open up and tell me whatever, and I started realizing Damn, you’re actually shy. You put this whole big attitude on but underneath all that shit she’s a kitten, a little kitten.”
ON SEPTEMBER 12, 1992, Shep Pettibone walked out of the studio with a completed master copy of Erotica in his hands. A month later, he saw Madonna at the launch party for her book Sex. While everyone around them got into Dionysian displays of simulated sex and live tattooing, he and she began talking about music. “After all, it was still the music that mattered, and it was the record we fawned over,” he said. Betts has another view of the party. “There was a bathtub full of popcorn and a nude lady inside it. Then there was a lady walking around with sushi but with her bare breasts on the sushi tray. And there was a person hanging on a chain from the ceiling and all this leather and shit,” he laughs. “But the crazy thing is, there are all these doors, and there were holes in the doors so you can look in and there’s people having sex.” What amused him the most, however, was when he saw a heavy macho guy he knew from the Bronx there on all fours with a dog collar around his neck. “I called his name and he looks back. He didn’t know I was working on the record and goes, ‘Oh my gosh!’ I was the last person that he thought he’d see there. There were very few people from the hood and Bronx at this party. As a matter of fact, I think it might have been three! It was funny,” says Betts. He also remembers Madonna wanting to go to her private chill-out room and asking Betts to hold hands and make a chain with him, her, and Stephen Miller to slide through the crowd. Even at her own party, she needed to feel protected and secure.
ALTHOUGH IT is one of Madonna’s bravest and most personal records, Erotica is her least successful. It sold 5 million copies worldwide (compared to True Blue’s 21 million or Like a Virgin’s 19 million). Her sales dropped in the United States. In her home country, she had always sold upward of 4 million, but Erotica stalled at half that. Madonna realized that her Sex book had become a massive diversion. “What was problematic was putting my Erotica album out at the same time. I love that record and it was overlooked. Everything I did for the next few years was dwarfed by my book,” she said. What the public wanted was the slick pop songs and the old cheeky, innocent Madonna they knew and loved. But she was never coming back; not in that guise, anyway.
Doug Wimbish feels that Erotica was a record ahead of its time. In the early 90s, Seattle grunge had kicked in, the bass-driven beats of jungle were emerging on the dance floor, and hip-hop hit a new level with the funky, conscious rap of acts like De La Soul. “Madonna’s enough of an artist to take the hues and shades of what’s happening and put a concept together. It’s not just bash out a record,” he says. “She had Maverick, she’d done the book, the film Dick Tracy, she dated a big-ass Hollywood actor. This was her first record with her concept. She just freaked everybody out. She turned the system upside down for a moment, and they had to deal with the shock and awe of it all.”
He doesn’t see Erotica’s 5 million sales as a failure. “In a sense, Erotica was the biggest one of her career. It was the one that molded her, that gave her the access code to what she’s doin’ now. True Blue and so on—it was good to get those numbers outta the way first. That’s fantastic. She’s much smarter now, when I look back on it. Absolute genius. Get those numbers outta the way when you’re young. Set up the template for what you wanna do when you’re older. Fifty million–plus records under your belt, you’re good. If the label can’t support what you’re trying to do, fuck ’em. On one level, she’s asking, how much do y’all really believe in me now?” Wimbish believes that Madonna forged a path for the next generation of female pop artists: “She was bringin’ it from her point of view as a woman, bringing it to the forefront for real. That set the template now for your Christina Aguileras, Britneys, Beyoncés. She paved the road for a lot of that. You can be nice and clean and then a freak. And there’ll be a lot of money for you in it at the end!”
MADONNA WAS experimenting with different guises, not just in her pop career, but in movie roles too. A pattern was beginning to emerge. With female directors she often expressed her strong, feisty side, notably as Susan in Desperately Seeking Susan. Then in A League of
Their Own, Penny Marshall’s 1992 film about a 1940s all-girl baseball team, Madonna summoned up the gutsy, gum-chewing spirit of her high school cheerleading days. Many male directors, however, couldn’t resist a kind of assassination of her power, taking the strong female roles she chose and twisting them. In David Mamet’s 1988 Broadway play Speed-the-Plow. Madonna understood her role as a kind of female avenger, a force for good, who persuades her cynical suitor to take up an inspirational story she has been reading instead of his usual commercial fare.
In the end, Mamet and director Gregory Mosher changed the emphasis of Karen’s character, so that she came across as conniving and manipulative rather than innocent. “It was devastating to do that night after night,” Madonna said. “I saw her as an angel, an innocent. They wanted her to be a cunt.” She often took on the role of the fallen woman, an adversary between two men. In Speed-the-Plow, Karen was the toy of Bobby Gould (played by Joe Mantegna) and his gung ho producer Charlie Fox (Ron Silver). Two years earlier, in Goose and Tomtom,
her first theatrical New York role, she played a brassy dame called Lorraine, who teased and tormented the two male protagonists. Conceived as a “Gnostic myth” by the playwright David Rabe, the play combined the supernatural with a criminal underworld. Art mirrored life, with Madonna’s Lorraine stirring up the jealousy between these two deadbeat gangster hoodlums, one of whom (Tomtom) was played by Sean Penn. In real life, Madonna was to stir up Sean’s jealous feelings in her friendship with Sandra Bernhard. A fan of David Rabe’s writing, Sean had wanted Madonna to play the part of Lorraine. Their next joint foray into acting after the disastrous Shanghai Surprise, it ran for four days, before Madonna had to go off to shoot Who’s That Girl? Although barely a thousand people saw it, this was one of her better performances.
“Madonna was the best Lorraine I ever saw…. There was certainly something in the part that seemed made-to-order for her persona—the Material Girl, which was all I knew before we started working together: sexy and materialistic, that sort of cynical, provocative thing she has,” recalled Rabe. “She had lines like, ‘I’m going to rule the world someday’; and she had probably been saying that all her life—as a child even.”
In Woody Allen’s 1992 film Shadows and Fog, Madonna plays the girl on the flying trapeze, caught between her husband the strongman and the clown. “I have all my tricks for seducing,” her character says, almost guilelessly. Then, in the 1993 thriller Body of Evidence, she plays Rebecca Carlson, a femme fatale who murders millionaire men by having adventurous sex with them. “She’s not only the defendant. She’s the murder weapon,” the prosecutor declaims at her trial. “She is a beautiful woman. But when this trial is over, you will see her as no other than a gun, a knife, or any deadly weapon.” For this film, shot after her work on the Sex book, Madonna engages in full frontal nudity, taking costar Willem Dafoe on an erotic journey with candles, nipple clamps, and cunnilingus in a parking lot.