I walked into the live room. There a rose-lit Lady Gaga had half the Lower East Side wrapped around her little mic cord.
She played her synth and sang “Wunderful.” A pitch-perfect song about being twenty-one and confused and in love. It never got released. Starlight backed her up from behind with a pair of records that played her sparse beat.
My voice caught in my throat and right then I caught this look from Gaga as she looked into my wide eyes. She smiled back at me as if to say, “Thanks for noticing, buster.”
*Wink.*
ON THE WAY BACK TO the bar St. Michael looked at me. “What just happened?”
“Nothing.”
“The empty demon has left your eyes.”
“Really?”
“It’s like you’re holding little Brendan in your arms, rocking him to sleep.” His tattooed arms made a ring holding a baby.
“I think she just did.” I had spent these last few years here on a mission. I wanted to find a band that would celebrate and eradicate the peculiar loneliness of youth. It was so sexist for me to think that I would find a group of boys to play music and feel like the friends I never had, to lead me in conversation with girls I never knew.
EVERYONE IN THE ROOM BEAMED at her after the show, but Guy still didn’t show up. But for once she didn’t beam it back. “Any luck?”
“He’s not in there.” I pulled out my phone. “I’ll text him now.”
Gaga finished up a minute later. She just played the best show of her life and amazed the entire room. But not Guy.
I’ll never forget that disappointed look on her face when she walked out there and didn’t see him anywhere. Maybe she had the charitable assumption that he had to DJ up front but that he’d wait there and support her.
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know. He was supposed to be here an hour ago.”
“Why didn’t he come?” She asked questions I just couldn’t answer. If my girlfriend had a show I’d stand in the front row throwing panties at her and cheering. I’d walk around with homemade band T-shirts and custom made, oversized foam fingers.
Starlight walked up with her record bag and her coat on. “I have to work at nine, honey. I love you. But I have to go.”
The singer of Semi Precious Weapons walked out a minute later, clomping around in his man-heels. “You were a vision out there.”
Gaga looked sad.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “What could possibly be wrong?”
She stopped a tear before it could smear her makeup. “I was expecting someone to be here tonight. And he wasn’t.”
“Well,” Justin said, smiling, “I’m here and if that’s not good enough for you then I don’t know what is. C’mon. We’re about to go on.”
He pulled her into the live room in back and shut the soundproof door.
Just then I heard an explosion coming from the back. A sonic valve churned out a crag of guitar. Pint glasses shook under the taps. People outside smoking squinted through the windows to find what they heard. At the bar you couldn’t hear the drinks people ordered. I ran in back to investigate.
On stage that little bottle-blond baby bird gawked at his audience and put on the singer equivalent of a bass-face, sneering through his makeup. The guitar went on. The drums materialized in perfect succession as if the amp feedback had stirred them to life. Justin screamed into the microphone the one perfect line that resonated with every soul in the room, “I can’t pay my rent, but I’m fucking gorgeous.”
Gaga stood off to the side of the stage, headbanging her dark mane all around the room. As their set went on she became lost in the music, bouncing around their chaotic symphony.
I walked back into the bar, which had completely emptied by then. The manager ran over to me, hanging up this little pink Razr phone we had that forwarded calls to us when we couldn’t hear the phone in the office. “Brendan, we can’t have this,” the manager shouted. “Heavy metal on a Sunday night? The neighbors are complaining. I have the sound guy cutting all the mics and the drums are a capella right now and it’s still too loud.”
“They said they brought their own equipment.”
“The guy across the street is throwing plants off his balcony, screaming that he’s going to call the cops.”
“What can we possibly do?” I said. “They only have four songs. Total. Wait it out.”
GUY SHOWED UP, FINALLY, AND gave me this moronic smirk, fresh from—and also smelling like—the bowling alley. “What’s up?” He straggled in with a bunch of guys just like him. Leather vests, denim jackets in July, smudged silk-screen band shirts. (I once dated this very wonderful Canadian girl and the only time I ever heard her say anything bad about anyone is when she described Guy and his ilk in a way that sounds pitch-perfect across cultures. “Hosers.”)
“You’re two hours late, that’s what’s up. And you already missed Gaga.”
“Why?”
“She went on early so Starlight could go to work and you could see her before your DJ set.”
“My what?”
“You’re the DJ tonight. Did you promote it?”
“Everyone’s already here.”
“Everyone’s already here to see your girlfriend—except you.”
“Don’t use the G word.”
“What?”
“Don’t use the G word that you just said.”
“You used the G word the first night I met her.”
“Listen, we were going to go down to Motor City. I just came in to do a shot.”
“Play some fucking records before I kill you.”
I’m worse at what I do best and for this gift I feel blessed
Normally when a band finishes in the LES, everyone goes outside for a smoke or they rush the bar for another drink. The number one reason to do this is to break away from the band so you can talk shit about them or their bassist or how you wish you wanted anything in the world as much as that band wanted to be the Strokes.
Gaga came out from the door at the opposite end of the room but instead of rushing over to see her late-as-hell boyfriend she exited the back room through the soundproof doors and ran upstairs. The go-go dancer couldn’t make it that night for the new party. A legion of neo-devotees of both bands followed her.
I ran up behind her as she strode over to the go-go platform. “What are you doing?”
“These guys need a go-go dancer. And I am a go-go dancer.”
WHAT GAGA DIDN’T BOTHER TELLING us at all was that she had been dropped from Island Def Jam. And I didn’t get the whole story until later.
When Gaga dropped out of Tisch School for the Performing Arts at New York University, she made a deal with her father. If she didn’t have a record deal before her twentieth birthday she would put her dreams on hold and finish school. Then when she had a degree under her belt she could try again. It was about to get more complicated than that, and just in the time that I’d known her she would have all her dreams come true, and then immediately fall through. Which meant that even this summer, the clock had started ticking again. Time was running out.
I got two versions of this story at first. The one I liked came from her: “Dad said, ‘I’ll give you two months rent and then you’re on your own.’” She went to play a show at the Cutting Room and a girl came up to her and said, “Are you ready for me to change your life?” The two went outside and the girl called her producer and said she’d found the perfect voice.
The producer, who was the same guy who called in the middle of the night we met, has another story, which has its place but doesn’t concern me.
The story I like best is mine, because I later found out that show was right around her twentieth birthday. I like to think of her there onstage at the Cutting Room, where the cast of Saturday Night Live usually went after their broadcast. Gaga would have known that even if she kept trying, she had to honor her agreement with her dad. School would start up again that summer. But that night—that night was her last show to
honor the deal. And she wanted to go down in glory, to belt out a killer sound instead of waiting to see if she was what people were looking for.
On the way into the show that night she saw a familiar face. Excited, ebullient, and in-the-know from an internship at Famous Music Publishing, a vocalist and songwriter named Wendy Starland. Gaga begged the vocalist to stay for her show. After the show, Wendy wanted to get Gaga in touch with a producer in Jersey named Rob Fusari, who was in the midst of doing what Kim Fowley did for Joan Jett and the Runaways in the seventies, only he wanted to make an all-girl version of the Strokes for the aughts.
Gaga’s dad was the sweetest businessman I ever met. Whenever I saw him he treated me like I was one of his many nephews. He never judged me and he always had a smile for me. But he was a killer businessman. When Rob Fusari first started working with Gaga, he wanted to sign a deal with her immediately, giving him 100 percent of the power to develop, record, and get distribution deals for her right away. Joe Germanotta gave him 20 percent.
The agreement stalled the ticking clock—for the time being. She didn’t go back to school.
Later that year—and she never once let on that anything like this had happened to her—Fusari introduced her to Joshua Sarubin over at Island Def Jam. In 2004 Sarubin had been the number-seven-ranked A&R man in the world, behind Clive Davis and that guy who discovered Josh Groban (both of these legends were behind Ben Berkman, who discovered Maroon 5). People in the record industry really like Sarubin because he discovered Avril Lavigne. He is famous for saying, “I’ve never found anything by sifting through demo tapes. But I keep looking.” Sadly, this meant that to make it in the music industry, you needed to be in the music industry.
Sarubin liked Gaga when he heard her. I like the idea that he liked her especially, because it meant that he didn’t have to go downtown and crowd into a sweaty place like Pianos just to hear this new savior of music. He passed the demo up to the legendary Antonio “L.A.” Reid, who had just taken over for Clive Davis at Arista a few years before. Pushing out Clive Davis in 1999 was a controversial move, which Barry Manilow called “mean-spirited.” Aretha Franklin threatened to leave the label, as did Carlos Santana (they didn’t). You know you’re fucking something up when Manilow, Santana, and Aretha are pissed at you. Reid bailed on BMG later that year (Davis briefly re-took over) and moved to Island Def Jam, where he did wicked obnoxious things. I won’t really go into how messed up the record industry was at the time, but they were still coming down from the boom-time high of CD sales. They acted like the last king of disco when he finally ran out of cigarettes and blow and found himself standing in a truck stop bathroom with an open-collared polyester shirt, only to discover the clock just struck 2003.
When I first met Gaga she was waiting to hear what Reid thought of her songs.
So this genius was in his office one day in early 2007 and he heard early masters of songs that would later come out in the same form on Gaga’s debut album, The Fame. I really can’t stress enough how desolate the record industry was at this time. Just as an example, Sony Music had 17,700 employees in 2000—by 2003 they had 13,400. That left 3,000 empty desks in the once-grand offices. A friend of mine moved to New York from Boston to work in their studios and the job disappeared while he was on the bus over. They later tore the building down. Soundscan started keeping track of record sales in 1991 and Sony had never had a lower number-one-selling album than when the Dream Girls soundtrack sold 66,000 copies. I mention this just so you won’t think that L.A. Reid has no taste or is a terrible businessman. The record labels were desperate for a savior, but L.A. Reid took one listen to this early incarnation of Gaga and did the one-finger-slash-your-throat hand motion. Cut her loose.
He even fired the guy who had put the record on.
At twenty years old Gaga had a production deal and still believed in herself. But her first label did not. Gaga’s dad had been as supportive and helpful as any dad could to his crazy kid with a wild dream. He had another daughter in private school at Sacred Heart and he wanted Gaga to set a good example. Education had always been important to the family, and young Stefani took her schooling very seriously because she knew that her parents made great sacrifices in order for them to afford to live in a nice home and go to a nice school.
Every child has a moment where they need to break out on their own. When I was a wee one, I packed my lunchbox with raw hot dogs, a bread-and-butter sandwich, and two juice boxes, and when my mother was on the phone, I ran away from home. At the foot of my street was a drainage ditch as wild and uncharted as the forest in the imagination of Max in Where the Wild Things Are. I would escape and live on my own as a savage five year old. I got to the foot of the driveway when something stopped me. I sniffled once and turned around at the home I was abandoning. Isn’t anybody going to miss me?
Joe Germanotta knew that he had done a good job raising the girls, but that they would never stand on their own at home. Gaga ran away and made it all the way from the Upper West Side to the Lower East Side. He let her have her fun and test her mettle. She had run away to join the circus but unlike most fathers, Joe Germanotta saw her high-wire act and realized, with a great sense of pride, that she was born for it. In another era, the Upper West Side dad would come downtown and knock on the tenement building where he would find his crying, despondent daughter under the sickly flicker of florescent light, crashed out on a tattered mattress on the floor. He would come down hard with a mix of tough love and papa-bear wisdom, colluding with the landlord via unsigned checks to get her evicted. Joe had every right—including a signed contract with his own daughter—to do this. But instead of clipping her wings he sat down with his little girl and said, “Hey, mom made lasagna.”
Joe then had every right to say to his little girl that she could try again after she finished school. But he didn’t. He got on the phone with Island Def Jam, and with a businessman’s alacrity and an Italian businessman’s mix of charm and terror, he made an agreement to return a part of the record advance if the label wouldn’t void the contract. This meant that Gaga could still afford her apartment on the Lower East Side, she would still be a working artist, and she would go out there again. And if he hadn’t done that with such precision, Gaga wouldn’t have played the songs that night that made my heart swell.
Rock ’n’ roll depends heavily on the artist’s middle finger. It shirks authority, defies convention, and doesn’t like to be told what to do. Most kids get into music as an escape from their parents. It drowns out Mommy and Daddy fighting in the kitchen and it comforts us on the way from one stepparent’s house to the next. It wouldn’t judge us, and would never be disappointed in us.
Having said that, you really have to hand it to awesome dads. Can anybody in your entire life swoop in and chase the monsters out from under your bed, or have you ever known anyone who wasn’t afraid of anything like your dad was?
When my high school sweetheart unceremoniously dumped me in the middle of winter vacation, my own father put me in the car and drove four hours to CBGB, the rock club on the Lower East Side that gave us the Ramones, Blondie, Television, and Warzone. We didn’t speak a word about it and if he’d said anything I would have burst into tears and never felt like a real man. Instead he took the day off work and brought me downtown. While my friends were watching TV in their parents’ basements or visiting grandma in Boca, my dad marched me into CBGB, vouched for me at the door, and had me sit there on the barstool where Joey Ramone waited to get paid and where Legs McNeil first met Blondie. It was three in the afternoon on a chilly February afternoon and I can still remember the way the bar smelled of scotch tape and damp wood. I still remember the bartender’s muddy eye makeup, curved, claw-like press-on fingernails and her baby doll hairdo. He didn’t say any fatherly bullshit or tell me to buck up. He just thought that his son might like to know there is a great big world out there waiting for you when you come out of your room.
We all got in tune when the dressing room got haz
y
After the show at Pianos, Michael T. and some of the other big names in nightlife hung around. Conrad came by after he closed up St. J’s and we stacked the remaining stools on the bar, lowered the iron gate, and then held a little afterhours of our own.
I liked watching Suicide Sundays become the go-to industry party on Sunday nights. All of my friends were dancers, bartenders, and DJs, and none of us could go out on Friday nights. Sunday was our Friday.
“Who is that guy?” Michael T.’s eyes lit up when Conrad went to the bathroom. Michael T.’s sexual preference is straight guys. Guy and St. Michael had known him for years and they actually got along quite well. “Does he partake?”
The guys from the upstairs party came down when they saw Michael T. follow Conrad downstairs. They smirked.
“What?” I said.
“You know about Michael T.’s boot thing, right? He only likes straight guys in cowboy boots. Lures them into the bathroom with coke and snorts it off the boots.”
Cleaning up, I smirked at the kids. “You guys gossip too much.”
“I’m not kidding. He even carries around a suitcase full of different-sized boots.”
When Conrad went down to the bathroom, Michael T. went and knocked on the door.
IN 2000 MICHAEL T. GOT together with Justine D. and our friend Georgie to put together a party at a club called Mother on the otherwise dead Sunday night of Memorial Day weekend for all the broke kids who didn’t have money to get out of town. They called it “Motherfucker.” It was a hit. Gay, straight, scenester, drag queens, rockers. The only way to get in was to dress wild. The nineties rock scene and the Giuliani crackdown had already come and faded out with the inspirational party known as SqueezeBox, many elements of which—including the rock ’n’ roll drag band the Toilet Boys—later became the musical and then the movie Headwig and the Angry Inch. The kids from Motherfucker were older scenesters, well studied in nightlife history and ready to take over between the waves of nineties excess and the posh bottle-service clubs that followed. Motherfucker became like a movie franchise, every holiday weekend sequel becoming bigger and wilder. They started doing it every three-day holiday, bouncing from club to club, the owners always letting them do whatever they wanted on the otherwise dead weekend. It became the highlight of the summer. A friend of mine once asked Michael T., “What’s the craziest thing people do to get into a Motherfucker party?”
Rivington Was Ours: Lady Gaga, the Lower East Side, and the Prime of Our Lives Page 6