The song that had made him think that was written by Bonnie and was called ‘Nick Of Time’. The preoccupations of pop lyrics tend to be quite narrow. This opened with lines that went somewhere no pop song had gone before. Bonnie Raitt sang about a friend of hers who called her on the phone at night and cried about the fact that all her friends but her were having babies. This sharply painful rumination on the passing of time became the album’s title track. ‘Nick Of Time’ sold a million copies.
The A&R man was right about the Grammys. The following year Raitt went up on stage five times to pick up awards in various categories. Sitting next to her was her father, the Broadway star who had never known the same honour his daughter was finally tasting in her forties. They both wept buckets. ‘The whole building saw him lose it. And I started crying, and we held each other for a good minute and a half until they told us to sit down,’ she remembered. ‘Nick Of Time’ won Best Female Performance for both pop and rock categories. It was a rock song about middle age.
Eric Clapton and Ringo Starr might have been newly sober too at the time but the sponsors of their tours were alcohol advertisers. Eric’s sponsor was Michelob. The Michelob campaign was aimed at yuppies. Yuppie was a term that had come into use in 1984 to describe people who had the careers of professionals but carried with them the stylistic hinterland of the hippies they once were. They drank Michelob. They went to see Eric Clapton. Being baby boomers they were prone to believe that whatever stage they were going through – raising children, setting up home, getting a promotion, buying a car – had never been gone through by anyone else in the past or if it had it had never been gone through quite as soulfully and stylishly. There was even a television programme that celebrated them. Thirtysomething was about a pair of writers who get married and raise a family in the suburbs while still trying to hang on to what they see as their wild, untamed rock and roll past. In 1989 this option was available for the first time. The concerns of yuppies were different from those of earlier generations because widely available contraception had provided them with the option of timing the planning of a family until it suited them.
There were many musical careers that were prospering in 1989 by ministering to the yuppie condition. Phil Collins’ … But Seriously had a song about relating to his son. Eurythmics’ We Too Are One had one about a woman who is not so much angry about her partner’s infidelity as she is disappointed by it. Bette Midler had one of the biggest hits of the year with ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’. All of these songs are identifiably set within marriage. They portray the ups and downs of love and family as noble and heroic. This goes down well with those who have found this is their lot. In the fifties and sixties the people who bought pop records were overwhelmingly in their teens and twenties. As we headed into the nineties this was no longer the case. The majority of people listening to it were not kids anymore. In fact they were middle-aged.
1989 PLAYLIST
Bonnie Raitt, ‘Nick Of Time’
The B-52s, ‘Love Shack’
Grateful Dead, Built To Last
The Jesus and Mary Chain, Automatic
Tracy Chapman, Crossroads
Bob Dylan, Oh Mercy
Nirvana, Bleach
Tom Petty, Full Moon Fever
Soul II Soul, Club Classics Vol. One
New Order, Technique
29 MAY 1990
TORONTO SKYDOME, CANADA
Rock star as celeb
MADONNA WAS PREPARING to play the last of three shows at Toronto’s SkyDome. Twenty thousand tickets had been sold, as they had for every night of her Blond Ambition world tour. This was Madonna getting back to what she did best after her most recent attempt to establish herself as an above-the-title actress, in the movie Shanghai Surprise. That film featured her then husband Sean Penn. The new one, Dick Tracy, was due to be released in the summer. This starred her latest boyfriend Warren Beatty. Beatty was fifty-three, which was twenty-two years older than Madonna.
He needed her more than she needed him. Warren had once been a big movie star but in 1990 he had very little chance of being allowed to make a big-budget movie like this without using a music star like Madonna. And in 1990 there was no music star quite like Madonna. Her presence on a project meant a $10 million saving on the marketing budget because Madonna was publicity. Publicity was not a by-product of what Madonna did, it was the product itself. Her profile owed as much to her ability to generate yards of press coverage as it did to the quality of her records. It was impossible to know whether this was by accident or design, just as it was impossible to know whether there was any distinction between her private and public lives. Certainly she seemed to delight in being the centre of attention, and she didn’t much care whether the attention was admiring or not.
In Toronto the local police force had received complaints about Madonna’s rendition of ‘Like A Virgin’ from people who had attended the previous night’s show. She performed this number wearing a Jean-Paul Gaultier bustier while undulating on a bed and pawing her crotch with unmistakable intent. On the afternoon of 29 May a senior police officer turned up at the SkyDome with a Crown attorney. He told the promoter that something had to be done about the lewd and indecent display involved in this number. The threat was that if no adjustments were made then the show would not be able to go ahead. There were negotiations. The promoter and Madonna’s manager proposed starting the show with the announcement that what followed contained adult themes and therefore anyone likely to be offended should leave. Madonna was having none of this because, as she loudly declared for the benefit of the movie cameras that were tailing her to make the tour documentary, she was an artist and nobody could censor her show.
The sequence of events that took place backstage, which made up part of the film In Bed With Madonna, is in one sense the real Madonna show. Madonna is a drama queen who achieves her full height only when bristling with indignation. She makes sure everyone around her shares her feelings. Her dancers are all of a twitter, some at the prospect of being carried from the stage by Mounties. Everyone is fairly secure in the knowledge that nothing bad is actually going to happen.
Madonna’s was not the kind of civil disobedience that leads to the busting of heads. By 1990 her travelling show was operating behind a ring of steel made up of security, management, catering, functionaries, limos, blacked-out people carriers and the rest of the services that made the modern touring environment feel as secure and as detached from normal life as a Presidential motorcade. Madonna and her dancers gathered into a gospel huddle. She announced that they were in ‘the fascist state of Toronto’ and would soon be back in the United States where freedom of expression was respected. On their way to the stage they sang the old spiritual of resistance ‘We Shall Overcome’.
It was all a lark. When they got in front of the audience Madonna made much of the police presence during her show. She asked the crowd if they wanted her to be bad. Of course they wanted her to be bad. Bad was what they had paid for. She did ‘Like A Virgin’. She undulated. She pawed. Nothing interrupted the show. Nobody stepped up to arrest her. The parameters of outrage had clearly been moved in a big way since Jim Morrison in Florida twenty years earlier. Madonna was denied her Rosa Parks moment, but she got a scene for her film and added another coat of lustre to her brand. Next time round she would have to bring religion into the argument to get some kind of reaction out of an establishment that didn’t seem to be up for the fight any longer. Madonna’s show was no longer the racy alternative to the mainstream. Her show was the new mainstream.
The Blond Ambition tour was the progenitor of the modern multimedia spectacle. It was what a generation raised on MTV had come to expect of a live show, which was that it should take the form of a very big, very loud TV show. It should involve regular changes of costume. It should have stunts and special effects. The performers should wear headsets and earpieces which hinted that they were performing completely live courtesy of some new miracle of sound reproduction. It was an
experience so beholden to click tracks, autocue machines and technological whizz-bangs that nothing could stand in its way or alter one step or one word from night to night. The performers were elements in a production rather than autonomous individuals who might at any stage stop what they were doing and change their mind. It was a Broadway show taken on the road and magnified many times over.
Popular music was testing the limits of its scalability. In the summer of 1990 even the Stone Roses, who just a year earlier had barely been able to fill a bath outside the north-west of England, played Spike Island in front of thirty thousand young adults all apparently wearing the same clothes and taking the same drugs.
The world for touring artists was starting to get flatter. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was seen in some quarters as an episode in the forty-year struggle between seriousness and triviality. P. J. O’Rourke wrote in Rolling Stone, ‘The best thing about our victory is we did it with Levi 501s. Seventy-two years of Communist propaganda got drowned out with the three-ounce Walkman. A totalitarian system has been brought down because nobody wants to wear Bulgarian shoes.’
As the big leisure and fashion brands rushed to export to this new world they found that the stars of music were their best ambassadors. Paul McGuinness, the manager of U2, chided the big names of the sixties for taking the money of these advertisers. Paul McCartney, who was rumoured to have been paid over $8 million by the credit card company Visa for having their name on his first major tour of the United States, said McGuinness should grow up. The older generation, however, had older-generation worries that could only be relieved by the windfalls that came from touring. There was a dawning realization on the part of acts like McCartney and the Who that the market didn’t want their new songs but was happy to hear them play the old ones. The latest US tour would eventually net Townshend £4 million, which would set him and his family up for the future. But he knew that he owed his first loyalty to his fellow band members. The real motivation for the tour was bassist John Entwistle’s need to pay his back taxes. After almost thirty years as a rock star Entwistle was primarily surviving by selling his guitars. In this, the rock acts of the sixties and seventies still belonged in a tradition that stretched back to the classical players of the past, who would sell their best violin at the end of their career to buy a pension.
The Madonna show made all this look rather quaint. The central performing unit of a Madonna show was the dance troupe. She led and they followed. Every move she made was shadowed by them and echoed by a movement of their own. In a device imported wholesale from the shiny floor shows of television, the star was twirled, lifted, swung, ground up against and adoringly pawed by lightly oiled muscular young men dressed as firemen or farmhands in a ceremony of adoration that seemed designed to boost the ravenous self-esteem of the star and to relegate the audience to mere onlookers of an orgy of self-congratulation.
Madonna had come to New York when she was only eighteen to try and make it as a dancer. The music came later. Her first reviews pointed out the music was always ancillary. She was a dancer first and foremost. She made records to give herself something to dance to. Many of the young women who came after her were cut from similar cloth. Most of the biggest stars of the pop music world we live in today are women. Madonna is the person who proved that was possible, who opened up a new world for them to grow into. As radio fragmented and rock was directed into its own morose silo, country was pushed thataway and indie was given its own playground in which to polish its illusions, the mainstream became largely about dancing.
1990 was the year of Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze doing half-naked pottery in the middle of the night in the movie Ghost, of Julia Roberts almost making prostitution seem attractive in Pretty Woman, of Victoria Abril healing Antonio Banderas’s cuts and bruises with her kisses in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, and Sherilyn Fenn getting a job in a brothel because she could tie a cherry stem with her tongue in Twin Peaks. The plot of the opening episode of NBC’s new comedy show Seinfeld hinged on whether the girl in the hero’s apartment was just a friend or intended to sleep with him. Suddenly it seemed there was no distinction between what had been known as adult entertainment and the mainstream. The issues once confined to the TV in the bedroom were now in everybody’s living rooms. One of the things that had put them there was MTV. And while the sex objects in most videos had tended to be women, like the one being drenched with a firehose by the members of Warrant in ‘Cherry Pie’, now they were just as likely to be male models with six-packs wandering the halls of luxury hotels ready to gratify the womanly needs of Janet Jackson, Whitney Houston or En Vogue. It was also the year of one of the most overt hits about masturbation, the Divinyls’ ‘I Touch Myself’. In no mood to cede ground in this new erotic arms race, Madonna released ‘Justify My Love’, the most controversial video of the year. In this she dressed and conducted herself like a character from the Penthouse letters page.
(The song was also characteristic of the new ways records were being made in a digital era. It started life as a poem by Ingrid Chavez. Lenny Kravitz worked it up into a song and presented it to Madonna, who changed one line. By the time the record came out it only had Madonna’s and Kravitz’s credits on it; Chavez eventually got hers, and a substantial out-of-court settlement. Another collaborator claimed he didn’t get paid for developing the rhythm track, which owed something to Public Enemy’s ‘Security Of The First World’, which in turn was made at least in part from components of James Brown’s ‘Funky Drummer’, which actually owed everything to the eponymous Clyde Stubblefield. This was the new hip hop way. New hits could be made from reconditioned parts of old ones. Putting together the records would be the producer’s job. The role of the artist was to get them noticed.)
What fascinated Madonna most was her own stardom. ‘People talk about how stardom changes you but they never talk about how stardom changes the people around you,’ she says at one point in the In Bed With Madonna film. One by one the people close to her float through the action, looking on in various degrees of shock and awe at what their daughter/sister/girlfriend has achieved through the force of her own singular drive. Her father, presumably not thrilled at sharing the spectacle of his daughter rogering herself in front of a few thousand fellow Detroit natives, thinks there are a couple of numbers he could have done without. An old friend appears to ask if she would be godmother to her child and gets a brush-off. She takes the film crew to cover her visiting the grave of her mother. One member of her entourage is filmed talking about her experience of being sexually assaulted. Near the end of the film Madonna is asked to say who is the love of her life and she replies ‘Sean’, the husband she’s recently divorced.
She didn’t seem to have any problem with bringing those people into her own personal drama. Warren Beatty is the sharpest operator in the film because he’s already sated himself on all the attention anyone could have and therefore he’s capable of hanging back from the camera’s ravenous eye. Everybody else just tumbles helplessly towards it. Beatty, who is trying to avoid the camera when Madonna drags him and the crew in to witness her consultation with a throat specialist in New York, asks her where this desperate need to over-share stops. Warren, who was born before the Second World War, tries to get the camera on his side by pleading that ‘She doesn’t want to live off-camera, much less talk. There’s nothing to say off-camera. Why would you say something if it’s off-camera? What point is there existing?’
It was too late to win that argument. After Madonna, stars had no secrets. What’s more, the technology that would eventually enable us all to be the stars of our own lives was already on its way.
1990 PLAYLIST
Madonna, ‘Vogue’
Sinéad O’Connor, ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’
MC Hammer, ‘U Can’t Touch This’
Garth Brooks, No Fences
George Michael, Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1
Angelo Badalamenti, Twin Peaks soundtrack
Depeche Mode, Violat
or
The Who, Join Together
Happy Mondays, Pills ’N’ Thrills And Bellyaches
Megadeth, Rust In Peace
24 NOVEMBER 1991
KENSINGTON, LONDON
The party’s over
IN JANUARY 1991, at a lavish launch party on board the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California – a party that was paid for by Disney, the owners of Queen’s new record company in the United States – guitarist Brian May was asked by a member of the American press whether it was true that Freddie Mercury had AIDS. He responded, as is traditional among British stars who happen to be in America, with an attack on the British tabloid press – ‘a low form of life’ – and a hearty assurance that the band’s singer was in good health.
It was certainly the case that the British press had been trying to stand up the story of Mercury’s illness ever since he had appeared in public looking gaunt and unwell. Indeed, as May spoke a number of them were stationed outside Mercury’s home, the Garden Lodge in Logan Place in one of London’s more prosperous boroughs, awaiting his end. Brian May and Roger Taylor, the only two members of Queen who attended the launch, knew that when they said Freddie didn’t feel like touring at the moment they were telling less than the truth. They had a party line to uphold. The British press pretended they had a sacred duty to shed light on the newsworthy secrets of prominent entertainers. Freddie had plenty of those.
Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars 1955-1994 Page 29