“Then you just go out there and knock ’em dead,” Tina said. She told her that they would be watching from seats in the front row, which Mathew was presently saving for them. “Okay, Mommy,” Beyoncé said with a big smile.
After just a few more moments, Tina and Solange said their goodbyes, told Beyoncé how much they loved her, and then left her with her little friends in the dressing room. Keith Bell then gathered all of the girls and began working with them on last-minute changes to one of their many dance routines.
With Andretta at her side, Tina walked back down the hallway on her way out of the backstage area. “Are you a mom, Ann?” Tina asked as she reached for Solange’s hand. Andretta said she was the mother of two young boys, Armon and Chris. This pleased Tina. She said she hoped Andretta would join the management team, “because we could always use another mother’s touch. Deborah and Denise are mothers, too, you know?”
“Well, there can never be enough mothers, I guess,” Andretta said, laughing.
“Ain’t that the truth!” Tina exclaimed. She then entwined her arm around Andretta’s as the two walked into the crowded auditorium. Already it was as if they were good friends.
Crossroads
Three days passed. Now it was Friday afternoon, September 7, 1990.
The show Tuesday night had gone very well. Tina and Mathew knew that Beyoncé had done her best, and in fact, they believed her to be the only one onstage who truly had any talent. Her voice was quite a wonder, as were her performing skills. Now the Knowleses were sitting with a group of other parents on the curb under a blazing hot sun in front of a small office building. Everyone looked disgruntled. “Ain’t this something?” Tina asked. “We drove all the way out here, and for what?” Mathew forced a smile and regarded his wife thoughtfully. “Well, you know, these things happen,” was all he could say.
This afternoon, Mathew was wearing a black gabardine suit that hung on him with precision; clearly it had been tailored by one of the best clothiers in Houston. A starched white shirt and pearl-gray silk tie finished the look. His large-framed glasses gave him a professorial look. He had taken time away from work to meet Tina.
After the show the other night, the parents of the performers had all congregated backstage and, in a quick meeting, agreed that Deborah Laday and Denise Seals needed help. They wanted to discuss their children’s future with the two managers and then take a vote to decide how to proceed. All agreed that Deborah and Denise had worked hard for the last six months. However, they feared that maybe the women didn’t have the financial resources to take the girls to the next level of success.
One might have thought the parents would have given Deborah and Denise a bit more latitude since it had only been six months since they began working with the girls. Were these kids to become stars overnight? However, the parents’ impatience was tied to the urgency many of them felt about seeing their children become famous. The Knowleses were the exceptions. Mathew had a good job and was making excellent money for the times. Tina had Headliners, and though business was spotty, she was still able to turn a good profit. The Knowleses lived in a fashionable home and had two very nice luxury vehicles. They didn’t need Beyoncé to become successful in order for them to sustain their good life. However, the other parents had different stories and if their daughters’ talent was to be a possible solution to their fiscal problems, there was no time to waste. Therefore, they made an appointment with the managers, and then took the drive to the bucolic suburb of Greater Greenspoint where Deborah and Denise had their D&D Management office space and rehearsal studio.
The parents were used to this trek to Greater Greenspoint, which could be anywhere from thirty to forty-five minutes each way. After all, every night, after their daughters finished some of their homework, they would drop them off at this very location, usually at about 6:00 p.m. The girls would then practice with Keith Bell until about 9:00—taking frequent homework breaks—and then the parents would have to retrieve them.
On this day, the parents assembled at the appointed hour in the middle of the afternoon while their children were still in school. They waited outside for the entire group to assemble—eight parents in all. When everyone was present, the contingent walked across a wide courtyard to the office complex in which D&D Management was housed. But at their destination, much to their dismay, they found something they did not expect: a padlock on the door and an eviction notice! “Everyone was pretty frustrated at that point,” Tina Knowles would later recall. “That’s the last thing we expected. I remember standing at that door, looking at that padlock, and thinking, ‘Oh no! You have got to be kidding me.’ ”1
“We can’t even tell Beyoncé about this goddamn thing,” Mathew said, according to Tina’s memory.
“Why?” Tina asked.
“Because I don’t want to discourage her,” he said. He then explained that he felt they should keep anything from her that would make her not want to give her all to the endeavor. She was a very determined little girl and he wanted to keep it that way.
It was certainly true that even at the age of nine, Beyoncé was laser-focused on one goal: She wanted to sing. For instance, Deborah and Denise had recently aligned themselves with Pro-Line and Soft & Beautiful products, leading hair care lines for women and girls of color. After looking at pictures of all the girls, the company wanted to audition LaTavia for national commercials and print advertising campaigns. Rather than single out her own daughter, LaTavia’s mother, Cheryl Mitchell, felt that all of the group members should audition. “So we all piled into a fifteen-passenger van and went to Dallas to meet with the Pro-Line executives,” LaTavia recalled. All of the girls were excited about auditioning, except for Beyoncé. “It’s just not what I want to do,” she said. There was no mistaking that she wasn’t a little girl who just wanted to be in show business and would settle for any venue. She wanted to be a singer, and that was it. (Incidentally, LaTavia was hired for the job and became the face of Pro-Line for young girls for the next ten years.)
On this hot, summer afternoon, judging from the grim expressions on the faces of the other couples—all of them sitting on the curb, lined up in single file—similar conversations about the children’s futures were taking place.
“But did you hear how hoarse her voice was this morning at breakfast?” Tina asked. Mathew nodded. Tina said that when she asked Beyoncé about the hoarseness, she told her that she had to sing all of the girls’ parts while teaching them.
“Yeah, but sacrifice is the name of this game,” Mathew said. According to Tina’s later testimony, he then asked her about the woman she’d met at the recent show in Dallas—Andretta Tillman. He wondered if she was “on the up-and-up.” Tina said she “seemed nice” but that she wasn’t sure what to make of her, at least not yet. As they continued to talk, Mathew mentioned that he wasn’t “crazy” about Deborah Laday, noting that every time he had a conversation with her, he liked her just a little bit less. Tina agreed, saying that she liked Denise more. “But who down here in the South knows how to manage singing groups anyway?” Mathew asked. “Shit! We’re in Houston. This sure ain’t Hollywood.”
Years later Tina would recall, “The next day, we all took a vote and decided that Andretta definitely should come in as a manager. We weren’t sure she would accept the job, though. Then one day soon after she called me and said that, yes, she was going to be co-managing the girls with Deborah and Denise. She said she had a producer and a songwriter and that she was going to pay for some studio time. This was exciting. I was happy, as was Mathew. We definitely started to feel a lot better about things for Beyoncé.”
Fine-Tuning
While the concept Deborah and Denise had for their “Ultimate Masterpiece” revue was a solid and entertaining one, it was also a little unwieldy. There was a “hype-master,” there were dancers, and there were singers. Some were good, some not so good. When she finally saw it, Andretta thought the package needed to be pared down and fine-tuned. “The dancing
is great, but there are just too many moving parts,” was how she put it. “Too many girls doing too many things, and some not very well.” Since she was now the primary investor, she had latitude to do whatever she felt was best. That’s where Alonzo Jackson came into the picture.
Alonzo, whom everyone knew as Lonnie, was a young, ambitious, and immensely talented writer and producer from East Oakland, California, whom Deborah had earlier met at Ultimate Sound recording studios in Houston. He describes himself as having been “twenty-one years old and hungry as hell, having only been in Houston for a short time. Creative and eager to be heard, I was producing local talent at Ultimate Sound and also acting as an engineer there. Anybody who had ears to sit down and listen to my ideas, to what I believed in, I was willing to talk to. Andretta was one of those people. Deborah and I had just started talking about things when she brought in Andretta, and then Andretta became the main contact.”
To also work with the team, Lonnie recruited Anthony Moore, whom everyone called Tony Mo., a talented young songwriter who was raised in Missouri City and also worked at Ultimate Sound. “We ended up being good friends and great collaborators,” Lonnie said of Tony Mo. “We fed off each other, me doing the music, him doing the lyrics. It was a good marriage.”
Andretta’s idea was to pare down the three separate acts in Deborah and Denise’s revue into one very strong vocal and dancing group. It would be up to Lonnie then to take a look at all of the youngsters and decide which could stay and which had to go. Then new girls would be auditioned to replace the ones who didn’t make the cut.
Lonnie immediately decided he wasn’t interested in working with Millicent Laday, Deborah’s daughter, known as M-1, the act’s DJ. Thus she was the first to go. Deborah understood; it was a business decision, and she would see what she could do with her daughter on her own. In fact, Millicent would continue her career as “M-1, Tha [sic] Lyrical Mistress.”
From the group called Destiny, Lonnie released Chris Lewis. However, he decided to keep dancers Nicki and Nina Taylor and their cousin, rapper LaTavia Roberson. “I liked LaTavia a lot,” he recalled. “She had this great, big personality and attitude. I was a fan of that kid’s right away.”
From the group Girls Tyme, Lonnie let Staci LaToisen and Jennifer Young go. That left only Beyoncé. “I then needed to find two girls to sing with Beyoncé,” Lonnie recalled. “The vision Andretta and I shared was to create a group around Beyoncé that had the old-school harmonies of a rhythm-and-blues sister act from Chicago called the Emotions and the contemporary edge of two other girl groups popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s—En Vogue and SWV.”
To that end, Lonnie and Andretta added Kelendria Rowland, known as Kelly. At ten, Kelly was bashful and unsure of herself, but her tone was clear as a bell. Though they felt she sounded like a young Whitney Houston, they never intended for her to sing lead. Rather, she would be a backing singer. “I had some doubts about Kelly, if you want to know the truth,” Lonnie said. “But there was just something about her. I felt like I wanted to give her a chance, a shot, you know?”
They also added Ashley Davis, eleven. The complete opposite of Kelly in personality, Ashley was outgoing and precocious. She had a strong voice and little trouble using it. Lonnie knew he had found someone special in her, a second lead singer with Beyoncé. “Ashley was a real discovery,” he recalled. “There was a grown-up quality about her that intrigued me. She had a surprising amount of power in her voice. When I heard her sing, I knew right away I wanted her to be included in the act.”
Ashley was an interesting counterpoint to Beyoncé. Whereas Beyoncé sounded like a young girl who could sing, Ashley sounded like a seasoned adult. She actually had more range than Beyoncé. In some ways, she represented what Beyoncé would morph into with time. When the two girls traded leads in early rehearsals, the way they played off one another seemed natural and effortless. “I think they were a good team,” LaTavia Roberson recalled. “They had a great blend. There was something about the two of them that inspired the rest of us. In a sense, they were both so good they made the rest of us want to work even harder.”
And so it happened that by the fall of 1990, Andretta Tillman and Lonnie Jackson finally had their girls’ group—three singers, Beyoncé, Kelly, and Ashley; one rapper, LaTavia; and two dancers, Nicki and Nina. Lonnie and Andretta liked the idea of the name Girls Tyme, so it was decided to keep it. Thus the six girls became the new, streamlined, and easier-to-digest version of Girls Tyme. “It was a good, viable package,” Lonnie Jackson recalled. “I felt that with Andretta managing, me producing, and Tony Mo. writing, we could really take this group right to the top.”
“A Family We Get to Choose”
How does one ever get over the loss of a child? Andretta Tillman had been asking herself that question ever since her infant daughter, Shawna, was taken from her by a drunk driver. With her husband, Dwight, also gone, she was forced to think of her family in smaller terms—now it was just her and her boys, Armon and Chris. “We were everything to my mother,” Armon would later recall. “Family mattered to her so much, and we had our own little unit. We were fractured. We were damaged. But thanks to my mother, what was left of us still felt bound together.”
“Still, there was a hole in her heart; she missed Dwight and Shawna,” Andretta’s other son, Chris, recalled. Though there wasn’t anything Andretta could do to completely fill the void left by Dwight, she tried to compensate for the loss of Shawna by taking on the youngsters in Girls Tyme as surrogate daughters. Chris remembered, “She began to love each of those girls as if they were her own. Actually, it was when Girls Tyme started practicing at our house that we started to feel like maybe our family wasn’t so ruined, like maybe there was some hope for the future.”
“As I came to know Ann, it was apparent to me that Girls Tyme filled the emptiness in her heart left by Shauna,” recalled Kenny Moore. “These little girls filled her house and her heart. Every day she was with them, the more time she spent with them, the more she loved them. Her life soon began to revolve around this newfound love affair with not one little girl, but six of them. There were actually times that Ann would call Shauna’s name instead of one of the girls’ names and have to quickly correct herself. ‘Shawna . . . oh my Lord, I mean . . . Beyoncé, you missed a step!’ In spirit, I came to believe that each girl represented some aspect of Shawna. Andretta loved and supported them as if it was Shawna she was loving and supporting.”
Girls Tyme would spend as much time as possible in rehearsals at Andretta’s home now, instead of at D&D Management. Deborah and Denise were still involved, but they became much less prominent once Andretta began taking over. Most, if not all, of the girls’ business started filtering through Andretta’s company, Tillman Management. Not only did the group quickly become attached to the ambitious but maternal woman they now called “Miss Ann,” but their parents also started to trust her. They marveled at the way their daughters blossomed under her careful tutelage. “Not taking anything away from Beyoncé, because she’s obviously an amazing performer,” Kenny Moore observed, “but the fact is that she was not born to be a star. Nobody is born to be a star. She was taught to be a star by Andretta. She was just receptive to the teaching. If you want to keep it real, that’s keeping it real.”
“Chris and I were just little boys at the time, but I remember we had a second level on our house that we could stand up on and look down into the living room,” recalled Armon Tillman. “We used to watch the girls perform, and my mom was always right on top of them, telling them what to do, how to act, keeping their spirits up, even giving them a sense of self-worth. ‘Beyoncé, it’s too much, pull back,’ she would always be heard saying. Or, ‘Kelly, you need to give more. You’re not putting yourself out there enough.’ In terms of discipline, my mom was old-school. It was the same with me and my brother as it was for the girls—just a very severe look was all you needed from my mom to know that you needed to get right.”
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�I remember that it was the same routine every day,” Beyoncé recalled. “We would get home from school and then race over to rehearsal at Miss Ann’s. Some days we wouldn’t even go home first, we’d just go straight to practice. We loved it so much, we couldn’t get enough of it. That first year, we did a lot of shows. So it was just practice, practice, practice. Someone told me in school that practice makes perfect, and I remember thinking by the beginning of 1991, ‘Well, we must be pretty darn perfect by now, ’cause we sure have practiced enough!’ ”
“We had this big guy in our group named A. J. Alarich, who was maybe three hundred pounds,” recalled Keith Bell of Tayste. “What a singer this guy was! He had such incredible range. When he would do something really cool, Beyoncé would put her little nine-year-old hands on her hips, give him a sassy look, and say, ‘I hate you!’ That’s the sound I want! Now how’d you get that sound?’ It was all in fun, but we all knew she really wanted his range and was still too young to develop it. ‘Dang!’ she would say to A.J., ‘that’s what I love. That’s how I want to sound. I sure hope I don’t have to gain three hundred pounds to sound that way, though!’ ”
Despite the unpredictable nature of their lives in those days, the Tillman sons still felt not only secure but also somehow attached to something that seemed vitally important. Indeed, the fulfillment of their mother’s dreams had become the family’s new mandate. “This is our lives now, boys,” Andretta told them. They couldn’t do anything about what had happened in the past, she said, because it had all been God’s divine plan. They couldn’t even question it, she told them. It was actually one of the rare times Andretta even referred to the accident that had so completely transformed their lives. It simply wasn’t something she felt comfortable discussing, even with her own sons.
Becoming Beyoncé Page 7