Becoming Beyoncé

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  “We love you, Ann,” Tina said.

  “I know,” she said halfheartedly.

  After this conversation a new partnership between Andretta, Kenny Moore, and Mathew Knowles would be formed, called Music World Entertainment, a venture that would see Mathew now getting the lion’s share of the profits.

  Destiny

  In order to legally use the group’s new name, the Dolls, the moniker had to be trademarked. Therefore, research was necessary in order to make sure the name wasn’t being used by another act. Then legal papers would need to be filed to protect it. When Daryl Simmons did his investigation, he found that there was actually more than one group using the name, and that they were all fighting about it among themselves. He didn’t want his act to be caught in the middle of all that contention. Thus the girls’ name would have to be changed once again.

  At this point, Daryl wanted to change the group’s name to simply . . . Beyoncé. It was an interesting idea. Back in the 1970s, Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles had changed their name to LaBelle. Carlos Santana’s group was called Santana, Eddie Van Halen’s band, Van Halen. Despite the fact that for the last few years he had obviously wanted to push Beyoncé forward, Mathew had to disagree with Daryl. He said, “Oh, hell no! I can’t do that. Those girls would kill each other if I did that.” Simmons had to agree, “though I still thought it was an awesome name for a group.”

  Ultimately, the act’s name was changed to Destiny.

  Of course, this wasn’t exactly an original idea. After all, Destiny had been the name of one of the three acts in Deborah Laday and Denise Seals’s all-girls revue. As managed by Laday and Seals, the acts were M-1 (Millicent Laday), Destiny (the dancers), and Girls Tyme (the singers, of whom Beyoncé was one). Beyoncé lore has it, though, that Tina Knowles came up with the name Destiny to replace that of the Dolls. Tina says that it was inspired by a verse in the Bible, in Isaiah, chapter 65, verses 11–12:

  But as for you who forsake the Lord and forget my holy mountain, who spread a table for fortune and fill bowls of mixed wine for Destiny, I will destine you for the sword, and you will all bend down for the slaughter.

  While it does seems a little odd that Tina would have picked out a name for her daughter’s group based on such a foreboding Bible passage, that’s her story and she’s always stuck to it. She says that she happened to turn to that passage in the Bible, and that when she did, a photo of the girls (which she’d been using as a page marker) fell into her lap. She looked at the page and her eye went right to the word “Destiny”—and that, she says, is how she came up with the name.

  In all fairness to Tina, it had been about five years since the Laday/Seals revue. So it’s possible she forgot that the name Destiny had already been associated with her daughter’s career, especially since Beyoncé wasn’t actually a member of that particular group of dancers.

  Columbia/Sony

  It was at about this time, 1995, that Lonnie Jackson’s childhood friend D’Wayne Wiggins—the founding member of the popular R&B group Tony! Toni! Toné!—had his date with Destiny. Wiggins’s own group was about to peak with its final studio album, House of Music, after a viable career that had begun back in 1988. The act had an astounding fourteen Billboard-charting R&B singles, including five number ones, and three Top Ten pop singles. They’d also been awarded one gold album, two platinum albums, and one double platinum album. With the act’s success now on the wane (they would disband in two years’ time), Wiggins—who was thirty-two in 1995—was determined to rebrand himself as a record producer.

  D’Wayne had seen Destiny perform years earlier when they were still Girls Tyme, but had lost track of them. “Some years later, I happened to be at Lonnie’s house and saw a picture of the girls on the wall,” he recalled. “I asked Lonnie, ‘Hey! Whatever happened to that group? They were dope!’ He said, ‘They’re with Daryl Simmons now.’ I told him I always thought they were special. A couple weeks later, Lonnie called and said, ‘Hey, remember those girls you were asking about? They’re having a problem with their deal at Elektra, something big happened . . . the whole damn thing fell apart. So Daryl is no longer working with them. I think their management wants to talk to you.’ ”

  D’Wayne made contact with Mathew Knowles soon after, and Mathew sent him a tape of some of the girls’ recordings. After one listen, he called Mathew. “Brother, these are no little girls,” D’Wayne told him. “You must have sent me the wrong tape. I know what little girls sound like, and they sure don’t sound like this!”

  Mathew had to laugh. “But that’s them!” he exclaimed. “I swear to God!”

  “It all happened pretty fast after that,” D’Wayne Wiggins recalled. “I just really wanted to work with them. I knew they’d been having a hard time and that they were very dismayed by the loss of the Elektra deal. I also suspected they were hungry. And Beyoncé, I mean, I wanted to get her into the studio as quickly as possible. So, yeah, I hammered out a production deal with Mathew and Andretta right away.

  “Then, I got to know the Knowles family,” he recalled. “I learned that if you’re in the inner circle, they will open up to you about their struggles, and they had a lot of them, too. Otherwise, no, they’re not givin’ up no information. That’s Mafia-style right there,” he said, laughing. “It was such a dope family clique, I mean, they were unbelievably close. If they let you in, you felt for sure they trusted you. I felt cool about being let in, too.”

  In the spring of 1995, Mathew and Andretta’s (and Kenny Moore’s) Music World entered into a deal with Wiggins’s production company, Grass Roots Entertainment, which was officed in his West Oakland, California, recording studio, House of Music. Just as with the other production deals in which the girls had been involved (with Arne Farger, Lonnie Jackson, and Daryl Simmons), D’Wayne Wiggins would produce songs for them, and then use those recordings to try to secure a deal with a record label. So Beyoncé, Kelly, LaTavia, and LeToya would now have to temporarily move to Oakland to record at House of Music. “I put them up in a six-bedroom house,” Wiggins recalled. “It was a grinding schedule, but they were happy to once again be in the studio after what had happened down in Atlanta. Of course, they were privately tutored in Oakland, as they had been in Atlanta.

  “My dealings with Andretta were usually on the telephone because she was so sick,” D’Wayne recalled. “My dealings with Mathew were in person. I thought they were a pretty good team in the sense that they were always keeping each other checked. It was actually to the advantage of the girls that they had managers who maybe didn’t trust each other very much. It kept everyone honest. Andretta would say to me, ‘Watch out for Mathew. If he does anything sneaky, let me know.’ I’d hang up and, ten minutes later, Mathew would say the exact same thing to me about her—‘If she does anything sneaky, let me know.’ ”

  Eventually, some of the songs recorded by Destiny in Oakland would end up on the desk of Teresa LaBarbera Whites at Columbia/Sony Records. This turn of events would prove to be a pivotal and defining moment in Beyoncé’s life, and thus it would be prudent to credit the right person for the submission. But there’s a great deal of disagreement about it. Mathew’s friends and family say he sent the songs to Teresa. However, Andretta insists it was she who did so. LaBarbera Whites says it was Mathew, though, and probably she should have the final word on the matter. It’s definitely true, though, that Teresa had been Andretta’s contact long before she was Mathew’s. “Andretta and Teresa were tied to the hip way before Mathew came into the picture,” is how Kenny Moore put it.

  Teresa says she had first seen the girls years earlier when she was working as a regional talent scout for Columbia/Sony, and this would have been back when Andretta was managing the girls by herself. “Beyoncé and Kelly were nine when I met them,” she recalls. However, as a talent scout, she had very little persuasive power over the label, though she believed the group was worth signing. She says Mathew contacted her once the group had recorded songs for Grass Roots and sent he
r a selection on tape. By this time she was on the A&R staff at Columbia/Sony and empowered to make signing decisions.

  After receiving the tape, Teresa went to Houston at Mathew’s behest and attended a special showcase he set up for her there. The girls performed for her, but midway through their first song, Mathew stopped them. He had warned them not to go swimming the night before, telling them that it might affect their voices for the all-important showcase. “It’s a very important day,” he told them, “and you can’t blow this. You’re gonna be all stopped up,” he said, meaning they would be congested, especially Beyoncé. The youngsters didn’t listen to Mathew; they went swimming anyway.

  The next day, the audition did not go well. “In the middle of the audition, I stopped and told them, ‘I don’t really care if Teresa is here. You see the price you’re paying for going swimming the other day? This is exactly what I was talking about. You guys decided to go swimming, and now you’re not sounding good.’ ”

  Mathew was miffed. Beyoncé, in particular, was mortified. She knew she had let her father down, and in her mind, nothing was more debilitating. “Me? I thought they sounded great,” Teresa said, laughing, “so I didn’t know what was going on.”

  Mathew told the girls to get offstage and blow their noses, then return and sing the song again. It was easier said than done. Pulling themselves together took all of their resolve. “This means everything,” Beyoncé told her friends. “We can’t mess up!” This time, when they went back onstage, they were very good. Teresa was impressed.

  After the audition, Teresa began to pressure the Columbia/Sony executives in New York into signing Destiny to a recording contract. To that end, another audition was conducted, this time for the suits in Manhattan. Mathew and Andretta were both at this one. “We had to perform in a conference room in the Columbia Records office in the Sony building,” Beyoncé has recalled. “It was a tiny room with couches all around it. There were a bunch of men and women of all different races sitting so close that we could put our arms out and touch them if we wanted to. It was that small and informal. It felt too intimate, being that close. Having to make eye contact was very scary, but we knew that this might be our last chance.”

  PART THREE

  Destiny’s Child

  Signing with Columbia/Sony

  As Andretta and Mathew had long before figured out, the record industry often moves at a snail’s pace. After they were finally given a commitment by Columbia/Sony, months passed with no formal paperwork. There was some hesitation from Columbia/Sony having to do with the Elektra deal gone bad. A great many questions were being asked about that arrangement, such as exactly how the money advanced by Elektra had been spent. The new label just wanted to be sure it was making a sound investment. The girls were teenagers, though, so even they were as annoyed as the adults by the delay.

  In order to give the record label a little more push, partners Knowles and Tillman decided to continue shopping for another deal, even if only to use it as leverage. As it happened, Polydor was keen on the idea of signing Destiny, especially considering D’Wayne Wiggins’s success there with Tony! Toni! Toné! Before anyone knew it, Polydor was actually drawing up contracts. After so much difficulty, Beyoncé’s group suddenly had two pending record deals. It was almost more than she and the others could comprehend. “Very typical of the record business,” Wiggins recalled. “I told the girls that you just can’t predict this crazy industry. If they didn’t believe me, they sure did now.”

  On October 15, 1995, with the paperwork under way at Polydor, Andretta telephoned Teresa LaBarbera Whites at Columbia/Sony to tell her that they’d decided to sign with another label. She was bluffing, hoping to get a rise out of Teresa. It worked. “Oh no you don’t!” exclaimed LaBarbera Whites. “No way! We are flying all of you to New York tomorrow to finalize the deal with us!”

  D’Wayne Wiggins happened to be in Washington at that time, at the Million Man March. The next day, he took a plane from there to New York to sit down with the Columbia/Sony executives. During their meeting with him, the label finalized a deal for Destiny that was much better than the one Polydor had offered. Now, just that fast—and so typical of the fickle record industry—Polydor was out and Columbia/Sony was in.

  “One day I got a call from Columbia,” recalled Daryl Simmons, who hadn’t seen the group in many months, not since the deal with Elektra fell apart. “It was Teresa LaBarbera Whites. She says, ‘I have the girls here with me.’ I heard them all screaming out hello in the background. ‘We’re getting ready to sign them,’ she told me. I said, ‘Great! They’re amazing.’ And she said, ‘Well, I know that when they were with you there were some issues. Is there anything we need to know?’ I said, ‘Look, the girls are great. I love ’em. They deserve a record deal. Mathew and I didn’t see eye-to-eye, but it certainly had nothing to do with Beyoncé and them.’ She said, ‘Okay, great. I just wanted to get your thoughts, because I’m pretty sure we’re going to sign them.’ I was happy for the girls, I genuinely was.”

  For a short period, the group was simply known at Columbia as Destiny. But, again, there was a problem with the name. From 1978 to 1981, Polydor had a group under contract called Alton McClain and Destiny. The trio of young women had one big hit for the label in 1979 called “It Must Be Love,” and then issued a few albums. Their back catalog at Polydor was still viable. Therefore, as Destiny’s contracts were being finalized, some label executives thought there might be confusion about the name. Beyoncé lore has it that it was Mathew’s idea to add the word “Child,” thereby making it Destiny’s Child. So at least according to this version of events, Tina came up with the first half of the name, and Mathew with the second.

  “Guess what? We’ve got a new name,” Beyoncé said, calling D’Wayne Wiggins on the telephone one morning.

  “What is it?”

  “Destiny’s Child,” she answered.

  “Um . . . cool. But I was sorta thinking, the Naturelles,” he told her, kidding. (“I was always gonna try to go Motown with it,” he later explained.)

  “For real?” Beyoncé asked, laughing. She said that she felt Destiny’s Child had “a certain ring to it.” She also noted that it was a phrase found in the Bible. “We love it,” she exclaimed.

  Destiny’s Child signed with Columbia/Sony for seven albums. According to a deal memo (with Beyoncé’s last name misspelled as “Knolls”), the budget for the first album was to be $85,000—not much in the record business. If the label were to continue with the group—and it had the option not to do so—the next album’s budget could be anywhere between $350,000 and $700,000. The third was between $375,000 and $750,000, and the scale continued to rise until the seventh album, the budget of which could be as high as $950,000. The group would be allowed “consultation” on their album jacket design, but not “approval.” The term’s commencement date was to be December 5, 1995 (and, in fact, that would be the day the girls would sign their deal). The advance from the label was $400,000, which the group’s recordings would have to earn back before anyone—they or their managers—saw any more money. It’s not known how much of this actually ended up in the Knowleses’ pockets, but it was most certainly enough to allow them some breathing room from bill collectors.

  It was also at about this time that Mathew and Andretta struck a new partnership deal, one that concerned the group’s royalties: Mathew would receive 15 percent, and Andretta just 5 percent. In exchange, Mathew said he would be responsible for 100 percent of the expenses, which is probably why Andretta agreed to a split that so favored him. “To be honest, Ann was just real tired by this time,” said Pat Felton. “I mean, she was sick, tired, broke . . . and even though there was obviously some joy attached to the fact that the girls finally had a record deal, it was bittersweet. A lot of water had gone under the bridge. I know she wanted to be happy. I’m not sure that she was able to be completely thrilled, though. Also, I think she had pretty much had it with Mathew by this time.”

  Beyo
ncé’s memory of the moment when she and her friends first realized they had recording contracts with Columbia/Sony is vivid. After church, the Knowleses always ate at Luby’s cafeteria. Mathew decided to try to trick Beyoncé, Kelly, LaTavia, and LeToya by putting their contracts in Luby’s company envelopes and presenting them to the girls one afternoon at Headliners. “I’ve got a little present for you girls,” he said, smiling. He handed each girl an envelope.

  “What’s this? A gift certificate to Luby’s?” Beyoncé asked.

  “Could be,” Mathew said with a smile. “Open it.”

  When the young ladies opened their envelopes, they found their recording contracts. “What is this?” Beyoncé asked, looking down at the paper. Then it dawned on her; the Sony letterhead was a dead giveaway. She was the first to scream with delight. She reached out to her father and pulled him into her arms, crying. “Is it true, Daddy?” she asked, as the other girls jumped up and down and squealed all around her. With tears in his eyes, Mathew told her that indeed it was true, that they’d finally reached this milestone and that they’d done it together as a team. “You deserve this, little girl,” he told her as he hugged her tightly. Considering all of the personal and professional pressures of recent years, it must have felt to Mathew that he had somehow pulled off a miracle. After spending time with her dad, Beyoncé pulled away from him and joined her singing partners in their jubilation.

  “The ladies with their heads under the dryers looked at us like we were crazy, because they couldn’t hear what all the screaming and yelling was about,” Beyoncé later recalled. “We ran all around the shop, jumping up and down, holding our contracts in the air for the customers to see. It was a beautiful day at Headliners, that’s for sure.”