Authors: Andrew Morton
That she did not was partly her doing, although not altogether her fault. She and the drummer had had a major falling out after he had argued that since he had recorded the demo, he should be the one to produce the single. While Madonna has often been blamed, if not demonized, for leaving him in the lurch, in truth she had little room for maneuver. As far as Kamins was concerned, his role as producer was non-negotiable. He had taken all the risks, brokered the deal, quit his job at Island Records, and signed the artist. The result, however, was that Madonna and Steve Bray split.
Worse still, their first experience of working together did not end happily for her and Kamins. As Mark says, ‘Things fell apart between us after that because I did not give her enough direction in the studio and the A-side did not come out as successfully as everyone had wanted.’ In fact, when Michael Rosenblatt of Sire Records listened to the scheduled A-side, ‘Ain’t No Big Deal,’ he was so unimpressed that he decided to put the B-side, ‘Everybody,’ on both sides of the 12-inch dance disk.
The record company was not especially eager to promote the artist, either. For a start, Warner only spent money on publicity for artists with an album release. Madonna did not even register on their PR radar. In an attempt to make the best of what they considered to be a bad job, Sire Records, which did not specialize in dance music, decided that the soulful dance sound of ‘Everybody’ was tailor-made for a black audience. So Madonna, with her newly bleached blonde hair, was in effect, marketed as a black artist. It was done by sleight of hand. For the cover of the single, which was issued in October 1982, Sire executives had given the go-ahead to a hip-hop collage image of downtown New York, rather than a portrait shot of Madonna, allowing the sound to convey the impression that she was black. ‘I was shocked,’ recalls Mark Kamins. So too was Madonna’s old friend from college days, photographer Linda Alaniz, who had been asked by the singer to take a photograph of her for the cover.
The idea seems extraordinary now, if not preposterous; indeed, as Arthur Baker observes of the song, ‘When you listen to it now it’s a laugh that people thought she was black.’ Marketing Madonna’s single as black dance music was a hard-headed business decision however, one that reflected the reality of the times. In 1980s America, popular music was still delineated by category, defined by radio-station playlists and a couple of TV shows, and within each category competition for air time was savage. The time when club DJs and MTV and other television music shows could make or break a single was still to come.
Although Sire’s marketing strategy came as a bitter blow to her, for once Madonna bit her tongue on her objections and toed the company line. Michael Rosenblatt was aware of the tensions, but commented sternly, ‘She will do anything to be a star, and that’s exactly what I look for in a star: total co-operation. I need the artist to be there to do whatever I need.’
In the froth of corporate self-congratulation and the soft-focus haze of hindsight that followed her rise to stardom, it is easy to forget that in the beginning, Madonna had been dealt a far from winning hand: a cut-price single deal, a record no one was enthusiastic about, no personal publicity and, as a final insult, the active promotion of the artist also known as black Madonna. Her recording career could hardly have got off to a worse start. ‘Sire just weren’t sure about her. She could have been a one-hit wonder – or a no-hit wonder,’ one music producer comments.
Undaunted, Madonna called on the one person she could always rely on – herself. Just as she had pestered her former manager, Camille Barbone, so she hustled and hassled in the way she had learned in the last four years of living in New York. She did everything she could to get a buzz going. At night she toured the clubs with her ‘crew,’ handing out her record and encouraging DJs to play the song. During the day she would stand on street corners giving out leaflets advertising her single.
In much the same way that she had seemed reluctant to trust her career to Camille Barbone without taking a hand herself, Madonna was anxious to ensure that no opportunity, however small, would slip through the corporate fingers of Sire Records. She attached herself to one of Sire’s dance record promoters, Bobby Shaw, accompanying him from time to time on his ‘milkrun’ rounds of radio stations and club DJs. Her visibility rather undermined Sire’s strategy of marketing the Madonna of the single as a black singer or group, but her presence undoubtedly helped to bring the record to wider notice.
It was during one milkrun that she was introduced to John ‘Jellybean’ Benitez, the DJ at the Funhouse, who listened to ‘Everybody’ and promised to ‘rock the house.’ The first meeting, in October or November 1982 – sources disagree – was to change both their lives, for she and Benitez would eventually become musical collaborators, as well as lovers. For a time, though, they were, in Benitez’s words, ‘playing little cat-and-mouse games,’ neither prepared to commit to a relationship.
Relationships, as far as Madonna was concerned, could wait. Lovers could come and go, but for her there was only one game in town – making her record a success. It was a measure not only of her ambition, but also of her absolute commitment, that she was the only one of Sire’s artists who joined Shaw and a number of club DJs in his eighth-floor office on 54th Street, every Friday afternoon. Here they discussed the business, gossiped and sampled the latest releases. Her presence guaranteed her an opportunity to influence the DJs’ playlists and, as importantly, did much to ensure that no one would badmouth her single while she was around. Nevertheless, on occasion the record-industry rookie could go a little too far, as Bobby Shaw recalls: ‘One time I was playing something and she said, “Please take this off.” I looked at her and said, “This isn’t your party.”’ For the most part, however, he thought she was ‘vivacious’ and ‘wanted to learn,’ even if her enthusiasm and desire for success sometimes outran her good sense.
For her part, Madonna was eager to teach senior Sire Record bosses, particularly Seymour Stein and Michael Rosenblatt, that, given the chance, she could graduate in the music business. While her cause was certainly not hurt when Rosenblatt began dating (and eventually married) her one-time roommate Janice Galloway, Madonna was anxious to showcase her talents independently. As luck would have it, she had the perfect opportunity when one of her New York friends, the poet and impresario Haoui Montaug organized one of his by then notorious
No Entiendes
(‘You Don’t Understand’) cabarets, to be performed at Danceteria. Among the cast of jugglers, fire-eaters and other esoteric acts was Madonna. Conscious that here was the perfect opportunity to influence her promoters, she invited Stein, Rosenblatt and other Warner executives, including the head of dance music, Craig Kostich, to come along.
With her usual attention to detail, and in what was to become her professional trademark, Madonna left absolutely nothing to chance. She hired a dance studio on the Upper West Side for rehearsals and persuaded three of her crew, dancer Erika Belle, British-born artist Martin Burgoyne and Bagens (‘Bags’) Rilez, to be her backup dancers for the show. Knowing that most of Montaug’s cabaret acts were under-rehearsed, Madonna was insistent that their choreography should be professional and polished. The four of them practiced endlessly, Madonna always the first to arrive, the last to leave.
On the night of the performance, Montaug, dressed in top hat and tails, introduced Madonna and her single, ‘Everybody.’ As the 300-strong audience boogied along and Stein and company watched from the wings, the singer and her dancers went through the three-minute song-and-dance routine they had worked out, described afterwards as a ‘disco act backed by avant-garde dancers.’ This performance is often taken as the seminal moment in Madonna’s career, the point at which the seers at Sire realized the singer’s visual impact, and decided to promote her through the new medium of video. As with so much that has been written or said about Madonna, however, the reality was a little different. The truth was that the record executives’ reaction was, at best, rather muted. Nevertheless, Rosenblatt contacted Ed Steinberg, who ran the Rock America video company, and asked if he had a few hours spare to make a no-frills company video of Madonna on stage at her next performance at Danceteria. The idea was to play the video to the rest of their promotional staff across the States, to give them an idea of their new artist’s music and performance. At a time when artists like Duran Duran and Michael Jackson thought nothing of spending a six-figure sum on TV videos, Rosenblatt offered Steinberg $1,000 for the strictly in-house production. They agreed on $1,500 – although the video producer jokes that he is still waiting for the other $500. While Sire was hardly pulling out all the stops for its new star, in fairness, MTV, then the only media company devoted to pop, was still in its infancy and never played dance videos.
Instead of shooting Madonna at a live gig, Steinberg suggested that they film her on location at Paradise Garage, a downtown gay disco he could use for free. It was a cut-price production; Madonna’s friend Debi Mazar did the makeup and then joined the crowd of dancers on the club floor, while Erika Belle and Bags Rilez were her backup dancers. Since Martin Burgoyne was not a professional dancer he was dropped from the troupe, although later he acted as Madonna’s tour manager for a time. She also brought a group of friends to make up the disco crowd, including the black graffiti artist Michael Stewart, who would die after being beaten by police a few months later.
As so many others have been, Steinberg was immediately impressed by Madonna’s professionalism and willingness, the singer never once complaining as he asked her to perform the song over and over again and again, until he was satisfied with the shot. ‘Before the shoot I had heard that she was a nightmare and very difficult,’ he remembers. ‘At that stage in her career she was relying on people who didn’t really know what they were doing, so it is easy to see why she got impatient,’ he adds, in barely concealed criticism of those around her at that time.
Sire Records got their in-house video, but Steinberg, impressed by the singer and her song, took matters further, sending copies of the tape out to those nightclubs all over America which used dance videos in their entertainment. It was a clever move that helped Madonna’s single, already storming up the dance charts, to grow from being a hit in New York, where it was played by black stations like WKTU, to gain a nationwide following.
All the energy and hard work now began to pay dividends. In November 1982 ‘Everybody’ hit the dance chart, and made it to the top slot weeks later. True, her debut single failed to breach the all important
Billboard
Top 100 pop chart, but it did bring Madonna her first magazine cover. In the December issue of
Dance Music Report
she and another band, Jekyll and Hyde, were nominated for awards in the ‘Sales’ category of a readers’ poll. It was Madonna’s picture that appeared on the cover, however. As with every one of her press clippings, she carefully labeled and saved the item. It was work that would expand with her success, for over the next couple of years she was to amass an entire portfolio of stories about herself.
Certainly the word was out on the street. Fab Five Freddie remembers walking along Houston Street one day after the single’s release, behind a couple of hip Puerto Rican girls, boombox in hand, singing and grooving to the sound of ‘Everybody.’ ‘That impressed me,’ he admits. ‘They were hot, she was hot. Madonna was attracting those who were more street, more savvy, more flavorful.’
At that time the epitome of downtown cool was another black graffiti artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat, who would become the James Dean of the art world, a young rebel who played hard and died young. Now the subject of several biographies and films, Basquiat, the Brooklyn-born son of a Haitian father and a Puerto Rican mother, was a wild genius who was introduced to Madonna by Ed Steinberg at the Lucky Strike Club just as her single was taking off. He was then making a name for himself as an artist, creating, with apparently effortless ease, striking semi-abstract works of art that synthesized the sights and sounds of the inner city, paintings that today attract widespread critical notice and very high prices.
‘You will never guess who I slept with last night,’ he told his roommate, stretcher-maker and general assistant, Steve Torton, one day in November 1982. ‘Madonna.’ Torton was unimpressed, but realized that if Basquiat was attracted to her, she must be special. ‘He was a study in exuberance,’ recalls Torton. ‘He was excited because he had identified her as the coming person.’
Their three-month love affair, which occurred just as both were being catapulted from obscurity to celebrity, gives a real sense of Madonna as an individual and as a developing artist. The manner in which she expressed her personality in this brief relationship reveals the qualities that combined to create her eventual popular appeal. Yet in many respects their affair was one of the attraction of opposites. He was everything that she was not: Madonna ambitious, ascetic, focused, self-aware and controlled; Basquiat prodigal, reckless and otherworldly.
For her every day had a direction, every meeting an outcome, every conversation a purpose. By contrast, life for Basquiat, two years her junior, was without calculation. Careless of opportunities and indifferent to career, utterly confident in his own talent and effortless ability, for him success was assured. He would paint all night, watch the sunrise, and might then spend all day in a hired limousine, sleeping, snorting coke and handing out money to eager street kids through the blacked-out windows. If one of his paintings sold, he might take a suite at the five-star Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on a whim and perhaps never use it. An enduring image is of Basquiat standing naked in his bathtub, a bag of cocaine in one hand, worrying about a party he was just about to throw for his friend and promoter Andy Warhol. Charismatic, spontaneous yet self-destructive, Basquiat emerged as one of the towering artistic geniuses of his generation. Yet he was not the easiest of free spirits, often falling prey to moods of depression, or rages in which he hurled accusations against those close to him. Like so many of the artists of that time, he expected to die young and did so, of a heroin overdose in August 1988, aged just twenty-seven.