She took out her frustrations in a series of confrontations with Pearl Lang, on one occasion banging her head against the studio wall in anger when she couldn’t perform a difficult dance step to the veteran choreographer’s liking. It heralded the parting of the ways, the recognition that Madonna’s individualism would never fit with the somewhat collegiate world of a dance troupe. Pearl Lang remembers the day she quit. ‘One day she said: “You know this dancing is difficult,” and I said: “I know it’s difficult,” and she said: “I have pains in my back.” I replied: “Everybody has pains in their back. It comes with the territory.”
‘Then she said: “I think I’m going to be a rock star.” She left and I never saw her again.’
At that stage in her life, Madonna had never sung a song or played a chord on a public stage, other than at school. It was a convenient fiction for both sides, a way of avoiding the cruel reality that in the world of dance, as her dance professor at the University of Michigan remarked, many are called but very few are chosen. For months afterwards the pain of the parting was almost tangible. Indeed, for a long while she talked about getting into this or that troupe, the reality becoming ever more distant. But she remained very much the party animal, loving to dance, out clubbing every night. Tellingly, though, the one thing she hated, passionately, was when a young girl in a nightclub would watch her move to the music and then come over and ask, perfectly innocently, ‘Are you a professional dancer?’ Madonna’s face would become a frozen mask, her manner icy cold as she briefly answered in the negative. The reason is not difficult to find, for the question forced her to confront her failure, to reflect for a few cruel moments upon what might have been.
A few minutes later, though, and she would be on the dance floor again, swirling, whirling and spinning to the song that was to become her personal anthem, Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive.’
Chapter Five
The ‘Lost’ First Songs
THE SEARCH FOR LOST RECORDINGS of a pop star’s early songs is not, perhaps, an activity likely to excite most archeologists. Nonetheless, in terms of the archeology of pop the site yields treasures as priceless as anything lifted from the Valley of the Kings. True, the ‘dig’ takes place in the basement of a converted synagogue in Queens, New York, rather than among the royal tombs of ancient Egypt, and the guide, Ed Gilroy, wears a white baseball cap rather than the sun helmet or panama hat favored by the stereotypical archeologist of popular legend, but even so the thrill of discovery is palpable.
There is even a green parrot – imaginatively named ‘Birdie’ – squawking in the background as Gilroy makes his way down the spiral staircase into the gloom of the building’s extensive basement. He swings his flashlight around until its beam picks out a nondescript white plastic bag nestling among several paintings his artist brother Dan had left stacked against a wall – landscapes, flower studies, and figures in a glade, one of them a youthful Madonna running through the long grass. Ed Gilroy rifles through the plastic bag until, with a smile of satisfaction, he pulls out a spool-to-spool four-track tape with an almost indecipherable label stuck to its center. Closer scrutiny of the hieroglyphics scrawled on the label in black ink yields the curious words: ‘Bkfst Club Set – Work Percuss 2 End’.
He carefully places the spool on a dusty thirty-year-old tape recorder, threads its free end on to the machine’s reel, and then shines his flashlight on the counter to line up the tape correctly. Satisfied, he presses the ‘Play’ button and, almost unbelievably, the ancient spools begin to turn. Instantly we travel back in time, to the summer of 1979, the days of punk rock and New Wave. Through the headphones can be heard the muddy but driving sound of the drums and two guitars, pounding out a rock beat. The voice belting out the lyrics is young, energetic, rather nasal, yet altogether unmistakable. This is Madonna, recording the first song she ever wrote.
The song, which runs for about three minutes, has simple pop lyrics, describing, appropriately enough, her belief that that she was born to dance and how she enjoys moving her body to the sound of the music inside her. As it reaches a crescendo her voice becomes slightly hoarse, straining for the higher notes, especially when she yells her words in the final chorus. Yet that very rawness gives the song a sharper edge and a greater sense of excitement. As Ed, who played lead guitar on the track, observes, ‘The quality of her voice is so pure. It just comes out, totally uninhibited. Nowadays studios would hack out the struggle in her voice but that’s too bad. It’s almost like a window into her soul.’
As he reflects on those early days he is sitting on a worn cherrywood chair on castors that Madonna had used when she first auditioned the song before him to see if he thought it was good enough to include in the repertoire of their band, The Breakfast Club. Behind him is the same Carlo Robelli acoustic guitar on which she had learnt her first chords, the instrument she had used to pick out the melody as she had put together the words to her first song.
Ed Gilroy’s nod of approval for that first song meant an enormous amount to the would-be singer. For months Madonna had been floundering impatiently, almost obsessively seeking a new purpose and direction for her life. And it was in the unlikely setting of a converted synagogue that she found for a while a home and a haven, an opportunity to express herself, a chance to regroup and rethink after the collapse of her dance career and the frustrations of the past year.
It might all have been so different. A chance meeting with her former boyfriend Norris Burroughs in April 1979 changed her destiny for ever. While they had drifted apart as lovers, they remained friends and, after exchanging their news, he invited her to a May Day party at a friend’s downtown loft. Knowing her eagerness to make a name for herself, he promised that there would be lots of ‘scene makers’ at the party. She duly arrived, her hair up and dressed in two tee-shirts and a ballet tutu. ‘Very New York,’ observed Curtis Zale, an artist who spent some time chatting with his friend Dan Gilroy that night. ‘She was being fun and coy and loud, like the twenty-year-old kid she was. I wasn’t interested, but Dan was.’
Madonna and Dan Gilroy met up a few days later and took the bus uptown to the Cloisters, a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art housed in a series of buildings, modeled on five medieval French cloisters, in Fort Tryon Park, overlooking the Hudson River. During their day together she happily mugged for the camera, joining on to the end of a line of visiting nuns, posing by a fountain, and kneeling as if in prayer before a medieval altar cross. As they walked and talked Gilroy learned that she was about to embark on a new career in France. Indeed, a part of the reason for their visit to the Cloisters was to give Madonna, ever the professional, a feel for the country by immersing herself in the French paintings and artifacts on show, many brought over by Philip Lehman and his son Robert, who bequeathed the collection to the Metropolitan Museum in 1969.
A few weeks earlier, she had been auditioned by two somewhat larger-than-life Belgian TV producers, Jean van Lieu and Jean-Claude Pellerin, who were managing the European disco star Patrick Hernandez. His single, ‘Born To Be Alive,’ which had grossed $25 million, had made him an international star, and his two managers were looking for dancers to strut their stuff while he went through his routine. Since he did not have a strong voice there was talk of grooming a couple of dancers to double as backup singers in performances and to work with him on his second single, ‘Disco Queen.’ Madonna had been singled out from 1,500 other hopefuls as a possible candidate. Defiantly, she insisted that she would only be a dancer, initially refusing to sing at the final audition. In the end she gave a very grudging rendition of ‘Happy Birthday.’
The plan formulated by van Lieu and Pellerin was to develop, in Paris, a Las Vegas-style cabaret act around Hernandez, using jugglers, fire-eaters and comedians, including a talking dildo and a black dancer dressed only in a skimpy thong being dragged around the stage on a chain. Indeed, Dan Gilroy and Curtis Zale even suggested a stage name for Madonna, ‘Mademoiselle Bijoux,’ a sobriquet she took to usi
ng on postcards and letters home. A world away from Pearl Lang’s work, The Patrick Hernandez Revue, as it was billed, was hardly high art. Much of the concept was based on Voideille, a New York underground show in which Dan Gilroy and his brother Ed had featured. In it they had performed a musical-comedy act called ‘Bill and Gil’ and had, at one time, talked of auditioning for a place in the Hernandez cabaret routine.
While nothing ever materialized for the Gilroys, Madonna, after her audition, had become part of the Hernandez troupe and in late May 1979 had moved out of the apartment she then shared with the writer and dancer Susan Cohen on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, to the Gramercy Park Hotel, prior to flying to Paris. Even though her Belgian patrons’ largesse was becoming legendary in underground New York, she herself was still chronically short of money. Before she left, in June, she borrowed $15 from Dan Gilroy to tide her over, carefully writing out a check in return. That, Dan thought, was that – he would not be seeing her again for a good while. ‘I imagined that she wanted to come back to New York a huge success,’ he remembers.
In the event, matters did not turn out as he had predicted, or as Madonna had hoped. Driven, disciplined and businesslike, she was very quickly to learn that not everyone shared her commitment. While she wanted to live her life on ‘fast forward,’ she soon discovered that her Belgian patrons had pushed the ‘pause’ button on their creative endeavors. She would spend hours on her dance routines, practicing her moves, eager and ready for action. By contrast, her genial hosts enjoyed long and lavish lunches, spent hours glad-handing Parisian socialites, and took their young New York friend to fashionable nightclubs like Régine and VIP.
The effect on Madonna was one of culture shock. While she was interested in advancing her career, her producers, as far as she was concerned, were keener on increasing their waistlines. ‘She called up a few times,’ recalls Dan, (complaining that all they did was sit around and eat. She kept feeling like, “Let’s go do it, let’s get something going.” It just wasn’t happening.’ The fact that she was living in the smart Parisian apartment of Jean-Claude Pellerin and his wife Daniele, had a new wardrobe and food and drink on tap, all without paying a cent herself, meant nothing to her. This girl wanted to see her name in lights, to be treated as an artiste, not as arm candy.
Even when the Hernandez troupe began rehearsals, Madonna felt distanced, even disconnected, from the creative process. She had become a cipher, a pretty puppet on a string, waiting for her cues and her moves. Moreover, although she had the gamine hairstyle and soulful eyes, her producers soon realized that she was not going to be the new Edith Piaf. Nor did she want to be. Madonna still saw herself as a dancer, not a singer. When she witnessed at first hand the adulation enjoyed by Hernandez, however, her earlier opposition began to crumble. For his part, the singer now says that Madonna was inspired to try singing because of the success he enjoyed.
Nonetheless, as the weeks passed it became clear to Madonna that the whole concept was artistically too middle-of-the-road and ‘hokey’ for her tastes. There were, too, other impulses at work. The two Belgian producers, like others before and after, discovered an essential Madonna characteristic, that she has a different sense of time from the rest of the world. For her, every moment is precious, every hour to be used productively. There is a kind of obsessiveness to this, as though she feels she is being chased through life by Time’s winged chariot. Whether this trait was inherited from her father’s insistence on using every minute constructively, or from her acute awareness that her mother had died in her early thirties, Madonna has an almost frenzied impatience, never knowingly or willingly wasting any time. It is a feature that occurs again and again throughout her career, and does much to explain why she abandoned dance.
When, after a matter of only weeks, it became clear to Madonna that the van Lieu/Pellerin production was not moving quickly enough for her, she decided to leave, telling Hernandez before she flew home in July, ‘Success is yours today, but it will be mine tomorrow.’ She returned to New York full of colorful stories: how she and Hernandez had had a romantic fling; how she had roared round the Parisian boulevards on the backs of motorcycles driven by Vietnamese punks; how two suitors had fought with knives over her; how she had flown to Tunisia with the singing star for a photocall, and how a simple cold had turned into life-threatening pneumonia. Other accounts allege that she amassed a portfolio of lovers during her brief French sojourn.
Yet as she approached her twenty-first birthday, the uncomfortable truth was that she was a penniless dropout who seemed to be going nowhere. Farfetched anecdotes, no matter how many, and however amusing, could not camouflage the fact that she had left college without graduating, had fallen out with Pearl Lang and ditched her chosen career, and had now run away from Paris. These bald facts did not tell the whole story, however. Madonna was searching for an artistic identity, a sense of self, and sometimes even a new name. At the same time, as her remark to Patrick Hernandez indicated, she had an unquenchable sense of her own destiny. Thus, despite the Paris fiasco, it was not long before the bubble of her creativity and ambition began inexorably to float to the surface once again.
For a time she lodged with a philosophy student in Manhattan, but began seeing Dan Gilroy more regularly, and before long had moved in to the synagogue in Queens he shared with his younger brother, Ed. ‘It was a comfortable place for her,’ Dan explains. ‘Here was this girl without work, bumming around, not knowing where to go. Here was a place with enough space to do her dancing. There was a washing machine and a dryer. Plus it was in an Italian neighborhood. What more could she want?’ he adds, with a smile.
Of course, the fact that, once more, Madonna enjoyed what she has described as some of the best times of her life, was due in no small part to the creative, amusing and generous-spirited personalities of the Gilroy brothers. Born in New York, the sons of a former air force and civil pilot, Dan and Ed discovered music early on. Their first duet, played on their mother’s pots and pans, was an inspired ditty that ran:
Biccy, biccy, biccy, bongo,
That means ‘I love you’ in the Congo.
Over the years they had formed a variety of bands with friends, enrolling schoolfriends Gary Burke and Mike Monahan, as well as other friends like Madonna’s former lover Norris Burroughs. When Madonna came on the scene, the brothers, as ‘Bill and Gill’, were playing everything from small downtown clubs to Boy Scout troops, and even Bellevue mental hospital. When they weren’t making music, Dan, who had taught painting, sculpture and photography, was a partner in a fashionable Manhattan fabric outlet called Gossamer Wing, while Ed worked full-time counseling families of which a member was in the final stages of terminal illness.
For Madonna, the year she stayed with Dan and Ed Gilroy proved to be a turning point, both creatively and personally. She arrived with desire but no direction, with ambition but little ability, other than as a dancer. By the time she left, she was ready to take on the world. Like Christopher Flynn, Dan Gilroy, twelve years her senior, took on the mantle of her muse and mentor. Just as Flynn had expanded her horizons as a dancer, so Dan opened her eyes to the possibilities of music.
One day he took up his trusty Carlo Robelli acoustic guitar and showed her how to play the simplest chord, an open E. Almost at once she discovered that she was able to run her fingers up and down the frets and sing along to the music she made. ‘It was a real eye-opener for her,’ Dan recalls. ‘She was always impressed by people who write songs and then she realized, “Wow, it’s not hard.” I remember one night she played her first little thing on the guitar and from then on she just wrote lots of songs.’
Nevertheless, because she was a trained dancer and already had a superb sense of rhythm, Dan believed that it would be best for her to start her musical career on the drums. He showed her the basic techniques and after that she was away, practicing for hour after hour on the drum kit in the basement where she and Dan slept. As Ed Gilroy remarks, ‘Dan is like a muse, he brings
it out of you. He’s a very nurturing, creative guy. When he showed her the drums you could see the light go on in her. She was thinking, “I can’t believe all this sound’s coming out of me.” Then someone joins you with a guitar and all of a sudden, Wow, man, you can create music and song. You’ve got an instant band.’
The transition from dance to music was not an overnight conversion, however. Madonna still went to dance class in Manhattan, she and Dan religiously running three miles around Flushing Meadows Park every morning before she continued in the studio with endless dance and stretching exercises. Yet something was changing. Under Dan’s tutelage, she was beginning to see another world of possibilities and opportunities, an easier way of gaining the applause and, ultimately, adulation she craved without the endless grind of dance rehearsal.
On one occasion they went to see a band called Get Wet run by a young man called Zecca and fronted by the improbably named Cherie Beachfront, a kind of sexy forerunner to Cyndi Lauper. As the singer strutted round the stage in her bustier and crinoline, Madonna watched her severely, arms folded across her chest in mute disapproval. Cherie’s voice was passable, her dance steps rudimentary, while the band was just about in tune. Yet for a while they were the talk of the local underground, predicted to be the next big thing. As she stood watching the band, Madonna’s thoughts were plain for all to see – ‘I can do that.’
A few months later, Zecca was walking through the East Village when he was startled out of his morning reverie by Madonna. Wagging a finger in his face, she yelled, ‘I’m going to be somebody and you’re going to be nobody.’ Then she stalked off leaving Zecca standing in the street, flabbergasted. Her prediction came true; the band’s only album bombed, Cherie Beachfront stopped making waves, went into therapy and then married her therapist. As a singer, she was last heard of playing gigs in Boston.
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