One person stood out from the middle of this crowd, honored by vendors and sought after by others from the in crowd, the AV club, the student press. You can imagine how great it was to discover that the most popular girl in school that Winter Music Conference 2008 was Gaga. She walked around this little study hall before classes began and said her hellos to everyone. Us bad kids thought of her as one of our own—even making her a special leather jacket to match the backup dancers, which only increased her stature, if only because it was ill-fitting and therefore impermanent. The Mean Girls wanted to give her sunglasses, and the Gearheads evangelized her at sound check. She was the new girl with a fresh start who hadn’t declared herself a member of any group. Yet. Gaga, the girl who wasn’t even invited to the party, quickly became the guest of honor as she smiled politely at her own army of Pro Tools. Gaga had wanted a recording career at sixteen, and dozens of people had told her no by then. And a good Italian girl never forgets her enemies. “You work with so and so over at that other label? Did you know such and such from this other label when they worked there?” Many of them grew red in the face when she could point them out by name. She knows I exist! As usual Gaga had her own interwoven Rolodex memorized—the new girl in school already knew who had gone out with whom.
It would take all of us—the Gearheads, the Pro Tools, Mean Girls, Label Whores, and us bad kids—to pull this off today.
The dancers stood in the shade, smoking and watching Gaga lap up the attention. We discussed what they might expect of us for the rest of the afternoon. Did they have a dressing room where we could leave our stuff? Should we try and get to our hotels? So far I had stayed out of the cliquish details. I had to meet with the Pro Tools and borrow from the Gearheads and handle things with the Mean Girls (although I didn’t get a goddamn pair of sunglasses). I actually did want to borrow someone’s WMC badge and go to the one thirty P.M. “Intellectual Property: Songwriting & Publishing” forum. Because I’m lame. Instead I mustered my best, most disaffected voice and turned to the bad kids: “You guys wanna get out of here?”
WE WALKED TO THE DAMN hotel because we’re New Yorkers. Also: It’s less than ten blocks. The avenue was lined with a fresh mix of palm trees, sunshine, outdoor cafés, and creatures walking around in bikinis. Male and female. The recession hit Miami like global warming hit the North Pole. Nothing seemed to change, but you felt that a new hotel or a just recently built venue might come crashing down like a great sheet of ice. You looked around instead at Miami’s own Polar Bears—those chubby, white-haired, bald old guys who zoom around in bright white Lamborghini convertibles. Polar bears on an ice flow. They would be out in any season, hunting fresh young models flown down on bikini-catalogue contracts. The entire ecosystem of South Beach stayed intact. As long as the models could migrate down here following a school of dollar bills, the Polar Bears were happy. When the Polar Bears faced extinction, so did Miami.
The dancers went to nap and I had the perfect montage of my own.
DJ enters the wicked-nice hotel room, drops his one bag on the chair, and jumps from the sofa to the other chair and into the adjoining suite. He jumps on the bed for every job he’s ever been fired from. He leaps in the air, dancing and singing a song that doesn’t yet have a music video. He bounces around as if gaining inspiration for the exuberance he will help capture on stage and on film in just two days. He checks the clock. He has twenty-five minutes to get to the beach and back in time for the show. Should he just wait? Ha! His pasty frame heads to the door in a baby-blue bathing suit with a singing-elephant pattern. (Shut up! They were a gift!) Door opens directly onto the beach across the way and he is instantly surrounded by girls and boom boxes; topless women in designer sunglasses groove around him in another universe. There will be no tan lines in our new universe. The hard work begins in twenty-three minutes. But these twenty-three minutes are what all the rock-star posturing stands behind. These are the goodies. He leaps into the ocean with a baptismal vigor that washes away all that New York jadedness. He discovers muscles he hasn’t used in years, and the great waves of South Beach toss him around with the effortless magic of a chiropractor, realigning his spine as if he never slept on a plane or carried a crate of records. He comes out refreshed, he comes out exuberant, he would jump on the bed in any hotel room for miles if only to share the joy he feels right now. He is ecstatic. He is happy, unassailably happy. He has also managed to lose his hotel key.
Gaga makes sweet praying-mantis love to a salad at an outdoor table on A1A with Troy Carter, Leah Landon, and various other people from the management company. Everywhere there are small huddles of work friends going over strategies and talking about the incompetence of other people in their department. Pro Tools scoff at the Mean Girls and the Gearheads squint in the sunshine to check their email.
DJs begin playing the official WMC sessions at ten in the morning and the record labels are eager to get songs placed with them now. Each WMC location had a series of DJs flown in to work in rotation. Most of them don’t get paid. Additionally, all of the hotels and restaurants and clubs have their own roster. Record labels and other exhibitors have their official WMC space and then they hold an after-party elsewhere in the city. In that sense it’s a bit like the running of the bulls in Pamplona. Millions of people come to town to watch the dangerous procession of talent. The local restaurants and hotels up their prices and have a set menu for the week. People come to see the bloodshed, as great talent falters in the ring.
Gaga makes a minor point about the difference in presentation between the two shows. On the roof of the Raleigh we have sort of a live demonstration of the record. It will be bright and the audience will not be as captive as we would like. If anything they will just stand around and clap when they have to. But again, more important DJs and radio programmers will be there so it’s better than just running into them at the party and surrendering a copy of the single. They need to be approachable, ground level. She doesn’t want to make a direct comparison to eight months ago at Lollapalooza. But you can’t help it. The main event—and we should work hard for both, of course—will be at Score Miami tonight for the Nervous Nitelife party. There the audience will be more mature gays who’ve had a few drinks. Before we go on there will already be that pulsating, energizing house music blaring. The Score Miami show will be much better for pictures.
Troy looked perplexed.
He nodded his head, a little bit lost, and didn’t seem to have heard the end of what Gaga said. She had ended on an upbeat note, saying that they were doing two very different shows today. That’s a good thing. It’s twice the exposure without creating overexposure. At the first they will get the record out to the right hands, and then later in the night they will get it to the right ears.
But Troy seemed fixated, either lost or somewhere else entirely. “Gaga?” he said.
“Yeah?”
“Is that skinny white boy over there your DJ?”
She turned around and saw where she had lost Troy. There I am, looking like I’d been working in nightlife for three years and had never seen the sun. I’ve not only lost the hotel’s keys, but I’ve forgotten its name. In order to find the hotel I decided to retrace my steps, which meant walking directly through the patio tables of all the restaurants on A1A in a pair of swim trunks, squinting at the names on the hotels behind the restaurants.
Gaga called out my name. I had never been relieved and embarrassed at the same time before. She giggled at my short swim trunks. “What are you doing?”
“I had twenty minutes for a swim and I . . . uhm—”
“Took a swim?” Gaga supplied. My dripping hair nodded in agreement. Gaga told me what they were talking about up until my ghostly apparition had haunted Troy.
“Exactly. That’s what we’ve always been talking about. Trying to get past the scenester’s lament of, ‘Uch, I’ll see them at the next show.’” I didn’t really want to spend any more time standing there in my swimsuit. But I still didn’t know where to go
. “Well, I guess I must be heading back.” I took a step forward.
“To your hotel?” Gaga pointed to it with her fork. Behind me.
“Right,” I said. “I didn’t know you could get through that way.”
Check out the hook while my DJ revolves it
Back in my room I suited up like a superhero. Tailored black jeans so tight I couldn’t put my phone in the pocket. I turned the belt around sideways and clipped my phone to the front like a belt buckle and clicked on the screen, which read, “DJVH1.” I wore a wifebeater and a black bandana with my leather jacket. Back home I probably would never dress like this all at once, but I felt like I had to represent the sort of people that I’d normally roll my eyes at. I had to embody downtown New York even while I was out of focus.
I walked to Gaga’s hotel on Eighth and Collins and when I opened the door she saw me in full regalia for the first time. Her mild mannered friend Brendan in the glasses had stayed back home, probably sitting at St. J’s with a library book tucked into his belt. Gaga answered the door in a bathrobe, and she stepped back when she saw me and looked wide-eyed through her half-done makeup. “You look fantastic. Where did you get those jeans?”
“You like them?”
“I love them. The gay boys are going to eat you up.”
The backup dancers came in the door behind me in matching captain’s hats, leotards, and leather jackets. When we processed in all together like this we really looked like a band. We belonged together. We really were that group of disaffected outsiders who sneered at the Mean Girls and cut class.
Gaga went back to the chair where a makeup artist fine-tuned her face. I sat on the bed and borrowed Gaga’s laptop to email Leigh. The dancers collapsed on the floor. Directly on the hotel carpet. It was the first time anyone noticed them. But these poor girls had to get up at four A.M., fly to Miami, and do two shows, which would last until almost four A.M.
The makeup artist stopped working on Gaga’s lower eyelashes. She glanced at Gaga’s otherwise heavenward gaze as if to make sure this was okay.
I looked down at both of them on the carpet. “Girls, I have one question.” And then in my best Gaga voice I sang the line from the song. “What’s. Go-in’ on on the floor?”
“Exhausted,” Sheryl muttered.
“We haven’t slept,” Katie said with a finality of decree.
I opened up Gaga’s laptop and the first screen I saw was the music-editing software GarageBand. On it she had open all the tracks for the show, all lined up side by side. It looked as if she had started to make one long show file of all of them premixed or spaced out in between. I wondered for a second what she wanted with all of that. The mix was bad, I could see that much. Wasn’t this my job?
The old joke goes like this: “My father worked for the same company for thirty years and they replaced him with a little machine with just one button. The worst part is the next day my mother went out and bought one.” I already felt like I maybe didn’t matter so much out here. But now I felt it for sure. The game changed. I already knew that. We used to have to put on a show. Now we had to—we needed to—put on a display.
TROY CARTER DROVE US IN a rental through the dense traffic to the show. Troy stood about five foot five and had the kind of smile of someone who had just shared a laugh with a good friend. “My daughter said to me today, ‘Daddy, can I get Lady Gaga on Limewire?’ And I said, ‘You better not!’” Troy survived the nineties working for Bad Boy Entertainment. He held on as a surviving war general who looked back on a given year and thought, We lost a lot of brave soldiers out there.
After a few blocks he stopped in front of a yacht showroom. It reminded me of the real estate offices we had all over Brooklyn. Condos for sale that hadn’t yet been built. Tiny, theoretical buildings where everything you hated about living in New York City had been considered and designed out. Here it looked like classroom models of the Titanic. Roughly the same size, but obviously counting on the tiny shipmates and crew. That boat was whiter than I am. If that boat could, it would wear K-Swiss shoes to the tennis matches. “You see that model boat in the window? That’s not even built yet. You have to order it custom. We’re gonna come back here next year and that boat’s gonna be called The Fame!”
We all looked around and laughed at/with Troy. The rest of us hadn’t paid bills this month. We would have rather had just a steady gig. A steady gig is like the fifties musicals with a steady girlfriend. Something we could count on. Let our bad days be bad days together.
“Are we almost there?” Gaga asked. Troy nodded. Gaga turned and asked me to hand her the cassette Walkman and headphones from her bag in the trunk/the eighties.
Troy, who was even a bit older than I was, looked down at the cassette player in mock disdain. “What is that thing?”
“I have to do my vocal warm-ups.” Gaga went through an operatic vocal warm-up in perfect Latin. She started at a perfect middle C and worked her way down and up the octaves until her voice opened up.
To catch anyone singing along to their headphones is usually funny. Even Troy couldn’t control his laughter. I didn’t laugh. A pop singer who takes the time to warm up her vocals like an opera singer will always have a leg up over the rest of the bands who sit around drinking and smoking their vocal range away.
THE PENTHOUSE OF THE RALEIGH had transformed into the World’s Fair for musicians. They broadcast live from one corner, doing the play-by-play on visiting DJs as if they were figure skaters coming up to do their routine. Stanton demoed new kinds of turntableless equipment that could fit in your record bag and work as a mixer, MIDI controller, and scratch surface. I couldn’t believe it. It felt like that story of Helen Keller going to the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 to meet the creator of the Braille typewriter—only a lamer version of that. The story of the DJ Who Can’t Lift That Many Records or Even a Single Turntable Meets This Fucking Guy.
Many famous DJs had come up there to play and I started to feel the competition. Remember the seven pilots chosen for Project Mercury—which became the space program—who were supposed to be the best of the best? They were among pilots who had been trained by those who had broken the sound barrier, the first to double it. And then they joined the National Aeronautic Advisory Board—later, NASA—where they would never get to fly anything. They would just sit in an automatic capsule and ride into the stratosphere and parachute down. Meanwhile, in their training they fell years behind the other pilots. I felt a bit like that here. If I were touring with a major label act, surely I had to be among the best. But I would never get a chance to prove it. Not that I had anything to prove. Right?
DJ’s in our scene at home are territorial about their nights, venues, mixes, dancers, signature style, song choice, and outfits. If I moved up one more step with Gaga I would be out of their league. I wondered then if I would ever play in the Lower East Side again. And if I did, would I be that guy who doesn’t stop going to high school football games?
AT SHOWTIME I STARTED WITH the Wendy Carlos theme from A Clockwork Orange and added a beat to it. Gaga opened right into the vocal intro to “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich.” Her vocals sounded no different than if they had heavy reverb. For so long we had thought of “Beautiful” as the main song, the downtown anthem about party kids taking money from their parents. She made the “shame shame” finger motion with one hand on her nose during “we just like to party like to p-p-party party!” like you would if you wanted to motion to a friend for cocaine. Rather than looking like a bunch of performers pretending to be downtown kids we looked like we were performing an original creation inspired by the scene. The Miami sunshine only intensified our dirty jackets and choppy haircuts, like stage lights on the cast of some bohemian drama.
Towards the end of our first song something unbelievably terrible happened. I had prepared for every conceivable outdoor problem, testing the turntables and making sure that the roof was solid enough that the dancers wouldn’t shake the table if they jumped. I was ready for rain or wo
rse. But I hadn’t planned on one thing. Right in the middle of a song a great big gust of wind came through the roof. It made Gaga look like a star as she sang into the microphone, the wind in her hair and flapping around in her blouse.
But it also blew the record clear off the table in the middle of a song. I watched as the needle skated across the surface. We all know that awful sound. It skipped off like a knife dancing to the edge of an outdoor café table on A1A when a gust of wind caught under the tablecloth. The needle went clanging jauntily off the table, chipping, catching, and dulling on the outer ribs of the platter as the record took flight. I wanted to cry. However, no one noticed. This was mostly because the record had nothing to do with the audio heard on the roof. Because the sound tech had ignored our technical rider, I had to switch to an automatic system and leave the records on the turntables just to have something to look at. I was embarrassed at first but definitely not anymore. We pulled off a live music video, complete with transitions. I bent over to get the record off the floor and no one seemed to notice. If anything, they saw another record spinning on my other turntable and figured I had gotten lucky. And I had.
The crowd grew noticeably excited when “Just Dance” began. People came to WMC not just to see their favorite band two weeks before they came to New York or LA. They came to see what’s next. Some people pulled out camera phones. Many previously bored photographers suddenly crouched down and machine-gunned the place with shots, as if hoping to later recreate the moment in stop-motion.
Rivington Was Ours: Lady Gaga, the Lower East Side, and the Prime of Our Lives Page 23
