It fell apart in 1998, when organizers couldn’t book a headliner, and has since been supplanted, in revenue and relevance, by the annual three-day Coachella music festival in California, which was founded in 1999 and took a more holistic approach to booking acts. Coachella did and does still feel alternative, but the roster of acts in any given year has a sense of the music obsessive’s abandon: The 2010 line-up included Jay-Z, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, MGMT, Sly and the Family Stone, LCD Soundsystem, Brit ska-punk legends the Specials, and nineties alternative heroes Pavement.
By 2003, Farrell, partnering with Capital Sports & Entertainment, now C3 Presents, was able to revive Lollapalooza by following the Coachella model—a one-off multiday music festival in a fixed location: Chicago. So Gaga’s booking, in summer 2007, was, contextually, a low-profile gig—she wasn’t even second stage, which is the smaller alternative to whatever’s happening on the big stage. She was booked on one of the smaller smaller stages—the apportionment of acts at a music festival can resemble nothing so much as the sonic equivalent of a nesting doll—called the BMI stage for its sponsor, Broadcast Music, Inc.
“Basically, we look for people who are just getting started who we think are interesting,” says Huston Powell, the promoter at C3 Productions who signed Gaga to Lollapalooza. “It’s not too much rocket science.”
The headliners on that year’s bill were Pearl Jam, Daft Punk, and Muse. Even though this was the biggest booking she’d had to date, Gaga took a very small coterie along: Fusari, a high school pal who was dying to go, and Lady Starlight, who was going to DJ.
Gaga’s slot was scheduled for day two, August 4, 2007. The sun was still out when she took the stage. As far as she was concerned, it did not go well. She was repeatedly mistaken for Amy Winehouse, which had one benefit: She got a lot of attention from the paparazzi. Starland maintains there was nothing calculated about Gaga’s resemblance to Winehouse, who’d become one of the biggest stars of the year with Back to Black, a broken-soul break-up record shot through with narcotized grief. Like Gaga’s debut, it smashed all demographics.
“Tons of reporters were charging after her, going, ‘Amy Winehouse, Amy Winehouse, we want your comment on this,’ ” Starland recalls. “And she was like, ‘Oh my God, this is awful.’ She did not want that at all.” That’s not to say she wasn’t highly aware of what her more successful peers were doing: Lily Allen, like Winehouse, was another distinctive-looking brunette, a foul-mouthed, hard-drinking Brit who’d had massive crossover success with her dub-tinged single “Smile.” “When Lily was big,” says Starland, “she’d say, ‘I need to keep my eye on her; there’s only room for one.’ ”
At sound check, the DJ stand was wobbly, so Gaga asked Besencon to find a replacement that was sturdy. Instead, he improvised a solution, jury-rigging the too-short leg. During the performance, Starlight’s record kept skipping, and the folding stage kept bouncing every time she’d jump. “She and Starlight just kind of showed up and were like, ‘We’re going to show these people what New York City’s about,’ ” Sullivan says. “And that’s not what you do at an outdoor show.”
Gaga plowed through anyway, this goth-looking chick singing dance music in a black bikini top and working her stripper moves in the sunlight, turning her back to the audience and bending over in her thong. It was confusing.
“She seemed to go for it from the get-go,” says C3’s Powell of her set. “Sometimes those are difficult slots, but she seemed to be very sure of herself. She had a lot of people watching her; they were pretty intrigued by it.” He estimates that there were 75,000 people on the ground total; a fraction of that—which turned out to be about 200—was still the biggest crowd for which she’d ever performed.
“She was on the smallest stage outside the kiddie area,” says Quinn Donahue, talent buyer at C3 Presents. Donahue helped Gaga set up and was surprised that she only had her manager and her DJ in tow. “I remember them cutting it kinda close” to set time, he says. He helped with the turntables and mixers, calling the minimal prep time “throw-and-go.”
Like Powell, Donahue was familiar with Gaga only through MySpace; he says he had no idea what to expect. There was nothing about her sound that really fit the Lollapalooza brand—it was “more pop”—but her stage presence was undeniable. “She had the charisma,” says Donahue, who watched her forty-five-minute set. “Once the crowd warmed up to her, they were all about it. She just kind of stole [the show].”
Sullivan says Gaga did not have the same experience. “They go onstage and have every technical problem imaginable,” he says. “She almost didn’t want to talk about it when she got back.” But apparently, she did: “First of all,” says Sullivan, “there’s the music, which was not where it is today. She’s got Rob Fusari’s beats. Second problem: She could not get past how out-of place she seemed. “She’s in a bikini but she’s behind a synthesizer, which isn’t exactly sexy.”
All Gaga could really think about, however, was the shaky table and the record that kept skipping because of it. “She spoke to the direct head of her label, Vincent Herbert,” says Starland. “And Vincent said to her, ‘You know what you’ve got to do.’ And Laurent was gone the next day.”
So was Starlight, axed as DJ, though her firing was much gentler: Gaga framed it as a lateral move, to stylist. And that, says Sullivan, “was the beginning of her and me working together more. I knew automatically. I love Starlight to death, but as a DJ—I would never let a record skip. I was like, I would’ve seen that coming.”
One of the headliners at Lollapalooza 2010: Lady Gaga. Actually, with the announcement that her stage set was going to cost $150,000, she declared herself the headliner.
After Lollapalooza, it was back to writing, recording, and attempting to streamline the Gaga image. She was still unable to divine a clear aesthetic, still working her heavy-metal-stripper look for lack of another idea. Gaga knew that she needed to look extreme, but right now she still looked like something out of Vice magazine’s “Don’t” pages—vicious street fashion commentary by New York City’s most acidic hipsters.
Her first priority, though, was getting herself on Jimmy Iovine’s radar. The fifty-seven-year-old Iovine is the head of Interscope, which he cofounded in 1990. He’d produced records for U2, Patti Smith, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers; he also coproduced 8 Mile, the critically acclaimed hip-hopera starring Eminem and based on the rapper’s life.
“In his area—the creation of pop/hip-hop/R&B—he’s considered an expert,” says a veteran of the industry. “The conflict with Jimmy becomes—the guy who [worked with] John Lennon, Tom Petty, Stevie Nicks—there’s this expectation that he’d be an ‘artist guy’ ”—the kind of exec that cultivates talent over the long term, who can help develop and sustain a body of work.
“But he’s not,” continues the source. “You’d think with that reputation that this is a guy who’d understand everything from Grizzly Bear to Beck, but in truth, this is a guy who’s all about the hit single.” When approached by Iovine about working with Akon, this source says he was reluctant to recommend the idea to his artist. But he did, and the project was successful. “I have no problem telling Jimmy, ‘That was all you,’ ” says the source. “We didn’t see it. But hey man, that was [Akon] completely, that launched our single and our tour. One hundred percent him. We didn’t see the depth in him as an artist, but Jimmy did.”
“Jimmy is the wizard behind the curtain for any act on Universal [Interscope’s parent company],” says Wendy Starland. “Every artist goes into a deal thinking they’re going to get the push, but the label really only has enough money to push a couple of artists [a year].”
One version of events has Iovine in his office on a Sunday afternoon, spinning stuff for Akon, soliciting his feedback. Iovine pops in “Boys, Boys, Boys” by Gaga, and Akon tells Iovine that he likes it. A lot. “So Jimmy Iovine calls her on a Sunday afternoon,” says a source, “and goes, ‘Stefani, Gaga, whatever—I just want you to know that we really li
ke this song of yours, and we’re going to be behind you.’ And that was the moment they decided that all the money and all the resources would go towards pushing Lady Gaga. All because Akon”—who’d long believed in her potential—“said he liked it.”
Akon has called Lady Gaga his “franchise player.” He’s said that she’s making it possible for him to consider retiring early, and upon hearing Gaga for the first time, he told Iovine, “Yo, I want to sign that right there. She needs to be under my umbrella”—Kon Live, the label he ran under Interscope. Iovine’s response, Akon has said, was “Yeah, whatever you want. Take her. Let’s get it done.”
In Gaga, they had an artist who, thanks to her ill-fated deal with Island Def Jam, had a good chunk of album-ready material in mastered form. But she still needed to write half a record, and the stuff that wasn’t working for her, or for Iovine and Akon, would go to other artists: the Pussycat Dolls, New Kids on the Block, and her teenage heroine Britney Spears, who recorded a track Gaga cowrote called “Quicksand.”
“They’d rejected so many songs and so many styles at that point—so much,” says Brendan Sullivan. “And she was writing for the Pussycat Dolls before that, but even then, they were disappointed in her and had rejected songs.”
It was, Gaga knew, another pivotal moment, akin to the pressure she felt when writing “The Fame” for Vincent Herbert. Her version of writing “Just Dance” is glamorous in its rock ’n’ roll decadence. She gets off a flight from New York to L.A., hungover from her going-away party on the Lower East Side the night before (she’s relocated to L.A. indefinitely) and heads straight to the recording studio where, minutes later, out pours the song, an ode to drinking and dancing, nothing more.
But Sullivan—who, like many friends, recalls a girl so driven she rarely indulged in alcohol, let alone drugs—suspects she applied herself with the same rigor and discipline when it came to penning a surefire hit, a song that would make Interscope move fast to make her a star.
Starland, meanwhile, was still hoping that Gaga would, as she saw it, do right by her. She’d spent Christmas 2007 with Gaga’s family on the Upper West Side; she says Gaga was upset that Rob Fusari, who’d promised to come, never showed up. Starland says Gaga told her she had a special gift for her, and presented her with a Chanel 2.55 bag worth several thousand dollars. It was understood, Starland says, that this also doubled as payment for Starland’s role in her career, for discovering her and introducing her to Fusari. Starland says she eventually worked up the nerve to confront Gaga over dinner one night at Tao, an expensive Asian fusion restaurant in midtown Manhattan. Gaga paid.
“I said, ‘Stefani, you only know how valuable a relationship or a contact is in someone’s life when it’s taken away.’ And she’s like, ‘Since I don’t have a lot of money right now, next time I won’t give you a bag, I’ll give you a vacation.’ And I just said to her, ‘Honestly, are you planning on screwing me over? Where would you be without all of this effort and development and connections?’ And she was like, ‘Wendy, our relationship is such that I would give you a vacation or whatever, but if you want to put this down with our lawyers, we will never talk again. Our friendship will be over.’ ” Starland opted not to sue—it’s not her style, she says—but the friendship remained distant and strained.
Not long after her dinner with Starland, on the Friday before Valentine’s Day, 2008, Gaga presented “Just Dance” to Interscope. “Jimmy Iovine is known for having these meetings—he’s like Steve Jobs—where he makes everyone sit and wait until he’s ready,” says Sullivan. “And it’s either because ‘None of you are doing your jobs, and I don’t know why I hired any of you people, and you people don’t even like music in the first place,’ blah blah blah, or he’s making them wait because he’s heard something and he wants them to get on it right away.”
On this day, according to Sullivan, it was the latter. “He heard ‘Just Dance,’ and he was like, ‘This is a hit record, and this is the one we’ve been waiting for since we signed her.’ ” Iovine brought Gaga into the office, into that meeting. “He said, ‘You did it, you did everything we asked you to do. We believed in you and we didn’t know why, and now we know why.’ And he played the song for the whole office, and she danced on the table. On the boardroom table.” Not long after, Iovine had her relocate to L.A. to finish the album.
As Sullivan later wrote in an essay for Esquire magazine’s May 2010 “Women” issue, Gaga had returned to New York for a visit and she and Sullivan were eating lunch in a Midtown deli when she got a call from Bert Padell, Madonna’s former business manager. He told her he wanted to step in and take over; she couldn’t believe it. He was one of the many high-level people she’d auditioned for as a teenager.
“Her dad’s a very savvy businessman,” says Sullivan. “He can basically get a meeting with anyone.” Her mother’s savvy as well; before the Padell audition she’d done her homework and learned that he wrote poetry, and at the audition she asked him about it. He gave her a copy of his book of poems. After Stefani performed, Padell said to her, ‘Well, you know, good luck with everything. We’ll call you.’ ” And he’d finally called. Stefani, now Gaga, said to him, “Actually, we have met. My mother still has your book of poetry.” She told Sullivan that it was “the best phone call of my entire life.”
Her boyfriend Lüc, however, was ever more unhappy. “Lüc never gave up on his rock ’n’ roll fantasy world, even though he’d never made it as a drummer,” says Sullivan. “He thought having a girlfriend with a record deal would be VIP shows and instant status. He didn’t know that music was an actual profession and that he would have a busy girl who was always out of town or on her BlackBerry.”
By that December, she’d had enough. After getting into a fight with Lüc one night over her needing to work and him complaining that she was neglecting him for the sake of her career, she told him: “I want you to get my self-tanner, my lipstick, and my disco ball, because you and I are through.”
Chapter Six
One Sequin at a Time
Gaga had been building a solid, substantial fan base online, which sounds far easier than it actually is; if anything, the Internet fractures attention spans and creates split-second, evanescent phenomena. Far more rare is the artist or clip that originates on the Web and becomes massively impactful, that moves into the more traditional mediums of TV, magazines, newspapers, that becomes known even to those people who don’t have a computer.
Susan Boyle, who became a global phenomenon months before Gaga herself did, is that similar, rare example: Her performance on Simon Cowell’s UK show, Britain’s Got Talent, shot around the Web at warp speed, and a confluence of factors—Boyle’s personal story, the production values of the clip, the meta-narrative of a homely spinster singing a song about daring to dream, charming a skeptical audience and the famously cruel Cowell—has turned her, eighteen months later, into a multimillionaire.
Gaga had none of these known quantities: She wasn’t framed by an existing structure, such as American Idol. Her presentation was deliberately confusing and a bit menacing; Boyle was a middle-aged woman who lived alone with her cat and said she’d never been in love. Gaga, unlike Boyle, had no machine behind her, no context. Though Boyle seemed, too, to be an overnight sensation, the clip from Britain’s Got Talent that made her a superstar played like a mini-movie, the quintessential underdog story told in about seven minutes. Gaga was selling a first single that, without visuals, was utterly indistinguishable from the bulk of preexisting, slickly produced, Auto-Tuned pop; she was trying to carve an identity for herself in a super-cluttered landscape. (Fittingly, Boyle and Gaga have expressed an interest in collaborating.)
And yet, this is Gaga’s genius: “She’s struck this difficult balance; she’s both intimate and enigmatic with her fan base,” says Eric Garland, CEO of BigChampagne.com. “Technologies like Twitter and Facebook and MySpace have created these platforms for ‘mass intimacy,’ but mostly it doesn’t work very well, mostly becaus
e you know that I’m not talking to you—if I wanted to talk to you, I’d call or e-mail. When you’re speaking to ten million ‘friends,’ you don’t have that intimacy. But some artists can make that happen—like in live performances, where people in the cheap seats feel like they’re having a command performance. An artist like Lady Gaga feels like she’s doing that, on the Internet, in real time. That’s very difficult.”
In May 2010, a YouTube clip of a twelve-year-old boy performing an astonishing cover of Gaga’s “Paparazzi” became a viral phenomenon, generating more than eighteen million views. Within days, sixth-grader Grayson Chance was on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, where he took a call from Lady Gaga herself, who gushed over his abilities and then helped him secure a record deal. Full circle.
Like every other arm of old media—network television, radio, publishing—the record industry has been grappling with maintaining both pop-cultural relevance and profit margins in the Internet age, and though a company like Interscope has the infrastructure to create a Lady Gaga, that alone is no longer enough.
“The process of breaking a star has become very difficult,” says an unnamed source familiar with Interscope’s Gaga strategy. “We used to have a very push-through relationship with the music consumer, where you got it on the radio and the radio pounded it one hundred times a day, and the kids said, ‘It must be a hit,’ and went out and bought it. The consumer now, kids thirteen to twenty-two years old, they’re much more savvy. They have many more sources of information. They don’t just listen to the radio and say, ‘If Ryan Seacrest says it’s a hit, it’s got to be a hit.’ They’re forming their own judgments. To break an artist today, there’s got to be some grist for the presentation. Enter Lady Gaga.”
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