Becoming Beyoncé

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Ice Cream Summit

  Chocolate, vanilla, or strawberry?” Mathew would ask.

  Those were the usual choices. Even though Mathew wasn’t living with Beyoncé, he still spent much of his time at the town house visiting her, Solange, and Kelly. Often he and Beyoncé would find themselves sitting in the kitchen, just the two of them—like old times at the Parkwood house. Father and daughter would then take the time to re-connect.

  “All three flavors, please,” would usually be Beyoncé’s answer to Mathew’s question. He would scoop the ice cream into a bowl for his daughter and then spray whipped cream over it. After doing the same for himself, he would sit at the table across from her, just the two of them, which somehow always seemed just right. For Mathew, it wasn’t like talking to a kid. Beyoncé had always been surprisingly grown up. There were moments, of course, when her youth was apparent, but for the most part, and especially when it came to Destiny’s Child, she was wise beyond her years.

  On this day at the end of February 1996, there was a lot going on. First, of course, was the excitement of the new record deal. Now that it was official that the group would be signed to Columbia/Sony, Beyoncé would say that her head was swimming with song ideas she was anxious to develop; she kept a notepad on her nightstand to jot down lyrics as they came to her, sometimes even in dreams. On this day, however, there were also other matters to consider, problems posed by LeToya Luckett and her mother, Pamela, and, to a lesser extent, by LaTavia Roberson.

  Surprisingly, only half of Destiny’s Child was immediately eager to sign their new deal with Columbia/Sony and ancillary management contracts with Mathew and Andretta. LaTavia wasn’t so sure about it. In fact, she later said she felt that “it was ridiculous for us to have to sign contracts right then and there.” She wanted time to take the documents home, maybe review them with an attorney.

  LeToya was also a holdout. She recalled, “The [recording] contracts were laid out in front of us, everybody’s excited, ready to sign, and then [Mathew] pulled out his management agreement and said, ‘This has to be signed before you sign that.’ ”

  Just as had earlier occurred when the group signed with Silent Partner Productions (which led to their unsuccessful tenure at Elektra), LeToya’s mom, Pamela, wasn’t going to just go along with the program. She wanted to talk over her daughter’s contract with a lawyer. “And why is that so unreasonable?” she asked at the time. “Any parent would do the same for her daughter.” She remembers, “It became a really bad situation. The girls were looking at it like, ‘Wow, LeToya is stopping our deal here!’ Then, of course, [LeToya’s] looking at me at that age saying, ‘What are you doing, Mom?’ ”

  This afternoon, the question before Mathew and Beyoncé was, “What are we going to do about LeToya and her momma?” About three years had passed since an eleven-year-old Beyoncé made the no-nonsense decision that LeToya should leave the group rather than risk ruining things for them all. LeToya ended up staying, but it was clear to everyone that she’d come very close to being dismissed. Now things were different; the girls were older and had their own points of view. It wasn’t just little Beyoncé with her surprisingly pragmatic solutions to problems.

  Mathew and Beyoncé knew that LaTavia and LeToya had become close in recent years. So there was probably no way LaTavia would go along with any program that would see LeToya pushed out of the group. On the other hand, they also knew that Kelly would be fine with seeing LeToya go. Kelly had already said she couldn’t believe there was any hesitation at all about the contracts. She thought there should “only be gratitude, plain and simple.” So in any major dispute, it would likely be two against two—Beyoncé and Kelly versus LaTavia and LeToya.

  On this afternoon in their kitchen, according to what Beyoncé would later testify, she told Mathew that she’d spent the last few years “wondering when the other shoe would drop with LeToya and her mom.” She liked LeToya well enough; they were friends. However, when it came to business, Beyoncé had always been able to look at things with clear-eyed unsentimentality. She said, “It feels like every time there is a victory for us, LeToya and her momma have something to say about it.”

  The bigger problem at this time was that Pamela felt that Mathew’s ideas for how to maintain group morale were too extreme. In fact, she viewed a letter Mathew sent her a week earlier as “an ultimatum.” It outlined specifically what he expected of LeToya if she were to remain in Destiny’s Child. Pamela by now realized that Mathew was always going to be one for complete commitment, but she felt he was going too far. In the letter, Mathew said he would now require LeToya (and LaTavia too) not only to live under his roof, but also to eat the exact same foods as the other girls and work out at the same gym together.

  “I just don’t see what the problem is with that,” Beyoncé reasoned. “They’re here all the time anyway, aren’t they? They eat all our food anyway, don’t they? We go to the same gym, don’t we? So what is the problem?”

  Pamela disagreed. She said that Mathew’s dictates were “unreasonable and somewhat ridiculous.” She noted that she believed her fifteen-year-old daughter should be able to spend as much time with her brother and her parents as possible, and that this was not an unreasonable expectation. “The girls of this group are and have been homeschooled at your address for some time, five days a week,” she wrote in a letter a few days earlier, on February 27. She noted that they already spent their Saturdays together and also went to church together on Sundays.

  Maybe it wasn’t the specifics of the demands that bothered Pamela as much as the tone of Mathew’s letter. Pamela was never one to be lorded over by Mathew, not without a good fight anyway. “LeToya and I are devastated by your ultimatum for such unwarranted requests,” she wrote. She sent copies of her correspondence to Teresa LaBarbera Whites at Columbia/Sony, as well as to D’Wayne Wiggins at Grass Roots. It was the copy to LaBarbera Whites at Columbia, though, that most concerned both Mathew and Beyoncé. They felt she was causing trouble for them at the label already, and they weren’t happy about it.

  On this day, over their ice cream, father and daughter were in total agreement: LeToya had to go, and before any recordings were released by Destiny’s Child on their new label and the public became acquainted with her. At this point, she was anonymous enough to be easily swapped out, just like Ashley, the girl she had replaced a few years earlier. “It’s inevitable,” Beyoncé said, “so we should just get it over with.”

  Also at play was the concern that maybe LeToya was becoming a bad influence over LaTavia. There was no other reason they could think of as to why LaTavia—who had known Beyoncé since the age of eight—would suddenly now be taking LeToya’s side against Mathew. Beyoncé may have had her issues with her dad from time to time, but she was eternally grateful to him for getting her this far in her career. More important, as she put it at around the time, “I am proud to be Mathew Knowles’s daughter.” So it was difficult for her to see LeToya’s point of view. As far as the group went, though, Beyoncé didn’t want to see LaTavia leave it too. After all, she’d been with the act since before Andretta! If LeToya had to be sacrificed for LaTavia, then so be it.

  In the end, father and daughter made up their minds that they would try one more time to work things out with the Lucketts. However, if there was any more resistance, LeToya would have to go and LaTavia would just have to understand. When told of this decision, Tina was in total agreement with it. “From the time LeToya got in the group there was always drama, always jealousy, always madness,” she would say.

  In the days to come, there was a lot of back-and-forth between Mathew’s attorney, Angela Phea, and the Lucketts. Eventually mother and daughter backed down. Phea then demanded that they not only verbally apologize to all of the group members, their parents and to Mathew and Andretta, but that they send a written apology to Teresa LaBarbera Whites for ever having questioned Mathew’s and Andretta’s management decisions. They also had to promise to never again have any communicatio
n with anyone from the record label. Also, Pam was asked to promise that, in the future, she would have “no input in any decisions.” All of this was hardball, but what else could Pamela Luckett do but play? Her daughter wanted nothing more than to continue with the group, no matter the cost. “Anytime a contract came up, Mathew kicked me out of the group because I wouldn’t sign just anything,” LeToya would later say. “It was like a bad relationship. He would kick me out and then call me back a few days later saying, ‘I need you, I need you, I need you.’ He needs prayer. He needs a hug.”

  Tina’s Request

  Earlier, on September 4, 1996, the day Beyoncé turned fifteen, she and her ex-boyfriend, Lyndall Locke, reconciled. At the time, Lyndall was about to turn seventeen. “A friend came over to my house one night and said he was going to Beyoncé’s birthday party,” recalled Lyndall. “I knew that under the circumstances of how we broke up, I probably shouldn’t go. I hadn’t seen or talked to her in a year and a half. I went anyway. I was walking up a flight of stairs, and when I got to the top, there she was.” As Lyndall recalled it, their eyes locked in an intense gaze that neither one was able to break.

  “In that moment, Beyoncé was still the most beautiful girl I had ever seen,” he remembered. “I asked LaTavia to get me her new telephone number, which she did. We started talking. By November, we were back together. I was older, she was older, and somehow it felt better, or maybe deeper. Funny thing, she never sang to me. Especially after we got together, I would say, ‘Come on, girl! Sing something!’ And she was so bashful, there was no way she was ever going to do that.”

  When Beyoncé told Tina she had gotten back together with Lyndall, Tina wasn’t surprised. “That’s how it is when you’re a teenager,” she told one relative. She said she wasn’t going to discourage a reconciliation, that Beyoncé had to make her own mistakes in life and that “maybe this will be good for her. Who knows?” Tina actually liked Lyndall and was disappointed in him when he betrayed Beyoncé. However, she understood he was young and impetuous; she was willing to give him another chance. “The main message I got from Mathew and Tina was, ‘Can you deal with our daughter and all the work she has to do with her career, and not distract her?’ ” recalled Lyndall. “I was good with that.”

  After Lyndall and Beyoncé were reunited, Tina pulled him aside to have a serious conversation. “Will you do me a favor,” she asked, “and please, just wait until she’s eighteen?”

  Lyndall wasn’t quite sure how to respond. Tina’s meaning was obvious; she didn’t need to spell it out for him. “It’s my responsibility to make sure you don’t do anything stupid,” she said. She was candid and concerned. “I’m not leaving here until we have a deal,” she told him.

  “Okay, sure,” Lyndall agreed, clearing his throat. “We have a deal.”

  “Thank you,” Tina said. “I love you both,” she added. “Now I’ll leave so you two can talk about me behind my back,” she concluded with a smile.

  Recording the First Hit

  When a young writer/producer named Rob Fusari walked into Sugar Bar, the intimate new nightclub on 72nd Street in Manhattan owned by former Motown staffers Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson, he could feel the energy in the room. The place was absolutely teeming with Columbia/Sony executives as well as radio station disc jockeys, reporters from print and television media, and all sorts of other industry types. It was a Thursday night and, as was the custom at Sugar Bar, a new group was about to be showcased, an act who hadn’t yet released any songs to the public but about whom the buzz was already strong. Rob’s friend Vince Herbert had earlier promised that the two would produce one of Rob’s songs for this group, so this was Rob’s opportunity to meet them. After the two men rendezvoused, they made their way backstage. There they found the four young ladies of Destiny’s Child in a small, cramped dressing room surrounded by well-wishers and fans. Somehow, they already had fans!

  “I walked in and said to myself, ‘Holy shit! I’ve just stepped into another era!’ ” Fusari recalled. “I was thinking, ‘Okay, this is the Supremes, right? Except there are four of them and they are super young.’ They were also beautiful in their sexy little sequined outfits. People were fussing over them, catering to them. A woman was teasing out their hair, someone else was tugging and pulling at their costumes. One of them, the lead singer, I figured, was giving instructions to the other three, saying things like, ‘Don’t forget to hit that note or the harmony will be ruined.’ All the while, they were being very pleasant to one another and to everyone in the room, but also focused. There was a level of concentration, a seriousness, like I had never seen before from girls their age. When Vince introduced me, we said a quick hello and then left to find our seats. But already I was impressed.”

  A short while later, Beyoncé, Kelly, LaTavia, and LeToya made their way onto the small stage for their two numbers. Nickolas Ashford later recalled, “If you can make it at the Sugar Bar, you can make it anywhere, because it’s a tough crowd of intelligent, mature listeners who have heard a lot.” Suffice it to say, Destiny’s Child did just fine.

  “The girls kill it,” Rob Fusari recalled. “The crowd goes crazy. I’m hearing Beyoncé sing for the first time, and she’s incredible. I’m hearing the girls harmonize, and they’re tight. I’m watching them move across the stage as a unit, and they’re precise. I can tell they’ve worked hard on their presentation, that they aren’t an act that has just been thrown together. ‘Oh, boy!’ I’m saying to myself. ‘I want to work with them so bad! I hope Vince isn’t bullshitting me.’

  “Afterward, there’s a buzz in the air. That’s when you know an act is going to blow up. That’s when you know it’s not a fluke, that it’s history in the making. I felt that same buzz again much later, the first time I saw Lady Gaga perform. It’s just this thing that happens in a room when everyone is on the same page about the greatness they’d just experienced. In the record business, there’s nothing more exciting.”

  Rob Fusari—who is now known by his stage name 8Bit—would go on to work with many iconic performers, including Britney Spears, Whitney Houston, Will Smith, and Lady Gaga (with whom he would have a romantic relationship; in 2010, Beyoncé would record a duet with Lady Gaga, “Telephone”). But his first act—in fact, the very first time he ever found himself in a recording studio—would be Destiny’s Child with a song he wrote called “No, No, No.”

  Fusari was born and raised in Livingston, New Jersey. As a classically trained pianist, he first began writing songs while studying at William Paterson University. He wanted to write and possibly produce music, though he didn’t know how to go about breaking into the business. Instead, he got a job in the corporate world. Bored and frustrated, he made a deal with his mother: If she would just allow him to live in her Manhattan home for just one year, he would devote all of his attention to music. If after a year he hadn’t succeeded, he would abandon the dream and get “a real job.” She agreed. He set up a small recording studio in the basement and went to work writing and producing his own material, playing keyboards, guitars, and drums. After a year, though, he still hadn’t found a way to truly connect with the music world. But then, just as he was about to give it all up, he wrote “No, No, No.”

  “I was heavily influenced by R&B,” he recalled, “and R. Kelly had produced a song called ‘Stroke You Up’ for a duo of girls called Changing Faces. That song inspired me to start writing ‘No, No, No,’ on one of my synthesizers. It had a very interesting vibe, I thought. I laid down a vocal I had written, the first verse and the hook, and I thought, ‘Okay, well maybe I have something here.’ ”

  A couple weeks later, 8Bit’s buddy Vince Herbert came into town and wanted to meet up with him. Vince had produced most of the memorable songs on Aaliyah’s groundbreaking One in a Million album. When he asked his friend what he was up to, 8Bit said, “I’ve got this song called ‘No, No, No.’ Let me play it for you.”

  “When I played it,” 8Bit recalled, “I could see Vince light u
p; his whole face, his whole aura changed. That’s when I knew I had something.”

  Vince then said he was getting ready to work with a new girl group at Columbia/Sony. “ ‘Can I take this song back to them?’ ” he asked. “Since I couldn’t get arrested in the record industry,” 8Bit recalled, “I said, ‘Sure. Why not?’ So he took the tape and left. I figured nothing was going to happen. I didn’t think much more about it.”

  A couple hours later, Vince Herbert called 8Bit to tell him that he’d played the song for Teresa LaBarbera Whites at Columbia/Sony and that she had agreed to allow him and 8Bit to produce it for Destiny’s Child. Not only that, Vince said, but it was going to be the girls’ very first single release! Now Fusari was skeptical. How could Vince be sure it was going to be the first single? It turned out that Vince had been so confident that “No, No, No” was a hit, he told LaBarbera Whites that if she didn’t agree to release it as Destiny Child’s debut single, he was going to give it to Brandy, another artist he was working with at the time. LaBarbera Whites agreed. Likely, though, she just wanted to get Destiny’s Child in the recording studio with the song, see how it went, and then deal with a release strategy later. After all, the girls hadn’t even heard the tune yet, and neither had Mathew Knowles. So how could she make any real promises about it? It’s likely she was bluffing as much as perhaps Vince was.

  A couple days later, Vince Herbert took 8Bit down to Chung King Studios in Manhattan—famous as the studio where Run-D.M.C, the Beastie Boys, and LL Cool J recorded some of their classic hits. It would be here that DC [as some in the industry had already started calling Destiny’s Child] would record “No, No, No.” 8Bit had already recorded the instrumental track for the song, with a sexy melody and a fat, dark bass line, in his mom’s basement; it took eighteen hours. So he couldn’t imagine what else would be left for him to do at Chung King. Much to his surprise, he soon learned that he would be coproducing the girls’ vocals with his friend Vince.