Becoming Beyoncé

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  “I had never even been in a recording studio before,” 8Bit exclaimed. “So I was freaking out. I was like, ‘Woah! This is too much!’ Then Beyoncé and the girls walked in and I got a good look at them and I thought, ‘Okay. Now, how the hell old are these girls? Fifteen? Sixteen?’ Despite their youth, though, I could see right off that they were all business. No small talk, no nothin’ . . . just Beyoncé saying, ‘Hello, everyone, let’s get to work.’ ”

  Beyoncé was the first in the recording booth, ready to lay down the lead vocal to “No, No, No.” She listened to 8Bit’s demo all the way through, where he sang the song against the prerecorded backing track. Then she listened to it again, this time studying it carefully and taking notes about the lyrics on a legal pad. At one point, she observed, “This chorus, ‘You be saying no when it’s really yes,’ is so interesting because that’s usually what a guy would be saying to a girl, not the other way around. I like the message it sends to girls that they can be aggressive and clear about what they want. It’s hot, it’s sexy,” she added, getting really charged up about it, “so let me just get in there and cut this dang song!”

  Though 8Bit had no experience producing an artist’s vocals, Beyoncé clearly had a lot of experience singing them. She finished all the verses in less than an hour, quick and easy. Certainly those many years at the knees of Lonnie Jackson, Tony Mo., and all of the others who had groomed her as a child were now paying off big-time, especially in terms of discipline and control. As it happens, “No, No, No” features one of her more conservative vocal performances. Absent are the kinds of vocal histrionics that—at least to a generation of young pop/R&B and hip-hop vocalists—would define singing with “soul.” Rather, it’s a simple, completely elegant performance.

  “From the start, Beyoncé was . . . well . . . let’s just say I knew it was going to be hard to break through her shell,” 8Bit continued. “She wasn’t stand-offish or arrogant as much as she was just in her own little world. During the session when she’d take a break and come out of the booth, I would try to engage her. I quickly realized, though, that it wasn’t going to be easy. She’s not someone who’s going to easily befriend you.

  “I figured maybe the distance between us was because I was this white kid in his early twenties trying to break into an urban market,” he recalled. “Funny thing, though, was that even though I would work with her many more times in the coming years, that first time I met her pretty much characterized every other time. It was always as if we’d just met. Even after we had a couple of hits together, it was never like, ‘Come on over and give me a hug and tell me what’s up.’

  “Kelly is just the opposite,” he continued. “She treats people like they are old friends, like, ‘I have known you forever, let’s go have coffee.’ But Beyoncé is more aloof.”

  There are actually two versions of 8Bit’s “No, No, No”—“No, No, No (Part 1),” which is the mellow groove the girls recorded with 8Bit and Vincent Herbert at Chung King, and “No, No, No (Part 2),” the remix that transforms the original track’s slow tempo into a beat-heavy hip-hop sound. On this one, Beyoncé sings the lyrics in rapid-fire style. The track is interspersed with a rap by its producer, Wyclef Jean, leader and producer of the multiplatinum superstar act the Fugees. (“They went from a dream to the young Supremes.”)

  The more upbeat Wyclef Jean version of the song is the result of a silly moment from Beyoncé. Because the group was over budget with the album, when they went into the studio with Jean for the remix of “No, No, No,” they had to do it in a hurry. With Wyclef at the control board and Beyoncé in the studio, she was taking her time, being very precise with her work, as usual. Frustrated, Jean said, “Come on, girl, we have to hurry this thing up.” Joking, she began to sing the song in triple time, all the while using the syncopated style she had learned from her original writer, Anthony Moore—Tony Mo. “Wait. Hold up! I like that,” Wyclef said. “Let’s cut it like that.” It took exactly fifty-seven minutes for her to record what was to be known as “No, No, No (Part 2).”

  As for DC’s cohesiveness in the studio, 8Bit says he didn’t see much of it. “It wasn’t a buddy-buddy ‘you’re my girls’ kind of thing,” he recalled. “They seemed like two separate units, Beyoncé and Kelly on one side and LeToya and LaTavia on the other. Beyoncé, even at fifteen, was someone you felt was very distinctive and unusual. And I mean no disrespect to the others, especially not to Kelly, who is a powerhouse vocalist on her own. [8Bit would produce three songs on Kelly’s first solo album, Simply Deep.] But I do remember thinking there was no way Beyoncé was going to be in this group for very long.”

  Recording the First Album

  Few artists could ask for a better shot at making a first album than the opportunities afforded Destiny’s Child with their debut. Thanks to the persistence and determination of Mathew and Andretta, the girls were able to work with some of the hottest producers and musicians of the period. Among them were the aforementioned 8Bit along with Vincent Herbert and Wyclef Jean, as well as Jermaine Dupri and Tim & Bob (songwriters/musicians Tim Kelly and Bob Robinson, who cut their production teeth on TLC and Boyz II Men). Also working on the album was Benjamin Wright, a veteran arranger/conductor whose résumé included soul legends such as the Temptations, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Aretha Franklin, and Barry White. Additionally, there was, of course, D’Wayne Wiggins, who had so brilliantly shepherded the girls’ deal with Columbia/Sony through his production company, Grass Roots.

  One of the immediate disagreements D’Wayne had with Mathew Knowles over the first DC album concerned the lead vocals on the songs he was producing. Wiggins wanted to make sure all four girls were showcased. However, Mathew, not surprisingly, was much more interested in positioning Beyoncé as the focal point. “I grew up listening to En Vogue and the Pointer Sisters,” Wiggins recalled. “So as far as I was concerned, if it was a group then everyone got to shine, not just one person. But Mathew wasn’t down with that. He was okay with the group when it came to harmony, but when it came to actual lead singing, he wanted that to be Beyoncé.

  “I remember giving LaTavia a little part on a song, and then Kelly, and then LeToya. That’s when Mathew and I hit a wall. From then on, we butted heads over the issue of lead singing because I campaigned hard for the other girls. For Mathew, though, it wasn’t just his kid singing the songs, it was a matter of branding. For instance, back in the day, when you heard the Supremes you heard Diana Ross singing lead and that was the group’s brand. There was no mistaking that sound, her voice. You heard it on the radio and you thought, ‘Boom! That’s the Supremes.’ He told me that this is what he was after with Destiny’s Child, an identifiable, branded sound.”

  An ironic point of contention between Beyoncé and Mathew was that she sided with D’Wayne when it came to divvying out lead vocals. It was as if she was so secure in her ability, she didn’t need to commandeer every single lead. One day, D’Wayne had her recording the lead vocal to a song while Kelly, LaTavia, and LeToya watched solemnly from the other side of the glass, all three sitting with him and the engineer. “Why am I singing all of this stuff when the other girls can sing some of it too?” Beyoncé asked from inside the recording booth.

  “Well, Mathew has a thing he’s trying to do,” D’Wayne said.

  “Good Lord! Mathew ain’t here now, is he?” Beyoncé asked, taking off her headphones. “One of the other girls can sing this part,” she decided. “Like Kelly. Kelly can sing this just fine.”

  “Heck, yeah,” Kelly said eagerly as she bolted from her chair. “Let me get in on there and do my thing!”

  After Kelly went into the recording booth with Beyoncé, the two girls worked on the composition of the song together. Coaching her friend every step along the way, Beyoncé practically produced the session. When Kelly finally had her chance to shine, she sounded just fine. However, it didn’t escape anyone in the studio that Beyoncé had a style of her own, and it was one that couldn’t be matched. In the end, Beyonc�
�’s vocal was the one that would be released.

  “It was ridiculous, the way Beyoncé could sing,” D’Wayne Wiggins exclaimed. I used to call her ‘Beulah.’ I’d say, ‘Let’s run that song down again, Beulah.’ The first time I called her that she was a little put off and asked why I gave her that nickname. I said, ‘Because you’re just this little-assed girl, but you got the voice of a big-assed woman.’ In fact, you got a voice that sounds like it should be coming out of a big ol’ woman named Beulah. She loved that and the nickname stuck. Beulah!”

  Many years later, in 2014, D’Wayne Wiggins would happen upon Mathew Knowles at The Essence Awards. “Aren’t you glad I made the decisions I made back then when it came to Beyoncé singing all them leads?” Mathew asked D’Wayne with a smile. “I was right, wasn’t I?”

  D’Wayne Wiggins had to laugh. “Dude! I’m sure glad you did that shit,” he said, vigorously shaking Mathew’s hand. “Thank you! You were right. And we all made a whole lot of money because of it!”

  “No Woman Deserves This”

  By January 1997, most of the songs Destiny’s Child planned to include on their first album were finally finished. There was a great deal of satisfaction about them, too. They sounded terrific, and it seemed to everyone that the girls were well on their way to stardom. There were other tunes they were still working on, though. In all they would record more than forty songs, and then whittle down the selection to a prized thirteen. The album was scheduled for release in February 1998, which sure seemed a long way off. Despite all of the anticipation, for the first half of 1997, Andretta Tillman’s illness was really all that was on the minds of everyone who cared about her.

  By April, Andretta was in and out of a wheelchair. Chemotherapy had turned her skin a sickly, darker color. Her hair was thinning. Tina Knowles still did what she could to style it, but it was becoming very difficult. Tina would go to Andretta’s home to work on her since Andretta could no longer make it to Headliners. One day, she found Andretta in such a debilitated state, she felt certain she should be in the hospital. However, Andretta refused to go. She still believed she would recover. In fact, she refused even to have a will drawn up—she was that determined to get better. “But she looked like a little old lady who had just been whittled down to nothing,” Pat Felton recalled sadly.

  “In the end, Mathew’s gonna get all the credit for the girls, you know that, don’t you?” Andretta asked Tony Mo. “I’m going to be completely erased from history as if I never even existed on the planet.” He told her he suspected that was true. “This is my legacy and it’s going to be just gone,” she sadly added.

  “She was very upset about it,” Tony Mo. recalled, “but comes a time, you know, when you’re fighting for your life and there’s not much you can do about a lot of things.”

  One weekend, Beyoncé and Kelly stayed with Andretta to try to help her out. They were just fifteen, but the girls wanted to do what they could for their “Miss Ann.” It was very difficult. Even with the help of Andretta’s boys, Armon and Chris, and her housekeeper, Janet, it was still too much for Beyoncé and Kelly to handle. Crying, Beyoncé told her mother that she and Kelly had tried to cheer Andretta up by singing to her, but that it didn’t work. She said that Andretta was so weak, she didn’t even leave her bed.

  The next weekend Beyoncé and Kelly wanted to return to Andretta’s, hoping they could help out in little ways, even if that just meant staying to pray with her. No, Tina decided. She felt that the last time had been too traumatic for the girls and she didn’t want to put them through it again. She said they could spend time there after school, but that they should come home and sleep in their own beds. Reluctantly, the girls agreed.

  “I remember going over to Tina’s for lunch one day, and the whole household felt muted,” recalled one friend of hers.” Usually the Knowles home was a bustling, busy place with a lot of excitement. But not on this day. “ ‘It gets to you,’ Tina told me. ‘Just knowing it’s going on in the background every single, solitary day, it gets to you. Ann is such a good person. No woman deserves this.’ ”

  Tina said she also felt badly that the girls had worked so hard to get to the point where they had a record label deal, only to now not be able to completely enjoy their victory. The weight of Andretta’s illness was such a burden, it wore everyone down. Tina wanted to shield the girls from the despair, but she knew there was no way to do it. “This is a horrible reality of life that I think the girls need to understand,” she told her friend. She said she couldn’t protect the girls from it even if she wanted to, “because they are over to Ann’s all the time.”

  The stress of Andretta’s illness was really getting to Beyoncé. One day, Tina suggested that she call Lyndall Locke and have him take her somewhere just to relieve her anxiety. However, Beyoncé had her mind made up about Lyndall, especially when it came to Andretta’s sickness—she didn’t want to share it with him. She had long ago established very strict boundaries where Lyndall was concerned; his purpose in her life was for good times, nothing more. Actually, she was underestimating him. As light-hearted as he was, he did have a serious side.

  One afternoon while Beyoncé was visiting with Armon and Christopher at the Tillman home, Andretta and Pat Felton got into a heated but whispered argument. “Don’t you tell my kids nothin’ about my health, do you hear me?” Andretta told Pat, trying to keep her voice low. “Not even with your last breath should you ever tell my kids anything about my health,” she insisted.

  Andretta’s angst stemmed from a recent conversation Pat had had with Armon during which she told him that his mother’s condition was very serious. Armon refused to believe it. “He’s sixteen and he needs to know what’s going on,” Pat argued. “He has enough information,” Andretta said. She said that she’d told Armon that she was diabetic, and that was all he needed to know.

  The two friends agreed to disagree, said that they loved one another, and put the issue to rest. Within a week Andretta would tell Pat that she had finally confessed the truth to Armon. “I am very, very sick,” she told her son through her tears as he tried to help her up the stairs. The teen was torn up inside; seeing his mother suffer was almost more than he could bear.

  Unbelievably enough, at around this same time, Pat Felton was also diagnosed with lupus. She’d never even heard of the disease before, and now, after spending so much time nursing her best friend through it, she had it herself. “It seemed so cruel and unfair,” Pat recalled. “But I knew my job was to help Ann, not feel sorry for myself. Now that I too needed treatment, I started looking for the best doctors for the two of us. It was as if lupus was the only thing going on in our lives.”

  5-16-97

  It was May 16, 1997. “Oh my, Ann! You look a lot better,” Tina Knowles was telling Andretta Tillman.

  “I actually feel better,” Andretta said with a weak smile. She was in the intensive care unit of Park Plaza Hospital in Houston. She had been admitted the day before, so ill that Pat Felton could barely get her there, with Armon’s help. Pat had read Bible passages with her that first night, and then went home to allow Andretta to get some rest. But then Andretta had a terrible time, suffering a heart attack and kidney failure both in that one evening. However, on this early Friday morning, she seemed much better.

  Standing in the doorway watching Andretta and Tina was Pat. She’d shown up along with Cholotte Taylor (the mother of Nicki and Nina, the two dancers who had once been a part of Girls Tyme) to spend the day with Andretta as she underwent a battery of tests. According to Pat, the two women found their friend sitting upright in bed signing documents. After she finished, Andretta handed the documents back to Tina, who inserted them into a manila envelope. “You really do look so much better to me,” Tina told her. “I’ll check on you later, Ann,” she said. “God bless you.” She held Andretta’s hand for a few moments before taking her leave, nodding at Pat and Cholotte as she departed.

  “Ann, what in the world were you doing?” Pat asked as s
he approached her.

  “Oh, Tina just had some papers for me to sign,” Andretta said, according to Pat’s memory of the conversation.

  “But you are in intensive care,” Pat exclaimed. “Are you okay to sign documents?”

  “Oh, it was nothing,” Andretta said. “Just some papers having to do with Destiny’s Child.”

  “It was obvious to me that they were legal documents,” Pat Felton said many years later. “I didn’t know if Ann had called Tina, or how Tina ended up being there with these papers. It concerned me, though. I just didn’t think Ann was up to signing anything important.”

  As part of her deposition for a later court case, Tina would deny that this happened and give a different version of events.

  About an hour later, Andretta was being rolled down the hall on a gurney and then into an elevator, headed for an ultrasound and X-rays. “I think your boys should be here,” Pat told her as she held her hand.

  “No,” Andretta said. “I don’t want them seeing me like this.”

  As the necessary tests were being conducted, Pat and Cholotte waited in a small room and chatted with nurses. Suddenly a set of double doors swung wide open and out came Andretta’s gurney, surrounded by a medical team. As they rushed down the hallway, a doctor gave Andretta, who was unconscious, chest compressions.

  “What’s going on?” Pat screamed.

  “We have to get her back up to intensive care,” said a nurse. “It’s a Code Blue,” she exclaimed.

  “No, no, wait!” Pat said. As the team stopped rolling the gurney, Pat rushed to her friend’s side. “Ann! Ann!” she screamed. There was no response. Andretta’s body was still, her eyes closed. Panicked, Pat slapped her friend hard across the face. “Ann!” Suddenly Andretta bolted upright on the gurney, stiff as a board, her head tilted back. She made panicked eye contact with Pat and then took a deep, loud gulp of air. She then stared at the medical team surrounding her, all of them frozen in place, seemingly startled by her visage as her eyes focused on them like lasers. Then, just as suddenly as she’d come to, she closed her eyes again and collapsed onto the gurney.