“Beyoncé came in with the girls, they were happy and successful, and it was such a great change from the last time I saw them, which was when they were crying their eyes out over getting dropped by Elektra,” remembered Simmons. “We clowned in the studio, had a great time. When we were finished with the session, I said, ‘Hey! Stay in touch with me,’ and gave all the girls my phone number. They thanked me, Mathew thanked me, and we all hugged it out.
“Some time later, I ran into Destiny’s Child at the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta airport. They were rushing somewhere and I was off to somewhere else. ‘Where you headed?’ I asked. ‘We’re fixin’ to catch a plane,’ they said, all out of breath. ‘We’re goin’ to a show!’ I said, ‘Cool, well, look, call me sometime.’ And, in unison, as they were racing by me, they all said, ‘We can’t call you! Mathew made us erase your number off our phones!’ Then . . . ‘See ya! Bye!’ And with that, they were gone. Well, that just cracked me up,” Simmons concluded, laughing. “That was just so Mathew. Protecting his girls, as always. I thought, ‘You know what? I ain’t even mad at you, Mathew Knowles. I get it.’ ”
Lyndall’s Nineteenth
On December 3, 1998, Lyndall Locke’s nineteenth birthday, he was in his garage with five of his buddies, playing dominoes. His hair was a wild natural these days; he also had a stud just below the center of his lower lip, called a labret. Because he and his pals were all smoking pot, the atmosphere was so cloudy, they could barely see one another.
“Whatchy’all doin’ in here?” came the voice from the other side of the garage door. When Lyndall went and opened it, he found Beyoncé standing there. She was seventeen now. He let her in and closed the door behind her. “Dang! It’s sure thick in here,” she said as she embraced him. He took her by the hand to the table. “Check it out. I’m winning,” he told her. “Of course you are,” she said, smiling. “It’s your birthday!”
“Take a hit?” someone asked Beyoncé, handing her a joint.
“No, man. Beyoncé don’t smoke,” Lyndall said as he took the joint from her.
The girls had been on the road promoting The Writing’s on the Wall, doing concerts and radio promotional appearances. They were just in town for a couple of days before having to head back out. Beyoncé said they’d been constantly rehearsing, Mathew pressuring them like always. “Good Lord, don’t nobody need to have their father as their manager,” she said, looking exhausted. When Lyndall said he actually liked “Big Mac,” according to him, Beyoncé deadpanned, “That’s ’cause Big Mac ain’t managing you.”
Lyndall then told the others present that he and his cousin Dallas Gillespie had earlier found the girls jogging on the nearby bayou. Laughing, Gillespie explained that Mathew had the girls jogging and singing at the same time in order to increase their breath control. “It was hilarious,” he said.
“It ain’t hilarious if you’re the one doin’ it,” Beyoncé said. “I was freezing to death!”
“We rode our bikes all the way up there—it was, like, miles and miles until we found them!” exclaimed Lyndall. “Then we gave the girls some Gatorades. You appreciate that, baby?” he asked Beyoncé.
“Oh my God! Them Gatorades were so good,” Beyoncé said as she wrapped her arms around Lyndall’s waist.
As they all hung out together, the conversation turned to a magazine article that had just been published about Destiny’s Child, one in which the writer mentioned that Beyoncé had a boyfriend. Lyndall’s name was misspelled as “Lindell.” Beyoncé frowned at the thought of it. She said that she wanted to telephone the writer and ask him to correct his article. Lyndall told her not to do it, though. He said he preferred the misspelling, that it helped to guarantee his anonymity. When Beyoncé asked why he didn’t want to be known, he told her, “I’m thinking about your career, your image. Don’t nobody need to find me back here smoking weed and then have it reflect back on you.”
That night, there was an intimate gathering at Lyndall’s home for his birthday. His mother, Lydia, baked a double-layer chocolate cake, his favorite, with red, white, and blue sprinkles. Of course, Beyoncé was at Lyndall’s side. While everyone was casual in jeans and T-shirts, she looked more dressy in a short-sleeved floor-length silk dress, her brown hair pulled into a ponytail. Also present were Kelly Rowland, Angie Beyincé, and other friends and relatives, such as Lyndall’s cousin Dallas. After Lyndall blew out the candles on his cake, Beyoncé presented him with his gift—a state-of-the-art PlayStation video game system.
“This is what you wanted, right?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said with a big smile, “and this, too,” he added, pulling her in close for a birthday kiss.
Living the Dream
My wife thought I was crazy,” Mathew Knowles was telling Dan Workman over cheese-and-turkey sandwiches during a break in a recording session for the second Destiny Child’s album. “I was this smart black guy working a six-figure job and I gave it all up to manage these girls,” he said.
“Couldn’t have been easy on your family,” Dan said.
Mathew laughed. “You don’t know the half of it. That’s why the stakes are so high now.” He noted that Destiny’s Child had a hit debut album, but that in his view it should’ve done even better in the marketplace. He said that “a hell of a lot” was riding on the sophomore album, and that this was why he stayed in what he called “the approval loop. Nothing goes down without my approval.”
“That probably makes you the bad guy in a lot of instances,” Dan observed.
“Oh yeah. I’m the bad guy, all right,” Mathew said with a chuckle. “But it’s all good,” he concluded. “I love my work. I am my work.”
With the success of Destiny’s Child’s second album, Mathew had become power personified; it actually seemed to emanate from him. He may not have understood all of the fine details of the record business, but he was now a formidable presence in it just the same. He’d always been a confident, self-reliant man, which is one of the reasons he’d been so successful in the corporate arena. Now, flush with success in a new and maybe more competitive venue, he comported himself with even greater authority, his personality an intriguing combination of arrogance and likability. Already there were people in the record business who didn’t care for him. That was fine with him. He wasn’t out to make friends, he was out to make money. “I’m finally living my dream,” he told Dan Workman. “This is it, right here and now. This is the dream.”
Despite—and maybe because—of all he represented in her young life, Mathew’s relationship with Beyoncé became more complex with the passing of the years. By the time she recorded the songs for The Writing’s on the Wall, she was seventeen. When it came to her father, rebellion wasn’t just a passing phase for Beyoncé, as it is for most girls her age. Once she decided to stand up to him—when she was about twelve—she would almost always stand up to him. She still listened to his advice, of course. However, she also often disagreed with him, and had no problem doing so. Therefore, father and daughter would be at loggerheads for many years to come. Both could attest to the fact that it was not easy navigating terrain where a business relationship intersected with a personal one. Beyoncé was headstrong, knew precisely what she wanted, and usually made sure she got it. Mathew, of course, was never easygoing either. If anything, the two were exactly alike.
In many ways, Beyoncé Knowles was like any other girl her age. Not only was her father often wrong in her mind, but so was her mother. She wasn’t above talking back to Tina and disagreeing with her the same way she did with Mathew. The dynamic between mother and daughter was very different, though. Mathew had no choice; he had to listen to her opinion if it differed from his. She was, after all, as much client to him as she was daughter. Tina didn’t have to put up with it, and she didn’t.
One relative tells the story of being at a barbecue when Beyoncé suddenly announced that she was leaving to meet Lyndall. Tina reminded her that they were in the middle of a family night. She suggested that Beyonc
é invite Lyndall over to the house, making it clear that she was not to leave. Beyoncé let out a heavy sigh as if she had the weight of the world on her shoulders. She then gave her mother a side-eyed glance of annoyance. The two had words, after which Beyoncé ran upstairs to her bedroom and slammed the door with all her might. Tina walked over to the staircase and hollered, “And you can stay up there for all I care.” It was nothing if not a typical exchange between a mother and her teenage daughter.
“We did our fair share of sneaking around,” Lyndall Locke recalled of him and Beyoncé. “If we wanted to be alone together, Beyoncé would ask her cousin Angie if we could hang out at her apartment. We’d go over there and hole up for hours. I’m sure that drove Tina crazy, Mathew too. Beyoncé was becoming a star, but she was also their little girl. I know they felt I was probably corrupting her,” Lyndall concluded. “And they were right, I was,” he concluded, laughing.
Beyoncé and Tina had their spats; there was nothing unusual about them. It was more unusual for a girl to disagree with her father over something like a recording session than it was having an argument with her mother about going out on a date.
For instance, around the time of the rehearsal for—not the actual recording of—one song for the second album, “Say My Name,” Beyoncé and Mathew seemed to be in a disagreement about some aspect of a negotiation for the budget of Destiny’s Child’s third album, which was to be a Christmas album. It was a small budget; Beyoncé wished the label would give them more money. However, Mathew was doing the best he could; holiday albums are usually not big-budgeted projects. (In the end, Mathew was able to get not only what Beyoncé asked for this album, but more.)3
During the rehearsal, Beyoncé thought her dad was being particularly recalcitrant. She didn’t like the instrumental track for “Say My Name,” thought it was too busy. Rodney Jerkins would remix it later, but at this time she was just trying to work with what she had in hand. She was impatient with it, though, and Mathew wasn’t making it any easier with his own suggestions. “Daddy, I’m a grown woman,” she finally told him. “Leave me be so I can rehearse this doggone thing.” Of course, her bad mood had little to do with the rehearsal, and more to do with the budget of the holiday album.
“Oh, hell no!” Mathew exclaimed, jumping to his feet. “I know you ain’t tryin’ to talk back to me up in here!”
At that, Beyoncé very calmly rose and walked out of the room, her head held high, right past her father and out the door, effectively shutting down the rehearsal. She recognized her power; after all, without her there could be no rehearsal.
Mathew took a deep breath and exhaled heavily. When he asked Kelly if she thought Beyoncé would be returning, Kelly smiled sheepishly and said, “Not till you apologize.”
Shaking his head and smiling with resignation, Mathew rose and left the room. Ten minutes later, he and Beyoncé returned, arm in arm, both seeming purely satisfied with whatever terms they’d come to that had quieted their tempers. “Now, let’s get back to this song,” he told her, kissing her on the cheek. “I think this thing is a hit, don’t you?” Beaming at her dad, Beyoncé eagerly returned to the work at hand.
Vocal Lessons
It was in 1998 that the respected vocal teacher Kim Wood Sandusky was contacted by Mathew Knowles to work with Destiny’s Child. More specifically, Sandusky, an attractive blonde in her midthirties, was brought in to work with Beyoncé and Kelly. “It was an interview, actually,” she recalled of that first meeting. “I showed up at Mathew’s Music World Entertainment offices ready to work on a small electric piano with the girls. Immediately, I felt that the chemistry was there between Beyoncé and Kelly and myself as I took them through some vocal exercises. I knew they were observing me as much as I was them. Afterward, Tina took me aside. She was pleasant, but all business.”
“What is it you think you can do for Beyoncé?” Tina asked the vocal coach.
“I think we need to build on her breathing stamina,” Kim answered. “Some of her vocal muscles could also be strengthened for a richer, rounder sound. We also have to work on her air flow so that she has longevity.” Kim added that Beyoncé was, in her estimation, “obviously a superstar.” She said you could “hear it in her talent.” Then she asked Tina, “She’s in it for the long haul, isn’t she?”
“We sure hope so,” Tina answered, seeming pleased. She said that she’d love to have Kim work with both Beyoncé and Kelly and that the coach should talk to Mathew to work out the details.
In her subsequent conversation with Mathew, Kim realized he had a wide range of plans for Destiny’s Child, from TV appearances to live concerts and recordings. “He sat on one side of his desk, I was on the other, and he laid out his ideas for the group, but more precisely for Beyoncé,” Kim recalled of Mathew. “ ‘I want to keep her voice in great shape,’ he told me, ‘because the demands on it for the next few years are going to be great. I like that you are concerned about longevity,’ he told me, ‘because that’s my concern, too. Kelly, too. I have plans for her as well. Both girls need to be on point.’ ”
The next day, Beyoncé showed up at Kim’s studio for her first lesson. “She pulled up in her Jag,” Kim recalled, “and I remember thinking, ‘How awesome is this? She’s seventeen and has already attained such a great level of success.’ ‘Okay, so let’s do it,’ she said as soon as she walked in. And we began working. I first started working with her on ‘Bills, Bills, Bills.’ It was a mouthful of words! She and I worked not only on phrasing but on places to breathe so she could create onstage what she’d done in the studio. ‘You can fix stuff in the studio, but live, it’s all me,’ she said, ‘so I really need this to be right.’ During that first lesson, I noticed her work ethic, her concentration and drive. I thought, ‘I am really going to love working with this artist.’ After about an hour and a half, the session was over. She got her things together, turned around, and said, ‘Okay, see you tomorrow, Kim?’ She had the biggest smile and sparkle in her eye. We hugged goodbye. Then, from that point on, we worked together for years.”
The morning after Beyoncé’s first lesson, Kelly showed up for hers. “Her voice was also great,” Sandusky recalled. “I could see why Mathew wanted to build her too. There was a real quality there. When I evaluated it, I knew I needed to make her voice more powerful, and I also wanted to work on her breathing and stamina. Kelly had the same work ethic as Beyoncé. She was focused and had such joy about what she was doing.”
Neither Mathew nor Tina ever talked to Kim about LaTavia or LeToya. It is arguable that neither was as much a consideration as they probably deserved to be, considering that they were half the group. In fact, both girls had talent.
Though LaTavia had started out as a rapper and not a singer, she’d grown into a capable vocalist. She had a deep and rich alto that rounded out the group’s harmony and, when utilized to its best advantage, effectively held down its bottom. Some felt she sounded like Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes from TLC. Maybe LaTavia wasn’t a lead singer, but not everyone can front a group. Though Beyoncé even slighted her by once claiming to Lola Ogunnaike for a Vibe magazine interview that she was “tone deaf,” that wasn’t really true. (Though she was quoted as having been talking about LeToya, clearly Beyoncé meant LaTavia, since Kelly clarified that they were referencing the “rapper” in the group.) In truth, LaTavia actually shared a lead with Beyoncé on one of the songs on The Writing’s on the Wall, “Sweet Sixteen.” She was also a great loyalist. She’d been with the group from the very beginning and wanted nothing more than to continue with it.
For her part, LeToya was a more than capable singer, a soprano who—again, when she was actually used—could really contribute to the upper reaches of the group’s harmony. She could sing lead too, with no problems. Of course, Mathew—and many of the group’s producers and engineers—didn’t see it that way, because LeToya was no Beyoncé . . . but, again, who was? All LeToya wanted was the same thing the other girls wanted: to sing and to be appreciated for
her talent. These days, she definitely wasn’t getting that sense of fulfillment, though. “My self-esteem was very, very low,” she would later confirm of this time in her life. “Beyoncé is very talented and I was thinking, ‘I can’t sound like that, so maybe I can’t sing.’ ”
“In my opinion, LaTavia and LeToya weren’t in the same vocal league as Beyoncé, and to a certain extent, neither was Kelly,” said engineer Dan Workman. “But pop music isn’t always just about the record. It’s also about the presentation. LaTavia and LeToya looked great on TV, in the videos, and onstage. They did their thing, for sure, even if it wasn’t always in the studio.”
Their talent aside, it had gotten to the point where LaTavia’s and LeToya’s presence in the recording studio sometimes wasn’t even deemed necessary by several of their producers. Thus some songs credited to Destiny’s Child were actually not group performances at all. Rather, they were just Beyoncé doing all the vocal parts herself. “I noticed, for instance, on ‘Bills Bills Bills,’ Kevin Briggs put Beyoncé in the booth and pretty much had her do the whole song, all the parts,” recalled Workman. “Then, when he put the other girls in the studio for a bit, it felt to me like it was just out of courtesy. In some cases, their vocal takes weren’t even mixed into the song, which they probably don’t even realize to this day. By the time we got to ‘Say My Name,’ for instance, it was Beyoncé doing most of the heavy lifting with Kelly filling in some parts. I remember hearing a playback and asking, ‘Is that LaTavia?’ and Kevin would say, ‘Nope. Beyoncé.’ A little later, I would ask, ‘LeToya?’ and he would answer, ‘Nope. Beyoncé.’ ”
Though Mathew’s philosophy had always been that the other girls in the group weren’t as important to its success as was Beyoncé, this present studio wizardry wasn’t even his idea. It was all in the purview of producers who felt it was quicker and easier to just use Beyoncé for all the harmonies. When The Writing’s on the Wall was released, it would definitely sound a lot more like a Beyoncé album than had the group’s debut record.
Becoming Beyoncé Page 25
