Later on, she recalled that Evan asked her if she was a singer. “I was 12 or 13 and he didn’t get what I was doing in a boutique of all places after school. It was just one of those really random moments when he told me that I had a really great voice.”
The phone number that Evan had given Stefani belonged to his uncle, Don Lawrence who happened to be a world-famous voice coach whose clients included Annie Lennox, Christina Aguilera and Mick Jagger. She called him up and got more excited by the prospect of being his student. As it turned out, that phone call was the first step to fame.
Chapter 3 – Making It On Her Own
Tisch School of the Arts
Aside from her parents and teachers at Sacred Heart, Don Lawrence exerted the biggest influence on Stefani in her early teens. He became her ‘guru’ and ‘mentor’. Lawrence had seen her potential and encouraged her to write music on the piano in her house when she was barely in her teens. His belief in her made her more confident to start performing live at coffee houses, to the point that she had opened her own coffee house at high school just so she would have a place to play.
There was no sign yet of Lady Gaga in Stefani (front row, first to the left) at Tisch
And at this particular time in Stefani Germanotta’s life, her parents were there to support her. They knew well that an obsession with music could prove distracting, especially for a student dealing with school work. And they also knew that Stefani’s passion for performing might not just be a hobby but a calling.
Totally in support of their daughter, Joseph and Cynthia decided that their daughter should continue her studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts after graduating from Sacred Hearts. Tisch is a prestigious establishment that is part of New York University and specializes in film, dance and drama. Its alumni include the who’s who of Hollywood such as Angelina Jolie, Anne Hathaway, Whoopi Goldberg, Woody Allen and director Oliver Stone.
Getting into Tisch was indeed a challenge. Competition was fierce and only the select few were allotted a place. And so those who get accepted into Tisch consider it an honor. But it is a greater honor to get a place there ahead of schedule.
Stefani Germanotta was only 17, fresh out of Sacred Heart, when she became one of 20 people in its 45-year history to gain early admission to the NYU arts school. She moved to a dorm and attended classes in music and theatre at the Undergraduate Department of Drama. She also took classes in art history and set design, things that she would apply later when she became Lady Gaga.
She had a very hectic schedule. In the mornings, she would spend five hours for dancing. She’d spend afternoons for acting and singing, followed by lessons on literature and modern art. All of these things provided a background and the discipline to make the music and stage the shows later in her life.
Stefani’s initial excitement was tempered because she found out that the classes didn’t challenge her creatively. She also thought felt that she wasn’t learning much and said, “Once you learn how to think about art, you can teach yourself.”
Her classmates thought of her as a very focused student, but her interests were outside of the classroom. During this time, she had set up her own band, the Stefani Germanotta Band, with some of NYU students. The band consisted of four members, with Stefani on vocals and keyboards, Calvin Pia on bass, Eli Silverman on guitar and Alex Beckman on drums.
Stefani’s band’s album, Red and Blue
The band released one album in 2006, the Red and Blue, which they sold at their shows. Of the band’s music, a friend said, “It was all very normal, very singer-songwritery. It was just the Stefani Germanotta Band. She’d have her piano standing up. The band, to be honest, they weren’t that great. I always thought she was talented. I’m sure she realized, ‘I gotta do something unique!’”
The band would perform at local clubs and had a decent following. There was a time when the band performed in front of talent scouts from Columbia Records. The talent scouts were apparently confused by the band’s sound.
One of the talent scouts said, “We get [Stefani’s voice] but we don’t get the music.” Apparently, the problem referred to identity. Stefani was trying hard to be a rocker but her vocal abilities and personality didn’t match it.
Although she didn’t stick it out at Tisch, she made a sizeable impact. She focused her attention to the demands of the curriculum. Many would attest that she was a keen student although she was starting to show signs of being a free-thinking libertarian. But anyway, Stefani demonstrated an intelligence that was unusual for a future pop star.
Also, Stefani made an impact on the Tisch authorities for the way she handled her heavy college workload even with a steady flow of after-hours gigs around the city. Not only did she perform on open-mike nights but she also competed in the annual talent contest called Ultra Violet Live in NYU. She almost won but came in third. Stefani’s video showing her singing Captivated and Electric Kiss is available on YouTube.
She was a busy bee, involved in too many extracurricular project and with a glam band. She wrote and played piano-heavy solo songs.
But Stefani grew frustrated, thinking that the best way to explore her love of music and art was outside the walls of Tisch. She felt that she never fitted in there. She said, “It never actually clicked for me in terms of art [even though] I always knew I’d have a life in art.”
Stefani knew she wasn’t going to make it to the end of her course and realized that she only went to Tisch because it was what was expected of her. “I think I was a little nervous about going out on my own after high school. It was like my family wouldn’t let me take off. It was frowned upon in school to not go to college.”
Stefani dropped out of Tisch after only a year there. She recalled,
“It just kind of happened. I did theatre in high school and I did theatre in college. I went to the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. Whenever I would do pop performances, people would say I should do theatre. When I would audition for musicals, they’d tell me I was too pop. I dropped out of college and got frustrated. I said, ‘Fuck it! I will do whatever I want to do.’”
This problem of her contemporaries and the college staff trying to determine where she fit in was what pushed her to decide to just leave the school. She was 19 when she politely told her parents about her plans of focusing solely on music but that she could not survive without their support or their money.
Her mother started crying while her father struck a deal with her. He would pay her rent for a year while she tried to make it in the music industry. If after that time she hadn’t made it, she would return to Tisch.
A Struggling Artist
Stefani was only too happy to agree although there was the possibility that she’d find herself eating crow. She really didn’t like the school which, for her, was like a sausage factory. “It was about making everybody good at lots of things rather than being amazing at one thing and sucking at all the others, which is what I’m kind of into.”
Stefani wanted to be really good at one thing. Expressing frustration over the confusion during auditions where people would say “You’re too pop” or “You’re too theatre”, Stefani realized she was losing her way. Thinking that instead of trying to be pop or trying to be theatre, she’d rather do something that married the two worlds.
Marrying pop and theatre sounded more like burlesque performance, and Stefani found herself doing just that after leaving Tisch in the fall of 2005. By this time, she had found an apartment in Clinton Street in New York’s Lower East Side. She wanted to become an artist, but having said goodbye in the meantime to her parents, she needed money to live and to buy food.
The apartment building where Stefani lived after quitting Tisch
She found a day job waitressing at the Cornelia Street Café and at night would go-go dancing at burlesque bars such as the Slipper Rooms. She also performed at clubs like the Knitting Factory with her new-found friend Lady Starlight. Lady Starlight was one of Stefani’s early collabor
ators and a regular face on the New York club scene.
At first, Stefani played at the Lower East Side, then widened her reach and began to play all over New York. She was good at waiting tables and at entertaining in skimpy stage-wear. She was so good that “I always got big tips. I always wore heels to work! I told everybody stories, and for customers on dates, I kept it romantic. It was kind of like performing.”
In terms of her nighttime employment, the extent of the burlesque-ness of it varied from one report to another. She called what she did “performance art parties.” She told Louise Gannon of the News of the World’s Fabulous magazine that what she was doing in clubs during this time was working as a stripper.
She told more! Magazine,
“I loved being a stripper. To me it was all about the act, it was all about art. I wanted to be the most outrageous performer on that stage. I was very into heavy metal. People would come to the clubs just to see what I was going to do that night – I found the whole thing amazing. I found the idea of taking my clothes off onstage incredibly liberating. I have absolutely no problem with my sexuality and any woman who wants to get more confident about her body should try stripping because it just makes you understand the power your body has.”
Stefani wasn’t ashamed about having a strong sense of sexuality. She said, “I love the naked human body and I have huge body confidence. I was working in strip clubs when I was 18.” But she was quick to acknowledge that girls her age “weren’t meant to turn into someone like me.” She went against everything she brought up to be. “I moved out of home, wouldn’t take any help from my parents. My act was pretty wild. I’d wear black leather and dance to Black Sabbath, Guns N’ Roses and Faith No More. Very rock’ n’ roll.”
Chapter 4 - Stefani, Her Music, and Her Drugs
It was a liberating experience for Stefani to be on her own and doing her stuff. She had a sense of freedom to do anything she wanted and to wear anything she pleased, something that her years at Sacred Heart suppressed. This time, she was ready to cut loose.
Living on her own brought out Stefani’s wild side. After performing with her band at night, she would party and drink heavily. And she began to experiment with illegal drugs.
Her parents, who all this time were very supportive of their daughter, weren’t too impressed to see her cavorting about half-naked with drag queens and go-go dancers. It wasn’t what they expected for their daughter. Joseph came to one of her shows and couldn’t look at his daughter. She was wearing a “leopard-thong-fringed bikini with a sequined high waist belt and granny panties.”
Her appearance shocked her father to tears. Seeing his daughter in such environment and doing such thing was hard for him to accept. The only thing that Stefani wanted was for them to see what she was doing. Her father thought she was going crazy and became upset. She said, “That totally freaked me out – I didn’t want to be a failure in his eyes.” A rift grew between Stefani and her parents.
The burlesque show wasn’t all that disappointed Stefani’s parents. Her experimentation with drugs became a full blown habit that led to addiction. She began using cocaine and would order bags of it to be delivered to her apartment. At times, she’d find herself alone in her apartment, snorting cocaine while listening to music. When she was high, she would work on her hair and make-up for hours. And then she would come down, snort cocaine, then do the whole thing again.
“It was quite sick,” she recalled of this experience. Although this did not last too long, her addiction became very serious. She would always be alone in her room, take the drug and listen to music. It was a sign of an addict and not just a dabbler. She didn’t cut herself off from her friends, but there were extended periods of isolation when it would just be her, her music and her drugs.
She referred to The Cure as her cocaine soundtrack. She recounted, “I loved all their music, but I listened to this one song [“Never Enough”] on repeat while I did bags and bags of cocaine…”
Stefani would listen to Never Enough of The Cure while taking drugs
Her parents were not the only ones concerned about Stefani’s drug use. Her friends, some of whom used drugs themselves, could tell that Stefani was in trouble. They begged for her to come out and spend time with them.
But Stefani didn’t think there was anything wrong until her friends asked her if she was doing drugs alone. She told them, “Um, yes. Me and my mirror.” She was referring to a mirror for snorting off.
Stefani wrote a song out of this experience: “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich.” Looking back on this particular point in her life, she said that it became a part of the performance art that was to become her life. She was able to see for herself what it was like to be at the bottom and realize that she didn’t want to be there.
“Beautiful, Dirty, Rich” told of her coke years, which began in 2005. She admitted that it was a sickening experience, and that the “vanity” of her debut album, The Fame, came from this experience. She referred to the times she spent in her apartment while doing drugs as a special moment that she had with herself where she could feel confident and feel like a star.
The stars she wanted to feel like were her heroes, people from rock history such as Andy Warhol and Mick Jagger. Stefani explained that she didn’t take drugs for the high. She stated, “I wanted to be them and I wanted to live their life, and I wanted to understand the way that they saw things and how they arrived at their art. And I believed the only way I could do this was to live the lifestyle, and so I did.”
Stefani considered it as one of the most difficult times in her life, but it was also something that she said she must experience. And she didn’t recommend others to do what she did for that reason.
During those times of drug use, Stefani managed to be active and constructive. She said she wasn’t a lazy drug addict. She would make demo tapes of the songs she had written and would bike around and take the tapes to record companies. She would pretend to be the manager when asked who she was at reception. She even spent the money from waitressing or burlesque dancing to photocopy posters of herself in order to land gigs.
She was determined not to be a drug addict for the rest of her life, knowing too well that it would be a hindrance to the stardom that she strongly wanted. She said, “I didn’t go to Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous. I did it myself. I have such a fear of failure; I didn’t want anything to make me fail. So I stopped.”
It was also her desire to put everything back on track that drove her to stop taking drugs. And if The Cure was the soundtrack for her drug use, it was Edith Piaf that offered the ideal song for what happened next in Stefani’s life. As much as she was concerned, her case was “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien.”
Now she could say that she was glad she did it all when she was still young because she was done with that part in her life. She explained, “At the time it was like self-discovery and a way for me to feel good about myself. But I don’t want my fans to think that way; I want them to listen to my music.” She also added that it was what the Monster Ball was all about, the name that she would assign to her tour after the success of her albums The Fame and The Fame Monster.
There was another reason why Stefani decided to quit drugs: her aunt Joanne, her father’s sister, who died when she was 19. Later on, Stefani has said, “I realized Joanne had instilled her spirit in me. She was a painter and a poet – and I had a spiritual vision that I had to finish her business.” Her aunt had a significant influence on her and her career despite the fact that they never met.
But it was her father who led her back on track. Seeing the sorry state of his daughter, Joseph decided to talk to her about her drug problems and show her the error of her ways. Her father had told her, “You’re fucking up, kid.” He had also found her in her apartment, high on drugs. He never said one word about the drug, or how he knew she was on drugs, but he told her,
“I just wanna tell you that anyone you meet while you’re like this, and any friend that you make in the fu
ture while you are with this thing, you will lose.”
They never talked about it again. Not wanting to further disappoint her father, that conversation with her dad served as a wake-up call. Although she didn’t stop completely, she stopped for a while. She was resolved to never fall into that hole again. She admitted that she can drink and she would still party, but it wouldn’t happen every day. And even when she drinks or parties, she could say that there was no darkness, but just a lot of fun.
Playing in Bands
Stefani spent much of her teenage years joining bands of all musical types. Truth be told, the quality of the bands’ output wasn’t something that would get the audience screaming for more. It gave the impression of a budding artist, confused as to what style to adopt and call her own. Stefani didn’t stop searching for the right environment for her ideas, and that alone is an indication of a keen mind.
Stefani formed Mackin Pulsifer in her early teens, a classic-rock covers band that played versions of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Jefferson Airplane songs. Then she formed the Stefani Germanotta Band (SGBand) in September 2005 right after she quit from NYU and lasted until the middle of 2006. The band featured Stefani on vocals and keyboards, Alex Beckman on drums, Eli Silverman on guitar and Calvin Pia on bass.
Stefani and her band became a regular at The Bitter End where they performed her original compositions
Modern Divas Boxed Set Page 9
