Madonna (16 page)

With their author in the throes of classic juvenile angst, it is not surprising that others of her songs were sad, reflective mid-tempo ballads telling of her loneliness and sense of isolation. In one she speaks rather than sings the song, which, yet again, is about the pain of parting, the references to her mother apparent in her final verse. While an organ plays plaintively in the background, Madonna recalls the empty spaces where her mother used to be, her beauty, and the pain of bereavement and loss.

In another lament, the lyrics are introspective, her apparent insignificance and low sense of self-esteem painfully evident as she sings of feeling displaced and incomplete, always moving on, always alone.

The mournful, self-pitying tone runs through all the verses, Madonna describing herself as being as insignificant as a speck of dust in the breeze or a smear on a glass pane. The chorus maintains the melancholic mood, repeating the lonely refrain that even her tears leave her, and expressing her longing to be rescued from her unhappiness.

Ed Gilroy remembers those early songs: ‘She is talking about loss, low self-esteem, things that had been inside her for who knows how long. She had stability here, security here, a positive environment to reach back into those times and try and express herself. Nowadays when you see her she is guarded, there’s a lot of holding back. Back then there was no holding back. It was completely out there.’

While these gloomy, introspective lyrics reflected a genuine aspect of her personality, albeit one she kept well concealed, on the surface Madonna was never a melancholy person. If anything, these early songs were a kind of catharsis, therapy that enabled her to address and confront her past before moving on to a more dynamic future. In public she was positive, lively and gregarious, with a generous streak often overlooked by earlier biographers or commentators eager to argue that she used everyone, and particularly those she met during her New York days, as stepping stones to stardom. Dan Gilroy gives the lie to this picture of Madonna as a selfish and callous, even ruthless, manipulator: ‘I love people who are passionate about their stuff. She was excited and intense about working and preparing for whatever – yoga, running, music, dance. She would get on her drums and practice like crazy.’ When she and Ed performed their first ever duet to his song ‘Cold Wind,’ she was as enthusiastic about supporting him as he and Dan were about helping her. Ed seconds his brother’s view of a warm and open-hearted friend, remarking, ‘I liked her generosity in lending herself to what we had here. She was very co-operative and worked so hard on my song. She gave me all her time and effort.’

After weeks of practicing, Dan decided that the moment was right to give his girlfriend a taste of live performance – on the street. Deciding to dress entirely in white for impact, they then hunted around the house for enough change to pay for the subway into Manhattan. With Dan wearing a battery-powered pig-nose amplifier strapped to his chest and Madonna carrying an electric guitar, they stood outside the Gulf and Western building and played their songs to a modest lunchtime audience of office workers. Inevitably, it was not long before the sound of Madonna running through the guitar scales attracted the attention of the police and they were promptly shooed away, still playing as they sauntered off, like wandering minstrels.

Madonna’s next gig was rather less frivolous, although still scarcely the big time. Their band, The Breakfast Club, was invited to play a number on Unique New York, a trendy cable-TV station. They would not be on camera, but it was a chance for a live performance, and for their music to be heard more widely. Before they arrived at the Manhattan studio Dan and Madonna had been food shopping, and she walked in with a giant leek under her arm. So while Dan, Ed and Angie played guitars, Madonna accompanied them on the leek, using it as a percussive instrument. When she wasn’t strumming the leek, she shook an old electric toaster as a makeshift tambourine.

For Madonna, and for the band, the wheel was beginning to turn. True, its movement seemed almost imperceptible as they moved on to the mundane and, for struggling bands, traditional world of small clubs. Madonna’s first ever live gig took place at the now long defunct UK Club, a downtown music venue known as much for its hard drinking as its collection of British memorabilia. They practiced day and night until their nine-song set was perfect. The line-up of the band at this time featured Madonna on drums, Angie on bass guitar, Ed and Dan on vocals and lead guitars. When she wasn’t rehearsing or practicing, Madonna spent hours on the phone trying to get something – anything – going for The Breakfast Club. For the UK Club gig she invited agents, record producers and others connected with the music business – none came – as well as friends to help swell the audience. ‘It was like a coming-out party,’ recalls Ed. Madonna wore a flared cocktail dress she had bought in a thrift store, while Angie stole their after-hours show with her sultry dark-haired beauty and a flimsy black see-through top – and no bra. For most of the set Madonna played drums, only taking the vocal lead for one number, the song she had written under Dan’s tutelage. With Mark Dolengowski, Curtis Zale and so many other friends in the crowd they were assured of a great reception, and at the end both girls remained on stage, soaking up the applause. Meanwhile Dan and Ed, veterans of these one-night gigs, waited for them backstage so that they could come back on to perform an encore. Madonna and Angie, however, spent so long out front that when they eventually came backstage the crowd had drifted to the bar and the moment was lost. It was a sign of their lack of experience, perhaps, but as they loaded their gear into the hired van it was obvious that both girls were enraptured. One successful gig was never going to be enough. Now they wanted more.

Among their next gigs was one at Country Bluegrass Blues or CBGBs, a legendary, if grungy, Lower East Side club that has become a fixture of New York’s underground scene, home to bands like Talking Heads, Blondie and The Ramones. While it is a somewhat rough-and-ready dive, the walls plastered with hundreds of posters of previous bands who have performed there down the years, music-industry scouts often hang out there, something the Gilroys were well aware of. When they went on to play, Dan noticed that ‘Bleecker’ Bob, a leading record-store owner known to have good music-business connections, was in the audience. The Breakfast Club went through the set with all its members playing to impress him. At one stage Madonna left the drums and took the mike to sing a couple of sugary songs written by Dan, and was thrilled when she won an enthusiastic reception from the audience. Then, during a lull between numbers, she let out a huge belch, much to Bleecker Bob’s irritation, who told her afterwards that she was ‘an amateur.’ Dan Gilroy, however, saw that gesture in another light, remarking that ‘it was an early indication that she wanted to be the center of attention, no matter what. She had always loved to get noticed, loved to get a reaction, but now this was in a band context.’

With a couple of gigs and a handful of lyrics and songs under her belt, Madonna’s musical confidence began to bubble. So too did her impatience. The energy and enthusiasm she had once devoted to dance she now poured into her budding musical career. Every day she was on the phone, contacting clubs, agents, anyone of influence or importance in the music industry, trying to organize gigs, and endlessly searching for that elusive Holy Grail to which all ambitious bands aspire – a record deal. When she wasn’t running up Dan’s phone bill, she was practicing on the drums. By now Ed’s girlfriend Sudha had moved into the converted synagogue and they built what they called the ‘Madonna wall’ to mask the sound of her drumming, allowing Sudha to study for her nursing exams in relative peace.

Even when she was working at one of the series of jobs she had at this time, music was never far from Madonna’s mind. For a time she colored silks at Gossamer Wing, the fabric company in which Dan was a partner. While everyone else enjoyed a smoke or a sandwich during their lunch break, Madonna would sneak into an empty back room and practice her guitar for an hour. That same enthusiasm and will to succeed were evident during rehearsals. ‘We took it very, very seriously,’ Ed Gilroy remembers. ‘Of course there was joking and ranking out, but it was very professional.’

As a result, with the band improving all the time, it was inevitable that her disappointment would be all the keener after the apparent failure of one of their early gigs, held at a sports bar owned by former New York Yankee baseball player Phil Linz. When the quartet went through their routine, which was by now well-rehearsed, polished and tight, the reaction of the audience was one of profound indifference. There was no cheering or clapping, or even whistling and booing as the set ended, just the buzz of a preppy bar crowd more used to watching the game and drinking a beer with their buddies. The Gilroy brothers, who had played all kinds of oddball gigs and curious venues, simply shrugged off the crowd’s respectful silence. For Madonna, however, just a few performances into her career, the lack of reaction struck a raw nerve. ‘It meant a LOT to her,’ Dan remarks, stressing the noun. ‘This gig precipitated the break-up of the band in that configuration as much as anything.’

For the truth was that there were other tensions in the band which ran deeper than a miserable reaction to a single performance. While Angie and Madonna were still friends, it was becoming clear that the Dutch dancer was struggling to keep up with the other band members. More of a performer than a musician, she was not as committed as Madonna and the Gilroys, often arriving at rehearsals under-prepared. A parting of the ways was becoming inevitable.

On the surface, however, everything seemed fine, with Ed, Sudha, Dan, Madonna, Angie and her Dutch boyfriend Henry celebrating Thanksgiving together with a very genial dinner in a restaurant at the World Trade Center in November 1979. Indeed, in October, only a few weeks earlier, Angie had played Madonna’s ‘sex slave’ in a low-budget underground film called A
Certain Sacrifice,
a movie that would return to haunt Madonna.

Her journey into film had begun just after she moved in with Dan in July 1979 and was casting around for work. An ad in
Back Stage
magazine, placed by former director Stephen Jon Lewicki, caught her eye. Lewicki was looking for ‘a dark, fiery young woman, dominant, with lots of energy, who can dance and is willing to work for no pay.’ She sent him a wry two-page resume and a handful of photographs, including some of the shots taken by Dan Gilroy during their first trip to the Cloisters. Impressed by her open, articulate and amusing letter, Lewicki arranged to meet her in Washington Square Park. His initial instincts were confirmed and he decided to cast her in the role of Bruna, a vengeful dominatrix. The hour-long, erotic art film, made for $20,000 – although it has to be said that it seems much less – features copious nudity as well as violence, including a gruesome rape scene in which Bruna is violated in the bathroom of a sleazy diner in downtown New York. With stilted, cliché-ridden dialogue and overwrought acting, the only feature missing, according to Dan Gilroy, who watched the filming, was ‘a laugh track.’ (It was, however, a step up from her first ever movie role, when an egg had been ‘fried’ on her belly button for a school film.) Perhaps mercifully, part way through the filming of A
Certain Sacrifice
Lewicki’s cash ran out and the cast dispersed, leaving Madonna more time for her music.

Now, just as Madonna and the band were getting into the groove, Angie Smit, beset by personal problems, seemed to be finding it difficult to commit herself to the band’s rehearsal schedule. So when, early in the New Year, former band stalwart Gary ‘the Bear’ Burke returned from Atlanta looking for a place in another group, it was not long before it was decided that Angie should go. ‘It was a tough call,’ admits Dan. With Gary joining as bass guitarist and an old schoolfriend of the Gilroys, Mike Monahan, taking over on drums, Madonna was ‘promoted’ to the front of the stage, now learning the Farfisa keyboard with the help of Dan and a teach-yourself book.

The change in the dynamics of the band soon became apparent. Just a few short months previously, Madonna had auditioned her songs before Ed and Dan Gilroy. Now Ed was singing his material before his brother and Madonna. ‘I would play a song and they would look at each other and go: “Naaah.” It was like being found guilty in front of the Politburo,’ Ed recalls.

The issue was as old as rock and roll itself – control. Now the questions were not about where they would play, or what songs would make up their set, but about who was going to front the band, and whose material was going to be used. The addition of Gary and Mike had given the band a much tighter sound, with Dan, Ed, and Madonna each singing three songs in any nine-song set. Yet even so, Madonna pressed continually to place more of her own material. The discussions would continue long after rehearsals were over, and Madonna and Dan often talked of changing the configuration of the act during their early-morning jogs.

There were, too, other changes in evidence. With Angie gone, Madonna was now the band’s only woman member. Content to play the sexy tomboy, she was still not above using her feminine wiles in her attempts to exert influence. On one occasion she purposely spilled water on her blouse so that it became semi-transparent. Mike and Gary were transfixed. ‘So suddenly Madonna’s left breast was controlling the rehearsal,’ notes Dan dryly. ‘Effectively, that meant Madonna was in charge.’

Nonetheless, even amid this creative tension, the band was moving forward. They were now playing regular gigs at CBGBs and other downtown clubs, and had garnered a smattering of favorable reviews in local listings sheets. As a result a band meeting was called, at which it was decided that the new Breakfast Club would record a demo tape to send out to local clubs as a kind of calling card. During a break in the recording session for that tape, Madonna and Gary Burke sat in the alleyway by the side of the synagogue and discussed the future. To Burke, her ambition was plain to see. ‘Oh, I so want to be famous, I want to be famous,’ she repeated, hugging her knees with the strength of her need. She wanted to equal or outstrip her musical heroines, as Gary Burke recalls: ‘She loved it when people compared her to Debbie Harry from Blondie, although the woman she absolutely worshipped was Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders. She thought she was so cool.’