Madonna (16 page)

“I had this rag tied in my hair the way I do, and she wanted to know everything about the way I dressed, the jewelry I wore, the way I sang, about how I grew up in Detroit.”
¹⁷

The filming in Spokane ran right up to the week of Thanksgiving. Madonna recalls the awkward family reunion she had when she dragged Jellybean back to Rochester for a turkey dinner with the Ciccone clan. “I came home with black pants, a black T-shirt, no jewelry at all and my hair just sort of not combed—that's pretty conservative.” Her father assessed her outfit, assuming it was a costume for the movie. He said, as Madonna recalls, “ ‘You always dress like that?' “
¹⁷

On January 14, 1984, Madonna appeared on the world's most famous teenage TV dance party: “American Bandstand.” Lip-syncing to her hit single, she performed “Holiday” and chatted with the show's famed host, Dick Clark. Although her “Burning Up” video had been aired on TV before this date, this live appearance represented her national television debut. After she finished performing the song, Clark asked her, “Now what do you really want to do when you grow up?” Without missing a beat, Madonna replied, “Rule the world.”
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Since “Holiday” was also climbing the charts in England, Madonna flew to London that same month to do some promotional gigs and be interviewed by several British magazines including
No. 1, The Face
, and
Record Mirror
. She impatiently told British journalists, “I'm desperate to start my second LP, but because of ‘Holiday,' I'll have to wait.”
⁷⁴
Indeed, since finishing off her first album, she had already gathered together a sizable amount of material for her next LP.

In early 1984, although she was beginning to make money, Madonna still felt basically unchanged. “I still ride the subway every day,” she told one reporter. “People come up and say, ‘You look just like Madonna,' and I'll go, ‘Thank you.' Or, they'll say, ‘Are you Madonna?' and I'll say, ‘Yes.' Then they'll go, ‘No you're not!' and I'll say, ‘O.K., I'm not.'”
³¹
It would not be long before all that would change.

Along the way, Madonna performed at several clubs around New York to promote her recordings. In early 1984, Madonna was booked at Studio 54 for the birthday celebration of the fashionable uptown clothing store, Fiorucci. Also on the bill was Manny Parrish, who was promoting his album,
Man Parrish
.

The performances that evening were tightly scheduled. At midnight, Parrish was to descend from the ceiling and perform his song, and then at two
A.M
., Madonna was to jump off a portable balcony onto Fiorucci's enormous birthday cake and slide down to the floor, where she would perform. Both singers and their dancers were all clad in outrageous Fiorucci clothes. However, Madonna didn't like that particular setup. According to Parrish, “She was on a fucking rampage—as usual. She wanted to go on at midnight when the room was full, not later on. I was the headliner—so to speak—and she wasn't.”
⁷⁵

Madonna's first ploy was to tell Parrish and his troupe that there had been a little change in plans. According to Parrish, “She told us that I wasn't going on at midnight, that she was, and that things were switched around. So everybody left the room and started walking around the club. She did this to fuck up my act, and the stage manager came in and said, ‘Hey, you're going on in twenty minutes—where is everybody? What's going on?' I told him, ‘Well, Madonna said we're going on second, and she's going on first.' And he said, ‘WHAT?!?' and ran into her room and started screaming at her.”
⁷⁵

When Plan A failed to work, Madonna came up with still another ploy: she'd hide Manny's group's stage clothes. “That fucking bitch stole my fucking jackets!” Manny recalls of his dilemma at midnight. “We had our costumes—we had graffiti jackets from Kansai, and we were getting ready to go on—and they were missing! So, we're looking around, and looking around, and looking around, and one of her dancers came in from outside, and said, ‘Look, she'll kill me if she finds me in here, but your costumes are hidden behind the boiler—in the back over there.' Somebody hid them, and her dancer was implying that it was her. And, they were plastic, so I had to soak them in ice water to keep them from melting!”
⁷⁵

Several weeks later, Madonna and Manny Parrish again shared the bill at another nightclub. “I played at the Red Parrot, and she went on last,” he recalls. “It was Sonic Force, and myself, and Madonna. Sonic went on at eleven
P.M
., I went on at one
A.M
., and she went on at three
A.M
. She complained afterward that we ruined the audience—that we wore them out and ruined them. She went onstage and said, ‘Well, thanks for waiting around. If you have anything left in you, we're going to have a good time.' The audience didn't really respond to her, and she screamed at the people who organized the evening for putting her on last.”
⁷⁵

Like so many people who met Madonna during this era, Manny distinctly remembers how abrasive she could be. “In the very beginning she was very determined—very snotty, with an attitude, and pushy,” he recalls. Looking back on Madonna's backstage antics, Parrish laughs forgivingly. “The bitch! She had to do what she had to do to get herself through.”
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In March 1984, “Borderline” was released as Madonna's next single, with an accompanying video, which represented her first work with director Mary Lambert. Unlike the “Burning Up” video, in which Madonna was dressed in a short white dress, this time around she was sporting an outfit that was to become identified as “the Madonna look.” She wore mismatched layers of clothes and rags tied in her hair, like a fashionable street waif. Alternating between color and black and white sequences, the video tells a story.

Madonna is spotted dancing in the street with a bunch of inner-city kids. A professional photographer spots her, offers her his business card, and the next thing you know, Madonna is in his studio doing a photo shoot. She ends up torn between choosing the well-to-do photographer or her street ruffian boyfriend. In the end she goes back to the street boyfriend. Along the way we see several telling early Madonna trademarks, including shots of her spray painting several of the photographer's possessions, including his car, with graffiti.

The song “Borderline” became Madonna's first Top Ten pop hit. Things were jelling, and she became a bona fide New York celebrity. Madonna herself was amazed to watch the transformation that was taking place. When the video for “Borderline” was released, people began to recognize Madonna on the street. Her first two singles didn't have hit videos, so she was a voice without a face. She went from “unknown” to “immediately recognizable.”

Suddenly Madonna didn't feel so comfortable riding around New York City on the subway. In one of her favorite East Village restaurants, a girl she had never met before came up to her table and started snapping pictures of her. Madonna nearly flipped out, but the fact of the matter was that she had crossed the “borderline” between anonymity and stardom.

Although she still liked to hang out at the Roxy and The Funhouse, now she couldn't do it quite so easily as an unknown patron. “Half the people I hung out with from the downtown area have totally snubbed me,” she stated with amazement that spring. “They think that I'm selling out and stuff. If I go back to clubs they won't talk to me.”
¹⁷

While her record company was busy pulling hit singles from her debut album, Madonna returned to the studio to begin work on her second LP. Since the
Madonna
album was so successful, especially the new single, “Borderline,” Reggie Lucas assumed that he would be called in to produce its successor. However, like so many men in Madonna's life, he was dumped from the Madonna camp.

One of Madonna's favorite albums in the past year had been David Bowie's smashing multi-platinum
Let
s
Dance
. It was produced by Nile Rodgers, one of the masterminds behind the successful seventies' funk-dance group, Chic.

In addition to being a member of Chic, and having gone on to produce hits for Diana Ross, Power Station, Duran Duran, Sister Sledge, and Debbie Harry, Nile is known in music business inner circles as a consummate professional. When the idea of hiring him to work with Madonna came up, several people warned him that she was a totally self-centered bitch who was a pain in the ass to work with. He had initial doubts in regard to getting involved with her.

“Everyone told me she was a terrible ogre, but I thought she was great,” he recalls.
⁴⁹
“She's a true professional—one of the best I've ever worked with.”
⁷⁶
He does however admit, “She's more temperamental than anyone I've ever worked with.”
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Nile's musical approach was different than the one employed on the
Madonna
album. Instead of relying on a mechanical drum machine, like Mark Kamins, Jellybean, and Reggie Lucas did on the tracks they produced for her, Nile chose to utilize his former Chic bandmate, drummer Tony Thompson.

Says Nile, “It seemed really important for Madonna to have just a little more musical credibility—just a little more artistry. Because when you're dealing with songs that have the subject matter of Madonna's songs, critics tend to say that they're really weak.”
⁷⁸

By giving her more musical integrity, the music on
Like a Virgin
definitely had more of an edge; it wasn't so much out of the mechanical Eurodisco arena. That would ultimately help create the across-the-board pop success the LP was met with when it was released.

Nile claims that Madonna, for the most part, has been misunderstood in the industry, and that part of this is due to misogynistic sexual politics. “Someone like Iggy Pop can get out there and be super-sexual and wild and that's great,” he explains defensively. “But Madonna is a woman, so they say she's sleazy. And all the arrogance bit—she sticks to her guns, that's all.”
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This is not to say that Madonna didn't throw a temper tantrum or two in the studio. “It was over some little thing,” Rodgers recalls of one of their arguments at the Power Station recording studios. “I can't even recall what it was about now.” Rodgers eventually walked out of the studio. Madonna followed a few minutes later. He recalls, “She came up to me and said, ‘Does this mean you don't love me anymore?'”
⁷⁶
He couldn't resist her charm. The anger was behind them.

Madonna remembers, “When we got into the second album, I had a lot more confidence in myself and I had a lot more to do with the way it came out soundwise.”
¹³
Madonna and Nile's successful collaboration yielded a sound with which both parties were content.

According to Madonna, the sound on
Like a Virgin
was a musical progression. “It's much harder, much more aggressive than the first record,” she stated when it was released. “The songs on that [first album] were pretty weak and I went to England during the recording, so I wasn't around for a lot of it—I wasn't in control.”
³¹
On the new album Madonna chose all of the songs, with plans for each one to be a hit. She used six of her own songs and six written by other artists.

While Madonna and Nile were working on the
Like a Virgin
album at the Power Station, one of Madonna's idols, Diana Ross, stopped in to meet her. Ms. Ross had been recording in a studio in the same building. Nile and she were friends, so he introduced the two. “Her kids really like my stuff, so she brought a bottle of champagne and toasted my success. I was so flattered.”
³¹

The recording sessions for
Like a Virgin
were completed in April 1984; the entire package was in the can and ready to release. However, Sire Records was forced to shelf the project for six months—because Madonna's first album was suddenly selling like hotcakes. To complicate matters, the record company was pleasantly forced to release another single in America.

Jellybean explains that a confusing situation arose, due to the fact that “Borderline” did not become a hit in England. According to him, Warner Brothers in Great Britain wanted to release “Lucky Star” as a single instead, so he was brought in to remix the song. “I thought that I could have done a more outrageous dance version—this was my chance to make ‘Lucky Star' more danceable,” he recalls. “So, I made it, and they made a video to my version for Europe. It was a big hit in Europe. Then ‘Borderline' was a big hit in America, so they decided, ‘Well, let's just give the [‘Lucky Star'] video to MTV. Then, the video got on MTV and just exploded! They hadn't released a single of ‘Lucky Star' over here yet, so they did. They had this all planned, and they never told Madonna. But, when she found out that ‘Lucky Star' was coming out as a single, she was really
not happy
”
⁷⁰

By this point, the
Madonna
album had hit million-selling status in the United States, as well as having become a huge hit in the U.K., France, Canada, Australia, and South Africa. Instead of releasing
Like a Virgin
on the tail of “Borderline,” as previously planned, the record company couldn't risk killing “Lucky Star.” Jellybean says, “MTV started playing the ‘Lucky Star' video, and then all of these radio stations got requests for ‘Lucky Star.' So, the
Madonna
album already had ‘Everybody' as a single, ‘Physical Attraction,' and ‘Burning Up,' then ‘Holiday,' then ‘Borderline,' [and] ‘Lucky Star,' so she was sitting on that album for half a year!”
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