Authors: Andrew Morton
After a sell-out gig at Bo’s Space in the spring of 1980 her dreams seemed to be coming a little closer to reality. With Madonna dancing around the stage and the group dressed in white outfits, The Breakfast Club seemed to have all the makings of a New Wave band that had arrived. For Madonna, though, there was an additional fillip. After the gig, a scout from Co Co Records took her aside and suggested that she would do better fronting a band on her own. He was not alone in that view. Both Gary and Mike were as keen as she to sign with a record company, and felt that their only chance was if Madonna led the band. Their judgment was, however, also influenced by the fact that they were utterly infatuated with her, as both men have admitted.
When, in the summer of that year, the band went on a weekend break to a country retreat, owned by Mike Monahan’s family, at Candlewood Lake in Connecticut, it marked a turning point. The excursion started badly, their car breaking down on the drive from New York. While the car was fixed, Madonna made the best of a bad job, playing a guitar and singing at the top of her voice, much to the amusement of passing motorists. Then she stood by the side of the highway, holding up a sign that read ‘Wrench.’ A couple stopped to help, having mistaken the word on her notice for ‘Wench.’ It was, perhaps, a small, symbolic indicator of the track her future career would follow.
When they finally reached the house, they cooled off with a swim in the lake before Madonna cooked them all ‘s’mores,’ a glutinous mixture of graham crackers, marshmallows and chocolate, which they ate by the campfire while Gary serenaded them on the guitar. Beneath the surface calm, however, the tensions were discernible, with whispered conversations and huddled meetings between band members, a tangled skein of the professional and the emotional.
Back in New York, rehearsals became more businesslike rather than fun, more of a job than rock and roll. Then, at a ‘testy’ band meeting, Mike, Gary and Madonna argued that (as rumor had it) with Blondie’s star on the wane, a group fronted by a good-looking woman would have more chance of securing a record deal. They added that Madonna should sing most of the songs, effectively sidelining the Gilroy brothers. It was not a route either Dan or Ed wished to take. As far as they were concerned they wanted to continue to write and perform their own work. When a half-and-half compromise was rejected, the band was thrown into turmoil. One thing was clear, however, a breakup was inevitable. For Madonna there was an additional, emotional complication, since intertwined with her own ambitions was her relationship with Dan. Yet even in this she was lucky, for while they were lovers and friends, they had realized from the start that theirs could never be a long-term relationship. So as she and Dan cooled off after their daily run one morning, she explained to him that she had to go, to follow her heart and her ambition. Dan remembers the moment with his customary generosity. ‘It was sad, sweet and rather poignant. She did it rather well and I have always appreciated that. There had always been the sense that she was passing through. Now she was moving on.’
As a breakup, both professional and emotional, it was as civilized as these things can be. The quintet remained good friends, the new band even practicing in the synagogue from time to time. Madonna took her suitcase to a pleasant and leafy neighborhood called Douglaston on the North Shore, where Mike Monahan was renting a room from his friend Larry Christiansen. For a time she and Mike were lovers, Madonna never long without a male protector and admirer in her life. Besides rehearsing at the synagogue, the new three-piece combo, who called themselves ‘Madonna and the Sky,’ found rehearsal space in Queens and Chelsea, although for the most part they used Larry’s garage in Douglaston. Here Madonna recorded three songs, using a $300 Rickenbacker guitar given to her by her adoring new boyfriend.
The safe neighborhood was also a quiet neighborhood, and it was not long before complaints from local residents forced the garage-based band to look for new quarters. They settled on a tenth-floor rehearsal space in the Music Building, a noisy, seedy hell hole on West 39th Street, used by several dozen bands for rehearsals and recording. The place was as dangerous as it was dirty; drug addicts lurked in the entrance hall, and the hallways smelled of urine. ‘It was awful, loud and disgusting,’ according to Dan Gilroy. ‘The kind of place you only went to rehearse and got out as quickly as you could.’
They shared the space with a Long Island band called Buddy Love, which was managed by a young man known only as Mark. He had seen Madonna and the Sky play at their one and only gig at the Eighties club, and now offered to look after their interests as well. It was not a happy collaboration. Mark and Gary both had designs on Madonna, while Mike, her current boyfriend, was finding it increasingly difficult to juggle a full-time job as an insurance agent for Equitable Life with nighttime duties as the band’s drummer. He would leave the air-conditioned comfort of his midtown office and rush down to the insalubrious neighborhood and grungy ambience of the Music Building, where Madonna and Gary were waiting for him. After a quick change, he would wearily begin rehearsals, knowing that Madonna would be on his back if his drumming did not come up to her expectations. After a few weeks it became clear that he had had enough of Madonna’s constant criticism, the endless commuting, and the seedy atmosphere of the Music Building. One evening he arrived at the studio and announced, ‘Sorry guys, I can’t do this any more.’ Then he walked out.
Down but not out, the two remaining band members advertised for a drummer. In the meantime, Madonna used the synagogue to phone Steve Bray, her old boyfriend in Michigan, to ask if he would like to join the band. He had been at the back of her mind ever since it had become clear that Mike Monahan was thinking of leaving, and she was delighted when he accepted, arriving in New York in early November 1980. She promptly took him off to a Talking Heads concert in Central Park before he had even unpacked his bags.
Fired by ambition, Madonna was determined to make a success of the new band. And it was at another Talking Heads concert, this time at Radio City, that the faithful Gary Burke witnessed and, for the first time, really understood her desperate desire for fame. He had bought two tickets for the gig in the forlorn hope that he could somehow kindle a romance. Soon after the concert began, she left her seat and went to stand in front of the stage, watching enthralled as David Byrne and company went through their paces. Afterwards they met up with Steve Bray, she and their new drummer dancing down Broadway and serenading onlookers with the chant, ‘We want to be in the clique, we want to be in the clique.’ As Gary now reflects, ‘It was clear that fame was more important to her than the music. She had a real hunger for success, and she wanted that success
yesterday.’
In Bray she found a colleague who was as relentless in the pursuit of perfection and, ultimately, glory as she was. ‘His drumming gave a huge lift to the energy of the band,’ Dan Gilroy recalls. ‘He was a real drill sergeant during rehearsals, as soon as the song ended he would want to do another take and start the count down.’ Bray soon realized, however, that Madonna’s skills as lead guitarist were limited and they advertised for a new player. Madonna traveled to Brooklyn to audition an Italian named Vinny, who lasted for a few weeks before Bray, who didn’t like his playing, fired him.
Bray, a born-again Christian, could be every bit as tough and stubborn as Madonna. When Mark eventually got them a gig, the drummer put his foot down at the idea of using the name Madonna and the Sky, deeming it to be sacrilegious (ironically, this was precisely the reason why Mike Monahan had liked the name in the first place). Madonna caved in, the manager coming up with the name The Millionaires, which later transmuted to Emmy, Dan’s nickname for Madonna.
The fortunes of The Millionaires ebbed and flowed swiftly and dramatically. No sooner had they recruited a drummer and a new lead guitar than they lost their manager. Somehow Madonna was maneuvered out of her Music Building lease, leaving the band Buddy Love in sole possession. When they were evicted, Gary, who blamed the machinations of their manager – and Love – for the loss of their rehearsal space, angrily confronted Mark in the street outside the Music Building, watched by an embarrassed Madonna. His outburst ensured the departure of their manager.
The comings and goings continued apace. Resourceful as ever, Madonna persuaded Brian Syms, a young musician from Virginia who rented a studio on the fifth floor of the Music Building, to give them rehearsal space. As a quid pro quo Syms took over from Vinny as Emmy’s lead guitarist. In the meantime, they borrowed a studio in Room 1002, home to Regina and the Red Hots, an up-and-coming band that had played with the Irish group U2. On November 30, 1980, Emmy recorded a four-song demo tape to send out to clubs and record companies. This time they were going for a Chrissie Hynde rather than a Blondie kind of feel to their music. At last they got a break, hired to appear at the Botany Talk House a couple of weeks before Christmas. They had a group photograph taken, put up billboards and seeded the festive audience with friends and admirers. The gig went well, and Madonna left to spend Christmas with her family back in Rochester in good spirits.
Her mood did not last long. For her, that midwinter proved to be especially bleak. Perhaps it resulted from the fact that she had spent a couple of weeks back home without having to worry about keeping warm or where the next meal was coming from. Perhaps it was because she was now living in an insanitary and dangerous loft space just round the corner from the Music Building and was forced to wash in public bathrooms. Or perhaps it came about because of yet another setback for Emmy, a band held together by hope and dreams and not much else. But whatever the reason, even her iron resolve and physical toughness failed her.
One morning in January Gary Burke came round to her dismal West 37th Street loft to find Madonna lying, fully clothed, on the floor, curled up in a fetal position and sobbing uncontrollably. It was the middle of a vicious cold snap in New York, and with the thermometer well below freezing the heating and water in her building had finally given up the unequal struggle. She had no money, no job, no prospects and, to crown it all, was coming down with the flu. ‘Madonna was a whisker away from throwing in the towel,’ recalls Gary. ‘She was going to go home, back to Detroit. For a girl with such burning ambition it shows you how low she had got.’
As her tears continued to flow, the Bear knelt down, gave her a hug and told her that everything would work out just fine. He knew, however, as she did, that the town she had dreamed of taking had finally tamed her.
Madonna, Max′s, Midnight
S
HE WAS THE SEXY QUEEN of underground New York, gyrating on stage in ripped stockings, her slinky bodystocking held together with safety pins, her makeup and lipstick as loud as her words and movements were lewd.
This was not Madonna. Her name – at least for stage purposes – was Cherry Vanilla. A former publicist for David Bowie, she was one of the first of a new wave of women performers to win fame for being themselves, rather than for being some rock star’s girlfriend. By the time Madonna arrived in New York, Cherry Vanilla had been joined by singers Patti Smith and Debbie Harry, the latter once a waitress at Max’s Kansas City, the downtown venue where, for a time, Cherry reigned supreme. Part of her appeal, and her success, lay in her desire to shock; a worshiper at the altar of sex and sexual freedom. She had published
Pop Tart,
a controversial book of black-and-white photographs of herself in a variety of revealingly exotic outfits and compromising poses.
As the 1970s drew to a close, the hip New York underground scene was in a state of creative flux. It was an exciting, vibrant time when the social, cultural and ethnic boundaries that had formerly defined high art and music, gay and black, poetry and rock, graffiti and punk, Latino and white, were beginning to be broken down. The buzz phrase ‘death to disco’ became a shorthand for the artistic backlash against ‘stale’ stadium rock, ‘staid’ radio playlists and ‘blinkered’ uptown art houses. And it was in clubs like Max’s, CBGBs, and the Roxy that the leading lights who would provoke, excite and, ultimately, define a generation came to mix and mingle. Ever responsive to trends, New York’s underground became a melting pot for the wealthy, the wild, the witty, the beautiful and the plain weird.
In this heady milieu, painters and sculptors, the Andy Warhol crowd among them, rubbed shoulders with drag queens or punk stars like Malcolm MacLaren, or with The Ramones and The New York Dolls, while Truman Capote might be found swapping anecdotes with Freddie Mercury of Queen, or David Byrne of Talking Heads. ‘It was a very special time that has not been duplicated since,’ recalls Vito Bruno, manager of the Roxy. ‘We were all very much anti-Studio 54. They were elitist, while we believed that it was what’s in your bones rather than what’s on your bones that gave you entry; kids with sparkle, rubbing shoulders with Warhol and Mick Jagger.’
Looking back, Jimi LaLumia, a one-time Max’s headliner and habitué, describes the scene as ‘a psychotic cabaret.’ ‘You always had the sense in the air that things were going to happen,’ he remarks. ‘You would have a young Debbie Harry asking you for a light, Johnny Thunders at the bar and Cherry Vanilla teetering by on gigantic spike heels. If Paul McCartney was in town, a visit to the club was almost obligatory.’
At the time, Madonna was just another youthful face in the crowd, soaking up the ambience and watching the whirl go round. ‘I’m sure this chick from the Midwest was absolutely bedazzled and wanted to be part of the scene,’ recalls LaLumia. ‘At that time she was just wanting to squeeze in. If we’d only known how she would end up, we would have been nicer to her.’
She was not to remain a nameless face in the crowd for long. In March 1981, Max’s Kansas City was the scene of one of the first gigs performed by Madonna and her band, Emmy. Ironically enough, it was also their last. After weeks of arm-twisting and pleading, bass guitarist Gary Burke had managed to secure the band a spot at the club and this had led to a second booking. During that gig there was only one person in the crowded club whom Madonna wanted to impress – a crop-haired, lesbian, fellow Italian-American, named Camille Barbone. Born on the same day as the singer, August 16, albeit eight years earlier, and brought up in the same neighborhood of Corona, Queens, where Madonna had lived with the Gilroy brothers, Camille had one burning ambition in life. Unlike Madonna, however, she didn’t want mass adulation. She simply wanted to manage the biggest rock star on the planet. As she watched Madonna perform that night, Camille knew that she had discovered her dream ticket. Her verdict was simple and uncompromising: great face, dramatic dancer, lousy band.