The Lost Madonna Tapes

Making It

It is easy to forget that Madonna's fortune was entirely self-made. From scratch. No trust fund. No hand outs from the bank of mommy and daddy. She is so careful with her cash that she makes the Sage of Omaha look a positive spendthrift. As she invests in property and art – never stocks and shares – she is effectively recession proof. “So tight she squeaks,” was one former boyfriend’s acerbic comment about her. Her brother Christopher’s notorious memoir is essentially a bitch list of money she owes him or he thinks she owes him; Madonna as the queen of mean.

Who can blame her? Long before the world woke up to “make do and mend” and recession dressing, Madonna had known what it is like to pull herself up by her boot straps. While she has exaggerated her hard scrabble family roots, when she was a single girl in New York she was familiar with rooting around at the bottom of the heap. She could have accepted help from her family—her father had a white-collar job in the arms industry—but resolutely wanted to make it on her own, telling stories about fishing out food from garbage, living off popcorn and desperately seeking nickels and dimes in her Queens apartment to pay her subway fare so she could earn more nickels and dimes from busking in Wall Street. Now of course she could buy the whole Street—with loose change to spare.

Understandably memories of those hard times have never left her. Hence her schizophrenic attitude to cash. So she employs a butler butcomplains that he spends too much on flowers for the couple’s $14 million London apartment, wears designer dresses on the red carpet yet haggles for a big discount. During her marriage to Sean Penn it drove her nuts that he threw his expensive Armani suits on the floor rather than look after them and hang them up.

I was reminded of how far and fast Madonna has come in a conversation with Ed Gilroy, one of the men Madonna credits with setting her on the yellow brick road to stardom. Back in the early 1980s he and his brother Dan had a modestly successful band, the Breakfast Club. Dan was dating Ms Ciccone as she was trying, and failing, to get work in her chosen profession as a dancer. She moved in with Dan and tried her hand at drumming—with a little help from Ed—practicing in the basement of the disused synagogue in Queens where they all lived. She soon graduated to singing, songwriting and after a couple of years she moved onwards and upwards. Seen by everyone but never seen by the boys again.

Ed still lives in the synagogue and recalled those days when Madonna was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in March this year. He took his own walk down memory lane and ventured again into the dingy basement where Madonna spent hours practicing the four guitar chords Dan taught her. Amidst the detritus of old amplifiers, beaten up electric guitars and drum kits was a tatty white plastic bag. Inside were five of Ed’s old tape cassettes that were used to make some of her earliest recordings of her performing– as well as her thoughts on life, nose picking and scratching her ass.

During her long and heartfelt acceptance speech, Madonna paid generous tribute to her two, largely forgotten, musical mentors. She talked about she learned the drums in the basement as she listened to Elvis Costello and how she felt the hairs on her arms stand up with excitement as she wrote what she described as her first song, ironically entitled “Tell The Truth.” It was as though “I was possessed by some magic,” she told the audience who included fellow inductee, songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen.