Madonna: Part 1 With Mel Ottenberg

Yasi kicks off Bandsplain’s multipart Madonna epic with returning guest and fashion icon Mel Ottenberg. They discuss Madonna’s childhood and upbringing in Michigan, her dance career and the formative relationships that led her to New York City, her history playing in bands, her immersion in the club scene, the breakthrough singles that made her impossible to ignore, her first three albums, and all the major collaborators, major looks, and major breakthroughs along the way. Episode PlaylistListen to the Madonna: Part 1 playlist here. CREDITS:Host: Yasi Salek @yasisalekGuest: Mel Ottenberg @melzy917Producer: Rob SundermannEditor: Adrian BridgesAdditional Production Supervision: Justin SaylesTheme Song: Bethany Cosentino Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

  Streaming October 30 on Paramount+.

• 0:32Speaker 02

  I'm Dexter Morgan. I've been killing killers for half my life. It gets to you.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  You're having a midlife crisis.

• 0:39Speaker 02

  I'm not ready for this.

• 0:41Speaker 01

  He's back.

• 0:42Speaker 02

  I'm older. I'm wiser.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  And sharper than ever.

• 0:47Speaker 02

  Things are gonna get messy. But if I can't believe in myself, I can't believe in anything.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Dexter Resurrection. New season, October 30 on the Paramount+ Premium Plan.

• 1:05Speaker 03

  What's with this band, anyway? I don't get it. Can you please explain? Wait, like, Bandplain? Never heard this band in my life. Oh, you haven't? I'd love that. Really? Why? Yeah, I love this song. Oh, I don't know that one. Bandplain, Bandplain, Bandplain. I really hate this band! Whatever. I'm their biggest fan. Bandplain, Bandplain, Bandplain, Bandplain. Bandplain!

• 1:45Yasi Salek?

  Hello and welcome to Bandplain. I am your host, Yasi Salek. This is a show where I invite an expert guest on to help me explain a cult band or iconic artist. Today's episode is part one of four episodes about maybe the most iconic artist of all: Madonna. If you've never heard Madonna, hey! What? Listen.

• 2:17Yasi Salek?

  You guys, my guest today, repeat bands planner, legend in his own right.

• 2:21Speaker 05

  Third time on.

• 2:22Yasi Salek?

  Third time, three-peat, editor in chief of a little magazine you might have heard of called Interview. It's Mel Ottenberg.

• 2:30Speaker 05

  Hello, and thank you so much for having me on Bands Plan to talk about Madonna.

• 2:34Yasi Salek?

  I'm so happy to have you here. I'm so happy to be doing this in person for the first time.

• 2:40Speaker 05

  Yes, I flew out to Hollywood on the Concorde this morning just for this, and I'm ready to go.

• 2:44Yasi Salek?

  They brought the Concorde back for you just for this podcast.

• 2:47Speaker 05

  Yes, they did.

• 2:48Yasi Salek?

  And we're really ready to party. Well, before we get into it, just have a quick, is it a disclaimer? I don't know. It's a thing. It's a statement. Let's just be clear. This is not necessarily for the members, card carrying Madonna Brotherhood and Sisterhood, the icons, the wannabes. I don't know what the Madonna fanbase is officially called.

• 3:13Speaker 05

  I don't either.

• 3:14Yasi Salek?

  I don't think there is a name. You guys, I think, probably already know all of this.

• 3:18Speaker 05

  And don't be fucking assholes to Yasi Salek because you disagree with like some chronological thing she's doing. She worked her motherfucking ass off to get this podcast together.

• 3:28Yasi Salek?

  Thank you so much.

• 3:29Speaker 05

  We were saying she's gonna have to go, does she have to go into hiding after this podcast comes out? No.

• 3:34Yasi Salek?

  Witness protection. Just this, this is for normal straight men. You guys made all the resources that I used to research this episode, the Madonna fan army. I'm gonna say it off the top, Today in Madonna History, thank you, Madonnapedia, Madonna Underground, Madonna Tribe, the Inside the Groove Podcast, obviously Encyclopedia Madonna.

• 3:55Speaker 05

  My personal favorite.

• 3:57Yasi Salek?

  So, just saying, thank you for your input. And of course, I couldn't have done this without Mary Gabriel's incredible book.

• 4:04Speaker 05

  Thank you, Mary Gabriel. It is a great book.

• 4:06Yasi Salek?

  Madonna Rebel Life. If you guys haven't read it, it's like the war and peace of the life of Madonna. Before we like dive, really dive in, dive in like off the, um, the board of the pool of Madonna, do you wanna give it a little like brief?

• 4:23Yasi Salek?

  Storytime of your like first encounters with Madonna as a young person.

• 4:31Speaker 05

  This isn't the first encounter, but the one that comes to mind.

• 4:34Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 4:35Speaker 05

  I can visualize the Lucky Star video. I can visualize the Borderline video. I can remember hearing Material Girl for the first time. But the thing that really does it for me and makes me such a diehard forever. I'm in Nantucket. It's the summer of 1986. There's like a scratchy small television in front of a big like glass door as the sun's setting. And Entertainment Tonight is on and they're showing that Madonna's new video Papa Don't Preach happened. So I just remembered seeing like with everyone else in history, seeing like a real legend be born. When you like strip away the, the one look and then you have a whole new look. And you change the world like that, you know what I'm saying?

• 5:16Yasi Salek?

  That was her first major, I think, aesthetic change.

• 5:19Speaker 05

  Yes. And that to me was when she just went from really fucking cool to godlike. And I remember it on this, it was like a really scratchy, like little TV. Like, I don't think little TVs like that are even made anymore, y'all see? And it was scratchy, you know, local.

• 5:34Yasi Salek?

  Rabbit ears.

• 5:35Speaker 05

  No cable here.

• 5:36Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 5:36Speaker 05

  Yeah. And uh, thank God it was on.

• 5:39Yasi Salek?

  No Hulu.

• 5:40Speaker 05

  But, but that, the power of that memory is what has made me a lifelong Madonna obsessive. But, and also lots of great music and lots of great imagery and videos and not giving a fuck. And just really, really, really making people mad.

• 5:56Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I love it. I don't wanna, I don't wanna be hyperbolic, but people who have listened to the podcast have heard me talk about this. Madonna was the first music I ever heard in my life. My mom was obsessed with Madonna.

• 6:10Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 6:10Yasi Salek?

  And that, my first memory of there being a music artist in the world is Madonna. We would watch the videos together. We would tape them off the VH1 and MTV onto VHS tapes. We would listen to it in the car since I was like three years old. Like this was, this, it's in my DNA. It shaped my world. So I don't even remember, I don't remember a world pre Madonna.

• 6:34Speaker 05

  The world for me pre Madonna doesn't really matter.

• 6:37Yasi Salek?

  Yes, it's all BM and AM.

• 6:41Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 6:42Yasi Salek?

  But yeah, I can't be, I couldn't be more excited to talk about this and like such, and also because my, my parents were kind of strict because they're like, you know, Iranian immigrants. But around Madonna, there was like no rules. There was weirdly like, it was strict, like you can't spend the night at your friend's house. But it was like, we're gonna watch like Basic Instinct at home in year nine, then that's fine. And they also let me have the Madonna poster from the sex book where she's like hitch, hitchhiking nude in the heels with like a cigarette like on my wall. And again, I'm like 10 years old. Like, they're like, that's fine.

• 7:13Speaker 05

  Madonna was there Donald Trump.

• 7:15Yasi Salek?

  Well, I don't know about my dad, but definitely for my mother, she was, that's I worship at the, she worshipped the altar of Madonna.

• 7:22Speaker 05

  That's beautiful.

• 7:22Yasi Salek?

  Thank you. My, shout out to my mom, who I believe her favorite song is Dress You Up in My Love.

• 7:27Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 7:27Yasi Salek?

  That's, that's not the title. It's just called Dress You Up, but I can't do it without the full sentence. Okay, let's get into it.

• 7:33Speaker 05

  Let's.

• 7:35Yasi Salek?

  Madonna Louise Veronica Shiconi.

• 7:39Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 7:40Yasi Salek?

  Veronica is her Catholic confirmation name after Saint Veronica, who quote, wiped the face of Jesus and then carried around the cloth with his blood and sweat on it. She said that was so passionate and weird. She loved it. She's born in Bay City, Michigan on August 16th, 1958. A Leo sun, a Virgo moon, which makes total sense, given the work ethic. Rising, I think is a point of contention, but she has self-reported in several interviews that she's an Aquarius rising, which also kind of makes sense to me. Her chart to me is like the perfect pop star chart.

• 8:15Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 8:16Yasi Salek?

  Leo, obviously like you shine like the sun, you love attention, you're bright, you know? Virgo is all about hard work and like results and ambition. And Aquarius is the one that is like, I do my own thing. I don't care what anyone thinks. Like, I march to the beat of my own drum. Her father's name, Silvio Tony, as he went by Shiconi, and her mother also named Madonna, Madonna Louise Fortin.

• 8:43Yasi Salek?

  They were 24 and 22 when they got married in 1955. They moved to Pontiac, Michigan. Tony was born to Italian immigrant parents from Pacentro in Abruzzo. I'm not good at Italian accents. He was one of only six kids who went to college. He joined the air force to go to college. Madonna Senior, her mother, was born to French-Canadian parents and raised in Bay City. It's so interesting to me because I would have thought an Italian person would be named Madonna, but not a French-Canadian person, right?

• 9:18Speaker 05

  We don't think of Madonna as having Canadian in her.

• 9:22Yasi Salek?

  I know.

• 9:23Speaker 05

  Seeing these words, they don't seem real, but they are.

• 9:26Yasi Salek?

  The Italian part is really obviously part of the mythology, but you don't get a lot of the Quebecois or whatever. I don't know if they're Quebecois, but French-Canadian.

• 9:34Speaker 05

  It's pretty shocking.

• 9:35Yasi Salek?

  Anyways, she, our Madonna, was the first girl in the family. She was born third after two elder brothers, Anthony and Martin. They called her Nonny as a little girl. And her sister Paula was born a year later, and then her little brother Christopher, a year after that. By all accounts, their home was very loving, very chaotic because there was lots of kids, and also very religious. Madonna said, "I grew up with a mother who was devoutly Catholic, and I saw her doing things that really affected me. She would kneel on uncooked rice and pray during Lent." So a quick sidebar, I need to tell you that back when I used to write things for magazines, R.I.P., for my career, not magazines that are thriving in your life, I went to do a story about kink.com.

• 10:20Yasi Salek?

  It was a porn website that specialized in like kink. So, but they had bought this like armory in San Francisco where they recorded everything. And it was like a castle with, it was just really crazy. And I went there to do this story and we were going through the like. Supply room, the warehouse. And I was like, okay, they had our actual iron maiden. They had like all this crazy stuff. And then I just got to these bins of rice. And I was like, I'm so sorry. I don't, what are these for? And they were like, people, they make people kneel in them.

• 10:53Speaker 05

  Because kneeling in rice is like a devoutly Catholic thing?

• 10:57Yasi Salek?

  It's just painful. It's like, it inflicts pain because the rice kernels are hard. And between you and your flesh and the hard ground, it just digs into your flesh.

• 11:06Speaker 05

  Madonna senior sounds sort of like she's giving Carrie's mom.

• 11:11Yasi Salek?

  Oh, interesting.

• 11:12Speaker 05

  You know what I'm saying?

• 11:13Yasi Salek?

  But for, for all the things that have been reported via Madonna and Christopher, who have spoken about their mom, she was like very loving and kind and not like, you know, crazy strict with them or anything. She just was very pious. It is really interesting, though, and we're going to obviously get into the Catholicism throughout. But the like, the sort of like juxtaposition of Catholic self pain infliction as punishment or like a way to be close to God and like S and M.

• 11:44Speaker 05

  Interesting.

• 11:45Yasi Salek?

  She said that at home, Madonna said, the first records I used to listen to were Twist, like 1960s Twist records. And, and I would do the limbo to Chubby Checker's records, you know, like Go Under a Broom. And my mother and father used to twist all the time, believe it or not.

• 12:08Yasi Salek?

  When Madonna senior was 28 and pregnant with her sixth child, she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

• 12:14Speaker 05

  That sucks.

• 12:14Yasi Salek?

  I know, 28, so young, six children already.

• 12:17Speaker 05

  God.

• 12:18Yasi Salek?

  Apparently, and this is like not proven or, you know, it's not canon, but she had worked for a long time as an X-ray technician. And apparently back then, they didn't know the ramifications of being exposed to that much radiation. And so it's possible that was a cause, but you know, obviously no one knows. Yeah. So in December of 1962, she passed away. Um, I think Madonna was, I think she was, had just turned five, maybe. She was very young.

• 12:45Speaker 05

  She was very young, yes.

• 12:46Yasi Salek?

  I think Madonna said, I think she had a lot of strength. I didn't notice it as much when I was younger, but looking back on it, she was ill for a long time and she never allowed herself any sort of self pity, you know? And we really tortured her when she was sick because we wanted her to play with us. We wanted her to do things when she was tired. We picked on her all the time because we just didn't understand. But I don't think she ever allowed herself to wallow in the tragedy of her situation. So in that respect, I think she gave me an incredible lesson. That was in Trivia Magazine in 1989. I think that's important. If you subscribe to the theory that like your whole personality and the way you view the world subconsciously is kind of set in stone by the time you're like 10 years old

• 13:26Yasi Salek?

  because of what you experienced in your childhood, that's like a major thread of someone's subconscious to be like, you suffer and you don't complain. Like you just get on with it, you know?

• 13:37Speaker 05

  Yes. Right, because you'd always be like, how could Madonna do what she's done? Okay, she did it by watching this.

• 13:47Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I think that's like an important building block. Also, and she talks about this a lot throughout her career and we'll read quotes as they come up, but she said it here, like, "What fuels my ambition is the desire to be heard and to find my mother, I suppose." I think this idea of wanting to be loved and this blank space of love in your life that would have or should have been filled by your mother being removed creates this vacuum, right? And it's like, well, I'm gonna be loved by everybody then.

• 14:19Speaker 05

  I hear that.

• 14:20Yasi Salek?

  All right. Her father, though, left to raise six kids. Madonna said, "My father was very strong. I don't agree with some of his values, but he did have integrity and if he told us not to do something, he didn't do it either. A lot of parents tell their kids not to smoke cigarettes and they smoke cigarettes, or they give you some idea of sexual modesty, but my father lived that way. He believed that making love to someone is a very sacred thing and it shouldn't happen until after you're married. He stuck by those beliefs and that represented a very strong person to me. He was my role model." Was in Time Magazine.

• 14:50Speaker 05

  Oh, father.

• 14:51Yasi Salek?

  Oh, father. For months after her mom died, her father would like move the children around. I mean, obviously, he was probably so overwhelmed, right? He's one guy. He's like 30 years old. He has a job. So he would move the children around, like, family members' homes, neighbors' homes. And then he started hiring housekeepers to help keep the house, but also raise the kids. According to a bunch of interviews, it was Madonna who had to kind of step up as the oldest daughter and take care of the smaller kids.

• 15:21Speaker 05

  I cried and cried and cried all day until the neighbors went away. It was very, it was very traumatizing.

• 15:26Yasi Salek?

  Okay, got it. Yeah, I'm sure it was traumatizing. Imagine being that young and then not only like you don't understand death, you don't understand that your mother's not there anymore. Also, now you're like, have to dress smaller children and make sure they get to school. And you're like seven or eight years old.

• 15:40Speaker 05

  That sucks.

• 15:51Yasi Salek?

  Here's another father, oh, father, shaping this personality. In the Mary Gabriel book, there's a quote from her, I don't know where it came from, but she says, "He didn't like us to have any idle time. If we didn't have schoolwork to do, he found work for us to do around the house. He thought we should always be productive." Always be productive, the Madonna-Chaconi story.

• 16:13Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 16:14Yasi Salek?

  Anyways, in 1966, Tony Chaconi ends up marrying one of the housekeepers, a 23-year-old woman named Joan Gustafson, and she became their stepmother. According to that Mary Gabriel book, Madonna's mother's side of the family, the Fortin family, were very furious over this. And they always called her the maid, even when they were married. I think they are maybe still married.

• 16:36Speaker 05

  She just recently died.

• 16:37Yasi Salek?

  But Tony Chaconi is alive.

• 16:39Speaker 05

  Tony Chaconi is alive.

• 16:40Yasi Salek?

  That's wild. He must be like 98 years old.

• 16:42Speaker 05

  And, yeah, she was like the wicked stepmother, right?

• 16:45Yasi Salek?

  I mean, there's multiple.

• 16:46Speaker 05

  Or, or at least Madonna didn't fuck with her.

• 16:48Yasi Salek?

  That's how Madonna felt, yes. She said, "I never liked my stepmother. She was really hard, strict, and disciplined." And then in Time Magazine, she said, "I don't really want to talk about my stepmother. I was the oldest girl, so I had a lot of adult responsibilities. I feel like my adolescence was spent taking care of babies and changing diapers and babysitting. I have to say I resented it, because when all my friends were out playing, I felt like I had all these adult responsibilities. That's when I really thought about how I wanted to do something else and get away from all of that. I really saw myself as the quintessential Cinderella. You know, I have this stepmother, and I have all this work to do, and it's awful, and I never go out, and I don't have pretty dresses. The thing I hated about my sisters most was my stepmother insisted on buying us the same dresses. I would do everything not to look like them."

• 17:32Yasi Salek?

  Okay, another pinnacle of the personality. I want to have my own style. I want to look different.

• 17:39Speaker 05

  I would wear weird colored knee socks or put bows on my hair or anything. I also went to Catholic schools, so I'd wear uniforms that were drab. I guess that was the beginning of my style. Here we go.

• 17:48Yasi Salek?

  Here we fucking go, babe. Okay, another thing that I think is very interesting, if we're building the cornerstone blocks of Madonna's maybe, you know, driving forces, is she said she learned early on how to use her femininity to get what she wanted. So she said, "From an early age, I knew that being a girl and being charming in a feminine way could get me many things. I squeezed everything I could out of it." She said that to The Face, and then to Record Magazine, she said, "I really do remember from when I was very, very young, being really attracted to men and being real flirtatious. The power of my femininity and charm. I remember it was just something I had that I'd been given, you know what I mean? From the age of five, I remember being able to affect people that way.

• 18:31Yasi Salek?

  I felt something, but I didn't know what to do with it. I was just very aware of it." She used that charm and her sense of humor and everything to like... Get what was in limited supply at her house, which is attention. You know, you have one dad, six children, about to be eight, because Joan also has two more children with her dad. Very little attention to go around. And so to get it, you have to kind of like, put on a show, you know?

• 18:55Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 18:56Yasi Salek?

  And I think she would talk about that, where she would had like, where she would like, stand on the table and like, lift her dress, like, whatever. And like, dad, you know, it's very, it's very keep it together, Ben. It's very, I got brothers, I got sisters too, stuck in the middle, tell you what I'm gonna do.

• 19:09Speaker 05

  I'm gonna get out of here, I'm gonna leave this place, so I can forget.

• 19:12Yasi Salek?

  Every single hungry face.

• 19:25Yasi Salek?

  When they were younger, as a family, they lived in a really like, integrated neighborhood that had a bunch of African-American families in it as well, and they were one of the only white families. And she said there was like, all these yard dances in the backyards, and all these little like, 45 turntables and stacks of records. And everyone was dancing and playing these Motown records, Supremes and girl groups. And like, she was very like, into that, which we'll hear, obviously, in some forthcoming music. And she studied piano, because her father made everyone do a musical thing, but she hated it. All right, in 1969, Joan has another baby, Mario. There was like, a lot of riots, urban, you know, conflict happening in the Detroit area at this time.

• 20:10Yasi Salek?

  And the family joined the white flight to go out to Rochester Hills. And they had been going to St. Andrews Catholic Elementary School, which obviously also deeply impacted young Madonna Catholic School, because she had to wear the uniform and all this stuff, and the nuns. Actually, this was a great quote. "Probably around the same time as I began to rebel against the church and my family, my breasts started to grow." So, right around that time was when I really started to think about sex, about its presence, not about what I was gonna do about it. But, in 1970, the state of Michigan banned state aid to private schools, which meant the Chacony kids stopped going to Catholic school, because there's six of them, and that would cost too much money, so they went to public school.

• 20:55Yasi Salek?

  West Junior High, no uniforms. This was good for Madonna, because she likes to wear cool clothes, but bad for Madonna, because her family was not wealthy, and she said she started to really notice, like, differences between the rich kids and herself. She said, "The angriest time of my life, I'd have to say, was that in my teen years, like, when I was out in junior high till I graduated from high school." Actually, I sort of mellowed out towards my last year, because I finally figured out what I was gonna do with my weird old self. Did you read that, that she had to, she was cleaning, oh, maybe that's in high school, that she started cleaning houses as a job, and she had to clean her, like, classmates' houses?

• 21:31Speaker 05

  Wow, I did read that.

• 21:33Yasi Salek?

  Really crazy. All right, Madonna's starting to get into more music now. She's in junior high, she loves Stevie Wonder, she loves Marvin Gaye, she loves the Jackson 5. I love that she loves "The Letter" by the Box Tops, shout out Alex Chilton, "Sugar Sugar" by the Archies.

• 21:47Speaker 05

  Oh, I love "Sugar Sugar."

• 21:48Yasi Salek?

  Who doesn't, babe? Honey, honey.

• 21:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, she loves, she loves the Carpenters, too.

• 21:54Yasi Salek?

  Yes, love the Carpenters.

• 21:55Speaker 05

  So, she loves, she loves the Motown, she loves the Black Sound. She loves the schmaltzy, soft stuff, same.

• 22:02Yasi Salek?

  It's all gonna come into play, too. Okay, important moment in her performance career. The West Junior High 8th Grade Talent Show.

• 22:10Speaker 05

  Oh, my God, that all goes down.

• 22:11Yasi Salek?

  I would love if we had video of this, and unfortunately, we don't. They wore tiny shorts and tank tops, and covered their body in fluorescent body paint, in neon green and pink with flowers and hearts, and did a fairly, maybe, quote, "sexual dance." And according to Christopher's book, their father was in the crowd, and he said, quote, "According to his strict moral code, her appearance is utterly X-rated." And he puts down the camera he was filming in horror. That was not good. Madonna got in trouble.

• 22:45Speaker 05

  He said that the performance was the most scandalous one that anyone has ever seen in this conservative community. Serious reprimands happened, Yasi.

• 22:53Yasi Salek?

  Serious reprimands, babe. And then also after that, Christopher said all the kids would come up to him and be like, "Your sister's a slut."

• 22:59Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 23:00Yasi Salek?

  Terrible.

• 23:01Speaker 05

  Grounded for two weeks, Yasi.

• 23:03Yasi Salek?

  And then shipped off to grandma's house in Bay City. And this is when the fucking magic happened, babe.

• 23:09Speaker 05

  Thank God.

• 23:10Yasi Salek?

  They thought they were punishing her, sending her to grandma's house. No, man. Grandma was chill. Grandma let her hang out with boys. Grandma let her drink beer.

• 23:19Speaker 05

  Fuck, yeah.

• 23:19Yasi Salek?

  Grandma was like, "You could stay out late."

• 23:21Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 23:21Yasi Salek?

  Her uncles had a rock and roll band and they practiced in the garage and smoked pot and chilled and she would chill with them.

• 23:27Speaker 05

  So great. Thank God.

• 23:29Yasi Salek?

  I know. Um, started plucking her eyebrows. All right, it's time for high school. Rochester Adams High School, 1972, one of the best public high schools in the state. A lot of rich kids. This is when she was cleaning the houses of the classmates and she really hated it. Again, this is like a start of a thing that I think we're gonna return to over and over again when we talk about Madonna. She was two things at once. So she was a cheerleader and she was obviously beautiful and like, kind of, I guess, in a way, things that you would describe to the popular girl. But she also felt like a total weirdo and felt isolated. Like, so she said,

• 24:10Yasi Salek?

  "In my school, there were the hippies, the more free group, the guys who had long hair and took a lot of jewelry and shop glasses and smoked a lot of pot during lunch hour. I didn't identify with them because I thought they were extremely lazy. Then there was the jock group and they were drunk on beer every day. I was a cheerleader for a little while, but I couldn't get into it anymore. It wasn't that I wasn't interested in sports. It's just that I couldn't agree with the sensibilities of the cheerleaders and the athletes. See, I had this idea that everybody went to school with blinders on their eyes in junior high and high school and it really pissed me off. For some reason, don't ask me how, because my parents weren't worldly and I didn't know many people who were. I was just sure everybody was missing something. I couldn't identify with anyone, so I just wandered around aimlessly."

• 24:53Speaker 05

  You think she was popular? She would never say she was popular.

• 24:56Yasi Salek?

  I just feel like-

• 24:57Speaker 05

  You think she was like closet, closet popular girl?

• 24:59Yasi Salek?

  No, I mean, I just feel like if you're beautiful and a cheerleader, you have a modicum of social currency, that's all. I don't think she was like an outcast.

• 25:08Speaker 05

  Right.

• 25:09Yasi Salek?

  And if she was an outcast, it sounds like it was self-imposed because she was like, "Y'all are lame."

• 25:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, "You guys are losers and I'm getting out of here."

• 25:16Yasi Salek?

  You're lazy, you're lazy pothead beer drinkers.

• 25:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 25:20Yasi Salek?

  Famously, Madonna was not really a participator in many vices like that.

• 25:27Speaker 05

  Right.

• 25:28Yasi Salek?

  She was in French Club, she was a lifeguard, she sang in the school choir, and she volunteered in a program for disadvantaged children, and she got straight A's.

• 25:36Speaker 05

  None of this is surprising.

• 25:37Yasi Salek?

  Nope, that, it's that Virgo moon. Okay, this is so interesting to me. She had a classmate named Wyn Cooper. He remembers her taking herself more seriously than everyone did at our age. When she was a freshman, he wanted to make a film and asked her to be in it. It was called Egg. It's one minute long, it's eight millimeter silent, and she eats a raw egg in it.

• 25:58Speaker 05

  It sounds so good.

• 25:59Yasi Salek?

  I wish we could see it.

• 26:00Speaker 05

  Me too.

• 26:00Yasi Salek?

  Well, Wyn Cooper, by the way, wrote a poem called Fun that was later turned into a song called All I Want to Do by Shail Crowe.

• 26:07Speaker 05

  Oh, incredible.

• 26:08Yasi Salek?

  Isn't that amazing?

• 26:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, that is.

• 26:10Yasi Salek?

  That was her classmate. All right, in 1974, she gets really into Joni Mitchell. I think this is important, right?

• 26:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, because there's, because us Madonna heads know there's many different types. There's always folksy stuff. We remember all the dancy stuff and the big stuff, but there was a lot of folksy stuff.

• 26:27Yasi Salek?

  A lot of folksy stuff.

• 26:28Speaker 05

  There's a lot of guitar stuff.

• 26:29Yasi Salek?

  A lot of guitar stuff, and also, I think Joni Mitchell may be best known for being a very early confessional, "I'm writing about myself" songwriter.

• 26:38Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 26:39Yasi Salek?

  And you'll see from the beginning when we start talking about Madonna, like, obviously very early on, she had some songs that were not touched by her hand, but pretty much as soon as she could, she's writing those lyrics, and those are her experiences and her words.

• 26:54Speaker 05

  I see a connection with like the songwriting types of stuff, where you're like listening to the stuff and it's not, it's not like so clear what they're talking about.

• 27:02Yasi Salek?

  No, exactly.

• 27:03Speaker 05

  Because they're really on some trip and they're just these really goddess women that are not basic bitches, you know, like we are.

• 27:11Yasi Salek?

  Speak for yourself, babe.

• 27:13Speaker 05

  And so they're, they're really, they're, they're just on some really high frequency, talking about their lives.

• 27:19Yasi Salek?

  Also, the thing that I think people should know about Madonna, if they don't know, is she was a really heavy reader.

• 27:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 27:25Yasi Salek?

  Loved F. Scott Fitzgerald, loved Hemingway, Flannery O'Connor, J.D. Salinger. She later told Norman Mailer, which was one of the best interviews ever, it will be in part two, because that's when it happened, but you guys should really read it, it was in Esquire. She told Norman Mailer that reading J.D. Salinger gave me license to behave eccentrically in a way, and made me feel comfortable in being precocious.

• 27:48Speaker 05

  That was one of my favorite quotes in this whole giant dossier that you put together.

• 27:53Yasi Salek?

  Seventy-page Google dossier I shared with you. It's so good, right? Because it's like, I love the idea of young Madonna reading Catcher in the Rye and being like, oh, like, I kind of feel like that, too. Like, it's, it's right there in what she just said about her classmates, how she felt like, I don't, I don't fuck with you guys, I don't get you guys, you know? Like, it's very Holden Caulfield. All right, 1974, major alert, 911.

• 28:18Speaker 05

  Enter Christopher Flynn.

• 28:20Yasi Salek?

  That's right, babe.

• 28:20Speaker 05

  The gays have entered the room.

• 28:22Yasi Salek?

  The gays have entered the chat.

• 28:23Speaker 05

  Thank God.

• 28:24Yasi Salek?

  Life is about, life will never be the same. Every woman remembers when their first gay came into their life.

• 28:31Speaker 05

  I love that.

• 28:32Yasi Salek?

  And if you haven't had a gay come into your life, babe?

• 28:35Speaker 05

  There's, there's time.

• 28:36Yasi Salek?

  There's time. Yeah, that's true. Don't give up. It's dark, baby, but it's like, it's like, it's like you're sitting in the dark and the light's going to be turned on. What do you know about Christopher Flynn, Mel?

• 28:44Speaker 05

  He was a dancer.

• 28:46Yasi Salek?

  Yes.

• 28:47Speaker 05

  He was a dance teacher.

• 28:48Yasi Salek?

  Correct.

• 28:49Speaker 05

  He was cool.

• 28:50Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 28:51Speaker 05

  He was worldly, like, he knew what was up, and he changed Madonna's life.

• 28:56Yasi Salek?

  Totally. I think he had been at Harvard.

• 28:58Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:58Yasi Salek?

  I believe. He was, he was like, quite, like, elevated, skilled. That was the first, that was the same year she lost her virginity, that she met Christopher Flynn. She said, "The first boy I ever slept with had been my boyfriend for a long time, and I was in love with him, so I didn't understand where it all came from. I would hear words like slut. I was called those names when I was still a virgin. I didn't fit in, and that's when I got into dancing. I shut off from all that, and I escaped." Okay, so Christopher Flynn had a dance studio in downtown Rochester Hills. He was her father's age. She discovered him through another girl in the 10th grade. She said, "When I was in the 10th grade, I knew a girl who was in a, who was a serious ballet dancer. She looked really smarter than your average girl, but in an interesting offbeat way. So I attached myself to her and she brought me to a ballet class.

• 29:42Yasi Salek?

  And that's where I met Christopher Flynn, who saved me from my high school turmoil. She told her dad, "I want to take ballet classes." And he was like, "Cool, get a job." And so she did. She got a job, paid for herself to go. Um, there's a great TV documentary series called Naked Ambition. Have you ever seen it?

• 30:00Speaker 05

  I have not.

• 30:01Yasi Salek?

  Okay, it's pretty fab. It must be pretty early on. It looks like it's like maybe 1990 or like late 80s. Um, they interview Christopher Flynn in it and he is like, so he's just like sitting in a cool apartment, smoking a cigarette, like talking about this, but he's like, "Yeah, she was like barely out of adolescence, had like this dishwater brown hair, nothing special." And he remembers her coming in, carrying like a huge doll and just like looking really childlike.

• 30:30Speaker 05

  Yes, I, I, right, the two-foot doll. I'd really also like to see the doll.

• 30:35Yasi Salek?

  That is, the quote that Mary Gabriel has in the book is from that documentary. I would have liked to see the doll too. Where are the photos? But he said, "She was a blank page, believe me. She desperately wanted to be filled in. She had this burning desire to learn. She had a thirst for learning that was insatiable. It was something that would not be denied."

• 30:52Speaker 05

  Yes, as you say, what do you say? We used to be a-

• 30:55Yasi Salek?

  Proper country.

• 30:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, we used to be a proper country.

• 30:58Yasi Salek?

  That's so true.

• 30:58Speaker 05

  But she's talking, we're talking about real greatness here. We're talking about the beginning of real greatness.

• 31:04Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 31:04Speaker 05

  Oh, nothing's great anymore, Yasi.

• 31:07Yasi Salek?

  Oh.

• 31:08Speaker 05

  No, we're, we suck. We're terrible. We're never gonna be as good as Madonna and that's okay.

• 31:12Yasi Salek?

  I just want you to know that I am drinking Celsius and have not left my computer for three and a half weeks. So like I, too, am pursuing greatness in perhaps a different realm than Madonna.

• 31:22Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 31:22Yasi Salek?

  But I'm, I'm devoted.

• 31:24Speaker 05

  I, I work hard too. I just think she's-

• 31:27Yasi Salek?

  She's on another level.

• 31:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, when we're reading about this, it's really interesting. Like, oh my gosh, it really is interesting.

• 31:32Yasi Salek?

  It's so interesting.

• 31:34Speaker 05

  But also I like that she was like, "I'm Cinderella and I'm finding, I don't need a man to make me the princess queen I will be." Yeah, right? She's just, she's, it's never about a man.

• 31:46Yasi Salek?

  It seems to me that men are-

• 31:51Yasi Salek?

  Auxiliary, you know, like accessories to the story. They're not ever the main course.

• 31:57Speaker 05

  I'm not saying there's not about.

• 31:58Yasi Salek?

  No, but it was like, I dream of like, meeting Prince Charming and settling down. Like, that was not like, a dream, as far as we know. It's never, none of these interviews talk about that.

• 32:06Speaker 05

  She wants to rule the world.

• 32:08Yasi Salek?

  She wants to rule the world, famously.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  Welcome to the 50th Hunger Games. Witness the beginning of the revolution. Hey Mitch, you've been trying to take down these games from Star. Film for IMAX. Make them remember you. The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Leaping, November 20th, rated PG-13.

• 32:27Speaker 00

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• 32:59Yasi Salek?

  Okay, so Christopher Flynn opens the world up for her, right? He's worldly, he's artistic, he takes her to museums, he tells her about art. She said, "I'd say that after my father, the most powerful, important relationship of my life was with Christopher Flynn, who was my ballet teacher, who was gay. I didn't understand the concept of gay at that time. I was probably 12 or 13 years old. All I knew was that my ballet teacher was different from everybody else. He was so alive. He had a certain theatricality about him. He made you proud of yourself, just the way he came up to me and put my face in his hand and said, 'You are beautiful.' No one had woken up that part of me yet." She said, in a different interview, that no one had ever told her she was beautiful until that moment.

• 33:37Speaker 05

  Maybe she, no, but she looked so good. Any picture you see of her, young.

• 33:41Yasi Salek?

  Stunner.

• 33:42Speaker 05

  She looks incredible, yeah.

• 33:43Yasi Salek?

  Okay, so dance.

• 33:45Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 33:45Yasi Salek?

  Dance opens her up, babe. We are, we have purpose.

• 33:52Yasi Salek?

  Harry Dean Stanton, this is the interview.

• 33:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, the interview.

• 33:55Yasi Salek?

  You were talking about with Harry Dean Stanton, 1985. He said, "I think the dancing you did gave you tremendous discipline." And she said, "Exactly. That was the first thing, the devotion to that and realizing that I could go from being unmolded clay, and over time, and with a lot of work, and with people helping me, I could turn myself into something else." I have the chills. "I could turn myself into something else." That's also part of the Madonna.

• 34:21Yasi Salek?

  Core principles, right?

• 34:23Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 34:24Yasi Salek?

  We'll, we'll talk about it later, but I think it's a famous thing that a lot of people know. What Madonna's maybe most cherished cherished, don't you dare fucking come for cherished. Um, piece of art is the Frida Kahlo, My Birth, right? She, for a long time, I don't know if she still does, would travel with it, like wherever she, because it's a small piece of art, she'd take it everywhere. And My Birth is this crazy piece of art with it's Frida Kahlo being born as an adult. It's pretty unnerving, but like, there's a great interview with Gril Marcus. He's in this Naked and Ambition documentary, he's talking about, and he was like,

• 35:02Yasi Salek?

  "The idea that you can be born as an adult means that you can continuously be reborn and reborn." And this was obviously something really important to Madonna. It makes so much sense that she has such a connection with that painting. "I could turn myself into something else."

• 35:22Speaker 05

  Amen.

• 35:23Yasi Salek?

  "Before I started feeling devoted to dancing, I really didn't like myself that much. I didn't think I was beautiful or talented. I spent a lot of time loathing myself and not feeling like I fit in and hating the authority of my parents like every adolescent does. When I started having a dream and working towards that goal, having a sense of discipline, I started to really like myself for the first time. And that just carried over into everything." She also saw David Bowie for the first time this year. Imagine, this is all in one year. You lose your virginity, you meet the most important gay man of your whole life, and you see David Bowie? Life changes.

• 35:55Speaker 05

  And it's Diamond Dogs.

• 35:56Yasi Salek?

  And it's fucking Diamond Dogs. And she said about that, "I recognized myself in him somehow, and he gave me license to dream a different future for myself." Woo, she went with Win Cooper, all I want to do is have some fun, guy. In 1975, she's a new girl, babe. It's all, it's all different. According to Christopher Chacon's, "No more cute clothes, black sweats. I'm a dancer, I'm serious. I do not wear makeup, I do not shave my armpits. I'm dedicated to dance."

• 36:24Speaker 05

  Incredible.

• 36:25Yasi Salek?

  Rochester Hills, Michigan. I have a dancer. Madonna said, "I thought it was cooler to not shave my legs or my under my arms." I mean, why did God give us hair there anyways? Why didn't guys have to shave there? Why was it accepted in Europe, but not in America? No one could answer my questions in a satisfactory manner, so I pushed the envelope even further. I refused to wear makeup and tied scarves around my head like a Russian peasant. I did the opposite of what all the other girls were doing, and I turned myself into a real man repellent. I dared people to like me and my non-conformity.

• 36:55Speaker 05

  Fabulous.

• 36:55Yasi Salek?

  So fucking cool. Okay, so she turns 16. She gets her driver's license and a 1966 Mustang.

• 37:02Speaker 05

  Nice.

• 37:02Yasi Salek?

  Okay, fucking so cool. Although I was thinking about it, and I was like, a 1966 Mustang in the 70s is just like a 10-year-old car. Probably it's not so cool, maybe? I don't know. I'm sure it was still cool.

• 37:16Speaker 05

  Let's look it up. Oh, god damn, look at that thing.

• 37:20Yasi Salek?

  Should we get one?

• 37:21Speaker 05

  I think it's cool. I think it's still cool.

• 37:23Yasi Salek?

  Even then, it was cool, yeah.

• 37:24Speaker 05

  It's just fucking cool.

• 37:26Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I agree. It was red.

• 37:27Speaker 05

  God damn, it's cool.

• 37:29Yasi Salek?

  So she's confident now. It's so fucking cool, babe. There's nothing cooler than that. Her stepmother stopped making her do chores, according to Christopher, because she was like, "No, I'm my own woman now." In one instance, again, Christopher's book said, that they fought and Joan slapped her, and Madonna slapped her ass right back.

• 37:49Speaker 05

  Damn.

• 37:50Yasi Salek?

  According to Christopher. Meanwhile, the other Christopher in her life, Christopher Flynn, was like, "Guess what? We're going to the disco, babe. You ever been to a disco? We're going to Menjo's."

• 38:02Yasi Salek?

  First Detroit disco that featured a DJ mixing records.

• 38:05Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 38:07Yasi Salek?

  It was on Six Mile Road, and it was the epicenter of gay life in Detroit.

• 38:12Yasi Salek?

  Madonna said, "I'd never been to a club, and only been to high school dances, and no guys would ever ask me to dance, because they thought I was insane. So I'd just go out and dance by myself. In school and in my neighborhood and everything. I felt like such an outsider, a misfit, a weirdo. And suddenly, when I went to the gay club, I didn't feel that way anymore. I just felt at home. I had a whole new sense of myself."

• 38:32Speaker 05

  This is the age that I started sneaking out and going to clubs, too.

• 38:35Yasi Salek?

  Gay clubs?

• 38:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, like 16.

• 38:37Yasi Salek?

  Amazing. This, I think, is another building block, right?

• 38:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 38:43Yasi Salek?

  I feel at home at the club.

• 38:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, a whole new sense of herself.

• 38:47Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. I started spending time with a lot of dancers and almost every male dancer I knew was gay. So I went through another kind of feeling inadequate because I was constantly falling in love with gay men. Of course, I was so miserable that I wasn't a man. Her, her eyes are opened.

• 39:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, she's cooking.

• 39:04Yasi Salek?

  She's cooking. She's seen art. She's seen the disco.

• 39:08Speaker 05

  Men were doing poppers and going crazy. They were all dressed really well and were more free about themselves than all the blockhead football players I met in high school.

• 39:16Yasi Salek?

  Babe, who amongst us, that's the other, again, if you haven't had a gay man into your life, I'm gonna warn you, the first thing that's gonna happen is you're gonna be like, what the fuck, man? I have to date straight guys, like, have never seen a gym in their life and they dress like this, and then there's all these gorgeous gay men who are like so beautiful and so devoted to their physiques and how they look, and you're just like,

• 39:36Yasi Salek?

  this is stupid. She finishes high school.

• 39:39Speaker 05

  Finally.

• 39:39Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, a semester early, because she's like, I want to devote myself full-time to dance in my last semester. And Christopher Flynn had been hired to teach at the University of Michigan at the new dance department. And they get Madonna to audition for the program, and she does. And she gets a four-year dance scholarship to the U of M. First one of her siblings to go to college. Apparently Martin and, is it Anthony, the other older brother?

• 40:03Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 40:03Yasi Salek?

  Were kind of bad boys.

• 40:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 40:06Yasi Salek?

  They were party, partiers. So she goes to college and does the college thing. She's into film, she's into poetry, she's watching Pasolini, she's watching Bunuel. She's watching English kitchen sink dramas, shout out Morrissey. Um, and reading Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. It's like very college, college hours, again, not shaving your armpits. And she's on a mission to get attention. "I was a real ham," she said. "I did everything I could to get attention and be the opposite of everyone else. I'd rip my leotards and wear teeny little safety pins, and I'd run my tights. I could have gone to a nightclub right after class." And she did. She found, um, the Ann Arbor Gay Club, the Ribouat, they called the Rube. And then she auditioned for her dream summer program in New York.

• 40:50Speaker 05

  Did she get in?

• 40:51Yasi Salek?

  She did, babe. She got a scholarship, and then she had to figure out how to get there. So a local hairdresser.

• 40:58Yasi Salek?

  Uh, drove her there.

• 41:00Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 41:02Yasi Salek?

  It's the summer of Sam Murders. Summer, that summer, nineteen seventy seven. Crime is rampant.

• 41:10Speaker 05

  Unprecedented levels of crime.

• 41:12Yasi Salek?

  That's right.

• 41:12Speaker 05

  But what? She loved it, Yasi.

• 41:14Yasi Salek?

  She loved it. You're reading my dog. She loved it. She said, once I got a taste of New York, I knew I had to be there. You know the feeling.

• 41:21Speaker 05

  I do. I do. I do. I know the feeling.

• 41:24Yasi Salek?

  But then she had to go back to Ann Arbor after the summer and she got a new roommate, Whitney Sutrockian, who was a girl who was actually from New York City, whose father was a stage actor named Ed. And they were broke, babe, but they were, they were living life. They're scooping ice cream, they're modeling for life drawing classes. Um, they're having a great time. In December of nineteen seventy seven, another really important man comes into her life. A twenty one year old bartender at the bar around the corner from their apartment called The Blue Frog. His name was Stephen Bray.

• 41:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, Stephen Bray, you've never heard of him before, but he's really important and he's, and, and, and you, you, you know his work.

• 42:01Yasi Salek?

  You're gonna hear about him a lot in the early half of this career, I think. Madonna said, he was real cute, someone all soulful and funky looking, you couldn't help but notice. First time in my life, I asked a guy to buy me a drink. Rolling Stone, nineteen eighty four, and Stephen Bray remembers, she stood out. Her energy was really apparent. I had encountered a force of nature. He's gorgeous. He was a, he was a musician. He's planning to go to Berklee College of Music. He's in a band called The Cost of Living and Madonna is like, I'm dating you and I'm going to every Cost of Living show and dancing like a maniac in front of it. And what a time. Who amongst us hasn't dated a guy in a band and come to every show and dance like a maniac?

• 42:43Speaker 05

  Love it.

• 42:44Yasi Salek?

  But you know what? She was tired of Ann Arbor, babe. This romance is ill fated because she's like, I gotta get out of here. She said, those were good days, but I knew my stay at Michigan was short term. I was just fine tuning my technique. And Christopher Flynn was like, babe, go ahead, get the fuck out of here. You don't even graduate. This is not a direct quote, but it's, I'm paraphrasing.

• 43:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. He was like, you don't, you're too big for this town.

• 43:07Yasi Salek?

  Exactly. Yeah. Madonna said, looking back, I think I probably did make Steve feel kind of bad. I was really insensitive in those days and I was totally self-absorbed, leaving a bit of a string of broken hearts. Her father was like, no, you're not going to New York. Again, who amongst us has experienced a father saying, no, you're not going to New York? And she was like, yes, I am. And she saved up money from all her jobs. And at the end of the school year, Christopher Flynn and her friend from dance class, Peter Kentis, drove her to the airport, waved her off. Her first time ever on an airplane. It's 1978. She's 19 years old. Also, her first taxi ride. She said, I didn't know anyone. I had nowhere to stay and I only had $35 in my pocket. This is a core

• 43:51Yasi Salek?

  piece of Madonna mythology.

• 43:53Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 43:54Yasi Salek?

  I've heard multiple dollar amounts in, in multiple, um, accounts by different people, but does it really matter?

• 44:01Speaker 05

  No, she didn't have much.

• 44:03Yasi Salek?

  She didn't have much.

• 44:04Speaker 05

  Yeah. And she definitely didn't have anyone looking out for her.

• 44:06Yasi Salek?

  Yes. And this is my favorite part of the mythology, and I don't care if it's true or not, because it's too good, that she got out, got a taxi and said, take me to the middle of everything. And the driver was like, bet, and dropped her off in Times Square. And also, like, again, I wasn't there because I wasn't born and you weren't there yet, because

• 44:26Speaker 05

  I was two.

• 44:27Yasi Salek?

  You were two. But Times Square in 1978 was a fucking shithole.

• 44:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 44:31Yasi Salek?

  It was like porn theaters and like disgusting. It wasn't like now where it's like the M and M store and like Olive Garden or whatever. Like, you wouldn't go there. It was bad. She said, I got out of the cab and I was overwhelmed because all the buildings, you know, really high. I walked east on 42nd Street and then south on Lexington and there was a street fair. It was a summer and I had a winter coat and was carrying a suitcase. This guy started following me around. He wasn't cute or anything, but he looked interesting. I said hi to him and he said, why are you walking around with a winter Coat in a suitcase. And I said, I just got off the plane. And he said, well, why don't you go home and drop your fucking coat off? That's all he said, but I'm just, I'm dramatizing. And I said, I don't live anywhere. He was dumbfounded. So he said, well, you can stay at my apartment.

• 45:15Yasi Salek?

  So I stayed there for the first two weeks. He didn't try to rape me or anything. He showed me where everything was and he fed me breakfast. It was perfect. I relied on the kindness of strangers. This story is psychotic to me.

• 45:26Speaker 05

  That's insane.

• 45:27Yasi Salek?

  It is a little bit. We used to be a proper country because I do feel that you used to be able to trust people more. Let me rephrase that.

• 45:38Yasi Salek?

  I don't know about able. I'm not talking about like what the outcome might be, but I think people did trust people more before. And now you wouldn't even like ask a stranger for the time, basically, because you're too scared, you know?

• 45:49Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 45:49Yasi Salek?

  It was just like such a different, especially as a young woman. But what a wonderful man. I wonder if he like knows, like that girl, that street urchin that he took care of in nineteen seventy eight is a global superstar now? We'll never know.

• 46:06Speaker 05

  We'll never know.

• 46:07Yasi Salek?

  We'll never know. Um, so she was scared. She's excited. She said, I used to go down and sit in the fountain at Lincoln Center and watch all the people and cry. I'd write in my journal, will I ever know anybody? It was pathetic. It was a scene in a bad movie. But I always say, if you can't say, I'll die if I don't do it. You should not do it.

• 46:26Speaker 05

  I love it.

• 46:27Yasi Salek?

  I love it.

• 46:27Speaker 05

  That part I really relate to.

• 46:28Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 46:29Speaker 05

  All of that, just being like, I'll never make it in this town. I'll never have friends.

• 46:33Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 46:33Speaker 05

  I'll never get a job. I'll never.

• 46:35Yasi Salek?

  I'll never be the editor of Interview Magazine.

• 46:38Speaker 05

  Or like, or like do something that there's a billboard or like.

• 46:42Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 46:42Speaker 05

  Know, understand which direction is north, south, east, west.

• 46:46Yasi Salek?

  When I first moved to New York.

• 46:48Speaker 05

  It was so hard.

• 46:48Yasi Salek?

  First of all, I didn't have only thirty five dollars. I'll be honest, I'm not afraid. I had two thousand dollars, which is kind of a lot of money, but it was also two thousand.

• 46:56Speaker 05

  Two thousand is like thirty five, you know?

• 46:58Yasi Salek?

  It's a chunk of money, but it's not, it's New York and it was two thousand and six, I think, which was like kind of peak. I spent it all, you guys, this is how soft I am. I spent almost all of it on car rides in the winter because I simply could not understand the weather. I was like, you want me to go on the train? You want me to walk to the train? It is negative five degrees. My tear froze to my beanie. I can't be, and also I was like, kind of violently hungover all the time. So it was like,

• 47:24Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 47:25Yasi Salek?

  violently hungover, plus like negative five degrees. I was like, North Side, please hold, babe. Some of you will remember North Side, please hold. That was the car service in Williamsburg. But this is pre Ubers. Anyways, I didn't, I didn't last. I only made it two years. She finds some other dance students. She's back at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. She's living with some dance students. She got a work-study scholarship to be in the Troops Third Tier Company. Every month or two, she had moved. Rental, squat, rental. Someone told her at this time, if you really want to master Alvin Ailey's technique, you need to study at the Martha Graham School. And she was like, okay, on my way. And she joined those beginners classes.

• 48:08Yasi Salek?

  Another dance teacher she took classes from this time, Marcus Schulkind, said of Madonna, she was a really brilliant dancer. She was musical, she had really strong technique, and she reeked of potential. What's holding her back is some of the attitude she had. The unbelievable snippiness and comebacks that she would come up with in dealing with other people's power. The choreographer is God, and you should be happy to bow down to them. And there wasn't an atom of that in Madonna.

• 48:35Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 48:36Yasi Salek?

  Early on, babe, she was like, I'm not listening to you. She went to the legendary Pearl Lang. And Pearl Lang said of Madonna, she was very talented, very fragile but fierce. Many people can do the acrobatics required, but she had a poetic quality to her. I was fond of her arrogance, her hunger and her spunk. Nothing fazed her. She was gonna do something and nothing was gonna get in her way. Pearl Lang got her a job at the Russian Tea Room, which she quickly got fired from because she wore fishnets and they didn't like that. Okay, this is one of my favorite stories, which I know you remember from the Mary Gabriel. Do you want to tell it?

• 49:11Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay, so that fall, her and Whitney, her roommate, came to New York for a family visit, and they met up with Whitney Lee's father, Ed, who we knew was like some sort of actor. They went to Joe Allen's. Um, an old school haunt and he invited his old friend to meet them there, who? Al Pacino. And Madonna was flirting with, uh,

• 49:31Yasi Salek?

  Al, you guys, Al Pacino.

• 49:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, Al Pacino.

• 49:34Yasi Salek?

  1978, Al Pacino.

• 49:35Speaker 05

  Blowing bubbles all night with bubble gum. She's great at blowing bubbles. And at the end of the night, when she was dropped off in Ed's car, Al Pacino turned to Whitley and said to her and Ed, that friend of yours stuck her tongue in my, in my ear.

• 49:48Yasi Salek?

  Madonna stuck her tongue in Al Pacino's ear in 1978. I don't, again, once again, if this story's not true, I don't care. Cause it's a wonderful story. And I, who's gonna make this up?

• 49:58Speaker 05

  She was spunky, man.

• 49:59Yasi Salek?

  She was funky, babe. She was, she was gonna stick that tongue right in Al Pacino's ear. All right, it's the end of 1978. Things are not going well despite a tongue in Al Pacino's ear. It is dive apartments. It's squats. We're living on popcorn.

• 50:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 50:14Yasi Salek?

  Uh, we're, we're doing nude modeling. That's gonna come back, uh, later in this. Well, or not oops.

• 50:21Speaker 05

  I'm not ashamed.

• 50:22Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I, I'm not ashamed. She said, it was hard and it was lonely and I had to dare myself every day to keep going. Sometimes I would play the victim and cry in my shoebox of a bedroom with a window that faced a wall, watching the pigeons shit on my windowsill. And I wondered if it was all worth it. Then I would pull myself together and look at a postcard of Frida Kahlo taped to my wall and the sight of her mustache consoled me.

• 50:43Speaker 05

  Beautiful.

• 50:44Yasi Salek?

  Because she was an artist who didn't care what people thought. I admired her. She was daring. People gave her a hard time. Life gave her a hard time. If she could do it, then so could I.

• 50:54Speaker 05

  Great.

• 50:55Yasi Salek?

  Love it. All right, this is kind of a sad, serious moment, but I think it's important to the story. So I'm not sure the exact timing, but sometime in that first year of being in New York, Madonna was raped. Um, according to her friend Whitley, this is what happened. She was on her way to dance class and she needed money to make a call to get into the locked door of the dance class. She asked a stranger for a coin and he gave it to her and offered to walk her to the phone booth. No one picked up. He was like, oh, you can call from my apartment. And she told Howard Stern much later, I was like, oh, that's really nice of you. I trusted everybody. But he did not take her to his apartment. He put a knife to her back and he forced her to the roof of the building and he raped her. Horrible. In 1995, she told the journalist Barbara Allen in an NME interview,

• 51:40Yasi Salek?

  Barbara Allen was like, I didn't know that you've been raped. And she said, you're the first person I've told. This is like, the first time she mentions it in public or press. So that's, you know, we're talking 11 years after she's famous, or whatever, 10 years after she's famous. And she said, was it a date rape situation, someone you knew? And she said, no, it was a complete stranger. And Barbara Allen said, did you get help afterwards? And she said, no, I was very young and I didn't know anybody. And then Barbara Allen's like, would you rather stop talking about this? And she goes, I don't want to talk about it only in that. I don't want to get into this Oprah Winfrey, Sinead O'Connor thing of, oh, everything, oh, everybody, all these horrible things that have happened to me. I don't want to make it an issue. I think I've had what a lot of people would consider to be horrific experiences in my life.

• 52:23Yasi Salek?

  But I don't want people to feel sorry for me because I don't. Okay, I don't, I'm, I, I just want to be clear, you guys, that when I'm, anything I'm bringing up in this podcast is only to inform her art. That's my purpose of it. This is not a salacious podcast. I'm not here to like dish or gossip. It's like, not interesting to me. I'm interested in this because of, one, how it ties back to like, watching her mother never victimize herself and be sick and dying and never feel sorry for herself, and how this came here. And it was like a similar situation where she's not, obviously similar having cancer, but she's like, I don't want this to be about oppressing.

• 53:05Yasi Salek?

  And I feel like that resilience and that view of herself comes through when we're going to get to all the kind of art she makes. Definitely a little bit in this, in this episode, but a lot in the second episode or through the 90s.

• 53:20Speaker 05

  By the way, these are not, this is all Madonna's quotes.

• 53:23Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 53:23Speaker 05

  These are not, this is, this, this isn't gossip or really.

• 53:27Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I'm just, I'm not, we're not so interested in like speculating on someone's personal life because I don't, unless it's like about why or how we understand their art, I don't think it's that interesting. Okay, it's 979, I'm, she's a little overdance, let's be honest. She was a little bit like.

• 53:42Speaker 05

  Dance schmance.

• 53:43Yasi Salek?

  Dance schmance. She starts going to auditions for stage and film jobs.

• 53:49Yasi Salek?

  Um, including musical theater, which is when she had to start singing. She said, most of the people auditioning were much more professional than I was. They brought sheet music and they'd give it to the piano player and I'll just wing it and sing songs I knew from the radio, like an Aretha Franklin song or some other ridiculous embarrassment. In late April, she was dating a guy named Norris Burrows. Side, side note about Norris Burrows, Ben, Norris Burrows wrote an entire book. They've dated for three months. He, he wrote a book.

• 54:19Speaker 05

  Did you read it?

• 54:20Yasi Salek?

  I tried. It's really, I, again, love and respect to Norris Burrows. It is really bad. There's like all these sentences that are like, she was an incredibly sensual lover. And you're like, okay, cool. Amazing. There's just one quote where, where, and I'm sure she actually never said this, but it's really funny that he wrote it, that she talks about when she lived in the East Village, how she was like, it's so lively down here. It's not New York, it's Nueva York.

• 54:44Yasi Salek?

  But I don't think she ever said that.

• 54:45Speaker 05

  Right, right, right.

• 54:46Yasi Salek?

  Anyways, that's Norris Burrows, but they dated a bit. And then he invited her and he, he's been interviewed multiple times about it and he kind of was like, she wasn't exactly dying to like settle and be my girlfriend. He invites her to a party in Tribeca on May Day at a guy called Dan Gilroy's house. Uh, uh, this is another important introduction of a person. He was a painter and he was also in a band called the Acme Band with his brother Ed. And he and Madonna hit it off. She said, I fell in love with him and it turned out he was a guitar player in a band. What happened is I said, you have to teach me how to play an instrument. Sorry, real quick sidebar about Dan Gilroy, which I think is so interesting, is that he ended up becoming Shelley Duvall's partner for 34 years until she died.

• 55:32Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 55:32Yasi Salek?

  Isn't that so interesting?

• 55:33Speaker 05

  It is.

• 55:33Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Um, anyways.

• 55:35Speaker 05

  Wait, but just, just, why, remind me why Dan Gilroy is so important?

• 55:39Yasi Salek?

  Okay, so Dan Gilroy is the person who A, teaches her how to play instruments.

• 55:44Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 55:44Yasi Salek?

  He's like, I'll show you chords on a guitar. I'll teach you how to play drums and they have a band together. And this is when she really is like, I'm gonna do music and I'm gonna like, you're gonna show me. And we're, and she starts collaborating, she starts being in a band and it's all through this guy.

• 55:59Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 55:59Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 55:59Speaker 05

  That's a lot. That's big.

• 56:01Yasi Salek?

  It's big. He lived in Queens, in Flushing Meadows, and they actually, it's so amazing, they lived in a synagogue that, like, I guess the rabbi had died, and so the people that owned the synagogue just rented it as is, and that's where they lived.

• 56:13Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 56:14Yasi Salek?

  And then practiced and stuff. And so he taught her guitar, and she remembers being like, that really clicked something off in my brain, like, learning guitar. Here's a reason I want to talk about this. I feel like there's such a misconception about Madonna not being a musi- like, a songwriter, you know? And I really feel we need to debunk that.

• 56:35Speaker 05

  That's just stupid, though.

• 56:35Yasi Salek?

  It's, I know, but people are, people are stupid, you know?

• 56:38Speaker 05

  She's a songwriter. She's written, like, she's, she's, she writes songs.

• 56:43Yasi Salek?

  She writes songs. But, like, very literally, this, we're gonna get into it, and you guys need to understand how fucking cool she was, but, like, she played, she was a drummer in a band that played, like, cool, you know, fucking CBGBs and stuff, like, go with the fucking program. Real quick, though, really important, love this story, because it's so fucking weird. They're dating, they're hanging out, two Belgian producers enter the story. Their names are Jan Van Lu and Jean-Claude Pellerin.

• 57:12Speaker 05

  Are these the Born to Be Alive people?

• 57:14Yasi Salek?

  What's Born to Be Alive?

• 57:15Speaker 05

  Born, born to be alive, born to be alive. That's the French singer Patrick Hernandez.

• 57:21Yasi Salek?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 57:30Speaker 05

  You don't know it?

• 57:31Yasi Salek?

  No, babe.

• 57:31Speaker 05

  It's so good. I love it.

• 57:33Yasi Salek?

  It sounded good, the way, the way you did it.

• 57:35Speaker 05

  It's an amazing song.

• 57:37Yasi Salek?

  Well, they, I guess they're iconic, then.

• 57:40Speaker 05

  That, he's a one-hit wonder.

• 57:41Yasi Salek?

  He's a one-hit wonder.

• 57:41Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 57:42Yasi Salek?

  Well, they came to town, and they happened to, they went to see Dan and Ed's band, the Acme Band, Dan Gillis, and they got struck with conversation. They were like, we're in town because we're having an open audition for backup dancers for Patrick Hernandez.

• 57:56Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 57:56Yasi Salek?

  And Dan goes home and tells Madonna, like, well, you're a dancer, do you want to do this? She goes and tries out with it, and the Belgians become fucking obsessed with her, of course. And they're like, can you sing? And Hernanda said, while she moved marvelously well, she said she didn't know how to sing at all. And to prove it to us, she hummed Jingle Bells, but we were already seduced.

• 58:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, they were like, she's got the look.

• 58:17Yasi Salek?

  She's got the look, she's got the charisma, she's got the moves, baby. I got the motion.

• 58:22Speaker 05

  Right.

• 58:22Yasi Salek?

  I'm causing a commotion. They're like, we want you to come make a album in Paris on our label Aquarius. And Madonna, very smart, young, involves a lawyer and then is like, okay, let's go. They fire on the Concorde to Paris.

• 58:36Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 58:36Yasi Salek?

  She stays at Jan Von Lu's ten-room apartment. It's not awesome. At first, she's like, this is awesome.

• 58:43Speaker 05

  She hates it.

• 58:43Yasi Salek?

  She hates it. They give her a vocal coach and she's like, I hate this man. So she doesn't do many sessions. She does dance lessons, but she's just fucking bored. She's like, I'm unhappy, I can't be creative. I have nothing to do. Paris is fucking slow. Like, I want, like, let's go, let's go. You know, she's like, she loves New York. She's writing all these letters to Dan Gilroy at home and they keep being like, we'll give you more money. Like, what, what can we do? And

• 59:10Speaker 05

  She escapes.

• 59:11Yasi Salek?

  Yes. She basically got really sick. I think she got pneumonia or something. And she's like, I just need to go home to see my friends and I'll be back. And she literally left all her clothes because she was lying and she's like, yeah, I'll be back.

• 59:23Speaker 05

  Never comes back. Back in New York.

• 59:25Yasi Salek?

  Back in New York, left her shit, was like, bye. Broke that contract.

• 59:28Speaker 05

  Back in the synagogue.

• 59:29Yasi Salek?

  Back to the gog, babe. That's what they called it, the gog.

• 59:32Speaker 05

  Did they?

• 59:32Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. It's kind of amazing. And she gets right back to work, babe. She's like, oh, you guys are at work? I'm practicing music all day. Four hours of playing drums along to Elvis Costello records. And then she'd switch to guitar and keyboards. And then Dan would come back home and they'd work on music together. And she started to learn to write songs. This was like her, like, musical training boot camp. And she said, it was one of the happiest times of my life. I really felt loved. Sometimes I'd write sad songs and he'd sit there and cry. Very sweet.

• 1:00:01Speaker 05

  Beautiful.

• 1:00:03Yasi Salek?

  They would talk all the time about music. They loved the Police, they loved Blondie, we love Blondie.

• 1:00:09Speaker 05

  We love Blondie.

• 1:00:11Yasi Salek?

  And Prince. And then one day, their band, the Acme Band's drummer quits. And Madonna's like, I'll do it, I'll be the drummer. She's zenbed. And her first song she had written, it was called Tell the Truth. It's four chords. And she said writing it was a religious experience. Okay, I'm so sorry, quick side quest.

• 1:00:28Speaker 05

  Let's go.

• 1:00:29Yasi Salek?

  In August of 1979, she saw an ad in Backstage. Does Backstage magazine still exist?

• 1:00:33Speaker 05

  I don't think so.

• 1:00:34Yasi Salek?

  For a part in a low-budget film. The ad was looking for a dominant woman who knows how to act and dance to play a dominatrix type. And she sends the director, Stephen John Lewicki, photos of herself and a two-page handwritten letter. And the director was like, I love this, you're gorgeous, I love this letter, come audition. And she gets the part. The film is called A Certain Sacrifice. And they filmed it for a while until he ran out of money. This is gonna come back to bite her in the ass. But I just wanna mark it here. I don't think that movie even ever really came out until, until she got famous. Okay, so then Madonna's like, okay, whatever, that was a fun experience, it's not coming out, back to music. They had this group that would practice all night. Dan and Ed Gilroy, Madonna and their bass player friend Angie Smith.

• 1:01:18Yasi Salek?

  And they would jam all night and then they would go to IHOP. And they started being like, wanna do Breakfast Club about going to IHOP? And then that's what they called their band.

• 1:01:27Speaker 05

  The Breakfast Club.

• 1:01:28Yasi Salek?

  The Breakfast Club. Madonna's like, so stoked. Like, she's in a band and now she can fucking start making things happen. She starts calling everyone in town, let's book gigs, let's get a deal. She moved into the gog full-time. And they would play shows and Madonna would only sing like one or two songs. Cause she's a drummer, right?

• 1:01:47Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:01:48Yasi Salek?

  But she said Dan Gilroy had created a monster. I was always thinking in my mind, I wanna be a singer in this group too. And they didn't need another singer.

• 1:01:57Speaker 05

  Well, wait, why has Dan Gilroy created the monster? I thought it would have been like the Cheesy People in France.

• 1:02:03Yasi Salek?

  Well, I think she-

• 1:02:03Speaker 05

  Like she would've like, you're a flop, but I want to be a dancer.

• 1:02:05Yasi Salek?

  Because he taught her how to write songs. And then she was like, oh, I'm gonna like,

• 1:02:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:08Yasi Salek?

  I want to get out there and sing my stuff and be my, yeah.

• 1:02:11Speaker 05

  Yes, yes, yes. She, she doesn't want to be like in the background playing-

• 1:02:15Yasi Salek?

  Playing drums.

• 1:02:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, but she's just doing it.

• 1:02:17Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, that was her only way in because the drummer quit. She said her inspirations singing back then were Patti Smith, Ricky Lee Jones, and Chrissy Hynde, The Pretenders. She said, I didn't see many concerts. I knew about Debbie Harry and Chrissy Hynde and the Talking Heads and David Bowie, but there was no pressure for me to be in anything, to be anything specifically, to sound a certain way, to look a certain way. That's an important thing because it allowed me to develop as an artist and to be pure without any influences. They had a big break, babe. It's a show at CBGB's. But Madonna's like, you know what? This show was cool, but I don't want to be in the back.

• 1:02:52Speaker 05

  Mm-mm.

• 1:02:53Yasi Salek?

  The more songs I wrote, the more I wanted to be the front person of the band, not just playing drums. I was an excellent drummer. I was really strong and I had all this dance training, so I had all this energy. Well, the old drummer of The Breakfast Club, or of the Acme Band, which is now The Breakfast Club, comes back and is like, I'm gonna drum now. So Madonna's like, okay, I'm on keys now, closer to the front.

• 1:03:14Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:03:15Yasi Salek?

  Dan also said he couldn't help but notice when she did sing her two songs, the crowd noticeably picked up and went wild because they loved her because she is Madonna. Then also the band starts to fall apart, and I won't get too much into the weeds of this, but half of the men in the band were in love with her.

• 1:03:31Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:03:32Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And she comes to the band and she's like, I should be the lead singer, you guys. And they're like, no. And she's like, okay, I quit, bye. And the two members that were in love with her were like, we'll go with you. So they started a new, their names are Gary Burke and Mike Monahan. Um, and they briefly had a band called Madonna in the Sky. Actually, I think played a couple of shows. But then Mike had to go back to his day job. But don't worry, Mel. Fate is back, stepping in.

• 1:04:00Speaker 05

  Stephen Bray showed up in New York. Stephen Bray is the gorgeous guy that she was dating before, which was like, I'm out of Michigan.

• 1:04:07Yasi Salek?

  Exactly.

• 1:04:07Speaker 05

  Bye loser, but now he's back.

• 1:04:09Yasi Salek?

  The musician who had just, I guess, studied at Berklee College of Music, no big deal, one of the best schools. And he's like, hey, I'm coming to New York, babe. And she's like, great, I need a drummer. I have a full set of songs and we have a gig. And he's like, oh, okay, I didn't even know you were playing music. And he also said later, I don't think she actually did have a gig, but he was like, okay, I'm on my way. Yeah. So he meets up with Madonna at this place called The Music Building, which were rehearsal studios on 38th and 8th, where she had been rehearsing with Gary Burke. And they jam and Madonna had 14 songs she had written. She had to move out of the gog, because she had broken up with Dan Gilroy when she left The Breakfast Club. And she couldn't stay at her current squat because she had set it on

• 1:04:53Yasi Salek?

  fire with an electric heater, because there's no heat in the squats.

• 1:04:56Speaker 05

  Whoops.

• 1:04:57Yasi Salek?

  Whoops. So she moves into the rehearsal studios, which is really disgusting. And Stephen Bray lives there too. They live in a rehearsal room. There's one bathroom in the hallway. There's no shower. It's a toilet and a sink. She really wanted it. I just want you guys to know. Have you ever, I don't know if you ever wanted anything that bad to live in a rehearsal space and use one bathroom that doesn't have a shower?

• 1:05:17Speaker 05

  It says here on your thing that she would go out to dinner with idiots so she could go home and use their bathroom. That means she would fuck guys for showers.

• 1:05:25Yasi Salek?

  It just said dinner.

• 1:05:27Speaker 05

  Oh, sorry. I just, the reason I'm saying that I think it's like that is that I do know someone that lives in a loft in New York, and he doesn't have a shower, so he does fuck guys on Grindr and take showers.

• 1:05:40Yasi Salek?

  I think that's great.

• 1:05:41Speaker 05

  I think it's great, too.

• 1:05:42Yasi Salek?

  Madonna said, Steve and I slept between amplifiers. We budgeted with little money, we had to about $1 a day. We had credit in all the Korean delis within a five block radius of the Music Building with our dollar. And we'd get some yogurt and peanuts. And then Steve and I would fight over whether we should mix the peanuts with the yogurt. He liked to eat them together and I liked to eat them separately. When we'd run out of money, I'd pass by the garbage can in the lobby of the Music Building, and if it smelled really good. Like if there was Burger King sitting on the top, I'd open it up. And if I was lucky, there'd be french fries that hadn't been eaten. I'm a vegetarian, which is why I didn't eat the burger.

• 1:06:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, see, if we were starving and we had to eat yogurt with peanuts, would you want to mix them or eat them separately?

• 1:06:21Yasi Salek?

  I wouldn't eat them separate because it would feel like it's like two meals.

• 1:06:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, I would definitely want to mix them.

• 1:06:25Yasi Salek?

  Oh, my God. So we would also fight about this. It's interesting. Okay. Well, good thing we've economically passed that place in our lives. Anyways, they love it. I know they're struggling, but they're like, this is the most creative time. We're like living in the rehearsal space. We're fucking writing music. Madonna said, you know, I remember getting up with Steve and he'd be doing drum exercise and I'd be doing my yoga and then I'd play guitar and I'd write a song and he'd play something he had written and I'd make up the words for it. Like, what a bliss, babe. Can you imagine?

• 1:06:51Speaker 05

  What, yours is 80?

• 1:06:52Yasi Salek?

  This is 1980, yeah.

• 1:06:54Speaker 05

  This picture's crazy.

• 1:06:55Yasi Salek?

  Okay.

• 1:06:55Speaker 05

  The Chrissy Hind of it all.

• 1:06:56Yasi Salek?

  I know. This is the picture of their new band, which they couldn't come up with a name. Madonna wanted to be Madonna and they were like, no. And they were like, okay, what about No Name spelled backwards? Which sounds, because they, the way they would say it sounded like Emmy. They became Emmy and the Emmys. Although there's another story that Madonna says that was her nickname. I'm not really sure. Anyways, they're Emmy and the Emmys. Emmy and the Emmys is fucking cool. You guys, I need to understand this.

• 1:07:23Speaker 05

  I don't know anything about Emmy.

• 1:07:24Yasi Salek?

  Emmy and the Emmys is the most realized pre Madonna as solo pop star project.

• 1:07:34Yasi Salek?

  Madonna described it as, quote, deranged punk with minimal funk. There are a lot of YouTube, they made a lot of songs and there's videos on YouTube. It's good. They sound a bit like the Talking Heads. It is that sort of CBGB sound, but then there's also like a song called Do You that I'm obsessed with. There's only a clip online. They sound like the Specials. It's like two-tone ska.

• 1:07:58Yasi Salek?

  It's good. There's a Pretendersy song called Laugh to Keep From Crying. They're good. She was in a real fucking band.

• 1:08:04Speaker 05

  Some of these songs are on that pre Madonna.

• 1:08:07Yasi Salek?

  Yes.

• 1:08:07Speaker 05

  Like compilation.

• 1:08:08Yasi Salek?

  It's been put out, exactly. So I just want you guys to know, put some respect on Madonna's name. Like, she was playing in a cool fucking band in New York before you were born.

• 1:08:18Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:08:21Speaker 01

  Welcome to the 50th Hunger Games. Witness the beginning of the revolution.

• 1:08:25Speaker 06

  Hey Mitch. You've been trying to take down these games from Star.

• 1:08:28Speaker 01

  Film for IMAX.

• 1:08:30Speaker 06

  Make them remember you.

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Weeping, November 20th, rated PG-13.

• 1:08:38Yasi Salek?

  I'm so sorry. This is so important right now for the bands playing audience. My core, I think, audience. And for me, this was deeply important. Madonna, at this time, was also involved in a band called the Spinal Root Gang. Here's what Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth said. Madonna was actually in a couple of no-wave bands that nobody ever talks about. She was in a band with these two twins, Dan and Josh Braun, who were the first members of Swans. You guys, Madonna, I believe, dated Michael Gira of Swans. Emergency, okay? Two of the hottest people to ever exist in 1980 or 79 were dating. And this, to me, is like just one of the most important things in the entire world. I'm sorry.

• 1:09:23Yasi Salek?

  Okay, 1981. We're in the music building. We're living there. We're making music. We're thriving.

• 1:09:29Speaker 05

  Things are about to happen.

• 1:09:30Yasi Salek?

  Things are about to pop off, babe. Because there is an artist management company in residence at that building called Gotham Sound. It's owned by a 29-year-old gay woman named Camille Barboni. Madonna meets her, obviously. She's like, I know there's a manager in here, babe, and I'm gonna find her.

• 1:09:45Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:09:46Yasi Salek?

  She invites Barboni. I hope it's Barboni. I don't know if it's Barbone or Barboni.

• 1:09:51Speaker 05

  Carbone.

• 1:09:52Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Okay, Barbone. To watch her band Emmy and the Emmys perform at Max's Kansas City. So cool. This is one of my favorite anecdotes in Mary Gabriel's book. When Barbone goes to write the date of the show in her calendar, Madonna grabs it and throws it aside. And she's like, if it's important enough to you, you'll remember.

• 1:10:15Yasi Salek?

  They don't make people like this anymore.

• 1:10:16Speaker 05

  Well, we don't know how to remember.

• 1:10:18Yasi Salek?

  That's so true.

• 1:10:19Speaker 05

  Cause of their phones.

• 1:10:20Yasi Salek?

  But. You couldn't do that to anyone now.

• 1:10:23Speaker 05

  Now we'd be like, what the fuck are you talking about? But, um, still, it seems like a lot to remember.

• 1:10:29Yasi Salek?

  I think it's really fucking amazing to be that confident.

• 1:10:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:10:34Yasi Salek?

  I would love like 2% of that.

• 1:10:35Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:10:36Yasi Salek?

  So Barbone went and she said she'd been on stage for one and a half minutes with a lousy band. There was something about her that was sensational. She sparkled in a very street way. Do you think I sparkle in a very street way?

• 1:10:50Speaker 05

  No, but you, but you certainly sparkle.

• 1:10:53Yasi Salek?

  Thank you so much. Not in a street way, though.

• 1:10:55Speaker 05

  No.

• 1:10:55Yasi Salek?

  Okay, so she signs a contract with Gotham.

• 1:10:57Speaker 05

  How would you like a manager?

• 1:10:58Yasi Salek?

  How would you like a manager? And she was like, I would love it.

• 1:11:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:11:03Yasi Salek?

  This is just a manager for Madonna, by the way, not for the band.

• 1:11:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:11:07Yasi Salek?

  I mean, that means it's no longer.

• 1:11:08Speaker 05

  Never, never to be heard of again on this podcast.

• 1:11:11Yasi Salek?

  No, not really. This is kind of cool. The first thing Barbone does is like, okay, you're living on the floor of a rehearsal space. You clearly need help. I'm going to give you a hundred dollars a week to live on. A rehearsal space. I'm going to fix your bike so you can get around town. And she moves her into the Star Motel, which actually low key was kind of worse than the music building because she shared a bathroom with, quote, two fat Colombians and this old Irish drunk who'd just been released from the insane asylum.

• 1:11:39Speaker 05

  Sounds dangerous.

• 1:11:41Yasi Salek?

  I just again, need to point out, I don't know if anyone's wanted anything this bad. You know? Like, I don't know if I've ever lived in a place called the Star Motel, sharing a bathroom with an Irish drunk from the mental asylum and two fat Colombians.

• 1:11:55Speaker 05

  Listen, same. Thank God she did it.

• 1:11:59Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:00Speaker 05

  This reminds me of this moment many years ago, probably like over 20 years ago, when I was telling this guy about like my struggles and I'm never going to make it and blah, blah, blah. And he was like, you know, part of success is, is outlasting everybody else. And I feel like she also knows this. So there's a million chicks in New York City that want to make it, want to make it and be a big star and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And she's like, bitch, I'm going to outlast all those people, like two fat Colombians and some Irishman that just got out of the mental institution are not getting in the way of me being like the next Frida Kahlo.

• 1:12:33Yasi Salek?

  No, it's so true. I think a corollary to your thing that I think about all the time is that. Truly, like, more than half of being successful is just doing something. Because people are too embarrassed.

• 1:12:44Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:12:45Yasi Salek?

  To do anything or put themselves out there. And it's like, do you know how many embarrassing things people have had to do before they hit it big?

• 1:12:51Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:12:51Yasi Salek?

  You know?

• 1:12:52Speaker 05

  God, yeah.

• 1:12:53Yasi Salek?

  All right, so she's got a manager.

• 1:12:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:56Yasi Salek?

  She moves out of the Star Motel because she got robbed.

• 1:12:58Speaker 05

  She's on the Upper West Side.

• 1:12:59Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. She calls up Christopher Chaconi and she's like, babe, come to New York. He had studied, he, I forgot to mention, while, when she found Christopher Flynn, she also brought Christopher, her brother.

• 1:13:11Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:13:12Yasi Salek?

  To study dance there. And there was a whole, mostly because this is Madonna's story and not Christopher's story, but Christopher talks about how like, he was like, oh, I've also never seen a gay man and I didn't, maybe, you know, maybe I'm gay.

• 1:13:23Speaker 05

  Yeah. He also talks about how like, they learned dance from the same source. So they're like, sort of like connected through dance.

• 1:13:33Yasi Salek?

  And why they're, they were good in the early days, which we'll get to, as him being her backup dancer, because they are, they had the same training. Well, that's, she calls him and she's like, come to New York City. And he had, he was dancing with a company in Detroit. And so he did come, but he only stayed two months and then he came back for good a year later. Okay, Camille Barbone is like, listen, your band sucks. We're gonna get you new people. But Madonna's like, Steve Bray has to stay. And she's like, okay. The demos that she's doing at the time through Barbone's direction are really Pat Benatar, Rock Chick. Like, that was the vibe. And that obviously is not really a

• 1:14:15Yasi Salek?

  thing. One of these early demos, though, is Burning Up. Burning Up was an Emmy and the Emmy song, as far as I can understand. So it's a very old song.

• 1:14:23Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:14:24Yasi Salek?

  Which fits in with the Rock Chick thing, but I'm, when we get to it, I'm gonna die on my sword for Burning Up. Burning Up is a severely underrated song.

• 1:14:32Speaker 05

  Love.

• 1:14:32Yasi Salek?

  Love. Okay. So it's the first ever Madonna show, babe. We're finally there. We're performing as Madonna, October 9th, 1981, at Chase Park on Lower Broadway. I need an image and unfortunately it doesn't exist. Or if you have one, one of these Madonna fan sites or someone, please send it over. But she wore a cape made of dozens of fox tails.

• 1:14:54Yasi Salek?

  And leather and fishnets. It sounds a little Mad Max.

• 1:14:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:14:58Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. But she gets booked into clubs from this. People are like, she's great. And she's just like, I don't, I don't want to be a Pat Benatar. You know, I'm not feeling this. I'm, again, paraphrasing. There's no quote about that. She's getting more into dance music. This is a quote from Rolling Stone, not her saying it. This is the writer. "It was the heyday of urban contemporary radio in New York, and Madonna was captivated by the funky sounds emanating from boomboxes all over town. She started writing material in that vein, but the band and her manager hated it. She said, they weren't used to that kind of stuff. And I'd agreed with my manager to do rock, but my heart wasn't in it."

• 1:15:33Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:15:33Yasi Salek?

  And Steve Bray was really into it. So they start working on dance music. Barbone said-

• 1:15:41Speaker 05

  You're a rock chick.

• 1:15:42Yasi Salek?

  You're a rock chick. Near Eve, 1981, I thought this was extremely major, actually. Madonna opened for David Johansson of the New York Dolls at a place called My Father's Place on Long Island at a party that was thrown by a cable TV channel that had just launched, you might have heard of, called MTV.

• 1:16:01Speaker 05

  It's really amazing.

• 1:16:02Yasi Salek?

  It's really amazing.

• 1:16:02Speaker 05

  Have you ever seen this performance?

• 1:16:03Yasi Salek?

  No, have you?

• 1:16:04Speaker 05

  No.

• 1:16:05Yasi Salek?

  Oh. According to Camille Barbone, she had gotten very, she was like in talks with Columbia Records to get Madonna signed. But Madonna somehow, we don't know how, got Billy Joel's lawyer, Jay Kramer, to come and negotiate her right out of the contract with Camille Barbone. Barbone told an unauthorized biographer, "I spent everything I had on Madonna's career. It bankrupted me. She wasn't intentionally malicious, but just incapable of seeing life from anyone else's point of view. She wanted what she wanted, and if you didn't give it, she turned her back on you." I do feel like your manager's supposed to give you what you want because that's their job, but that's the end of Camille Barbone for now. And actually forever. She doesn't work with her anymore. Camille Barbone leaving means the support left, though.

• 1:16:49Yasi Salek?

  No more rent paid, no more rehearsal space. The band is gone, except for Stephen Bray. And Stephen Bray's like, fuck them. We're going to do our demos. We got this. And you know what they did with those demos?

• 1:17:00Yasi Salek?

  Well, not they, more Madonna.

• 1:17:01Speaker 05

  They took them to the clubs.

• 1:17:02Yasi Salek?

  Took them to the clubs, babe. They were like, Anars, they're not, they're not listening to demos sent into them. They're going to see what the DJs play.

• 1:17:09Speaker 05

  They want to see the look. They want to see the vibe. They want to see what cool people are doing.

• 1:17:13Yasi Salek?

  Exactly. So they have this four-song demo. It has Everybody, Stay, you love Stay.

• 1:17:18Speaker 05

  Love Stay.

• 1:17:19Yasi Salek?

  Scoobly doo boo.

• 1:17:20Speaker 05

  Scoobly boo boo, yeah.

• 1:17:23Yasi Salek?

  Uh, Don't You Know and Ain't No Big Deal. Paul Pesco, he's a guy who played on the four-track demo and actually plays on further Madonna recordings, said, "What I admire about Madonna and Steve Ray was that they had this very distinct approach or sound in mind, even in the way that she programmed her drum machine." I want you to listen to that. She programmed her drum machine. Madonna programmed the drum machine. Okay, she is a musician. She is an artist.

• 1:17:46Speaker 05

  Boobity scoop, scoop, scoop, boobity beep bop, yeah.

• 1:17:50Yasi Salek?

  Okay, so Madonna, we're at the Roxy, we're at Dance Tera, we're at Paradise Garage on Saturday nights. Friday nights was the Roxy, Wheels of Steel night. Cool Lady Blue, a woman from London, would bring together the hip-hop scenes and the new wave kids and punk kids into one space. So cool. I don't have a lot of time to do, um, a TLDR here, because we'll be here all night about the history of hip-hop, but just, I need you to know 1982 was a big year for hip-hop.

• 1:18:16Speaker 05

  It was a big year for hip-hop.

• 1:18:18Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:18Speaker 05

  The world's changing. It's a big year for New York. I mean, New York's alive.

• 1:18:22Yasi Salek?

  Again, 82, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five put out The Message, and African Babada puts out Planet Rock. These are major

• 1:18:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:18:29Yasi Salek?

  hip-hop moments, and also Planet Rock is fully a dance club anthem.

• 1:18:33Speaker 05

  I was saying to my friend who never, I, I, my friend was around, he was at Dance Tera, and I was like, "Remind me, I'm going on this podcast, remind me what you thought of her, like, at the very, very beginning, because you were at Dance Tera and you thought she was cool." And he said she was cool. When I moved to New York in 1982, people were buzzing about her in the nightclub. She had worked at a few of the coolest bars as a bartender that everyone went to. You didn't have to be gay. It was all mixed. One was called Lucky Strike. There's nothing to do with the restaurant, and it was on Third Avenue and Ninth Street on the second floor. It was great. Another place was The Red Bar, which I think was on the corner of First Avenue and Seventh Street, the East Village. Was dangerous and edgy and it had its own crew.

• 1:19:12Speaker 05

  The whole hip hop thing and liking Latin boys was just emerging for everyone liked just new wave or punk guys. She was super early and super hip. There was this great guy, a beautiful black kid with short dreads that would have been a star. His name was Michael Stewart. He was my pot dealer, for instance. He did graffiti and the police beat him up on the subway one night and he died. But before he died, there was a benefit and Madonna came to sing after she had her first hit, which was Everybody, oh my god. I'm going ahead.

• 1:19:39Yasi Salek?

  I like that you just said the thing about the graffiti artist and doing the benefit. Madonna was kind of really in that world and she was dating, this is around the time she was dating Futura.

• 1:19:49Speaker 05

  Yes, which is amazing. Who's also still around.

• 1:19:52Yasi Salek?

  Oh, yeah, totally.

• 1:19:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:19:53Yasi Salek?

  But like so major, like this is.

• 1:19:55Speaker 05

  She's just cool. She's doing it.

• 1:19:57Yasi Salek?

  She's cool.

• 1:19:58Speaker 05

  We're not there yet. I don't think she's literally, she's not the queen of New York.

• 1:20:01Yasi Salek?

  No, but I think what's important to point out is she always has had the best instinct for what's happening and about to happen.

• 1:20:10Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:20:10Yasi Salek?

  That's one of her greatest artistic skills.

• 1:20:12Speaker 05

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:20:13Yasi Salek?

  It's already here, right?

• 1:20:14Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:20:14Yasi Salek?

  Hip hop and graffiti are about to pop off and she's their front row, you know?

• 1:20:18Speaker 05

  Right, right. Everyone is kind of thinking Human League and she's thinking Futura.

• 1:20:21Yasi Salek?

  And Fab Five Freddy, exactly.

• 1:20:23Speaker 05

  And Fab Five Freddy and African Bombata and all that stuff.

• 1:20:27Yasi Salek?

  Lucky Strike is very interesting. It's a little further down my dock, but that's where she worked with Martin Burgoyne, which we're gonna get into.

• 1:20:32Speaker 05

  Got it.

• 1:20:32Yasi Salek?

  Um, okay. She would do graffiti, babe. And you know what her tag was?

• 1:20:36Speaker 05

  Boy Toy.

• 1:20:36Yasi Salek?

  That's right.

• 1:20:37Speaker 05

  So good.

• 1:20:39Yasi Salek?

  So she has met Debbie Mazur at Danceateria. Danceateria is so cool, you guys. Again, I didn't experience it and you didn't experience it. But LL Cool J worked there, the Beastie Boys worked there, Sade worked there, Keith Haring worked there, like.

• 1:20:53Speaker 05

  It's deeply fabulous.

• 1:20:54Yasi Salek?

  It's deeply fabulous. Her and Debbie.

• 1:20:57Speaker 05

  Multiple floors.

• 1:20:58Yasi Salek?

  Multiple floors. There's an elevator. That's where she met Debbie. They call it themselves the Weebo Girls, like waybos, girls with balls. This is where she meets DJ Mark Kamens. Super important. Mark Kamens and Madonna start dating.

• 1:21:12Yasi Salek?

  Madonna gives him the tape, the demo tape. And at some point, he starts playing it during his set, Everybody, the song. And the crowd loves it. More importantly, Mark Caymans did A and R. I think for Island? And he brought the tape to Chris Blackwell of Island Records, who was like, no, thank you. Apparently, Chris Blackwell, according to Mark Caymans, didn't like Madonna. And he said that, I'm not gonna sign my A and R guy's girlfriend. So that kind of backfired.

• 1:21:39Speaker 05

  I know.

• 1:21:39Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, well, he would be very, I think he's probably was really rich anyways.

• 1:21:42Speaker 05

  Bop, bop, bop.

• 1:21:45Yasi Salek?

  Apparently, Geffen also passed, but I don't have any proof of that. That's just sidely mentioned in one of the books.

• 1:21:50Speaker 05

  How can anyone be passing on everybody? It's so good, but we'll get there.

• 1:21:55Yasi Salek?

  She meets Michael Rosenblatt, because he brought Wham! To Dan Satria.

• 1:22:01Speaker 05

  Love.

• 1:22:02Yasi Salek?

  And then he's like, okay, I'll listen to your tape. And then he's like, okay, this is not amazing, but come meet with me. And he said, the girl sitting in my office was just radiating star power. I knew that there was a star sitting right there. I always ask this question, and I still do with any artist I'm interested in, which is, what do you want? What are you looking for? The wrong answer is, I want to get my art out there. The best answer was the one Madonna gave me, which was, I want to rule the world. And I thought that's a hell of an answer. But she also famously gives that answer later.

• 1:22:34Speaker 05

  Dick Clark.

• 1:22:35Yasi Salek?

  Clark.

• 1:22:36Speaker 05

  Dick Clark?

• 1:22:36Yasi Salek?

  Dick Clark, American Bandstand, yeah.

• 1:22:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:22:39Speaker 06

  We are a couple of weeks into the new year. What do you hope will happen, not only in 1984, but for the rest of your professional life? What are your dreams, what's left? To rule the world. There you go. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Madonna.

• 1:22:51Yasi Salek?

  So he's like, great, you're a star. Here's $5,000. Two 12-inch singles. And you'll get royalties and publishing fees of $1,000 for each song you write.

• 1:23:01Speaker 05

  Incredible.

• 1:23:02Yasi Salek?

  Except, not yet. Because he has to get Seymour Stein to sign off. The legend, babe. The fucking icon that is Seymour Stein. He had signed the Ramones, the Talking Heads, the Pretenders. And his label, Sire, had just become part of Warner Brothers. He's 40, he's in the hospital recovering from open heart surgery. And he describes it as encountering Florence Nightingale when Madonna comes. He said in his book, "As penicillin dropped into my heart, I lay there and listened. I liked the hook. I liked Madonna's voice. I liked the feel. I liked the name Madonna. I liked it all and I played it again." So he hits up Mark Caymans and he's like, "Bring that Madonna to see me." And he said, "I could tell she wouldn't have cared if I was like Sandra or Sarah Bernhardt

• 1:23:44Yasi Salek?

  lying in a coffin. All she cared was that one of my arms moved and that I could sign a contract. What I saw there was even more important than the one song I heard. I saw a young woman who was so determined to be a star."

• 1:23:57Speaker 05

  This part of the story is so great because just seeing her become a real success, like she really knew. Even if she was scared, it can be both things at the same time.

• 1:24:05Yasi Salek?

  I really admire that drive, that like, I'm not, I'm not letting it go until I achieve this goal.

• 1:24:15Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:24:16Yasi Salek?

  Like, I'm coming to the hospital bedside of Seymour Stein and I'm lifting his arm up to sign this signature. I don't care what happens. And you'd think this was all set in stone. No, no, babe. Seymour Stein now has to get Mo Austin, the head of Warner Brothers, to sign off. And you know what? Mo Austin said, "No, babe." He was like, "I don't like, I don't want this." I don't know what exactly he said, but I know he said no. And Seymour Stein pulled a very Yasi and Madonna move, which was like, "Okay, babe." And then went right around him to the head of Warner's international division, Nessuhi Erthugan. And Erthugan was like, "All right, I'll back the deal." So actually Madonna's initial contract was sire or was with sire and Warner International.

• 1:24:58Yasi Salek?

  Very interesting. Now it's time to record everybody for real. But who's going to produce it, Mo?

• 1:25:05Speaker 05

  Well, she has to decide between Caymans and Steve Bray.

• 1:25:10Yasi Salek?

  I know. And she ultimately chose her boyfriend Caymans, not because he was her boyfriend, but because he had more experience. Here's the thing, I think, and I'm just, this is just my personal opinion. Madonna would never choose someone because of a personal allegiance. She would always choose the person that she thought would have the best outcome.

• 1:25:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:25:26Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. She said, "I was really scared. I thought I had been given a golden egg. In my mind, I thought, okay, Mark can produce the album. Steve can play the instruments. Uh-oh, Steve wanted to produce. It was really awful, but I just didn't trust him enough." Steve was mad.

• 1:25:39Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:25:39Yasi Salek?

  Steve left. Steve didn't talk to her anymore for two years. October 1982, the everybody's single comes out. I'm very interested in this right now because the cover art, was Madonna one of the most gorgeous women to exist? Yes. Is there a picture of her on the cover of the single?

• 1:25:57Speaker 05

  No.

• 1:25:58Yasi Salek?

  No. It's a colorful street scene, a collage of downtown New York City by a Michigan raised illustrator named Lou Beach, who had actually done stuff for The Carpenters and The Police. This is a time where there was black radio and there was white radio. It was bifurcated like that. And Madonna's music, as hard as maybe to wrap your mind around now, was in the R and B tradition. They didn't know where to put it because they were like, well, we can't, it's not white radio music. And so they serviced it to black radio. And I think they didn't want to really reveal what she looked like because then people could imagine she was Puerto Rican or she was black, you know?

• 1:26:43Yasi Salek?

  Like even Michael Rosenblatt was like, I thought I could get a lot of R and B play on that record because a lot of people thought she was black. Isn't that interesting? Just not, it's not the misleading building, the thing she's black, but the more of the idea that like, in this era of pop music, what we now consider to just all pop music is rooted in black music? You know, like it's wouldn't, you wouldn't even think to make the distinction. But back then it was like, you're one or the other.

• 1:27:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:27:09Yasi Salek?

  Everybody popped off, babe. The clubs loved it. You know, I said it's, it's serviced to black radio and that's important. But what's really important is Mark Kamens takes it to a guy named Larry Levon, who was a legendary DJ from Paradise Garage, and he loved it. He would play the nine minute dub version. So sick, man. We used to be a proper fucking society with nine minute dub versions of songs. And he played it for Frankie Crocker, who was a DJ at the R and B station WBLS. Fun fact, Shep Pettibone also was a DJ there, I think a little bit later, though. And Frankie Crocker is the first person to put Madonna on the radio. He puts everybody on the radio and within a month, it's number one on their playlist and number three on the Billboard dance charts. Here's what Fab Five Freddie said about the song.

• 1:27:52Yasi Salek?

  He was like, I was walking down Avenue A and about 20 steps ahead of me were these three young Puerto Rican girls. They were really hot and sexy and I was watching them walk down the street and they had a little boombox with them. And I remember, I was like, whatever this record is, these girls are really into it. They were singing and walking and switching down the street. And as I get a little closer to them, I realized it was Madonna's record.

• 1:28:12Speaker 05

  It's a hard song.

• 1:28:13Yasi Salek?

  It's so fucking cool. Everybody.

• 1:28:25Yasi Salek?

  Okay, so Madonna's like, I have a song on the fucking radio, babe. It's number three on the dance charts. I'm gonna move out of my place because Future did graffiti all over the apartment and I have to leave. And she gets her own place on Fourth between Avenue A and B. Right next door to a 19 year old guy called Martin Burgoyne. Hell yeah. Another doo doo doo, important figure.

• 1:28:48Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:28:49Yasi Salek?

  An important gay.

• 1:28:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, her first gay bestie.

• 1:28:52Yasi Salek?

  Her first, like, yeah, not gay mentor, but gay bestie. They're inseparable. Christopher Chaconi said that Martin Burgoyne was very influential on the way Madonna dressed. Because he would always wear like a little boys jacket and knee length shorts and like flat shoes with little socks. And I'm like, oh, I could see that, you know? He was British, I believe.

• 1:29:12Yasi Salek?

  He is the one that introduced her to your friend.

• 1:29:16Speaker 05

  Maripole.

• 1:29:16Yasi Salek?

  Maripole, Moroccan born, French raised jewelry designer, Maripole, who was the art director at the Fieruji store.

• 1:29:23Speaker 05

  Yeah. Anyway, Maripole invented the rubber bracelet.

• 1:29:28Yasi Salek?

  Which is so crazy.

• 1:29:29Speaker 05

  Huge.

• 1:29:29Yasi Salek?

  Which also, I just wanna say something that's really fucked up. I called Hot Topic today in the Burbank Mall to try to procure some rubber bracelets for this podcast. And they were like, we don't have any. And I was like, what has happened to our country? We're in shambles.

• 1:29:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, you know, the 80s are inching back, so maybe it'll come back. Maybe the, maybe the rubber. Rubber bracelet comes in and out of.

• 1:29:49Yasi Salek?

  It's been back babe, like Warped Tortines wore it like.

• 1:29:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:29:53Yasi Salek?

  I just feel if we can't count on Hot Topic to stock black rubber bracelets, what are we doing? Is it the tariffs?

• 1:30:00Speaker 05

  God, I love, I love rubber bracelets so much.

• 1:30:04Yasi Salek?

  They're so cool.

• 1:30:04Speaker 05

  I love, I mean, I, I style and I never use rubber bracelets. I should.

• 1:30:09Yasi Salek?

  You know where they have them? I hate to say it, but Jeff Bezos, he does have plenty of them. I saw them on his website.

• 1:30:13Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 1:30:14Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. He personally has it in his closet, but also on his website. So this is when she's bartending at Lucky Strike, like your friend mentioned, with Martin and Erica Bell.

• 1:30:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:30:24Yasi Salek?

  They apparently saved up money and or stole money from the register, unclear, and went to England for the first time. And I loved the story because Martin was best friends with Mark Almond from Soft Cell.

• 1:30:34Speaker 05

  So cool.

• 1:30:35Yasi Salek?

  So cool. And he was out of town and they stated it as like bed sit that apparently.

• 1:30:39Speaker 05

  What does that mean?

• 1:30:40Yasi Salek?

  Bed sits were like a room you could rent, apparently. Like it was like these like shitty like dorm style things. If I'm getting it wrong, I'm sorry, because I'm not British, but like from what I understand, they were like very low cost rental rooms.

• 1:30:54Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:30:55Yasi Salek?

  He said it was a hellhole, Mark Almond. He said there were prostitutes upstairs, junkies downstairs, and it was a bare room with a bed, nylon sheets and a kitchenette with dirty plates and a lamp. I've always felt ashamed that she stayed in such a pit. If I had known in 1983 how huge she'd become, I'd have cut up the sheets and sold them on eBay. Mark Almond, amazing. Then she starts dating Jean-Michel Basquiat in late 1982. Kind of incredible, no?

• 1:31:19Speaker 05

  It is.

• 1:31:19Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:20Speaker 05

  I mean, 1982 is, is great in New York City.

• 1:31:24Yasi Salek?

  And just like she really hadn't, she really had a knack for being drawn to really cool, talented people. Like she could identify them before the world had, you know?

• 1:31:36Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:31:37Yasi Salek?

  Um, they're together for a while, but it was a bit rocky because he had a drug problem.

• 1:31:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, he's a heroin addict.

• 1:31:42Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. All right, 1983.

• 1:31:45Speaker 05

  Okay, now we're like really cooking with gas.

• 1:31:48Yasi Salek?

  Like full in flames in Fuego babe, because we're burning up.

• 1:31:52Speaker 05

  We're on fire.

• 1:31:53Yasi Salek?

  We're on fire. Hot, hot, hot, hot, hot, hot.

• 1:32:06Yasi Salek?

  Burning Up single comes out March 9th, 1982.

• 1:32:08Speaker 05

  Come on, let go. What a great song. Come on. Who wrote this shit?

• 1:32:16Yasi Salek?

  Madonna, Louise, Veronica, Shikoni bitch. She wrote this song, okay? Only credited songwriter.

• 1:32:24Speaker 05

  It's such a great song.

• 1:32:25Yasi Salek?

  It is produced by Reggie Lucas, I believe. It was a heavyweight R and B producer.

• 1:32:34Speaker 05

  Come on, let go. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm trying not to sing yet because we gotta keep this moving. But this song is fucking great.

• 1:32:42Yasi Salek?

  I really feel it is unfairly slept on. And maybe I'm wrong. Maybe people are not, people are wide awake about it. But I don't hear it talked about enough. I feel like when people talk about it, they're like, oh, that's her. That's like the weird rock song. Because it is kind of a rock song. It's incredible. It's so catchy, the fucking bassline. It's like, also, I think it's important to point out, this is pretty much, I think, the first really sexually explicit lyrical song.

• 1:33:09Speaker 05

  By Madonna?

• 1:33:10Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. And we've only put out one song. But also, even on the first album, the rest are-

• 1:33:15Speaker 05

  The lyrics are great. She wrote it.

• 1:33:17Yasi Salek?

  She wrote it.

• 1:33:17Speaker 05

  The lyrics are great.

• 1:33:18Yasi Salek?

  You can tell she wrote it.

• 1:33:19Speaker 05

  This is a great song. I love it so much.

• 1:33:21Yasi Salek?

  I have no shame. I'm on fire.

• 1:33:23Speaker 05

  I'm not the same. I have no shame. I'm on fire. This song is very autobiographical.

• 1:33:27Yasi Salek?

  Do you want me down on my knees or bending over backwards now, would you please?

• 1:33:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, like, is she desperate? Get used to it. It's fucking Madonna. And, and takes no prisoners, you know?

• 1:33:46Yasi Salek?

  I love it so much.

• 1:33:47Speaker 05

  She's alive and she knows that she wants, that you want to want her.

• 1:33:50Yasi Salek?

  You want to want me, but you can't let go. Come on, let go.

• 1:33:54Speaker 05

  It's just great.

• 1:33:55Yasi Salek?

  It's great, okay. Stephen Bray and Paul Pascoe play guitar and do programming. Fred Zar, Butch Jones and Ed Walsh on synth and Bobby Maloch on tenor saxophone. All produced by Reggie Lucas, who, once sire, was like, everybody fucking popped off. Like, we can invest a little more money. That's enough. Mark Kamen, thank you so much. We need a real producer now. And Reggie Lucas had worked with Roberta Flack. He produced- I think he helped write the song or wrote the song Never Knew Love Like This Before.

• 1:34:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, that song's good.

• 1:34:25Yasi Salek?

  Reggie Lucas said, "When Warner Brothers called me about working with Madonna, I was the big score. It seemed ridiculous in retrospect, but I was an established professional and she was a nobody. I met with her in a tiny little apartment she had in the Lower East Side. I thought she was vivacious and sexy and interesting and had a lot of energy." Okay, I was obsessed with this quote. "Most of the people around Madonna at the corporate level did not get her and for the most part did not like her. You could see them recoil from her bohemianism. Everybody thought she was crazy and gross." What? They thought she was crazy and gross? Josie Grossi.

• 1:34:58Speaker 05

  People are always gonna find Madonna disgusting from this moment.

• 1:35:02Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:35:02Speaker 05

  Until now.

• 1:35:03Yasi Salek?

  There'll always be people that will recoil.

• 1:35:05Speaker 05

  Revolted by Madonna.

• 1:35:07Yasi Salek?

  You're so right, and that's part of like the most insane appeal. Um, the B-side of Burning Up is Physical Attraction.

• 1:35:14Speaker 05

  I love Physical Attraction.

• 1:35:15Yasi Salek?

  Reggie Lucas wrote it. What we need to talk about is the artwork. Cover art. Martin Burgoyne designed it.

• 1:35:22Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:35:23Yasi Salek?

  He was inspired by Andy Warhol and the cover of the Rolling Stones' Some Girls, 1978. But again, interestingly, because of the color palette, an author named Mark Bago, who wrote Madonna: Blonde Ambition, he observed that the design obscures her skin tone, so she could still be mixed race or Puerto Rican.

• 1:35:44Speaker 05

  I have heard from many, a friend who was around at this time, like black and Puerto Rican friends of New York.

• 1:35:50Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:51Speaker 05

  That it was, it was very that. Like you didn't know, you just assumed that Madonna was black or Puerto Rican.

• 1:35:57Yasi Salek?

  Or mixed race, yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:58Speaker 05

  Because it is, that's like where it is, and then it was really cool and it was very of that thing.

• 1:36:06Yasi Salek?

  Okay, great video too, by the way, I gotta point out, directed by Steve Barron. Yeah. He had done Toto, Africa, and Billie Jean by Michael Jackson, ever heard of that?

• 1:36:15Speaker 05

  It's a fine video.

• 1:36:17Yasi Salek?

  She's so pretty.

• 1:36:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, she's so pretty in it. And, and, and she's writhing around, I actually can feel myself right now as a seven-year-old.

• 1:36:25Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:25Speaker 05

  Being like just her in the middle of the street, maybe?

• 1:36:29Yasi Salek?

  There's a car.

• 1:36:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, like on concrete and there's a car and she's sort of bending over backwards.

• 1:36:34Yasi Salek?

  Now would you please?

• 1:36:35Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:36:36Yasi Salek?

  Okay, now I need to talk about Chacony Youth, because again, pertinent to the band's playing audience. Like we said, Sonic, Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon and Madonna were names. Shikoni Youth is a Sonic Youth side project that featured Mike Watt and Jay Mascis. And it was actually, Mike Watt, as you guys know, from the Minutemen and Firehose. When Dee Boon from the Minutemen passed away, he was very depressed and he visited Sonic Youth. And they were like, okay, let's start a side project. Let's like get him doing music again. And so in 1986, a seven inch single is released in the United States on New Alliance Records, under the name Shikoni Youth, and it was Mike Watt performing Madonna's "Burn It Up." Well, also the B-side of that, just so you know, is a cover of Into the Groove, called Into the Groovy.

• 1:37:16Speaker 05

  Nice.

• 1:37:17Yasi Salek?

  Just wonderful, wonderful fucking stuff. Again, this is not until 86, but just know that that exists, you guys. And just like comfort yourself in your heart that that exists. All right, "Burn It Up" is doing well. We have two singles out. Madonna and her crew, Erica Bell, Bags Riley, Martin and her brother Christopher, fly to the UK for two weeks of little shows. They had a name for them, track shows? Is that what, do you remember them being called?

• 1:37:41Speaker 05

  I don't know, but I just remember that they didn't have a good time.

• 1:37:44Yasi Salek?

  They didn't have a good time. They basically, I think that track show is like, there's no band, there's no music. It's just like-

• 1:37:50Speaker 05

  Oh, track, right, right.

• 1:37:51Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, they're playing the track and then they're dancing and maybe lip syncing, yeah. They played the hacienda in Manchester, which I'm just like absolutely deceased, dying, imagining a fanfiction where her and Sean Ryder from the Happy Mondays cross paths, which they would have, because that's the exact Happy Mondays time.

• 1:38:07Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:38:07Yasi Salek?

  She gets into some British music magazines. There's a quote for her in a thing called Flexi Pop where she's like, "I think it's really important to exude sexuality on stage, but I don't think I have to entice men. I don't think people have to be aroused sexually by what you wear. I get over that by way of being sexy, just by the way I sing and move on stage." All right, they get back. It's time to keep working on the album. Madonna's a little feeling-

• 1:38:34Yasi Salek?

  If I'm, should be so bold to say, a little hemmed in by Reggie Lucas's production style. She said, "It wasn't until my first album was three quarters of the way done that I realized, hey, I know a lot more about this than I'm allowing myself to speak out about. So I started going backward and stripping the songs down and making them more sparse. Until then, they'd been layered with a lot of stuff." I mean, I never knew love like this before, Guy, is coming in, making that kind of sound.

• 1:39:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, I can imagine, yes, and this album, Madonna's production is very sparse. So she clearly got what she wanted, to a certain extent.

• 1:39:08Yasi Salek?

  Totally, which again, makes so much sense because she comes out of the, she's just come out of Emmy and the Emmys, like, playing kind of post-punk, new wave, which is kind of sparse, you know? Okay, so Ain't No Fun, anyways.

• 1:39:20Speaker 05

  I don't even know that fucking song.

• 1:39:21Yasi Salek?

  Doesn't matter, because yeah, because that song doesn't exist because it got sold to another artist.

• 1:39:25Speaker 05

  Oh, okay.

• 1:39:26Yasi Salek?

  And it couldn't be on the album. And they were like, fuck, we need a song. So Rosenblatt, the A and R, takes Madonna out to LA to meet with Warner Brothers, to try to be like, "Hey, can you give us more money? Hey." Because they needed another song to finish the album, they're out of money. And he remembers going to his mom's house, and he's like, "My mom pulls me aside before we leave and goes, 'Do you think you should tell Madonna to take the rags out of her hair before you go meet Warner Brothers?'"

• 1:39:54Speaker 05

  The rags are so good.

• 1:39:57Yasi Salek?

  Also, I want to pause a thing, which I didn't find any direct correlation, but I'm so interested to know, because I don't know if you remember, but Viv Albertine and the Slits, that, and Ari Up did that with their hair.

• 1:40:10Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:40:11Yasi Salek?

  And also, Viv Albertine really had kind of a similar style of like, little like, lacy tights and like, shoot, you know? I'm wondering if Madonna ever saw that, because, or if it just trickled its way down. Anyways, he brings her, importantly, to Freddie Demand.

• 1:40:27Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:40:28Yasi Salek?

  Or Seymour Stein does, who at the time was managing Michael Jackson.

• 1:40:31Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:40:32Yasi Salek?

  And he was like, "Okay, I'll come see you." Flies out.

• 1:40:36Speaker 05

  How long does Freddie become her manager for?

• 1:40:38Yasi Salek?

  For a really long time.

• 1:40:39Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:40:40Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I think it's a really long time, until he's like, retiring because he's old.

• 1:40:44Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:40:45Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, because they start Maverick together, like, it's a quite a, quite a long time. He flew out to Sierra Studio 54 for Furuji's 50th anniversary party on my birthday, May 19th. I was one. Um, performance is a hit. Free demand is in. However, Michael Jackson is no longer his client. And they thought that she would be bummed about that, but she was actually apparently thrilled because she was like, "You can pay more attention to me. I'm the most important now." This is the part that you liked when she goes to the Seder.

• 1:41:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, oh my god.

• 1:41:15Yasi Salek?

  So Michael Rosenblatt in LA had brought her to a Seder.

• 1:41:18Speaker 05

  Rosenblatt, you guys, I know you understand what that means.

• 1:41:21Yasi Salek?

  Well, Seymour Stein, Mo Austin, these are all Jewish people.

• 1:41:26Speaker 05

  These are my people.

• 1:41:27Yasi Salek?

  They go to Chasen's restaurant and she sings verses of the Hagata.

• 1:41:31Speaker 05

  Oh, god.

• 1:41:32Yasi Salek?

  Can you sing a couple of verses of the Hagata?

• 1:41:34Speaker 05

  Da, da, eh, nu. Oh, oh, um, shit, uh, the Hagata.

• 1:41:38Yasi Salek?

  I'm sorry, am I saying it wrong?

• 1:41:39Speaker 05

  Well, no, uh, you know. Let my people go. But Madonna vibes. It's great. It's fucking great.

• 1:41:48Yasi Salek?

  She's wearing her crosses. It's so good.

• 1:41:50Speaker 05

  That's great.

• 1:41:51Yasi Salek?

  But guess what? Everyone loved her. They loved, they loved it that she was so charming and they're like, yep, "Here's ten grand. Go make it, go make another song."

• 1:41:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:41:59Yasi Salek?

  Madonna has a new boyfriend. I'm not laughing. It's so cool. She should, I would, I should be so lucky. She's had more boyfriends in one year than I've had in my life. And this new boyfriend is named John Jellybean Benitez.

• 1:42:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, one of the main boyfriends.

• 1:42:11Yasi Salek?

  You might have heard of him.

• 1:42:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:42:13Yasi Salek?

  He was, I guess at the time, one of the most important deejays in New York City. He was raised in the South Bronx by his mother, who had emigrated from Puerto Rico. The place he did his called Fun House, which had originally opened as a gay club, um, and was kind of struggling, but Jellybean came and brought in like a Latin music scene and audience. So she's like, "My album's almost done. Can you please remix these three songs, which were Burning Up and Lucky Star?" And Michael Rosenblatt told him, "Listen, if you can find an eighth song for the album, you can produce it wherever. I'll give you a bonus. I don't know." And he's like, "Guess what, bitch? I have one right here."

• 1:42:48Speaker 05

  What's it called?

• 1:42:50Yasi Salek?

  It's called Holiday.

• 1:42:51Speaker 05

  Good, thank you.

• 1:42:52Yasi Salek?

  First, one, one more piece of information, then we're gonna talk about the album. And the piece of information is a woman named Liz Rosenberg. Ever heard of her, bitch?

• 1:43:00Speaker 05

  She's the gatekeeper of Madonna and press.

• 1:43:03Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:04Speaker 05

  Madonna press, like, remember, this is like, you know.

• 1:43:07Yasi Salek?

  I also think-

• 1:43:07Speaker 05

  Need I, I'm, there, I just have to say that this is like forty years before the internet. And like, she is gate-kept, but she's also everywhere and hugely famous beyond belief. So it all has to go through Liz Rosenberg, so she really is famous in her own right.

• 1:43:22Yasi Salek?

  I think she was really crucial.

• 1:43:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, I do too.

• 1:43:25Yasi Salek?

  Her other clients, Cher, Prince, Rod Stewart, and Van Halen at the time.

• 1:43:28Speaker 05

  Incredible.

• 1:43:29Yasi Salek?

  All right, Madonna.

• 1:43:31Speaker 05

  The album, it is released July twenty-seventh, nineteen eighty-three. Look at it, look at it.

• 1:43:36Yasi Salek?

  Gorgeous.

• 1:43:37Speaker 05

  Look at that fucking motherfucking album.

• 1:43:39Yasi Salek?

  What a face.

• 1:43:40Speaker 05

  What a great album, guys.

• 1:43:41Yasi Salek?

  The sleeve is designed by Martin Burgoyne?

• 1:43:44Speaker 05

  No, the Martin Burgoyne one didn't work out. It's sort of like a, she's wearing a yellow outfit.

• 1:43:49Yasi Salek?

  Right, right.

• 1:43:49Speaker 05

  She said it wasn't iconic enough.

• 1:43:50Yasi Salek?

  So he initially designed one?

• 1:43:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, Madonna was like, no, no, no, this wasn't iconic enough. And it's not, it's not this. This is really, really good.

• 1:43:58Yasi Salek?

  This one is actually shot by Gary Hiri and art directed by Karen Goldberg.

• 1:44:03Speaker 05

  Okay, I'm assuming that Maripole styled it.

• 1:44:06Yasi Salek?

  Oh, well, I'm ju- judging.

• 1:44:07Speaker 05

  Because of the, the mix of rubber bracelets and chains and all that, and she invented the rubber bracelet.

• 1:44:11Yasi Salek?

  I think Maripole was styling her this whole time, like, for the Fierro Richi party, like, she's, once they kind of met, and I didn't really, we didn't talk about it, but yeah, she's like really in the mix. And Christopher Shiconi said in his book that like, she had the greatest influence, in, at least in the, on the early look of Madonna. Well, you already know, it went five times platinum and sold, um, ten million copies worldwide, but let's go through the songs.

• 1:44:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, oh my god, let's do it.

• 1:44:36Yasi Salek?

  Lucky Star.

• 1:44:37Speaker 05

  I love Lucky Star.

• 1:44:38Yasi Salek?

  I want you to know that she wrote it on a Casio Tone keyboard that apparently Michael Rosenblatt or Seymour Stein, if you, two different stories, gave her, and written by Madonna.

• 1:44:47Speaker 05

  And she clearly loves it, because she's still playing it. No.

• 1:44:52Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I think, well, again, she wrote it, so I think that's a telltale sign of, you know, I'm gonna love this song, it's one of the first songs I wrote, and it was a hit. Lucky Star does have a video.

• 1:45:02Speaker 05

  The Lucky Star video is cute, by the way.

• 1:45:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, Lucky Star's a cute video, Burning Up is a cute video, Borderline is a Madonna video.

• 1:45:18Yasi Salek?

  Well, let's talk about the song first, Reggie Lucas' Borderline. I want to talk really briefly about the Lin drum machine, which is used all over this album. I just think it's interesting for people that maybe did not remember a time before Ableton, or whatever, before the LM1, which was the precursor to the Lin drum machine, created by American engineering guitarist Roger Lynn, he was like, you know what, drum machines sound like shit. I want a machine that really sounds good. And the keyboardist of Toto, Steve Procaro, was like, why don't you record samples of real drums? Because before that, that's not what drum machines were. They were like synthesized, made of synthesized sound.

• 1:46:02Yasi Salek?

  What's so crazy is there's a guy named Art Wood, who, I don't know if he's still alive, played most of the drums on this Lin drum machine, and this Lin drum machine was used on like every song in the 80s, so every song you've ever heard in the 80s is Art Wood playing drums. Technically. That's so interesting. And the handclaps were by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. And the first song ever to hit the top 10 using the Lin, well, the first one, I think, was Human League's Love Action.

• 1:46:29Speaker 05

  Great song.

• 1:46:30Yasi Salek?

  Great song. Anyways, that's it.

• 1:46:30Speaker 05

  Also, I would assume Toto, the keyboardist of Toto, would have been a good person to get the advice from, because Toto's keyboardist was incredible.

• 1:46:38Yasi Salek?

  Was a fucking major player.

• 1:46:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:46:40Yasi Salek?

  They used the Lin drum on this album a bunch. They also used some live drums, but it's mostly Lin drum. And then the piano you hear on Borderline, which I think gives it like that beautiful bit of melancholy, is a Fender Rhodes.

• 1:47:00Yasi Salek?

  Let's talk about the video. I think what's really important to note is who directed it.

• 1:47:04Speaker 05

  Mary Lambert.

• 1:47:05Yasi Salek?

  This is gonna be a long time creative collaboration.

• 1:47:08Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 1:47:10Yasi Salek?

  She was art school friends with Tina Waymouth and Chris Franz from The Talking Heads. And she had tried to direct a video for the Tom Tom Club. But I guess Sire didn't want to do it or didn't want to hire her. And instead, they were like, why don't you do this Madonna video? And that's how it happened. I can't. This video, the story, the arc, she's caught between her Latin boyfriend and this rich British photographer. I don't really know how you're supposed to know he's British because he never speaks. And obviously, it's a music video. But in the description, it says he's British. Did you get that from him?

• 1:47:43Speaker 05

  All I can see is her at the photo shoot.

• 1:47:45Yasi Salek?

  Spray painting of his car. Yeah, with that big bow on her head.

• 1:47:51Speaker 05

  It's just life changing.

• 1:48:01Yasi Salek?

  Anyway, she's so beautiful, even with that fuck ass striped hat with the bow. Do you know what I'm talking about?

• 1:48:05Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:48:06Yasi Salek?

  If you could look good in that fuck ass striped hat with the big bow, you're the most beautiful person on earth. If I wore that right now, absolute clown on earth.

• 1:48:13Speaker 05

  Recently, I saw some like restored high res, I wish I knew where they were on my phone, pictures of like the fluorescent green pumps and the leggings and stuff. And it just, it goes so crazy.

• 1:48:24Yasi Salek?

  Orange. Alright, we talked about Burning Up already because it was a single. What about I Know It?

• 1:48:29Speaker 05

  Newsflash, I'll go, I'll go on BandSplend and talk shit about stuff and be like, I'm not interested in that.

• 1:48:34Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:35Speaker 05

  But that's not gonna happen on this episode. I, I have nothing to say but, but like, love. I love, I love I Know It.

• 1:48:42Yasi Salek?

  There are a couple of songs where I'm gonna come out and say this is not for me, but this is not one of them.

• 1:48:45Speaker 05

  Oh, sorry. There is not a song on this album that I don't love. I love them all. Obviously, I Know It is an album track.

• 1:48:53Yasi Salek?

  The thing about that song is it sounds very dated now.

• 1:49:04Yasi Salek?

  Holiday. Now it's time.

• 1:49:05Speaker 05

  Okay, I gotta say, I don't give a shit about Holiday anymore, but obviously it's amazing.

• 1:49:10Yasi Salek?

  Do you think it's because you heard it too many times?

• 1:49:12Speaker 05

  I think I've heard it too many times. But, but if I am listening to this album, I'm gonna skip Holiday, but it's great. I, I, Holiday's great, whatever.

• 1:49:21Yasi Salek?

  It's really great. Okay, I'm gonna tell you the story of it real quick.

• 1:49:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:49:23Yasi Salek?

  This is the one Jelly Bean Benita's brought in. It was written by Curtis Hudson and Lisa Stevens that were in a band called Pure Energy. The original sounds a bit different, um, obviously, because Madonna Madonna did it up and Jelly Bean Jelly Bean did it up. Madonna plays cowbell. That cowbell on there, that's Madonna. Ding ding. Um, the background vocals were Norma Jean Wright and Tina Baker, and this also has Rhodes piano, which also gives it a bit of melancholy. It's why Holiday is so good, because Holiday is this like celebratory song, but it has an undercurrent of like a bit of sadness. It really is a song of like, oh, you can go out Saturday, bitch, but Sunday's gonna come.

• 1:49:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:49:57Yasi Salek?

  You know?

• 1:50:07Yasi Salek?

  So it actually came out at first as a double A-side with Lucky Star. It hit number 31 on the Dance Club Songs, but then, a month later, it hit number one and stayed there for five weeks.

• 1:50:20Speaker 05

  Yeah. Hey, do we know what, what it got to on the Hot 100?

• 1:50:23Yasi Salek?

  It peaked at number 16.

• 1:50:25Speaker 05

  This makes sense with my Punk Palace memory of like, it's pre superstardom. I remember ripping out from Star Hits Magazine a picture of Madonna from Holiday and putting it on the wall in the basement where I created a Punk Palace. Punk Palace. And, uh, and, uh, and it was dreadlocks. It was like pre this hair.

• 1:50:49Yasi Salek?

  There's only-

• 1:50:49Speaker 05

  She had dreads.

• 1:50:50Yasi Salek?

  There's only a few photos of that on the internet.

• 1:50:52Speaker 05

  Yeah. Oh, interesting.

• 1:50:53Yasi Salek?

  They seem to be like temporary dreads, like not like real, real dreads, you know what I mean?

• 1:50:57Speaker 05

  Maybe. It was just like somehow-

• 1:50:58Yasi Salek?

  Like with gel or something, you know?

• 1:50:59Speaker 05

  I think of Holiday as being the dreads and it's right before she really pops.

• 1:51:04Yasi Salek?

  Holiday is, Holiday is the crossover song for sure. Think of me, I just for some reason have no notes, not even though I like the song.

• 1:51:10Speaker 05

  I love it. Next?

• 1:51:11Yasi Salek?

  Uh, Physical Attraction.

• 1:51:12Speaker 05

  I love it.

• 1:51:12Yasi Salek?

  You already said you loved it.

• 1:51:13Speaker 05

  You don't love it.

• 1:51:14Yasi Salek?

  I think Burning Up is stronger. I was just making the point that I understand why Burning Up is the A-side and this is the B-side. I do like it. I have-

• 1:51:20Speaker 05

  Attraction.

• 1:51:21Yasi Salek?

  I can't stress to you enough that these first three albums- All I can forget.

• 1:51:26Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:51:26Yasi Salek?

  Everything on earth and the last things when I have dementia and I'm going out will be the lyrics to all of these songs. I I realized I hadn't put on, and this is my bad, because what the fuck am I doing with my dumb life? I hadn't put on True Blue in so long. And I put it on and I was like, every word right here, top of the fucking mind. I'm catching my whole life, I'm walking my dog, I'm singing at the top of my lungs. I know every word from point one to the end of the fucking CD.

• 1:51:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, me too.

• 1:51:51Yasi Salek?

  It's never gonna leave.

• 1:51:51Speaker 05

  It's never gonna leave me either. I I feel the same way. Um, and everybody is the best.

• 1:51:56Yasi Salek?

  Where is it? Come on, dance and sing. Um, so, okay, she gets offered her first, I mean, if we don't count A Certain Sacrifice or the egg, raw egg eating.

• 1:52:04Speaker 05

  Which we don't.

• 1:52:05Yasi Salek?

  She gets her first role in a small, or the film is not small, the role is small, Vision Quest. I don't know who it's directed by, but produced by John Peters.

• 1:52:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, which we love.

• 1:52:15Yasi Salek?

  Iconic. It's shot in Spokane, Washington. She plays herself, a club singer. This is important not because of her acting art, because she's just singing songs, but because of the songs. Because what do we got from this? A little song.

• 1:52:26Speaker 05

  Gambler.

• 1:52:27Yasi Salek?

  That's the one you went to first?

• 1:52:28Speaker 05

  No, I was just, I was just heating you up. I was gassing you up. What's the song?

• 1:52:32Yasi Salek?

  Crazy for you, babe.

• 1:52:34Speaker 05

  Crazy for you.

• 1:52:35Yasi Salek?

  Bah, bah, bah.

• 1:52:46Yasi Salek?

  Okay, I'm gonna point, paint you a picture. I'm in the first grade.

• 1:52:49Speaker 05

  Yes, you are.

• 1:52:50Yasi Salek?

  I'm in love with Ryan Yamamoto.

• 1:52:52Speaker 05

  Yes, you are.

• 1:52:53Yasi Salek?

  I'm sitting on the monkey bars.

• 1:52:54Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:52:55Yasi Salek?

  Singing this to myself, gazing lovingly upon.

• 1:52:58Speaker 05

  Oh, wow. Yes.

• 1:53:00Yasi Salek?

  Yearning.

• 1:53:00Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:53:02Yasi Salek?

  If you're out there, Ryan Yamamoto. Who went to Arnold Elementary School in Torrance, California. Just know that I was singing Crazy for You on the monkey bars, gazing lovingly at you across the playground. Uh, written by John Bettis and John Lind, uh, breakout song of the film, The Gambler is fine.

• 1:53:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, it doesn't matter. Gambler doesn't matter, but Crazy for You is one of the greats. Yeah.

• 1:53:22Yasi Salek?

  And there was a third song, apparently, that she had just reconciled with Stephen Bray. It's called Warning Signs. It is not used. I've never heard it.

• 1:53:28Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:53:29Yasi Salek?

  I'm sure you could, but I have not.

• 1:53:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, me either.

• 1:53:31Yasi Salek?

  Jelly Bean produced both these songs. Now it's eighty-four. In January, it's when she starts to hit the circuits, babe, to do holiday press. And that includes Dick Clark's American Bandstand, from which, A, we got a very iconic look.

• 1:53:46Yasi Salek?

  Just a few layers of studded belts, looking cool as hell. And we get the best little interview clip.

• 1:53:52Speaker 05

  Yes. What does he say to her?

• 1:53:53Yasi Salek?

  What do you want to do, I think? And what does she say?

• 1:53:56Speaker 05

  To rule the world.

• 1:53:58Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:53:59Yasi Salek?

  I want to rule the world.

• 1:54:00Speaker 05

  It's great.

• 1:54:00Yasi Salek?

  Then she goes on Top of the Pops in the UK with Christopher and Erica Bell. And then she does the Tube Live special back at the Hacienda in Manchester. Christopher, Erica Bell, she does Burning Up also. This is an insane tidbit. I previously said about the Hacienda that I was imagining fanfiction of Sean Ryder from Happy Mondays. Oh, but don't worry, a real thing actually happened, not with Sean Ryder. Apparently Peter Hook from New Order came backstage during this time and was like, here's 50 quid, can you give me a private dance? And she was like, fuck off.

• 1:54:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, wow.

• 1:54:34Yasi Salek?

  I live for this detail. I don't know if it happened, but it was in Q Magazine in 2003, so I must do my duty to report it. This is when holiday breaks into the top 20, like we said, 16 because of all these press appearances. Also, one thing I want to point out, Madonna's early look was very midriff forward.

• 1:54:52Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:54:53Yasi Salek?

  It wasn't anything else in terms of like being revealing, except belly button, which I thought was really interesting. People were really fixated on it.

• 1:55:02Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:55:02Yasi Salek?

  And again, I don't, I don't remember, so I don't know fashion wise, but it sounds like the way people talk about it, that was just not a thing. Like she was kind of a like pioneer of that in the like mainstream, I guess. And which is why all these little girls started copying her to do it.

• 1:55:18Speaker 05

  It's also very rags, you know, it's not, it's a different kind of glamour.

• 1:55:21Yasi Salek?

  Totally, totally. I love it. I love a midriff bearing. Okay, so this is, we're, we're, I don't know if we're like in flames and fuego cooking with gas in terms of career, but like, things are, things are going well.

• 1:55:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, things are going well.

• 1:55:36Yasi Salek?

  She's like, I want to do my next album and I know just who the fuck I want to produce it. And his name is Nell Rogers.

• 1:55:42Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:55:43Yasi Salek?

  Kind of an incredibly cool choice.

• 1:55:46Speaker 05

  Yes. Chic.

• 1:55:47Yasi Salek?

  Yes, the co-founder of the band Chic and who had just produced David Bowie's highest selling album, Let's Dance. And she loved Bowie and more importantly, she wanted to make dance music.

• 1:56:00Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:56:01Yasi Salek?

  In his book, Nell Rogers recalls meeting her and he says that he expected a young Puerto Rican girl.

• 1:56:08Yasi Salek?

  But he was startled by what he saw, a toothsome white girl stepping. Stepping was what R and B bands like the Jackson 5 and most others used to do, until the likes of Prince moved the scene to more rock-like performance. Now here was a white girl doing intricate choreography, all while crooning holiday, celebrate. She was akin to a young, sexually aggressive, white Gladys Knight. Um, but she, he, I guess, wasn't like fully sold until he like really saw her like charisma and her ambition and stuff. So now Rogers is on board, babe. But another important piece of the puzzle is about to fall into place. Mo Austin's son, Michael, not a fail son, a success son. He was an A and R at Warner Brothers and he found a song they thought was perfect for Madonna.

• 1:56:53Yasi Salek?

  It was called Like a Virgin. They do it. They make it and it's ready to go.

• 1:56:59Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:57:00Yasi Salek?

  But Warner Brothers is like, nope, Borderline is doing really well.

• 1:57:03Speaker 05

  They probably wanted to like move the, the sophomore album to 1985.

• 1:57:09Yasi Salek?

  They just wanted to give the first album time to keep selling, especially because MTV's playing the hell out of Borderline, which I literally three years old remember this.

• 1:57:17Speaker 05

  I really remember it.

• 1:57:19Yasi Salek?

  They re-released Lucky Star as its own standalone single, like we talked about as the fourth single, and Madonna's like, I don't care. I, many people in interviews have said Madonna was the most impatient person that's ever lived, and I love that for her. Um, but she was like, okay, I'm gonna perform my song and another new song, Dress You Up, at my good friend Keith Haring's first annual Party of Life celebration at Paradise Garage.

• 1:57:45Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:57:45Yasi Salek?

  So cool. When they do put out Lucky Star as a standalone single, it's her first song to break into the, the Hot 100's top five.

• 1:57:52Speaker 05

  It's happening. The debut album is still really going.

• 1:57:56Yasi Salek?

  And it has a video, but it's just like old dance, track dancing. Yeah, it's great. It's great because you can see. That, you can see Christopher and Erica Bell in their dance moves and like,

• 1:58:08Speaker 05

  I like it.

• 1:58:09Yasi Salek?

  Kind of incredibly important moment right now.

• 1:58:11Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:58:13Yasi Salek?

  Desperately Seeking Susan.

• 1:58:14Speaker 05

  So good.

• 1:58:15Yasi Salek?

  It's not coming out right now.

• 1:58:16Speaker 05

  Five stars.

• 1:58:16Yasi Salek?

  Five stars. If you haven't seen that movie, just stop the podcast.

• 1:58:20Speaker 05

  It's great.

• 1:58:21Yasi Salek?

  Go watch it.

• 1:58:22Speaker 05

  Just go, go watch it. Come back to the podcast.

• 1:58:24Yasi Salek?

  So, Desperately Seeking Susan was written by Leora Berish and directed by Susan Seidman. Susan Seidman said 200 actors had read for the part of Susan, but Seidman actually knew of Madonna because she lived nearby to her and she was like at Danceateria, like seeing her around. So she's like, I want Madonna to screen test for this. Like, I just feel, I have a feeling. I love this. She remembers Madonna coming to the audition and she gets out of the cab and she's like, I don't have any money to pay for it. And she said, so here she is, meeting a bunch of movie people for a job and the first thing she does is hit us up for cab fare. It was exactly what Susan would have done. She feels like she did it on purpose, right? To be like, I'm method.

• 1:59:02Speaker 05

  I really love this part of your thing, this quote. Will you read it to us?

• 1:59:05Yasi Salek?

  Even when I was testing the other actresses, people like Melanie Griffith and Kelly McGillis, I just couldn't get Madonna out of my mind. She seemed more secure about who she was than anyone I'd seen. She was somebody who thought she was special and she made you feel special. The key to the character of Susan was that she had to be so magnetic that people were irrevocably drawn to her. Madonna has that quality. It leaps out at you. I think it's so right. She's so great in this role.

• 1:59:31Speaker 05

  Few stars have ever erupted like Madonna in the, during the time that this was being filmed and you just feel that energy in a way that Melanie Griffith, she's cool. Melanie Griffith is really cool at this time and so is Kelly McGillis. But there's something about Madonna in that role that is just so spectacular.

• 1:59:49Yasi Salek?

  I think it's just genius because like you can't actually extract one from the other. Like I, you buy it because that probably was exactly what Madonna was like. She was, as everyone describes her, she's this magnetic, charismatic girl that's really cool and does her own thing, which is exactly what Susan is. And it's so amazing that we have a document. Like if you watch Desperately Seeking Susan, you can see what everyone else saw in this early time of this like woman that you cannot take your eyes off of.

• 2:00:15Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 2:00:16Yasi Salek?

  Then she performs at the VMAs, babe. The first ever VMAs. 1984, hosted by Bette Midler and Dan Aykroyd. She was nominated for Best New Artist in a Video for Borderline, but she wanted to perform Like a Virgin instead. You can watch this on YouTube. Have you ever watched it?

• 2:00:31Speaker 05

  Oh, I've watched it eighty seven times, yeah.

• 2:00:34Yasi Salek?

  It's so amazing.

• 2:00:35Speaker 05

  The best thing.

• 2:00:36Yasi Salek?

  It's amazing. It's really her Elvis Presley moment. What was it? What show was he on when he moved his hips? And everyone was like, ah!

• 2:00:40Speaker 05

  It's sort of like a mix of like Elvis Presley doing his like crotch dance.

• 2:00:45Yasi Salek?

  Yes, exactly.

• 2:00:46Speaker 05

  And, and Miley Cyrus, we don't stop debacle. Because I guess people don't like it. Every adult is horrified and they're like, this is the end of your career because you're a garbage pale slut. And you're going like, you're going to the dump.

• 2:01:05Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:06Speaker 05

  But actually.

• 2:01:07Yasi Salek?

  But actually, it just.

• 2:01:08Speaker 05

  It's the best. It's also the best thing ever. I love it so much. Her shoe falls off.

• 2:01:11Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, she tries to go get it and it shows her underwear.

• 2:01:14Speaker 05

  It's just so great.

• 2:01:15Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, she climbs out of the cake and that like iconic, like the bustier with the like skirt with the hearts and the veil and the, you know, takes her hair down. She has the boy toy belt.

• 2:01:32Yasi Salek?

  Maybe a light simulation of masturbation if you wanted to see it that way, if your, if your mind is in the gutter.

• 2:01:38Speaker 05

  She's humping the floor, right?

• 2:01:40Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, okay. Annie Lennox called it very, very horish.

• 2:01:45Speaker 05

  It is very, very horish.

• 2:01:46Yasi Salek?

  It was like fucking the music industry.

• 2:01:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, I love that.

• 2:01:50Yasi Salek?

  I do too. I think she meant that as a diss, but actually it's like such a huge compliment. Cyndi Lauper, on the other hand, said, I loved it. It was performance art. She later, Madonna later told Howard Stern that her manager Friday, the man came up to her after and was like, your career is over. Like, do you know what you just did? Like you just said, right? And she said, I wasn't that apologetic. I said, well, fuck it. I made a mistake.

• 2:02:11Speaker 05

  I love it so much. It's so great.

• 2:02:13Yasi Salek?

  Don't worry. It wasn't a mistake. It made her even more famous. Also, it made the VMAs matter because apparently one of the founders of MTV was like, we had to beg people to come to the first VMAs. Like, nobody wanted to show up. And then the next year, everybody was like dying for an invite.

• 2:02:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, because it was a spectacle. It was a spectacle.

• 2:02:30Yasi Salek?

  It was like must see TV.

• 2:02:31Speaker 05

  Oh, I remember. I remember it.

• 2:02:34Yasi Salek?

  Mari Po said, because she styled her for it. And she was like, I watched her as we got into the limousine. She looked at the kids and wondered why she was there. She wanted to be with them on the street cheering for herself. I looked at her face. There was pure innocence and joy. Guess who else was in the audience for that?

• 2:02:49Speaker 05

  Jean Paul Gaultier.

• 2:02:50Yasi Salek?

  You ever heard of him?

• 2:02:51Speaker 05

  I have.

• 2:02:52Yasi Salek?

  I wonder why he was there, but he said he remembered he was surrounded by mostly business people who were horrified and there were just a few young fans and me who absolutely loved it. That is when I realized that she couldn't care less what others thought of her and I also saw how powerful she was.

• 2:03:05Speaker 05

  Yes, Madonna.

• 2:03:06Yasi Salek?

  Let's go. Now it's time for Sidewalk Talk.

• 2:03:09Speaker 05

  Justice for Sidewalk Talk.

• 2:03:10Yasi Salek?

  Comes out before Like a Virgin.

• 2:03:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:03:12Yasi Salek?

  Same month. And that is a Jelly Bean Benito song, is that right?

• 2:03:15Speaker 05

  It is. She sings the chorus. It's not a Madonna song. I just love it.

• 2:03:21Yasi Salek?

  Even though Sidewalk Talk didn't take off quite maybe as the way it should have, Like a Virgin does, the single that is released October 31st, 1984. I just want to say before we get into this, I am really sad we don't call people fine anymore. My whole youth, we were like, oh, that guy's so fine.

• 2:03:35Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:03:35Yasi Salek?

  Nobody says that anymore.

• 2:03:36Speaker 05

  It's gone.

• 2:03:37Yasi Salek?

  It's so sad.

• 2:03:37Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:03:38Yasi Salek?

  It's such a nice way to describe someone being attractive.

• 2:03:41Speaker 05

  He's so fine.

• 2:03:41Yasi Salek?

  So fine.

• 2:03:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:03:43Yasi Salek?

  Okay, so Billy Steinberg, who wrote the lyrics of this song, um, the music was by Tom Kelly, said, "I was saying, I've been bad at romantically and emotionally, but I'm starting a new relationship and it just feels so good. It's healing all the wounds and making me feel like I've never done this before." Hence, Like a Virgin. Now Rogers was like, "I don't know about this song, babe." Madonna was like, "Look, at a certain age, all young girls talk about is their losing their virginity," which I think is very true. And she, she really had, again, her instinct is so good. Like, how many, myself amongst them, like, young girls are gonna hear this and be like, so like intrigued by it.

• 2:04:22Speaker 05

  It's so great.

• 2:04:23Yasi Salek?

  Do you like the video?

• 2:04:24Speaker 05

  I do like the video.

• 2:04:25Yasi Salek?

  Directed by Mary Lambert?

• 2:04:26Speaker 05

  She just looks so hot and it's the most 80s thing ever and it's, it's...

• 2:04:31Yasi Salek?

  They shot it in Venice, Italy.

• 2:04:32Speaker 05

  Yeah. It's just very horny and hot. It's horny, it's horny, it's hot.

• 2:04:36Yasi Salek?

  And what's in it, besides a lion?

• 2:04:39Speaker 05

  A ga- Madonna writhing around in a gondola?

• 2:04:42Yasi Salek?

  But two Madonnas. There's like, there's like a street sassy Madonna and then there's this like, sort of like bridal Madonna in the like palazzo or whatever.

• 2:04:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:04:52Yasi Salek?

  The two Madonnas. I'm obsessed with lion. We used, we used to just bring a lion and make a video. We used to bring a panther and make a movie. Who's That Girl? What the fuck? Now we use CGI?

• 2:05:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's just...

• 2:05:03Yasi Salek?

  Horrible. Rough.

• 2:05:11Yasi Salek?

  I wanted to talk about something that's so important to me personally. Literally, the first words of Reservoir Dogs is Quentin Tarantino saying, "It's all about a girl who digs a guy with a big dick." The entire song is a metaphor for big dicks.

• 2:05:26Speaker 05

  I totally agree with that. It's a metaphor for a big, Italian, uncut cock in Italy, in Rome. That's the lion.

• 2:05:33Yasi Salek?

  You and Quentin Tarantino think the same thing.

• 2:05:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:05:36Yasi Salek?

  Mister, I'm more of a Mr. Blonde, which he said, "No, it's about a girl who's very vulnerable. She's been fucked over a few times and she meets a guy who's very sensitive."

• 2:05:46Speaker 05

  I think he might be so sensitive and very, very hot.

• 2:05:49Yasi Salek?

  And also have a big cock.

• 2:05:50Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:05:51Yasi Salek?

  Quentin Tarantino goes, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, time out, Green Bay. Tell that to the fucking tourists. Like a Virgin is not about some sensitive girl who meets a nice fella. That's what True Blue is about."

• 2:06:01Speaker 05

  Everything, everything that this is.

• 2:06:04Yasi Salek?

  It's so perfect.

• 2:06:05Speaker 05

  It's so good.

• 2:06:06Yasi Salek?

  Anyway, they talk about Madonna for like another like four minutes. Wonderful show.

• 2:06:12Yasi Salek?

  Welcome to the 50th Hunger Games.

• 2:06:14Speaker 01

  Witness the beginning of the revolution.

• 2:06:16Speaker 06

  Hey Mitch, you've been trying to take down these games from the start.

• 2:06:19Speaker 01

  Filmed for IMAX.

• 2:06:21Speaker 06

  Make them remember you.

• 2:06:23Speaker 01

  The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, November 20th, rated PG-13.

• 2:06:27Speaker 00

  LinkedIn is pretty amazing at helping you grow your small business. We cannot make your email response time faster. We can help you sell, market, and hire in one place. We cannot help you find space for your three desk drinks. Why do you have three? And while we can't help you find the perfect volume for your presentation video, LinkedIn can help you find the perfect audience for your business. Grow your small business on LinkedIn. Learn more at LinkedIn.com/smallbusiness.

• 2:06:59Speaker 05

  Can we please flash?

• 2:07:00Yasi Salek?

  Yes.

• 2:07:00Speaker 05

  The Like a Virgin album cover shot by a baby Steven Mizell on the screen. I believe it was styled by Paul Cavaco. Madonna once told me that Paul Cavaco was the person that put her in a bustier for the first time.

• 2:07:14Yasi Salek?

  Oh, so it wasn't Maripole?

• 2:07:15Speaker 05

  And I said it wasn't Maripole? And she was like, "No, Paul Cavaco put me in a bustier for the first time." I'm not trying to start fights. I'm just telling you what Madonna told me.

• 2:07:22Yasi Salek?

  This is... The way she looks.

• 2:07:25Speaker 05

  Oh, looks. This is the way you guys.

• 2:07:27Yasi Salek?

  The look she's giving.

• 2:07:28Speaker 05

  Looks. Look at this.

• 2:07:29Yasi Salek?

  The hair.

• 2:07:30Speaker 05

  The boy toy, the, the, the, the baby's breath.

• 2:07:34Yasi Salek?

  The skirt with the heart embroidery on it. A huge pearl earring hanging.

• 2:07:38Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. Two jo- look at those earrings.

• 2:07:40Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, she has a pearl and a cross. Um, all right, let's talk about it. November 12th, 1984. Nile Rodgers produced this. Um, when they first got to work, Madonna was like,

• 2:07:53Yasi Salek?

  "I have five songs

• 2:07:56Yasi Salek?

  that I wrote. Four of them were with Stephen Ray, one me, and four others that other people wrote, and I want them on the album. And if you don't love all these songs, we can't work together." And he was like, "Well, to be honest, I don't love all of them, but I can promise you this. By the time we're finished with them, I will."

• 2:08:13Speaker 05

  It's a good answer.

• 2:08:14Yasi Salek?

  It's a good answer. And they worked out of, uh, the loft that she lived in with Jelly Bean on Broom and West Broadway.

• 2:08:21Speaker 05

  They were living together.

• 2:08:22Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. I like how you called it baby Stephen Mizel, but he was 30.

• 2:08:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:08:25Yasi Salek?

  Mizel, sorry. Stephen Mizel was 30.

• 2:08:27Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:08:27Yasi Salek?

  She said, "Before I worked with Stephen, I just showed up in the clothes I was wearing, stood in for the lights, and got my picture taken. With Stephen, a team of people descended on me, started to undress me. Someone grabbed my hair, another grabbed my face, another started helping me try on bits of clothes, and they all seemed to be speaking a language I didn't understand. The language of Stephen Mizel." They had actually worked together one time before this in 83 in a photo shoot published in Island Magazine.

• 2:08:51Speaker 05

  Gotta see that.

• 2:08:52Yasi Salek?

  I've never heard of such a thing.

• 2:08:53Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:08:54Yasi Salek?

  Do you know about that Island Magazine? In my notes, it says "Stalled by Maripole."

• 2:08:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:08:58Yasi Salek?

  But who knows? Maybe it was both, because she just talked about that team of people coming and descending upon her.

• 2:09:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:09:04Yasi Salek?

  That look is the same look she wore at the VMAs, which was "Stalled by Maripole," so maybe there were tweaks made.

• 2:09:09Speaker 05

  I, I don't, I don't know.

• 2:09:11Yasi Salek?

  You're trying to start fights.

• 2:09:12Speaker 05

  All I know is that it's great. The reviews were not great.

• 2:09:16Yasi Salek?

  They were not great, babe. The enemy said Madonna isn't a musician and doesn't wish to be a singer. It's rude.

• 2:09:24Speaker 05

  Shut your damn motherfucking holes.

• 2:09:26Yasi Salek?

  I think it's a good time to get into Madonna's voice.

• 2:09:28Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 2:09:30Yasi Salek?

  I actually have thought about this quite a bit. I love the early Madonna recordings of the way her voice sounds. It has this very girlish quality to it. And also, it's so unique. And also, I don't think that she's a bad singer, the way people say.

• 2:09:49Speaker 05

  I've also thought about it recently. And also, when I was preparing to be on Band's Plane, listening to Madonna, as if I don't listen to it all the time anyway.

• 2:09:58Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 2:09:59Speaker 05

  But sometimes you're like, oh, wow, that isn't. And then you're like, yeah, it's Madonna. But that's also what's so great about Madonna is it's Madonna.

• 2:10:09Yasi Salek?

  I'm just like.

• 2:10:09Speaker 05

  Truly Madonna. And I know that sounds like, I'm not saying it right, but like, that is literally what it is. And that's what makes it so irresistible. It's not classically trained or something. It's just truly Madonna.

• 2:10:22Yasi Salek?

  Well, yeah, and I do think, I think that's kind of crucial, in my opinion, to being a pop star. Is like, being a pop star is about having a unique identity, right? It's a good voice and it's very distinctive. And I love the girlish quality because she's, she's reaching young women. And you hear it and you're like, that's my girl, you know?

• 2:10:44Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:10:45Yasi Salek?

  Anyways, that's my little sidebar.

• 2:10:46Speaker 05

  I'm with you.

• 2:10:47Yasi Salek?

  Who cares? That's not important. What's important is the LA Times called her a sheep in pain. And they're wrong. Don't worry, the fans, they loved it.

• 2:10:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:10:57Yasi Salek?

  It hit number one in the USA, this album.

• 2:10:59Speaker 05

  Yes, it did.

• 2:11:00Yasi Salek?

  Triple platinum by February of 1985.

• 2:11:02Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 2:11:03Yasi Salek?

  Couple of months. This, I loved this fact. Nile Rodgers at first wasn't buying Madonna, what was Madonna was selling, right? And then he was like, okay, I'm in. Not only am I so in, I will reject Warner Brothers' offer of 3% royalty on the album, which was pretty standard, in favor of 2% on the first 2 million sold and 6% retroactive after that. And Madonna's first album had only sold 300,000 copies. So Warner Brothers was like, yeah, you're nuts, okay, you're never gonna get that. And then they were really mad.

• 2:11:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:11:34Yasi Salek?

  And they tried to make Madonna pay that percentage. And Madonna's lawyer was like, bitch, you thought.

• 2:11:39Speaker 05

  No.

• 2:11:40Yasi Salek?

  And Seymour Stein said in his book, cause like it hit six million copies by the end of nineteen eighty-five. Seymour Stein was like, from here on in Warner was pretty much gonna accept whatever Madonna wanted. She was in charge now.

• 2:11:51Speaker 05

  Yes. Ten times platinum.

• 2:11:54Yasi Salek?

  Ten times platinum. What a jump, right? Like from holiday, not even breaking the top ten, but then borderline picked up steam on MTV. Like, kind of the label was right to delay it, cause like, they really let this like thing build. And then when Like a Virgin hit, it was like off to the races.

• 2:12:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:12:15Yasi Salek?

  Let's talk about the songs.

• 2:12:16Speaker 05

  Okay. Like a Virgin, we love.

• 2:12:19Yasi Salek?

  Let's talk about Material Girl. It's the first song on the.

• 2:12:21Speaker 05

  Material Girl is one of my early memories and just, I remember hearing it in the kitchen on a kitchen radio and being like, oh, it's so fun. And I didn't know what campy meant, but I got it. I got the humor.

• 2:12:32Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:32Speaker 05

  I got the campiness and like the fun humor and like the sort of jokey vibe that she was going for. I really locked in on her point of view and I loved it.

• 2:12:43Yasi Salek?

  You've identified something really important about Madonna going forward that I think we all, we need to really identify, which is Madonna is a comedic person. She's a comedic actress. She is a comedic, her, her like positioning is often one of comedy. And it's really true here.

• 2:13:08Yasi Salek?

  What a fucking jam.

• 2:13:10Speaker 05

  It's a great song and it's such a great video. Oh, my God.

• 2:13:12Yasi Salek?

  When they cut my heart open on the autopsy when I'm dead, it's, it's just gonna be a tiny Madonna in that pink dress, walking down the red stairs with all the men behind her like this. First of all, I had never seen.

• 2:13:22Speaker 05

  A gentleman preferred blonde.

• 2:13:24Yasi Salek?

  A gentleman front. I don't know what that was. This was what that was to me. It's like how I saw Spaceballs before I saw Star Wars. Like I, like I loved it, but I was like, what are we referencing? I don't know what you're talking about.

• 2:13:34Speaker 05

  It's a great video, whether or not you know what's going on. And now that I know what's going on and watched it again last week, it's, it's just so great.

• 2:13:40Yasi Salek?

  So great. Also really cool that there are. Multi ethnic men in that movie. Like, there's like, like, a prominently featured hot Asian guy. Pretty early on for that to be a thing.

• 2:13:53Speaker 05

  Thank you, Madonna.

• 2:13:53Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, thank you, Madonna.

• 2:14:02Yasi Salek?

  Michael Austin brought that song, by the way.

• 2:14:04Speaker 05

  OK, and Mary Lambert directed the video.

• 2:14:06Yasi Salek?

  OK, Angel, we had, we've been having heated, not even heated, but like.

• 2:14:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, the Madonna Splain group chat, where it's all the people that are lucky enough to be on this podcast as a guest like myself, have been talking about it today. People are like, we don't like it. Madonna apparently doesn't like it.

• 2:14:24Yasi Salek?

  No, we do like it.

• 2:14:25Speaker 05

  But I think someone was saying Madonna doesn't like it.

• 2:14:27Yasi Salek?

  Madonna doesn't like it, yeah.

• 2:14:28Speaker 05

  I like it.

• 2:14:29Yasi Salek?

  I love it.

• 2:14:29Speaker 05

  I think it's good.

• 2:14:30Yasi Salek?

  I love it.

• 2:14:30Speaker 05

  I love it.

• 2:14:31Yasi Salek?

  I love the laugh at the beginning. I think it's, yeah. It's so cute.

• 2:14:43Yasi Salek?

  I think this song, "Bang," Stephen Bray wrote it with her. It was the third single. We already talked about "Like a Virgin."

• 2:14:49Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:14:49Yasi Salek?

  Over and over.

• 2:14:50Speaker 05

  Over and over. You don't give a shit about this, right?

• 2:14:52Yasi Salek?

  I feel the song is mid, but I think the lyrics are really important because it's very Madonna thesis statement.

• 2:15:00Speaker 05

  Oh, you're right.

• 2:15:00Yasi Salek?

  Hurry up, I just can't wait. I gotta do it now.

• 2:15:03Speaker 05

  I can't be late.

• 2:15:11Speaker 05

  You try to criticize my drive. If I lose, I don't feel paralyzed. It's not the game. It's how you play. And if I fall, I get up again now. You're right. This is the thesis.

• 2:15:20Yasi Salek?

  Right?

• 2:15:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, you're right.

• 2:15:21Yasi Salek?

  Love don't live here anymore.

• 2:15:23Speaker 05

  Don't live. If you want to know what I'm listening to, full blast, in a rental car in Los Angeles, it might be "Love Don't Live Here Anymore." I just, I love it. I love it.

• 2:15:45Yasi Salek?

  Okay, let's talk about Dress You Up, which I have such a soft spot for because of my mother's soft spot. And my mom says she remembers hearing it, how crazy, in a movie theater. Like, not in a movie, just like they would play a song before, as a preview, almost, of a movie. And she was like, what is this? And she was like obsessed with it.

• 2:16:02Speaker 05

  I love this song.

• 2:16:03Yasi Salek?

  I remember as a child, she was obsessed with this. And I remember the videos, we would watch it over and over again. It almost didn't make it on the record.

• 2:16:09Speaker 05

  Really? Why not?

• 2:16:11Yasi Salek?

  So this is written by two songwriters named Andrea LaRusso and Peggy Stonizale. I'm so sorry if I butchered that. And he, he asked them, can you write a song for Madonna in the style of chic? And they took a really fucking long time. And Roger was like, okay, we don't have time to do the song anymore. But Madonna loved it. And she was like, we want more putting this on the album. It's funny, because I don't consider this song at all, like provocative or offensive. But in that summer of 85, the Parents Music Resource Center, PMRC, you might know them for being responsible for putting those parental warning things spearheaded by Tipper Gore,

• 2:16:53Yasi Salek?

  included Dress You Up on its filthy 15 list. Now I'm like, damn, can you make a comp CD of that? I want the filthy 15 of every year. That'd be like the sickest songs. She said it was very offensive.

• 2:17:05Speaker 05

  Well, she's wrong.

• 2:17:06Yasi Salek?

  Why do you think? I'm gonna dress you up in my love.

• 2:17:09Speaker 05

  Dress you up in my love, all over your body. I guess, I don't know. It doesn't matter. It's a, fuck them. It's a great song.

• 2:17:16Yasi Salek?

  Do you want me to get down on my knees bending over backwards now? Would you please more qualify for the filthy 15?

• 2:17:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But they hadn't noticed her yet.

• 2:17:23Yasi Salek?

  Right, right, totally. Because she wasn't so famous.

• 2:17:31Yasi Salek?

  Okay, let's talk about Shubydo.

• 2:17:34Speaker 05

  This is Yasi's notes. Shubydo, written by Madonna. This is nice, but moving on. I always say justice for Shubydo, but I guess we don't need to get stuck on this.

• 2:17:44Yasi Salek?

  In what sense? What kind of justice do you want for Shubydo?

• 2:17:46Speaker 05

  It's my life and I'll do what I want and I'll listen to Shubydo, okay? Pretender.

• 2:17:52Yasi Salek?

  Um, this feels to me a very Emmy and the Emmys era song. It's kind of in that post-punk vein. Don't you feel like that's sort of like new wavy? It's like a new wavy song.

• 2:18:00Speaker 05

  I like it.

• 2:18:00Yasi Salek?

  I like it too.

• 2:18:01Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:18:09Yasi Salek?

  Stay.

• 2:18:10Speaker 05

  Dude, I love Stay.

• 2:18:11Yasi Salek?

  Scoobadis, Scoobadis, Scoobadabop, yeah.

• 2:18:15Speaker 05

  Don't be afraid. It's gonna be alright. I don't think that Like a Virgin sounds like today. The kids in my office are always talking to me about different things that their generations are rediscovering or discovering for the first time of Madonna, but like no one's ever talking about this album, but I love it.

• 2:18:32Yasi Salek?

  I think, and if you're a young person, please contact me, but I go to bed at 8, so do it within the hours of 6 a.m. to 8 p.m.

• 2:18:43Yasi Salek?

  I feel that these first two albums are like illegible for young people. It's too 80s sounding. Like, it's too distinctive of that time that they like, are like, I don't like this.

• 2:18:53Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:18:53Yasi Salek?

  I assume. I don't know.

• 2:18:54Speaker 05

  I would understand that. I just, I don't care. I love it.

• 2:18:57Yasi Salek?

  I don't care. I love it. I'm getting this makes me feel like safe and at home.

• 2:19:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, I feel like that, yeah.

• 2:19:02Yasi Salek?

  But I could see them connecting with True Blue because the production value is completely different.

• 2:19:06Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 2:19:07Yasi Salek?

  And while obviously it does sound a bit of its time, it sounds, there's less like obvious like, ew, Lucky Star synth than like things that are like really put you back into a different time. I want to talk about the cover of Rolling Stone. It's her first Rolling Stone cover.

• 2:19:21Speaker 05

  It's great.

• 2:19:21Yasi Salek?

  It's called Madonna Goes All the Way. She looks so gorgeous.

• 2:19:24Speaker 05

  So gorgeous.

• 2:19:25Yasi Salek?

  Written by Chris Connolly, although it's a kind of a shitty profile and this is not gonna be the first time, Ben. It's gonna be the first time.

• 2:19:30Speaker 05

  What do they talk about the whole time?

• 2:19:31Yasi Salek?

  It basically focuses on how she like, I don't know if it, yes, I don't know if it like explicitly says this, but it's kind of like the implication in my... Opinion is that she used men to get where she is.

• 2:19:44Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:19:45Yasi Salek?

  Again, this is only my subjective view. It didn't seem at all like she was like, oh, I'm gonna fuck that guy to get ahead.

• 2:19:52Speaker 05

  Also, poor is the man whose pleasures depend on the permission of another.

• 2:19:55Yasi Salek?

  Of another babe, who cares?

• 2:19:57Speaker 05

  She's hot, they're hot, she wants to fuck and have a good time and get ahead.

• 2:20:02Yasi Salek?

  It's just like, she's a fun girl who has one goal and it's not to marry you.

• 2:20:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:20:09Yasi Salek?

  You know, and like she had like-

• 2:20:11Speaker 05

  You're not the one.

• 2:20:11Yasi Salek?

  You're not the one. The one is the career, you know?

• 2:20:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:20:15Yasi Salek?

  You guys, do you remember Desperately Seeking Susan that we brought up earlier, five hours ago?

• 2:20:19Speaker 05

  Remember that.

• 2:20:20Yasi Salek?

  That's been filming this whole time that we've been putting out like A Virgin and skyrocketing in fame. So, keep in mind, she got cast in this movie as like, you know, a sort of like cult dance hit artist. And now she's like an international superstar. Um, and people are starting to come to sad being like, is this a Madonna movie? Is Madonna here? During the prep for the launch of the movie is when she meets Herb Ritz. Uh-uh. Important gay alert.

• 2:20:46Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 2:20:47Yasi Salek?

  He's hired to shoot an ad for the film and he remembers that she arrived very early and marched into the studio with all her boy toy belts and black lace. Very definite. She said, "I've seen all your work in Lea magazine. You're good." Just like that. She knew who I was, even though I'd only been shooting for a couple of years. She always did her homework. So, in the memory of the editor of Tatler magazine, Herb Ritz was actually hired to shoot Roseanne Arquette. And during the shoot, Herb was like, "Oh, there's this other girl in the next stream. She's gonna be a star. She really, she's the singer of the film. She's gonna be a star." And imagine Roseanne Arquette might have been a little annoyed by this.

• 2:21:21Speaker 05

  I bet you.

• 2:21:21Yasi Salek?

  I'm only imagining because later on, there are some quotes from Susan Seidman about Roseanne Arquette being a little annoyed. About Madonna's like sort of skyrocketing fame and how it compromised maybe her being the star and her being the second lead. All right, January 1985. We already talked about Material Girl and the single song and the video, but like, this is actually when the video comes out. It didn't come out when the album came out. One important thing about this video.

• 2:21:49Speaker 05

  Big part.

• 2:21:50Yasi Salek?

  Not one important, huge important, majorly important.

• 2:21:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:21:53Yasi Salek?

  A 24-year-old man named Sean Penn was lurking around the set during the making of this video. He had been in some big movies, Taps, Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Here's why he was here. He had an assistant named Megan, Megan, Megan Ox, who had played a cassette tape of Like a Virgin in the car while she was driving it around. And apparently in his biography by Richard Kelly, the story is that the tape would be playing and Sean would be like, Megan, who do you think I should marry? And she was like, well, I think you should marry Madonna. And he was like, who is that? And she was like, this is the singer we're listening to.

• 2:22:22Speaker 05

  Oh, God.

• 2:22:23Yasi Salek?

  And after that, every time he'd get in the car, he'd be like, okay, play my wife now. And then as fate would have it, you guys, Megan was hired to work on the Material Girl video shoot and she called Sean, she was like, guess what? I'm working with your wife. And so the story goes, Sean was watching MTV with his friend, the director James Foley, and the Like a Virgin video came on. And they were like, you know what? Let's go check that girl out. And they were close to where Material Girl was filming, so they went to rehearsals. And I guess during those rehearsals, the video's producer was like, on the walkie-talkie telling Madonna, Sean Penn wants to come visit the set. And she yelled, only if he'll go out with me after. And he did come to set, but he didn't talk to her. Madonna said, so I was standing up at the top.

• 2:23:07Speaker 05

  Played it cool.

• 2:23:08Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, he played it.

• 2:23:08Speaker 05

  Or too shy.

• 2:23:09Yasi Salek?

  I think he was shy, yeah. Madonna said, so I was standing up at the top of these steps waiting. They were doing some lighting and I looked down and noticed this guy in a leather jacket and sunglasses, kind of standing in the corner looking at me. And I realized it was Sean Penn. And I immediately had this fantasy that we're gonna meet and fall in love and get married, which is exactly what happened.

• 2:23:26Speaker 05

  It's beautiful.

• 2:23:26Yasi Salek?

  She gave him a flower, basically, before he left. And then Sean said, afterward, I was over at a friend's house and he had a book of quotations. He picked it up and turned to a random page and read the following. She had the innocence of a child and the wit of a man. I looked at my friend and he just said, go get her. It's so beautiful. So they start dating in February and just before that, I just need you to know that she went on a very odd date with Prince. At a restaurant that I assumed would be Yamashiro, because she said it was a Japanese restaurant in the hills.

• 2:23:55Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 2:23:56Yasi Salek?

  And he doesn't eat the whole meal. And then he's like, will you be my girl? And allegedly she replied, now that's food for thought. She did not want to be his girl, I guess. Um, but don't worry. She wants to be Sean Penn's girl.

• 2:24:09Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:24:09Yasi Salek?

  And they have a storied and passionate and loving and tumultuous relationship. Okay, Desperately Seeking Susan comes out, March 29th, 1985. What a fucking film. We just talked about how much we loved it. Has the coolest cameos, John Laurie, Richard Hell, um, Anne Magnuson. And then one thing that blew blew my mind, which nobody would have cared about back then because no one knew who they were yet. But when I saw it a couple of years ago at Brain Dead, do you remember the documentary about the three, those triplets that were separated at birth? And all adopted by different families?

• 2:24:43Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:24:44Yasi Salek?

  They're in this film.

• 2:24:45Speaker 05

  Oh, wow.

• 2:24:45Yasi Salek?

  They're just standing outside the police station when her, uh, Roseanne Arquette's character's husband and sister go to get her.

• 2:24:53Speaker 05

  Oh, wow.

• 2:24:54Yasi Salek?

  And obviously, like, they put them there on purpose because the camera lingers on them. And they just probably thought it was cool. There was three triplets in the same outfit, but they're the fucking triplets from the documentary.

• 2:25:03Speaker 05

  Oh, wow.

• 2:25:04Yasi Salek?

  So nuts. By the way, Desperately Seeking Susan did really well, I think probably on the back of Madonna's fame.

• 2:25:09Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 2:25:09Yasi Salek?

  Not, I mean, it was a great movie, but it was a small movie. I think it wouldn't have done probably as well.

• 2:25:13Speaker 05

  It's an amazing movie because like something, there's a seismic shift going on in the universe and that is Madonna and she happens to be in it as she's changing the world.

• 2:25:22Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 2:25:23Speaker 05

  Or, or starting to like rule the world. And it's just really interesting.

• 2:25:26Yasi Salek?

  That's really well put.

• 2:25:27Speaker 05

  It's an unbelievable time capsule of history that she's in it and like the energy of that still feels very fresh to me.

• 2:25:35Yasi Salek?

  Totally. I think you really nailed it. Like, it's like, it's amazing that we have a document of this.

• 2:25:39Speaker 05

  It's truly incredible.

• 2:25:41Yasi Salek?

  You know the part where she is in the bathroom at Port Authority and flips the, and dries her hair, the hand dryer? That was improvised by Madonna.

• 2:25:49Speaker 05

  Incredible.

• 2:25:50Yasi Salek?

  So good. I guess Roseanne Arquette said, as an actress, I felt cheated.

• 2:25:55Speaker 05

  I get that.

• 2:25:55Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:56Speaker 05

  She is, she is more airtime, but it is all about Susan.

• 2:26:00Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. She got really good reviews for, for Madonna did for Susan. Pauline Kael, the icon, said, "She moves regally, an indolent, trampy goddess. She has dumbfounding aplomb." And a really important part of "Desperately Seeking Susan" is obviously the song "Into the Groove."

• 2:26:19Speaker 05

  Incredible.

• 2:26:20Yasi Salek?

  Let's talk about it real quick.

• 2:26:22Speaker 05

  It became a huge hit on the back of this movie.

• 2:26:25Yasi Salek?

  Yes, but it was not a real song. I don't know how to say this. It was not a commercially released song. This movie did not have a commercially released soundtrack. This wasn't out anywhere to purchase. But while they were filming, Susan Salam was like, "Oh, we need a song for the club scene." And she was like, "Do you have anything?" And her and Steve Ray had just recorded a demo of this song. By the way, at his apartment, no soundproofing, like dogs barking in the East Village, rough, SM58 microphone. Actually, they had meant to give it to a French singer named Natalie Gab, but she couldn't sing it and turned it down. And a girl named Reggie, do you know this one, "Last Night a DJ Saved My Life"?

• 2:27:07Speaker 05

  I know that song, yeah.

• 2:27:08Yasi Salek?

  She actually recorded a version of this, but ended up not being her song. Anyways, the point is, they bring this tape in, and Madonna's like, "Okay, I wanted to test it out on the extras." And they were dancing to it, and it was a good song. I had no intention of using it in the movie. But I brought it in and we played it, and we had to do take after take. And pretty soon, everyone was starting to like the song. They were saying, "What's this song? Where's it coming from?" And I said, "It's just a song." And as the film got nearer to the end, and they were doing the final cut, Susan called me up and said, "Look."

• 2:27:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, that comes from Interview Magazine in 1985.

• 2:27:36Yasi Salek?

  That's right, babe.

• 2:27:37Speaker 05

  The demo becomes the iconic, famous, very famous song.

• 2:27:41Yasi Salek?

  And apparently Steve Ray was like, "We should re-record it." Madonna was like, "No, it sounds fine."

• 2:27:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, which is...

• 2:27:45Yasi Salek?

  She's right. It's perfect.

• 2:27:46Speaker 05

  Which is great.

• 2:27:47Yasi Salek?

  And so, yeah, like you said, it became a major success off the back of, there's a video given to MTV with footage from "Desperately Seeking Susan." And it was so popular that DJs were recording the video to play at the club.

• 2:28:00Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 2:28:01Yasi Salek?

  So sick.

• 2:28:09Yasi Salek?

  And this is the very first song Madonna has a production credit on, is "Into the Groove." All right. First Madonna tour. Did you go?

• 2:28:18Speaker 05

  I didn't.

• 2:28:19Yasi Salek?

  The Virgin tour?

• 2:28:19Speaker 05

  I didn't go.

• 2:28:20Yasi Salek?

  Me neither. I've never seen Madonna live.

• 2:28:22Speaker 05

  What's your first concert?

• 2:28:24Yasi Salek?

  Ever?

• 2:28:24Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:28:25Yasi Salek?

  Like that my parents took me to or of my own volition?

• 2:28:28Speaker 05

  No, that your parents took you to.

• 2:28:30Yasi Salek?

  Gypsy Kings, I think?

• 2:28:31Speaker 05

  OK, mine was the Purple Rain tour.

• 2:28:33Yasi Salek?

  OK, that's a lot.

• 2:28:34Speaker 05

  But I wish, I wish we had gone to the Virgin tour too.

• 2:28:36Yasi Salek?

  The Purple Rain?

• 2:28:37Speaker 05

  I do want to say that my parents, Jane and Richard, took me and my siblings, Daniel, Kate, and Emma, to Blonde Ambition.

• 2:28:45Yasi Salek?

  I hate you so much.

• 2:28:46Speaker 05

  Isn't that amazing?

• 2:28:46Yasi Salek?

  I've never seen Madonna.

• 2:28:47Speaker 05

  I was fourteen, or I was, maybe it's been thirteen.

• 2:28:50Yasi Salek?

  You guys, if anyone's listening on the Team Madonna, I'm sure like at least one person's listening, I really, I worked hard here. I really killed, I'm drinking a Salsa at a 8pm. If you, if Madonna is gonna tour again, could we just extend one small invite to Yasi Salek?

• 2:29:03Speaker 05

  Yes, it has.

• 2:29:04Yasi Salek?

  Who's gonna have to go to mental hospital from the amount of research I've done here. I'd just love to like see her one time. I can't, I've never seen her, it's not fair for me.

• 2:29:12Speaker 05

  I am so, I am, I do think that Blonde Ambition's the greatest thing I've ever seen in my entire life, in any, in any medium.

• 2:29:18Yasi Salek?

  All right, let's talk about the Virgin tour. Twenty-seven city, thirty-eight show, thirty-eight show tour starts in Seattle, ends in New York. Madonna hired the Purple Rain tour set designer, Ian Knight. Also, two musicians from Michael Jackson's Victory Tour, the drummer Jonathan P Moffett, and very importantly, Mel.

• 2:29:37Speaker 05

  The keyboardist, Patrick. Excuse me, everyone. I was yawning. The keyboardist, Patrick Leonard.

• 2:29:43Yasi Salek?

  Oh, he's not.

• 2:29:43Speaker 05

  Who would become one of the most important collaborators of her career.

• 2:29:46Yasi Salek?

  I was gonna do, oh, oh, but Patrick Leonard's straight, he has a family. So he's not important, gay guy alert, but he's a very important collaborator alert. She makes him the music director of sorts, and for the choreography, she hires a twenty-four year old guy named Brad Jeffries. I just loved this tidbit from Mary Gabriel book where Jeffries said he remembered during prep for this tour, he was at Madonna's house and she got a phone call from her business manager telling her she had just made her first million dollars, and she was like totally unbothered. She was like, OK, cool, bye. Should we have pizza?

• 2:30:16Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 2:30:16Yasi Salek?

  She said it in a quote somewhere, but I couldn't find it, that she always wanted to be famous, but never cared about being rich.

• 2:30:21Speaker 05

  Interesting.

• 2:30:22Yasi Salek?

  Which is interesting. And then she got two dancers, who would also be backup singers, Lyndon B. Johnson, who had been on Hill Street Blues.

• 2:30:30Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 2:30:30Yasi Salek?

  Eighties hours, and Michael Perea, who had toured with Cher. And for the costuming, she hired Marlene Stewart, LA-based designer. And as her dresser, an emotional support animal.

• 2:30:41Speaker 05

  Christopher Chaconi.

• 2:30:42Yasi Salek?

  Christopher Chaconi.

• 2:30:43Speaker 05

  Marlene Stewart works with her for a while and does a lot of iconic stuff with her.

• 2:30:48Yasi Salek?

  Designed her wedding dress.

• 2:30:49Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:30:50Yasi Salek?

  We'll get it. It's a little ahead, but.

• 2:30:51Speaker 05

  Styled, styled the Vogue VMA performance.

• 2:30:55Yasi Salek?

  Yes, with the.

• 2:30:56Speaker 05

  Come on.

• 2:30:57Yasi Salek?

  Come on.

• 2:30:58Speaker 05

  Literally, literally, come on.

• 2:30:59Yasi Salek?

  The Beastie Boys opened this tour. They have not put out an album yet, and that's such a cool choice.

• 2:31:04Speaker 05

  So cool. Total unknowns.

• 2:31:06Yasi Salek?

  Total unknowns.

• 2:31:07Speaker 05

  Cookie Puss, though, come on.

• 2:31:08Yasi Salek?

  They had, yes, they had put out one single called Cookie Puss.

• 2:31:10Speaker 05

  Such a good song.

• 2:31:11Yasi Salek?

  They nearly get booed offstage every night, because all these Madonna girls are like, who the fuck are these, like? And Freddie DeMann actually wanted to kick them off, and Madonna was like, absolutely not. They're staying. Here's what Madonna said about her very first, like, non-track. This is her first real show, right?

• 2:31:27Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:31:28Yasi Salek?

  It's actually, I found it very moving. "I remember the first concert I did on the Virgin Tour in Seattle, when everything became big and I had no way of being prepared for it. It literally sucked the life out of me, sucked the air out of my lungs when I walked onstage. I sort of had an out-of-body experience. Not a bad feeling, not an out-of-control feeling, but an otherworldly feeling that nothing could prepare you for. Teen girls were losing their minds, babe. They're filling the shows, they're losing their minds. A seventeen-year-old girl at the Houston show told Time Magazine, 'I like the way she handled herself, sort of take it or leave it. She's sexy, but she doesn't need men, really. She's kind of there by herself. It's really women's lib, not being afraid of what guys think.'" I love that.

• 2:32:07Speaker 05

  I love it too.

• 2:32:08Yasi Salek?

  It's it's cra- it is hard to overstate how important I think Madonna was for young women.

• 2:32:13Speaker 05

  Wait, wait, wait. I have to go to this text of my friend Peter. Shout out to Peter Curry, who's a huge Madonna fan. He, cause he was saying, you know what I've been thinking about? Do you know that voiceover introduction where she speaks before the video of the Virgin Tour starts? I want to sing. I want to dance. I want to be real famous. I want to make people happy. I want people to love me. I worked real, real hard. My dream came true.

• 2:32:35Yasi Salek?

  I worked real, real hard and my dream came true.

• 2:32:37Speaker 05

  She does in some voice like that.

• 2:32:38Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, yeah. It's like, it's like kind of a cartoony voice.

• 2:32:41Speaker 05

  Paraphrasing like ditzy blonde voice.

• 2:32:44Yasi Salek?

  But that part she does say, I worked real, real hard and my dream came true. Oh, it's so, I have my arm hair standing. I'm so sweet. Okay, here are the songs in order, just so you guys need to know. I do this for all the tours. I think it's important. Dress You Up, Holiday, Into the Groove, and then she sits on her boombox and says, I want to introduce you to my special friend, my box. Everybody has a box, right? You see, mine is different from other people's. Mine makes music, but you have to turn it on.

• 2:33:13Speaker 05

  All right.

• 2:33:14Yasi Salek?

  Do you think that's the first documented usage of the word box as a vagina? Or do you think that was already in the slang at the time?

• 2:33:23Speaker 05

  I think it was in the slang.

• 2:33:23Yasi Salek?

  Okay. Then it's everybody.

• 2:33:26Speaker 05

  She made it mass.

• 2:33:27Yasi Salek?

  She made it mass, yeah. Then Angel. Okay.

• 2:33:30Speaker 05

  We love Angel.

• 2:33:31Yasi Salek?

  Hundreds of balloons were released with the message, dreams come true from the rafters when Madonna played Angel. Can you believe?

• 2:33:39Speaker 05

  I love it.

• 2:33:40Yasi Salek?

  Then The Gambler. Okay, random. I'm sorry, it's random. It's a weird song. And then Borderline, Lucky Star, Crazy For You, Over and Over, and Burning Up. Um, she does get down on her knees during that in front of Paul Pesco, the guitar player. And then she closed the show with Material Girl. And this, this I also really liked. At the end, there was a tape of a man's voice meant to be her father that would be like, get down off of that stage this instant. And she would be like, daddy, do I have to? So cute. See, she's doing theater.

• 2:34:08Speaker 05

  Yes, she is.

• 2:34:10Yasi Salek?

  This is the beginning of the wannabes, the young girls that would dress up like Madonna.

• 2:34:13Speaker 05

  And it was a sensation. It was like a real worldwide.

• 2:34:16Yasi Salek?

  I just want you to know I was one of them. A hundred percent. Oh my God, I'll never forget you guys. Uh, LA used to be so cool. So on Fairfax, there was a store called Four Kids Only, with a four. And I had the coolest clothes and my mom would bring me and I got to like buy whatever, one outfit a year. And I remember getting this like denim skirt with patches of leopard on it. And I would wear white lace tights underneath, like footless. And I had a denim jacket that had like white lace in it. I thought I was the coolest fucking bitch on the planet in that outfit.

• 2:34:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, it sounds fucking cool to me.

• 2:34:50Yasi Salek?

  Once again, I'm like seven or eight years old, but I'm like styling it up.

• 2:34:53Speaker 05

  I feel it.

• 2:34:54Yasi Salek?

  And those little, oh my God, those salmon libby little ballet flats with the, with the bow. What was living? A Rolling Stone review of the Seattle show said this, Madonna's clumsy dance steps, funky costumes and camped up come ons made her appealing and surprised likeable. She's not some perfect unattainable sexual icon. She's a real person like her fans. A lot of the press at the time focused on her looks and her style and the exposed midriff. It's like they'd never, this is why I was saying, was this not a thing? Cause it's like they'd never seen this before. Cher had her fucking belly button out all the time.

• 2:35:26Speaker 05

  She did.

• 2:35:27Yasi Salek?

  This is what Madonna said to Record Magazine. I think people want to see me as a little tart bimbo who sells records because I'm cute and record companies push them because they know they can make a quick buck on my image. People don't want to like me and that's because you're not supposed to be flirty unless you're an airhead. And they say, I do all this stuff to my appearance and look the way I do because I want to please men. I'm doing it because I like it. If I don't like it, no one's going to. I do it because it turns me on. That's right, Madonna.

• 2:35:54Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 2:35:55Yasi Salek?

  This tour is targeted by the religious right who pickets outside her shows and also she receives death threats.

• 2:36:02Speaker 05

  She's called the daughter of Satan.

• 2:36:03Yasi Salek?

  The daughter of Satan's so sick. Can you imagine this is like how different 1985 is that you got death threats for showing your belly button and kneeling down on stage?

• 2:36:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:36:15Yasi Salek?

  Can you imagine if, if those people could be transported to 2026 and see what the fuck is going on at Coachella?

• 2:36:20Speaker 05

  Yes. Well, I mean, they're just, they're equally horrible, if not even worse now, but that doesn't bother them.

• 2:36:27Yasi Salek?

  With that as well, yeah, they have other things on their minds.

• 2:36:29Speaker 05

  They're, they're, let's, let's remember.

• 2:36:31Yasi Salek?

  You're so right. Yeah, they haven't gone away.

• 2:36:32Speaker 05

  Even more conservative, nightmarish time, but that, but being naked doesn't, doesn't.

• 2:36:38Yasi Salek?

  No, that's.

• 2:36:39Speaker 05

  Naked doesn't register as, as like the problem.

• 2:36:42Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, you're so right. You're so right. Um, all right. In June, she plays a bunch of shows at Radio City. And there's a Madonna lookalike contest at the Macy's in Herald Square. And Warhol is a judge and Mary Poppins. How cool is that? Um, because they had a Macy's Madonna land department. It's just, I, I, okay, I bring this up.

• 2:37:00Speaker 05

  Madonna land department.

• 2:37:02Yasi Salek?

  It's so fucking cool, but also every pop star that's come after has walked in a path that Madonna carved out.

• 2:37:09Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 2:37:10Yasi Salek?

  When you now see the way merch is merchandised by pop stars and the way they create collaborations or what? This is, this all rooted Madonna was selling like crazy amounts of T-shirts and like, it was kind of really like, she's the one that created the blueprint.

• 2:37:27Speaker 05

  She did, and it's huge.

• 2:37:29Yasi Salek?

  All right. In June, the tour wraps Madonna goes down to Tennessee where Sean is filming At Close Range. Good movie, honestly. Really good movie.

• 2:37:37Speaker 05

  Oh, oh, oh, big news, big news, big news.

• 2:37:40Yasi Salek?

  What is it?

• 2:37:41Speaker 05

  They got engaged.

• 2:37:42Yasi Salek?

  Oh, yeah. Okay.

• 2:37:42Speaker 05

  Sean and Madonna.

• 2:37:44Yasi Salek?

  So they get engaged in Tennessee. She told Harry Dean Sandin, Sean asked me to marry him, but he didn't say it out loud. I read his mind. I read his mind back to him. Where were you? And he's, she said, in Tennessee at the Something Inn. We were out in the middle of nowhere and 7-Eleven was the high point of interest there. It was a Sunday morning and I was jumping up and down on the bed, performing one of my morning rituals. And all of a sudden he got this look in his eye and I felt like I just knew what he was thinking. And I said, whatever you're thinking, I'll say yes to. That was his chance. So he popped it. Then we went to 7-Eleven and bought a whole bunch of jawbreakers and celebrated. Sean is my hero and my best friend. Remember when I cried thinking about them getting divorced forty years ago, thirty years ago? I'm not, I'm not doing well. Okay, so the paparazzi are nonstop around them. It's already started.

• 2:38:30Yasi Salek?

  I don't know if this is the first time, but this is one of many times that Sean Penn does throw a rock at a photographer and rips his camera off and beats him with it.

• 2:38:40Speaker 05

  Sean is ill-prepared for the media onslaught.

• 2:38:44Yasi Salek?

  And the like imposition and the like no boundaries and the craziness. And he also, I think, very famously was like kind of a method actor and was was playing all these parts where he was sort of an aggressive, angry person. And so while he was filming these roles, he was that person, you know?

• 2:39:04Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 2:39:05Yasi Salek?

  All right. In July Playboy published a fourteen-page spread of nude photos of Madonna. Remember we talked about the art class posing? Okay, well, these people sold the photos to Playboy. Cool, cool story at Playboy. Very nice job for you to do that.

• 2:39:22Speaker 05

  They did it. And then Penthouse did it the next week, right?

• 2:39:24Yasi Salek?

  Yes, they definitely had both. I don't know if they they were trying to beat each other, but yeah, they did do it the next week.

• 2:39:28Speaker 05

  It was like a different batch of pictures.

• 2:39:30Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, because she was making, she was, she had to eat popcorn to make money.

• 2:39:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. Listen, you don't, you don't have to sell me on the fact that.

• 2:39:38Yasi Salek?

  If you've seen these photos, they're so not scandal. They're literally like, kind of like beautiful art photos and like, it's like not anything, but this is the eighties, so it's a big deal.

• 2:39:47Speaker 05

  And this is the kind of thing that will take down a star, right?

• 2:39:50Yasi Salek?

  Vanessa Williams had just had to give her crown back.

• 2:39:53Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 2:39:53Yasi Salek?

  Because the same thing happened to her after she won Miss America. Someone sold these old nude photos of her.

• 2:39:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. The first black woman to win the Miss America pageant and then her dreams are dashed.

• 2:40:03Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, so it could have been bad, I think, but. In the story, Liz Rosenberg is like, you know what, babe?

• 2:40:10Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:40:10Yasi Salek?

  We're not letting this, this is not gonna go bad, cuz fuck them, we're not letting it. And she gets a story in the New York Post, and this is the, what it says, Madonna on nude pics. So what? And then the headline was Madonna, I'm not ashamed.

• 2:40:26Speaker 05

  One of the best Madonna New York Post covers of all time.

• 2:40:30Yasi Salek?

  Madonna told Rolling Stone in 1986, I can't say I wasn't devastated by the experience. Sean kept saying, look, this is all gonna blow over, but nobody wants their skeleton to come out of the closet. I think when I first found out about it, the thing that annoyed me most wasn't so much that they were nude photographs, but that I felt really out of control. For the first time in what I thought to be several years of careful planning and knowing what was gonna happen, it took me by surprise.

• 2:40:52Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 2:40:53Yasi Salek?

  And that's an interesting point, cuz she really was, one thing is, she's gonna do is plan.

• 2:40:58Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 2:40:59Yasi Salek?

  Do you remember Live Aid going on TV?

• 2:41:01Speaker 05

  I do.

• 2:41:01Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:02Speaker 05

  I remember watching.

• 2:41:03Yasi Salek?

  And like, you made it like a point, like your family sat down.

• 2:41:06Speaker 05

  I can see the television that I'm watching her perform holiday.

• 2:41:12Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, she did Into the Groove, Holiday and Love Makes the World Go Round.

• 2:41:15Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 2:41:16Yasi Salek?

  Which hadn't come out yet, but she had already written it with.

• 2:41:17Speaker 05

  I can see it. And then she's wearing like, she's dressed in like a, in, she's making a point to be like extremely covered from the neck down.

• 2:41:24Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, she was wearing like a, a, a long jacket and she, it was hot and she wouldn't take it off.

• 2:41:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, like it's, she's wearing like a brocade embroidered baby blue jacket. It's giving sort of Sergeant Pepper, Rock Royalty, Prince vibes.

• 2:41:37Yasi Salek?

  That makes sense, cuz it was Bob Geldof put it together, um, to raise funds for the famine in Ethiopia. She said, it was the first time since the pictures came out, I was making a public appearance. Part of me felt about this big, and another part of me was saying, I'll be damned if I'm gonna let them make me feel down. I'm gonna get out there and kick ass, get this dark cloud out from over my head.

• 2:41:57Speaker 05

  Fuck yeah, Madonna.

• 2:41:58Yasi Salek?

  And she triumphed, babe. Okay, I've included in the, in the doc, the Madonna and Sean Penn wedding invitation.

• 2:42:04Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 2:42:04Yasi Salek?

  Drawn by Sean Penn's brother.

• 2:42:06Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 2:42:07Yasi Salek?

  So an American Gothic type drawing, but like Edward Gory style. Madonna has a boy toy belt on.

• 2:42:13Speaker 05

  She does.

• 2:42:14Yasi Salek?

  Madonna was so famous at this point, they actually could not. Write the address on the invite. They had to like, call people on the phone the day of and tell them where it was. Because the paparazzi would find out, which they found out anyways. They get married on Madonna's birthday, August 16th, and Sean's is August 17th. So they really wanted to do it at midnight, but it didn't work out. In Malibu, at the home of Elda and Dan Unger, Sean's parents' friends. Do you want to talk about Madonna War?

• 2:42:42Speaker 05

  Yes, Madonna War, dressed by Marlene Stewart, with a 10-foot train and a pink sash, plus a little black bowler hat. Another detail that I love that I'm so glad that you have here, is that Sean wore a $695 Versace suit off the rack.

• 2:42:57Yasi Salek?

  It's kind of crazy to think now, but I think that was like, really normal back then. Like, not every, not every actor was like, outfitted by the Dior atelier for like, everything they did. It was just like, I'm just gonna go get a fucking suit.

• 2:43:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm sure he looked great.

• 2:43:12Yasi Salek?

  Um, he did look great. There's photos. Um, Wolfgang Puck catered.

• 2:43:16Speaker 05

  And Herbert took the pictures. This is great.

• 2:43:19Yasi Salek?

  The best man was James Foley, who, um, plays into this whole story much more, um, with his films and his music video directing. And maid of honor was Madonna's sister Paula. Their first dance was to Chariots of Fire. I don't know how.

• 2:43:36Speaker 05

  It feels corny as hell.

• 2:43:37Yasi Salek?

  It's just weird. Like, what a weird, it's not really, to me, it's not a romantic song.

• 2:43:41Speaker 05

  It feels like nails on a chalkboard.

• 2:43:43Yasi Salek?

  It's just like.

• 2:43:44Speaker 05

  And what was going on?

• 2:43:45Yasi Salek?

  That's like getting, that's like having your first dance to the Rocky theme song. Like, does it?

• 2:43:50Yasi Salek?

  I mean, good for them. Okay, do you want to have an abbreviated guest list?

• 2:43:54Speaker 05

  I'd love one.

• 2:43:54Yasi Salek?

  Keith Haring, Debbie Mazur, Mari Poel, Mo Austin, David Geffen, Christopher Flynn, Diane Keaton, Susan Seidman and Rosanna Arquette, Tom Cruise, Harry Dean Stanton, Robert Duvall, Christopher Walken, Carrie Fisher, Charlie Sheen, Emilio Estevez, Judd Nelson, Rob Lowe, Timothy Hutton, Cameron Crowe, Cher, and Martin Burgoyne, who brought Andy Warhol as his date.

• 2:44:15Speaker 05

  Okay, you guys, this is, I want to read this, because I was like, oh wait, I remember this thing that Andy Warhol had said in the Andy Warhol Diaries about the wedding. "It was just the most exciting weekend of my life. Martin went down to the hairdresser earlier." During the day to have his hair done. We rode in a limo out to Malibu and when we saw helicopters in the distance, we knew we were at the wedding. Someone had tipped the reporters off about about where the wedding was and about 10 helicopters were hovering. It was like apocalypse now. And one helicopter had a girl hanging off with a camera and they were all trying to get in close. And the security people found camouflage outfitted photographers in the bushes. And I looked really close at Madonna and she is beautiful. And she and Sean are just so in love. She wore white and a black bowler hat. I don't know what that was supposed to mean.

• 2:45:00Speaker 05

  And someone said that Sean had shot at the helicopters the night before. The only boring celebrity there was Diane Keaton, really. He always hated Diane Keaton.

• 2:45:08Yasi Salek?

  Why?

• 2:45:08Speaker 05

  I don't know. He just thought she was such a bitch. And it was the right mixture of nobodies and celebrities. Sean came over to say hello and the good looking family of Madonna was there, all the brothers. And you could see Madonna and Sean love each other so much. Really, it was the most exciting thing ever. Boom, said Andy Warhol.

• 2:45:27Yasi Salek?

  You know what? Madonna's family is really hot.

• 2:45:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:45:30Yasi Salek?

  All the brothers, like everyone's good genes.

• 2:45:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:45:34Yasi Salek?

  Um, the other fun fact about this wedding, which didn't work, but Sean had written fuck off in 12 foot high letters on the beach below. Trying to think like they couldn't take pictures, but they were like, we'll just crop it, babe.

• 2:45:45Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:45:46Yasi Salek?

  They took their honeymoon in Carmel. Sean got Madonna 1957 Thunderbird convertible. It's the one that's in the True Blue video as a wedding gift. This is what Sean said to Vanity Fair in March of 86. Nothing I've said so far, nothing that I could possibly come up with is as important as her. No movie, nothing is as important as her. That's the best answer I can give.

• 2:46:08Speaker 05

  1986 is sort of, I'm just gonna say, it's kind of my, I just.

• 2:46:13Yasi Salek?

  It's your jam?

• 2:46:14Speaker 05

  It's my jam.

• 2:46:15Yasi Salek?

  You're really into 1986?

• 2:46:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, Madonna wise, because that's, that's 1986 is we're getting to my, I'm 10.

• 2:46:22Yasi Salek?

  And True Blue comes out.

• 2:46:23Speaker 05

  True Blue comes out.

• 2:46:24Yasi Salek?

  And you love Shanghai Surprises, your favorite movie?

• 2:46:26Speaker 05

  No, I've, I've, I only, I watched part of it the other day.

• 2:46:29Yasi Salek?

  I made it all the way through.

• 2:46:30Speaker 05

  It's, it's clearly not good. Sean is really not working for me, even more than Madonna. You'd think it was the other way around. I just really don't like Sean. haircut.

• 2:46:38Yasi Salek?

  His, his, the beard. No, I know, but the beard that they put on the beginning, it's obviously put on with like a mascara wand. Like it's so horrible.

• 2:46:46Speaker 05

  Right, right, right. Also, her, her glam is all wrong for the movie, but she looks so good.

• 2:46:51Yasi Salek?

  So stunning. It's almost worth watching just to look at her.

• 2:46:54Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:46:54Yasi Salek?

  Cause she's so stunning.

• 2:46:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, she looks incredible.

• 2:46:56Yasi Salek?

  This movie is garbage. It's filmed in Asia.

• 2:46:58Speaker 05

  It ruined their, it ruined their, their, their merit.

• 2:47:01Yasi Salek?

  I think it was a contributing factor and it was really sweet. Cause like, I think she really wanted to do it. And he did it as a gift to her, kind of like, I'll be in this movie with you.

• 2:47:10Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:47:11Yasi Salek?

  And I think they both thought the script was good upon looking at it. George Harrison was the producer. It had good signs.

• 2:47:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:47:20Yasi Salek?

  The making of it is a disaster. The paparazzi are hounding them. The British crew hates them. They hated the director, Jim Good, Jim Goddard. It's freezing. Cause they're filming in the winter, but it's supposed to be summer. So she's like always in these thin dresses being cold. Sean, by his own admission, was just drunk the entire time.

• 2:47:37Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:47:38Yasi Salek?

  Um, which is probably why his performance is not top notch.

• 2:47:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:47:41Yasi Salek?

  Um, she said, we were on a ship without a captain. We were so miserable while we were working on it. And I'm sure it shows. There's like a physical altercation with a paparazzi with Sean. Um, and I think he goes to jail in Hong Kong. But then they leave jail. I can't remember the exact story.

• 2:48:00Speaker 05

  It's, it's a mess and he, and things happen and it's a disaster.

• 2:48:03Yasi Salek?

  It's a disaster.

• 2:48:04Speaker 05

  Every day is a disaster.

• 2:48:05Yasi Salek?

  Every day is a disaster. Obviously over time, and unfortunately this is not part of your purview, but you're, I'm happy for you to weigh in on it. Cause we're gonna talk about Madonna's film career as we go forward, cause it's part of the story. Some bad shakes, like some unfortunate choices that I think unfairly. Now characterize her acting career. Would you agree?

• 2:48:29Speaker 05

  What do you mean? Can you, can you go a little further?

• 2:48:31Yasi Salek?

  Like desperately seeking Susan, like everyone's like, yes, amazing. And then Shanghai Surprise and everyone's like, this sucks. Actually you weren't that good in that. But you know what I mean? They're like, oh, that was a fluke. This is, this is what you are in this movie sucks. So that comes and then it doesn't really get better. She choose, there's a lot of movies that. I like Body of Evidence. I think it's good and kind of unfairly maligned.

• 2:48:53Speaker 05

  She looks so good in that movie. It's crazy.

• 2:48:55Yasi Salek?

  Bye.

• 2:48:56Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:48:57Yasi Salek?

  Goodbye.

• 2:48:57Speaker 05

  You know what? She has two great movies, Desperately Seeking Susan and Truth or Dare. And you know what? That's more than many people have.

• 2:49:04Yasi Salek?

  Truth or Dare is a documentary.

• 2:49:06Speaker 05

  I know, but it's still a movie, you know? You like, um, Who's That Girl?

• 2:49:11Yasi Salek?

  I love Who's That Girl. I love Who's That Girl.

• 2:49:13Speaker 05

  Well, that's a flop, but...

• 2:49:15Yasi Salek?

  But it's a great movie.

• 2:49:16Speaker 05

  It's not a great movie, but I understand why you love it.

• 2:49:18Yasi Salek?

  I love it.

• 2:49:19Speaker 05

  There's something about it that I really love, too.

• 2:49:20Yasi Salek?

  It's very charming.

• 2:49:21Speaker 05

  But first, True Blue.

• 2:49:22Yasi Salek?

  But first, I'm sorry.

• 2:49:23Speaker 05

  True Love, Baby. So basically, everything's on the rocks when she, when she, when she lays down True Blue, right?

• 2:49:30Yasi Salek?

  I don't know. No, I think, I think there's holes, there's just tiny holes in the boat, but it's not like we're getting divorced.

• 2:49:40Speaker 05

  Right, right, right, right, right.

• 2:49:41Yasi Salek?

  That's like a prayer.

• 2:49:42Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 2:49:43Yasi Salek?

  Like, the songs written for this album were written in the spirit of true love.

• 2:49:48Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 2:49:48Yasi Salek?

  And you can hear it. Like, it's bliss.

• 2:49:50Speaker 05

  True Love, Baby, yeah.

• 2:49:51Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. She writes some of the songs on set at Shanghai Surprise. Like, they're still like, I think, I think this is very much in love, you know?

• 2:50:00Speaker 01

  Welcome to the 50th Hunger Games. Witness the beginning of the revolution.

• 2:50:05Speaker 06

  Hey Mitch, you've been trying to take down these games from Star.

• 2:50:07Speaker 01

  Film for IMAX.

• 2:50:09Speaker 06

  Make them remember you.

• 2:50:11Speaker 01

  The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, November 20th, rated PG-13.

• 2:50:15Speaker 00

  LinkedIn is pretty amazing at helping you grow your small business. We cannot make your email response time faster. We can help you sell, market, and hire in one place. We cannot help you find space for your three desk drinks. Why do you have three? And while we can't help you find the perfect volume for your presentation video, LinkedIn can help you find the perfect audience for your business. Grow your small business on LinkedIn. Learn more at LinkedIn.com/smallbusiness.

• 2:50:47Yasi Salek?

  Bro, this album didn't have to go so hard.

• 2:50:52Speaker 05

  It's so good.

• 2:50:54Yasi Salek?

  It's produced by Madonna, Stephen Bray and Patrick Leonard. They were like, we don't need a big name producer, we can do it ourselves. Stephen Bray remembers, we were working for this big label and she had gotten to the point where she didn't really have to answer to them creatively. Like we said, she sold, whatever, 10 million copies of Triple Diamond or whatever like a version was. So we were left on our own to make this whole album, doing whatever we wanted and letting them in the room we finished was great.

• 2:51:16Speaker 05

  So, so you know, she's got the disco guy, I never knew Love Like This before and she's kinda up and down with it. Reggie Lucas for the first album and then she's got now Rogers for the second one. And then she really comes into the Madonna sound with True Blue.

• 2:51:32Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, because I think at first, obviously, she's like, well, I don't know how to do it. And obviously the label, the first album's not gonna let her do it. So they're like, you have this guy. And she's like, okay, great, but then she's like, I don't like how it, let's strip it back. And then even now Rogers, who she chose, she liked it to an extent, but like ultimately she knows what she wants all the time.

• 2:51:49Speaker 05

  And also Stephen Bray and Patrick Leonard are her boys and now she's just like, let me just do it with my boys.

• 2:51:55Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. The title, which is obviously a song, but also the title comes from one of Sean's favorite expressions.

• 2:52:02Speaker 05

  That's beautiful.

• 2:52:03Yasi Salek?

  The cover is shot by Herbert's.

• 2:52:04Speaker 05

  Great, great, great cover.

• 2:52:07Yasi Salek?

  Psychotic. Also, I think it's interesting to point out that the cover actually didn't have text on it.

• 2:52:12Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:52:12Yasi Salek?

  It was in the, it was on the shrink wrap, but they didn't wanna like sully the image, which is such a cool thing.

• 2:52:17Speaker 05

  Yeah. And it's, it's one of the defining record covers of the 1980s.

• 2:52:23Yasi Salek?

  She's so beautiful. It is interesting to think about how hard it was to make album covers back then because you, there's no Photoshop, man. Like you had to type, type set to bring the types. It was like you couldn't, there was a limited amount of stuff you could do. Here's what the LA Times said. "Some people will never take Madonna seriously, just as many never took Marilyn Monroe seriously. Novelty images, especially that of a sex symbol, are hard to erase. But talent far outshines novelty in Madonna's new LP. The most obvious growth is in the control and character in Madonna's singing. Where she previously seemed dependent on clever record production, her vocals are so finely tailored that she actually extends the punch and appeal of the production touches." I love it. They compare her to David Bowie.

• 2:53:05Yasi Salek?

  Not all the reviews were positive. The Chicago Sun-Times said this album just isn't as fun as her previous two, which is like.

• 2:53:11Speaker 05

  Shut up.

• 2:53:12Yasi Salek?

  Literally shut up. And also, yes, it is.

• 2:53:15Speaker 05

  I think what the LA Times is saying is true because like you and I both love the novelty of Madonna and like a virgin and they feel like a warm bath, I think, to both of us. And we just enjoy it very much. But then True Blue really is, it's just talent.

• 2:53:29Yasi Salek?

  It's objectively good.

• 2:53:29Speaker 05

  It's blonde ambition. It's incredible. It's starting to get to this god tier thing.

• 2:53:36Yasi Salek?

  The first single, Live to Tell, which is a crazy first single.

• 2:53:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:53:41Yasi Salek?

  Given that this woman has made her career off like fun dance music, I just, I think the story is really interesting. So Patrick Lennar had already written the, the music part of it in 1985 for a film. It's supposed to be instrumental in a film called Fire with Fire. Um, the studio was like, we don't want it. And so he shows it to Madonna and she's like, well, I love this. And he's like, well, will you write lyrics? And she's like, yeah. And you said, you point out, she wrote it in like, what?

• 2:54:07Speaker 05

  Thirty-one minutes, perhaps. Something like that.

• 2:54:10Yasi Salek?

  And I think, I think she already had in mind, I don't know exactly, but I think she already had in mind, um, At Close Range, because the lyrics are kind of in, inspired by the sort of, um, complicated relationship of father and son in At Close Range. Um, Christopher Walken is the father. Um, really great movie. And Madonna's like, okay, well, let me just take it to Sean for the new movie or whatever. And James Foley, who we talked about earlier, the best man, the director, he loved it. He was like, well, he was like, let's, he's like, I want it. And Madonna's like, okay, who's gonna sing it? Because she had written it from the perspective of a man. And, and she assumed the register was low. She was like, a man should sing this. And they were like, no, you're singing. This is your song

• 2:54:55Yasi Salek?

  you're singing in. And she was like, okay. And then Foley ended up asking Patrick Lennar to score the entire film. And the song, once again, just like Into the Roof, the one they used in the film is just that demo.

• 2:55:07Speaker 05

  It's just so great.

• 2:55:08Yasi Salek?

  It's just so good.

• 2:55:08Speaker 05

  She's like my boy. You got it, you got it.

• 2:55:10Yasi Salek?

  When you got it, you got it. And then they're like, it's gonna be the first single. And Warner Brothers is like, please no seven minute long um sad song for first single, please. And she was like, yes, it is. And guess what? It went straight to motherfucking number one on the charts because it's one of the best songs

• 2:55:27Speaker 05

  It's so good.

• 2:55:27Yasi Salek?

  that has ever been written. This.

• 2:55:30Speaker 05

  It's incredible.

• 2:55:31Yasi Salek?

  I'm gonna go ahead and say it. I think, obviously, there's a few production touches that are eighties, but like, I think this sounds so modern, this song, when you play it now. Just the construction of the song. Am I wrong? Am I just old?

• 2:55:44Speaker 05

  I just love it so much. I just think it's really great. And uh it always sounds great. It's a forever kind of song.

• 2:55:53Yasi Salek?

  Her voice sounds so good.

• 2:55:54Speaker 05

  It does.

• 2:56:04Yasi Salek?

  Okay, absolute fucking jam, absolute fucking banger.

• 2:56:07Speaker 05

  So good.

• 2:56:08Yasi Salek?

  Second single is the first song on the album, so we can go through it. It's your, it's your big memory.

• 2:56:13Speaker 05

  Boom, boom, boom, ba, ba, ba, ba.

• 2:56:17Yasi Salek?

  The drama, babe. The string openings of Papa Don't Preach.

• 2:56:21Speaker 05

  Come on. It's so good.

• 2:56:23Yasi Salek?

  Then the fat bass drops.

• 2:56:24Speaker 05

  So good. This song is so good.

• 2:56:35Yasi Salek?

  This was written by a man named Brian Elliott. Um, so Bri, this is so interesting to me. Brian Elliott um had like a mirror, like a window, a front window that teenage girls would use as a mirror. They would just stand outside, like putting on lipstick, and he would overhear them talking. And that's how he was inspired to write this song.

• 2:56:54Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 2:56:54Yasi Salek?

  It's kind of cool.

• 2:56:55Speaker 05

  I love it.

• 2:56:55Yasi Salek?

  In North Hollywood.

• 2:56:57Speaker 05

  Was this controversial? I feel like I remember it being controversial.

• 2:57:00Yasi Salek?

  Okay, so it's very interesting, because like. It's, the song is like so cool to me and it makes so much, even though she didn't write the lyrics, I think she tweaked them maybe a little bit, but like it's a perfect in the hands of Madonna, because this is not an anti-abortion song, this is not a pro-abortion song. This is a song about a young girl's agency, about her right to choose for herself what to do with her life, which is like a perfect Madonna conceit. But there was controversy because the right wing people were like, this is glamorizing teen pregnancy. And then the pro-choice people were like, you're encouraging people, teenagers to have babies and not get abortions. And she was like, oh, this is just a story.

• 2:57:42Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:57:43Yasi Salek?

  What she actually said was, immediately they're gonna say, I'm advising every young girl to go out and get pregnant. When I first heard the song, I thought that was silly, but I thought, wait a minute. This song is really about a girl who's making a decision in her life. She has a very close relationship with her father and wants to maintain that closeness. To me, it's a celebration of life. It says, I love you, father, and I love this man and this child that is growing inside of me. Of course, who knows how it'll end, but at least it starts off positive. Rolling Stone, this caused them to call her the pop poet of the lower middle class of America, which I loved. Bruce Springsteen moment, babe. Um, the video? Directed by James Foley, who we just talked about.

• 2:58:20Speaker 05

  Video. Wait, remind me, James Foley is friends with Sean Penn?

• 2:58:23Yasi Salek?

  Best friends with Sean Penn, directed at close range.

• 2:58:25Speaker 05

  Got it.

• 2:58:25Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:26Speaker 05

  And was also hanging out with her.

• 2:58:28Yasi Salek?

  Who's that girl?

• 2:58:28Speaker 05

  And was like, right, and directed Who's That Girl?

• 2:58:32Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:32Speaker 05

  And Fear.

• 2:58:33Yasi Salek?

  And Fear. I think he's done a lot of stuff.

• 2:58:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:58:35Yasi Salek?

  And he's done multiple music videos for her. This is filmed in Staten Island. Alex McArthur, who I looked up because he was so fucking hot.

• 2:58:42Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:58:42Yasi Salek?

  He's so hot, this man.

• 2:58:44Speaker 05

  And Danielle Yello as her father.

• 2:58:45Yasi Salek?

  As her father.

• 2:58:46Speaker 05

  Just want, okay, this is, this is the life-changing moment for Mel Ottenberg.

• 2:58:49Yasi Salek?

  Okay.

• 2:58:50Speaker 05

  As, as, as a creative, anything, as a human being, but like, no one in the world is famous like Madonna is right now.

• 2:58:56Yasi Salek?

  Maybe Michael Jackson.

• 2:58:58Speaker 05

  Well, no, no, no, in modern culture, not to diss on everyone in modern culture.

• 2:59:02Yasi Salek?

  Oh, you mean currently?

• 2:59:03Speaker 05

  But no one is currently as famous as Madonna and as fashionable as Madonna. No one at this moment is that famous that is as fashionable. Or like their actual style as being ripped to shreds and copied by the masses and blah, blah, blah. And what she sees is that it's time to change it. So she, whatever she does with her gays or with her brother or with her stylist friends or whatever, she goes inwardly and figures out this whole new thing for herself. And then she blasts it with this video and it's like, there's no jewelry. You know, she's got this Jean Saebert thing going on with the hair.

• 2:59:40Yasi Salek?

  The curls are gone. It's like a cropped hair, the stripes, the leather jacket.

• 2:59:44Speaker 05

  Leather jacket, the high waisted black pant with like the bell. It's like very, very, very, very simple. It's a whole new look. And then she's also in the studio with this sort of like old Hollywood 50s thing with the pedal pusher pants and the bustier.

• 2:59:56Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:56Speaker 05

  But again, it's like, it's very like, you know, Madonna land at, um, at, uh,

• 3:00:03Yasi Salek?

  Macy's?

• 3:00:03Speaker 05

  At Macy's. That shit is over bitch. That shit's all tired. That's old news. This is the new thing.

• 3:00:10Yasi Salek?

  Throw your bracelets in the trash.

• 3:00:11Speaker 05

  You thought Madonna looked like this bitch? You're a fucking fool. Madonna looks like this.

• 3:00:16Yasi Salek?

  Oh boy.

• 3:00:24Speaker 05

  And that, that is like a thing that is like, it's not just me saying that. This is a moment. This is like an incredible thing to study till the end of time is this moment.

• 3:00:36Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Her first, her first major reinvention of her look.

• 3:00:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:00:40Yasi Salek?

  Of one of many.

• 3:00:41Speaker 05

  You sobbed when watching this video. I did not. I think the end is so corny and funny, but I love it. You love it in a different way. You're a woman.

• 3:00:48Yasi Salek?

  I love my dad.

• 3:00:49Speaker 05

  I, I love my dad too.

• 3:00:51Yasi Salek?

  I know, but I just really love my dad. And I'm just like, oh my God, what would my dad do? And what he, and then when he's like, I can't look at you or talk to you, but then at the end he comes and accepts her and hugs her.

• 3:01:00Speaker 05

  I know, in her bedroom with like the, the, the pink panther stuffed animal and stuff.

• 3:01:07Speaker 05

  It's a great, it's a great video.

• 3:01:08Yasi Salek?

  I'm hanging on by a thread though, as you know, so meant like my mental health is not good. So take it with a grain of salt, but yeah, it's a fucking great video. I love it. Debbie Mazars in it and Erica Bell in the beginning, those are her girlfriends.

• 3:01:19Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 3:01:19Yasi Salek?

  You know, um, all right. Are you ready to talk about the fucking, one of the best songs that ever existed on the history of the world?

• 3:01:25Speaker 05

  Yes, I am.

• 3:01:28Yasi Salek?

  Open your heart to me.

• 3:01:31Speaker 05

  This, this, I'm, I'm gonna say that this is my favorite Madonna song.

• 3:01:35Yasi Salek?

  It's really up there for me.

• 3:01:36Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:01:36Yasi Salek?

  It's really, I want you guys, I just challenge you, you're in a bad mood, you wake up in the morning, maybe you need to walk your dog around a quiet neighborhood. Put your headphones in, throw on, open your heart, that your whole life will change.

• 3:01:46Speaker 05

  It's such a great song. It's the best Madonna song. This always makes me feel close to myself too. Like I feel like I'm like, I'm close to like every version of me.

• 3:01:57Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 3:01:58Speaker 05

  The human being, the man.

• 3:02:00Yasi Salek?

  I always thought she was saying would you, would you, would you, but it's watch out. That's my favorite. Oh, which, oh, which, oh, which.

• 3:02:13Yasi Salek?

  Fun story time, officially from my vegans, shout out my vegans. I mean, I'm not a vegan, but shout out my vegans. This was written by originally by Gardner Cole and Peter Rafelson for Cyndi Lauper.

• 3:02:29Speaker 05

  Oh, wow.

• 3:02:29Yasi Salek?

  They lived in Canoga Park. It was called Follow Your Heart. And why is that? Vegans will understand. There was a health food store in Canoga Park, it's actually, I think it's still there, called Follow Your Heart. You might know them now from their mass-produced, uh, vegan products that you can find in grocery stores. And one of the guys was in love with a waitress there named Lisa. So the song was actually Follow Your Heart.

• 3:02:53Speaker 05

  Follow your heart.

• 3:02:54Yasi Salek?

  It doesn't work as well.

• 3:02:55Speaker 05

  I'll make you love me.

• 3:02:57Yasi Salek?

  Madonna changed it to make it better. Um, but what's really important also is that Gardner Cole had a girlfriend that he asked to record the demo and her name was Donna Delory.

• 3:03:06Speaker 05

  Incredible. Donna Delory is important to the story.

• 3:03:08Yasi Salek?

  So major. And that's how she gets in the mix and becomes one of Madonna's backup singers. And the guitar is by the guy who played guitar on Billie Jean, David Williams.

• 3:03:17Speaker 05

  And Patrick Leonard produced this with her.

• 3:03:20Yasi Salek?

  Correct.

• 3:03:21Speaker 05

  And it's just, I'm, I'm telling you, it is my favorite. It hit number seven. It will always be number one in my mind. The video rips.

• 3:03:30Yasi Salek?

  Bro, we gotta like, we gotta really get into it. Jean Baptiste Mundino.

• 3:03:36Speaker 05

  It's so good. Mondino's first video with her.

• 3:03:39Yasi Salek?

  With her, yeah.

• 3:03:40Speaker 05

  Maybe he had shot, maybe he had shot her, I don't know, but like this is a genius video.

• 3:03:44Yasi Salek?

  It's.

• 3:03:45Speaker 05

  It's got so much style. It's very international. It's very world. It's very big. It's very explosive. The style is so sick. I don't know who styled it. Did Marlene Stewart style it?

• 3:03:55Yasi Salek?

  Very well. Uh, the her, the clothes are.

• 3:03:58Speaker 05

  Clothes are made by Marlene.

• 3:03:59Yasi Salek?

  Made by her, yeah.

• 3:04:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's so good. It's so seedy. It's so chic. It's just, she's, she just looks so nuts, too. She also doesn't look human anymore. This is the moment where, where she's.

• 3:04:12Yasi Salek?

  She's a goddess level.

• 3:04:13Speaker 05

  She's goddess level. And I don't mean that it's like, she's no longer just a human. She's like real, her body is like really taut. And everything about her has changed.

• 3:04:24Yasi Salek?

  I should point out, the Like a Virgin tour, the Virgin tour, is when she realized, she's like, oh, I can't do this. Like, I can't sustain performing for this long and dancing. So she started working out really heavily. But she's always a dancer, obviously, but she started like doing more like concentrated working out for stamina. And this is why she starts to lean out when you get here, you know? I mean, yeah, this is a cabaret, right? This is a cabaret inspired situation. She even starts out in that little black wig like Liza.

• 3:04:55Speaker 05

  Right.

• 3:04:55Yasi Salek?

  Um, which was Mondino's idea.

• 3:04:57Speaker 05

  Genius idea.

• 3:04:57Yasi Salek?

  He said, I said to her, you know, it would be nice if maybe, if you wear a black wig, because she was known as being the blonde with short hair. So a few days before the shoot, we had the meeting with hair and makeup, and they work on her and they prepare her with the outfit, the wig and stuff. And then she turns around, looks at me with the wig and says, okay, Mondino, tell me what you think. And I look at her and say, well, you look great, but to be honest, I prefer you blonde. Um, she looked at me and that day she trusted me because she knew more than anyone else that she was better in blonde.

• 3:05:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, she's a great blonde.

• 3:05:23Yasi Salek?

  She's an incredible blonde. Obviously, like, it's a music video, so we're getting a bit of story, but it's all, you kind of have to stretch your imagination to understand the story. But it's pretty obvious that, okay, this is like a porn-esque theater where like a woman is dancing sexy. So the people watching her through these windows, one is a woman and one is two men that I think are, seem to be two gay men. I don't know. There's no real explicit.

• 3:05:52Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 3:05:52Yasi Salek?

  But I've read a bunch of things that are like, okay, this is like the first overt reference to homosexuality in her work, and it was on MTV.

• 3:06:00Speaker 05

  Right.

• 3:06:01Yasi Salek?

  Did you notice that when you watched?

• 3:06:02Speaker 05

  No, what I what I noticed when I watched it the other day is just how amazing it is and how well it's so eccentric and it's such a tight vision and it's amazing and every single person is dressed so interestingly, like every detail.

• 3:06:16Yasi Salek?

  And every face is interesting, like they were cast really well and we didn't even talk about the young boy.

• 3:06:20Speaker 05

  The boy is like a very specific boy who'd been shot for the face and stuff.

• 3:06:24Yasi Salek?

  Oh, she was one of those Buffalo's like military.

• 3:06:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's like, there's like pictures that you've seen pictures of that boy in like Buffalo styling and stuff like.

• 3:06:34Yasi Salek?

  Wow.

• 3:06:35Speaker 05

  Yeah. Um. He's a really specifically cast incredible face.

• 3:06:40Yasi Salek?

  One of the theories about the styling of this boy and also Madonna is that he represented Martin Burgoyne because that little hat and the little boy, because that's how he dressed, you know?

• 3:06:51Speaker 05

  Right.

• 3:06:52Yasi Salek?

  Martin Burgoyne gets sick with AIDS quite early.

• 3:06:57Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 3:06:57Yasi Salek?

  Um, I don't know if it's happened yet, but.

• 3:06:59Speaker 05

  I think it probably has.

• 3:07:01Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, so that might be why this like homage to him in the thing.

• 3:07:06Speaker 05

  Cause he dies really, really early.

• 3:07:08Yasi Salek?

  He's like 24 or something, I think, when he died. It was so sad.

• 3:07:10Speaker 05

  And also Madonna is like a real early and fearless pioneer of of like not being afraid of gay people and people with AIDS.

• 3:07:20Yasi Salek?

  And raising awareness about.

• 3:07:22Speaker 05

  Awareness and money.

• 3:07:23Yasi Salek?

  And money, yeah.

• 3:07:24Speaker 05

  She's a hero.

• 3:07:25Yasi Salek?

  Okay, um, White Heat.

• 3:07:27Speaker 05

  I love it.

• 3:07:27Yasi Salek?

  As I said, the ACAB left my body, babe. This, I love Cops, actually.

• 3:07:31Speaker 05

  It's great.

• 3:07:32Yasi Salek?

  I love it. I'm sorry. I also cried walking. I can't explain. This one I can't actually explain again. Maybe I'm just really unwell. But I just, it's like so beautiful. Where's the party? Like this innocence. That's like, I love when I love how her voice gets a little ragged, where she's like, where's the party? You know, like it gets a little.

• 3:08:00Yasi Salek?

  Okay, well, True Blue, babe, third single.

• 3:08:02Speaker 05

  Okay, um, True Blue is a big hit.

• 3:08:05Yasi Salek?

  Hey!

• 3:08:05Speaker 05

  What?

• 3:08:06Yasi Salek?

  Listen, um, I love that song.

• 3:08:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, I love it, whatever.

• 3:08:10Yasi Salek?

  You don't like, you whatever it?

• 3:08:11Speaker 05

  I can't, no, no, no, I, I love it, I love it, I love it. No more sadness, I kiss it goodbye. The sun was bursting right out of the sky. I searched my whole world for someone like you. Don't you know, don't you know that it's?

• 3:08:31Yasi Salek?

  Come on, you can't?

• 3:08:32Speaker 05

  It's fucking good.

• 3:08:34Yasi Salek?

  You can't know more sadness, that like, just, my heart?

• 3:08:37Speaker 05

  Oh, no, no, no.

• 3:08:37Yasi Salek?

  Opens right up.

• 3:08:38Speaker 05

  You just reminded me that-

• 3:08:39Yasi Salek?

  The sun shines right through.

• 3:08:40Speaker 05

  You just reminded me that I love it so much.

• 3:08:42Yasi Salek?

  Thank you.

• 3:08:51Yasi Salek?

  I mean, this, their love, their love inspired this.

• 3:08:54Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:08:56Yasi Salek?

  This is the first instance of her working with Shep Pettybone, just want to point that out.

• 3:09:00Speaker 05

  Incredible.

• 3:09:00Yasi Salek?

  That's important, he does the remix. Um, he, he had worked with Africa Bombada, did you know that, that's really cool? The video?

• 3:09:08Speaker 05

  It's not my favorite video, it's too-

• 3:09:10Yasi Salek?

  Which one are you thinking of, the black and white one?

• 3:09:12Speaker 05

  No, the color one.

• 3:09:14Yasi Salek?

  Okay, so do you know the story, it's so interesting?

• 3:09:16Speaker 05

  No.

• 3:09:17Yasi Salek?

  That one was never shown in America.

• 3:09:19Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 3:09:19Yasi Salek?

  Okay, because, it's so interesting, because I don't remember it, and then I like, I watched it the other day, I was like, oh. James Foley directed this, it's shot outside of the United States because Cyre Records in the United States, team with MTV, for a competition called Madonna's Make My Video Contest, and they had fans make videos and submit them for a huge contest, and there was a whole day on MTV where she played all these videos, and they got twenty-five thousand dollars, three thousand people entered, and this is actually really funny, there was, most of them were like love videos, but one, um, had schoolgirls overpowering and tying up a teacher who spoke badly of Madonna, and in another one, an American girl and a Russian boy grow up to become President of the United States and the USSR.

• 3:10:03Yasi Salek?

  Anyways, I would have loved to see that one. The Venezuelan born Miami based college student named Angel Garcia won. And there's a black and white sepia toned clip. And that became the video in America. I hadn't, I don't remember this at all. No.

• 3:10:19Speaker 05

  Oh, wow.

• 3:10:19Yasi Salek?

  I don't remember this at all.

• 3:10:21Speaker 05

  I don't remember this at all either.

• 3:10:22Yasi Salek?

  But that's just from my research.

• 3:10:23Speaker 05

  That lore is lost on me.

• 3:10:25Yasi Salek?

  Mel, y'all mind if a white girl speaks some Espanol? It's time for Lysabone Tom.

• 3:10:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. What does she say in Spanish in this video?

• 3:10:36Yasi Salek?

  Te digo que amo. How can you say that?

• 3:10:41Speaker 05

  When I was listening to it on the way here, I was like, do I fuck with this song anymore?

• 3:10:45Yasi Salek?

  I fuck with it so heavy.

• 3:10:47Speaker 05

  Fuck with this song?

• 3:10:48Yasi Salek?

  The song goes crazy.

• 3:10:49Speaker 05

  Crazy?

• 3:10:49Yasi Salek?

  The song goes crazy, babe.

• 3:10:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, it goes crazy.

• 3:10:51Yasi Salek?

  My mom was obsessed with the song. My mom loves a little Spanish guitar moment. And this is like, it's like the best thing that ever happened to her is that Madonna plus Spanish guitar music.

• 3:11:10Speaker 05

  Did she write the song?

• 3:11:12Yasi Salek?

  Yes, written by Madonna and Patrick Leonard and Bruce Gage, who I assume probably did the guitar part. I'm not really sure, but.

• 3:11:18Speaker 05

  This quote's really interesting.

• 3:11:20Yasi Salek?

  So it's very funny because, okay, so obviously the quote or the lyric is, I fell in love with San Pedro. Okay, and everyone was like, oh, San Pedro, like is that the island in Belize, the Dominican Republic, Cuba? Rolling Stone, she's like, yeah, I don't know where that came from. And the interviewer goes, are you telling me you never dreamt of San Pedro? She goes, I don't know where San Pedro is. At that point, I wasn't a person who went on holidays to beautiful islands. I may have been on the way to the studio and seen an exit ramp for San Pedro. I don't know if you guys have been to San Pedro, babe?

• 3:11:54Speaker 05

  I actually have, just for one photo shoot, but it's not, it's not this.

• 3:11:58Yasi Salek?

  Love and respect to San Pedro, but it is not the thing that would inspire, it is not a beautiful island.

• 3:12:03Speaker 05

  What, what's the, what's the, what's the highway that you're on if you see the?

• 3:12:06Yasi Salek?

  The 110, maybe?

• 3:12:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, you're on the 110 going south and you see the signs for San Pedro.

• 3:12:10Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it's like, San Pedro's kind of close to Torrance where I grew up. And we, I remember there, there was like, I remember still there was like a bridge or like an underground thing near the beach that was all graffiti and we would go smoke pot in there.

• 3:12:21Speaker 05

  You love Jimmy Jimmy, I don't care.

• 3:12:25Speaker 05

  Oh, it's about, it's about James Dean.

• 3:12:27Yasi Salek?

  But I feel like the lyrics are so about herself. You're much too wild for this town. Not a lot here that's gonna hold you down. You've got a lot of style to take you far. Take you further than my backyard. I like a new wave song. It's a new wave song.

• 3:12:42Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 3:12:52Speaker 05

  What do you think about Love Makes the World Go Round?

• 3:12:54Yasi Salek?

  Okay, I'm sorry, I love it.

• 3:12:56Speaker 05

  Oh, my God.

• 3:12:57Yasi Salek?

  You don't love it?

• 3:12:58Speaker 05

  No, but I mean, like.

• 3:13:00Yasi Salek?

  Okay, I mean, yes. Is the lyrical conceit a little cheesy? Yes.

• 3:13:04Speaker 05

  I don't really like it.

• 3:13:06Yasi Salek?

  But I just, to me, this True Blue is just no skips. Pretty, like, all kind of in a band of goodness. Like, yes, okay, Love Makes the World Go Round and Jimmy Jamir on the lower band, but they're still, I never skip them. I'm always happy when they come on. I love the, like, Jimmy, I just love it. I love it. Fucking, to me, you're perfect.

• 3:13:33Speaker 05

  I love, I love, I love this album. I love Madonna in 1986.

• 3:13:36Yasi Salek?

  It's really good.

• 3:13:38Speaker 05

  Okay, but AIDS is going on. It's good to remind ourselves, because there's a lot of hard stuff going on in these days, too, and ain't no one talking about it.

• 3:13:45Yasi Salek?

  No, I think.

• 3:13:46Speaker 05

  You know, and, you know, authoritarianism and, and like, this motherfucking president. War mongering and fear mongering and blah, blah, blah. No one's touching this with a 10-foot pole, because everyone just wants the likes and the streams and everything.

• 3:14:03Yasi Salek?

  I was just talking to my friend Sam about this, where he was talking to me from Coachella, and he was like, it's so crazy. He's like, there's barely anyone with any sort of political messaging here. Little, like, people in t-shirts, even in the bands. Like, I was like, that's, the whole point of art, especially music as counterculture, is to, like, speak up. You know, like, The Strokes did it at Coachella. I just saw clips of it. Like, that was really cool. They were like, they had this whole visual thing about all the, um, heads of foreign states that the CIA allegedly killed, which I thought was really fucking cool of them. But yeah, like, what, everyone, like, people are just,

• 3:14:44Yasi Salek?

  I don't think it's everyone's fault. I think the way that information is delivered to us now is so psychotic, like,

• 3:14:50Speaker 05

  No, I think it's just like, we've given up. We're just like, oh, we're sliding into authoritarianism. And like, we all love, we all love the dopamine.

• 3:14:59Yasi Salek?

  Right. We're, we're, we've been lulled, like, Instagram was a psyop of the CIA to get us to stop paying attention.

• 3:15:05Speaker 05

  I do believe that.

• 3:15:07Yasi Salek?

  I mean, not know.

• 3:15:07Speaker 05

  I mean, not know. And also, like, being a dem, being a liberal, being anti-fascism is lame, but you know what?

• 3:15:14Yasi Salek?

  How is it lame? Why? Is it cool to be pro-fascist?

• 3:15:16Speaker 05

  No, that's the thing. It's like, seems lamer to me. But anyway, that's just the way it is.

• 3:15:21Yasi Salek?

  I just think it's crazy that we are delivered, like, sixty different fucked up things that you read about. And not only do you read about it, it's delivered to you in a psychotic meme format from Jump. Like, I woke, wake up, open my eyes, and there's an AI video of Donald Trump made by Iran. It's already, everything's immediately a joke.

• 3:15:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:15:42Yasi Salek?

  It's too crazy. And I think people are just like, I don't, my, our brains are short circuited.

• 3:15:46Speaker 05

  Well, the crazy thing about the eighties, that we're way too young to like, really understand. It's easy to forget. Is that AIDS happening to all these amazing, cool, creative people are dying all the time. And, um, there's all this Christians and the moral majority and Jerry Falwell and shit. And then AIDS deaths are happening. And like, the president never mentions it.

• 3:16:09Yasi Salek?

  Doesn't even say a word. It's like, it's like as if COVID happened and no one talked about it.

• 3:16:14Speaker 05

  But Madonna, and anyway, we're bringing it up because Madonna is really talking about it. And she, you know, not only is connecting with like, paying for Martin Burgoyne and stuff, but I feel like she did all this cool stuff about that, right?

• 3:16:27Yasi Salek?

  Hundred percent. So, okay, so, like, you're talking about, this is going on. Christopher Flynn and Martin Burgoyne contract AIDS, and Madonna finds out about it around the same time. She, she flies to New York and, like you said, paid for all of Martin's medical bills and life costs. Madonna and Sean Penn do a play together with David Ray called Goose and Tom Tom. Just want to point that out. She's a she's a serious actor. She's trying to be a serious actor. And I think she is. And she gets really good reviews for this, even though not that many people apparently saw it. It was kind of a limited run rehearsal type thing. There's also a really great story, which I didn't include in the doc, but you might remember from the book where Martin comes. She makes sure Martin can come and see her and brings him backstage after.

• 3:17:09Yasi Salek?

  And he is like, really, he's pretty sick then, and his whole face has like lesions and stuff on it. And she is like, arms around him, they're sharing a candy bar. She's like, like really showing like, I'm not scared, you know? And it was like, I think a pretty big deal, you know?

• 3:17:25Speaker 05

  It's a big deal. I also remember from the Andy Warhol diaries that she had like, she had done like a fundraiser for him, just so he could like live really well. So he was like, living really well in his last, he was living very comfortably in his last moments.

• 3:17:42Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, pretty awesome.

• 3:17:44Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:17:44Yasi Salek?

  Um, okay, Goose and Tom Tom, second night Shanghai Surprise comes out. And guess what?

• 3:17:49Speaker 05

  Terrible reviews.

• 3:17:49Yasi Salek?

  People are like, this is trash.

• 3:17:51Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:17:51Yasi Salek?

  This is one of the worst things we've ever seen. I felt really sad that the paparazzi were dragging Martin into their like shenanigans and like saying that like, Sean is terrified and furious because Martin, you know, Madonna's friend has AIDS and she's hanging out with her and whatever. And he was like, oh, my God, like so devastated.

• 3:18:08Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 3:18:08Yasi Salek?

  And then they go back to Malibu where they live. Paparazzi is once again destroying them, not helping. Another thing not helping is that Sean has a new bestie and his name is Charles Bukowski. And he's hanging around the house, just being absolutely wasted, hammered pants all the time. MC Hammered Pants. Would you be? One of the most like notorious drunks. I mean, obviously iconic legend.

• 3:18:29Speaker 05

  Also like, what is Sean not getting wasted with Charles Bukowski? No one ever says that part, but it's like, hello, like.

• 3:18:35Yasi Salek?

  I would assume. You're not going to let Charles Bukowski drink alone.

• 3:18:38Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:18:38Yasi Salek?

  Anyways, it's it's really, it's not the vibe. But Madonna is busy, so she has other things to focus on. Primarily her next movie with James Foley, who's that girl? Okay, I just learned it was originally called Slammer?

• 3:18:54Speaker 05

  Slammer.

• 3:18:55Yasi Salek?

  Slammer. She plays Nikki Fen, a young woman accused of murder. She did not commit. And she's released on parole. She sets out to clear her name.

• 3:19:02Speaker 05

  Sets out to clear her name.

• 3:19:04Yasi Salek?

  Alongside Loud and Trot. What is it? What does she say his last name is when they're in the hospital? Loud and clear. Loud and clear.

• 3:19:13Speaker 05

  Oh, loud and clear, Mr. Clear.

• 3:19:14Yasi Salek?

  Mr. Clear, played by Griffin Dunn, which I'm gonna, I'm sorry, I just have to say, cause I'm kind of obsessed with Griffin Dunn, cause I love After Hours, and they just feel like we don't have this kind of actor anymore.

• 3:19:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, he's kind of like a sexy, like, not well accustomed to like, late nights, you know?

• 3:19:31Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, but not like a Jacob Elordi, like, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong.

• 3:19:36Speaker 05

  He's also sort of like an indie leading man, isn't he?

• 3:19:39Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:39Speaker 05

  Indie.

• 3:19:40Yasi Salek?

  Our After Hours was Scorsese.

• 3:19:42Speaker 05

  I know, I know, but there's something very indie about After Hours to me, too.

• 3:19:46Yasi Salek?

  That's true, that's true.

• 3:19:46Speaker 05

  And I like After Hours.

• 3:19:47Yasi Salek?

  I do, too.

• 3:19:48Speaker 05

  I like, I like Griffin Dunn, son of Dominic Dunn.

• 3:19:52Yasi Salek?

  Son of Dominic.

• 3:19:52Speaker 05

  Son of Dominic.

• 3:19:54Yasi Salek?

  Anyways, it's great, it's, I love, well, we, I don't even like it. I love it!

• 3:19:58Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 3:19:59Yasi Salek?

  Oh, you said we weren't gonna fight, but we have something to fight about. Anyways, this is not out yet. So, the reason the movie became called Who's That Girl is cause she had the song, and she couldn't rhyme anything with Slammer, is what I read. And so she's like, we're changing it to Who's That Girl, and you're changing the movie name. And he does, and then it named the tour.

• 3:20:20Speaker 05

  Well, Slammer would have been a horrible name for this, for this movie. I mean, Who's That Girl, the name, it's a great name.

• 3:20:26Yasi Salek?

  It's a great name. Who's That Girl World Tour, nineteen eighty-seven, Shabadoo, a thirty-two-year-old choreographer, actually, his name is Alfred Quinones, um, he was in the movie Breakin'.

• 3:20:39Speaker 05

  Oh, you better fucking believe it, I saw Breakin' in the movie theater in nineteen eighty-four.

• 3:20:43Yasi Salek?

  Did you?

• 3:20:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, and then Breakin' to Electric Boogaloo, fuck yeah.

• 3:20:46Yasi Salek?

  Oh, yeah, Electric Boogaloo. So, he's, he's major. Angel Ferrara from L.A. is a dancer that dances with her, and then a thirteen-year-old dancer named Chris Finch, cause he plays the Open Your Heart character. Um, Donna DeLore is now in the mix, she's twenty-two, and then also Nikki Harris, twenty-four.

• 3:21:02Speaker 05

  That's incredible, Donna and Nikki.

• 3:21:03Yasi Salek?

  Donna and Nikki, she had sang with Whitney Houston. Um, they're gonna be with her for several decades. There's also Deborah Parsons, the third singer, Christopher comes back as dresser, Debbie Mazur is doing makeup, Marlene Stewart does wardrobe, and also her little brother Mario was hired to do props and ambiance.

• 3:21:18Speaker 05

  That's very nice.

• 3:21:19Yasi Salek?

  Here are the songs, Open Your Heart, Lucky Star, True Blue, Papa Don't Preach, Dress You Up, Material Girl, Like a Virgin, Where's the Party, Live to Tell, Into the Groove, La Isla Bonita, Who's That Girl, and Holiday. I'm gonna say it, Waltz of Wallmangers.

• 3:21:32Speaker 05

  It's really good.

• 3:21:33Yasi Salek?

  Know the gambler here, you know?

• 3:21:34Speaker 05

  Know the gambler. It's, it's all, hold on, I'm sorry.

• 3:21:38Yasi Salek?

  What?

• 3:21:39Speaker 05

  The look of love is in there.

• 3:21:40Yasi Salek?

  Is it?

• 3:21:41Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 3:21:41Yasi Salek?

  Did I miss it?

• 3:21:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's on there. I mean, I just watched, I watched Madonna, Chavatalia the other day.

• 3:21:47Yasi Salek?

  You know what really struck me with Madonna, Chavatalia, and I say this with like the utmost respect of my heart to Marlene Stewart, but it's just so insane to me that you can watch the Blond Ambition Tour.

• 3:22:00Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:22:00Yasi Salek?

  And it could be today.

• 3:22:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:22:02Yasi Salek?

  And it doesn't look dated. Like, it looks so modern and cool and

• 3:22:05Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 3:22:05Yasi Salek?

  and perfect.

• 3:22:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:22:06Yasi Salek?

  All the people, like, we were watching Truth or Dare last night with my friend Brianna. We were like, that guy looks like he'd be in Bushwick right now.

• 3:22:13Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:22:13Yasi Salek?

  You know what I mean? Like, at the cool bar or whatever.

• 3:22:17Yasi Salek?

  Chavatalia?

• 3:22:17Speaker 05

  It's the most eighties thing.

• 3:22:19Yasi Salek?

  She's absolutely wearing a gold lame blazer.

• 3:22:21Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:22:22Yasi Salek?

  There's like some show where you're like, what is this?

• 3:22:24Speaker 05

  It says at the end, costumes by Marlene Stewart. I will also say that I love Chavatalia. I love, first of all, I just want to say, I want to make a plug for chair dancing. Madonna does chair dancing. Chair dancing is like a thing of the eighties. It's so amazing.

• 3:22:39Yasi Salek?

  She also does it in human nature.

• 3:22:41Speaker 05

  On a chair, she does it in human nature too. But I just mean like, you know, it's happening.

• 3:22:45Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 3:22:45Speaker 05

  Like Janet Jackson's doing it.

• 3:22:47Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:22:47Speaker 05

  Madonna's doing it.

• 3:22:49Yasi Salek?

  Open Your Heart video obviously has it.

• 3:22:50Speaker 05

  Open Your Heart video has it. And then, oh my god, Madonna, chair dancing at the beginning of, of the Who's That Girl Tour with the, like, just basking in the energy of the adoring giant crowd screaming for her.

• 3:23:05Yasi Salek?

  The Italians.

• 3:23:06Speaker 05

  It's just really amazing. It's, it's just pop heaven.

• 3:23:09Yasi Salek?

  It's wonderful.

• 3:23:09Speaker 05

  But you're right, the, the, it's also sort of dated and

• 3:23:12Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it's super cute. I love how she looks. I love her leather jacket over the cute little, like, Fonzie dress. Like, I love it. She uses the, the Madison Square Garden date of this tour to raise money for AMFAR for AIDS, $400,000, and then dedicates Live to Tell to Martin.

• 3:23:29Speaker 05

  Beautiful.

• 3:23:30Yasi Salek?

  But here's the most interesting thing to me about that. She distributes a brochure at this tour that describes how AIDS is spread and how it can be prevented with a handwritten note that says, "Right now, there's no cure for AIDS, but there is a way to stop it from spreading. Don't let fear keep you from knowing the facts. Read this booklet then give it to your best friend. It just might save his or her life. It might save your own." This is a year before the United States government creates a brochure about AIDS and safe sex. Madonna did it first, babe.

• 3:24:01Speaker 05

  Incredible.

• 3:24:02Yasi Salek?

  It's just so cool. Rave reviews, babe. JD Constantine of the Baltimore Sun said, "I've seen the Springsteen Stadium Tour. I've seen Dylan and the Grateful Dead, and I was at Live Aid. Out of all those shows, Madonna's is the only one I want to see again. You need a larger-than-life show if you want to come off in a stadium, and Madonna does."

• 3:24:19Speaker 05

  She's not that large physically, but she holds your attention. There's, there's an energy about Madonna in the Who's That Girl Tour that is so unbelievable. Like, she is explosive, she is infectious, she is like, she's truly larger-than-life. It's very remarkable.

• 3:24:37Yasi Salek?

  She looks so cool, too. It's that, it's that short bleached hair, I think, is really, anyways. Okay, in the midst of the tour, Who's That Girl film came out that I love, but it flopped, so.

• 3:24:46Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:24:46Yasi Salek?

  I guess I was wrong. Meanwhile, Sean is in jail. I don't remember why, it was another one of the paparazzi altercations.

• 3:24:52Speaker 05

  It was like, yeah, it was, it was, um, a paparazzi, what got on his, uh, the set of his new movie in LA? And he beat him up or something.

• 3:25:03Yasi Salek?

  Yes. He's in jail for a while, like, several months, right?

• 3:25:07Speaker 05

  Right, it says here that he's in jail with Richard Ramirez, is that true?

• 3:25:10Yasi Salek?

  That's true, yeah, and Richard Ramirez really, like, wanted to, like, like, wrote him a note. And Sean Penn, like, I guess, wrote him a note back and was like, "I find everyone interesting except you. I found the exception, I want nothing to do with you."

• 3:25:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, that's the, that's the right move.

• 3:25:23Yasi Salek?

  And he asked for his autograph, and Sean was like, "No, thank you." Um, all right, should we talk about the Who's That Girl soundtrack?

• 3:25:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'd love to.

• 3:25:29Yasi Salek?

  To bring it home?

• 3:25:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'd love to.

• 3:25:31Yasi Salek?

  This is credited as a Madonna album, although it's only four of her songs, because it is kind of a traditional soundtrack. Do you mind if a white girl speaks a little more Espanol?

• 3:25:41Speaker 05

  No.

• 3:25:42Yasi Salek?

  Quién es esta niña? Who's that girl?

• 3:25:46Speaker 05

  I love this song.

• 3:25:47Yasi Salek?

  I do too, babe, it's fucking banger, are you kidding?

• 3:25:48Speaker 05

  I love this song.

• 3:25:49Yasi Salek?

  Na na na na.

• 3:25:51Speaker 05

  Causing a commotion, I've got the moves, baby, you got the motion. We, if we got together, we'd be causing a commotion.

• 3:25:57Yasi Salek?

  Okay, I said this in the chat earlier, but I am a little bit dead about why I'm in the Madonna Reddit, r-madonna, and how, why someone three smooth years ago. That would have been twenty twenty three. This came out in nineteen eighty seven, came on to Reddit angry as hell one day and was like, what's her problem with causing a commotion?

• 3:26:16Speaker 05

  Or this person?

• 3:26:17Yasi Salek?

  This person, not me.

• 3:26:18Speaker 05

  I'm like that. I'm part of this, this group.

• 3:26:20Yasi Salek?

  Okay, so you're.

• 3:26:20Speaker 05

  I'm mad as fucking hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore. I've actually complained. I've been on, I've been, I've, I've responded to, to, to this kind of shenanigan. I don't mind that it's not on, um, a Macca collection.

• 3:26:32Yasi Salek?

  We're thirty nine years out from this. I just want you to know.

• 3:26:36Speaker 05

  I, I understand, but I'm, I'm, I'm mad as hell. I'm not gonna take it anymore.

• 3:26:39Yasi Salek?

  Okay, okay.

• 3:26:39Speaker 05

  Um, uh, it's okay. It's not on a Macca collection. Many songs aren't and a Macca collection is perfect. You'll get to that.

• 3:26:47Yasi Salek?

  In next episode.

• 3:26:47Speaker 05

  Next episode.

• 3:26:48Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:26:48Speaker 05

  Um, it's really great and it's fine that it's on the celebration tour. It's just, she took it out of the thirty number one hits and added something like Jimmy Jimmy. I could be mistaken, but I don't think I am mistaken. And you know what? I didn't like that Madonna. I was just upset about that. As a big fan, I just love it.

• 3:27:08Yasi Salek?

  Do you feel like it's?

• 3:27:09Speaker 05

  It's her only complaint.

• 3:27:10Yasi Salek?

  No, you also said Who's That Girl Isn't That Good, the movie, and I'm, I'm gonna remind you that you're wrong.

• 3:27:14Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 3:27:15Yasi Salek?

  She's very charismatic in it. The story is fun.

• 3:27:17Speaker 05

  No, it's pretty good.

• 3:27:18Yasi Salek?

  The, there's a panther.

• 3:27:20Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, there's a panther with a Cartier necklace on.

• 3:27:23Yasi Salek?

  Oh my, are you kidding? Fucking fabulous. The way they desecrate the fucking Rolls Royce by the end is so fucking cool. They're rolling around town in a hoop-dee covered in graffiti that used to be a Rolls Royce.

• 3:27:33Speaker 05

  And it's a Warner Brothers movie and they, they have this, which I've always loved, the, the, the, the opening credits, which you can see on YouTube are just so great.

• 3:27:43Yasi Salek?

  The cartoon Madonna?

• 3:27:44Speaker 05

  The cartoon Madonna. That's what I'm talking about.

• 3:27:45Yasi Salek?

  It's so wonderful.

• 3:27:46Speaker 05

  I've always been inspired by the cartoon Madonna.

• 3:27:49Yasi Salek?

  I'm sorry. This is, people need to reassess. We used to have fun in this country.

• 3:27:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I do, I do not know if I'd ever seen Who's That Girl before a few days ago because I feel like I was swayed by the bad press and didn't see it.

• 3:28:02Yasi Salek?

  Poisoned.

• 3:28:03Speaker 05

  I don't feel like I insisted on going to see it because of all the bad reviews and I, I was reading reviews, you know?

• 3:28:10Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, at eleven years old.

• 3:28:12Speaker 05

  Definitely.

• 3:28:12Yasi Salek?

  You were checking variety. You were like, Dad, open up The Hollywood Reporter. I need to see what they said.

• 3:28:18Speaker 05

  I definitely had a People Magazine subscription, so I feel like I got a lot of news from that. I know, at 11 years old. How else am I supposed to be like part of culture?

• 3:28:27Yasi Salek?

  You were meant to be in magazines from the beginning. Okay, you saying the look of love a little bit earlier.

• 3:28:32Speaker 05

  You know what? I've never cared about it, but somehow in 2026, I've been fucking with it.

• 3:28:37Yasi Salek?

  It's really wonderful, and I feel this song could have, it almost feels like a lost ray of light track almost. Like, it's that kind of ahead of its time.

• 3:28:46Speaker 05

  I love it.

• 3:28:46Yasi Salek?

  Just bear with me.

• 3:28:48Speaker 05

  Can't Stop, Forgettable, Sorry. I don't know if I've ever heard it before.

• 3:28:52Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I don't know, sorry. Maybe you have and you forgot it, because it's forgettable. And then some other great songs on here. There's a Skriti Palitti song. Skriti Palitti is gonna play into later Madonna music, but I won't spoil that.

• 3:29:02Speaker 05

  I just wanna say that on the note of my People Magazine subscription, I can remember exactly where I was in the week of December 14th, I see here, where I get the mail and I get the People Magazine with Diary of a Mad Marriage on the cover. I remember the moment. I remember the feeling I felt about Diary of a Mad Marriage. I sent it to the Madonna's plan.

• 3:29:31Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, you did.

• 3:29:32Speaker 05

  It's just so powerful.

• 3:29:34Yasi Salek?

  I think that's a great place for us to end. So, this is, we'll wrap it up right here. Sean Penn gets out of jail in September after Who's That Girl comes out. The marriage is pretty bad. In late November, Liz Rosenberg issues a statement saying that she has called off the marriage. They're getting divorced. Madonna's lawyers file papers December 4th. Diary of a Mad Marriage comes out December 14th.

• 3:29:54Speaker 05

  Oh shit.

• 3:29:55Yasi Salek?

  But then on December 18th, it's announced that actually she's withdrawn her petition, and they're gonna stay together.

• 3:30:00Speaker 05

  Yasi, thank you so much for allowing me to do the first 29 years of Madonna's life.

• 3:30:08Yasi Salek?

  Thank you so much, Mel. This has been a real pleasure. You are a wonderful guest and a great, just a stand-up man. You're an officer and also a gentleman, and thank you for going on this journey with me. Come back next week. We're gonna start off with, going into 1988, we're gonna talk about You Can Dance, and we're gonna talk about the next several Madonna albums, so please don't miss it.

• 3:30:41Yasi Salek?

  If you liked what you heard today, subscribe for more episodes of Bandplain. Our guest today was Mel Ottenberg. This episode was produced by Rob Sunderman and edited by Adrian Bridges with help from Justin Sales. Video production by Kevin Corrigan. Executive producers for Bandplain are Gina Dalvak and me, Yasi Salek. Our gorgeous and catchy theme song was composed and performed by Bethany Cosentino and Jennifer Clavon, graciously recorded by Carlos Vilgarza in Los Angeles, California. Special thanks to our producer Emeritus, producer Dylan, aka Dylan Tupper Rupert, and also Sean Fennessey, Sarah Nisthoff, and my new best friend Celsius. Come back every Thursday for a new episode of Bandplain on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

• 3:31:29Yasi Salek?

  I think we might make it to who's that, girl? How are you feeling? You gonna pass out? It's 9 PM.

• 3:31:34Speaker 05

  I'm, I will do it. I've got the stamina of Madonna tonight. My work ethic is insane.

• 3:31:40Speaker 01

  Welcome to the 50th Hunger Games. Witness the beginning of the revolution.

• 3:31:44Speaker 06

  Hey Mitch, you've been trying to take down these games from the start.

• 3:31:47Speaker 01

  Filmed for IMAX.

• 3:31:49Speaker 06

  Make them remember you.

• 3:31:51Speaker 01

  The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, November 20th, rated PG-13.

• 3:31:55Speaker 00

  LinkedIn is pretty amazing at helping you grow your small business. We cannot stop your new clients from emailing you at 3 AM.

• 3:32:04Speaker 00

  We can help you sell, market, and hire in one place. We cannot help you be in three places at once. And while we can't help you organize your calendar, LinkedIn can help you land more clients so you have a calendar to organize. Grow your small business on LinkedIn. Learn more at LinkedIn.com/smallbusiness.