SPOTLIGHT: A new book by a former DJ and close confidant spills on the wild Lower East Side days of rising star Lady Gaga, including her tempestuous romance with loverboy Luc Carl (above), who had a roving eye. (NPG.com)
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Lady Gaga’s first shot at fame didn’t go exactly as planned.
Booked for Lollapalooza in 2007, she performed on a side stage in the early hours of the day. Her DJ, Lady Starlight, experienced massive feedback, and the crowd spent much of Gaga’s set screaming at the stage. On top of that, they had been given shaky folding tables for their turntables, so every time Gaga moved, the record skipped.
The indignities continued off-stage. A bicycle cop wrote her a ticket for “wearing hot pants.”
Finally, writes her friend Brendan Jay Sullivan, there was the one fan who recognized her.
“This girl saw me backstage,” Gaga said, “and she screamed, ‘Amy! Amy! I love you!’ ”
Taking it in stride that the girl had mistaken her for Amy Winehouse, Gaga responded with a “fierce glare” and in “her foggiest East London accent,” yelled “Oi! Feck off!”
Still, Sullivan could see Gaga loved even the false recognition.
“I laughed because Gaga still saw it as a chance to perform,” he writes. “From the way she squirmed on her bar stool, I could see she still found a thrill in having a fan.”
As big a star as Lady Gaga is — she was recently named No. 2 on Forbes’ list of the world’s most powerful celebrities, behind only Oprah — it wasn’t that long ago that she clamored simply for the chance to sing in a Lower East Side bar.
As Gaga re-enters the spotlight with her new album, “ARTPOP,” coming this fall, Sullivan, her longtime friend and former DJ, has penned a touching memoir, “Rivington Was Ours: Lady Gaga, the Lower East Side, and the Prime of Our Lives” (It Books), which recalls Gaga’s mid-aughts on the LES. Stardom and riches had yet to replace a run-down apartment on Stanton Street and the excitement of getting to play Pianos on Ludlow for the first time.
When Sullivan first met Stefani Germanotta, she was 20, had a record deal with Island Records and was dating a heavy-metal drummer and bar manager named Luc Carl — whom Sullivan depicts as inattentive and possessive, often dictating whom she could talk to and where she could work, and regularly ignoring her in order to flirt with any young cutie who crossed his path.
Sullivan and Gaga became fast friends, and the night she learned that she would be recording an album, she excitedly shared the news with her new friend while Carl “became distracted by a small coterie of drunk girls.”
“The underage girl looked a little lost,” writes Sullivan of Germanotta. “Even her own boyfriend didn’t have time for her.”
But as they helped each other through troublesome relationships, Sullivan learned that there was more to this talented spitfire than met the eye.
“She had an innate social intelligence that made her approachable to everyone,” Sullivan writes. “Gaga’s genius was in her ability to mirror those around her . . . If you thought she was a bit dumb, it was probably because she thought you were not that bright and didn’t try to say anything over your head.”
Gaga was also single-minded in her ambitions.
When Sullivan’s girlfriend broke up with him, Gaga implored him to read the book “The Secret,” trying to persuade him to visualize getting his ex back the same way, he writes, that Gaga had visualized one day playing Madison Square Garden.
“Roll your eyes all you want,” she said. “But you have to have a vision for what you want. You have to picture it in your mind.”
‘Do you expect me to fit inside of this cake?”
Gaga was preparing for a performance, in honor of a friend’s birthday, unlike any before for her, as it would have her popping out of a fake cake — really a barrel — at Beauty Bar on 14th Street.
The barrel was too small for her, but Gaga, ever the trouper, would make it work, despite the “tremble of intimidation” in her voice when she asked, “Are we really doing this?”
“Thing about Gaga was she physically needed to perform, but she had to perform big,” Sullivan writes, later adding, “This was the first time anyone in Manhattan had seen this Lady Gaga, the new performance artist.”
At midnight on the appointed night, Sullivan, who was DJ’ing, cut the music, brought up the birthday boy, and said, “Mr. President . . .” Gaga’s hand popped out of the massive “cake” they had constructed, and he yelled, “Marilyn Monroe!” Stepping out onto a platform, Gaga sang “Happy Birthday” over a recording of Monroe doing the same and crushed the actress’ voice to a “thunderous cheer.”
“She stood radiant in the light of the disco spotlight, her chest heaving as she stood with perfect soloist’s posture,” he writes. Sullivan then switched the song to “Birthday,” by The Beatles, and Gaga “go-go-danced her ass off” as the crowd “crammed huge tips into her garter belts and she put on a big show, bending over and having them stuff her opalescent sequined bra.”
She finished the night dancing on the bar in white leather heels to Bryan Adams’ “Summer of ’69,” “wearing nothing but fishnets, bloomers and her bikini top,” with her stockings “barely reach[ing] her crotch.”
Sullivan characterizes the evening as one of Gaga’s early triumphs, playing a downtown New York bar rather than the indifferent crowds of Lollapalooza.
“Everyone in the whole bar had one eye shining on her . . . She had a new spirit in her,” he writes. “I hoped she never played outdoors ever again.” Gaga played Beauty Bar, Pianos and more, becoming a downtown fixture as Island Records dropped her.
But if the labels hadn’t yet cottoned to her brilliance, the locals knew. At one bar gig, Gaga go-go-danced alongside a friend’s band — and halfway through a song, she “crawled on stage on all fours,” the crowd loving “this feral creature . . . crawling around the wires and guitar pedals” before being handed the mike and emitting a shriek “like the lonely captive of a harem.”
Another time, just sitting at a bar, Sullivan heard a girl say about Gaga — who wore “a backless unitard, tights and a series of belts instead of pants” — “normally I would think a girl dressed like that is a slut. But that girl looks awesome.”
When complimented on her barely-there outfits, Gaga would respond, “Thank you. I don’t like wearing clothes.”
“The girl we all used to ignore,” notes Sullivan, “had become a central focus.”
Many of Gaga’s early songs — the same ones that would later make her a superstar — were inspired by these Lower East Side experiences, especially her tumultuous relationship with Carl.
The first original song she played for Sullivan “began with a harsh beat, a decaying synth horn, and a backwards-bass effect.” As it played, Gaga shouted, “I wrote this for him!” explaining that since Carl liked only heavy metal and “doesn’t like my sing-songy piano ballads,” she would perform “music to impress him, so I can be close to him.”
She laid out an image in the lyrics of photographers chasing her as she chased Carl and then sang to him, calling him “Papa” — which she then expanded to “Paparazzi,” the title of the song that would later become the fourth from her debut album to top Billboard’s Pop Songs chart.
“This is just the beginning,” Gaga told Sullivan that night, after playing him several more tracks. “I don’t even just want to be a singer forever. I’m going to be a producer. I’m going to bring in young bands and help them develop. I am going to be the grandmother of pop.”
Gaga continued trying to cement her image, but not every move seemed as brilliant as her songs.
Sullivan recalls the time his friend “walked up to me silent, sheepish and biting her lower lip.” As she gazed downward, Sullivan saw that “her thick, dark, raven-haired Italian mane had been fried on her head,” and that “what normally swung free and full of life now clumped together, strings of mismatched lengths like a toupee.”
“You’re blond,” he noted with surprise, telling her that she looked great, while really thinking that she looked like “one of the Golden Girls,” with “her hair broken off in some places, mangling her haircut.”
She explained that her management wanted a new look for her and told her that she needed to be “blond with olive skin.”
“Rivington Street was aghast at the change,” Sullivan writes. “Already, people talked about her ‘selling out,’ which is also known as ‘doing her job’ or ‘having a job.’ Alien concepts around here.”
While Gaga realized that her hair would have to be redone, her “thick, lustrous, Italian hair” having been replaced by “the kind of dead, gassed-out, NutraSweet-and-iced-tea blond you see in truck stops,” she did note one advantage to her new look. Her boyfriend loved it, since, she said as she rolled her eyes, “He likes f–king a blonde.”
Gaga soon landed a deal with Interscope and had the hack-job hairdo replaced with a look of sleek platinum, with Sullivan writing that “bleaching the surface of her hair made Gaga walk like a star.”
She eventually moved to LA, where her marketing team “worried constantly” about how they would sell her.
“She wasn’t uptown enough for hip-hop; she wasn’t LA enough for R&B,” Sullivan writes. “She wasn’t mainstream enough for pop or pop enough for mainstream.”
Eventually, they figured it out. Sullivan presents a detailed account of Gaga’s early days in LA and the making of her first video, “Just Dance,” in which he had a part.
And he’s there when Gaga and Carl finally break up (though they would later get back together before finally separating for good). Angry at the way Carl ignores her, Gaga tells him — correctly, it seems — “One day you’re not going to be able to get a coffee in a f–king deli without seeing or hearing about me.”