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Madonna · S2 E5
Breakfast Club
The band she started, the recordings that went nowhere, and the arguments about who was actually in charge
The Music Building, 1697 Broadway, Manhattan, 1980. Four musicians are arguing about who gets to sing lead, and the drummer keeps standing up from behind the kit and walking to the microphone.
Crazy for You, official music video (1985). A completely different Madonna from the one playing drums in a Queens synagogue three years earlier. This ballad proves she can do more than dance tracks, and it comes directly from the vocal confidence she builds by forcing her way to the front of Breakfast Club.
The Power Struggle
Madonna joins Breakfast Club as the drummer, but she does not think like a drummer. She thinks like a frontwoman trapped behind a drum kit. She starts writing songs, then insisting the band play them, then moving to the front of the stage during shows. Dan Gilroy watches his girlfriend slowly take over his band.
“She'd be behind the drums and then suddenly she'd be at the microphone. And you'd think, wait, who's playing drums? Nobody. Nobody was playing drums. She just left.”
— Dan Gilroy, in Taraborrelli, Madonna: An Intimate Biography, 2001
Breakfast Club: The Facts
The Music Building, 1697 Broadway
A midtown Manhattan rehearsal space where dozens of bands rented cheap rooms in the early 1980s. Breakfast Club rehearsed here daily. The hallways were a factory for aspiring musicians, where connections got made and bands got poached.
TAP TO REVEAL: What happened between Madonna and Dan Gilroy when she finally left Breakfast Club?
Angel, Madonna
From Like a Virgin (1984). One of the poppiest tracks on her second album, and you can hear the Breakfast Club DNA in it: the tight arrangement, the new wave guitar, the feeling of a band playing together in a room. This is what the Music Building hallways sounded like, filtered through a Sire Records budget.
After Madonna left Breakfast Club, what eventually happened to the band?
She is done with bands and done with democracy. Next: a drummer from the University of Michigan named Steve Bray becomes the creative partner who finally matches her speed.
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