The bus from New York dropped off Stefani Germanotta along Route 46 in Parsippany. It was morning in a suburban stretch of office parks but she looked ready to strut into a nightclub, with tumbling black hair, dark eyeliner, gold pants and Herman Munster platform heels.
She hiked a quarter-mile down New Road to reach Rob Fusari’s recording studio. At the time, Germanotta was a 19-year-old singer-songwriter dreaming of becoming the next Fiona Apple.
She was developing her sound with Fusari, a producer who had helped pen hits by Destiny's Child and Will Smith. Over the course of four months, Germanotta commuted from New York to Jersey seven days a week, radically reshaping her approach. Fusari goaded her to experiment, swapping rock riffs for dance beats.In that Parsippany studio in 2006, Germanotta was reborn as Lady Gaga.
Fusari, 41, explains: “One morning, I was reading an article about how difficult it is for women to succeed in the rock genre. I loved what we were doing, but it wasn’t going to be an easy sell. I said, ‘Stef, what if we sit down today, abandon what we were going to work on and I’ll sit at the drum machine, do a beat and we’ll start with a more dance thing.’ She’s like, ‘No way. I’m not doing it.’ ”
They took a break at Chili’s, their regular lunch spot, and Fusari convinced Germanotta to test his idea. By day’s end, the two completed the tune, “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich,” which eventually landed on Gaga’s debut album, “The Fame.”
“That song opened the floodgates,” says Fusari, a Livingston native who majored in music management at William Paterson University. “We never went back to the rock stuff. I played it for Joshua Sarubin, who was at Island Def Jam and he’s like, ‘I gotta get this girl in here next week.’ ”
During that meeting, chairman Antonio “L.A.” Reid stopped in and predicted that she was going to change music for women.
“There was something unusual about her,” says Sarubin, a Montclair resident. “She sat down at the piano in a showcase room and the way she played and the lyrics and the way she acted and sang was just so different and in your face, and you couldn’t turn away. She was wearing these crazy white thigh-high boots and a black minidress and she had this presence like, ‘I’m sexy and I don’t care what anybody has to say about it.’ ”
A vastly self-aware entertainer matching pop hooks with alien fashions, Gaga is the product of attention-deficit culture. She reinvents herself faster than Madonna on a treadmill, exhibiting multiple personalities within the span of a single video. Yet she is not simply a puppet for stylists and photographers.
Gaga is a classically trained musician who earned early admission to New York University. She could create more challenging music if she wanted, but then she wouldn’t have a mass audience to mess with. In her world, sex blends with violence and gender is subjective. Her whole career is like a master act of satire.
Today, Lady Gaga is a platinum-selling style queen, but Fusari still remembers her as a feisty young Manhattanite with the resilience to keep writing and recording after her first major label deal fell through. It took years for her to find her place in the pop stratosphere. (She performs tomorrow and Sunday at Radio City Music Hall. She was unavailable for comment for this story.)
"Radio Ga Ga"
The name Lady Gaga may sound like some avant garde in-joke but it’s actually a reference to the Queen hit, “Radio Ga Ga,” one of Fusari’s favorites from the band.
“Every day, when Stef came to the studio, instead of saying hello, I would start singing ‘Radio Ga Ga,’ ” Fusari explains. “That was her entrance song.” Germanotta was in the midst of brainstorming a stage moniker, when she received a text from Fusari that read “Lady Gaga.” “It was actually a glitch,” says Fusari. “I typed ‘Radio Ga Ga’ in a text and it did an autocorrect so somehow ‘Radio’ got changed to ‘Lady.’ She texted me back, ‘That’s it.’ After that day, she was Lady Gaga. She’s like. ‘Don’t ever call me Stefani again.’ ”
Fusari first met the artist formerly known as Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta in 2006 when he was searching for musicians he could mentor to create a female version of the Strokes. She performed during a songwriters’ night at the now-closed New York club, the Cutting Room. One of Fusari’s friends called him from the show and put him on the phone with Gaga.
“While I was talking to her, I was near the computer so I went to her page on PureVolume and had the music on real low in the background,” Fusari says.
"Quite frankly, it sounded wedding band-ish, but I could tell that this person had more to offer creatively so I invited her to the studio." She took an 8 p.m. bus to Parsippany from the Port Authority and Fusari waited for her at the stop with a friend.
"We're in the car and we see a girl through the window of this pizzeria," Fusari says. "My buddy goes, 'I think that's her.' I was hoping that wasn't her. I had a clear vision of what she should look like and that wasn't it. I was hoping to find someone who looked a little grungy, like they just rolled out of bed. She was more like a guidette, for lack of a better term." He continues, "Still, there was something quirky about her. She was mixing the decades in terms of fashion. There was something very '60s about her but also something sort of '90s. My friend comes out with her and it's a short ride back to the studio and I was thinking, 'This ain't gonna work.' "
Seeing a superstar
Although he was skeptical, Fusari asked her to sample one of her songs on the piano.
He says, "Within 15 seconds, I'm like, 'This is it. My life is about to change.' While she's playing, I'm on my phone e-mailing my attorney like, 'I need a contract tomorrow.' I totally saw superstar potential. I just didn't know in what form or what genre it was going to be."
Fusari was focused on the sound while Gaga was also interested in making a fashion statement.
“She kept this scrapbook of all these different things she would see in magazines,” Fusari says. “It wasn’t always clothes. It might just be like a neon sign. It might be somebody’s hand with a ring on it. She would show it to me and I’d be like, ‘Yeah, that’s great, Stef.’ I wasn’t interested.”
In fact, he was often reluctant to go out in public with her because of her bizarre wardrobe. And this was before she started wrapping herself in plastic and furs. He remembers one particularly odd ensemble she put together on the town in Miami.
“It looked like a one-piece bathing suit with these shoes that looked 3 feet tall and a ripped-up jean skirt with one leg attached. The jewelry looked like it was from Mars. I’m like, ‘Stef, I’ll either walk behind or in front of you. I’m not walking next to you.’ ”
She walked in front. Even in anything-goes New York, when she was dressed for nothing in particular, she drew stares.
“She would go to Starbucks and I would be embarrassed to go with her because of her outfits,” says Sarubin, who now works for Sony/ATV Music Publishing. “She did it 24/7 and that to me is what makes a star. She lived it. One time, we were eating lunch and she was like, ‘Oh Josh, you look at me like no boyfriend I ever had.’ I was like, ‘Wow, you just think you’re it.’ ”
Dealing with rejection
That confidence was shaken when she got dropped from Island Def Jam after just a few months. The reason the company booted her remains a mystery, but word came down from Reid's office that they were severing the contract.
“There may have been people at the company who got turned off because of the outfits and the overtly sexual lyrics,” says Sarubin. “It was behind my back because I never heard it. She maybe could have stayed with the label a little while longer, but I didn’t want her to be in a situation where people didn’t get it. She was too good. It was painful because I absolutely thought she was going to be my next big thing.”
Gaga was wondering if she should ditch music entirely. Fusari encouraged her to rest for awhile and spend time with her family. She eventually wrote a revenge song about Reid, one of some 40 unreleased and unfinished tracks in the Parsippany archives.
Getting rejected by Reid made her even more rebellious and outlandish in her appearance. Her clothes grew skimpier and she got deeper into the parallel reality of Lady Gaga. Fusari introduced her to songwriter, RedOne, with whom she collaborated on the breakthrough singles, "Just Dance" and "Poker Face," a psychosexual screed set to a club beat.
Fusari called his friend, Vince Herbert, who had linked him up with Destiny’s Child back in the day. Herbert signed Gaga to Streamline Records, an affiliate of Interscope. Before the deal could go through, however, they had to meet Jimmy Iovine, the head of the conglomerate and an industry legend who’d worked as engineer with such artists as Bruce Springsteen and John Lennon.
“What we saw was a very quiet, reserved Gaga,” says Fusari. “I don’t know if she was intimidated. It was definitely one of her record idols. She knew the acts he had done. Jimmy talked about Mick Jagger, John Lennon and at the end of the meeting, he stood up and said, ‘Let’s give it a try.’ ”
It had been such an odyssey getting signed a second time, Fusari didn’t feel like celebrating that night. He had doubts the deal would even happen.
Fusari found himself a bit flummoxed when Gaga grew more conceptual in her performance style. She teamed with a glam-rock deejay named Lady Starlight in 2007 to launch a downtown Manhattan burlesque revue.
Drifting away from the diva
"She was doing this striptease act with music in the background," says Fusari. "It was all these great songs we had done, and they were playing while these two girls were doing a comedy-burlesque strip show. I didn't even want them using my music for that. I felt like I had worked at finding a sound for this artist and I was proud of it, and she was undermining it with the outfits, with the comedy."
The Jersey music guy has drifted away from the Dada diva but they remain friends and he hopes to go back into the studio with her at some point. For now, however, he’s keeping his distance from the spectacle.
“It was a bit of the mini-Frankenstein here,” says Fusari. “It was like the doctor who creates this thing and all of a sudden when it lives, it goes off on its own. Of course I miss her, but I’m also very proud of her and happy that it went as big as it did. ”
Read Star-Ledger critic Jay Lustig's review of Lady Gaga's performance at Radio City Music Hall here.
Lisa Rose may be reached at lrose@starledger.com.