Record Time

MUSIC

Steve Bray makes music for Madonna, and then some

I prefer quietly slaving over a hot keyboard." That's how twenty-nineyear-old songwriter Steve Bray comes on: soft-spoken, not too ambitious, and real hip. The day I visited him in his not-a-hint-of-a-doorman building on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the gray wall paint peeling to expose lilac blue, he was wearing army pants, a white thermal undershirt, a gray hooded sweatshirt, and red Converse high-tops. While talking, he kept his profile turned three-quarters away.

Steve Bray may be shy, but his career is bold. Last December, Madonna showed up at his three-room apartment every afternoon to record the four songs they wrote together for her new album, including a dance anthem that's vintage Madonna ("Spotlight"), a nostalgic Motown-girl-group song ("True Blue"), and a British sixties number circa the Hollies ("Jimmy Jimmy"). They worked long hours in Bray's Mr. Wizard sound studio, a quarter of a million dollars'

worth of recording equipment crammed into a tiny, windowless room.

Bray is also in his own band, called Breakfast Club—a bunch of low-attitude, material guys who chose the name five years before John Hughes's teenexploitation film complicated matters— and its first album is due out around the same time as Madonna's. A rare spot for a relative unknown who started playing drums in hometown Detroit as "a way of communicating without having to sit down and talk face-to-face."

Steve Bray and Madonna Ciccone go way back. They met in the late seventies when Bray was waiting tables and she was dancing at a college disco in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Bray recalls how "people would move back to watch this wild person, gyrating in the middle of the floor. I said to myself, 'Hmmm. I'd like to talk to her.' " He did, and they started going out. In 1978 Madonna took off for New York and started a band. Bray soon followed in his little green Chevette to become her drummer.

Then came "the most romantic period of my musical career. ' ' Bray worked at a record store and slept on Fender bass speakers in a midtown rehearsal loft. Their band went through a number of name changes. When Madonna wanted to call it "Madonna," Bray threatened to quit. "I thought it was really over the top to just call your band Madonna. At the time I didn't know just how much ego she had. It turned out to be quite appropriate."

Madonna and Bray squatted amid the American Bandstand detritus of the loft ("I would leave the light on at night so the mice wouldn't come too close to me") and laid down four songs —usually his music, her lyrics.

But after that demo tape led Madonna to a deal with Sire Records, Bray felt left behind and they fell out —he even thought of suing her. But in 1983, when Madonna was immaculately conceiving Like a Virgin, she invited Bray to help write. They came up with "Angel," "Stay," "Over and Over," and "Pretender." And later they casually recorded another Bray tune called "Into the Groove."

Ever since, Bray's been getting into his own groove. Holed up in his recording studio, paid for with Madonna residuals, Bray is now free to pursue his lifelong romance with machines. He dubs himself a "technophiliac," and remembers that "the first machine I ever fell in love with was a tape recorder." Sure, there's an Elvis-style, ruby-red electric guitar leaning in a comer, but he prefers the riffs recorded on his musical computers—he can count on them to be synthetically perfect. Bray, who speaks in a robot's wry dead pan, is big on "control," and sheds no crocodile tears over the loss of spontaneity in studio mixes.

Breakfast Club's songs are as airbrushed as L.A., and yet they have a street-smart edge that makes them, as Bray says, "grittier." The result is sophisticated car-radio music. Of course, Bray expects the inevitable comparisons to Madonna. ("Around June or July there'll be a definite Steve Bray glut.") But he feels that Breakfast Club's songs will come across as more "clever" and comedy-orientthan hers. Madonna's 2 more concerned | with just singing a song and being direct," he says. "Our songwriter, Dan Gilroy [another longlost Madonna boyfriend], is more angular and sideways. He beats around the bush; she doesn't." Breakfast Club's best songs, "Tonguetied" and "Kiss and Tell," have a witty urban sass most like the songs of Daryl Hall, whose smoothly commercial productions Bray admires.

Diddling with the dials in his studiolaboratory, Bray swears he doesn't write his own music—"My Macintosh does it for me," he says. But on the tape Bray is working so hard to mix just right, Madonna keeps bleating, "Step into the spotlight." Bray doesn't seem to be getting the message.

Brad Gooch