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Authors: Maureen Callahan
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carefully cultivated bad taste.
To Michael T., it seemed that Gaga had no personal, cohesive style: “I mean, I suppose, like anybody, she was probably taking a lot of what she was seeing from her friends,” he says. “But I can tell you that between Colleen’s Bowie impression and Lady Gaga’s—night and day. Colleen looked like a freak from 1973. Gaga looked like somebody had said, ‘Oh, let’s put a David Bowie lightning bolt on your face.’ ”
Gaga wanted Michael T. to hire her to dance at his parties. She auditioned. “She was OK,” he says, laughing. “I wasn’t floored.” But he was friendly with Lüc the bartender, who Michael T. recalls as Gaga’s boyfriend by this time. (She was still involved with Fusari, but Lüc, by all accounts, had no idea they had anything other than a professional relationship.)
“Colleen would tell me she was doing this act with her,” Michael T. says, “but just the way it was being described, I really did not take it seriously. Like, really? Like, live DJ, two dancers, and Lady Gaga looking like a heavy-metal queen?” The Gaga moniker barely registered with him, harking back as it did to the nineties club scene, when twenty-nine-year-old “club kids” ran around town with names like “Pebbles” and “Desi Monster.”
Michael T. relented, hiring Gaga—with Lüc—to host a Motherfucker party DJ’d by Moby at the now-defunct, super-plush club Eugene on 24th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues.
The job description, according to him: “Look good, invite cute friends and bands, drink, work for about three hours.”
She didn’t make much of an impression on doorman Thomas Onorato. “She was friends with my friend Lüc, who was also a host that night,” he says. “She was one of eight to ten promo-sexual hosts—that’s what we called them. She was brunette at that point. That’s really all I can tell you.”
“I remember she looked nice,” says Michael T. “Sort of like the heavy-metal stripper girl going for a fancy night out. She wore a long gown, I want to say maybe pink or salmon, with a low-cut back.”
Even though Gaga didn’t seem of the downtown rock scene, Michael T. understood why she wanted to be in it. “Suddenly, something happened” in New York, he says. “Electroclash had been over and done with for a number of years.” But it would hugely inform Gaga’s music. Cult electroclash artists such as Felix Da Housecat and Miss Kittin ironically wrote about fame and paparazzi culture, playing with the idea of being superstars in a scene that would abide no such thing. Gaga was also influenced by their fuzzy, filthy syncopated beats, but she would clean them up, make them less challenging and more radio-friendly.
Dance parties were replacing rock shows. Kids were gravitating toward stuff that felt under-the-radar, dirty, secret, elitist, and judgmental—even though, ostensibly, the downtown scene was about welcoming all freaks and misfits. It wasn’t, and never really has been; you had to be the right kind of misfit—cool, or cool enough. Or, in Gaga’s case, friends with people who were cool and would help you out, vouch for you, let you be their “+1,” in nightlife parlance.
But everything was, and is, degrees, as it always has been in New York City. On the Lower East Side, knowing where the newest secret bar was located was good; having the number was better; knowing the owner and having unlimited access was enough to validate one’s self-worth for a good few weeks, till everyone figured it out and something else as supposedly secret and stupidly exclusive sprang up to replace it.
Similarly, it wasn’t enough to just know about a secret rock show; you had to be on the list, know about not the official after-party but the after -after party, post pictures of you with the band to LastNightsParty. This was the era when actual superstars, high-profile Vogue magazine editors, and pristine uptown socialites began actively
To Michael T., it seemed that Gaga had no personal, cohesive style: “I mean, I suppose, like anybody, she was probably taking a lot of what she was seeing from her friends,” he says. “But I can tell you that between Colleen’s Bowie impression and Lady Gaga’s—night and day. Colleen looked like a freak from 1973. Gaga looked like somebody had said, ‘Oh, let’s put a David Bowie lightning bolt on your face.’ ”
Gaga wanted Michael T. to hire her to dance at his parties. She auditioned. “She was OK,” he says, laughing. “I wasn’t floored.” But he was friendly with Lüc the bartender, who Michael T. recalls as Gaga’s boyfriend by this time. (She was still involved with Fusari, but Lüc, by all accounts, had no idea they had anything other than a professional relationship.)
“Colleen would tell me she was doing this act with her,” Michael T. says, “but just the way it was being described, I really did not take it seriously. Like, really? Like, live DJ, two dancers, and Lady Gaga looking like a heavy-metal queen?” The Gaga moniker barely registered with him, harking back as it did to the nineties club scene, when twenty-nine-year-old “club kids” ran around town with names like “Pebbles” and “Desi Monster.”
Michael T. relented, hiring Gaga—with Lüc—to host a Motherfucker party DJ’d by Moby at the now-defunct, super-plush club Eugene on 24th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues.
The job description, according to him: “Look good, invite cute friends and bands, drink, work for about three hours.”
She didn’t make much of an impression on doorman Thomas Onorato. “She was friends with my friend Lüc, who was also a host that night,” he says. “She was one of eight to ten promo-sexual hosts—that’s what we called them. She was brunette at that point. That’s really all I can tell you.”
“I remember she looked nice,” says Michael T. “Sort of like the heavy-metal stripper girl going for a fancy night out. She wore a long gown, I want to say maybe pink or salmon, with a low-cut back.”
Even though Gaga didn’t seem of the downtown rock scene, Michael T. understood why she wanted to be in it. “Suddenly, something happened” in New York, he says. “Electroclash had been over and done with for a number of years.” But it would hugely inform Gaga’s music. Cult electroclash artists such as Felix Da Housecat and Miss Kittin ironically wrote about fame and paparazzi culture, playing with the idea of being superstars in a scene that would abide no such thing. Gaga was also influenced by their fuzzy, filthy syncopated beats, but she would clean them up, make them less challenging and more radio-friendly.
Dance parties were replacing rock shows. Kids were gravitating toward stuff that felt under-the-radar, dirty, secret, elitist, and judgmental—even though, ostensibly, the downtown scene was about welcoming all freaks and misfits. It wasn’t, and never really has been; you had to be the right kind of misfit—cool, or cool enough. Or, in Gaga’s case, friends with people who were cool and would help you out, vouch for you, let you be their “+1,” in nightlife parlance.
But everything was, and is, degrees, as it always has been in New York City. On the Lower East Side, knowing where the newest secret bar was located was good; having the number was better; knowing the owner and having unlimited access was enough to validate one’s self-worth for a good few weeks, till everyone figured it out and something else as supposedly secret and stupidly exclusive sprang up to replace it.
Similarly, it wasn’t enough to just know about a secret rock show; you had to be on the list, know about not the official after-party but the after -after party, post pictures of you with the band to LastNightsParty. This was the era when actual superstars, high-profile Vogue magazine editors, and pristine uptown socialites began actively
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