Early Madonna Recordings Hit Web, Feature Material Girl's First Songs

An unreleased tape featuring some of Madonna's earliest recordings has been unearthed. The tape, which was recorded roughly 27 years ago, captures the era in Madonna's life when she was living in the basement of a Queens, New York synagogue with Ed and Dan Gilroy, who was her boyfriend at the time. Madonna spoke about the brothers in her reflective induction speech at this year's Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ceremony. Snippets of that speech are interspersed with the old recording, which features one of her early songs "Born To Be A Dancer." The tape also features Madonna playing guitar and drums on the "first song" she'd ever written, "Tell the Truth." Soon after the recordings, as Madonna also noted in her Hall of Fame speech, she and her band began playing NYC venues like CBGB and Max's Kansas City. Based on the excerpts, it's safe to say that Madonna would have made an awesome Debbie Harry if she didn't become the Material Girl.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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