Dreamlover: Mariah The Legend Music Life - 1996, Australia

Dreamlover: Mariah The Legend
Music Life - 1996, Australia

It was always going to be tough for Mariah Carey to live up to her initial success in the music world. By the time she was 21 she had released a debut album that eventually went on to sell more than ten million copies. She was also the proud owner of a pair of Grammys she picked up in 1991 for Best New Artist and Best Female Vocalist. But as one journalist explained back in 1991, for a while it looked like the only award this budding vocalist was going to pick up was for "New York's Worst Waitress."

Mariah has a pretty clear memory of what it was like waiting tables. "I worked in a sports bar and they had these huge screens where they watched sporting events and pop videos. The boss felt sorry for me because I was such a pathetic waitress that they thought no one else would hire me. The coat-check was right across from the screen and I always said I wanted to go back and watch my own video up on that screen. One day I'll do that - but the food's not too great there, so I've got to go when I'm not really hungry!"

Mariah was the third child of white Irish-American opera singer Patricia who's now a voice coach. Her father was black engineer Alfred Roy Carey who is part Venezuelan and part African-American. She was born on March 27, 1970. This racially mixed marriage often put the family in difficult situations. "Their cars were blown up, their dogs were poisoned..." remembered Mariah in 1994 about some of the hell her parents were subjected to.

The children didn't escape the racist slurs either. Her sister Alison, 10 years older than Mariah and with a considerably darker skin was often picked on. "They'd shout racial slurs at her and beat her up," she said. Their brother Morgan, also nearly ten years older than Mariah, would try and intervene but he suffered from cerebral palsy and epilepsy in his youth so it was difficult for him to retaliate.

Mariah feels strongly about her African American background and is adamant that she is an R&B vocalist regardless of how many pop hits she has. She was inspired to sing by her older sister's collection of soul, jazz and gospel records.

She was also encouraged by her mother and her own internal drive. "All I ever wanted to do was sing. And my mum always told me, 'You are special, you have a talent, and, if you believe you can do something, you can do it.' It was not an unrealistic goal."

Mariah has fond memories of singing with her mother. "I was singing with my mum and her musician friends from the time I was about four years old. I'd get home from school, and she would have, like, five friends over who were jazz musicians, and I'd end up singing 'My Funny Valentine' at 2 in the morning."

Finishing her schooling was not big on Mariah's list of priorities. She wanted to be a singer. As she explained once her report cards said she needed to work harder! "What they used to write on my report card was 'She's very smart, but she doesn't apply herself unless it's something she likes.' Which was like, creative writing. I was always in the classes with the smart kids. The Honours Creative Writing class. Then I would be in the worst remedial math. I hated math. And my father's an engineer, so he's completely mathematically whatever you call it. He's just amazing as far as that goes."

As soon as she could, which was when she turned 16, Mariah quit school and headed for New York where she became a waitress to pay the bills. Her brother Morgan had introduced her to Ben Marguiles who became her first songwriting partner. She and Ben recorded endless demo tapes in a room with one microphone and an old reel-to-reel tape recorder. More than one company expressed interest but the initial positive comments didn't amount to anything. One music publisher offered to send a song to Whitney Houston for consideration. But Mariah apparently denied him permission. These were her songs and she was going to sing them!

There seem to be some parallels to the hardships that Madonna endured when she first arrived in the Big Apple trying to establish her career. Around this time Mariah was doing pretty tough financially as she remembered. "It was a year of days on one slice of Munster cheese with a bagel or some pasta, because that's all I could afford. But it was fun. I was learning, collaborating. Well, it was also a year of crying yourself to sleep every night because you want to do something so badly. It sounds exaggerated, but it's a long time, especially in a young person's life."

Legend has it that Mariah managed to get a demo tape to then CBS Records President Tommy Mottola at a party. It was a Friday night party she was taken to by the singer Brenda K. Starr, a disco artist whom Mariah was singing back up vocals for.

After the party on the way home in the car, Tommy apparently put on the tape, was immediately impressed, turned the car around and tried to track down Mariah. It was not until the following Monday that he was able to meet up with her. He offered her a deal immediately, which was signed within a month, which soon saw her working in the studio on her debut album.

But this was no rush job. The album took shape over the next two years with some of the hottest producers available - Narada Michael Walden, Ric Wake and Rhett Lawrence. Then Sony embarked on one of the biggest promotional campaigns they had ever undertaken. Mariah sang for music shop dealers at their annual convention and then toured major radio stations and music stores for "meet and greets."

Sony even managed to secure her the gig of singing the US national anthem before an NBA final game some two months before her first single release! From this performance of the "Star Spangled Banner" she was offered appearances on The Tonight Show and Arsenio Hall.

The first single she ever released was "Vision of Love." It went to number one in the US and she never looked back! Mariah didn't have time! The next two singles - "Love Takes Time" and Someday" - also hit the top of the charts.

Mariah wanted to sing so badly that she didn't stop. Soon after finishing and promoting her first album, she was working again on what was to become "The Wind" - a track featured on the album "Emotions." Here's how Mariah described her work schedule for her second album. "I've done this album in four months, staying in the studio literally every night until about five in the morning. I go home to sleep, and wake up around 2:30... go back to the studio and repeat the same thing, so it's not as though I have so much time to go out and meet people and do the normal everyday things."

So what do you do when you don't meet people? You marry the boss, that's what you do. Back in 1991 there were only rumours that Mariah was seeing Mr. Mottola. This is how she coped with one journalist's question about the relationship.

"You can't think you're going to put a record out and be really successful and people are not going to gossip about you. And there are a lot of worse things they could say. When you work with someone on such an intense level as we did, people are going to say things when it's a girl and a guy. If I was a man, or was working with another woman, they wouldn't say it. I can't worry about what people think."

And she certainly didn't! Mariah Carey and Tommy Mottola eventually married in June 1993. It turned out that Mariah had been denying their relationship for the best part of three years while Tommy got out of his previous marriage.

The marriage is never talked about much by Mariah in interviews. But she was particularly candid with this interviewer in London in 1995.

"I never envisaged it happening to me. My parents split when I was three and I've always had a bad outlook on the institution. People talk of the difficulties of coming from a single parent background but I was always struck by the unhappy atmosphere in the homes of friends whose parents were still together. I'm very independent, which made me think it even less likely I'd marry. But here I am and I'm very happy."

While Mariah was happy with this new relationship, she was saddened by the end of another. This one was her split with her first songwriting partner Ben Marguiles. Although she's never spoken openly about what happened, she did give the readers of Q magazine a fair hint when she explained something about the background of the conflict between her and Ben.

"Be careful what you sign. You hear it a thousand times. When you're struggling you still do it. I blindly signed. Later, I tried to make it right so we could continue our professional, our artistic relationship, but he wouldn't accept it. What can you do?"

What Mariah was talking about signing was a deal with Ben that apparently Gave him half of all her earnings from the first album, not just a share of the publishing which is all he normally would have gotten.

It was 1994 before Mariah Carey ever gave a live concert. Her first ever show (if you don't count the small audience at MTV's Unplugged concert) was at the Miami Arena in front of about 15,000 people. It wasn't a first concert she is ever likely to forget either as she explained how she handled her first ever live dates to a journalist back then.

"I was OK until I had to walk up this ramp on to the stage and I heard this deafening scream and it was kinda like everything in my life, this whole incredible whirlwind I'd been going through, it had all been leading up to that insane moment - and there I was.

"That was so intense. And then they killed me. Not the audience - they knew it was my first show, they were very supportive. I got really bad reviews, though. Well, there were a lot critics out to get me: this girl's sold all these albums, she's never toured, let's get her. So they did. I turned on the TV in bed that night and the CNN guy was saying, 'The reviews are in and it's bad news for Mariah Carey.' It really hurt me a lot.

"Still, I learnt. The next show I did, in Worcester, Massachusetts, I put all my anger into it, let go all my inhibitions and just lost myself in performing. Not like this is what matters to me, but the reviews were raves."

It's easy to believe that Mariah doesn't really care a lot what other people have to say. When you've sold as many albums as Mariah has in so many places you know you must be doing something pretty right! In the past she's been more than willing to stand up in support of her sound.

"I stand by my pop songs, definitely. I've had to put up with a lot of people accusing me either being 'too white' or 'too black' and I hate that, but music for me is such a celebratory thing: something when I'm writing it's coming from a place of happiness. And then there are the schmaltzy ballads. I acknowledge that's what they are. I'm a realist about it. I have a sense of humour about it, but the truth is sometimes it's OK. Y'know, there are moments when you can't resist schmaltz. People are affected by it; they're moved; it can help them."

And when Mariah says her songs can help some people she's not joking!

"One person could say 'Hello' is a schmaltzy piece of garbage, but another person can write me a letter and say, I've considered committing suicide every day of my life for the past 10 years until I heard that song and I realised after all that I can be my own hero. And that, that's an unexplainable feeling, like I've done something with my life, y'know? Here I am the propped up doll tralala singing a song - and it meant something to someone. So you can critique it to the end of time. I've done my job."

While she is a stout defender of her material categorised as pop she has said in the past that there's only one thing she really likes to call herself. "I consider myself R&B. That's what makes me really proud because there are so many boundaries and barriers in life and in music today, I don't know what is pop music today because it's so disjointed in a way. I really wanted to do much more of an R&B album because that's the music that I love."

Mariah too has been heavily influenced by gospel music. And she is a fan of two of the best gospel singers ever. "I think singers like Vanessa Bell Armstrong and The Clark Sisters are the best singers in the world. I have a pretty good knowledge of gospel now and although it's not like I grew up in church. I love it. It's hard to explain, but sometimes when I'm singing gospel, everything seems to be right. I'm not thinking, I don't know how I'm going to sing the next line, because I'm letting go. The choir's wailing away and there's an uplifting spiritual moment where the voices connect with the music and what I'm feeling...it comes from somewhere else and it's such an amazing gift."

When you see quotes from interviews where Mariah is defending her songwriting, you can be suddenly reminded that this is a young woman still in her early twenties. "I tell stories in my own way," she said two years ago about her songwriting. "Not everything has to be soul-searching, gut-wrenching, heart-rending. I'm not going to kill myself digging in night and day for that inner pain. If I did, I think it would be too heavy. I would hurt people and I would hurt myself. I'm not ready for it."

"Mostly I'm choosing specifically to write lyrics that might inspire someone because I've been blessed with a positive and incredible life, I've been blessed with this ability - no matter what I went through, no matter how horrible I felt growing up, no matter how inadequate I felt I was, no matter how poor I was, no matter what - I'm here."

As well as occasional sniping from some critics, Mariah cops it from other performers sometimes. One of the more memorable was an aside from Madonna in Spin magazine recently. When Madonna was asked if she'd be happier singing 'silly little pop songs' like Mariah Carey, she replied, "I'd kill myself." Mariah was more than diplomatic in her response. "I really don't think of us as competitors in any way, because we're really totally different. My focus has always been on the music. Dressing up and working with designers, that's all fun for me, but I'm always the same person."

One of the few clouds on the Carey horizon in the past couple of years has been the family squabble over her sister Alison and Alison's son. Her son was recently taken away by Mariah's mother apparently against Alison's will. Alison has been a drug addict and a prostitute and has been diagnosed as being HIV-positive. There was a custody battle over the boy which Mariah's mother won. Some magazine reports say Alison has recently been evicted from her home for not paying rent. So Alison is now apparently claiming that Mariah is rejecting her.

Somehow we think there's probably a little more to it. But it's not really any of our business, suffice to say it is a little hard to imagine that Mariah is doing the wrong thing by a member of her family. We may hear more if the often mentioned book that Alison is writing ever gets published.

At that we have seen Mariah say about the turmoil is the following comment: "It's difficult to have public family dramas, especially when someone has real serious problems and it's treated like a gossip item. We are talking about something that affects little children's lives."

But her nephew isn't the only youngster Mariah has helped out. She has put her name to a venture called Camp Mariah which sends inner-city kids for a holiday they would otherwise be unable to take. One concert she gave to help set up the camp raised about $1 million. Earlier this year, Mariah explained what sort of people she is looking to help out. "A lot of them only have negative influences, like drug dealers on the street. They're the only people they can look up to, with their nice cars, so at least when they come to these things, they meet people who give them a different outlook."

But there's a few other people who are just as special to her as husband Tommy. Her pets! Living with her and her music industry mogul husband in their Connecticut mansion are two Dobermans, Princess and Duke, two Yorkshire Terriers, Jack and Ginger and three cats, Tompkins, Clarence and Puffy. The two Terriers are the stars of the bunch. Jack has made it into three of Mariah's videos while Ginger can be seen prowling around in the background of the "One Sweet Day" clip.

Although Mariah won two Grammy Awards for her first outing, she has had a little trouble picking up any more of these most prestigious awards. This year she was nominated for an incredible six Grammys for her brilliant "Daydream" album. Equally incredibly she managed to get overlooked in every category she was nominated in. Speaking with W magazine after the show earlier this year, she explained how she felt about the evening.

"What can you do? Let me put it this way, I will never be disappointed again. After sitting the whole show and not winning once, I can handle anything. But - and I know everyone always say this - I wasn't expecting to win."

The magazine then asked Mariah about press reports that she was sulking at the Sony party afterward. "They said I was sitting in a corner at the Sony party sulking with Tommy. That couldn't have been father from the truth. I actually had a great time there and was one of the last to leave. I practically closed the joint."

For the future we can expect more Mariah albums. She's currently in the studio now working on her next. She also has plans to develop her own label called Crave. One of the artists she has already signed is an outfit called Blue Denim featuring Kimberly "Kimmie Kat" James, the younger sister of Cheryl James of Salt-N-Pepa. The band's manager says Mariah has been helping to write material and has even sung back-up vocals on some tracks.

This whole Mariah thing does at times seems the stuff of fairy tales. Elysa Gardner from VIBE magazine suggested to Mariah earlier this year that she is perhaps a little like Cinderella. And it wasn't a parallel she laughed off.

"I think of Cinderella as a poor girl who worked her ass off and became a princess. In that sense, I don't mind the comparison."







Many thanks to Kerry from MariahCareyCollection for the scans!