jitterbug – Tony Shimkin speaks about unreleased demo



Madonna goes “all the way” as Mae Mordabito, jittering her bug with co-star Eddie Mekka – A League of Their Own director, Penny Marshall’s co-star in Laverne and Shirley

Exactly five years ago, this very week, I visited the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress in Washington, DC to listen to a number of Madonna’s rare unreleased demo tapes.

One or rather, two of the most interesting tapes on file at the LOC are what has become known in Madonna myth as “The Rain Tapes”. If you haven’t heard of them before, “The Rain Tapes” are two cassette tapes containing a number of demos from the Erotica album that were filed at the LOC by Madonna’s Erotica co-producer, Shep Pettibone – the existence of the tapes were first brought to light by my old friend, Bruce Baron in his 1999 article “Madonna – From Genesis to Revelations” in US magazine, Goldmine.

On one of the two Maxwell UD II 90 minute audio cassette tapes on which the Erotica demos are recorded (LOC reference: Pau.1.605.641/643), in between two demos of Thief of Hearts is a clip of a song called Jitterbug. The song is listed as “Jitterbug” Rough 1/17/92 on the handwritten cassette cover, spelt incorrectly with a “G” and corrected with a bold “J”. All songs on the tape are credited to S.Pettibone/M.Ciccone/T.Shimkin (Shep Pettibone, Madonna and Tony Shimkin).

When Bruce Baron visited the LOC, he was given a number of hours to listen to and review the demos. I was given permission to review the demos over a four day period, so my notes about the song differ slightly from Bruce’s original online report:

Madonna sings in a cartoonish/I’m Breathless style, “Jitter, b-b-b-b-b-bug, Get up, u-u-u-u-u-up”. The music is like a modern take on the swing music of the 1940s, but incorporates some house style piano and synth horns. The music continues and Madonna mock scolds in her best Cry Baby “Nu Yoik” voice, “That’s not how you do it!” (Do what – the jitterbug?) The music continues and Madonna says, “Is this gonna go on forever?” no less than twice and then says, “Somebody end this damn thing,” continuing, “There were some cute ideas in there”.

A few days after my trip to the LOC, I interviewed Madonna’s Erotica co-producer/songwriter, Tony Shimkin, at his office/studio in New York:

thebeatswithin: I heard a snippet of a song called Jitterbug when I visited the Library of Congress, which was on the same tape as the other Erotica demos, but sounds nothing like any of those songs.

“It was an attempt to do something for the A League of Their Own soundtrack where there was a jitterbug dance scene in the film and it was an attempt to try to do a jitterbug in somewhat of a modern way. So, it was a real, rough demo idea of how it would be and envisioning it.

Actually, if it had have been carried out, it probably would played out like the actual piece of music that was used in the movie. It was very Big Band oriented and, if it were to have been produced, I think it would have been produced with a full Big Band and a full horn section and all that.

We were trying to think conceptually was there a way to do a jitterbug in a cool kind of contemporary way and give it to her and see what kind of lyrics and melody she would come up with and it was never really explored beyond the initial demo music.
thebeatswithin: I only heard about 30 seconds of music. Was that as far as the idea went?

“Pretty much. There was just a really rough sketch – “How about something like this? Is this what you’re trying to do?” I think we were in the middle of so many other things at the time and maybe there wasn’t a necessity for it in the movie.

It was around the time we were doing This Used to Be My Playground and the Jitterbug thing was an idea then. We went to meet with her in Chicago when she was doing the movie, so that’s when that was done.”

thebeatswithin: Did you record that demo with Madonna in Chicago?

“No, we recorded This Used to Be My Playground in Los Angeles and Jitterbug, we did in New York at Shep’s house.”

Click here to watch the scene from A League of Their Own, that inspired Jitterbug. Incidentally, the scene uses the song Flying Home, written by “The King of Swing” Benny Goodman, with Lionel Hampton, Sid Robin and Sydney Robin, and is performed by Doc’s Rhythm Cats.

maybe you’re the next best thing – Rupert Everett unreleased duet



Happy Independence Day to all my readers in the USA!!!

When I interviewed producer Mark Endert in 2007 about recording with Madonna and William Orbit, he told me about an alternative version of the song Time Stood Still, from The Next Best Thing soundtrack, that remains unreleased:  

“We were set out to record Music at The Hit Factory, New York. William was there and we were all set up and already working on tracks for Music. She was in the middle of making the film and she said, “I have to do these other two songs”. I remember Time Stood Still because it was a duet with Rupert Everett. I think that was that song is that right?”
thebeatswithin: Didn’t he sing backing vocals on American Pie?

“That's funny! I never really followed that up, but were his background vocals used on American Pie?”

thebeatswithin: Yeah, he’s on that song and he even appears in the video with Madonna. In fact, I’m not sure if you know this, but Rupert released a pop album back in the 1980s (Generation of Loneliness).

“Wow! I didn't know that, but he could really sing actually. We did a song called The Next Best Thing. Did that get used?”

thebeatswithin: Yes, albeit that is the chorus lyric – the song was actually titles Time Stood Still.

“That's funny, because, as I recall Rupert also sang on that song. But there’s a lot of recording that doesn't get used.”

Click here to listen to the Rupert-less version of Time Stood Still, taken from The Next Best Thing soundtrack.  

i’ll take my chance on a beautiful stranger – Mark Endert speaks

Mark Endert - to know him is to love him



This week, 12 years ago, Beautiful Stranger was at #8 on the UK Singles Chart – spending its third week inside the Top 10. The song entered the chart at #2; behind children’s TV sensation S Club 7’s debut single, Bring It All Back – not the first “novelty” single to keep Madonna from pole position.

More than a year after its release, the Grammy-grabbing Ray of Light was still hovering in and out of the Top 20 UK Album Chart. Tentative plans to extend the album campaign even further (with the single release of Skin and a remix album, Veronica Electronica) were shelved when Madonna recorded Beautiful Stranger for the soundtrack of Mike Meyers’ Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, with her Ray of Light co-producer, William Orbit.

On Beautiful Stranger, Madonna and Orbit take Ray of Light’s 1960s pop psychedelia flirtations to the next level with a “love-in” of Lennon/Ono proportions – much inspired by William’s Liquid Mix of Ray of Light, not to mention the 1967 single, She Comes In Colors, by US psychedelic rock band, Love. The song also features Madonna’s most unapologetic, outright pop hook since Vogue, sung in a voice that harks back to the one-woman girl group days of True Blue and Cherish, but with her Evita-trained chops ensuring effortless perfection.  

Such pop perfection resulted in an immediate UK radio smash and Beautiful Stranger quickly became one of the most played songs on UK radio ever – at one point receiving 2,462 broadcasts in a single week! A total of 16 weeks on the UK singles chart (seven of which within the Top 20) helped rack up sales of 520,000, making Beautiful Stranger Madonna’s tenth best selling single in the UK.

In 2007 I spoke to producer Mark Endert (Maroon 5, Rhianna, Savage Garden) who worked extensively with Madonna and William Orbit on recording Ray of Light, Music, The Next Best Thing soundtrack and Beautiful Stranger:

“In between those two albums (Ray of Light and Music), I recorded Beautiful Stranger with her (Madonna) and William. William had decided to record Beautiful Stranger using a Pro Tools system, which he brought in to Encore Recording Studios (in Burbank, California). Before Madonna turned up, he said to me, “Mark, she’s just had nothing but problems with Pro Tools and we can’t let her know that we’re using it.” So, I was like, “What do you want me to do?” And he was like, “Mark, if you would be so kind to put the keyboard on top of the analogue remote, so it looks like you’re using the tape machine, but you’re pressing the actual computer keyboard. She’ll never know, but we’ll tell her afterwards.” Apparently her experience with Pro Tools had been so bad that she would’ve been pissed off if she knew that we were actually using it.
She thought it was too cumbersome and I think she lost some vocals or something got screwed up and she lost information – either part of a song, or part of one of her tracks. What we call “data loss” obviously isn’t good when you’re trying to be creative and make a record.
So, we recorded all of her lead vocals for Beautiful Stranger and everyone was happy. She was in a great mood, she was singing great and the track sounded really great. We’d all been there since early in the morning and we were all going to break for lunch. She comes into the room and she was like, “William this track’s really coming along,” and she said, “What’s this screen?” William was like, “Madonna, I wasn’t going to say anything until we were finished, but we’ve been recording to Pro Tools this whole time.” She was like, “William, you know I don’t like that thing” and she walked out of the room.
While everyone had gone to lunch, I hit play on the tape machine and we couldn’t get the session to play – at all. All of her vocals that she had just cut were locked in the machine. The session crashed, the file got corrupted and I had to spend two hours transferring the files onto an analogue tape machine. I got no lunch and it delayed the session by three hours. Also, Madonna came into the room every 20 minutes saying, “How long do we need Mark?”
So, she was understandably pissed because we’d used Pro Tools without telling her. I was scrambling to salvage her vocals, which thankfully I happened to do. We did rest of the session on analogue tape because the entire system crashed and I ended up working a 14-hour day with no lunch. Had we lost everything, I’m sure someone would’ve been fired. Her background vocals and everything were on the tape machine. So, she had her reasons why she didn’t like Pro Tools.”
thebeatswithin: Beautiful Stranger definitely seems to have been inspired by William’s remix of Ray of Light.
“It had such an awesome production and a lot of it is just William Orbit to a T. I remember that it was the first recording that he had done pretty much entirely in Pro Tools. He was living in Malibu then and he had a little studio at his house there. Of course, this was totally different than the Trident Recording Console and everything else that he had in London. I believe he put most of that track together in Malibu, unless I’m incorrect. But he had done all of it in Pro Tools, and he was very concerned with the sound.
William had always been able to get such great sounds out of his old outdated equipment and here he was on the latest equipment and I remember he said, “Do you like the snare? Do you like the backbeat? Is it okay? Does it sound right?” I said, “William, the backbeat on this is charming. It sounds like the 1960s!” And he said, “It’s amazing you used that word. I like that word – charming! It is a charming backbeat isn’t it?”


He was really concerned with the sound of Beautiful Stranger because it was the first one that he had done kind of on a completely new system.  The funny thing is that it sounded even more retro and even more organic than a lot of the electronic stuff done with the old equipment. He did the song on the latest gear that you could buy and it sounded like one of the older more vintage-style recordings.”


Click here to watch the Brett Ratner-directed video for Beautiful Stranger