fellas that were in the mood – Goh Hotoda update

Image courtesy of Goh Hotoda - check out what's at the front of the stack of vinyl records to the left of Goh





In response to my post “Goh Hotoda – we love you”, Mr Hotoda himself emailed me to let me know that he has been working on another Madonna-related project. Stay tuned for more info, as soon as I get it!

Goh Hotoda – we love you

This week, 21 years ago, Vogue was still giving good face, spending in its eighth week inside the Top 10 of the UK singles chart. The song had already been at #1 for a month – not to mention #1 in 30 other countries!

When I interviewed Goh Hotoda in 2007, he told me about mixing the song and coming up with the song’s synth string introduction.

“Even for me, Vogue was my monumental work. As my career was Chicago house music, it was only ever dance music and never crossed over to pop music. The pop music style in 1990 was still white bread candy pop with lots of reverb and many expensive effects all over the place. Our work on Vogue was very contemporary – so simple and very dry. There was nothing like it then - now, the beat style is so popular that everybody is making music like that. But that was the kind of music that I really wanted to work on for such a long time.

Madonna’s original aim was to release the song as special 12” record and so she gave us total freedom. The song was originally produced a bit different at first. I made a different introduction to the mix and recreated a different version only for club play (Bette Davis Dub). It was standard that I make a dub mix after everything was done and Tony (Shimkin) would edit them later. Shep and Madonna really liked the new introduction that I made and so we went back into the studio to re-make the video version based on my Dub Mix and Tony’s edit. The song became an untouchable hit.”

Click here to listen to Vogue (Bette Davis Dub), as mixed by Goh

bad girl guitar demo – Paul Pesco speaks

Paul Pesco - grinding his axe!

 

In 2008 an unreleased demo of Bad Girl, known as the ‘Guitar Demo’, leaked online. Due to a number of fake Madonna demos doing the rounds online and a lack of information about the origins of this demo; many believe this to be the creation of a talented fan.

In 2006 I visited the Library of Congress in Washington, DC and listened to a number of Erotica demos on the infamous ‘Rain Tapes’ and although I listened to some Bad Girl demos, the guitar demo wasn’t among them.

When I spoke to legendary stage and session guitarist, Paul Pesco, I asked him about playing guitar on the Erotica sessions:

“I actually played on a couple of other tracks that I don’t think ended up on the album. I think it was Bad Girl I played on, where I did a couple of tracks. Bad Girl had a lot more guitar. That was really cool – I thought it was awesome! I played tracks on Deeper and Deeper, Bad Girl and it may have been Thief of Hearts, I’m not sure. She ended up using Why’s It So Hard and Deeper and Deeper.

It (the sessions with Madonna and Shep Pettibone) was always great. There were a couple of engineers also. I worked with Goh (Hotoda) a lot. I was there throughout the recording of the album. By that time, I’d done dozens of sessions for Shep’s records and he’d used me a lot for stuff over the years, and I’d been friends with him. He has a very distinct production style and he knows exactly what he wants and the groove would be in there. It’s funny, for not being a musician; he’s one of those people who's very musical.

For that album I used my blue ESP Strat (Fender Stratocaster guitar) that’s been one of my main studio axes on a bunch of records. I also used my ESP graffiti Strat that has EMG pick-ups on it that I used on that album as well and actually I used that guitar for the C&C Music Factory stuff as well, the Sweat (Everybody Dance Now) guitar part – that was my ESP graffiti guitar.”

Click here to listen to the Bad Girl guitar demo.