7 | Britney Spears: Hit Me Baby
THE FIRST SIGN that teen pop was going to be massive came from the Spice Girls, a five-member group from the UK. Music entrepreneur Simon Fuller managed the band. Like the Backstreet Boys, the Spice Girls were a group made up of different personality types, to appeal to different psychodemographics. Peter Loraine and his colleagues at Top of the Pops came up with nicknames to go along with the girls’ supposed identities: Sporty, Scary, Posh, Baby, and Ginger Spice. When the Spice Girls first blew up in England, in 1996, they were viewed by American A&R guys like David McPherson as a weird British enthusiasm that would never make it big in the States. That notion was proven wrong in January of 1997, when the group’s single “Wannabe” hit number one in the Hot 100 and stayed there for four weeks. Their debut album, Spice, sold 7.4 million in the United States, and a whopping 28 million worldwide, equaling Ace of Base.
Next came Hanson, a band of three adorable blond brothers (Isaac, Taylor, and Zac Hanson, in descending order of age) from Tulsa, Oklahoma, whose infectious song “MMMBop” topped the Hot 100 in May 1997, and remained there for three weeks. It featured a fuzzed-out guitar vibe, and hip-hop-style scratching on the chorus, which makes “Da Doo Ron Ron” sound like Shakespeare.
Ba du bop . . .
By the summer of 1997, Clive Calder judged the time was finally right to bring the Backstreet Boys back from their two-year international crusade, and try again to crack the US market. A second single, “Quit Playing Games (With My Heart),” was selected from the batch that had been recorded back in June 1995 at Cheiron. (Calder, in a rare error of judgment, had pressed the group to go out with his friend Mutt Lange’s song “If You Want It to Be Good Girl” as the single, but both the boys and Lou were dead set against it, and Calder eventually relented.) Before the song was released, Nick Carter, the baby of the bunch, recorded a second verse. Carter’s voice had changed and he was now one of the strongest vocalists in the group, and Calder wanted to feature him on the record.
“Quit Playing Games” was released to radio on May 19, 1997, and as a CD single on June 10. By the end of June, the song had hit number two on the Hot 100, and it remained on the chart for forty-three weeks. “Quit Playing Games” was followed by the singles “As Long as You Love Me,” “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back),” and “I’ll Never Break Your Heart,” all enormous hits.
“And with that,” McPherson says, “the world knew all about Backstreet, Max Martin, and Cheiron Studios.” In his 2009 memoir, Live to Win, Andreas Carlsson writes, “For a long time Martin was actually the Backstreet Boys’ sixth member. He sounded more like Backstreet then they did themselves, or it was they who sounded like Max Martin.”
When the group returned to Sweden toward the end of that year, the boys were mobbed. Max was amazed by the number of fans in the street, including “the thousands of young girls who would camp out and sleep on the bus-stop benches outside the Cheiron studios. They had to hire a company to provide bodyguards, and park limousines as a barrier in front of the studio, as the façade contained only glass windows. Otherwise things could have really gone sideways.”
But although the boys were a gigantic success around the world now, selling millions of CDs and playing sold-out shows, the band saw very little of the money. Pearlman explained that plenty of dough would be forthcoming, after he had recouped the funds—$3 million altogether, he claimed—he had invested in creating, training, housing, feeding, clothing, adorning, grooming, recording, transporting, and promoting the group. But the boys and their parents began to suspect Lou was never going to part with their money. And to make matters worse, a new boy band—’N Sync—had appeared on the scene, threatening Backstreet’s market.
IT HAD TAKEN LONGER than expected for the Backstreet Boys to break through in their own country, but Lou Pearlman hadn’t been idle while waiting. He figured it was inevitable when the group finally did take off that someone else would come along and piggyback off their success by offering a product that was basically the same but just different enough to gain market share. “My feeling was, where there’s McDonald’s, there’s Burger King,” Pearlman says over the phone from prison, “and where there’s Coke there’s Pepsi and where’s there’s Backstreet Boys, there’s going to be someone else. Someone’s going to have it, why not us?” So, without telling the Backstreet Boys, Pearlman had set about creating another boy band, which he eventually named ’N Sync.
As luck would have it, the Disney Channel’s Mickey Mouse Club, a reliable teen talent finder since 1989, was canceled in 1996, and one of the Mouseketeers, sixteen-year-old Justin Timberlake, was interested in joining Pearlman’s new group. Others members were JC Chavez, Chris Kirkpatrick, Joey Fatone, and Lance Bass. Johnny Wright, Backstreet’s manager, became ’N Sync’s manager too, again without the boys being told. Areola, a BMG label, signed the group, and Cheiron wrote and produced songs for them, including the first single, “I Want You Back,” and the second, “Tearin’ Up My Heart.” Like Backstreet Boys, the group first caught on in Europe. BMG was delighted to have its very own boy band to compete with Jive.
Once ’N Sync was launched, Pearlman’s next move was to manufacture a girl group to complement his two boys bands. Spice Girls were huge, and just as Lou’s boy bands had proven even more popular than the comparable British offerings, so Lou thought he could do Simon Fuller one better on the distaff side too. In 1997, working with Lynn Harless—Justin Timberlake’s mother—Lou began auditioning girls for his group, which was to be called Innosense. Harless suggested another former cast member of the Mickey Mouse Club. Not only could she dance and sing, Harless said, she could also act, and she had been schooled in the same clean-cut and wholesome Disney values that had shaped Justin. Her name was Britney Spears.
BORN IN DECEMBER 1981, in Mississippi, Britney Spears grew up in Kentwood, a small town in southern Louisiana. She was fifteen when Pearlman auditioned her. She had been in show business for half her life at that point. Her mother, Lynne, was a day-care supervisor and her father, Jaime, was a boilermaker and construction worker whose problems with alcohol plagued the family. Britney found order and control, both absent in her home life, by performing at local talent shows, where she first made a name for herself with the power of her voice. When she was eight, Britney auditioned for and was awarded a spot on the Mickey Mouse Club, in recognition of which her hometown would later declare a “Britney Spears Day.”
But the Disney producers eventually decided Britney was too young to be a Mouseketeer, and so, on the advice of a Disney talent scout she went to New York, where she was taken on by an agent, Nancy Carson of the Carson-Adler talent agency, who specialized in child performers. Lynne and her daughter lived in a small apartment in the theater district, and Britney attended the Professional Performing Arts School. She was cast as the understudy to the star, Laura Bell Bundy, in the off-Broadway musical Ruthless! In 1992, before the musical premiered, she got to the finals of Star Search, the Ed McMahon–hosted television talent show. But she finished second, which crushed her, and after four months of long nights backstage at the theater, she and Lynne called it quits and went back to Kentwood. Britney was replaced by another unknown child actor named Natalie Portman.
The following year she auditioned for the Mickey Mouse Club again, and this time secured a spot among the seven new mice on the show; her cohort included Timberlake, Ryan Gosling, and Christina Aguilera. She and Lynne moved to Orlando in the summer of 1993, and Britney’s show-biz career began in earnest. In addition to acting, singing, and dancing, she learned to smile for the paparazzi, sign autographs, and how to conduct herself in interviews and “meet-and-greets.” Britney was a model student of these show-business mores, and a dutiful if unimaginative pupil in the school Disney created for Mouseketeers (where controversial subjects, such as evolution, were avoided). As the principal of the “Mickey Mouse School,” Chuck Yerger, later recalled in Britney: Inside the Dream by Steve Dennis, “In all that she did, Britney gave the distinct impression that if an adult says do something, you do it. She truly felt that all adults and people in authority were good people, who had her best interests at heart.”
After the show was canceled, Britney went back to Kentwood, where she tried to reenter normal American teen life: proms and homecomings (she was voted “Junior High Most Beautiful”), shopping and movie dates. But she did not give up on her show-biz dreams. In 1996, she contacted a New York–based entertainment lawyer named Larry Rudolph, who represented the Backstreet Boys and Toni Braxton, and, it so happened, Lou Pearlman. Upon meeting her, Rudolph sensed “a certain inexplicable quality” about the thirteen-year-old, and agreed to represent her. She auditioned for Innosense; Pearlman liked her and had a contract ready for her to sign. But Britney backed out of the contract at the last minute, deciding she would rather try for a solo career.
Not long after that, Rudolph sent Spears a tape of a song written for his client Toni Braxton, which Braxton had recorded but ultimately rejected for sounding too young. Rudolph advised Spears to sing it just the way Braxton sang it, and to make her own demo and mail it back to him. Upon receiving the demo, Rudolph sent it around to various labels, and garnered the interest of three: Mercury, Epic, and Jive. He arranged for Britney to audition for each of the three respective A&R teams, and in July 1997, Lynne and her now fifteen-year-old daughter flew to New York.
AT THE SONY BUILDING, a Philip Johnson–designed postmodernist skyscraper with a distinctive “Chippendale” top, Britney met Epic’s vice president of A&R, Michael Caplan. He was joined by Polly Anthony, a veteran of radio promotion, and several other key Epic personnel. Rudolph, who escorted Britney and her mother to the meeting, had assured Caplan that his client was “the next big thing.” But upon meeting her, the forty-year-old A&R man was unimpressed. “I was expecting a true artiste,” he later told Steve Dennis, “and in walked a shy little girl.” Britney performed a clutch of Whitney Houston songs for the Epic execs. “She came in,” Caplan went on, “warbled ‘I Will Always Love You,’ and I couldn’t wait for it to end. Her complexion wasn’t great, her voice wasn’t great and when the song ended, it was Larry, not Britney, who did all the talking. Seated beside me was Polly—more the pop connoisseur—and I don’t think she was impressed either, so we passed.” He added, “I believe in artistes, I believe in the art within music. Call me old-fashioned but I’m looking for true talent and a hell of a voice. I’m not looking for someone I can reinvent in the age of the celebutante that seems to have transcended the musical artiste.” Noble sentiments—and possibly the worst business decision Caplan ever made.
Mercury also passed. That left Jive.
Rudolph had sent Britney’s “Toni Braxton” demo tape to Jeff Fenster, a senior vice president of A&R for Jive in the United States. Besides Fenster, no one at the label liked it, except for A&R man Steve Lunt, who heard something in the demo. “It was in the wrong key,” he remembers. “Britney was trying to sing like Toni Braxton, which was way too low for her. It sounded pretty awful in places. But when her voice went up high, you could hear the girlish quality, and there was something really appealing about that.” Some snapshots of the fifteen-year-old accompanied the demo, showing a cute all-American teen in pigtails, sitting on a ramshackle wooden porch in Kentwood, and playing with her dog on the lawn. “I said, ‘This is something we should look at seriously.’ ”
Britney and her entourage turned up at the Jive offices. There was nothing fancy about the place. “Clive was all about what went on between the walls,” says Lunt, “and not the walls themselves.” Britney met the entire A&R department, along with Calder, in a conference room. It was July, and the teenager wore a mid-thigh sundress. She sang two Whitney Houston songs, a cappella: “I Will Always Love You,” and “I Have Nothing.”
“Her eyes were rolling back in her head as she was singing,” Lunt noticed, “and I remember thinking to myself, ‘That is really weird but it’s going to look great on video.’ It was old-school church meets modern-day sex. But in fact it was because she was so nervous.” When she was finished, Fenster asked her if she knew anything else, and Britney sang the national anthem. Everyone thanked her and said they would be in touch. Lynne and her daughter flew back to Kentwood that night.
As with all A&R matters at Jive, the decision about whether to sign Britney rested with Calder. Eric Beall, then the creative director of Zomba, observes, “Clive Calder was always searching for his Whitney or Mariah, but he never found her. We must have listened to a hundred auditions, but Clive’s position was always that artists like Whitney or Mariah are the single most expensive and risky investment that a label can make, and you had to be prepared to spend millions in promotion.” Such an investment wasn’t a problem for Clive Davis, who had major-label backing. But Jive, an independent, did not have those resources, and besides Calder was congenitally frugal. “He could never find anyone that he felt was enough of a natural talent to warrant the risk,” Beall says.
Calder was on surer ground with a girl like Britney, who was inexpensive to sign, and so evidently eager to please. She was hardly the type to engage in the divalike histrionics that made the Whitneys and Mariahs of the music world so difficult and costly to handle. Calder had the idea that Britney could be an American Robyn—a Europop teen queen, with an added dash of girl-next-door.
Calder offered Britney a contract with a “get-out” clause, stipulating that Jive could cancel the deal within ninety days, with no further commitment to Spears, if A&R decided the album wasn’t going to work. Lunt was designated to be her A&R guy and to oversee the writing, the demos, and the musical direction. “It was my brief to either make this work within the ninety-day period, or to let Clive know that we should look elsewhere for our female pop star.”
WITH THE CLOCK TICKING, the label brought Britney back to New York and installed her in a Jive penthouse. She was accompanied by a chaperone, a family friend named Felicia Culotta. Because Jive was still a predominantly rap and R&B label, almost all of its in-house songsmiths were urban writers. They had only one pop producer, Eric Foster White, signed to Zomba, Calder’s publishing company.
Almost every day, Britney and Culotta, often accompanied by Lunt, would be driven out to White’s studio, 4MW East Studios in New Jersey, where they worked on developing the teenager’s sound. Spears had originally envisioned doing “Sheryl Crow music, but younger,” but Lunt and White pushed her in a teen-pop direction, which Britney liked “because I can dance to it—it’s more me.” White also got her to sing higher, to bring out the girlish quality that Lunt had heard in her voice. They recorded a handful of original songs together, some of which, like “From the Bottom of My Broken Heart,” ended up on her debut album. But Calder didn’t hear any hits in the demos, and he debated not picking up the option. With time running out, Lunt suggested that Britney cover a hit from the ’80s, “You Got It All,” by the Jets. On hearing that demo in an A&R meeting, Calder said, “OK we have a project, let’s pick up the option and get going on an album. If the Backstreet Boys are the New Kids on the Block, then this is Debbie Gibson.”
In October, Lunt flew down to New Orleans, and made the hour drive north to Kentwood, to get a better idea of where their new artist was coming from. He showed Britney Robyn’s video of “Show Me Love.” He recalls, “She said, ‘The record is really good, but the video is all wrong. It’s in boring black and white and no one is dancing. If it was me I’d be wearing a miniskirt and I’d be dancing.’ ” Dancing, it turned out, was the teenager’s passion: Jive had no idea. In his notes Lunt wrote, “She says she can dance and she really wants to be able to entertain.” Lunt also noted that Britney told him the only thing she was afraid of was “failing, and having to go back to Louisiana and face all the people.”
Everyone agreed that Max Martin had to be involved with the Britney project, and shortly after the label picked up the option Max was flown to New York to meet the girl.
“I was scared of him!” Spears said of first meeting the hirsute Swede. “I thought he was someone from, like, Mötley Crüe or something.” Though he was rapidly becoming the genius of teen pop, Max Martin still looked like Martin White, the front man of It’s Alive: very long lank hair, a fleshy grizzled face, skinny tees and jeans, and the sallow skin of a studio rat.
The label left them alone together for a couple of hours, and Max came away impressed. Lunt says, “I remember Max saying from the first meeting, ‘I get it, I know what to do.’ ” He adds, “Robyn was a forceful artist, and Max couldn’t always get her to do it his way.” (Robyn herself later commented, “I became quite associated with Max Martin and Denniz PoP during that time, which I didn’t always find so amusing as I really wanted to stand on my own two feet.”) Lunt continues: “But with Britney, Max said, ‘She’s fifteen years old; I can make the record I really want to make, and use her qualities appropriately, without her telling me what to do.’ Which is kind of what happened.”
MAX MARTIN HAD A song in mind for Britney. He had composed it in Stockholm the year before with Rami Yacoub, the Swedish-Moroccan beat maker who was now part of the Cheiron team. The song, which was initially called “Hit Me Baby (One More Time)” had been written for TLC, the three-woman American R&B group. Cheiron sent TLC a demo of the song, which featured Max doing four-part harmonies all by himself. (As E-Type said, “With his own demos, Max Martin singing himself, those would have sold ten million or more, but he wasn’t an artist, he didn’t want to be an artist.”) TLC rejected it. Years later, T-Boz recalled their decision: “I was like, I like the song but do I think it’s a hit? Do I think it’s TLC? . . . Was I going to say ‘Hit me baby one more time’? Hell no!”
“Max at that point in his career thought he was writing a R&B song,” Steve Lunt says, “whereas in reality he was writing a Swedish pop song. It was ABBA with a groove, basically.” There is a funky bass slap in the song, which sounds urban, and on the trace vocal Max did that cowboy-sounding “owww” made famous by Cameo and beloved by Denniz. “But all those chords are so European, how could that possibly be an American R&B song?” Lunt continues. “No black artist was going to sing it.” He adds, “But that was the genius of Max Martin. Without being fully aware of it, he’d forged a brilliant sound all his own, and within a few weeks every American producer was desperately scrambling to emulate it.”
When TLC rejected the song, Max offered it to Robyn, but nothing came of that, either. After meeting Britney in New York, he went back to Stockholm, worked on the song a little more with her in mind, made a copy, and mailed it to Jive. As was Max’s method of demo making, all the hooks in the song were worked up to their finished state, but most of the verses were unfinished, often mere vowel sounds. There was no bridge yet, because, as Lunt puts it, “Max would say, ‘If you don’t like the song by then, fuck you’—in his polite Swedish way, of course.” When the demo reached Jive, everyone thought, “Holy shit, this is perfect,” according to Lunt.
“Hit Me Baby (One More Time)” is a song about obsession, and it takes all of two seconds to hook you, not once but twice, first with the swung triplet “Da Nah Nah” and then with that alluring growl-purr Britney emits with her first line, “Oh baby bay-bee.” Then the funky Cheiron backbeat kicks in, with drums that sound like percussion grenades. Next comes Tomas Lindberg’s wah-wah guitar lines, which signal to one’s inner disco hater that it can relax: it’s a rock song, after all. In terms of sheer sonic drama, “Hit Me Baby (One More Time)” belongs to the theatrical rock tradition of Queen, mixed with Mutt Lange’s work with Def Leppard. It marries melody and rhythm in a way that Denniz PoP had been seeking since his DJ days—a catchy pop song that doesn’t stop the dancing.
And yet the vocal hook, irresistible as it was, sounded odd. You weren’t sure it was OK to sing it out loud. It’s hard to imagine that anyone for whom English is a first language would write the phrase “Hit me baby” without intending it as an allusion to domestic violence or S&M. That was the furthest thing from the minds of the gentle Swedes, who were only trying to use up-to-the-minute lingo for “Call me.” Jive, concerned that Americans might get the wrong idea, changed the title to “. . . Baby One More Time.”