#dj'sgetitdone

Madonna's Summer Song -- Holiday

An artist’s first hit!  For some it’s also their last hit.  For some talented artists, it’s the first of many.  But, there’s a lot that the first hit often tells you about the artist.  Consider Madonna’s first hit “Holiday”.  Madonna was living in New York and frequented nightclubs to get disc jockeys to play her demo songs.  Mark Kamins a DJ at Danceteria (and friend of Madonna) arranged a meeting for her with Seymour Stein of Sire Records (part of Warner Brothers). He gave her a three single deal, with an option for an album.  Her singles cracked the top 10 in Billboard’s “Hot Dance Club Songs” chart. With that success, Warner Brothers hired a producer and they began to cobble together the album that would become her first, the self-titled “Madonna”.  

Madonna was unhappy with the way the album was progressing and the way the songs were moving away from the sparser beat-based form of the original demos. This is the fork in the road where things changed. As a New York dance club aficionado Madonna asked John Benitez the DJ from The Fun House to do some remixing of the tracks.  The Fun House was a 26th Street Manhattan dance club, with a decidedly anti-Studio 54 club vibe, full of younger less affluent clientele.  Benitez knew the pulse of the city’s youth. Nicknamed “Jellybean” because of his initials, he remixed her singles “Burning Up”, “Borderline” and “Lucky Star”. They needed one more song for the album and “Jellybean” knew of the song “Holiday” written by Curtis Hudson and Lisa Stevens-Crowder for their own musical act Pure Energy. They refused at first, but agreed after meeting with Madonna.  Again, another game changing moment. Benitez then produced the track.