This haste would prove futile. Baker wasn’t the only music man who’d left the party with a copy of Mariah’s cassette. His former manager , Tommy Mottola—now the head of U.S. operations for CBS Records—had one, too. In fact, he had witnessed the entire transaction. Arthur Baker and Brenda K. Starr offer slightly varying accounts of the interaction and exchange, but both involve some version of Mottola quipping, “Hey, who’s the broad with the body?” According to Baker, Mottola finagled a copy of the tape—Mariah and Brenda had only brought two—after Brenda had passed it to her old Mirage Records boss, Jerry Greenberg. “Jerry had signed Brenda four years earlier, so she figured she should give one to him,” Baker explains. “He had the tape, I think he put it in his pocket, and Mottola took it and put it in his pocket .” As legend has it, Tommy Mottola listened to the tape in his limousine while driving home that evening, and was so immediately struck by what he heard that he doubled back to the party to track her down. Unlike Baker, whose copy of the tape had phone numbers for Ben Margulies, Mariah, and Brenda scrawled on the label in magic marker, his copy was unlabeled, leading him to begin a frantic search for Mariah the next day, beginning with a call to Brenda K. Starr’s manager, Buddy Allen.
Mottola, and Jerry Greenberg.” Spotting Arthur Baker, Brenda introduced him to Mariah, and urged him to listen to her demo. Afterwards, the three headed twenty blocks downtown to Arthur’s Shakedown Sound studio on West 37th Street to play the tape. “She put the tape on and I said, ‘Oh fuck, this girl is going to be huge,’” he remembers. Baker was even more impressed when he learned that Mariah was a writer and had largely written the songs herself. “I’m thinking it’s Madonna meets Whitney. She wrote pop songs like Madonna but sounded like Whitney. I’m like, ‘ This is it. I’ve discovered gold .’” The playback session didn’t only leave an impression on Arthur Baker, but also on others within earshot. “In the other room was a singer I was working with from a group called Vertical Hold,” Baker remembers. “She came in and said, ‘Wow, who is that?’ Mariah goes, ‘That was me,’ and sings a little bit. The girl just went, ‘Whoa.’ That girl was Angie Stone, who was Angie B. at the time.” Almost immediately, Arthur had his sights set on signing Mariah to a production deal with the help of his new manager, Bennett Freed. Warner Music and MCA Records came to mind as targets. “I said, ‘Benny, you got to get here; this girl is going to be the biggest thing ever. He said, ‘Send me the tape.’ I go, ‘Trust me. Get on the red eye tonight. I’ll pay for your first-class ticket.”
102 WaxPoetics
( top ) A scene from Mariah Carey’s “I Still Believe” video (1998), directed by Trevor O’Shana.
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