Madonna, when he decided to pay a call to Morgan Carey. He and Morgan had met during their first year at Northport High School on Long Island in the ’70s, and become fast friends. Not only was Pesco, whose mother was South Korean, one of few other mixed or non-white kids in the school, but, uncannily, they both had parents who were professional opera singers. “[Pat Carey] and my father would sing at the library and do concerts together at various times,” Pesco recalls. “They were associates, very interestingly…I’d go over to their house, and Mariah was this little toddler running around the house with her blonde hair.” Pesco had some money in his pocket and stories to share following Madonna’s massively successful Virgin tour with the Beastie Boys, and was eager to reconnect with friends. “I call Morgan and I say, ‘Hey Morgan, what’s up man?’ And he goes, ‘You know, man, my little sister, she’s fourteen now, my mom’s been working with her, and she sounds so good. She’s really, really good .” [Mariah was sixteen in summer 1985— Ed .] Pesco by this time had become one of New York’s most in- demand session guitarists, and he’d also joined the System, vocalist Mic Murphy’s electro R&B project with keyboardist David Frank. He’d soon be back on the road, touring with Steve Winwood. He wasn’t in a position to offer mentorship to his friend’s little sister, but he knew just the right person for her to meet. Gavin Christopher had come up in Chicago around Chaka Khan, with whom he’d briefly had a band called Lyfe. He joined another outfit, High Voltage, with Chaka’s future Rufus colleagues Bobby Watson and Tony Maiden, and wrote Rufus’s Chaka-fronted singles “Once You Get Started” and “Dance Wit’ Me.” After some time in California, he’d made his way to New York, where he signed with Manhattan Records and embraced a more pop-leaning R&B sound with his 1986 album, One Step Closer , reaching #22 on the Billboard Hot 100 with that album’s lead single, “One Step Closer to You.” Paul Pesco played guitar on that album, and he was impressed by Gavin Christopher. “Gavin was the next best thing to Stevie Wonder, of people that I know personally,” Pesco says. “He had a voice just like Stevie. So I say, ‘Morgan, I’ve been working with this really great singer, Gavin Christopher, you should have Mariah work with Gavin.” Christopher, who passed away in 2016, recalled meeting a fifteen-year-old Mariah in an interview published on the fan site Mariahcareyarchives.com: “Morgan had asked me to listen to his sister, and tell him what I thought about her voice. I immediately walked into my living room after hearing her voice and told Morgan that his sister [would] be a huge success someday.” Christopher was so impressed with young Mariah’s voice and personality that he invited her to begin working with him twice a week at his apartment on 23rd Street in Manhattan. “We had a few songs we were working on with no specific genre in mind,” Christopher said. “We were co-writing. So, there was a bit of guidance on my part. But, I think Mariah already knew who she was, and where she wanted to go. We did not get a chance to work
together very long, maybe a few months at the most. But, it was the most rewarding.” While working on a song called “Just Can’t Hold It Back,” a connection was made with Ben Margulies, a musician and songwriter who’d played in a band with Christopher in California, and, it turned out, now had a band with another of Morgan and Paul Pesco’s high school friends from Northport, multi-instrumentalist and recording engineer Chris Toland. Mariah wasn’t impressed with Margulies’s keyboard playing—he was really more of a drummer— but they clicked as writers, and made plans to keep working together. Meanwhile, Chris Toland and Ben Margulies’s band, which also included Chris’s twin brother, Jeff, had fizzled out. Ben and Chris were looking for the next thing. They found Mariah. “Mariah came in and immediately her and Ben became inseparable,” Chris Toland recalls. “Ben is an amazing drummer, and a wonderful musician. [They] hit it off amazingly well, as you can see [from] the chemistry and sensibilities in the music they came up with.” For Mariah, the beginnings of a music career in New York were falling into place. Inspired equally by her new studio life in the city and her strong aversion to her mother’s new fiancé, Mariah moved to the city after finishing high school in June 1987. Her first Manhattan address was at Morgan’s apartment in Greenwich Village, where she house-sat her brother’s cats while he traveled overseas. When that arrangement ran its course, she moved into a place on the Upper West Side with Clarissa Dane, a young singer she’d met while writing with Gavin Christopher. Another roommate, Kennan Keating, was an engineer at Unique Studios in Times Square, where Mariah had started picking up session work. To supplement her
96 WaxPoetics
( top ) A Columbia Records magazine advertisement for Mariah Carey’s 1990 self-titled debut album.
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