Free Poker Face by Maureen Callahan Page A

CEO of BigChampagne.com, Garland is an expert in the consumption of music online; his company tracks data, including peer-to-peer file sharing, for all the major labels.
    Gaga, he says, “is an incredibly social animal in the new definition of social. She’s sort of promiscuous. And I don’t mean promiscuous in the Ke$ha sense—I mean socially promiscuous online.” (Ke$ha is the pop singer who styles herself as the avant-gardist of the trailer park, who does what she can to draw comparisons to Gaga.) But it was Gaga’s innate understanding of creating and cultivating an online identity—and a sense of community with those who responded—that would, as much as major-label backing, catapult her into global consciousness. She would later actively cultivate the support of gossip blogger Perez Hilton, whose site, as of April 2010, was ranked 192 in most-trafficked websites in the United States and 517th globally.
    As for the brick-and-mortar music business, the earthbound major labels: Gaga got a lot of no’s. They would say she didn’t have the right look, that they didn’t hear any hits in the material. She didn’t stop trying. She tried to get a publishing deal—basically, a contract to write songs that could be sold to other artists—with Irwin Robinson, her old boss at Famous Music. He said no. She tried to get a publishing deal with Sony/ATV; they said no. Her meeting at Sony/ATV, according to a source, was with Danny Goldberg, who had managed Nirvana and had run three major labels. She was there with Fusari, which should have conferred a level of respect, but Gaga felt Goldberg wasn’t listening to a thing she was saying, that he couldn’t have made his disinterest clearer. She left the meeting in a rage, yelling at Fusari that she would never sign to Sony/ATV. Then she took her act up to the Island Def Jam offices in midtown Manhattan to audition for a deal in late 2006.
    An Island Def Jam employee remembers seeing Gaga coming down the hall: “She reminded me of Julia Roberts [in] Pretty Woman, ” she says. “But in American Apparel.”
    What happened that afternoon at Island Def Jam has become part of the Gaga myth, and even one of her closest friends from this time—who was not present but heard about the audition from Gaga immediately afterward—tells it the same way: Gaga sang and played piano for a gaggle of execs. She saw one, out of the corner of her eye, get up and leave; she panicked, but you’d never have been able to tell by looking at her. She kept going and, when she was done, looked up to see label head Antonio “L.A.” Reid in the doorway. He said, “See legal on your way out”—industry-speak for “We’re signing you.”
    It didn’t really go down that way, according to someone who was in the room. For one thing, her appointment that day was with Reid himself: “She walked into L.A.’s office,” says the source. “A couple of minutes later, someone asked me if I would go watch Gaga do a showcase in L.A.’s office.”
    Also in the room: Gaga’s future artist and repertoire person Josh Sarubin; senior VP Karen Kwak, also known as Reid’s right-hand woman; and a few others. Reid had a tiny room off his office, maybe ten feet by ten feet, outfitted with an upright piano; this is where Gaga auditioned.
    “She sat down at the piano and introduced herself,” says the source. “Then she started playing—she did ‘Beautiful, Dirty, Rich’ and a few other songs. She was amazing. There was no doubt about it—the minute you saw her behind her instrument, you knew she was special. But the thing is—and I know I’m not the only person who thinks this—I don’t remember anything about the songs, because the whole time we could not take our eyes off her ass. She was in this tight little skirt or tube dress. She moved back and forth and you could just see her ass cheeks running up and down, like on a seesaw almost. Everyone was looking around the room with these giant smiles,