When Pat Leonard was kicked out of Park Ridge`s Maine East High School in the mid-`70s, he was a rebellious teenager who thought everybody else had their heads screwed on backward.
”They didn`t feel I was cooperating,” he says. ”It was too big a school to be a musician who didn`t want to do anything but music. I figured,
`All these people are jerks, and I`m a genius.` ”
Fifteen years later, Leonard is having the last laugh. After being Madonna`s musical alter ego for four years, the 34-year-old keyboardist-composer-producer has become one of the hottest behind-the-scenes music talents in Los Angeles.
”I`m over the Madonna thing and sick of hearing about it,” he says by phone from his own 48-track recording studio in Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife and three children. ”At some point, what she`s doing crosses the line into sensationalism, and it`s not art or entertainment anymore.”
Still, Leonard says he`s proud of the work he produced with her. While she has relied on other composers for most of her dance tracks, several of Madonna`s most substantial songs, including ”Like a Prayer” and the majestic ”Live to Tell,” have featured Leonard`s soaring melodies.
For Madonna`s albums ”True Blue,” ”Like a Prayer” and ”Dick Tracy,” Leonard hired the musicians, programmed the tracks, played keyboards, wrote and arranged the music, and supervised the singing, but he felt left out of the final product.
”I`d get into the heat of writing with her, then at some point realize,
`Wow, this isn`t my record.` You wake up the next morning and hear a dance mix by someone you never met, it`s kind of shocking. I felt a little like Dorothy in Oz; maybe I was a little naive. It`s totally her right; it`s her picture on the cover. But working with her, I learned the difference between what is my record and somebody else`s.”
These days, Leonard is more interested in talking about his band, Toy Matinee, whose debut on Warner/Reprise reflects his roots in the progressive rock sound he used to play in his first Chicago band, Trillion.
”The music that most influenced me was played by virtuosos whose songs expressed ideas and emotion,” Leonard says. ”From Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd all the way through Genesis, Gentle Giant and Jethro Tull, what turned me on about that music was a certain feeling of risk and adventure. Getting that feeling again is part of what this group is all about.”
Replete with tempo changes, modulations, lots of chord changes and disparate styles ranging from clarinet swing band to baroque piano breaks, the album shows off Leonard`s wide-ranging musical skills, which he has developed since he was a 3-year-old learning classical pieces by ear that his older sister played for him.
By age 9, Leonard was accompanying his saxophone-playing dad at gigs in Mundelein supper clubs. Around the time he left high school, Leonard formed Trillion, which released two records on Mercury. In 1982, he led an instrumental trio called Soft Machine. In the early `80s, Leonard fell into the lucrative advertising jingle scene after taking a crash course in sight reading music at Roosevelt University.
Leonard says that by 1984 he had ”learned enough humility” and decided to move to Los Angeles. After three auditions he became not only keyboardist but also musical director for the Jacksons.
This career leapfrog was followed by another when Madonna`s manager asked Leonard to put together her new show. ”I wasn`t interested at all,” Leonard says. ”To me she was just someone who rolled around in her underwear. But they said, `Just meet her.` So I did, and she was just so headstrong and focused. She said, `You can put the whole thing together.` ” So Leonard relented and began writing songs with Madonna during her ”Like a Virgin”
tour.
Since breaking with Madonna in 1988, Leonard has been working on movie sound tracks, a solo instrumental pop-jazz album produced by Chick Corea, and collaborations with Robbie Robertson; Roger Waters (formerly of Pink Floyd);
and a young singer named Schascle.
”I love working with people who are brilliant at what they do,” Leonard says. ”It`s so exciting to read Roger Waters` lyrics, and to be able to help form this into something finished.”
