In 1985 Madonna starred in Desperately Seeking Susan. She was on the cover of Rolling Stone. And “Crazy For You,” her first hit ballad, reached Number 1 on Billboard, bumping “We Are the World.”
It was also a good year for Jon Lind ’69. Two years earlier, Lind was new in his career with Warner Brothers Music Publishing when he got the assignment to co-write a song for the movie Vision Quest. The recording artist: a mostly unknown singer named Madonna who had yet to release her first album.
“I didn’t know a thing about her,” Lind says. He read the script, then wrote the melody on his acoustic guitar. “I had the chorus and the title. I didn’t have a plot, or much else.” That title: "Crazy for You."
Lind already had one big hit under his belt, Earth Wind & Fire’s 1979 “Boogie Wonderland.” For the Madonna song, he had a proven lyricist in co-writer John Bettis, who’d written “Top of the World” for the Carpenters. Inside Lind’s Hollywood home, Bettis pulled out a legal pad and wrote, “Swaying room as the music starts.” Lind didn’t like that first line; he found it too hard to say. Bettis suggested, “Let’s come back to it.”
Four hours later, happy with their work, they returned to the first line. Bettis told a still-skeptical Lind, “Trust me.”
Soon they met Madonna in the studio. She seemed awkward and uncomfortable, Lind says, and the song as she recorded it “was not warm, fun or inspirational. It was not good.” After the session Lind and Bettis walked to a Mexican restaurant and ordered tequila shots and beer. Failure seemed certain.
Flash-forward 58 weeks. “I’m in a bar, Joe Allen’s," Lind says. A woman comes over and says “Crazy For You” will be the next single for Madonna, who is by now all over the radio. Lind’s reaction: “Impossible.”
It turns out the original recording had been scrapped and replaced with a recut, entirely different version. “And," he says, "it was awesome."
Lind went on to co-write the Vanessa Williams hit “Save the Best for Last,” a 1993 Grammy nominee for Song of the Year. He became head of A&R at Hollywood Records. Now semi-retired, he often meets young songwriters who ask how he came up with a line as great as “Swaying room as the music starts.”
To Lind, the line proves a lesson he’s carried with him since the writing session with Bettis: trust your collaborators. Today, Vision Quest is long forgotten. “Crazy For You,” from the first line to the last, has stood the test of time.