Debbie Gibson may be a truly global star but she's determined to stay to her humble roots born August 31st, 1970 in Brooklyn New York in a primerly Catholic neighborhood, but moved to Merrick after a neighborhood shooting. Merrick is a classic Long Island commuter town of about 23,000 people nestled halfway between Manhattan and the Hamptons.
Cheerful and outgoing from the start she was an accomplished musician at age two.
"When she was 2 years old, and only this big, she wanted a guitar, desperately," Diane Gibson recalls. "We passed the music store one day and I saw this ukulele -- Deborah was still in the carriage -- and I said, would you like that 'guitar'? She thought it was the most wonderful guitar and she would pluck out little things ..."
My sisters started playing piano when I was four and I started tagging along with them, picking it up by ear. I told my Mom that I wanted to learn but she thought I was too young but when I was six I finally convinced her to sign me up for piano lessons and started taking lessons from the piano teacher that Billy Joel.
"The first year was a waste. My sisters had started a year earlier and I used to sit and listen to them practice and when I started, the teacher used to give me the same pieces."
Besides the piano lessons, there were voice lessons and a grounding in the basics of production with engineers, producers, arrangers and other music professionals, some of whom must have been taken aback by Gibson's assertiveness (she came out of a meeting with one lyricist, thinking the encounter was "ridiculous -- who is an authority on whether you put 'but,' 'and' or 'if' in this sentence?"). The result: She became not just a singer -- the classic role offered women in music -- or writer, but also a musician and producer, a total pop package.
There were also dance classes, which probably helped Gibson develop her surprisingly savvy stage presence. "But I don't like acting classes," she says. "It's like songwriting: You can't teach someone how to write songs and you can't teach them how to act."
Her mother worked as an officer manager in various doctor offices around New York and her dad worked steadily at Twa airlines in costumer service still money was tight in the Gibson household.
It was really hard for them to make ends meat taking singing lessons and dance lessons.
At the age of twelve she joined the Metropolitan Opera Children's Chorus and continued it for three years; and doing community theater and commercials.
"I would cut out the auditions and leave them on the kitchen table circled with a note that said, 'Somebody take me. Change your work schedule. Take me.' I used to go on any audition that was around. 'Black girl, age 25,' I was like, 'I'm here!' Anything. I was the pushy little kid who would never take no."
Gibson's ambitions crystallized at the ripe age of seven, when she saw the Broadway production of Annie. "She was seven or eight when 'Annie' hit," Gibson's mother told the Washington Post. "That was it; that was when she decided that this was going to be her life. She was going to be Annie one way or another. And she had tremendous determination. She would go to interviews and auditions that would last 10 or 12 hours; she wouldn't care."
Gibson's parents became concerned about her level of ambition, but they decided to support rather than discourage her. "I knew that one way or another, with or without us, she would wind up in the music business and be successful," her mother said. "It was a matter of, do you want to see her stumble and make mistakes, or do you want to offer guidance and encouragement and hopefully see it go the right way?"
Gibson's parents offered not only encouragement, but an impressive array of musical equipment as well.
When I was 12 years old, my Mom used the office Fed Ex supplies to get a cassette recording of a song I wrote on a Casio synthesizer called "I Come From America" in by the deadline (I was always a bit "last minute"!) ... Well? It paid off. I won first prize which was $1000 and a chance to hear my song played on WOR Radio! Little did she know, she created a monster! I was already obsessed with the radio but, the thrill I got from hearing MY original song on the radio...well, that was the be all end all for me.
