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  Rick James and Art Stewart receiving Rick’s first gold album for Come Get It! with Skip Miller and Barney Ales, 1979.

  Bobby Holland/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.

  Rick James wins the American Music Award for Favorite Soul Album for Street Songs, 1982.

  Time & Life Pictures/The LIFE Pictures Collection/Getty Images.

  Rick and his daughter, Ty.

  Tyenza Matthews.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Editorial assistance by Aaron Cohen and Harry Weinger.

  Thanks to Jeff Jampol for making this book possible—and to the estate of Rick James for continuing to honor his legacy.

  Gratitude to David Vigliano, Malaika Adero, Todd Hunter, Will LoTurco, and Arron Saxe.

  Much love to my family—wonderful wife, Roberta, and Ali, Jess, Henry, Jim, Charlotte, Nins, James, Isaac, Esther, and Elizabeth.

  To the Tuesday morning gang—Dennis, Skip, Ian, Dave, Kevin, David, Herb, Dejon, Juan, and Dan—and all my friends in and out of the meetings who keep me sane.

  And love to my dear brothers Alan Eisenstock and Harry Weinger for helping me in so many ways.

  —David Ritz

  INTRODUCTION

  I met Rick James in Marvin Gaye’s studio on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood in 1979. Marvin was forty, Rick was thirty-one, and I was thirty-five.

  Rick was riding high. His Come Get It! album, with the hits “You and I” and “Mary Jane,” had gone double platinum. Rick later described this time: “[My royalties] bought me a mansion once owned by William Randolph Hearst with a sunken living room and a dramatic fireplace that looked like it came out of Citizen Kane.” His second album, Bustin’ Out of L Seven, was a runaway smash, and in the kingdom of Motown, he was the newly crowned prince.

  Once upon a time, Marvin had been a prince himself, but in the late seventies he was struggling to regain commercial success. It had been two years since his last hit, the nouvelle disco “Got to Give It Up,” an autographical meditation on his reluctance to dance.

  That night Rick was dancing all over Marvin’s studio. He wore a tiny silver cocaine spoon around his neck and, dipping into his bag of blow, he freely offered up samples.

  I was there as Gaye’s biographer, learning as much as I could about Marvin’s life, which, in those days, revolved around the studio. Marvin was low-key, but having recently completed the autobiography of Ray Charles, I was accustomed to a supercharged personality. I was not, though, accustomed to anyone as supercharged as Rick. His energy was outrageous. He spoke in streams of consciousness that revealed a brilliant mind. He spoke nonstop. He was respectful of Marvin, whom he referred to as “the Master.” But knowing that Gaye was self-conscious about having hit forty, he also liked to needle him by calling him “Uncle Marvin.”

  When Rick asked to hear what Marvin was working on, Gaye played “Dance ’N’ Be Happy” from the unreleased Love Man, an album that would be reworked several times and finally issued as In Our Lifetime, an uncompromising view of an impending apocalypse.

  Rick liked what he heard, but Marvin didn’t.

  “It’s superficial,” said Gaye.

  “Sometimes superficial sells,” said James.

  “But substantive sells even more,” Marvin argued.

  “I like substantive,” said Rick. “What do you think about this substance I have right here?”

  Marvin laughed. “It’s good,” he said.

  “It’s all good,” Rick agreed.

  Marvin’s tracks played over the banter.

  “The funk is deep,” said Rick.

  “Substantially deep. But I haven’t gotten the story straight. That’s why this man is here—to help me figure out the story.” That’s when Marvin formally introduced me to Rick.

  “When that book comes out,” said Rick, “I’m going to be the first to read it.”

  When, six years later, the book—Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye—did come out, Rick was among the first people to call me with his reaction.

  “Marvin’s story is incredible,” he said, “but wait till you hear mine. My story will blow you away.”

  It did. When we got together on several occasions, I started taking notes. I couldn’t write fast enough. Rick’s story was off the charts, an epic of music, crime, and sex. He didn’t give me the whole picture, but enough to whet my appetite. Rick had great musical focus but limited conversational focus. He’d start stories, build them up, and then, reminded of another story, switch tracks. At times he’d have four stories going at once. He might not finish any of them. One thing, though, was clear: he contained stories like the oceans contain fish.

  Reading Divided Soul, Rick was more motivated than ever to write his own book.

  “Marvin’s story ends in tragedy,” said Rick, “but mine will end in triumph.”

  There were, to be sure, more triumphs in store for Rick, and in the coming years he called me several times to make sure I took note of them. “The book will get done,” he said. “I really want to get started.”

  But that didn’t happen until the nineties, when a prison sentence gave Rick the literary focus he might otherwise never have experienced. I was asked to write an essay to accompany a multi-CD overview of James’s career. I readily agreed, seeing it as a chance to reconnect with Rick.

  A long series of prison interviews ensued, many in person, many more on the phone. During the first, Rick told me that he had been studying biographies and reread the ones I did on Marvin and Ray Charles. He was finally and firmly committed to do one of his own. Would I help? I was only too glad. I used this eight-week period of face-to-face encounters with Rick to form the basis of what I hoped would be his autobiography.

  While he was still incarcerated, the CD set came out (Bustin’ Out: The Best of Rick James), along with my essay “The Musical Memoirs of a Superfreak,” largely written in Rick’s voice. He sent me a message that he liked the essay and had high hopes for the book that we would write together. I was optimistic about completing the project, based on not only the large amount of intimate interview material I had accumulated but also Rick’s willingness to bare his soul.

  When he was released from prison in 1996, he had served two years and twenty-three days of his five-year sentence. He was elated and called me a month later, eager for us to get together and work on the book. He mailed me several hundred pages of notes and partial chapters that he had written in prison. The story was not organized chronologically. There were major gaps and more than a few breakdowns in logic. Yet I was encouraged because there was so much to work with. Rick was serious about telling his story.

  Another year passed before he called me. He was ready to release a new album, Urban Rapsody, and wanted me to come to the studio to hear it. The music was great, and, like your typical writer, I was gratified to see that on the studio console were copies of autobiographies I had written with B. B. King and Etta James.

  “I haven’t disappeared,” said Rick. “I’ve been keeping up with you through your books. I just had to get this music out. We’ll get to work. I’ll call you in a few weeks.” We had several long conversations after that, during which we discussed the structure of the book and several new passages he had written. Then his calls stopped.

  I tried contacting him dozens of times. A couple of those times we connected, but he sounded increasingly remote. The prospect of our putting his autobiography in publishable shape seemed more and more distant. Through
mutual friends, I heard that his struggles with drugs had deepened.

  In 2004, he called to ask whether I had caught him on Chappelle’s Show, where Dave Chappelle, playing Rick, uttered the immortal line “I’m Rick James, bitch!” I had watched him, and though the skit was funny, I saw tremendous pain in Rick’s eyes. He looked like a defeated man. He said that because he was back in the public eye, it was time to do more work on his book. He was depressed because his marriage to Tanya Hijazi, the great love of his life, had collapsed. Their divorce became official in the summer of 2004.

  On August 6 of that year, a friend called to say that Rick had passed. The papers called it “pulmonary and cardiac failure.” I thought of what Rick had said, twenty-five years earlier, about avoiding what Marvin Gaye did not avoid—a tragic end. I went to the phonograph and put on “Standing on the Top,” the song Rick had written and produced for the Temptations’ Reunion album. I had a happy memory of watching Rick rehearse that group, his favorite, back in the early eighties when the record was cut. The session had been chaotic but creative, with Rick in possession of his full musical powers. That day he experienced tremendous satisfaction.

  Rick James was a major player in the highly competitive game of rhythm and blues, where only the most talented survive. In that earlier essay, I wrote, “Between Parliament and Prince, Rick carried the banner of black pop over that fertile territory known as funk. As the seventies melted into the eighties, he was bad, superbad, the baddest of the bad. His orchestrations were brilliant, his shows spectacular. He worked in the celebrated R & B instrumental tradition—percussive guitar riffs, busy bass line, syncopated horn punches—extending from Louis Jordan, Ray Charles, Ike Turner, James Brown, the Memphis Horns, Johnny “Guitar” Watson, Sly Stone, and George Clinton. Rick honored the tradition—and added to it. His funk was high and mighty while his attitude stayed down and dirty. His eroticism was raw. He was an early gangsta of love, calculatedly insane, unmanageable, both benefactor and victim of his own inexhaustible energy.”

  A half-realized unauthorized version of a James autobiography appeared after his death but fell woefully far short of achieving Rick’s goal—to write a book worthy of his musical and literary intelligence. The last thing Rick told me was, “The material is there, but the book still needs lots of work.” Until now, that work has never been done.

  Glow: The Autobiography of Rick James represents the full expression of our original project. It is based on not only my interviews with Rick but also the material Rick gave me. It is written entirely in Rick’s voice—our intention from the very start of our collaboration. It’s all Rick, all the time.

  My hope is that in reading this book you will hear Rick, see Rick, and feel Rick revealing his heart. He was as creative as he was conflicted, as driven as he was diverted by his demons.

  This is, I’m convinced, the book that Rick wanted—a memoir that is startlingly candid, fearless, and informed by the notion that confession is the most sincere and powerful form of prayer.

  David Ritz

  Los Angeles, 2013

  PART ONE

  BREAKING OUT

  LOCKED UP

  I’m having these crazy dreams in jail. The dreams are so vivid—so wildly creative—that I know God is in charge of my imagination. I couldn’t dream up this shit without God. God has to be the author of my dreams. In one dream, I’m with Miles Davis. We’re dressed like African princes. Our robes are blue and gold. Miles is singing and I’m playing trumpet. Black angels are surrounding us. We’re bathed in sunlight. We’re on top of the Empire State Building and everyone in the city of New York can hear us. The people are assembled on the street; they’re hanging out their windows and waving flags from office buildings. Helicopters are flying over us, but our music is so powerful that we drown out all noise. Our music is some symphony that has the angels dancing in the sky.

  “Didn’t know you could play jazz so good,” Miles says to me.

  “Didn’t know you could sing so funky,” I say to him.

  The music is so beautiful I start crying through Miles’s horn.

  Someone says, “The hospitals are clearing out. The patients are healed.”

  Someone else says, “The churches are clearing. The congregations are in the streets.”

  “I told you,” says Miles. “I told you we could do it.”

  When I put the trumpet to my lips again, the horn turns into a megaphone. When I start to speak, I hear the voice of my mother.

  “My son has the answer,” she says. “Miles gave him the answer. Listen to my son.”

  I turn to Miles, who rarely smiles, and see that he is smiling.

  When I wake up from this dream, I am smiling.

  But I’m still in jail.

  This long stay in jail is the first time I’m remembering my dreams. I’m not even sure I had dreams before they put my ass behind bars. My mind was clogged up with cocaine—not just any cocaine, but cocaine strong enough to fuel jet engines. I was a jet engine that got dislodged from the plane of my brain. I crashed to the ground and broke into a million pieces. When the pieces magically came back together, the engine could work again. But the fuel was no longer cocaine. The fuel was something I hadn’t used since I was a little boy. I’d call it natural energy and natural drive. It’s a natural restlessness to see and explore and learn. Couldn’t do any of that exploring when I was ripping and running through the world of intoxicants. Didn’t wanna explore. Just wanted to stay high.

  So ain’t this a bitch? My highs are my dreams. My dreams are my escape. And my imagination is my way out of prison. If you break down the word “imagination,” I guess it means manufacturing images. Dreaming is the purest form of that process—so, for as long as I’m locked up, I’m gonna write down my dreams.

  I’m also gonna write down my life.

  I’ve always wanted to write my own life story. But outside of prison I could never sit down and be quiet. My energy was scattered. I was always going in a dozen different directions at once. But now I got no choice. Got nowhere to go and nothing to do. I’m forced to read. And in reading—especially about the lives of people I relate to—I get excited. I read about Charlie Parker, Nat King Cole, Bob Marley, and Malcolm X, and I understand exactly why their lives went the way they did. I see their fuckups as my fuckups; I see their talents as my talents. Sometimes talent is so big it takes you to places that you don’t understand. Super talent doesn’t take you to the Land of Peace; it takes you to Crazyland. And if you ain’t emotionally grounded in something rock-solid, you gonna get annihilated.

  I got annihilated. Now I’m getting healed. And part of the healing is dreaming, remembering, and writing.

  I can write in peace because I don’t have access to my lethal vices. Being a celebrity in jail also means I have protectors who keep the bad cats away from me. They see I’m serious about writing and form a shield around me.

  In prison, I’ve gravitated toward the bookish brothas. I’ve met Muslims who have taken me deep into the Koran. I love and respect Islam. I was raised Catholic but never really studied the Bible till late in life. The Christian brothas in prison have given me a new way to look at the Word. A Jewish man has been talking about Kabbalah, mysticism with wisdom of its own.

  Don’t worry. I ain’t gonna shove no religion down your throat. I’m not using this book to win converts. I’m just using the book to manufacture images from my past. I just wanna look at old pictures, lay ’em out there, and, like a jigsaw puzzle, see if I can make the pieces fit. See if I can make sense of a life of nonsense and understand how I got to be caged up like an animal.

  I am an animal, a fuckin’ wild animal. I lost my human soul. I lost my human mind. But in this animal cage, my intention is to win back my humanity. Animals can’t write.

  I can.

  I will.

  Here goes . . .

  STANDING ON THE TOP

  This ain’t no dream. This shit really happened:

  Nineteen eighty-two
. Ronald fuckin’ Reagan in the White House turning this country more conservative than it’d been since slavery, and me telling my manager, “I gotta get outta here. Gotta get to Europe.”

  “Beautiful,” said my manager, “because Europe has been calling. Europe wants the funk.”

  “Well, let’s funk ’em up,” I said. “Let’s freak ’em out.”

  “What do you think of Germany?” asked my manager.

  “They’re the biggest freaks of all. Let’s fuckin’ freak ’em!”

  Next thing I know I’m at the airport, where, as the cats in my band are boarding the plane, I’m standing there popping quaaludes in many of their mouths. I take two. We’re getting fucked up ’cause we’re scared shitless of flying over the ocean. We drink ourselves into oblivion.

  When we land, an army of funk fans is waiting at the airport. We’re treated like conquering heroes. They’re waving all my albums—Come Get It!, Bustin’ Out, Fire It Up, Street Songs—and breaking out in a spontaneous version of “Super Freak.” Chicks are stuffing joints in my pocket. One fine bitch slips into my limo. Her blond hair is the color of sunlight and her big beautiful breasts are practically busting through a T-shirt that says something in German I don’t understand.

  “What does that mean?” I ask.

  In heavily accented English she answers, “ ‘Fucking is fun.’ ”

  She calls herself Greta and says she’s my biggest fan.

  “Are your songs about things that really happen to you?” she asks.

  “My songs are fantasies.”

  “Can I be a fantasy?” she asks.

  “You already are.”

  The fantasy gets fatter:

  I’m onstage in front of the cameras for Rockpalast, a German MTV-style show that’s broadcast to one hundred fifty million fans across Europe. My opening acts are the Kinks and Van Morrison. I get out and fire up the funk to where the riot squad is lined up in the front of the stage. Doesn’t matter that the audience is German; those motherfuckers know every word to my every song. They’re mouthing along like they grew up in the hood. They’re flashing me the funk sign and won’t stop screaming till I give ’em five encores.