Meeting Rick James

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.