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lively funk music
Rick James' "Mary Jane"
Come here, baby
Mary, I love you
Do it, girl
Mary Jane
I'm in love with Mary Jane
She's my main thing
She makes me feel all right
She makes my heart sing
And when I'm feeling low
She comes as no surprise
Turns me on with her love
Takes me to paradise
[vocalizing]
Do you love me Mary Jane?
Yeah
Whoa-oh-oh
Do ya? Do ya? Do ya?
Now do you think you love me Mary Jane?
Don't you play no games
Ooh
Mary Jane...
-[Ty] Patrick! -[Patrick] Hi. How are you?
[Ty] Good.
-Been a while. -[Ty] I know.
It's been at least 12 years
since I've seen anything that we put away in storage.
But they are all personal artifacts
from my dad's whole life.
low bass music
Oh, wow.
Hey, Daddy.
Most of these things were in Buffalo, New York.
And then a lot of stuff was also in the house
we had in Woodland Hills.
Oh, my God. Look how beautiful this is.
This was hanging in the house in Woodland Hills.
Oh.
[Patrick] Is that Catherine Bach
from, uh, Dukes of Hazzard?
Probably so.
I mean...
Daddy had his share of women, that's for sure.
Oh, my gosh.
This is OJ and his wife.
You know my dad. He speaks his mind.
I don't know if he had some insight,
but he said, "That motherfucker did it."
I haven't been here since my dad passed
because I knew it could be sort of emotional.
This is his whole life.
Oh, my gosh.
Oh, man.
We had some father/daughter
chats right here.
I love this piece.
I miss you, Daddy.
[news anchor] Sad news tonight for Rick James fans.
The funk singer best known
for his hit song "Super Freak" has died.
[news anchor] He was in fragile health
after a stroke and years of drug use.
[news anchor] It was in 1981 that James'
million-seller album Street Songs gave us
the hits "Give It to Me Baby" and "Super Freak."
James earned a Grammy nomination for that album.
After that, though, James' personal life was troubled.
He was arrested several times on drug charges, assault,
and served time in Folsom Prison.
It didn't take his death for me to start playing his music.
It's been in my car.
It's been in my house. I'm--big fan.
[Ty] On behalf of the James family,
we would like to thank all of his fans.
This is his moment of glory,
and he would have loved to...
know that he had this much support,
and we appreciate your prayers.
Thank you.
soft funk music
[Rick] When I hit the stage, I become Rick James.
That character exemplifies everything that it stands for:
freedom, sex, love, power, truth.
I couldn't be the same person off the stage.
If I was that way off the stage, I'd be nuts by now.
Rick James' "Super Freak"
Rick James was the ultimate "be yourself" artist.
upbeat funky music
He was groundbreaking and fearless.
His music speaks for itself.
It gets no more funkier than Rick James.
[Big Daddy Kane] And he was just so raw.
He became one of the guys that a lot of men wanted to be
and women wanted to be with.
[Nile] He had a certain magic
in his style of production.
His musical legacy is undeniable.
[Dr. Boyd] Rick's powerful music really anchored itself
to the evolution of Black history in America.
Rick put it to music, and he put words to it.
[Tanya] From the bottom to the top,
from the top to the bottom, he could relate to everybody
because he had been in every shoe.
Musically, there weren't many that could touch him.
He was a real motherfucker.
She's a super freak, super freak
She's super freaky, yow!
[engine revving]
Everybody sing
Super freak, super freak...
Never mind who you thought I was.
I'm Rick James, bitch.
[cheers and applause]
I used to have these dreams.
I just knew that it was gonna happen, you know,
and I used to see it, and my mother,
consequently, would take me to a psychiatrist,
and the psychiatrist would tell her,
"Hey, he's real normal. He's above normal.
He has a super high intelligence,
but the boy just...
wants to be a star.
And that is that." [both laugh]
[narrator] This is Buffalo, the second-largest city
in New York state.
Strategically located at the eastern end of Lake Erie,
it early was given the title
of the Queen City of the Lakes.
Buffalo is a bustling community,
and serves as the hub of the Niagara frontier.
Its dynamic development results
from an unusual diversity of industry.
classical music playing
[news reporter] What's Buffalo like to you?
What is Buffalo?
It's basically a small town.
It's a good place for music, you know,
'cause we have a lot of music there.
Nice hills and ghetto.
[laughter]
[speaking language]
Rats this big.
mellow music
[Conway] Buffalo, to me, is one of the most
racially-segregated cities in the country.
Now we posted up at the Chinese store
Hopin' somebody would buy us a cigar
Then we evolved
To breakin' in houses and stealin' cars...
It's split up in sections,
you know what I'm saying?
Like, this the east side, that's your ghetto.
You see the school. You see how this shit look?
It's more Black kids and shit, you know what I'm saying?
And Black families trying to figure it out.
The bottom, I call it. You got the west side.
It's more, like, you know, Hispanic--
like, Latinos and shit, you know what I mean?
Your Puerto Ricans and Dominicans and shit like that,
but it's also still more cultural, too,
because you got your Middle Easterns
and, you know, you got some people--you know,
you got people from all over, really, on the west side,
you know what I'm saying? Then you got South Buffalo.
That's, like, your poor whites.
And then North Buffalo, they're--you know,
it's nice houses, it's nice schools.
You know, everybody is doing well-well-off,
so to speak, over there.
Me, personally, I stay on the east,
where I belong, you know what I mean?
lively soul music
[producer] What's the local legend of Rick James?
[Conway] OG Jimbo once had our nigga Rick James
to come through, you know what I mean?
Caught him. Caught him getting right, man.
Pulling up in the limo with furs and shit on, though.
Bitches and shit with him.
Two, three cars deep and shit, making a spot hot.
Like, "Damn, nigga, you gonna--
you gonna make my spot hot."
[laughs]
He was just one of them dudes
that you didn't want to fuck with,
you didn't want to mess with,
who was known for definitely
everything you hear in his music,
you know what I'm saying?
Songs like "Ghetto Life" and all that shit, like,
that's Rick James, man, in a nutshell.
Like, you know what I'm saying?
Coming from we from, we all like that.
lively funk music
[David] He was born in 1948.
So his growing up period in Buffalo
were really the 1950s.
- Here today - Here today
To make you dance the ghetto way
You telling me?
And we're gonna sing a little song...
[Carmen] His first name is James.
His second name is Ambrose
'cause that's his father's name,
so he was James Ambrose Johnson.
And I do remember when he was born.
He was a little light, bright dude, almost white.
[Ty] My dad was one of eight
in a household where his mom struggled.
He watch his dad abuse his mom.
His mother was very protective of him.
I feel like he was the favorite.
She was a hustler, and she did what she had to do
to raise her eight children.
[Rick] My mother was a very strong disciplinarian.
We got a lot of what they call whoopings
with ironing cords-- what they call now child abuse.
So I guess you might say, in a kind of a way,
I was an abused child.
But I had a lot of love in my family.
somber music
My first sexual encounter, I had when I was, like,
eight or nine years old.
And it was kind of a strange thing,
because, you know, most men like to claim, like,
the first time they make love, they know exactly what to do,
and, well, that's a complete fallacy,
a complete lie, you know.
But when I was around 13, there was this older woman,
a friend of my mother's babysat me.
And I remember laying on the bed, and this older woman,
she started touching me and doing these things,
and it felt good to me.
I'm not gonna sit here and lie.
It didn't go very far... [laughs]
because my mother came home early,
and my mother snatched her out of those covers.
It's the first time I've ever seen my mother fight.
My mother just punched her,
and, you know, and, "How could you do this to my son?"
and beat her down the stairs, because in those days,
it wasn't about, you call this bureau,
you call this association for sexually abused children.
If you caught something like that going down
where I grew up, you beat the person down.
That was it.
dramatic R&B music
[Carmen] In Buffalo, the street life was--
it was lively, man.
There were a lot of Black businesses,
but most of your bigger ones were numbers-orientated.
Numbers today, it would be the lotto.
My mother got into that.
My mother wanted to be a dancer and a singer.
It didn't take her too long to see that
working scrubbing floors and washing dishes
was not gonna make it.
And she ran numbers,
and she was making a very good living.
[Stan] His mother, she introduced Rick
to the numbers racket.
Rick's job was to pick up the money.
That's his first involvement in breaking the law.
[Levi] Rick and I went to grammar school together
from the third grade through the eighth grade.
As a child, he was, uh,
rambunctious, like we all were.
Rick hated school. He was bored, like I was.
And Rick wanted to be a musician,
and I thought he was nuts.
Yeah
[playing lively rock and roll]
Yeah
[David] What he really absorbed
in that period were two things:
one was the music
of Ray Charles and Bo Diddley and Little Richard,
but the other thing he discovered in Buffalo--
because there was a club there called the Royal Arms
that he went to--was jazz.
Headed for the station with a pack on my back
[Carmen] He listened to music all the time.
My mother had a huge jazz selection.
We had everything. I remember Louis Jordan.
Take her right back to the track, Jack
[smooth jazz playing]
[David] Rick was definitely a musical prodigy,
and he talked about hearing Miles and Monk
at a very, very early age, in person,
and getting it,
understanding exactly what these guys were doing.
[Rick] I was playing drums when I was, like,
I don't know, nine, ten years old.
My mother would take me to blues and jazz clubs,
and I'd sit in,
but I just was able to keep a beat,
and I kinda knew automatically
what I was supposed to be doing.
He's hearing a lot of funky R&B, gut bucket stuff,
and, you know,
begins to absorb all these sounds
that are coming at him.
I don't know, growing up, I guess I was
sort of a ham, you know.
I was, like, always kind of crazy.
And I always liked entertainment,
and I always liked singing, and...
just kind of joking around, you know.
My teacher either said I was going to be...
a hoodlum or a great entertainer.
ethereal music
[Carmen] If you lived in Buffalo, and you were
from the projects, there were gangs galore,
so you were not gonna walk around
and be without confrontation.
And he had his share. Rick was not a choir boy.
[Jason] There was a lot of skirmishes with the law
related to theft, burglary, drug use, and so on,
'cause he was introduced to drugs pretty early.
[narrator] The city of Buffalo grew up as a port
and became a great industrial center.
But in recent times, Buffalo has been changing.
Businesses gone, jobs gone,
people gone.
[JoJo] In the '60s in Buffalo,
people were just tired of the segregation.
It was basically schools,
bussing, jobs,
and the lack thereof.
[Carmen] Buffalo is probably one of the most
racist cities in the world.
I used to love that little sign
as you're coming in,
where it says the "All-American City."
I used to laugh at that.
It is the All-American city, all right--
racist right down to the bone, you know?
At that time, it was the whole Black power thing.
[playing percussive music]
We were all into wearing daishikis and stuff back then.
[Rick] I had just left high school
because I wanted to play with this African culture group.
And I played conga drums.
[Levi] Everybody that I knew back then
wanted to get the hell out of town, out of Buffalo,
but when we got of age, there was a war.
And not trying to be funny, but that got
a lot of guys out of the neighborhood.
[President Johnson] Situation in Vietnam is difficult,
but there is an old American saying
that when the going gets tough,
the tough get going.
[Levi] You had to go to Fort Here and Fort There,
and so that's how we learned about the rest of the world.
He had tried to go in the Navy, and that didn't work.
[Rick] I was getting ready to get drafted.
So they said, "You know, if you join the reserves,
you won't have to go to Vietnam,"
but they didn't tell me if I didn't go to meetings,
I'd go to active duty,
So I stopped going to the meetings,
and of course, they sent me on active duty.
sustained guitar note
[Levi] We got in there, man.
It was too rigid, too disciplined.
Ain't no place to be if you're a free spirit.
Tell you what time to get up, what to put on,
when to take a shower, when to do everything.
You know, quote, "That makes you a man."
No, it don't. Makes you a goddamn robot.
[speaker] I don't think no Black man should really be,
we'll just say, drafted into the service.
Actually, I think it really should be
a voluntary basis for a Black man.
Every Black man, send him off to Vietnam, he go out there,
fight, get shot up, yet still, he come back to the States,
and he can't buy a house, and so what's the point?
[Rick] You know, here I come from the street,
playing African music and being real Afro-centric,
all of a sudden into this white society
of a uniform and white authority,
and it was a terrible change.
I mean, I wasn't ready for it.
My mind was saying, "Something is wrong here."
That's when I decided to go to Canada.
upbeat rock music
[David] Rick went AWOL and wound up in Canada
and gravitated to Toronto,
where there was a burgeoning folk rock and roll scene.
[narrator] This is Yorkville Village,
a phenomena in Toronto in the mid-'60s--
a colorful, quaint, cacophonous community
with a split personality.
When the sun goes down, Yorkville becomes
the no man's land of the teenagers.
[rock music playing]
[David] It's interesting how this whole Canadian entry
begins with Rick because he's in Toronto,
he's walking down the street, somebody calls him the N-word,
looks like they're gonna jump him, there's a scuffle.
Yow! Trap door
[Rick] Well, what happened was,
some white boys started fighting with me.
Now here I am, thinking that white people
are cool in Canada, and I get in this fight.
And some guys came to my defense
and beat these guys up 'cause I was a little guy;
I was a little skinny kid.
But the guys who beat these guys up
were in a band called The Hawks.
Later, it turned out they called themselves
The Band--Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm--
and they played behind Bob Dylan.
And they kind of rescued me.
And they kind of took me under their wing.
You know, the Toronto scene, where he ends up,
pretty much like what was happening in Greenwich Village,
in New York, at that time.
The music scene was extremely active.
Yorkville Avenue had door-to-door clubs
and patios and bars,
and every one of them had a band.
Rick found his people, you know,
found kind of a tribe in the mid-'60s.
[Rick] When I went to Canada, I was really at a point
in my life where I didn't like white people
because I was seeing what they were doing.
But it seemed like the Canadian white people
that I met were friendly,
and they didn't have this hatred
and this animosity towards Black people.
The Canadian musicians on Yorkville were very inventive,
and Rick fit in very well with them.
He's meeting and hanging out with Joni Mitchell,
and he's hanging out with Neil Young.
So he's in this stew pot
of all this mid-'60s music and flow,
and he's 17, 18,
living in that and figuring that out.
[David] Whatever this new music was, he could do it.
It didn't really matter that he was a brother from Buffalo.
He could adapt.
He went by many different names.
He was always changing his name
because he didn't want to get caught.
[Rick] I was sitting around a restaurant,
and this friend of mine was saying, he's saying,
"You're running away from the service,
you gotta have another name."
And this girl, who was a singer in Canada--
her name was Shirley Matthews--
she says, "Well," she says,
"I got a cousin named Rickie Matthews.
Why don't you call yourself Rickie Matthews?"
So, I said Rickie, and I put my name--
middle name James Matthews.
So it was Rickie James Matthews.
And that's when I had the band with Neil Young.
-[singer] Hey, man? -[Rickie] Yeah?
[singer] What's that little black thing in the corner
-with the yellow beak? -[Rickie] That's a mynah bird!
[Rick] I joined this group, and we called ourselves
The Sailor Boys, and then later on,
we stopped wearing my sailor suits
and just wore whatever we wanted to wear,
and we called ourselves the Mynah Birds.
So this group is Rickie Mathews,
Neil Young on guitar, and Bruce Palmer on bass.
Those two guys end up in Buffalo Springfield.
lively rock music
But, you know, we're getting ahead of the story.
There's John Taylor
and Rickman Mason on drums.
[Rickman] We played rock, R&B.
We didn't get into any folky stuff.
That's all we did. That was our job.
We lived in probably 10 or 15 different places.
We got our own apartment, and the next thing you know,
there was 15 people living in the apartment.
[Rick] We had a very big following around Toronto.
It was us playing around the village,
and we were all just starving musicians
who just loved music.
[Rickman] Rick--very talented musician.
He knew what he wanted to do, and that got done that way.
Actually, we basically followed his lead through tunes.
[Rick] Me and Neil wrote a lot of stuff.
Neil was very fluent on acoustic,
and he taught me a lot of chords and different stuff.
Some people say it's hard to imagine
Neil Young and Rick James together,
but really, when you think about it, it's not
'cause I was singing in those days,
and I really wasn't playing guitar or anything.
I was kind of playing a little harmonica.
Neil was into very melodic chords,
real pretty kind of chords, you know,
and I would write kind of R&B lyrics over these chords.
So really, it was a very interesting combination.
We had this manager, and he thought,
you know, we were great, and, you know, he used to come
to our shows all the time.
And he ended up going to Motown
and telling Motown about us, and they flew us down.
[Harry] The Mynah Birds do an audition at Motown,
They get signed, and they go and they cut four songs.
So, this is a copy of the actual multitrack session.
Motown had master tape-- master reels.
Here it is. "It's My Time." Take 21, people.
[upbeat rock music playing]
I mean, I can't play, but, you know.
I really love you, darling
A love that's so strong and so fine...
[Rickman] Being signed to Motown, it was fabulous,
especially white people too.
They just accepted us like whammo,
and we were in there and recording,
And it was a whirlwind, actually,
'cause all's I remember is 24/7 being in the studio.
Actually, Rick disappeared out of the studio somewhere
and passed out on the steps,
and they found him an hour later.
Love you anyway
[Harry] Cue Neil Young.
[Rickman] We had the Supremes come in and back us up,
and Stevie Wonder would jump in
and play a little keyboard.
It was a great time.
It's my time
It feels like it's my time
I'm gonna love you anyway
[song ends]
I mean, you know, I feel like a kid
playing my favorite singles when I hear that,
and, you know--
but Rick is trying to sound like Mick Jagger.
I can't get no
Satisfaction
He used Mick Jagger's actions too.
I think he really liked the way Mick moved.
He was interested in being a rock star,
and it's not surprising.
I mean, a lot of Black artists of the 1960s were inspired
by the rock movement as much as or more than R&B music.
[singer vocalizing]
soft rock music
In love
If a pain in...
[Harry] When you hear the Mynah Birds,
there's a moment where your brain
can't quite accept that it's Rick James.
You tell people, "You know that's Rick James,"
and they go, "Oh, right. Right."
Kind of lean in and listen to go, "Oh,"
'cause there's a quality to his voice that's unique.
And it didn't last
Like you thought it would
[Harry] I think there's a somewhat
of a vulnerability there that I hadn't heard before.
Hadn't heard since.
He's 18 and trying to figure something out.
sentimental piano chords
Rick is thinking, "Okay, we're on Motown.
We're gonna be popular.
We've got a built-in promotional machine.
We're going."
But the Mynah Birds,
they had fired their manager.
[Rickman] Our manager, Morley Shelman, got upset,
and somehow Morley knew Rick was a draft dodger
and squealed on him.
Rickie gets snatched back by the Navy,
has to go in the brig 'cause he's been AWOL.
We had no idea that he was a draft dodger.
None at all.
We had no Rick, so we had to find another singer.
We had a couple of jobs to play.
There was really not much to talk about, I guess.
It just was bam. Over.
mellow music
[Rick] Well, after I got out of the brig,
I went back home for a while,
and I had to decide what I wanted to do with my life.
I mean, you gotta understand, it was like three years,
four years of my life now have passed by.
You know, so I had to get used to my family all over again,
and, you know, and just--you know,
I had to get used to me again, you know,
find out what I wanted to do.
And the outcome was the same-- music, music, music.
I wanted to make music.
[Stan] The Mynah Birds don't have the kind of success
that Rick James was hoping for.
But he ends up doing more work for Motown
as a session songwriter
and arranger, among other things.
[narrator] From Michigan's Motor Town, a new export
was added to cars-- the Detroit sound.
My world is empty without you, babe
It's not a one-man organization or a two-man organization,
but it is an organization of teamwork.
[David] Rick would go to Motown.
He would write.
There would be Holland-Dozier-Holland
and Norman Whitfield and Bobby Taylor,
and a whole bunch of people hanging around,
and was part of the machine.
[Rick] It was very hard for me to get into the studio
because, I mean, there was so much
competition of great people.
So I just really spent a couple years
just learning my craft.
[David] Rick doesn't do well with authority,
and Motown was a highly authoritarian climate.
He didn't have any hits,
and he was an impatient young man.
And when it didn't happen in a hurry,
he got out of dodge.
[Rick] I just felt I was going nowhere.
What I wanted to do was rock and roll,
and what I wanted to do, Motown was not doing,
and I wanted to take what they were doing
a step farther, and I couldn't do it there.
So me and a bass player named Gregory,
we headed out to California,
and a whole nother thing happened.
[David] It's in California
where Rick James becomes Rick James.
With some stumbles along the way.
They audition for bass for Crosby, Stills, and Nash,
and Reeves got the gig. Rick didn't.
He had designs of continuing what he had begun in Canada,
which was to be part of this kind of
burgeoning folk rock culture.
He watched these people who he had first met in Canada
begin to really get over big,
and whether as a bass player, whether as a vocalist,
he wanted in.
And it didn't happen.
[Rick] You know, they got these houses,
and, you know, all these gold albums and stuff,
and Buffalo Springfield are doing well,
and here I am, feeling like shit.
You know, I'm saying, like, you know,
"Why don't I have any of this?
You know, what's wrong with me?"
[Harry] He gets in this band called Salt 'N' Pepper.
Interracial band, right? Salt 'N' Pepper.
They get their big break.
They open for Jethro Tull
at the Fillmore West,
and then they break up. Doesn't happen.
When I met Rick,
he was in and out of several bands.
He was in a band, and then it would be short-lived,
for one reason or another.
And then my job was to get him out of all those contracts.
Take him down a country road...
[Harry] Then there's a band out of Toronto
called Heaven and Earth.
And this is a band where they're incorporating horns.
Heaven and Earth was like a blues band.
Rick wrote some amazing love songs.
That band mutates into White Cane.
twangy folk music
He worked that band hard, and that was a leap up.
The music was hard-driving. It was just spectacular music.
We heard about this group called White Cane
at the Whiskey.
Gotta see it.
We were gonna see, you know, this guy.
And he played the guitar and wore a hat
almost just like this.
Rick was very electric, you know.
We all whispered, like, "Wow," you know,
"He's gonna do something."
[Stan] Rick, in the middle of the tour,
gets into arguments with the band
about Rick stopping the music and addressing the audience,
getting them to clap or say things in unison.
And the tour fell apart. Rick left the band.
I've never seen anybody with so much drive and ambition
to make it, and frustration because he wasn't making it.
funky bass music
[Rick] I met my first true love
when I came out to California.
Her name was Syville.
We met at, like, this crazy Halloween party.
Drugs, sex everywhere. It was decadent.
It was like Dionysius or something going on.
[producer] Your daughter just informed me
that the party you were at was actually an orgy.
[laughs] It was a party and an orgy.
You know, but it was civilized, you know.
It wasn't just crazy.
I saw Rick sitting in the seat right by the kitchen area.
He was, you know,
a very nice-looking man, very intelligent.
There was a lot about him, you know, that I liked.
Eventually, he came over to where I was sitting.
He said, "Syville, do you wanna go with me?"
And I said, "Well, yeah."
[Rick] I ended up going over to her place,
and a few years later, I was still there.
We had two children: my daughter Ty,
and a son named Rickie.
He was absent. He was pursuing his career.
He was chasing his dreams.
I'm sure him and my mom
had their reasons for whatever took place.
That's how life was, and you have to go with that.
When he got to LA, he got right smack dab
in the middle of hippie culture,
and he met Jay Sebring,
who was a well-known hairdresser,
who knew Sharon Tate.
And he was invited to a party, and that turned out
to be the party of the Manson murders.
[news anchor] An employee came to work
and found several bodies in the house.
The tentative identification of the persons are as follows:
Sharon Polanski, Jay Sebring.
[Syville] We was supposed to go to a party,
and I wanted to go.
And he said he was tired,
and, you know, he didn't want to go.
He said, "We'll do something else another day."
[reporter] Do you believe that
there should be a death penalty?
[Charles] A death penalty? Aren't we all born to die?
[Rick] After Jay died, I was really distraught.
[interviewer] What were you doing during the '70s?
Tripping around. Going nuts. Writing music.
Getting turned down by record companies.
I think hustle is just part of the American DNA.
And Rick was definitely a hustler.
And I mean that in a good way because he did survive.
When the California hippie thing didn't work out,
he'd go home, he'd deal drugs,
he'd have big shipments coming in from God knows where.
He did all kinds of crazy shit.
[Rick] I went to Canada for a brief moment,
and I met a friend up there, and, uh...[laughs]
we went to Colombia, South America.
I really don't even know if I should get into it, you know?
Anyway, went to South America, and we did this deal,
and we made a bunch of money.
I took that money, and I went to Buffalo.
When you really get confused, you go home to your mother.
I says, "Mom, I'm tired. I've been away from home,
like, eight or nine years. Nothing's happening."
So I start getting into being at home with her,
and listening to the music going around,
and it was in the ghetto,
so I listened to a lot of Black music.
And I was hearing the Parliament-Funkadelics
and Bootsy and all that kind of stuff.
And I start saying, "Well, this is kind of
like my concept--rock and funk. But not the way I would do it."
I wanted to be nasty, and I wanted to be raw,
and I if I hit a bad chord or a bad note in my record,
and it made sense, I'd keep it.
Or if I hit a bad note, vocally,
and if it had the magic, I'd keep it.
[singer trilling]
[singer vocalizing]
upbeat funk music
You and I
We fit together like a glove on hand
That's right
Don't you know
That I would gladly take you anywhere
You wanted to go...
I had written these songs when I was staying
with my mother at home in Buffalo.
I got some neighborhood musicians, and we recorded.
Wouldn't you agree?
And if by chance...
I took the tape, and I came out
to Los Angeles to make a deal.
The end of me
I had no visions of being with Motown
when I came out with this music.
Matter of fact, Motown was the last company in the world
that I wanted to be with.
I was riding in the elevator, and I ran into Jeffrey Bowen,
and he was producing stuff at Motown,
and he said, "What are you doing here?"
I said, "Well, I got an album I just finished.
I'm trying to shop a deal."
He said, "Well, let me hear it."
You know, rest was history. I ended up signing with them.
My first album was called Come Get It!
I always come
It's so much fun, yeah...
He'd been toiling throughout the 1970s
as a kind of musical journeyman.
It finally clicked in 1978 with Come Get It!
[Kerry] My father thought that
Rick was a great producer.
And he was just like, "Man, he's got a sound
that we don't have here."
Motown as a label was trying to make the transition
from being a conveyor belt kind of a label,
where they produced and wrote everything for their artists,
and trying to catch up with the times.
By '77, people were operating as artists.
They were writing their own music.
They were expressing themselves from the heart,
as opposed to having songwriters do it for them.
[Jason] Rick James basically helps Motown by providing it
with a new economic model of self-sufficiency.
And that becomes the Motown model in the 1970s,
and it's one that actually helps save Motown in an era
of dwindling financial returns for the company.
"You and I" combines a lot of different sounds.
I mean, it builds to an intro, and then there's another intro.
There's--these female vocals come in.
There's, like, these steps.
[lively funk music playing]
Rick loved guitar riffs.
Step three.
Step two.
[singers vocalizing]
Another one. That's another one.
There's three intros.
You know, he's adlibbing, feeling free.
He's not trying to fit in the formula.
He's giving you some odd sounds right off the bat.
[producer] It's like disco and funk eloped.
This three-part harmony
Wouldn't you agree?
[Norwood] "You and I" was one of my favorite songs.
It was my jam.
I liked the lyrics, the melody,
the bassline, the beat.
I still remember just jumping up and down,
dancing and singing that-- the hook to that song.
[Kerry] Rick understood the demographic
and the psychographic of the audience
that he was focusing on.
When he says,
Some people must say
I'm infatuated with you
I don't care, 'cause they really don't know
They never hear or see the things I do
So far as I'm concerned, they all can go to hell
[holding note]
Whoa-oh, whoa-oh, oh-oh-oh
When he says that,
we're like, "What? He said 'go to hell?'"
And it worked.
Sing it, sugar
[Kerry] It also gave him a vibe
that no other Motown artist had.
[Rick] To me, my attitude about it,
it was long incoming.
I was a superstar in my head already.
I mean, although I wasn't financially,
my ego at the time was like,
"Yeah, it's about time for this."
Think about a kid, maybe, like, 13 or 14 years old,
and we only hit when we're 30 years old.
It took a whole lot of years for him to get there.
It was not what you call an overnight
sensation shit with us.
We had been looking for a break,
and finally got one in life, and we took advantage of it.
[Kerry] That Come and Get It album had "You and I" on it,
and it had "Mary Jane" on it.
Now, let's welcome an extremely gifted young man
who, in less than a year's time, has a platinum album
and two gold singles to his credit
on Motown, of course,
and as he joins us to do one of those smash singles,
how about it, gang, for Rick James
and the Stone City Band.
I'm in love with Mary Jane
She's my main thing
She makes me feel all right
She makes my heart sing
[Ice Cube] I remember hearing Rick James.
First song I ever heard, I believe, was "Mary Jane."
My friend Ronnie and his brother Robert--
we called him Ace--
I knew when Ace had to watch us,
we was gonna see some titty magazines,
we was gonna learn some dirty words,
we was gonna see him roll a joint,
and we was gonna hear him play some Rick James.
I'm in love with Mary Jane
I'm not the only one
And Mary wanna play around
I let her have her fun...
[Ice Cube] When I was young, I thought it was a song
talking about a pretty girl that he loved.
Ace taught me, "No.
He talking about weed."
And I'm like, "I be damned.
This man is a genius."
Oh, do ya? Do ya? Do ya?
Now do you think you love me Mary Jane?
Don't you play no games...
[Dr. Boyd] People were trying to go beyond the boundaries.
They were trying to go against convention.
It kind of linked up perfectly with the music he was making.
I mean, this wasn't Nat King Cole singing ballads.
This was a guy making a song about smoking weed,
which, back in the late '70s, was radical.
[Steven] No one had ever really heard that before.
And at the time--you know, it's almost laughable now--
this was just a very controversial record.
[Kerry] You have this album from a new artist
who has a totally new and different persona.
There was a guy by the name of Skip Miller.
He said, "You know what,
this is one of the first times that I can say
I think we have a Benji record here."
I said, "What's a Benji record?"
He said, "You know, remember the dog Benji?"
He said, "This record is so good
that Benji could have took the record
into the radio station and got it played."
The main influence I hear in Rick's music is George Clinton.
[crowd singing indistinctly]
Say it like you mean it
Parliament-Funkadelic had a focus on creating
these really tight, funky grooves.
I also hear Sly and the Family Stone
as a clear influence in Rick's work.
I want to thank you
For lettin' me be myself again
Funk was a bad word until we made it famous.
Funk is, like, just the way you feeling.
I mean, whatever you feeling is funk.
We came out of the A-hole in between the P-hole.
So if you come from that, then you funky anyway.
Funk is the modern interpretation
of our ancestors screaming through us,
from Africa, through the pain of slavery, through Jim Crow.
It's Black excellence, and it's nigga shit.
The worst made beautiful.
The lowest given the opportunity to express.
Shit, Rick James is
an amazing expression of all of that.
Tonight, Rock Concert presents
the Pied Piper of funk fun--
oh, "punk funk," I'm sorry.
[crewmember] 204. Take two.
Tonight, Rock Concert presents
the Pied Piper of punk funk, Rick James.
We're bustin' out of this L-Seven square
Freaks like you and I
Could never funk from there
[Big Daddy Kane] I remember listening to Rick James'
music when I was a kid.
Bustin' Out was probably one of my favorites.
Heavy bassline-driven grooves,
and Rick was just wilding on the songs.
Just spitting it raw.
Put your hands in the air
And sing along with me
Bustin' out!
[Big Daddy Kane] Rick James' style of funk
wasn't like the GAP Band,
Con Funk Shun, Ohio Players.
His style was just hard.
[Jason] He was creating a really rhythmic, aggressive,
hard-driving Black dance music.
Rick James' grooves were groovier than most.
The way that they hit on the one,
meaning on the first beat of every measure,
meant that they caused a kind of energetic response.
Every time you come to that first melody--uh.
[playing funky rhythm]
Uh.
The Rick James sound
was basically like a funk grenade.
[Levi] He named it punk funk.
Rick wanted to me a rocker,
and then he came from Buffalo,
and, you know, we have a different kind of style,
you know, our genre is funk,
but it's a different kind of funk.
You're doing jazz.
You're doing hard rock with guitars.
You're doing big band music, with the horns.
The punk part was punk from, like, Europe.
He was equating the poor kids over in England
with the poor kids here in the neighborhoods in Buffalo.
Punk funk was the attitude.
"We're gonna do what the hell we want to do."
It gave me a vehicle to write about anything
I wanted to write about.
You know, I smoke marijuana, I can write about it.
If I don't like Richard Nixon, I can call him an asshole.
To be able to finally have Blacks write about whatever,
and be able to wear whatever--
because for so long, Blacks have been stigmatized
into this choreographed--
Doo wop, doo wah
I love you
Ooh, do, do, do, do You know, eh.
And I remember asking Rick, "Man, what are you gonna do
if this thing is a success? What are you going to--
what are you gonna do with your money, for instance?"
"Oh, Steve, ain't nothing gonna change, man.
I'm just gonna buy some more clothes or something."
But things did change, and they changed rapidly.
The hustling energy is an energy.
And that energy-- once you get through
with your non-musical hustle, whatever it is,
that energy is still there in the music.
You can feel that intensity in his music.
It's aspirational.
He aspires to get over. It's America.
[Rick] I had a double platinum album on my hands,
and then I needed a group, so I went home,
and I put together my favorite musicians in that town,
who became my family for years--the Stone City Band.
[news reporter] Do you want to present everybody to us?
Sure.
'Cause you know them better than I do.
[Rick] This light-skinned fellow.
This is Tom McDermott, guitar player.
-[reporter, indistinct] -[Rick] That's Hughes.
-Drummer. -How you doing?
[Rick] This is Joanne McDuffie.
We call her JoJo for short.
One of the girl singers.
-This is Levi Ruffin. -How you doing?
[Rick] We're the Stone City Band.
This is Lisa Sarna, one of the girl singers.
That's Oscar Alston, Alexander Monday.
[laughter]
That's our bass player.
Rick came up and asked me, "Man, who's jamming now?"
and I said, "As far as, like, the groove's concerned,
it's still George Clinton and Bootsy."
And he told me, man, I quote,
"Man, we can do better than that."
I said, "Shit. Sign me up."
[Lanise] We did our first rehearsals at Rick house.
He had some songs that he wanted to do.
So we went to the studio. We recorded the demos.
Rick took them back to Motown.
Berry Gordy told Rick--he said,
"Whoever those musicians are, that's your band."
[Oscar] Rick could write.
He wasn't a great pianist or bass,
but he knew what he liked
and what would work and fit together.
So when he had all of us around,
that's like having all of the notes on the piano,
all of the notes on the bass.
[Levi] Chemistry was like new, because none of us
really had played together in the studio.
I knew what we was supposed to sound like.
I just didn't know how to make it.
Rick showed us how to make it.
He wanted us to see everything he was doing.
I guess he was figuring, you know,
"One day I might not be here. Maybe I can't do it.
Y'all can still carry on with the shit."
[announcer] All-points bulletin:
be on the lookout for Rick James.
Rick James and the Stone City Band.
They're bustin' out.
funky R&B music
[Oscar] I was staying with my mom.
Rick said, "We're all gonna have to get braids."
"Braids? Are you kidding. My mama's gonna kill me."
He said, "If you want to be a part of this band,
you have to get your braids."
[Rick] I had, like, this short Afro,
you know, and I didn't want that.
You know, I didn't wanna look like everybody else.
And the Beatles had made such a tremendous effect on me
with the Beatle haircut.
So I ran into this African woman on an airplane,
she was from the Masai, and I saw her hair.
I said, "God, that's fantastic.
How do you do that?" and she showed me these books
of Africans with their short hair,
and then she showed me some pictures after they finished
doing what they did, their magic.
I said, "Can you do this for me?"
And she said, "Yeah." I said, "There it is. Bam.
That's the vision. That's what I want."
Bustin' out!
We're bustin' out
[Levi] I had beads and everything in mine.
Everybody thought we was fucking crazy.
Next thing you know, all the brothers,
they started wearing this shit.
He wanted everybody to put glitter on,
you know, their hair, and it'd be in your suitcase
for, like, six months after the tour, you know.
Rick would pour all that stuff in your hair, man.
It was like, man, you know, I be ready to fight.
[Lanise] He wanted us to look like
we were ready to take care of business,
and that's what we did, every night.
I mean, for me, I couldn't fuck with it.
[laughs]
Rick James had a style that
kind of reminded you of David Bowie, Kiss.
It was Black, it was rock, but it was kinda avant-garde,
in terms of Black culture, for sure.
Look at you
Mary Jane
[David] Rick sees George Clinton's showmanship,
and he realizes that,
just as George became the purple-haired crazy man,
he's gonna have to come up with his show identity.
Where's the ganja tonight?
[David] Weed became a signature part of his act.
You know, the giant joint on stage.
[Val] They would tell us at sound check,
"You cannot smoke."
Rick said, "We're smoking anyway."
So on stage, he would light it up,
and he would tell the audience,
"If the police bother me,
you all tear this mother sucker up."
funky R&B music
[Steven] P-Funk, Parliament, Bootsy, all these people,
they were kinda looking at Rick sideways,
because he had learned how to craft pop with funk,
and so he hit the big time faster than they did.
[Bootsy] Rick was the smartest one out of all of us.
He sold a lot of records. People came to the concerts.
And, you know, he used to talk about,
"Yeah, I'm selling more records than y'all."
I think George took offense a little bit.
But all was fair in funk and war, man.
[cheers and applause]
[Tommy] The first tour was amazing.
We'd be going out six, seven months.
We hit every place in America, it seemed like.
LA Coliseum, July 1979.
Greatest Funk Festival.
[cheers and applause]
[Lanise] There was over 100,000 people in there.
In the audience.
And they was chanting our name,
screaming and hollering.
And that made me feel real good,
and I was saying, "We did it."
[Gail] He was a showman.
From the time he walked on stage
to the time he walked off,
he was in it to give everything that he felt about the music
and throw that out to the audience.
Sing!
I'm in the beach house
[Lisa] Life on the road with Rick James
and the Stone City Band
was tumultuous, high energy, never-ending.
One of the most fun nights of my life
was jamming with him
at Giants Stadium here in New York.
I guess we were of the mindset that we were so free,
we could just really do anything we want.
I don't even know what we played,
but I remember going out there with Rick and just jamming,
and just doing whatever the hell we wanted,
and the crowd went bananas.
I mean, it was incredible.
[Tommy] It was just, like, pedal to the metal.
We just bump and groove,
and there was pyrotechnics, you know, and theatrics.
We had dancers.
The pyrotechnics was really a lot, you know.
Sometimes it would go off,
and you'd be, like, shell-shocked.
Bam! [imitates ringing]
Your ears would be ringing.
The band, the girls, Rick, the crew--we were family.
[Val] We toured all over the country.
Throwing money up in the air in pillowcases.
You ate at the best restaurants.
Christmas time, bonuses.
"Let's go. Let's take a Learjet.
Let's take a helicopter. Let's go to New York."
Just anything he wanted to do.
Most of us are from Buffalo, and we moved to LA.
We were living in Randolph Hearst's mansion.
I mean, we were, like, living big time.
I brought all these guys out, my homeboys from the ghetto.
[Lanise] Coming from Buffalo, New York to LA
was an extreme culture shock to me.
That was beautiful, man,
up in the canyons-- Coldwater Canyon.
I walked in there and said, "I--damn."
I said, "This is living."
I mean, the house was so big, you rarely ran into each other.
[laughs]
You had to get on the intercom to find somebody.
[Levi] There was some stupid shit going on out there.
There was plenty of dope around.
Freaky women, all kinds of different narcotics.
I think I snorted everything on God's planet earth
when I was in the band.
Drugs. Rock and roll. Women.
It was all part of the same package.
That was Rick.
I mean, he did that before he even got famous.
He partied.
Plus he liked to be around people.
[Rick] And those days was wild and crazy.
I mean, we were fucking all standing
on the verge of insanity in those days.
Everybody was snorting cocaine,
and everybody was taking quaaludes,
drinking Cristal and Dom Pérignon champagne,
and getting butt naked and doing it in the bathrooms.
It was wonderful.
Girls love girls,
and I don't know what guys were doing.
Personally, I was loving women very, very hard them days.
I got a lot of inspiration from women in those days.
[Oscar] There was a girl, we had the video camera,
and her and I were engaged sexually,
and Rick was behind the camera, you know, taping us.
So at one point,
Rick just, you know, took off his belt--
had the belt--and the girl was on top of me,
and he started hitting the girl on her behind with the strap.
And I'm thinking, "Oh, these are just love taps.
You know, no big thing."
Until one time, the belt slipped off of her behind
and hit me on the leg, and it hurt it.
And I, you know, hollered out, but I saw on her body
these red marks from the belt hitting her behind.
If you gave him that space, if you allowed him to do--
he would take that opportunity and do it.
[Steven] He did everything to women
to see what they could withstand,
see what would make them say, "Oh no. I'm not gonna do that."
The more they agreed to,
the more upset he became with them.
He treated women the way that rock and rollers treated women.
[Tanya] His sexual exploits were more,
"You do that to that person. Let me watch.
I want to orchestrate some shit over here."
He wasn't personally involved.
He was not that kind of "super freak."
He didn't let people touch him.
He wasn't, like, in the orgy.
He would watch the orgy.
It was not a personal thing for him.
If he was gonna be sexual,
it was with somebody he trusted,
and he trusted no one.
[siren wailing]
[Levi] He had broads, man, chasing our limos
down the street and shit, man, throwing panties on stage
and all kinds of stupid shit.
And that shit was funny to me, but it was fun.
That's what you dreamed of when you were growing up.
[Gail] I would say that part of his persona
was the bad boy, living on the dangerous side,
running around with the different women,
the drugs, the whole bigger-than-life picture
that he painted.
[Jason] On stage and in his lyrics and in his music,
he was portraying this sexual bravado and machismo.
Off stage, we now know
that what was underwriting that machismo
and that bravado was very disturbing,
very dark, and abusive.
upbeat R&B music
[Harry] Rick essentially has a run of nine albums
in six, seven years-- Come Get it!
Bustin' Out of L Seven, Fire It Up.
Bam, bam, bam, bam. He's got all these hits.
[Levi] I used to sit there and watch him write.
Incredible speed. He would just--my God.
Next thing you know, you got a hit record right there.
[Steven] He was making records and making music
and making money, but he was leveling off.
people were still into Rick,
but we were waiting on something else.
And then came Street Songs.
First, there was rock. Then there was hard rock.
Then there was punk rock.
And now, thanks to-- mainly to our next performer,
there's punk funk.
Here he is, the Pied Piper of Funk, Mr. Rick James.
[cheers and applause]
upbeat funk music
[Rick] Street Songs spoke of things
that happened in the ghetto.
It talks about very real subjects
and very real things.
You know, Black people made me.
Black people bought tickets
and sold out concerts and stadiums.
So it was a conscious attempt on my part
to get back to the roots of what I'm all about.
When I came home last night
You wouldn't make love to me...
[Lanise] Rick James had to come back
to Buffalo, New York, to feel the vibe of everybody,
what was going on at that particular time.
Out all night just dancing...
This is the album that everybody's talking about
and everybody is buying.
And triple platinum.
Your sales are just setting
new records in the recording industry.
[host] What are you gonna do with all that money, Rick?
Going to invest it in making more money.
-Are you? -[laughter]
[Jason] Street Songs in 1981
takes him to a whole other level.
Street Songs is a concept album
that is very much rooted around his childhood experience
growing up in Buffalo,
and his focus on the issues that informed him
and informed Black communities at the time.
When I was a young boy
Growing up in the ghetto
Hanging out on corners
Singing with the fellas...
[Dr. Boyd] "Ghetto Life" could be a hip hop song.
The scene he's describing is sort of, you know,
Black America at a particular point,
from a class perspective, talking about pimp game,
the dope game, police brutality.
"Mr. Policeman" came out years before "Fuck tha Police."
Hey, Mr. Policeman
I've seen you in my neighborhood
You look to me you'll do no good
[Ice Cube] And it's basically saying the same thing.
I remember, like,
listening to it over and over and over again.
[Jason] It's probably his best album.
It all really came together on Street Songs,
and you understood him to be a concept R&B artist,
not just a kind of hired hand.
[funky music playing]
[Harry] So this is bare bones.
Rhythm section and some guitar riffs.
Master of the hand claps.
Give it to me, baby
[Harry] It's great to be able to break it apart
and enjoy the pieces.
You know, we love it when it's all together.
Like, we were just grooving
when you get the bass and drums together.
Ho!
[Rick] All right, I hear your fingers wearing out.
I hear 'em wearing out.
I hear the motherfuckers wearing out.
[laughs]
"Super Freak"
I hate "Super Freak."
[playing "Super Freak" bassline]
[Kerry] Well, it's really funny.
That was the last song
that he recorded on the album,
and he didn't have anything that he felt was pop,
and he just started humming this thing.
[hums "Super Freak" bassline]
[Lanise] Every time it would come on
in an arena that we was at,
the people acted a fool.
They went crazy over it.
'Cause we was playing that song early in the night.
It was so big, we had to make that
the last tune of the night.
She's a very kinky girl
The kind you don't take home to mother
And she will never let your spirit down
Once you get her off the street
She likes the boys in the band
[Rick] "Super Freak" was just--it was a parody.
It was just a fucking joke.
You know, girls trying to seduce you.
You know, I was with girls who thought--
whatever-- candle lights and incense
and ménage à trois and 714 quaaludes.
It was right on time.
I mean, "Super Freak" was everywhere, you know?
Rick just called it out.
That girl is pretty kinky
The girl's a super freak
[Bootsy] And I think it was good
because they felt good about coming out.
Rick knew what he was doing.
I hate the fact that it became so popular.
There were a lot of people who had no idea
what Rick was about, who heard that song,
and embraced it
separate from the rest of his body of work.
I went to college in the early '80s,
and "Super Freak" was the kind of song
you'd hear at a white frat party.
[host] Straight from Rick James
and Dance Party USA's Halloween Special!
Awoo!
[Dr. Boyd] And all the rest of the music they gonna play
is gonna be rock and roll.
They're gonna play one Black song,
it's gonna be "Super Freak,"
and they're gonna freak out over it.
[producer] So it sounds like you've been
to a few white frat parties.
You know, I made the rounds, you know what I'm saying?
That record spoke to a different mentality.
It spoke to the New Wave generation.
It spoke to a different tempo.
You got the Oberheim synth playing this little riff
where he's like,
"This is where I'm gonna get white folks on board."
[bass line, synth notes from New Wave song]
Devo's "Whip It"
So, it's this little thing in the mix
that became the catalyst, that made it cross over,
that just kinda caught white folks' ears, you know.
[producer] The dog whistle for whites.
-[laughter] -Oh, shit.
She likes the boys in the band
She says that I'm her all-time favorite
When I make my move to her room
It's the right time
She's never hard to please...
[Nancy] I directed all Rick's videos.
He was the first visual artist for Motown.
New wave magazine
That girl is pretty kinky
That girl's a super freak...
[Mark] It was June 1981.
It was, like, right after "Super Freak" came out.
Us Magazine sent me to Buffalo, New York,
to his house, and I did photos in all the different rooms.
Rick was really proud of his things.
You know, he had these two tusks
that were going into his pool.
I mean, it was a little off the top, you know,
but I think everything that he ever wanted,
he wanted to put in his home in Buffalo.
He was living the rock star life.
[Rick] Do I love sex? Yes. Abundantly.
Do I love women? Yes. Totally.
Do I love the fact that I have lots of money
and I'm rich and famous and--
yes. That's real great.
[Mark] I started shooting Rick at concerts.
He was the Black Elvis. Just larger than life.
James Brown on steroids. This just says it all.
His boys around him, and he's getting ready to go on stage.
It's a cross between David Lee Roth,
Bret Michaels, and Vince Neil,
before they were even around. [chuckles]
He was on top of the world. He really was.
Girl's a super freak
[Nancy] He wanted the fame.
He knew how to get it,
but he didn't know how to turn it off.
That girl's all right
With me
[plays single note] Yeah
[Nancy] He was getting high, you know, and goofing up.
He talked about, "I could have gone
with another video company,
or, you know--where they supply a whole cocaine budget.
They put into the budget the cocaine.
How come you don't do that?"
[Jason] There was a kind of visceral danger about him.
You see this in the lyrics, right,
where he's talking about perversity and kink
and the kind of seedier sides of the erotic.
You see this in his own kind of self-presentation,
the way he dresses and the way he interacts with the camera.
He sometimes seemed really coked up
in front of the camera.
This wasn't just a performance.
This was actually who he was in some ways.
[Gail] If Rick James came along now
and was doing what he was doing,
it would not pass the test in terms of misogyny,
women as sex objects.
He would probably stand out
like a sore thumb and be ostracized.
The nominees for favorite soul album are:
Gap Band III, The Gap Band...
[cheers and applause]
...Hotter than July, Stevie Wonder...
[cheers and applause]
...Street Songs, Rick James...
[cheers and applause]
...and The Dude, Quincy Jones.
[cheers and applause]
And the winner?
And the winner is... [giggles]
...Street Songs, Rick James.
[upbeat music plays]
[Stan] Street Songs really just facilitated
this extraordinary explosion
of what he could do in all its forms.
He's winning awards. He's appearing at the Grammys.
He's expanding his empire.
Mom, I love you, and I told you
that there's such a thing called rock and roll.
Well, now there's a thing called funk and roll.
Thank you, people.
Rick James was not just a great songwriter
and producer for his own music,
but also for other artists.
[Steven] Once Rick showed Motown
that he could deliver hits,
they were interested in him
producing "Mary Had a Little Lamb."
They didn't care. Anybody.
And they had a girl
who had been a staff writer there for the longest.
[indistinct chatter]
[laughs]
[Steven] Teena Marie.
They didn't know what to do with her.
They had made tracks on her.
They had done all kinds of styles with her.
Which song now?
Anybody ever wrote for me.
I always wrote songs for everybody else.
Nobody ever wrote me one.
[Jason] One of Rick James' greatest contributions
as a songwriter and producer and arranger
was working with Teena Marie.
He produced her debut album "Wild and Peaceful."
[Carmen] I was in California.
And we're riding down to Motown,
and he puts this tape in. He said, "Listen to this."
So, I'm listening to it,
and I think it was--that it's a Black girl,
automatically, because it had that sound.
[Teena Marie] Young and I'm old
I'm rich and I'm poor
It feel like I've been on this earth
Many times before
[Carmen] So we get to Motown.
These two girls are walking towards us,
Black and a white one,
and he said, "Here's Teena now.
You can meet her," and as we get closer,
I say to the Black girl,
"Hey, I heard your music. You're bad."
And Rick says, "No, not her. Her."
And I look at the little white girl,
and I'm just like, "Her?"
[interviewer] How did that happen when you first met Rick?
He was walking down the hallway.
-[interviewer] 17th floor? -Yeah.
[interviewer] That sounds strange.
Just walking down the hall in the record company.
Walking down the hallway.
[interviewer] You hadn't known him before this?
No, I never knew him before that.
[indistinct]
[Rick] I starting working with Teena by sheer accident.
I was happened to be walking around the halls of Motown,
and I happened to hear this girl
singing through a room, and I happened to go in,
and here's this little white girl playing piano.
And I stopped and I listened. And I thought she was great.
So I had this song "Sucker for Love,"
and I put it on Teena.
Baby, you too
Are a mellow fellow
And you're as rare as vintage wine
[Steven] I remember the first time
they did a session together.
They were at Marvin Gaye's studio.
Everybody and they mama was in this place,
all sitting in the control room,
just watching this.
Rick was behind the board.
And he knew exactly what he wanted.
And he gave her a huge record.
[David] He knew she was an R&B vocalist.
He obviously knew she was white.
And he didn't really care.
He was open-minded. He saw she could really blow.
He allowed her to grow.
He tutored her. He mentored her.
And she became a star in her own right.
smooth funky music
She developed primarily a Black fan base,
because she was authentically Black.
She just had the soul.
I used to tell her all the time,
"Your skin is light, but you're a Black woman."
[Levi] She was a sister. She wasn't faking shit.
And that's the first thing, you know, one would think.
"Man, bitch can't be all that shit, man.
You faking this bull." No, no, she's straight sister.
[Steven] Their relationship was initially
one of big brother and little sister.
But it turned into a boy-girl relationship sort of a thing.
[Levi] She said, "Me and Rick getting married."
I said, "When? When the fuck you hear this?"
"Levi, I'm in love,
and he's in love. We getting married."
I said, "Teena, he ain't marrying you."
And it never happened.
That was just Rick high somewhere talking that shit.
[Teena vocalizing]
[cheers and applause]
Abuse them
[band plays soul music]
Oh, that's what I used to do
Use and abuse them
Oh
Then I laid eyes on you
[Ice Cube] "Fire and Desire" is one of the most
perfectly produced songs ever made.
Pain for pleasure
[Ice Cube] It walks you through
a relationship that once was
but can't be no more.
It was burning too hot. Too much passion.
When you don't think Rick can hang with Teena Marie,
he does.
You were cold as ice
[Teena] Whoo
Don't you know, sugar, sugar
[Steven] It was just some sho'nuff soul.
It became a big signature record for he and Teena.
[Nile] When I first heard him doing the duet with Teena,
I mean, it was, like, off the chart.
He brought out something special
in the people that were around him.
He had a certain magic in his style of production
that, you know, all the great producers have--
the Gamble and Huffs
and the Princes and the Quincys.
All night long
Long
Oh, something's got me so excited
Baby
A feeling I've been holding back so long
[Rick] Ever since I had established myself,
I had a concept for some girl singers.
'Cause I knew I can write for girls.
You know, it's easy for me to write for them, you know.
I've been such an asshole to them that, you know,
I can kind of reverse and know how they feel, you know?
[JoJo] He said, "I'm gonna start a female group."
He said, "I want you to learn these songs,
'cause these are gonna be some of the songs
that I'm gonna use for the group."
I really didn't know what direction
he wanted to go in until he said,
"What kind of music do you like?
What would you like this particular project to be?"
I said, "Something that they're gonna play 30 years later."
Boy, you can just best believe
I'm the only girl in your life
[upbeat soul music playing]
I'll be your sugar in the morning
And the sweet stuff you need at night
[Stan] Rick takes the Mary Jane Girls
and really pours his female side into this group.
We've got this demo of "In My House"
with Rick singing the dummy lyrics.
[Rick] But you can just hide your key
[continues singing indistinctly]
[Stan] Could have easily been a Rick James song.
But he found a way to make it,
"No, I think it's got the girls."
Maybe there's a falsetto in his head that he's hearing.
When you need a little peace of mind
Come on over, boy, anytime
I'll keep you happy and so satisfied
In my house
[Stan] Rick is taking his vibe and orchestrating this sound.
[singing indistinctly]
Come home to every night
The girl that makes all your dreams
And fantasies come true
[David] Rick saw himself
as a businessman as well as an artist.
And he wanted to develop different acts
and own different acts. He was entrepreneurial.
[Jason] The role of a producer
is to be able to go into a recording studio,
bring musicians together, record them,
generate an amazing energy in that performance,
and then transfer that on to record.
Rick James was amazing at doing that.
But he was also really savvy about creating hits.
When you're on the top
There's no place you can really go
But down, down, down
[Steven] Motown said, "Hey,
who else you wanna produce here?"
So he produced The Temptations,
"Standing on the Top." He got them a hit.
He worked with Smokey Robinson. Then he branched out.
[John] Eddie Murphy has been in Buffalo
for almost a week.
Most of that time has been spent
inside Rick James' recording studio.
The pair plan to produce Murphy's first singing single.
My girl wants to party all the time
Party all the time
Yeah
[Ty] Daddy was showing him the ropes like a big brother.
And Eddie was like a kid at that time
and really looked up to my dad.
They had a lot of love and respect for each other.
Mick Jagger--I had a great big influence on Mick.
When I first met Mick, his lip was small.
And after meeting me, he came out with this new look.
[laughter]
[Levi] Being in a rock and roll band
is not a lot of free time.
Rock and roll is hard, going at it hard.
Especially funk. You gotta hit it hard.
Hit it like you're fighting it. That's what he did.
soft jazz music
[Ty] I think my dad being absent from my life
was just--there was a void. There was an emptiness.
To my knowledge, I met him for the first time
when I was 13 years old.
[producer] But there were years when he gave you
absolutely no money, right?
Correct. He didn't even know where I was.
[Ty] When you have a father that has millions of dollars,
like, you think that you should be riding
in the Benzes and the Rollses, and you have all the new bags
and the Girbaud jeans that everybody is wearing,
and the Jordache.
You know, and that wasn't the case.
My brother, Little Rickie,
he's two years younger than me.
And so he would go around, like,
bragging about who his dad was.
And, you know, me being the older sister, I'm like,
"Stop telling people that. Don't tell nobody else that."
So... [laughs]
...one little boy he told, I guess his dad happened
to work for my father, as security,
and his dad wind up telling my father,
and my dad was probably like,
"Well, where are they at? Because it probably is."
A private investigator knocked on our door,
and within days we were flown to Buffalo, New York
to meet our dad for the first time.
When we landed,
he told us that he went up to some other kids,
and it wasn't us, so it was, like,
this whole big ordeal about, you know,
him not really knowing who his children were.
I just welcomed him with open arms,
and it was--it was instant love.
He's living this rock-and-roll lifestyle.
I could see him trying to tone it down a tiny bit.
He still has to be RJ.
And Rick would treat his little boy
like he was a grown man. And I got mad at Rick.
I said, "Rick, man, you just met him again.
Why are you hollering at him?" "Because he's doing dumb shit."
"Yeah. That's his job, to do dumb shit.
Your job is to make sure he doesn't do it anymore.
You took them out of the projects, man,
to come out to this huge mansion.
They're, like, in awe, and you gonna holler at him
because he did some stupid shit a kid would do?
Come on, man. Let it go."
[Ty] At times, when he would try to be a father,
it would be more so, like, "I'm gonna go out.
I'm gonna hang out. I'm gonna go party.
But when I get back, you better still--stay in your room.
Like, don't come out the rest of the night."
Like, I'm, like, "Oh my God." Like, I would almost be scared
to see what was taking place outside the doors.
Walking over naked girls
at 7:00 a.m. in the morning was normal to me.
I'm like, "Oh, excuse me."
[laughs]
[Jason] Rick James fashioned himself
into a kind of unique creation.
So there was no one else like Rick James
at all that existed in the scene.
However, there was someone who would eventually
become quite close to Rick James,
in terms of his image, and that was Prince.
upbeat music
[Rick] My manager brought some tapes over and said,
"Well, there's this kid who's got this record.
'I Want to Be Your Lover.'" And I loved that record.
And I saw some videos of him.
And, you know, he was cool, you know.
I mean, I felt he resembled us a lot.
I ain't got no money
I ain't like those other guys you hang around
[Jason] In the late 1970s, the music industry
had its hopes pinned on Prince.
Prince, who was trying to find his legs
as a musician and as an artist,
ended up on tour with Rick James.
He actually opened for Rick James.
Oh, my God.
Rick had a love-hate relationship with Prince.
He loved him because he loved what Prince was about.
He loved the swagger. He loved the music.
He hated him because Prince gave him heat.
Rick definitely had an attitude with Prince.
They just was competing with one another.
[Levi] Rick got mad when Prince would watch us on stage
and do the same goddamn shit.
Rick would go, "Ooh, ooh."
And his audience would go crazy every time he would do that.
Prince would start doing the "Ooh, ooh"...
[laughs]
...before Rick would come out.
And Rick was like, "Man, you can't do that
'Ooh, ooh' stuff. That's what I do."
And Prince was like, "Dude.
You don't have a monopoly on 'Ooh, ooh.'
I can do what the fuck I want to do."
[Rick] I got really pissed off.
And I went and told his managers.
I said, "Look, how can I go up and do what I gotta do
if this dude's gonna be taking my shit?"
It all straightened itself out.
But I mean, you know, Prince
was giving me hell on the road.
I remember being on shows with Rick and Prince,
and, you know, they would pull plugs on each other,
you know, and get ready to go to blows.
I used to always say to Rick, you know,
"We all are just doing our own kind of thing.
Like, you know, Prince is Prince, you're you.
We all have our own identity
when it comes to the world of funk."
[Levi] Prince was, like, what, 21, 22?
We can't do what a 21- or 22-year-old dude
can do anymore. We tried.
But we had a lot of, you know,
shots and B12 shots and shit we'd have to take.
I think, whenever the master sees an acolyte
who might be younger and hotter,
the master gets a little nervous.
[announcer] MTV. Music Television.
Video music, 24 hours a day. And it's stereo.
[Steven] Other than Prince,
Rick's biggest battle was with MTV.
[narrator] The American recording industry essentially
divides rock and roll music into two basic categories:
white rock and Black rhythm and blues.
We are looking for a certain sound
and a certain point of view.
We are not all things to all people.
[Jason] MTV, as an institution, thought of itself
as a platform
that would play music videos that would primarily appeal
to its desired demographic,
which is young white men who are into rock music.
And that meant that Black artists
had very little opportunity to present themselves on MTV.
In fact, they just didn't play most Black music videos.
[reporter] Consumers of both Black and pop music
bought 3 million copies of Rick James' album
"Super Freak," but MTV would not air it.
MTV doesn't play Rick James.
They don't play Michael Jackson.
They don't play the Commodores.
They don't play Earth, Wind & Fire.
They don't play Stevie Wonder. Why is that?
[Steven] When Rick tried to get on,
he didn't have that muscle
that Warner Brothers or Columbia Records provided.
And I just remember him getting on the phone
and just screaming at me and saying,
"Why did you not stand your ground
and make them put
"Super Freak" on there?
So what Rick chose to do was to take his war public.
We're being sat in the back of the bus, television-style.
This isn't The Wizard of Oz.
I mean, there are Black people here.
And we make music.
And we spent thousands-- a hundred thousand
dollars on videos. I mean, don't we exist?
In the case of Rick James,
the determination was made that it was an R&B song
and was not a rock and roll song.
[Rick] I was very vocal,
because I'm very vocal about injustice.
I've never been one to bite my tongue, and I never will.
If I see something funky that's going on,
I'm gonna speak on it.
[reporter] In the past few months,
MTV has increased
the number of Black videos it programs
to include Michael Jackson and Prince.
Michael, because of this whole thing that Rick did,
was able to be the person that MTV say,
"No, we do play Black music
because we start playing Michael Jackson."
Being Black, you see this all the time with white people.
They'll pick someone that is still kind of edgy,
but not too edgy.
You look at Michael
standing next to Rick, at that point in time,
they're gonna gravitate to Michael.
MTV should give the opportunity,
whether they're playing Rick James or not,
I think they should play--
there's a lot of great Black videos out there,
and I think they should be seen.
In one way, I'm sad I spoke out.
In another way, I'm happy that I spoke out.
Because it didn't help me.
I mean, it didn't get me any videos played.
I had met with one of the MTV executives,
and we got drunk together in New York at a club.
And he had told me--he said, "Rick, you know,
they just got a hard-on for you, man."
And that's one of the things that really hurt me.
[Nancy] He's not trusting Motown.
And I probably perpetuated that as well.
"You're not helping us out at Motown."
No one liked him after that, you know?
It was too much.
[Kerry] Rick pretty much knew that he was responsible
for his demise at Motown.
After the "Throwin' Down" record,
he had come off of tour.
On the Super Freak tour, we made 40 million bucks.
On the Throwin' Down tour, he only made 13 million bucks
because the record didn't do as well as Street Songs.
When he was delivering his record to Motown,
I was with him,
and we went into Jay Lasker's office.
Now, Jay Lasker was the president of Motown.
The way that it was is that he would turn in a tape
and he would get a check for a million dollars.
He says, "Here's your tapes."
And then Jay was like--with a cigar--
"Okay, yeah.
Well, give him his million dollars," right?
So as he gets his million dollars,
he grabs the million dollars and said, "You know what,
I don't give a fuck about a million dollars."
He said, "Sell my goddamn record!"
And Jay was like, "Dude."
He said, "No! You sell my motherfucking record!
Because the fact of the matter is
I made $40 million on tour with 'Street Songs,'
and I only made $13 million.
I don't give a fuck about this million dollars!
Sell my motherfucking record
so I can make some motherfucking money!"
And then Rick pulls out cocaine,
puts it on the desk, chops it up,
snorts it in front of Jay Lasker.
And Jay Lasker's sitting back there.
I'm sitting next to Rick.
And I'm like, "Oh, shit," right?
And then Rick snorts it,
jumps on Jay Lasker's desk,
puts his dick in front of Jay Lasker's face,
and says, "Sell my goddamn record!"
He takes the check
and he walks out of Jay Lasker's office.
And then Jay Lasker says to me,
"Lionel Richie."
Hello
Is it me you're looking for?
[Kerry] And that was it.
He was done with Rick.
And his focus went on Lionel Richie.
And that's the reason that Lionel Richie
got all of this incredible, amazing push.
[David] I think he suffered
from all the usual ailments
that assault show business people.
Too much adulation is not healthy.
Gets you high. He suffered from entitlement.
"I've worked so hard.
I might as well get whatever I want--
whatever woman, whatever drug."
Show business, if you're not emotionally well-grounded,
will chew you up and spit you out.
You could almost think
that Rick had multiple personalities
because you could talk to any number of people
they would say, "Oh, he's very generous."
But now, if there was another situation,
"Rick, how about putting our names--not my name,
our names--on this record?"
He wouldn't say no.
But it never happened.
We didn't get shit from Rick.
The idea was, "I'm gonna get you guys."
You know, very charismatically saying,
"I'm gonna pay you guys off, man.
You've been beautiful. You've been wonderful,"
and all this shit. Man, where's the money?
Fuck the fame. I want the fortune, bro.
The guys in other bands that I knew
were buying houses in Miami and shit,
and in Panama.
These motherfuckers with us, man--
just enough rent fucking money.
mellow music
[Jason] I think it had become clear
that Rick James' behavior
was erratic, was excessive.
Drugs were a source of the reason why
his career stalled in the 1980s.
Drugs incapacitated him.
[Levi] I did a whole bunch of shit,
but I had one thing that Rick didn't have.
I knew it came to a time,
"I can't be doing this shit no more."
The worst thing God ever did
was put cocaine in a form where you could smoke it.
You don't quit.
When they was smoking that shit,
they did it all day and all night.
[JoJo] I started to see him as a person
who had an addiction.
When someone has an addiction, they're not rationale.
They're not thinking rationally.
[Oscar] Rick was the only one
that really allowed that drug
to take over and change who you really are.
And over time, as, primarily,
band members saw that, they began to peel off.
It kind of fell apart gradually, you know.
Things started to kind of unravel.
I was the first person to leave.
It just wasn't feeling right for me.
I left before all that-- the shit
started getting really out of pocket,
'cause it got to a point where Rick was Rick now.
There's no more James Johnson, Jr.
That dude gone.
Got to the point to where
Rick's primary circle
wasn't the band anymore.
Everybody want to be around. They know you get high.
They want to bring it to you.
They don't want the best for you.
And a lot of times, Rick used to tell me
he felt he was a tool.
Everyone wanted to come to him to get this and get that.
[Rick] I wish that there was somebody
who would go up on stage and be Rick James.
I wish that there was somebody
who could have lived my lifestyle,
when I was living all through my pain.
[chuckles] I would have loved to have that.
It would have taken a lot of pressure off me.
One day, I had him crying. I was mad at him, man.
I was so mad-- "That white bitch got you"--
that's what we called cocaine-- "That white bitch
got you fucked up, man."
And he would say, "Like, man, I just can't stop."
I said, "Goddamn it, you're weak.
You're a weak motherfucker, man.
You can't keep doing this shit. It's gonna kill you."
[Rick] I was in a lawsuit with Motown Records
for about five or six years
where I couldn't make an album.
And that whole period of time,
my drug addiction really just escalated.
I was spending six, seven-- seven, eight thousand dollars
a week on drugs--cocaine. This went on for years.
'Cause I pretty much just stopped touring.
And I was basically just isolating myself.
I never experienced him smoking cocaine.
Like, I never saw him high.
So I think he wanted me to believe
that that wasn't taking place.
But, I mean, of course, I knew.
[Jason] The moment that really marks a change in the way
that we think about Rick James is 1990.
MC Hammer's "U Can't Touch This"
Can't touch this
[Rick] I've only met MC Hammer
one time in my life,
and he was a nice guy. I mean, he was okay.
But at the time, a lot of rap was going on
that was really kind of off-beat,
very derogative towards women.
Listen up, baby, you look real pretty
Let me pull off your shirt and suck yo titties
[Rick] And I really got pissed off,
because I certainly didn't need the money.
And I told my accountants and lawyers, "No more rappers
are allowed to use any of my stuff. Nothing."
[Dr. Boyd] Rick was not a big fan of hip hop,
and a lot of older Black artists at the time
were not fans of hip hop when it emerged.
Matter of fact, they were hating.
But I think, if you look at the history of music,
whenever there's a new form, old heads often don't like it.
Louis Armstrong didn't like what Charlie Parker
and Dizzy Gillespie was doing.
[Rick] I was driving in LA, and I heard the DJ
say something about Rick James.
And then he said, this is number five
in the country pop record or something.
And he played it on-- Nah, nah, nah, nah
Nah-nah, nah-nah
And I said, "Oh, great." You know, "I'm back."
And then the record stopped and the guy says,
"Can't Touch This." What?
And then he really pissed me off.
-He says this line... - My-my-my-my
Music hits me so hard
[Rick] And I really got enflamed.
"His music"? And I remember calling up
my accountants and lawyers and said,
"I really thought I told you guys
not to let any more rappers use my stuff."
I was yelling--[grumbling]
Then they said, you know, "You're gonna be making
so many million dollars." I said, "Okay, never mind."
Rick James is very, very, very happy.
And because of my using
his music,
it has made him enough money
to buy a new Rolls-Royce and a new house.
I told you, homeboy, you can't touch this
[Dr. Boyd] Hip hop gave a second life
to a lot of Black artists.
MC Hammer is the most popular example.
It's corny as hell. But it was huge.
Hammer beat everybody to the punch.
To this day, if you put it on,
it'll get it cracking up in here.
The irony is that he probably made more money
from "U Can't Touch This"
than, you know, he made on the original version
of "Super Freak."
[Rick] I decided I wanted to do another record.
So I signed with Warner Brothers.
I did an album called "Wonderful."
It had a number one R&B single, "Loosey's Rap."
I know a chick, her name is Loosey
She's a freaky thang
I was on the label on Warner Brothers.
I'm Shanté, and the rhyme today
Just rap so fresh till I get out of breath
They were like, "Okay, well look, you need
to go and stay with Rick for a little while,
and you guys are gonna and work on a single together."
And I'm straight out the group home.
I already have a baby.
I'm spending so much time on tour,
I didn't even have a home address.
So I'll go to Rick James' house and stay.
A lady was also staying there, and I take it
that she was Rick's wife,
girlfriend, live-in girlfriend, or whatever.
And it's so sad, because I was thinking
about this recently--like, I never knew her name,
and I was there for almost three months.
'Cause her called her "bitch."
"Bitch, get something from the store."
"Bitch, go get them something to eat."
"Bitch, such such such."
And, you know, she just, "Okay.
Okay, Rick. Okay."
You know, and I knew I didn't want to be that bitch.
[Ty] Daddy had numerous girls.
There was always somebody flying in and out.
You know, we'd go to the local pizza shop,
and girls would be coming back.
I remember Tanya
coming to the house for the first time.
She was 17. She was the same age as me.
He comes in the house.
They're pratting in from the airport.
I pulled him to the side. "How old is she?"
"She's 21!"
I'm like, "Hmm. Okay."
[Tanya] When I met him, I didn't feel like he was
so much older than me.
He definitely did not have the spirit of a 39-year-old.
He didn't look like a 39-year-old.
You know Black don't crack.
So he was 30, maybe.
And I was a precious 17, so.
If I would have been hip to who he was,
we would not have connected.
[Levi] Rick fell in love with a young girl.
They just had a lot of sex and shit--
people, whatnot, parties with everybody naked.
She was too young for me to be around.
I mean, she was like a baby to me.
They both met under the influence.
They proceeded to get together under that same thing.
So I didn't think much of it.
[Tanya] I came damaged,
and Rick saw that damage in me because he was damaged.
The reason we connected so well was because, in a safe space,
we could be vulnerable together,
and both of our damage connected,
because he had such a fucking, like, image
that he couldn't even escape.
Like, he couldn't escape that image.
He could escape it with me.
[Rick] I bought this house.
It was at the top of Mulholland.
Gorgeous home. And really, all it was for me
was just a place to get high.
I'd go out, and come home with 20, 30 people,
19 of them I never met before, and they'd stay for days.
And my life was pretty dark at that time.
The house had really turned into a crack haven.
A person who sniffs coke and does things on a certain,
more expensive level,
won't have certain people around them.
But a person who will smoke crack is liable
to have anybody around them
because it becomes an anybody drug.
[sighs]
It was a time that I was
trying to intercede a binge.
And my dad was on, like, maybe--it was three
or four days that we hadn't saw his face.
I called Val, and I was like, "I'm going in the room."
I got there to the house.
We got a butter knife
out of the kitchen drawer, and went in there.
We went looking around,
with women hiding in the closet or in the shower.
I was like, "You gotta go.
It's time to go. It's check-out time."
Right? So he's still asleep.
And he woke up and just--
it was--it was pretty bad.
He started throwing things.
Then he threw at book at me.
I picked the book up and threw it right back at him.
He was ducking.
He threw, like, a candlestick or something,
and it cut my foot open.
I had to have stitches.
I wound up in the hospital.
I didn't talk to my dad for eight months.
That was the demon. That was the devil.
That was drug-possessed James Johnson.
Pop singer Rick James is being accused of
all kinds of terrible things,
and authorities are taking it very seriously.
[reporter] James is accused of assault with a deadly weapon,
aggravated mayhem, torture, and forceable oral copulation.
Arrested for assault with great bodily injury
was Tanya Hijazi,
21 years of age, and Rick James.
[Robert] The day that Rick got arrested,
I was called on that case.
Rick was accused of torturing a girl with a crackpipe.
Hi, all these cameras.
[JoJo] I was shocked.
That broke my heart when I saw the report on that.
He looked like he was scared.
Well, you know, I just hope that phrase--
innocent till proven guilty-- is true.
I've kind of found, since I've been in here,
it's like guilty till proven innocent.
I've always been guilty of things till proven innocent.
[Ty] He was accused of sexual assault,
and the girl was pretty much partying
with them the whole time.
And I guess, you know, when it was over,
she had a couple of burns.
Like, Tanya had some burns too.
This is something that was condoned.
[Joseph] Frances Alley told us about having been a visitor
at Rick James' home.
Everything got out of control when he suspected her
of stealing some kind of--some cocaine.
He tied her up to a chair while she was nude,
and she said that he burned her with a crack cocaine pipe,
and brought out a big butcher knife from the kitchen,
after his girlfriend warmed it up,
and put it against her leg.
[reporter] Why would someone make these stories up?
-Well, we-- -We'll take care of that.
We--Mr. James is gonna fight
this thing in court, and we can't wait
for the truth to come out. The truth will come out.
[Rick] You don't force anyone to do crack.
You don't force them. People that I know,
that smoke crack, they'll go out
and sell their babies for a hit of crack.
And she said I forced her to have sex.
I never forced her to have sex.
I never forced a woman in my life to have sex.
If anything, I gotta force them not to have sex.
[Tanya] What sprang out of that adversity
was our connection.
"The witch hunt that is happening
right now is serious,
and we need to stick together,
and I need to protect this man,
and he needs to protect me,
because this is some foul shit."
[Carmen] I hated to see him catch that case,
because he didn't need that. But was he capable of that?
Any addict is capable of anything.
You can do some subhuman stuff, and that's just the way it is.
[Nile] That didn't seem like the person I knew at all.
We did our fair share of partying, that's for sure.
But nothing, I mean, nothing of that sort.
[Betty] I just worry about it.
That's the only thing I can tell you.
And I think I'll never give up praying about it--
that he will stop,
or if he not doing, don't do it anymore.
[Carmen] When my mother was dying,
and me and my brother Roy
was calling him to come, he was in California,
and we was calling him-- we was threatening him
we'd come and get him,
because she was that tied to him.
And he was out there getting high.
And we called him and told him,
"Hey, we gotta come and get your ass.
We're gonna come and get you, man."
And then he came on back, and he was fucked up
when he came. Excuse my French.
[Rick] When I went to Buffalo to see her,
she was already dying. She was just hanging on.
She was in a coma for like three or four days.
She really didn't want to leave, you know.
She didn't want to let go till, like,
she saw all her kids, you know.
And I was, like, the loneliest,
empty person in the world.
[Tanya] That was the beginning of the downfall.
And the depression was a constant
within, you know, that.
[Robert] Even though they had all these headlines
about Rick was facing life imprisonment,
they agreed to drop all the serious felony charges,
and Rick was able to get a year in drug rehab as his sentence.
While we were still wrapping up our case,
Rick picked up another case, Mary Sauger.
[Mary] He basically slammed me against the wall,
started strangling me, and...
the fists, the--everything.
It just went on repeatedly for hours and hours.
And then at one point, I was knocked unconscious.
[Rick] I went to a hotel room to get away for a while.
And Tanya joined me there. This girl came over.
And two days went by,
and we were all pretty drunk, pretty high.
Her and Tanya got into a fight.
She smacked Tanya. Tanya smacked her.
And she kicked Tanya.
Well, when the girl tried to kick Tanya,
that ticked me off. I went into the girl.
Yeah, I laid hands on this girl.
[Robert] The codefendant, Tanya,
has pled guilty today,
and she's serving four years in state prison
when she surrenders, and that's gonna be in a month.
And he's facing two torture charges
and one charge of aggravated mayhem.
Those three counts alone are life sentences.
[Tanya] There was so much shit that hit the fan,
all immediately, all at one time.
And there was no time to think.
You just acted on judgment.
And my judgment was to go all-in with this man
because I knew that he didn't deserve what was going on.
[Rick] You know, I was in, like, a dream.
I couldn't believe it. You know, I was getting high
every night before the trial,
falling asleep at court. I'm snoring.
Because I was just in a daze that this was happening.
[Carmen] When I was watching him,
when he was in court,
and he was nodding and carrying on,
that said a lot, basically.
[Steven] That was just too much
for anyone to deal with.
And then times were changing too.
It was like, "Rick, ain't nobody doing this shit no more.
Everybody grows up at some point.
I mean, you still doing this stuff?"
[Kerry] I think it was totally taken out of context.
But it was what it was.
What matters is that he's in court.
He's got to fight it, and if he loses,
he could be in jail for the rest of his life.
We, the jury, in the above entitled action,
find the defendant Rick James
guilty of the crime of sale...
[Rick] They ended up giving five years, four months.
That's when I went to Folsom Prison.
This was a serious, strange transition.
As much as I thought it was a curse and a terrible thing,
it turned out to be a beautiful blessing.
I'm thankful to God to let me have prison as an alternative,
as opposed to the grave,
'cause I was headed to the grave.
[Tanya] He chose to be Muslim
when he was in prison.
It didn't last long.
But a lot of that was understand himself.
He felt, too, like the Rick James persona--like,
he's not Rick James. He's James Ambrose Johnson.
[Rick] When Tanya was in prison,
we used to write letters to each other a lot.
We needed to stop doing drugs for our son.
[Tanya] Even though we were up against all this bullshit,
we were bringing life into the world,
and it was a very special time for us.
Literally, like,
the rose that grew through the concrete,
'cause we were facing some really heavy shit,
but we were giving birth to a magnificent spirit.
[Ty] Tazman grounded him a lot.
He got a second chance at being a father.
Funk musician Rick James is a free man
after spending three years in prison.
The first thing James did when he was released
was to hug his four-year-old son.
He says his prison time was well-spent, though.
He got off drugs and wrote 400 songs.
[Rick] There was so much pain inside of me.
And there was so many things that I wanted to say.
It's like when I started, you know?
I had that hunger again.
Plus I was going broke, and I needed to--
[laughter]
I had a hard time, you know,
'cause a lot of record companies
didn't want to take a chance on me.
So I just said, "Fuck it. I'm gonna make my own album."
I just wanted to go back to the roots of what I was about.
Once he got out of prison, he called me, and he said,
"I want to get the original Stone City Band
back together. Come on over."
And I'm just like, "Wait a minute.
I have a job, you know." He said, "No, no, no.
You've got to get down here right now."
And he just did that.
So when he says that, you do that.
Everything was business as usual.
He was normal. He wasn't high.
I thought it was a great album. We went on tour.
[band plays "Give It To Me Baby"]
Give it to me baby, give it to me baby
[Kerry] As soon as he got out of jail,
my job was to make sure he didn't get high.
I put him on a few shows, and he would go on there,
and people would say, "Oh, my gosh. Rick is clean.
He's smart. He's intelligent. And he was clear."
But during this time period,
my phone stopped ringing as a manager,
because people didn't want to see a clean Rick James.
They wanted to see a Super Freak.
-Hey, man. -[both laugh]
Hey. What's up?
[record scratches]
Nice girls dude
This man lost a serious guitar of minute.
That's not the issue with you.
Okay? And that is the issue that I'm dealing with.
That's not what you bringing up.
You bringing up a character reference.
-Well, are you not gay? -Hold on. Hold on.
That's got nothing to do with nothing.
You don't ask me my personal business.
But, at the same time,
he turned back into that lifestyle.
[Tanya] Rick was always the champion of the underdogs
but never of himself.
He would stay sober
for very short, sporadic times,
but it was until he could not bear
the depression anymore.
He would stay sober for a month to three months, at the most.
I've never seen Rick sober for more than three months.
Rick went to over 30 rehabs.
Rick was constantly trying to get clean.
He wanted to be his potential.
His addiction was the bane of his existence.
He was a tortured soul.
Most of our marriage was spent at Cedars-Sinai Hospital,
dealing with his health problems.
My husband asked me
to come out here and talk to you guys.
He suffered a stroke.
[Ty] He had a pacemaker installed.
His doctor told him, "You gotta stop doing drugs."
And he just lived the way he wanted to live,
till the wheels fell off.
[Tanya] His dopamine, his adrenaline was gone,
and the only way it would be brought back up again
was with cocaine.
Cocaine had stolen
all of his pleasure centers in his brain.
Cocaine is a hell of a drug.
[laughter]
[Jason] In the early 2000s,
Rick James is not really thought of a lot.
In 2004, on the Dave Chappelle show,
there's a skit about Rick James.
Ladies and gentlemen, make some noise--
"Charlie Murphy's True Hollywood Stories."
I was a huge Rick James fan.
That's the first person that I would say,
out of all the celebrities that I met,
that I was-I was starstruck.
Come on, babe. Just show me your titties.
I'm Rick James. Do something.
Mm. Mm.
I wish I had more hands,
so I could give those titties four thumbs down.
What Dave Chappelle did with the Rick James character--
you know, it really showed you, like,
what Rick James' personality was.
Rick James didn't give a fuck.
And Dave Chappelle embodied that.
-[Dave as Rick] Charlie! -What's up, man?
There's a new joke going around.
Have you heard it? [laughing]
What did the five fingers say to the face?
[laughing]
-What? -Slap!
[audience laughter, applause]
I'm Rick James, bitch.
[Donnell] In that moment,
being in the studio, I was like,
"This is a sketch that people are gonna be talking about
and remembering for the rest of their lives."
That sketch was so powerful,
it had grade school kids getting suspended.
They was going to school, lunchroom, cafeteria,
any chance they had-- "I'm Rick James, bitch."
I must be losing my mind.
Reminiscing about Charlie Murphy jump kicking my ass.
Ain't that a B.
"I'm Rick James, bitch" wasn't funny to me,
'cause all it made him was a caricature,
as far as I was concerned. They made him out of a toy,
as opposed to a real live man, human being.
A lot of that was true.
Rick would actually do that--come in and talk shit.
That was Rick, all the way.
In the beginning, his attitude was,
"Oh, well that's kind of cute.
It doesn't matter. It's TV. It's comedy."
But then it got to be a whole thing.
He might have imagined that he was being mocked.
And yet, at the same time, he was so interested
in maintaining his own forward momentum,
that he took advantage of that mockery
and turned it into something that would work for him.
Never mind who you thought I was.
I'm Rick James, bitch.
[cheers and applause]
[Jason] He uses the very catchphrase
that could have been used against him
to help brand him in a different way.
That was really the source of Rick James' renewed popularity
in the early 2000s.
Love
[Teena] Whoo
[cheers and applause]
Them and leave them
Yes!
That's what I used to do
Sing the song
I used to use and abuse them, baby
[Carmen] That music awards thing
he was on--he was nothing.
The voice was gone. Everything was gone.
He was nothing but a shell there.
That hurt. That hurt.
[interviewer] But most people saw that as a great,
big moment.
Yeah, well...
I saw it as, like, the bitter end.
I knew something was gonna happen.
bass chords
[Steven] I think that by that time,
he was bored with the whole thing.
It's kind of like anyone who gets money or stuff or a woman.
You think it's going to change things,
and the change begins within.
And I don't think Rick really knew that.
He kept looking outward for some salvation.
And he just never found it.
[David] The times I saw Rick, after jail,
I left with a broken heart.
I felt as though I don't know if he can live a lot longer.
[reporter] Grammy Award-winning singer Rick James
found dead in his home. Rick James was 56 years old.
[Levi] My father called me first
and told me Rick was gone.
And man, we cried.
God damn, we cried over that phone, man.
And it still fucks with me.
I was in Florida, and I was coming off the plane.
I looked up on the news screen,
coming from the airport, CNN,
and it had "Rick James dead." They was taking his body.
[reporter] He had nine drugs in his system.
Nine. Among them, Xanax,
Valium, Vicodin, crystal meth, and cocaine.
[Tanya] I went right the fuck there.
Like, immediately, I was on it.
Security at the place that he was at
were not letting us in. So I hopped the gate.
I'm running, because the place that he was at
was a little bit further in from the security gate.
And security is, like, "Stop! Stop!"
And I was like, "If you want to talk to me,
you better start running, because I'm not stopping."
I got there, and he was dead.
[Ty] I just remember going in the room,
and he was still in the bed, where he passed.
And I just wanted to be next to him.
And I laid there for about an hour,
just holding his hand,
before they came to pick him up.
And everything was chaotic
outside of us, and I just said,
"Close the door. I don't want anybody in here."
I don't think he tried to OD, man.
He loved being alive. We had things to do.
We were ready to go back on the road.
That means we going back in the studio.
Come over for some fresh shit.
Man, we--oh, we would have killed them the next time out.
We never got there. Almost.
[Stevie Wonder] I love you, Rick, for the time
that you stood with my brother Calvin,
and the fun that y'all had and the fun we had,
and the songs that you heard of mine, that you said,
"Nah, I don't think that's good enough.
You gotta do something else with that."
[laughter]
[Teena] I will forever be linked
in the archives
of R&B history with this man.
[Tanya] I love that people came out to honor him
at the day of his death.
My contention is, though, with all these powerful friends,
compadres, and connections--
when he was needing help,
when he was having trouble,
where were these people?
[Carmen] Wasn't Mr. Perfect, by far.
You know, he had all the fallacies.
But he was a good guy,
and a very talented guy.
And I think that if he would have been able
to shake that demon, would still be strong today.
[JoJo] Even in the adversity,
I learned a lot from him,
and I'm grateful. I'm still--I mean,
I'm older now. We mature--excuse me.
I told JoJo, "If Rick were here,
and he asked me tomorrow,
'Why don't you come back?
We're taking the band back out,' I'd go."
thoughtful bass music
[indistinct chatter]
[Oscar] It took a lot of work,
because we were all over the place.
I think because we really realized
we're getting to the point to where people
are asking for Rick's music in a genuine sense again.
So we got together and said, "Hey. Let's do it."
It feels great. I love to play.
You know, that's what we're are. We're players.
[host] So without further ado, I need everybody
to stand to your feet,
so we can bring them out the Buffalo way.
Make some noise for my boys,
the Stone City Band!
[band playing upbeat funky music]
Buffalo, are you in the house?
Guess who's back up in here this evening.
We got the original boys.
Stone City Band.
Whoo.
[singers vocalizing]
What y'all smoking?
Oh, yeah
I'm in love with Mary Jane
She's my main thing
She makes me feel alright
She makes my heart sing
And when I'm feeling low
She comes as no surprise
Turns me on with her love
Takes me to paradise
Do you love me Mary Jane?
[interviewer] Had you become the Rick James character?
[Rick] Yeah. I think that was the problem,
was I was trying to live out the Rick James character.
And if you try to hang out with Rick James, you're in trouble.
Mary Jane
Don't you play no games
Whoo
Mary Jane
I love her just the same
Mary Jane
dramatic hip hop music
[Taz] I was at a party.
I think I might have been, like, 14.
And everybody was rapping. And I started rapping.
And the whole crowd of people spun around,
and all of a sudden I was just, like,
in the middle of this crowd,
and they're all, like, so mesmerized.
That was the first time I was, like "Whoa.
Maybe I can do this shit."
'Cause I saw my dad do it for so long.
No matter what you say about how he lived,
you know, drug-wise, sex-wise, whatever,
but he's a fucking legend.
If my dad was here today,
I'm sure he would, you know what I'm saying,
have a million things to say: "Do what feels right.
Don't correct yourself for whoever you are.
Just do what feels right to you.
Do what's natural."
upbeat funky music
What's your favorite Rick James record?
"You and I."
[laughter]
Why "You and I"?
Why is "You and I" your favorite Rick James record?
I just like the sound of it,
the melody, the rhythm.
-It makes me move. -It makes you feel good?
-It makes me feel good. -[laughter]
What's your favorite Rick James record?
Oh, my favorite is
-Cold--mm-do-do--Blooded. -Do it again.
-[Charisma] Do it again. -[laughter]
-[Ty] Do-do-doo -[Jasmine] Blooded
Oh, it's the best.
-[Ty] Oh, my God. -[Jasmine] I love that song.
It just has--oh, my gosh.
The beat to it. Yeah.