Rick James

Dwell long enough in pop culture's mind's-eye and you'll be forgiven or forgotten; watershed glam-funk craftsman Rick James didn't live long enough to pull off either one. Television comedian Dave LaChappelle's riotous send-up of the performer's addictions, abuses, and all-around sleaziness managed instead, in the year preceding James' death, to resurrect and thoroughly reinscribe the musican's self-inflicted image as a clownish amoral grotesque. Not quite pop music's Fatty Arbuckle - James' party indiscretions left no corpses, and after a prison term for the second of his convictions for sexual assault he drifted rather easily back into his recording career - neither did he parlay incidents like setting himself on fire with a crack pipe into an image of poignant repentance, a la Richard Pryor. And, no matter how often he alluded to tastes for white or underaged women, he was never as threatening a figure as, say, Jack Johnson, or even Chuck Berry. Not with that panda-bear posture, not with that childish leer. Instead, dogged by how perfectly the term "Super Freak" fit to the cartoon-pimp image he manufactured and then inhabited far too sincerely, James seemed merely icky, and silly.

What's lost behind the admittedly entertaining caricature is, well, only everything I'd like to suggest ought to be recalled about Rick James:

1. Despite an aura of heavy-lidded indolence that attached to his long, drug-addled waning from the pop charts, Rick James worked harder than most, toiled at his trade, paid lavish dues: Sixteen years worth by the time of "Super Freak"'s overnight success in 1981. James might be called the Pete Rose of Funk; deprived of Sly Stone's or Prince's native genius, he scrapped his way to the top. Born (as James Johnson Jr.) in Buffalo, New York in 1948, James was third of eight children raised on the wrong side of that hardbitten town's tracks by a single mother, a Harlem nightclub dancer turned numbers runner. Already bearing a rap sheet at fifteen, James ran away to the Naval Reserves, then went AWOL, in 1964, on being designated for Vietnam. In Toronto exile he formed The Mynah Byrds, an integrated rock band which included a young Neil Young, as well as a future member of Steppenwolf. In 1968 James, on behalf of the band, played his one card: poppa may have been a rolling stone, but his uncle was also a Temptation - specifically Melvin Franklin, the bass-voiced anchor of the legendary singing group. So, the Mynah Birds were signed to Motown, but an irate manager tipped James' presence in Detroit to the military police. Motown shelved the demo tapes, the Birds flew, and James spent a year in the brig for his desertion. Then came another decade's apprenticeship; songwriting and arranging for Motown, more demos, more forgotten bands in Detroit and London, and at last, in 1978, fourteen years after his first band, a breakthrough with the single "You and Me", from his debut album. Nor did the effort diminish with success: along with his own steady output, James was a tireless impresario who created hits for The Mary Jane Girls, Teena Marie, and Eddie Murphy. In collaborations on his own records James gave a leg up both to his elders, The Temptations and Smokey Robinson, and to some of the rappers who had yet to conquer the world. As much for his showmanship and his lunacy, James ought to be remembered for his ambition, his fluency, his dogged professionalism. Among past colleagues and collaborators, he is.

2. While never an innovator at the level of James Brown, George Clinton, or Sly Stone, the sound that James concocted was sturdy, glossy, and irresistible. Hugely reliant on magpie appropriations of Funkadelic's sound, particular Bootsy Collins's basslines, James was a consolidator, one who punched the essence of funk music into a commercial sphere unknown to his rivals, most of whom never forgave him for it (George Clinton, for one, always mocked him as "Slick James"). By the time of his commercial and artistic triumph - the album Street Songs, which held both "Super Freak" and "Give It To Me", his two mightiest singles - the mercurial and opportunistic James was calling his music 'Punk-Funk', which wasn't so far from the truth. "Super Freak", above all, was a confection full of vocal mannerisms and twitchy synthesizer hooks that suggested he'd been listening to Elvis Costello, Devo, and The Cars as closely as to his fellow funksters. The sound he fashioned, funk full of clean guitars, swirly keyboards, and pop hooks, blew open the door that Prince would walk through only a year or two later. It also points both to producer Rick Rubin's guitar-and-rap epiphanies with Run DMC and The Beastie Boys, and to Outkast. Not a bad legacy for the Pete Rose of funk.

3. "Super Freak" itself probably shouldn't be glossed over too lightly. Consider the lives that hook has lived! Has anyone who heard it not succumbed? Please be honest. And if you have, can't you bring it to mind in an instant, now? Boing-boingy-bump, querburp, querburp! As musical memes go, it's one of the immortals, one which transcended its first incarnation, in "Super Freak", to become the core of what remains (sorry, purists) the best-selling rap single of all time: M.C. Hammer's "You Can't Touch This". When Rick James first heard how whopping a chunk of "Super Freak" the rapper had sampled - without James' knowledge, let alone his permission - he wasn't at all happy, though oceans of royalties soon soothed his pain. Hammer's hit would win James his only Grammy, perhaps an appropriate irony for a musician dependent on borrowed riffs himself.

4. "Super Freak" nonwithstanding, if I could free your mind of preconceptions I'd steer you elsewhere to contemplate Rick James' muddled legacy. Motown has too-belatedly issued, as an addition to a "Deluxe Edition" of Street Songs, a live disc of Rick James and his Stone City Band playing in Long Beach, California, at their very height, in 1981. Try, if you will, "Ghetto Life", which in this rendition is stripped of studio gloss, instead is nearly drowned in his fans' collective roar. Here's where the promise of 'punk-funk' is kept: these ragged, furious guitars, blended with James' ragged, furious voice, and ragged, furious lyrics, suggest a reconciliation of Bill Withers, perhaps, or Stevie Wonder, with the sonic insult of Gang of Four or Nirvana. James sings:

When I was a young boy
Tenements on the corner, man
Playing tag with winos
Only way to have some fun
One thing 'bout the ghetto
You don't have to worry
It'll be there tomorrow
Sister don't you hurry

Here, genuine pride and defiance are impossible to mistake. If Rick James had to turn from that place to a glamorous and then a loathsome self-destruction, we can at least recollect that he reached it once.

 

New York Times Magazine, 2004