Listen to the Rick James interview

By Marc D. Allan

Pop culture has a short memory, but Rick James is one of those characters who are impossible to forget. The “master of funk” conquered the pop-music world in the 1970s and early ’80s with hits such as Super Freak and as producer of the Mary Jane Girls and Eddie Murphy’s debut album.

Then in 1991, he was accused of imprisoning and torturing her with a hot cocaine pipe. Later, he wound up spending two years in Folsom Prison on assault and cocaine-possession charges.

But just in case you’ve forgotten him, James himself provides a succinct primer: “Here’s this black man running around, with long braids, with all these gorgeous white movie stars and women, flaunting smoking weed onstage, making millions of dollars, jumping out of limousines, eating at Spago’s, drinking champagne and throwing bottles out of the limousine.”

Now, at 49, he’s back. Nine years removed from his last album of new material, James is about to release Urban Rapsody and hit the road again with a tour that begins Friday at the Indiana Convention Center.

He also has a modest but important goal: a positive memory for his 5-year-old son 

“I want to leave my son some epitaph that’s good,” he says, “so I don’t leave this planet with `Rick James was a son of a bitch.’ “

No matter what happens in the third act of James’ career, he certainly will leave behind a legacy. As the blunt, self-deprecating and sometimes humorous James says about his past:

“A lot of things I had done over the years, I can’t remember if I did ’em or not. But they sort of sound great.”

Familiar names

James remembers the highlights, starting in the 1960s in Toronto, where, AWOL from the U.S. Navy and using the name Ricky Matthews, he started a band called the Mynah Birds with Neil Young, Bruce Palmer (who went on with Young to form Buffalo Springfield) and Goldy McJohn (later of Steppenwolf).

He emerged in the late 1970s and into the mid-’80s as a songwriter and producer, coming up with a string of pop/rhythm-and-blues hits that included You and I, Mary Jane, Bustin’ Out and Super Freak. He also gave the music world the Mary Jane Girls, producing the sexy trio’s music and writing the group’s hit, In My House; and produced Murphy’s album that contained the hit Party All the Time.

Then he smoked cocaine for the first time.

“The first hit I ever took off a freebase pipe, I fell out,” he says by phone from his Southern California home. “And I said, `Yeah, this is for me.’ It completely took me out of my worries. . . . Cocaine just seemed to deliver me. It was me and that drug. I didn’t need a woman, I didn’t need anything. I just needed that drug.

“The first hit is exhilarating. It’s probably the greatest feeling I’ve had. It’s 500,000 times better than an orgasm. But that was the dangerous part. After that, you’re chasing that high.

And you never get that same high.” James couldn’t stop chasing. His career and personal life hit a serious slump that followed him into the ’90s.

In 1990, rapper MC Hammer took James’ Super Freak and sampled the music for U Can’t Touch This, which turned out to be the song of 1990.

“The checks from that were great,” James says. “Unfortunately, MC Hammer, I think, went a little nuts thinking he could actually sample a song and get such a big record and that he could carry on that he was creative. I don’t know what he was thinking.”

Brain not engaged

But Hammer was thinking (until he went bankrupt a few years later, anyway), and James wasn’t. He was too wasted.

Just before James went to prison, he remembers, he was living in what he describes as a $10 million hilltop mansion formerly owned by actor Mickey Rooney.

“One day, I walked outside and discovered I had a rose garden on the side of my house,” he says. “I was really isolating myself and living a lonely existence.

“I never really thought about my addiction until one day my accountants came to me and said, `You know, Rick, you spent a million and a half dollars on drugs.’ And I said, `Well, drugs are expensive.’ “

They suggested drug rehabilitation. Ringo Starr and David Crosby also helped push him into rehab programs.

None worked – except for prison, which came shortly after the sex-torture arrest.

“There was a girl in a hotel that I had a physical fight with because she actually kicked my pregnant girlfriend in the stomach,” James recalls. “So I commenced to punching her and got carried away. . . . I had been up for two weeks and I got infuriated. I was out of my mind.”

As for the kidnapping and torture, James says that never happened. “Here’s a girl who has a pimp who feels they can try to get some money out of Rick James so they can support their habit.”

On the other hand, “It’s a wonderful story,” he says, laughing. “It makes me seem like Marquis de Sade and it’s very decadent and it’s almost romantic. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen; but if I ever do a movie, I guess I’ll put it in there just to make it look interesting. Because when I read it myself, I go, `Damn! I did all this for sex? As much sex as I was getting? I was like turning women away at the door. I never had any problem with sex.”

Sex, no. Drugs, yes. Prison cured that.

“All the rehabs didn’t give me what prison gave me,” he says. “Prison took away my freedoms on a serious level. And it really put me in the belly of the beast. It was a racist pen. It’s an old institution, like a French bastille or something. It’s full of racism and it’s full of hatred.”

Charms to soothe

He found some comfort there – from the prisoners who grew up listening to his music and from someone who helped get him a tape recorder.

James says he wrote more than 400 songs while in prison, all captured on tape. His first thought was to put out a three-disc acoustic album, but he decided not to “burden people’s souls.”

Urban Rapsody turned out to be an aural movie with many poignant moments in its ” ’90s street songs.” (The disc is scheduled for release Oct. 14.)

When James sings “I nearly forgot where I truly belong,” he means his roots in Buffalo, N.Y., where he grew up, and the ghetto.

“When you’re making millions of dollars and you’re traveling a lot, you lose sight of your roots. The culture I really understand and I’m really comfortable with is my blackness and the ghetto.

That’s what I understand, that’s what I feel, that’s what I cry to, that’s what I cling to, that’s what satisfies me. During my drug addiction, I lost sight of that.”

He also sings of the Good Ol’ Days.

“I just had to say something about how in the ’80s and ’70s you could go to a concert and you never had to worry about being shot or stabbed,” he says. “People got together for fun and love. Let’s go back to the times when love was simple.”

That’s the overriding message of Urban Rapsody and the accompanying tour, James says.