Soulless

by Jim Derogatis

  In the spring of 1984, Robert Kelly stood center stage in Kenwood Academy’s expansive auditorium during the annual talent show. Skinny, gangly, and dark-skinned, six-foot-three with a close-cropped head of nappy hair, he dressed like many of his classmates, looking preppy in a white button-down shirt, maroon sweater vest, and khaki pants. He masked his nerves with a bit of jokey showmanship. Hiding behind a dark pair of sunglasses like the designer shades Stevie Wonder wore, he had a friend lead him onstage as if he, too, was blind.

  As another classmate accompanied him on piano, Kelly sweetly cooed the Motown giant’s then-current hit, “Ribbon in the Sky,” a romantic slow jam soon to become a ubiquitous wedding song. A decade later, Dave Hoekstra wrote the first major profile of Kelly in the Sun-Times. “That night, it was like Spider-Man being bit,” the singer told Hoekstra. “I discovered this power. I knew I had something then.”

  Kenwood Academy, the most expensive school the city had built when it opened in 1969 at East 50th Street and South Blackstone Avenue, is roughly two miles equidistant from the house at 40th and King and the storied campus of the University of Chicago in Hyde Park. CPS intended for it to serve both less fortunate students from neighborhoods like Grand Boulevard to the north and west and the children of faculty and staff at the university to the south. A magnet program drew bright seventh- and eighth-graders from elementary schools throughout the South Side, and many went on to take early college courses at the U. of C., but most of Kenwood’s students came from schools in the surrounding neighborhoods. From the beginning, parents lied and gave the addresses of friends and relatives so their daughters and sons could go to Kenwood rather than their neighborhood high school.

  Kenwood adhered to tough academic standards, and only four hundred from the class of seven hundred who enrolled might graduate four years later. Plenty of poor students fell between the cracks, having been passed ahead from grammar school despite failing grades, then dropping out before earning a high school diploma. Since CPS student transcripts are not public information, I do not know exactly when Kelly ceased to be an official student there, or if he was ever diagnosed or received special treatment for what he calls “something more than dyslexia.” He simply became one of the three hundred who didn’t make it.

  “I got to go there not because I was smart, but because I played basketball,” Kelly claims in Soulacoaster, but the school’s team didn’t rank, and the Broncos didn’t specifically recruit players. “There was no status from that, the team wasn’t producing stars, and if he played, he wasn’t going to be the next Michael Jordan or anything,” said Dr. Jake-Matthews, who was Charmaine Jake at the time. The girls’ swimming and boys’ track and field teams won the citywide championships year after year through the eighties, and their members comprised the athletic cliques that garnered most of the glory in the lunchroom, but special status also graced members of the choir led by Lena McLin, whom Kelly calls his “second mom, teacher, and pastor.”

  McLin was born in Atlanta, but her parents sent her to live in Chicago at age five, when her uncle, the Rev. Thomas A. Dorsey, took over as the music director at Pilgrim Baptist Church in Bronzeville in 1932. The blues and jazz pianist who started performing as Georgia Tom found God when his first wife and son died shortly after childbirth. Leading his new South Side congregation, he became one of the architects of modern gospel music, writing more than five hundred spirituals, including “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” and “Peace in the Valley.” He inspired Chicagoans Mahalia Jackson and Albertina Walker, as well as Detroit legend Aretha Franklin. Jackson sang “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” at Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral. Dorsey was also an entrepreneur, and he started one of the first black-owned music-publishing companies.

  Like her celebrated uncle, McLin became a composer, and she later led a congregation of her own, at Holy Vessel Baptist Church in Hyde Park, in addition to spending a career teaching for CPS, most of it at Kenwood. Heavyset like Joann, with piercing brown eyes and an impressive black bouffant, she headed the music department from 1970 through her retirement, not long before her uncle died in 1993. The list of performers McLin mentored includes Broadway star Mandy Patinkin, opera singers Jonita Lattimore and Mark Rucker, pop star Jennifer Hudson, gospel singer Calvin Brunson, and R&B great Chaka Khan, who wound up on the teacher’s bad side, allegedly because of partying. McLin scowled whenever students mentioned the former Yvette Marie Stevens, but she consistently championed Kelly from the day he initially appeared in Room 126.

  “On the first day I met her, Ms. McLin told me, ‘You’re going to be one of the greatest singers, songwriters, and performers of all time,’” Kelly said in an interview with Maudlyne Ihejirika of the Sun-Times in 2015, when he headlined a benefit concert at the Chicago Theatre to raise money to help buy the apartment McLin risked losing as her building went condo.

  McLin was a proponent of tough love. Several of her students told me she could be sweet and nurturing as well as a harsh taskmaster, demanding that choir members come to rehearsal early and stay late. She pushed her favorite singers to hit notes they never thought they could reach, and she forced them to drop every other extracurricular activity. She brusquely informed Kelly’s basketball coach that he would not be playing on the team. “She didn’t like me,” said Amy Hundley, whose boyfriend sang in the choir, “and she let me know it. Not in these exact words, but she made it clear she thought I was going to take him down some garden path of sexual vice or whatever. She was a scary lady, in terms of the moral code she was trying to impose on people.”

  McLin did not tolerate infractions of her rules, such as slouching or chewing gum in class, and she railed at any hint of what she called “minstrelsy.” Pulse: A History of Music, her 1977 book portraying musical favorites from the baroque era through Stevie Wonder, derides the minstrel shows of the nineteenth century for “making fun of the black man, demeaning and stereotyping him, painting a false picture of a sad people.” Confronted with anyone stooping to such tomfoolery, she angrily invoked the star of Good Times: “J.J. doesn’t speak for all of us!”

  The teacher may not have approved of Kelly’s blind-man act at the talent show, but she forgave many sins by her favorites. Being chosen as one of her anointed carried the luster of being a champion quarterback at a Texas high school. “Once you became a part of her circle, your experience at school changed to the extent that you could hang around the choir room all day and never go anywhere else,” Jake-Matthews said. “Robert was part of that tight circle of people around Ms. McLin. Obviously, he was a soloist, and a lot of the girls thought he was cute. Somebody always had a crush on Robert Kelly.” Added Hundley, “For whatever reason, Ms. McLin was in love with him, and he could do no wrong.”

  Focused and determined, Kelly worked hard to master McLin’s lessons about breath control, phrasing, and Italian bel canto singing. He played starring roles in the school productions of My Fair Lady, Carousel, and Purlie, and for years he sang the solo in the song central to Kenwood’s annual Christmas pageant, which seems to have been one of McLin’s original compositions. In the mid-eighties, the teacher tapped Jake Austen, now an energetic force on Chicago’s indie-rock scene as a writer, garage rocker, and public-access television producer, to take the solo.

  “Robert and I went into the guitar room next door to the choir room and spent a day of him kind of coaching me on how to sing this song,” Austen said. “He didn’t actually give me any vocal lessons, he just talked about stage presence, and he said the secret to being onstage is being like Bing Crosby—you have to walk and sing at the same time. Obviously, he’d watched White Christmas—he watched everything coming up—and he definitely thought about what people were doing, what it took to be a success.” In the end, Kelly wound up taking the solo as usual.

  Austen and Jake-Matthews both followed Kelly into Kenwood by two years; they say he should have been a junior when they started their first semester. Kelly claims in Soulacoaster that his mentor argued with t
he principal, who wanted to expel him at the end of his freshman year because of failing grades. “In spite of Ms. McLin’s best efforts to keep me in school, I quit—just like that.” He does not say that he kept coming back to high school for at least six more years, rehearsing with the choir and performing in its shows, a physically maturing young adult surrounded by awkward, acne-plagued teens.

  “This is pre–metal detectors and security, so the fact that he could just walk into the school for years and go to choir, it wasn’t really a question,” Austen said. Kelly also spent hours in what Austen called the “guitar room,” off McLin’s classroom. “When I found this secret room at school that everyone seemed to have forgotten about,” Kelly says in his book, “it became another . . . safe place. And there was a piano in it.”

  The aspiring songwriter taught himself to play by ear, an ability he says he first realized a few years earlier, when a neighbor he calls Willie Pearl loaned him a Casiotone 201, the first portable battery-powered keyboard that appeared on the market in 1980. Kelly began picking out rudimentary chords and improvising vocal parts, writing his first songs, including one about his mother: “Hard times, she working night and day / Hard times, just to keep the landlord away / Hard times, she does it all alone / Hard times, her love keeps us strong.” He describes it in Soulacoaster as “a simple melody in a deep blues bag,” while the lyrics seem to crib from the theme song for Good Times.

  During the years when he continued hanging out at Kenwood, Kelly busked on the streets of downtown Chicago and the Near North Side. When he started earning enough money, he left home and moved into the old YMCA Hotel in the South Loop at East Ninth Street and South Wabash Avenue, close to some of the spots where he performed. Especially lucrative were the bustling “L” stop on Jackson Boulevard in the Loop, servicing both the Red and Blue Lines, and Rush Street, outside the bars catering to middle-age businessmen. He claims he collected as much as $400 a day, accompanying himself on the Casio and mixing songs by Wonder and Hathaway with his originals, including one about the burgers and fries from McDonald’s. “He’d sing to people as they exited the Golden Arches,” Cheo Hodari Coker wrote in Vibe, “hoping they’d leave the restaurant with a smile . . . and leave him some spare change.”

  Kelly also says in Soulacoaster that he worked as a male stripper, singing as part of his act. “Because I had a body—I was ripped real good—women went crazy [and] . . . My voice gave me an advantage over all the other strippers.” He provides no other details about what he calls his other “hustle,” and no one I’ve interviewed has ever mentioned it.

  Presumably with money he’d saved from both busking and stripping, Kelly eventually boarded a flight to Los Angeles. It was his first airplane trip, and it revealed what would become a growing fear of flying. He spent several months in California in the mid-eighties and claims in his book to have secured a songwriting deal with A&M Records, but it fell apart when he refused to share credit for tunes he’d written on his own. He came back home to Chicago, and once again, Joann consoled him. “The music business is cold-blooded, son. It’s testing you. It’s saying, ‘How bad you want it, boy?’”

  After regrouping, Kelly says that he traveled to the West Coast again to make another go of it, “living homeless on the beach” and carrying his clothes in a brown paper bag. This time, he claims in his book, after a few more months of trying to break through, the contract he believed he’d scored with Benny Medina at Warner Bros. Records never materialized. A Motown veteran, Medina became the Vice President of Black Music at Warner Bros. in 1988, but he has never spoken about trying to sign Kelly.

  Frustrated with performing at open mics and talent shows, Kelly even failed as a street musician in Venice Beach. He had to compete not only with other street singers, but also with magicians, mimes, comics, and fire-jugglers. He again returned to Chicago in defeat, but he says in Soulacoaster that he came up with a new plan.

  First, Kelly truncated his first name. “‘Robert’ is too ordinary,” he told his then-girlfriend, whom he calls Lonneice in his book. “‘R.’ sounds more mysterious.” Next, seeing that New Edition, the California group the Boys, and Guy (with Teddy Riley) commanded the R&B spotlight, he followed their model. “I decided I was going to get the break I’d been looking for with a group. In 1987, I found three guys who could dance and sing. I put the group together, became the lead singer, and then set to work.”

  The account Kelly gives in Soulacoaster differs from a story in the Chicago Tribune about the quartet at the height of its local popularity. Kelly claims he chose the name “R. Kelly and MGM, for Musically Gifted Men,” but Karen E. Klages reported that the group had been formed by Vince Walker, Shawn Brooks, and Marc McWilliams six months before Kelly joined, and MGM stood for “Mentally Gifted Men.” The acronym “really says a lot,” Walker told her. “What it says is that as much as we’re musically gifted, we’re mentally gifted—keeping drug-free, staying above the average group and going in the positive direction. Definite role models.”

  MGM dressed in oversize black suede suits with satin collars and rhinestones fashioned by Chicago designer Barbara Bates, who’d worked with Kool Moe Dee, Bobby Brown, and Whitney Houston. They looked ridiculous, but then a lot of aspiring pop stars did in the late eighties. “Walking around with beepers and with hats turned to the side, you’re labeled a gangbanger,” Kelly told Klages. “I think it’s very important the image you portray. Kids identify with it. Onstage, you have to be careful.”

  MGM’s clean-cut image extended to the lyrics of the songs Kelly wrote for the group. “The music that they do—fast or slow—really has a message,” said Eric Payton, the manager who allowed the four to rehearse and practice their dance moves for as many as eight hours a day in his basement whenever the weather made singing on the rocks along the shore of Lake Michigan prohibitive.

  Payton was Kelly’s second manager. The first, a friend named Chuck Smith, did not last long; he didn’t have the connections or the clout Kelly knew he needed. Payton fared better in garnering some attention for Kelly and MGM. “They sing about racial harmony in ‘We Are Family’ and about the danger of drugs in ‘Let’s Get It Together,’” Klages wrote. But they also released an indie single and made a self-financed video for the song “Why You Wanna Play Me” that offers a glimpse of the R. Kelly who’d eventually connect with listeners. Over a derivative new jack swing groove that brings a hint of a hip-hop rhythm to the then–au courant boy-band sound, Kelly boasts that he is “not the average guy,” and he lashes out at the girlfriend who doesn’t respect or love him the way he thinks he deserves.

  “Do I look like a doughnut?” Kelly asks. “Then why you wanna glaze me?” The video emphasizes the lyrical couplet he took the most pride in, an attempt to coin a catchphrase with a flash of the gonzo humor that would become a trademark.

  Opening for headliners such as En Vogue, Heavy D & the Boyz, and Kool Moe Dee, R. Kelly and MGM began building their own following at the New Regal Theater on East 79th Street and at the Cotton Club on South Michigan Avenue. Though the often-apocryphal “creative differences” percolated—“I felt envy building behind my back,” Kelly says in Soulacoaster—they became contestants on The Big Break, a syndicated TV talent show hosted by Natalie Cole for one season in 1990. They made it through two rounds and won the third and final round to claim the $100,000 grand prize.

  In April 1991, shortly after that triumph, the Tribune noted that an album on Jive Records would be forthcoming in June. Klages asked Kelly where the foursome would go next. “Farther up,” he said. “We don’t want to be a fly-by-night group.” Indeed, as Klages paraphrased the conversation, MGM would become “the black Beatles.”

  Things didn’t work out that way. “I didn’t get a dime of the $100,000 in cash and prizes,” Kelly says in his book. “I blamed MGM. I decided that I couldn’t deal with them anymore. Our manager decided to stick with the group. I had no choice but to forget MGM—forever.” Sources close to the band say that
, once again, Kelly’s account differs from what they call the facts. They claim MGM actually recorded many of the vocals on what would become Kelly’s debut album with a new group, Public Announcement, and that his third manager, Barry Hankerson, had to negotiate the split from Payton after Kelly signed to Jive.

  Launched in London in the early eighties, Jive Records scored its first big international success with the oddly coiffed New Wave band A Flock of Seagulls. South African–born label head Clive Calder then partnered with Barry Weiss, a New Yorker who made that city the label’s new headquarters. Jive established itself by signing hip-hop artists such as DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, Too $hort, Schoolly D, A Tribe Called Quest, KRS-One, and E-40. In the late 1990s and 2000s, the label achieved massive success with the Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, and Britney Spears, but its biggest hits before the teen-pop years came from R. Kelly.

  Forever in search of the next big thing, Jive opened a Chicago office in 1990 helmed by A&R rep Wayne Williams. The stepbrother of pioneering deejay Jesse Saunders, another of McLin’s star pupils at Kenwood, Williams had worked at Trax Records, a key underground dance label during the heyday of house music in the eighties. He actually enrolled at Chicago’s police academy before Jive offered him a job, after he steered a now-long-forgotten soul artist named Adonis to the label. He first saw Kelly by chance, singing at a backyard barbecue on the South Side. “At these parties, the guy singing is generally just doing the recent hits,” Williams told Bill Wyman of the Chicago Reader. “I heard a song, I didn’t know it, but it sounded good. Then I heard another, and that sounded really good, too. I went outside, and I see this guy has it all—choreography, the voice, everything.”