by Danyel Smith
And it didn’t hurt to have legendary hit maker Hawk Watkins on her team. “She’s one of the most extraordinary people in this world,” Watkins says cheerfully from his New York offices. “Sunny is that rare species—a hardworking, natural talent.” It was the huge mainstream success of Bliss that began the murmurs. On urban radio stations around the country, jocks and programmers started complaining, on and off air, that Sunny wasn’t really “black,” or not black “enough.”
“She was a trip for a minute,” says Jimi “Go-Go” Gonzales, now program director of Los Angeles’ soulful KLUV 93.1. “Right before that first cover album, Hymn to Humanity, came out. I was on air then, and we were playing Sun’s stuff like crazy. She’d come to town, go straight to the pop stations, the big white stations, do drops for them, hang out all through their wack-ass morning shows, and not even come by here for a wazzup.”
Sunny sees it differently. “I was young. I didn’t want to visit any radio stations, or be interviewed at all for that matter. All I wanted to do was just be. Record. Perform. Write. Sing. Jesus!” She sighs loudly and shakes her head. “But this is a business, and that’s something I learned from Eva Glenn.”
Eva Glenn, erstwhile glamorous record label executress, and now manager to the some of the most successful recording artists in the country, signed Sunny to the now defunct Roadshow Records after a fiery, early nineties bidding war. Glenn, loved and hated, is the stuff of legend herself. Often labeled as too much of a “fun” girl by her (some say jealous) colleagues and competitors, Glenn remains the marketing and managerial mini-mogul behind Sunny’s astronomical sales and edgy (yet somehow still pristine) reputation.
“It’s always been Eva,” says Sunny, laughing. “Even when we fought like fools. And besides, she don’t party like she used to. She’s Mama Eva now.”
Piper Gibbs, senior director of promotion and advertising for BET, was, many moons ago, personal assistant to Glenn, and sometime assistant to Sunny. “Eva was a bitch, no question. And she’d be glad to hear me say it. But she was one of the hardest-working people at Roadshow. And she tried to be honest. In this business it’s hard to do that. And she wasn’t scared of Sunny or any of the artists, really—like Seb [former Roadshow CEO Sebastian Turcos] was. Eva wasn’t scared of younger people, either—like me. She didn’t hate on us. She tried to bring us up.”
And Sunny?
“Sunny and Eva were on some love-hate back then, though now I guess it’s love-love. I always thought that they were more alike than not. If Sunny couldn’t sing, she probably would’ve been an Eva. And if Eva could sing—oh my God!—she’d be bigger than Sun is right now.”
Poems and Bliss Unknown behind her, it was Addison’s third album, Hymn to Humanity, that pushed her into territory previously occupied by the likes of Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, and (in terms of international success) Michael Jackson. Within two years, ten million copies of Hymn sold, and as of January 2005, it’s up to almost eighteen million. Among the songs on the cover album: a tear-down-the-walls version of Barry Manilow’s “Looks Like We Made It,” a slow, acoustic twist on Bill Wither’s “Lovely Day,” a melodic tribute to Tupac Shakur’s “Dear Mama” (sparked by the loop of a never-before-heard snippet from a voice-mail message from the late great MC himself), Billy Preston’s “Will It Go Round in Circles,” and a wild rendering of “Midnight Train to Georgia” that had Gladys Knight jumping to a standing ovation during Sunny’s second prime-time network special, 2000’s ratings blockbuster, Sunshine on My Shoulders: A Prime-Time Party with Sunny Addison.
Hymn to Humanity’s last-minute lead single was a duet with Sunny’s younger brother, D’Artagnan Addison.
Yes—that D’Artagnan, the platinum recording artist known by his evocative first name.
“And it’s his real name,” Sunny says, munching on shrimp toasts placed on the table by a discreet attendant. Then she pours herself a glass of water from a pitcher lined with slices of lime. “D’Artagnan Marlon Addison. At home, though, he’s just Dart.” The astonishing single, a masterful retooling of the Temptations 1968 “I Wish It Would Rain,” not only anchored Hymn and kicked off the career of Sunny’s notoriously private sibling (D’Artagnan declined to be interviewed for this story), but the song has become a fairy tale swathed in mystery wrapped in a quilt of secrets.
Tall tales and urban legends are pervasive in the word of recorded music. And they are seductive. In some cases, the tales lend earthy tangibility to the magic of music. In others, the legend just adds to the mystery and the immortality of a piece of art so perfect, it’s impact goes far beyond sales and chart positions, and remains super-naturally immeasurable.
There’s the myth, for example, about Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight.” No, he didn’t write the song after witnessing, while unable to help, a friend of his drown. The song is Collins being aggravated about his marriage to his then wife, Andrea.
Another legend keeps up the notion that Michael Jackson’s home phone number was in the UPC (bar) code of Thriller (No!). And the model on the cover of the Ohio Players’ Honey is the subject of an old, macabre rumor. Supposedly, the model’s skin was horribly burned by the heated (so it would drip more easily) honey at the photo shoot, and days later she came to the recording studio where the Players were working on their “Love Rollercoaster.” Supposedly angry—and literally scarred—the model threatened to sue OP for every dollar they had, and so the band’s manager supposedly stabbed her to death right there in the studio, her dying screams supposedly, inadvertently recorded and then included in the song. There are screams buried low in the mix of “Love Rollercoaster,” but they aren’t even a woman’s. Keyboardist Billy Beck screeched for the song.
But the stories still awhirl around Sunny and Dart’s version of “I Wish It Would Rain” are complicated and convoluted and have all the makings of a (Lifetime? VH-1 “Movies That Rock”?) fun film. Depression, sex, betrayal, even … the unexplained.
And, of course, what seems a happy ending.
Here are the particulars.
Sunny Addison “employed” her only sibling, D’Artagnan, as her manager because he was suicidal (so she kept him near). He took no (or very little) money for his work. Some say Dart never really did anything for Sunny. Some say he was devoted to her in a way that was almost unhealthy for brother and sister. Some say Sun manipulated him and he resented her. Some say he was always jealous of her success. Some say they have an extremely healthy, loving relationship that was solidified by an absent father, a strict mother, and the fact that they ran away from home together when Sunny was nineteen and Dart eighteen. They lived in their car until they had money for shifty hotels. By the time they had money enough for a raggedy apartment (one in Fresno, then one in Rosemead), they began traveling Arizona, Washington, and California’s cities and back roads, Sun singing wherever she could for dollars tossed in a green glass dish that she supposedly still has in her home—now filled with floating lilies.
Eva Glenn signed Sunny when Sunny was supposedly at the end of her rope. By most accounts, Sunny’d told Dart that if she hadn’t been signed to a deal by the end of that summer in central California, she was going to get a job, probably get her GED, maybe go to college, or join the service. “Dart was in the dregs back then,” says Hawk Watkins, who was a part of the eventual bidding battle for Sunny. “He was very overweight, and depressed at the idea of Sunny giving up on her dream.”
But then Eva signed Sunny to Roadshow.
Fast-forward.
In 1998, when Sunny and Dart were at a music industry convention in the Bahamas, Dart was supposedly upset at Sunny’s success, and disappeared. “He was NOT ‘upset’ or depressed with my quote-unquote success,” Sunny says with an eye roll. “If you knew him—and you never will—you would know that was impossible.”
Sunny was torn. Does she stay at the Lost City resort and debut Hymn to Humanity to radio execs anxious to hate her? Or does she run all over the (seven hundred!) islands of the B
ahamas looking for him?
This is where Eva Glenn comes in with a power move. Eva, repping for the scandalous Roadshow Records (in real life, Sebastian Turcos did his six months and is living fat somewhere near Marbella, Spain), and in order to keep Sunny on point for her do-or-die showcase, and also because Eva was in love with Dart (though she loved bigwig Ron Littlejohn, too, but he wouldn’t have her because his parents wouldn’t accept a black woman for their son), Eva ran off to get Dart.
Eva knew Dart was into voodoo, and knew (how?) the special island on which the most intense Bahamian voodoo was practiced.
So Eva went there, found Dart, met superproducer “Giant” Eddie Innocent (who was supposedly captain of a ship!) at an open-air market. “I was not a captain“, says Innocent, from his car. He says he’s on the Williamsburg Bridge, and his music is blasting. “And my sister’s name is no one’s business. She loves Eva, though. Just like I do.”
Eddie liked Eva, but she was in love with Dart (and Lil’ John, as he used to be known back when he was down with hip hop). Eddie’s sister was a voodoo priestess and put a spell on Eva, and Eva had a breakdown. Her fingernails started falling out, her hair started falling out, her legs had sores, and all kinds of craziness. All Eva wanted to do was sit and stare into the sun.
Sun. Get it?
Dart couldn’t help Eva because he was kind of suicidal still, so he wanted it to rain. For some reason, he started singing “I Wish It Would Rain” to the sky, like a prayer.
Eddie heard him, and—not even knowing D’Artagnan was a multi-platinum star’s brother—recorded him in his own raggedy studio, using the actual ocean breezes from the Bahamian shores for sound effects. “I did not know who was Eva, or Dart,” says Innocent, who seems to be turning up the volume of his stereo as he speaks. “I thought they were a couple, running away for adventure.”
Did you love Eva?
“Hahahahahaha,” Eddie laughs, like I have got to the heart of something hilarious. “Hanging up now.”
Did they stay at a place called the Roll House? The Roth House?
Innocent’s laugh only gets bigger. “The Rowe House,” he says. “That’s it.” And he hangs up.
D’Artganan has an incredible song on his debut called “Sunrise on the Rowes,” which people think is a misspelling, a typo of “Sunrise on the Rose.” The whole thing just gets murkier and murkier, especially when I receive a callback from a Thaddeus Rowe of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. On the voice mail he says, “Because you were courteous with my wife I am returning your call. I will tell you what I have told every … reporter who has asked: I do not know of a Sunny Addison, a D’Artagnan Addison, or an Eva Glenn. My wife and I did, at one time in the nineties, own a small home on Cat Island in the Bahamas. We had wonderful neighbors whose names I do not care to mention. Wishing you the best of luck in your quest. Please don’t phone again.”
Huh?
Meanwhile.
Sunny was worried. She somehow (how?) found out where Dart and Eva were, went there, and laid her background vocals in on “The Rain Song.” Sunny’s voice (what? crazy!) lifted the spell Eddie’s sister had placed on Eva. And then the sister (Anne? Audrey? Anita? The name is never the same) put a nice voodoo spell on the song. Some say Anne/Audrey/Anita never existed. Some say she works in Sunny’s home. Some say she cooks for Dart. Some say she lives in Haiti with her husband, surrounded by grandchildren.
They—Sunny, Eva, D’Artagnan, Eddie—came back, and Eva, back to her usual self, crashed the song onto the album, even though the masters had already been finalized.
Sunny and D’Artagnan’s 1999 “I Wish It Would Rain” broke sales and radio-play records for months. Sunny and Eva left Roadshow right before the Feds shut it down. D’Artagnan (who is now managed by Eva Glenn and Ron Littlejohn) released his debut, Kindness for Weakness, early in 2001. The rest, as is said, is (multiplatinum) history.
On a final note, little Lanie Littlejohn, Eva and Ron’s older daughter (Lanie is four, Dinah is almost two) has long been rumored to be Eva and Dart’s love child.
Whew.
“Hm. I’ve heard all that, and it’s all real cute except the part about my brother being suicidal. He talks about his depressions through his music. He never wanted to kill himself.” Then Sunny gets up and pours herself a glass of merlot. “To call a kid’s parentage into question is a serious thing. Lanie and Dinah are my godchildren. Ron’s like my brother. Please.”
As if on cue, Sunny’s manager and proclaimed “best friend” walks on deck looking like the proverbial million dollars.
“Hey, miss,” she warmly says to her client/friend, and gives her a huge hug. Then Glenn eyes me suspiciously. “Thought I’d pop by and see how everything’s going. You have ninety minutes, right? We’re at what, eighty-nine?”
“Here she is,” Sunny Addison says to me while handing Glenn a glass of wine. “My secret weapon.”
Eva Glenn must be forty and she looks twenty-nine. In an Italian suit probably from next spring’s collections, an antique designer bag that has one-of-a-kind written all over it, Glenn’s gumball of a diamond flashes in the sunlight. Bling, as the saying goes, bling.
Glenn’s engaged to Ronald Littlejohn after seven years and two daughters. She and Littlejohn are partners in Bona Fide, a thriving music management and film production firm (their second film was the audience fave at Sundance last year, and, according to Sunny, their next film stars her) based in Los Angeles.
“I hear you out here denying rumors, Sun. You’re above that. Let fools think what they want.”
Sunny knocks back her wine in three gulps, and seems exasperated, but she wants to discuss the Rain Song. “It’s always been hard for me to talk about it, because it’s really Dart’s. I fucking sing background on that song.”
In fact, she does, but the way the lyrics were written (by a Motown tag team), and the way Sunny sings them, the background vocals work with the main vocals as a poignant duet.
“The simple fact is,” Eva pipes in coolly, “Dart and Eddie had already recorded the vocals by the time Sun got to the island.”
“I didn’t sing on that song until we got to Nassau,” Sunny says. “To a better studio. Dart wasn’t even there. Just me, Ron, and Eddie.”
I wonder aloud where Eva Glenn was.
“Sick,” she says quickly. “I was at a doctor’s office. My mother had just died.”
“Oh,” says Sunny with a smirk. She pours herself more wine. “And your girl Pritz was there.”
“Pritz? My girl?” Eva looks at Sunny like it’s time for Sunny to shut up. “Pour me a glass of imaginary Scotch, Sun. And pass me an imaginary cigarette.”
“You got jokes,” Sunny says with slitty eyes. “I can talk about what I want to talk about.”
“Keep fucking with me and I’ll go get the imaginary wine.”
Sunny smiles at me, while Eva glances at her dainty yellow gold watch. “Prizzi,” says Sun, mischeviously, “gets on Eva’s nerves. Eva don’t like her skin to be got under. Don’t like to be got over on.”
“All right, Sunny,” Glenn says.
“I love you,” Sunny says, “too.”
The villain in the story is Giada “Pritz” Biasella. She sued Sunny and D’Artagnan and Eddie Innocent and Roadshow for production credit on Dart’s version of “I Wish It Would Rain,” and she got it. It was a seven-figure payout, and the kind that keeps paying out. Biasella has points on the single and the HTH album. Reached at the recently relaunched Solaar Records, where she is general manager, Biasella seems bored with any discussion of Sunny and Dart. “I am no heavy. I don’t like to comment on Sunny or Dart, or those crazy days. I got what was owed to me for setting things up, for helping produce that song. That’s it. Eva, Leetle John, all of them, they know how it was.”
At the Rowe House? Were you at the Rowe House?
“Roll? What? I don’t have an idea of what you are saying.”
“If you start asking me a whole bunch of stupid questions abou
t who was where when and all that, I’m going to shut up and you can take your little recorder and pens and be out.”
The sun is setting on the California coastline, but Sunny Addison is at full heat. She’s talking, and while her manager had been trying to curtail her, now Eva Glenn sips at her iced water like it’s a cocktail, and listens like Sun’s story is new to her.
“Eva was packing to leave for the States because her mom … had passed. I was going to stay on Nassau for a few more days with Pritz. Eddie came up to my hotel room with a DAT and played the song for me, Pritz, and Ron. Dart was God knew where, but as soon as Eddie pressed PLAY, my brother was in the room with us.”
“On the original,” Glenn says evenly, “Dart was singing his own background and it sounded weird and too heavy—you know how his voice is—”
“And all Pritz said,” said Sunny, “was ‘it needs something different—’”
“—‘a girl on the track. That would be good.’ That’s all the bitch said.”
“I stepped up,” Sunny says, “saying I’d sing something on it. We weren’t even thinking of it being a big deal. More a present to Dart. For when we found him, to make—”
“Like a souvenir,” Glenn says, “from the trip.”
“Eva and Ron saw the money,” says Sunny with a cackle.
“Recognized Dart’s talent and potential as a superstar. He was positive. Sun is positive. It was a tough time—Tupac and Biggie had been dead a year, we were all still reeling. It was time for some old-fashioned rhythm and blues.”
Then Addison gets up and leaves me with Glenn. I ask her if she’s happy.
“I can’t complain,” she says. “And if I did, who would listen?”
“Your fiancé must listen.”
“He’s the only one.”
Sunny rushes back out with a CD. She slides it into the system she has built into the outer wall of her pool house. The first bluesy notes of the Rain Song come streaming from the big speakers.