by Rick James
During my trip to the Vanguard and the Apollo, I had me an epiphany. Brotha, I had me a vision. I wanted John Coltrane’s sacred spirit and Jackie Wilson’s sexual energy. I wanted Trane’s imagination and Jackie’s syncopation. I wanted to be honored like Trane as a great artist and be worshipped like Jackie as a great lover. I wanted it all.
“What you gonna get,” said Mom when I came back to Buffalo late the next day, “is a whipping like you never got before.”
The whipping was serious, but the trip was worth it. I had been in the presence of genius. The standards had been set. Now I was on the move. Every few weeks I’d scrounge up some money to hop the bus back to New York. I needed to hear Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers do “Moanin’ ” at Birdland and see Chubby Checker doing “The Twist” at the Peppermint Lounge. The pattern set in: I’d come home, get a beating from Mom, then go back out again. Finally, she had enough. She sent the cops after me. They found me hiding in the tiny bathroom in the back of the Buffalo Greyhound station and hauled me off to a juvenile delinquent home. Mom came to visit.
“Why?” was the first thing she asked. “Why you always running, son?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I get antsy. I need to get out and see the world. There’s music I need to hear.”
“There’s music in Buffalo.”
“Not like New York.”
“But your family’s in Buffalo. Your family’s all you got. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do.”
“And you know I love you.”
“I know that too, Mom.”
“Then stop all this nonsense before something real bad happens.”
I stayed quiet.
“Did you hear me, James?”
“I heard you, Mom.”
“And you’ll listen to me?”
“I will.”
I didn’t. I got into deeper devilment. I started running with one of the gangs at school. I did that because the danger excited me. I did that to show the tough guys that I wasn’t scared of nothing.
It was all about action and music. I didn’t have an instrument to play so I took Mom’s broom and strummed it like a guitar until all the straw fell out on the kitchen floor. When Mom saw what I had done, she broke out the iron cord. Another whipping. I took that anger and put it into a gang fight. In one of those rumbles, a kid got shot. I wasn’t the shooter, but, along with three others, I was arrested and spent three months back in the juvie. When I got out, Mom was so furious she went for the iron cord again. But by then I was too old for a beating and far stronger than her. I caught her hand and held it. This look of bewilderment came over her eyes. Then came the tears. I couldn’t stand seeing Mom cry. But tears or no tears, that woman wasn’t going to beat me again.
The mood of our household—reflecting the mood of my mother—went from low to high in a New York minute.
“Guess what, baby?” she said one Sunday when she and her boyfriend, Al Gladden, came out of her bedroom.
“What?”
“Me and Al are getting married. Ain’t that wonderful?”
I didn’t know what to say. I felt like I was losing my mother to another man. At the same time, I’d been noticing that the more she was with Al back there in her bedroom, the less angry she was with me. Al helped her moods. Al also got her pregnant and got me a little baby sister, Penny. Penny brought joy to the family—she was everybody’s baby doll—and Al brought us to our first real house with a front and back yard. It was on Ferry Street, in a better black hood than we were used to. The only drawback was that Al’s mama, daddy, brother, and sister lived on the second floor. Each of them weighed at least three hundred pounds. It was like living under elephants. Every time they took a step, the ceiling shook like it was about to cave in. They were also Holy Roller Christians who looked down at us as sinners. Mom’s marriage was working out—except for his heavy drinking, Al was a cool guy—but the living arrangement was all wrong. I was still looking to escape.
Other than my gang exploits, my big escape was music. At Bennett High, I was a decent jock but I could never compete with someone like Bob Lanier, the star of our basketball team, who’d go on to NBA glory with the Detroit Pistons. In music, though, I figured I could compete with anyone, even the great John Coltrane. I just needed a sax of my own. But Mr. Hillard, our music teacher, said all the saxes were taken. So I went to a set of drums and started banging away. I must have been playing for ten minutes before Mr. Hillard came over and said, “Not bad, James. Where’d you learn to play?”
“Taught myself.”
“Let me hear you do a double paradiddle.”
“A double what?”
“It’s an essential drum rudiment. You have to learn the rudiments.”
“Why? I can already knock out a killer groove.”
“Strong rhythm is essential, but it isn’t everything.”
“Well, I wanna know everything.”
“Then stick around, James.”
I tried but couldn’t stick around for long. Mr. Hillard, a Juilliard graduate, had a lot of information that went over my head. Even the words he used—like “polyrhythms” and “complex time signature”—got my head to swimming. I didn’t have the patience to learn out of a book. I didn’t want to spend my time exercising the muscles in my fingers. I just wanted to groove!
Mr. Hillard and I went back and forth. He said the groove wasn’t enough. I said the groove was the magic: that’s why Trane could keep riffing for a half hour on the same song. Elvin Jones’s groove locked him in. Same thing with James Brown. His grooves were monsters. I was also deep into the Latin grooves of Mongo Santamaria and Willie Bobo.
The midsixties, my teen years, was the time that Motown, just across Lake Erie from Buffalo, was grooving like a motherfucker. Those huge hits by the Supremes, the Four Tops, the Temptations, the Miracles, Martha and the Vandellas, and Marvin Gaye came out of the great grooves of a rhythm section that I later learned was anchored by bassist James Jamerson and drummer Benny Benjamin, cats called the Funk Brothers. I knew I was a natural-born funk brother and didn’t need no book learning to prove it.
Mr. Hillard was a good guy who put up with my arrogance as best he could. Hard as he tried, though, he couldn’t get me to study. I might have eventually listened to him were it not for a decision I made during my sophomore year at Bennett. I entered the talent contest. I was nervous as hell, so scared that the night of the show I had to run to the bathroom and throw up. But I was also confident enough to face an auditorium filled with all my teachers, friends, and family. The world was watching me.
My plan was to kill the crowd by keeping it simple. I went onstage with nothing but a drum and a couple of sticks. I set a funk beat and stayed on it a long time before opening my mouth. The groove, accented by rim shots, got the crowd going. Every crowd loves a groove. I decided to sing a song everyone knew—Stevie Wonder’s “Fingertips.” That number has a bongo beat of its own, but I added to that beat—I put my own hurting on it—and gave it a new edge. “Fingertips” is a sing-along-type song, making it easy for me to get the crowd going. It was easy to get them on their feet and shouting, it was easy to get them up dancing in the aisles, easy to get them to make me sing the song a second and third time. Took the principal ten minutes to calm them down. I walked off with first prize, and musically speaking, no one could tell me nothing. Sorry, Mr. Hillard, you’re a cool guy, but I won’t be needing those books of yours. I can make the world dance without ’em.
Came to find out that singing onstage made the girls love me more. After my victory, they were coming after me like moths to the flame. Beautiful butterflies were fluttering around me. From the minute I became a little jive-ass star in high school, it was never enough to have one. Sure, I liked the blue butterfly, but the yellow one was cool and the orange one even cooler. They were all so pretty that I had to have me a collection. And naturally the cats I ran with had to know about my collection. In their eyes, that made me a big
ger man. The bigger my collection, the more time I spent studying their beauty. I skipped a lot of school until Bennett kicked me out.
Welcome to East High, notorious for its juvenile delinquents. I fit right in until I got kicked right out. While I was there, though, I took on another challenge. East had an all-black marching band called the Brown Cadet Corps with riflemen, bugle blowers, and long-legged majorettes. I wanted to see whether I could cut it as a drummer in the corps. I also wanted to wear the super-sharp uniforms—this unit was cleaner than the Board of Health—as well as score some of that juicy majorette pussy. Proud to report that I accomplished both my goals: Marching around the football fields of Western New York, I didn’t drop a beat. And diving into those majorettes, I got me the honey I’d been dreaming of.
East High let me go. My lousy grades, poor attendance, and disrespectful manners with the teachers—who I saw as stuffed shirts and old maids—were too much. I was too bad even for the bad-boy school.
Grover Cleveland was my third and last-stop high school. It was a mix of Italian and chocolate, and the tension was high. They called us niggers and we called them guineas. It wasn’t exactly a level playing field because a couple of the guineas had fathers in the mob. That meant our fighting equipment—mainly switchblades and baseball bats stolen from the gym—didn’t have a chance against the serious handguns holstered under their leather jackets. When Mom caught wind of the coming wars between the black and Italian gangs, she pulled me out of that school before I could quit. She may have saved my life. Two weeks after I was gone there was a nasty rumble where one of my partners got shot through the heart.
My school history came to a screeching halt. I told myself that I’d never have to see the insides of a classroom again—and I was glad. But I was also without a clue. No school, no job, no future.
Sixteen-year-old black boy running the snowy streets of Buffalo, looking to break out.
But what does he make of the world around him? Barry Goldwater is running for president against Lyndon Johnson. The Vietnam War is firing up and the draft is on. Civil rights legislation is being passed and Martin Luther King is in the news, but the hipper cats on the corner are talking about Malcolm X.
Where do I go?
What do I do?
How in hell am I ever gonna get over?
THE CULTURE
We finally got out from under the Gladdens and moved down the street to another house on Ferry. Roy had healed up and turned into an honor student. Carmen had fucked up and was back in prison. Camille had two babies and was living over a fish store with her old man. Cheryl, Alberta, and Penny were growing by leaps and bounds. Brother William was almost tall as me.
I was out on the streets, picking up part-time jobs but mainly gangbanging. The big race riots didn’t happen till 1967, but when I was fifteen in 1963 the rumblings had begun. There was an incident on the East Side where some brothas broke into a big electronics store and started looting. Me and my partners followed them and ran out with a big-ass stereo that we dropped off at my house. We went back for seconds and hauled off three TVs. Next day we pawned off the merchandise for enough money to buy a summer’s worth of weed.
“Smoking all that weed is turning you into a full-fledged knucklehead,” said Malcolm Erni, a black minister who knew Mom ’cause he liked to the play the numbers.
“Weed makes me creative,” I said. “It stimulates my mind.”
“Weed makes you horny,” he said. “It stimulates your dick.”
I couldn’t argue. My stash of girlfriends was up to four—my all-time high.
“Do something useful with your mind,” said Malcolm. “Learn your culture.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Books, literature, politics, history. The black culture is a beautiful culture. Did you know that Jesus was black? Before Jesus, black people’s roots go back to the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Then there’s the Nubian culture, one of the most ancient and brilliant cultures the world has ever known. A black culture. A deep culture. A culture you need to learn about.”
Malcolm spoke with authority. Because I’d never really known a dad, I latched on to him. I liked how he took an interest in me. I liked reading the books on African history that he gave me because it wasn’t part of school. It was part of life. Malcolm would preach and teach on street corners. One day he’d talk about Israel, the next day Egypt. He could break it all down to where you understood. Mom was impressed that for the first time in my life I was actually sitting down and reading books.
I learned that black culture is old as history itself. In fact, it’s the original culture. Malcolm talked about how, without knowing it, white American culture made us feel inferior. The slavery mentality continued long after emancipation. The slavery mentality gave us a complex that, if we didn’t recognize it and work to eliminate it, would impoverish our lives and kill our spirit. Malcolm taught black pride, and I was his best student. I liked him because, even though he was a Christian who’d talk your ear off about Jesus all day long, he didn’t disregard the militant cats angry at racist America. Like Dr. King, Malcolm was definitely a minister for nonviolence, but he understood what was happening in the minds of young black men. We were free to openly express our feelings without judgment.
I started wearing wild-colored dashikis and African jewelry. I studied Swahili. Had me one of the first Afros in Buffalo. And when Malcolm said he wanted to start an Afro center right in the middle of the hood, I was down.
An African drummer from Senegal came in and showed me some grooves on conga. I couldn’t convince the cat that I didn’t have Senegalese relatives. Hell, maybe I did. Amopuza Enza, a dance teacher from the Ivory Coast, showed up with her son Ty. Without a place to stay, I invited them to my house, where Mom gave them Carmen’s old room. I was madly in love with Amopuza, the most exotic woman I’d ever seen. She was tall and elegant in her flowing robes. Her bone structure looked like it had been created by a great sculptor. She was in her thirties, so I gave her respect. But I still dreamed that one day she’d walk into my bedroom and introduce me to the ancient rituals of making love African-style.
Ty was a percussionist and taught me more than Mr. Hillard ever could. Ty was a motherfucker. Never have seen anyone negotiate rhythms like him. He came over with a djembe, a West African hand drum that he’d mastered as a little boy. I learned to play it nearly as good as he did. We’d jam for hours on end. The rhythms of the motherland poured out of me like I was a native.
The Afro Center pointed me in a positive direction. I liked the alternative feel of a culture that was both foreign and familiar. It was like learning about myself. And when Malcolm asked me if I’d help with a picnic, I pitched in, organizing the music and recruiting the girls to cook the food. We were going to start out at noon and stay till midnight. We went to a state park with a beach on Lake Erie not far from Niagara Falls.
The day was beautiful—blues skies, mild temp, the water warm enough for swimming. Must have been forty of us having the time of our lives. Malcolm led a discussion of a book he’d given us to read—The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin. I loved Baldwin’s passion and position—that white society had done everything to make the black man feel weak and inferior.
“You’re right,” said Malcolm, after hearing my synopsis of Baldwin, “but he still professes a Christian love. He still calls for forgiveness. Without forgiveness, we turn bitter. While others attack us from the outside, we turn on ourselves from the inside. We self-destruct.”
I didn’t know it at the time, but Malcolm was describing that force that Brotha Guru would later call the Me Monster. At that same picnic, I also didn’t know that this would be my last day as an active participant in the Afro Center.
By nightfall, we’d had a great time. We swam and ate and built bonfires. We played music, danced, and discussed our pasts and our futures. It was beautiful. Until everything went crazy . . .
We heard a distant scream that sounded like someone was being mu
rdered. We jumped to our feet and looked around. Out of the bushes ran one of dancers, blood all over her face. She’d been beaten. Then came the shouts: “Get the niggers!” Men holding torches were advancing on our campfire. Me, Ty, and the other boys picked up rocks. We were ready to rumble.
“Put those rocks down,” ordered Malcolm, “and get to the bus.”
I wanted to stand our ground and show these crackers what we were made of. I wanted to do to them what they’d done to our sista.
“To the bus!” Malcolm yelled.
Reluctantly, I did what I was told. We made it to the bus and locked the doors. We got on the floor and covered ourselves with blankets because the crackers were smashing the windows. They were rocking the bus. We thought they were going to turn it over and set it on fire. We thought we’d be burned to death. I wasn’t as scared as I was frustrated. I was dying to fight these assholes. If Mom were there, she’d have led the charge. Yet here we were, crouched down like cowards.
After a while the crackers got bored with their taunting and left. Malcolm saw this as a victory. He found a pay phone and called the police, who escorted our bus home. There was no more singing, no more lessons on black pride. Nearly all our women were crying.
I felt like I’d let them down. And I told that to Malcolm.