by Rick James
Tanya, far wiser than me, whispered, “Find out what she wants, Rick. She could mean trouble.”
“Okay,” I said to M. “What do you want?”
“Two thousand in cash and a shopping spree in Beverly Hills.”
I laughed. I thought she was gonna say two hundred thousand. She was thinking more in terms of five thousand. This was a nickel-dime shakedown, something I didn’t need to worry about.
“I’m going to bed, bitch,” I told M, “and when I wake up I ain’t even gonna remember talking to you.”
“Don’t blow me off.”
“I’m not blowing you off, I’m just going back to sleep.”
Tanya and I probably slept thirty hours straight. When we woke up, we headed back to L.A. to score more dope. We went to a dealer in Inglewood. We were seated in front of his big-screen TV, blasted on blow and booze, when I felt Tanya stiffen up next to me. She had been listening to the TV while I’d been nodding out.
“Rick!” she cried. “They’re talking about us!”
The reporter was saying that Rick James, “already facing charges of drug possession, kidnapping, and torture”—referring to our pending case—“has new legal problems. He and his twenty-one-year-old girlfriend, Tanya Hijazi, are being sought in another incident at a local hotel where James and Ms. Hijazi allegedly assaulted a thirty-two-year-old West Hollywood woman.”
Inside my head, I went crazy. I wanted to go find M and murder her. What kind of bitch would file assault charges after smoking my crack and hanging out with me and Tanya for days after the assault? Later I learned that M’s roommate was a lawyer looking to score. With this shit all over the TV screen—with mug shots of me and talk of the cops chasing me down—it was hard not to panic.
I called a few friends I could trust. They all confirmed my gut instinct. We had to turn ourselves in. If there was a dragnet, we’d never make it out of town. And even if we did, how long could we duck and hide? I was too well-known. Eventually someone would drop a dime on my ass.
Problem, though, was that it was Friday night. If we gave ourselves up we’d have to spend the weekend in the can. There’d be no hope of bail till Monday. Neither of us wanted to spend forty-eight hours in jail separated from each other—and separated from the pipe. So we copped as much of the dealer’s dope as possible and planned on one more lost weekend.
We put on disguises, and rather than take a chance on driving, we walked the streets of Inglewood, a crazy crack couple in search of some anonymous hot-sheet motel. We found one just off the freeway. Forty bucks a night. Moth-eaten bedspreads and pee-stained rugs. Seedy as seedy gets. We didn’t care. We had our stash and forty-eight hours to stay plastered.
The high was hell. We kept watching the broken-down TV for news flashes. Soon as the picture came on, it’d fade out. Same for the sound. We heard bits of our story and saw flashes of our faces. But we didn’t catch it all. Paranoia attacked us like the flu. We were sweating and shaking. Around three A.M. we thought we heard sirens. Was it from the TV or real life? We saw flashing lights. I peeped through the curtains and saw that a SWAT team was surrounding the motel. The manager must have turned us in. What the fuck to do? We climbed out the bathroom window and dropped down into the shrubbery. We stayed there, expecting the SWAT to start screaming at us through a bullhorn. But those screams never came. The SWAT team went away. But maybe they hadn’t been there to begin with. Maybe my fucked-up mind was seeing things.
When dawn broke, we were more trashed than at any time in our lives. All we had were a few Valiums. We swallowed them and waited for the calming effects. When the calm came we used it to walk to the nearest cop station to turn ourselves in. We slept in our jail cells for three straight days.
On the fourth day I posted bond. We moved in with Tanya’s mother, our staunchest supporter, where we stayed while the long legal drama unfolded.
Everything was gone—my reputation, my money, my dignity. I had lost my self-respect long ago. Now it was nothing but self-disgust. I had my woman Tanya but knew that I was the one who’d dragged her down into the pits of hell.
What was there worth fighting for?
What was there worth living for?
I looked at the big picture:
This adventure began in 1948 in Buffalo, New York, when a boy-child was born to a wonderful woman who worked hard so that he might have a life easier than hers. The boychild became a manchild who managed to turn that life from triumph to tragedy. In 1993, in the forty-fifth year of that life, the manchild was down to two choices—suicide and jail.
JAIL
Tell me how you managed to get such little time for such big convictions,” Brotha Guru says to me as we sit in a corner of the yard of Folsom prison. The Northern California sky is overcast, but the chill in the air feels good. It feels good to breathe fresh air.
“First of all, the bastards tried to get Tanya to testify against me, and she wouldn’t.”
“She proved loyal.”
“She proved strong. When that bitch kicked Tanya in the stomach, we lost our baby, but that motivated Tanya even more to be a good mother to Taz. So she took a deal that’s gonna get her out in two years.”
“What about your deal?” asks Brotha Guru. “How did it come down?”
“The original court, in Malibu, was liberal as a motherfucker. But at the last minute I was switched to San Fernando, which had a ninety-eight percent conviction rate. I was nailed on two charges—assault and kidnapping. They wanted to get me on torture but that was dropped. Torture could have gotten me life. Then the negotiations started. I was offered eight years, but something told me to turn that down. I had this gut feeling I could do better. I did do better, thanks to a cat I met through Jim Brown—Dwayne Moody. Dwayne had had similar legal problems to mine and hooked me up with Tom Owens, a private detective, who gathered evidence that the chicks who had testified against me had been compensated in one form or another. It was Tom’s badass detective work that got my sentence reduced to five years. With good behavior, I was told I’d be out in two.”
“And here you are, almost at the end of your prison journey.”
“Did I tell you about the beginning of the journey?” I ask Brotha Guru.
“You said you started out in L.A. County.”
Prison wasn’t anything new for me. I’d been in before and I knew how to deal with the shit. Because I’m a celebrity, I knew I’d have certain protections and privileges—and I did. I also knew I needed to get clean, and prison was the only way. Prison would only make me stronger. I had no doubt I’d get through twenty-four months without breaking down.
My breakdown happened on January 17, 1994, at four thirty in the morning. The walls of the prison began to shake violently. The floor began to sway. I was thrown out of my bunk. Prisoners—hardened criminals—began screaming like frightened babies. An earthquake was rocking the massive building from side to side. The corrections officers ran outside, leaving us alone. I was certain the ceiling would cave in on my head. I was certain I’d be trapped in this fuckin’ cell and die a slow and agonizing death. I began sobbing and praying. I completely lost it. And even when the shaking stopped, I was still covered in fear. The aftershocks only reinforced the fear. It’s one thing to be in an earthquake; it’s another to be in a tiny jail cell, locked up and unable to run, when the quake hits. It took me weeks to lose this horrible feeling of impending doom. I was a nervous wreck.
What saved me was a transfer from county to the California Rehabilitation Center, a minimum-security prison they call Camp Snoopy. I lived in a dorm, got to play sports all day, and attended decent therapy sessions, group and individual. It was a humane situation.
The only bad day at Camp Snoopy happened courtesy of an Aryan-power fucker. He didn’t like that I was recruited on his baseball team. After a game he suckered me into the bathroom. He thought he’d teach me a lesson. But I drew on my experience as a YMCA boxer back in Buffalo and beat the shit out of him. Once he was down, I was
about to kick in his ribs when a brotha stopped me and said, “Rick, you got short time here. Don’t mess up by putting this cat in the hospital.” The brotha was right. I backed off. From that day on, though, my reputation was sealed. Don’t fuck with Rick.
After nearly nine months, the woman warden sent me to Folsom. The bitch never liked me. She thought I had attitude.
“Did you?” asks Brotha Guru, interrupting my story.
“Sure. It’s attitude that got me through.”
“Or attitude that got you in.”
“I’ve survived, haven’t I?”
“When you got here, you made a helluva stir.”
“You heard about that?”
“Who didn’t? It was big news that Rick James had come to Folsom. Were you scared?”
“A little. County and Camp Snoopy had been a breeze. But Folsom had this reputation as the hard-core prison in the state. I remember walking through the yard my first day. All the cats stopped talking. They stopped lifting weights and turned to look at me. I didn’t know what the fuck they were thinking. Then one guy yelled, ‘Hey, Rick, come to Five Building,’ and another screamed, ‘No, man, Four Building is the jam. Have them put you in Four Building.’ Soon everyone was shouting to get me into their building. They started singing ‘Mary Jane’ and ‘You and I’ and shouting my name like I was Muhammad Ali.”
“Wasn’t there some big commotion when you wound up here in Building Two?” asks Brotha Guru.
“That happened because of this fat redneck guard who brought me over here. When I asked him if I could call my lawyers, he gave me shit. He said, ‘Sing me a song, boy, and maybe I’ll let you.’ Well, with all the prisoners listening, I made up a song on the spot:
Well, I guess here in Folsom I gotta figure
This big fat redneck guard don’t like niggas
“The guys in their cells screamed and clapped. The guard was humiliated. A little later three female guards—one Puerto Rican, one black, one white—came to see me. They heard I’d just arrived and wanted to hear me sing. I went into ‘Ebony Eyes’ and they started swooning, ‘That’s my song!’ I sang some more songs and by the time I was through every nigga in the joint was my best friend.”
“That’s when you became king of Folsom,” says Brotha Guru.
“You know how it went down. All the power cats wanted to get next to me. They threw a blanket of love over me. The 415, the Crips, the Bloods, even the fuckin’ Aryan cats thought I was cool. For a while I heard the Mexican Mafia had a hit out on me. That got me worried until the head Mexican came to me and said, ‘That’s bullshit, Rick. I’ve been locked up in this motherfucker for twenty-five years and your music helped me get through this shit. I ain’t letting no one touch you.’ ”
“I heard that some of the guards had it out for you.”
“They did until I let them know that my cousin Louis Stokes is one of the most powerful cats in the U.S. Congress.”
“So now you’re all set.”
“One of the lady corrections officers got me an acoustic guitar and lets me play for hours in a room behind the library. She even snuck in a tape recorder for me. Since I been locked up, I’ve written over three hundred songs.”
“That’s beautiful.”
“And I don’t gotta tell you, Brotha Guru, that I got all the steak, escargot, and champagne I want.”
“Doesn’t that champagne mess with your sobriety, Rick?”
“Booze was never my problem. Blow was the problem. Haven’t had any blow in my body for nearly two years.”
“And soon you’ll be outta here.”
“In just a couple of weeks.”
“You worried?”
“What should I be worried about?”
“That Me Monster.”
“You still on that Me Monster kick?”
“I’m believing that you got to the truth. It wasn’t no Mexican Mafia that had a hit out on you. It wasn’t the Aryan Brotherhood. But it was—and it still is—someone. I think it’s the Me Monster, Rick. I think that’s the motherfucker that wants to do you in.”
“Too late.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve already gotten through this prison thing. If the earthquake didn’t kill me, if the redneck guards and the crazy prisoners didn’t kill me, I ain’t worried about nothing.”
“Not even going out on drugs again?”
“No, sir. I know better. That shit is behind me.”
The thing that made me confident was my new family. Tanya’s mom had taken Taz to see me nearly every weekend at Folsom. He was a beautiful child and gave me reason to live. Tanya and I wrote each other hundreds of letters. Our love was stronger than ever, and we planned to marry soon as I was released. She got out first and started planning the wedding. She fucked up, though, when she got caught stealing a pair of shoes for her bridal shower. That parole violation sent her back to county jail. That meant I’d have to raise Taz alone until her release. Her mom would help, but I was still nervous. I’d been dreaming of freedom—but freedom meant I’d have a million choices. I wanted to make the right ones.
I wanted to get straight and stay straight.
STRAIGHT
Straight is the gate,” said Jesus, “and narrow the way that leads unto life, and few there be that find it.”
I wanted to find it.
One of the beautiful things I did in jail was to learn more about the great sages—Jesus, Buddha, Confucius. I studied the life of Muhammad. I read the Koran and felt myself deeply drawn to Islam. I realized that wisdom is required to get through this life. I knew that Brotha Guru, in his warnings about the Me Monster, was talking about the need to believe in something bigger than myself. I did believe. I was willing to submit to God. I wanted to be released, as they say in the program, from the burden of self.
And yet, upon release from prison, I needed to feel good about myself. I needed to know that I was still wanted by the public and loved by my fans. I needed to be reassured that my old friends were still there and ready to re-embrace me.
They were.
After Tanya’s release from county jail, we married at the end of 1997. It was a small wedding at our house. Our marriage came as the result of deep love but also practicality. We were both felons, and felons aren’t allowed to live together if either is on parole. My parole officer urged us to marry or else risk another prison sentence.
That same year saw the release of an album that gave me more satisfaction than any other. I was gratified that a major label, Mercury/Polygram, wanted me and was willing to let me produce it myself. They trusted me as an artist.
I recruited my main man, Danny LeMelle, to help me write, produce, and arrange the record. Danny had been with me for years and understood my music as well as anyone.
My concept was big. Following in the footsteps of Marvin Gaye, I wanted to do my own What’s Going On. I wanted to create a suite of songs and tell a long-form story that would be a permanent part of our musical heritage. Where Marvin’s concept album concerned his brother Frankie’s return to America from Vietnam, mine would focus on my return from prison. I called it Urban Rapsody.
It opens with a Marvin-esque, Gershwin-esque mood piece, the title track, “Urban Rapsody.” The rap is by 4-Tay, who lets you know that I’m using all the tools of cutting-edge hip-hop. For a long time I had an attitude about rap. I thought all the rapping and sampling was adopted by people who, because they couldn’t sing, had to figure out some other shit. Over the years, though, I realized that rapping and sampling were their own art forms. Of course it helped that, years before, MC Hammer’s use of “Super Freak” in “U Can’t Touch This” made me a shitload of money. That did wonders for my appreciation of sampling. Beyond that, though, I realized that music always grows and I wanted to grow along with it. I wanted Urban Rapsody to go forward even as it referred to the past.
I saw “West Coast Thang” as my return to L.A., to the sunshine and the palm trees and yes, the fine bitche
s I’d missed in prison. I needed to let the world know that the Rick James character, the man who knew how to party, was back, “sippin’ gin and juice, blowing some Mary Jane, and talking about our future.”
“Somebody’s Watching You” took the story back to my jail days when the corrections officers were giving me shit and I gave them shit back. The song’s about the paranoia that clings to you during prison and the years that follow.
“Back in You Again” was a happy track written for the film Money Talks. I saw the preview with the movie’s star, Chris Tucker. We became fast friends and the tune turned out to be, in part, the story of my love for Tanya: “Glad to say that I miss your sexy ways / Here I am girl back in you again / Since I’ve been gone I thought about you every day . . . One minute I’m in jail, the next I’m on the run . . . but suddenly I’m free.” The song proved prophetic, at least in the short run.
Some songs, like “Turn It Out,” were sex fantasies I had about Tanya when I was locked up, while other songs, like “Good Ol Days,” sung with Charlie Wilson of the Gap Band and my girl Joanne from the Mary Jane Girls, were pure nostalgia.
Bobby Womack joined me on “Player’s Way.” Bobby’s one of the baddest soul singers ever, and he helped me gain back the confidence I needed to put this jam in the pocket. I love Snoop Dogg, who wrote a super-hip rap that smoothed out the track with a cool contemporary feel.
I wrote “Never Say You Love Me” for me and Teena Marie. It was gonna be the next Rick/Teena big thing after “Fire and Desire.” At the time Teena was living with my sister Penny. Penny and I got into an argument—can’t even remember what about—and Teena wouldn’t sing with me until I made up with Penny. I said, “Fuck it,” and got JoJo McDuffie Funderburg, who sang it beautifully. Before the album came out though, I remembered how much I loved Teena and dedicated the song to her.
“So Soft So Wet” is more late-night jailhouse super-horny sex music, written when Tanya sent me some outrageous pictures of her. Instead of jacking off, I wrote this song. I saw it as a musical ejaculation.