“I said yes because I felt I owed it to Keenen because he was wonderful to me,” says Perez. “But I didn’t like the job. I wasn’t good at it. I was too young to take on that amount of responsibility. They needed a professional manager. It wasn’t fair to the girls.”
The whole music project had begun a year earlier, before Lopez even joined. Gold had contacted Jeff Ayeroff, a music executive who’d cofounded Virgin’s U.S. label, and told him about this idea to turn the Fly Girls into pop stars. Ayeroff had some experience with such transformations. One of his first signings at Virgin was former L.A. Lakers cheerleader-turned-choreographer Paula Abdul. Ayeroff and Gemma Corfield, who worked in A&R at Virgin, came to a rehearsal to hear the Fly Girls sing.
“I have to be diplomatic about it,” says Ayeroff, laughing. “They couldn’t sing, weren’t the right age, and weren’t as attractive as I’d like. So, I said, ‘You gotta go find some other people to do this.’ ”
Not long after, Ayeroff got another call from Gold. “I found the girl,” Gold told him. He meant Lopez.
At that point, both Ayeroff and Corfield thought there was potential. But the recording project seemed to aggravate already existing tensions within the group. Keenen charged Perez with deciding who should be the lead singer. Deidre Lang had experience as a singer, but Perez thought she sounded “too Broadway.” Carrie Ann Inaba had been a pop star in Japan in her teens, but Perez found her voice “too pageant-sounding.” Lisa Marie Todd wasn’t a trained singer, but was game to try. Cari French wasn’t too enthused about the entire prospect: She suggested turning her microphone off. That left Lopez, whom Perez felt was “very pitchy but had a commercial tone.” In the end, Perez passed the decision to Keenen, who decreed that Lopez, Lang, and Inaba should share lead singing duties. Seth Riggs, a vocal coach who’s worked with Michael Jackson, Prince, Barbra Streisand, and Madonna, was enlisted to help iron out the considerable kinks.
“We were having individual sessions as well as group sessions,” says Todd. “They weren’t playing around. There was a game plan of how we’re going to formulate this group and merchandise it all.”
Perez helped recruit producers and songwriters, including Dallas Austin, who’d worked with Boyz II Men, Bell Biv DeVoe, and Janet Jackson.
“We flew to New York and had a meeting at Virgin,” says Todd. They met with a young Sean “Puffy” Combs and A Tribe Called Quest’s Q-Tip. “This was before Puffy was P. Diddy. I didn’t know who he was. I was like, ‘Puffy and Q-Tip? What kinds of names are these?’ ”
The group spent time practicing and even recorded some demos. As to the quality of those recordings, Perez didn’t think much of them. “It was bad,” she says. “That’s what I remember about it. Some of the girls were into it, some weren’t. I wasn’t.”
According to Gold though, it wasn’t the music that sank the Virgin deal, but rather an incident so absurd, it’s hard to believe any part of it could be true. In Gold’s telling, the Girls had a meeting with Ayeroff at Virgin’s Beverly Hills offices. At the time, Paula Abdul was one of the label’s top artists: Her 1989 album Forever Your Girl had spawned four number one singles; the 1991 follow-up Spellbound had gone triple platinum, and she’d become a national spokesperson for Diet Coke. Most of the Fly Girls knew her personally, at least in passing, as did Perez. In fact, at the 1990 Emmys, after Perez lost to Abdul for Best Choreography, Abdul tracked down Perez to graciously tell her the award should’ve been hers. As Keenen recalled, Rosie’s response was simple and to the point: “I know.”
Despite Abdul’s huge and somewhat unlikely success, recently she’d been beset by bad PR. In April 1991, one of her backup singers sued Virgin, saying it was actually her voice, not Abdul’s, singing the lead on several of her hits. In Living Color, as the show was wont to do, piled on. A vicious musical parody of Abdul’s hit “Promise of a New Day,” retitled “Promise of a Thin Me,” mocked her troubles, her struggles with her weight, and her romantic relationship with Arsenio Hall. (Sample lyric: “My voice is bad and my singing’s a joke/I still make millions off of Diet Coke/How do I sing on key?/Others do it with me.”) Perez says she begged off choreographing the sketch, which featured a few Fly Girls, handing the work to her assistant.
“It was kind of cruel,” she says. “I respected Paula so much. Keenen was like, ‘Get over it. It’s comedy. It’s not personal.’ But I was like, ‘If that was me, I’d die.’ ”
The irony, of course, was that the transition Abdul had made—from dancer to pop star—was exactly the one the Fly Girls were attempting. As Gold recalls, during a break from their meeting with Ayeroff, some of the Girls went to the bathroom.
“The girls go into the bathroom and start talking shit about Paula Abdul,” says Gold. As karma would have it, at that very moment, in one of the other bathroom stalls, was none other than Paula Abdul. “Out of the stall comes Paula, who walks into Jeff Ayeroff’s office and says, ‘They go or I go.’ Virgin dropped them.”
Keenen laughs when asked about the story, and is cagey about his memory of it. “It wasn’t the Fly Girls, but there was someone who was part of this whole situation that was in the bathroom talking shit about Paula,” he says. “And Paula was in the bathroom.”
Though Gold swears by it and Keenen somewhat confirms it, neither Todd nor French has any memory of the incident. Nor does Ayeroff or Corfield. But like most myths, there might be at least a grain of truth in it.
“I’m sure if Paula heard about us signing another girl group she would’ve been pissed,” says Corfield. “Certainly, when we signed Janet Jackson, we had to give Paula her own label.”
To Ayeroff, the idea of Abdul freaking out about the Fly Girls being on the label is completely plausible. “That makes total sense. The fact she was in the bathroom while they were talking smack, that’s like something from a bad Jon Cryer movie.” He says that they would’ve likely had a discussion with Abdul before finalizing a deal with the Fly Girls, “because you don’t want to kill the goose who’s laying the golden egg.”
Even with the Virgin deal dead, the Fly Girls’ prospects as recording artists weren’t totally smothered. According to Gold, Benny Medina—then best known as the inspiration for Will Smith’s character in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air—brought the group to Warner Bros. and their odyssey continued for a while.
The persistent interest in the Fly Girls had as much to do with In Living Color’s exalted status as an arbiter of black culture as it did anything else. Perez’s batting average on Season 3’s musical guests was even better than in past seasons: Performers included A Tribe Called Quest, Eric B & Rakim, Jodeci, and Black Sheep. Big Daddy Kane, whose performance of “Ooh, Aah, Nah-Nah-Nah” featured dozens jammed onstage with him, says that the show had earned real respect within rap circles.
“Keenen kept it hood,” says Kane. “He had a DJ. He had chicks in biker shorts doing hip-hop dances. It was introducing a lot of elements of hip-hop to people that weren’t aware of hip-hop.”
The show had earned a reputation as, if not quite a star-maker, then certainly a necessary stop on the way to stardom for aspiring rappers. “It was huge for us,” says Black Sheep MC Andres “Dres” Titus. “There weren’t many accolades higher than that. Getting asked to perform on In Living Color or Arsenio was the pinnacle as far as a hip-hop event. It was a bridge and helped us a great deal as far as middle America and putting a face with the artist.”
Perez says Black Sheep’s performance of what was then barely a hit but later became one of the era’s defining songs, “The Choice Is Yours,” was among her favorites in the show’s entire run. “It was the first time the entire cast got into the performance. They joined in the part, ‘Engine engine number 9 . . .’ It was just so fantastic.”
Dres remembers the thrill of watching the cast dance along with him. “I remember seeing Jim Carrey dancing and it making me chuckle,” he says. “It was kind of obvious he was a standout amongst their cast. Seeing him so animated to something we
created, to me, was really funny.”
After the performance Dres says Jamie Foxx invited him to his dressing room. “He had a keyboard set up with an amp,” says Dres. “He wanted me to hear him sing.” Dres was skeptical. “Then when he started playing and singing, I was blown away.”
Foxx buttonholed many musical guests, singing or pressing demo tapes on them. At one point that third season, Teddy Riley, who was then part of the R&B group Guy, but had also produced and written for Keith Sweat, Bobby Brown, Heavy D, and Big Daddy Kane, was backstage during a taping. Foxx spotted him just as he was leaving.
“I grab my demo cassette tape, but I’m dressed as Wanda,” Foxx said. “So I’m running down the hall. ‘Yo, Ted!’ This nigga turns around and sees titties and size twenty-one pumps. He’s like, ‘What the fuck?’ I said, ‘Yo, Ted, I want you to check my music out. I do music.’ He goes, ‘Impossible.’ ”
In one of the season’s more electric moments, Heavy D & the Boyz perform a raucous rendition of “You Can’t See What I See,” with Flavor Flav chiming in on the chorus, and Tupac Shakur and Sean “Puffy” Combs—both then still young unknowns—nodding their heads, dancing, and occasionally shouting along in the background. Toward the end of the song, Tupac and Combs—who later became such bitter rivals that Combs was accused by some of having Shakur murdered—are arm in arm, bouncing up and down ecstatically.
“It was the Golden Era,” says Dres. “Hip-hop at the time was still very new to commercial airwaves. It was the beginnings of this happening, the beginnings of an ad agency being able to look at our genre as something more than something played on radio in inner cities late at night. In Living Color was one of the bridges making it accepted, a platform to perform for South Dakota or Minnesota or Florida—places that wasn’t going to get it otherwise.”
By the third season, In Living Color had become almost like a salon where the people who were important in black America and the people who wanted to be important came to hang out, laugh, be seen, make deals, and swap ideas. Rappers on the come-up, like Tupac and Biggie Smalls, stopped by, as did once and future R&B stars, like TLC and Mary J. Blige. It was also a hangout of choice for young actors and comics, like Denzel Washington and Martin Lawrence. Leroy “Twist” Casey, a childhood friend of Shawn Wayans, who took over as the show’s DJ when Shawn was promoted to the cast, recalls that the next generation of black comics, guys like Chris Tucker, Chris Spencer, and Alex Thomas, were often backstage soaking it all in.
It wasn’t just entertainers. Michael Anthony Snowden recalls seeing Mae Jemison, the first black female astronaut, and Angela Davis, the iconic black power activist who’d once been on the FBI’s Most Wanted List for her alleged role in a dramatic 1970 kidnapping and shootout in a California courthouse. (She was later acquitted.)
“Angela Davis came and what was funny is I had on a Malcolm X T-shirt,” says Snowden. “She looked at the shirt and just [approvingly] shook her head.”
One person who never really stopped by was Eddie Murphy, but in a way, he was there all the time. His influence was all over the show. In some ways he was its silent godfather.
“If Eddie Murphy didn’t emerge on SNL, there would be no In Living Color,” says Tamara Rawitt, who had first met Keenen while working for Murphy. “He gave Keenen the idea for Sucka. Eddie was supportive of Damon and Chris Rock because he believed in their innate talent. All things emanate from Eddie Murphy. Eddie is the Plymouth Rock for this generation of comedy.”
While the show was basking in the loving glow of the black community’s approval, it was simultaneously trying to broaden its audience. Steve Park was hired in part to make ILC less of an African-American-centered sketch show. The first two seasons had been sketch comedy from a black point of view, but there were generally only two possible targets of their satire: black people or white people. The reasons to open up the scope probably had more to do with giving the writers and cast fresh ideas than any sort of nod toward broader representation, but at any rate, Park put more ethnicities on the table. He played a kung fu master, a ninja, Connie Chung, and the comically narcissistic Tommy Wu, based on a real-life infomercial star. In one of his best moments on the show, he plays the head of a Korean family who opens a bodega next door to a restaurant run by the Hedleys, the hardworking family of Jamaican immigrants featured in previous “Hey Mon” sketches. Park’s character is basically an extension of the shopkeeper he portrayed in Do the Right Thing, but this time he plays the industrious Korean immigrant archetype purely for laughs. He had some mixed feelings about conforming to pre-existing notions about Asians, but also knew what he’d signed up for.
“That was the nature of that show,” he says. “We were doing stereotypes completely in your face so I felt like I had to dive in headfirst. I couldn’t be lukewarm about it. I had to commit to these characters I was playing.” Still, at times, he was ill at ease. “I remember feeling a lot of responsibility to the Asian-American community to have as much integrity as I could and not let myself get used to the point where I was doing something insulting. That was a really fine line I was always walking.”
Besides walking that line, Park was dealing with the garden-variety difficulties of being a new face on the show. “It was extremely intimidating,” he says. “It’s like going to a party and everybody knows each other. Just getting comfortable, being completely star-struck by everyone, and then trying to perform in the middle of that was really challenging. I was dealing with massive insecurities and that atmosphere was extremely competitive.”
He gravitated toward the show’s other new guy, Foxx, and the two hung out a bit, but they were decidedly different personalities. Foxx, a former star high school quarterback, seemed to thrive in the hyper-aggressive environment, while Park constantly felt like “whatever I was doing I needed to amp it up 100, 200, 300 percent. That’s not something that comes naturally to me. It was a little traumatic.”
The show had also hoped to bring in a Latino cast member and by most accounts had their sights set on John Leguizamo. In early 1991, Leguizamo began performing a one-man show in New York called Mambo Mouth, in which he played an array of Latino characters. Tamara Rawitt and Keenen flew out to New York to see Mambo Mouth during its first week.
“Leguizamo was dazzling,” she says. “Versatile, fearless, fierce—all his characters and his entire body of work is based on his ethnicity. He could’ve carried a third of the show on his back with all his characters.”
All signs pointed toward him joining the cast. Eric Gold confirms that the show “tried very hard to get Leguizamo to come in.” Firestein says that the courting was a long, drawn-out, will-he-or-won’t-he process.
“We’d always hear the name Leguizamo around the hallways,” Firestein says, “because Fox was always looking for What’s the next big thing? I’m going to overstate it and say he was like a holy grail because as the show was going to grow over time, it wasn’t just going to be African-American culture. We wanted to expand the show to Latinos, so he was like the golden goose.” Writers were even assigned to write sketches for Leguizamo in hopes of enticing him.
Leguizamo himself had few reservations. “I was a huge, huge fan,” he says. “I wanted to do it, they wanted me to do it.” Yet, it never happened. He says, in retrospect, the people around him scuttled the deal. “Your representation talks in your ear and the whole thing gasses up your head,” he says. “My handlers at the time said, ‘You’re blowing up, John! You’ve got to do your own thing! You’ve got to have your own show! You gotta do you!’ I got talked out of doing it. I was young and gullible.”
25
“We Were Horrible to the Censors”
On September 28, 1991, Jesse Jackson appeared on Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update,” reading from Dr. Seuss’s classic children’s book Green Eggs and Ham. Jackson’s performance is note-perfect: He’s stern-faced and serious throughout, at one moment removing his glasses for effect, and at another banging his hand on the desk for emphas
is. It got big laughs. Most everyone saw the cameo as a well-conceived, well-executed, if ultimately lightweight, bit. Keenen saw something more sinister.
He’d already taped a remarkably similar cold open for In Living Color. In it, Keenen plays Jesse Jackson selling a line of Dr. Seuss–like children’s books with titles like “Hop On Cop,” “Horton Hears a Ho,” and “Green Eggs and the Guv’ment Cheese.” The sketches aren’t identical, but the joke at their core is. Larry Wilmore, who wrote ILC’s Jesse Jackson sketch, recalls watching SNL that night in disbelief.
“I’m like, ‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding me! How could this happen?’ ” he says. “I’d already written my sketch and we’d already shot it, but our show wasn’t live.” His Jesse Jackson sketch aired two weeks after SNL’s. “But I wrote it like a month before.”
At the time, some writers said Keenen was convinced SNL head writer Jim Downey had bugged his phone and stolen the idea. Even more than twenty years later, Keenen still finds the whole incident highly suspect.
“Two people don’t get that idea at the same time,” he says. “Saturday Night Live didn’t make fun of black celebrities. They didn’t have people on the show they utilized in that capacity. It didn’t seem consistent with Saturday Night Live. I’m not accusing them of stealing but it raised that suspicion.” A Spy magazine story from a couple years later painted Keenen’s paranoia about SNL as part of a larger pattern of wild theories that included the belief that certain vegetables enhance sexual prowess, watermelon helps prevent hair loss, and that, in addition to SNL, Keenen was also being watched by the CIA. Les Firestein says the magazine story was “mostly true,” but also notes that while Keenen had plenty of seemingly odd ideas about food and health, he might’ve been onto something. “As a result of Keenen’s paranoia, today he looks younger than when we did the show.”
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