Speaker 1: Couest Love Supreme is a production of iHeartRadio. This classic
Speaker 1: episode was produced by the team at Pandora. What's up, y'all,
Speaker 1: This is Quest Love and this is QLs classic in
Speaker 1: which we hear at Quest Love Supreme tack into our
Speaker 1: archives to bring you some amazing stories from past episodes.
Speaker 1: This was a really great episode with Ray Parker Jr.
Speaker 1: Talking about his life as a musician, working with Barry White,
Speaker 1: with Stevie Wonder, with sha Ka Khan, hanging with Prince,
Speaker 1: giving Quincy Jones stories, even and even Huey Lewis h
Speaker 1: This is one for the music fans. We really hope
Speaker 1: you enjoyed this Quest Love Supreme episode with Ray Parker Jr.
Speaker 2: So Supremo, Sun sup Supremo, roll call, Suprema su Supremo,
Speaker 2: roll call, Suprema s S Supremo, roll call, Suprema Something Supremo,
Speaker 2: roll call.
Speaker 1: My name is Questo. Yeah that understood.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Let me tell you something, yeah, must it makes me
Speaker 1: feel good?
Speaker 2: Suprema something something Supremo, role called Suprema Son Son Supremo,
Speaker 2: roll call.
Speaker 3: My name is Fante.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: My favorite album is Voodoo. Yeah, because that woman needs love. Yeah,
Speaker 5: just like you Doro Suprema.
Speaker 2: Son Son Suprema. Roll called Suprema something Suprema.
Speaker 4: Roll call.
Speaker 1: My name is Sugar, Yeah, I love to ball.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know my number? Yeah, so who You're gonna call.
Speaker 2: Something something Suprema. Roll call Suprema so something Supremo. Roll call.
Speaker 1: I'm un pay bill.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's something strange. Yeah, you stole my ship.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Braves.
Speaker 2: Suprema, roll call Supreme Supremo role.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, roll call Supreme.
Speaker 3: Roll Supreme.
Speaker 6: So my name yeah, No, I'm not jail.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but if I would, mister Parker, Yeah, I'll go
Speaker 4: up any hill.
Speaker 2: Roll call Supremo. Roll call Suprema so so Supremo.
Speaker 4: Role call.
Speaker 3: My name is Ray, Yeah, Taurus born in me. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm my love is strong. Yeah, brab My gets I
Speaker 3: play with it.
Speaker 2: Supreme Supreme, roll call Supremo, Supremo. Role called Supreme Supremo,
Speaker 2: Role called Supreme.
Speaker 3: Role. We have an amazing show for you today.
Speaker 1: Our guest is someone I really wanted to get it
Speaker 1: on the show since we launched it. He's an incredible
Speaker 1: talented singer, songwriter, guitarist, and producer. He's worked with some
Speaker 1: true legends of soul, including mister Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gabe,
Speaker 1: Barry White, so many more, ladies, gentlemen. Mister Ray Parker Jr.
Speaker 1: Is on the show today. Now before we bring him on,
Speaker 1: let's check it in quickly with Team Supreme. How you doing, ma'am.
Speaker 1: I'm doing okay. I'm kind of tired.
Speaker 5: I think I have decision for you, Like I'm tired
Speaker 5: of making that damn decisions.
Speaker 3: I'm mentally exhausted.
Speaker 5: So now me and me and my lady are finally
Speaker 5: moving into our house. And so now you've been moving
Speaker 5: in this house for the longest, dude, it's like because
Speaker 5: it's just been a lot, man, It's been like, well, hell,
Speaker 5: I ain't been home.
Speaker 3: I've been running around with y'all all day.
Speaker 1: But no, man, but no, it's just that.
Speaker 5: And then it's like changing bills, like getting stuff from
Speaker 5: your old place to your new place, and like I'm working,
Speaker 5: my ladies working, the kids is working, and it's just
Speaker 5: it's just.
Speaker 1: A fucking lot, man. The kids are working house well,
Speaker 1: I mean in school, and you know what I'm saying,
Speaker 1: And like, well, this is a question from a person
Speaker 1: that's not a father. Okay, okay, So how what's the
Speaker 1: report card system. Like now, do they just email you
Speaker 1: the report?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 1: Man, yo, the report causes? Do they bring it home
Speaker 1: to you?
Speaker 2: Nah?
Speaker 1: Nah? They come straight to your hands? So no more.
Speaker 1: I can't.
Speaker 3: I can't. Uh Ferris beauting my way out of the
Speaker 3: nah bro like.
Speaker 5: This, everything is electronic. You can log on, you can
Speaker 5: see they skipping class. You can see like absences Tony's Day. Guys,
Speaker 5: do you live in a police state? I think we
Speaker 5: all right?
Speaker 1: Now?
Speaker 3: Okay, yeah, so serious helicopter parenting right there?
Speaker 1: All right? I just want to play one Ray Parker
Speaker 1: Junior song and Radio before he comes in because we
Speaker 1: need to relax so he's gonna have all these crazy
Speaker 1: stories to tell us. I want to play one of
Speaker 1: my favorite joints off of the two places at the
Speaker 1: same time. Record It's uh Tonight's to Night by Ray
Speaker 1: Parker Jr. And Radio This question Love Supreme only on Pandora.
Speaker 1: Come on.
Speaker 3: The mood, that's right, m M.
Speaker 7: If we want to get down to night to night,
Speaker 7: tell Thomas at us something we don't need his life,
Speaker 7: that's right, And remind doctor Bell.
Speaker 3: Not the ring, this phone nothing singing.
Speaker 1: We got live moves right here. Ray Parker Jr. This
Speaker 1: quest love Supreme want to lay down right, calm down
Speaker 1: like you? That was to nice to night. Ray Parker Jr.
Speaker 1: And Radio air Conditioning here on request lore.
Speaker 3: Uh yo, this is there's some story behind that song
Speaker 3: this You should not let that just drip.
Speaker 1: I'm I'm never We want to ask all the stories.
Speaker 1: Every episode is a blessing, but this one in particular
Speaker 1: is like I mean, this man is the consummate musician,
Speaker 1: session player, producer, uh songwriter personality. I mean, he's one
Speaker 1: of the coolest people alive. You don't understand. It's real. Seriously,
Speaker 1: it's cool. Ladies and gentlemen, Welcome the greatest. Ray Parkerjr.
Speaker 1: Thank you good to be here. Thank you man. This
Speaker 1: is this is a dream, a dream. Thank you, Thank
Speaker 1: you for coming to do our show. We are going
Speaker 1: to ask every question ever I want to ask you
Speaker 1: right now. The kid is a nice thing. Okay, tell
Speaker 1: me usually a start at the beginning, but tell what
Speaker 1: was the story behind tonight and night Tonight?
Speaker 3: It's an interesting song because I don't know if you recall,
Speaker 3: but I used to play on all the Herbie Hancock
Speaker 3: and I wrote a lot of songs with Herbie So
Speaker 3: I was over his house one day and we were
Speaker 3: kicking it. And if you know anything about Herbie, he
Speaker 3: never plays the same thing twice. He just doesn't, you know.
Speaker 3: And his chords changed like every half a beat, it's
Speaker 3: a different chord, and it's like going off forever. And
Speaker 3: he ran across these three chords and I was like, WHOA,
Speaker 3: that works, but you just got to slow it down.
Speaker 3: He's like, what are you talking about? I said, slow
Speaker 3: that down? He said, that ain't working on my song.
Speaker 3: I said, I ain't talk about your song no more
Speaker 3: with that already, slow it down. And I had to
Speaker 3: get him to play the chords in segments where it
Speaker 3: would just hold for two bars. He says, what do
Speaker 3: you mean? He says, what am I doing for two
Speaker 3: I says, you're not doing anything. Just hit the sustained pedble,
Speaker 3: just hold it, let it drift. And I ended up talking.
Speaker 3: I said, you know, I could write a whole song
Speaker 3: off of that. So what I did is I took
Speaker 3: his synthesizer and his mood, unplugged it from right where
Speaker 3: we were at his house, which was off of Doheny,
Speaker 3: put it in my car, put him in the.
Speaker 1: Car in front seat.
Speaker 3: That stuff in the back, drove him to my house
Speaker 3: in my studio, right plugged it back up, and I said,
Speaker 3: now I want you to do exactly what you're doing
Speaker 3: at your house. I just want you to do it
Speaker 3: like him one twelfth the time. So everything lasts two bars,
Speaker 3: and he had one hell of a time done. We
Speaker 3: spent a long time because he just couldn't hold those
Speaker 3: cords that long. He says, man, this is stupid. I said,
Speaker 3: don't worry about the stupidity of it, just do it
Speaker 3: and let that hang. And then he played the bass
Speaker 3: on it. Then to put the bass on second. He
Speaker 3: was playing way too many notes for it. Slowed that
Speaker 3: down to just do do do do?
Speaker 1: Do you know?
Speaker 3: Which still is a lot for me. Right, he's that's
Speaker 3: his version that slowed down. Then we took the synthesizes
Speaker 3: back to his house and finished his song.
Speaker 1: What was it?
Speaker 3: I don't know. I just remember tonight to night I
Speaker 3: was so and thrown with my song. I forgot what
Speaker 3: we were doing for him? Is that hard for you
Speaker 3: to do it like?
Speaker 1: I'm often frustrated because obviously jazz cats have a bigger, wider,
Speaker 1: expansive vocabulary, yeah, than the average musician. So to get
Speaker 1: them to just simplify, I think it's a pride thing.
Speaker 1: Like they feel like every I think it has to
Speaker 1: be this elaborate, big product, traumatic thing, and they don't
Speaker 1: understand the beauty of simplicity. Do you think that's because
Speaker 1: like they just think they're above pop music or.
Speaker 3: Yeah, in a sense, they're like in more notes is
Speaker 3: more something? You know, I've learned that the less notes
Speaker 3: you play, the more money you get a lot of money.
Speaker 1: For the space, you know.
Speaker 3: But you know it's like, you know, most of my
Speaker 3: friends and I start off like this too. I used
Speaker 3: to play jazz and the old stuff when I was younger.
Speaker 3: You want to play something that the musicians sitting next
Speaker 3: to you cannot play. So it's that kind of a
Speaker 3: thing like watch me do this run and you can't
Speaker 3: do this run when actually, when you're making music, you
Speaker 3: want to play something that the person that everybody, even
Speaker 3: if they play it bad, they want to you make
Speaker 3: them try to play it, so they think I got it,
Speaker 3: I got it, you know. So it's it's actually the
Speaker 3: opposite thing. So what you feel is that resistance from
Speaker 3: people when they locked into jazz and they say I
Speaker 3: got it.
Speaker 1: This is it.
Speaker 3: They're locked into their world and they just can't see
Speaker 3: anything else, so they just over there.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: I don't even know if they think they're better than anybody.
Speaker 3: I don't think it's better. I just think they think
Speaker 3: they're different and they think that the difference is correct.
Speaker 1: I also think it's easier for jazz guys to do
Speaker 1: the more difficult composition stuff, but it's literally impossible for
Speaker 1: them to play something simple. Yeah, so I want to
Speaker 1: go back to the beginning. You were You're from the
Speaker 1: d right yere? Are you from Detroit? Yeah? What part
Speaker 1: of Detroit? Are you on? The west side?
Speaker 3: West side Grand Boulevard, Dexter, Actually Virginia Park and Dexter.
Speaker 3: But I was born halfway between the Grandy Ballroom and Motown,
Speaker 3: really right in the middle.
Speaker 1: I could walk either way.
Speaker 3: If I walked northwest, I was going to the Grandy Ballroom,
Speaker 3: in which I was a kid not old enough.
Speaker 1: To go in.
Speaker 3: You could hear Jimmy Hendricks playing upstairs, you know, coming
Speaker 3: out the window. And for those of y'all who don't know,
Speaker 3: the Grandy Ballroom was like a white rock club in
Speaker 3: the harder the ghetto. Black people everywhere, and it was
Speaker 3: almost like off demilitarized zone. They could go to from
Speaker 3: their cars to the club and back without being harmed.
Speaker 3: If they went another block either way, that was it,
Speaker 3: you know, or half a block either way, and it
Speaker 3: was like holly sacred ground. But it was right in
Speaker 3: the middle of the ghetto, and all of the rock
Speaker 3: bands would played, the Ted nug and the m Boy Dukes.
Speaker 3: That's when he had a group called the m Boy Dukes,
Speaker 3: and all the rock bands were famous for playing here.
Speaker 3: And then if I went the other way, it was
Speaker 3: Northwestern High School, which I ended up graduating from, and
Speaker 3: then there was Motown down the street, so I could
Speaker 3: walk to Motown too.
Speaker 1: First of all, it was guitar, your first instrum no no,
Speaker 1: I played clarinet. Six years old, I assume that was school.
Speaker 1: That was elementary school. I had a teacher named Alfred T. Kirby,
Speaker 1: and he's probably the most important person in my life
Speaker 1: because at five years old, I was in kindergarten and
Speaker 1: I hated kindergarten because the gym class didn't have you
Speaker 1: dance these Russian dances with the girls where you got
Speaker 1: to change, you know, partners and all that stuff. I
Speaker 1: wasn't into no girls, you know, that's another story. Took
Speaker 1: me a long time to find girls.
Speaker 3: When I found a little but you know, so I
Speaker 3: didn't want to do this. So at the type of
Speaker 3: person I was out going at, you know, tame time
Speaker 3: for the first grade. Now I'm six years old, I said,
Speaker 3: I ain't doing it. I'm not gonna do it. So
Speaker 3: I want to go talk to my parents about it.
Speaker 3: Because they didn't really know what I was talking about. So
Speaker 3: I decided to find out who's running this school, and
Speaker 3: so they told me the principal. I said, well, where
Speaker 3: is the principal? And so I marched out of class,
Speaker 3: went to the principal's office and said, look, I ain't
Speaker 3: digging the gym thing with the dancing with the girls.
Speaker 3: Is there something else I can do? So the principal
Speaker 3: looked at me, I'll never forget to look. First of all,
Speaker 3: the principal said absolutely nothing. For maybe a it seemed
Speaker 3: like sixty seconds like this, the little kid come in
Speaker 3: here talking it's cramp like you know, So it was
Speaker 3: like that more of that. Then the principal said, okay,
Speaker 3: I got something for you and took me to the
Speaker 3: music class. He said, if you don't want to be
Speaker 3: in this gym class doing these dances, you can take
Speaker 3: a music class. I said, what's a music class? Said,
Speaker 3: you pick an instrument and you go play. Now, well,
Speaker 3: it's nice about the music class that I just this
Speaker 3: is a god given just a gift. Is my only
Speaker 3: had two best friends in the world. That was Nathan
Speaker 3: and Olie, and both of them were already in the
Speaker 3: music class. Oli Brown and Nathan wantthan elem them absolutely
Speaker 3: wow Jesus yeah, so the band. So, so I go
Speaker 3: to the class. I walk into the room. There's Nathan
Speaker 3: playing his trumpet. Nathan played the trumpet. Ollie was playing
Speaker 3: the drums, but at that time he had a snare
Speaker 3: drum and we hung a symbol from the ceiling, you know.
Speaker 3: And uh so the teacher asked me what I want
Speaker 3: to play? Well, I was a young kid. I wasn't
Speaker 3: going to say the tuba, right, take tuba? So I
Speaker 3: wanted to play the flute. And all the girls had
Speaker 3: taken the flute, so was I said, what's the next
Speaker 3: smallest instrument? And the next small censure was the clarinet,
Speaker 3: you know. And so mister Kirby, who was a genius guy.
Speaker 3: I wish I could talk to him now, mister Kirby.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 3: He looked at me, he says, young man. Just about
Speaker 3: a week into it, he could see that I was
Speaker 3: less than enthuseda as Oli and Nathan were. He says,
Speaker 3: we're going to start a band, and this band is
Speaker 3: to be called the Sting Rays, which was named after me.
Speaker 3: I didn't figure that out for twenty years. But the
Speaker 3: band was named after me. And you know who else
Speaker 3: didn't figure it out? Allie and Nathan. They were too
Speaker 3: stupid to figure out.
Speaker 1: Its just been radio was named after you until later.
Speaker 1: That's a story.
Speaker 3: So and I think he named it after me because
Speaker 3: I needed the most. I needed more encouragement than Nathan
Speaker 3: and Olie did, you know. And so it was interesting.
Speaker 3: We we did parent teacher conference stuff, orphanages and a
Speaker 3: whole bunch of stuff. And our hit song which was
Speaker 3: hitting the neighborhood, local local hit. It's called Airplane du
Speaker 3: Do Do Do Do Do Do Doom d crash, you know,
Speaker 3: And that was it. And man, we were we were popular.
Speaker 6: And we select for somebody this is under ten years old, six.
Speaker 3: Years old, can't it's we were six years old, six
Speaker 3: were rocking. That's the show, ladies.
Speaker 5: And yeah, I was dancing to one of your songs.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So that's how it all began is on the clarinet,
Speaker 3: Nathan played the trumpet, Allie played the drums.
Speaker 1: Any any other notable Session Monster musicians also go to
Speaker 1: the school with you during this time period that Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: when you know Diana Ross went to that school, not
Speaker 1: when I went toations went to that school, I think.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there was a lot. No, this was a famous
Speaker 3: now what you got a picture. I'm sure you've noticed
Speaker 3: that a lot of famous people have come out of Detroit.
Speaker 3: It was just a small area. So everybody was going
Speaker 3: to either that school or the school next to it,
Speaker 3: or Cast Tech or you know. We were all in
Speaker 3: the same genre, so to speak. Kevin Tony went to
Speaker 3: high school with me. He still plays with me now.
Speaker 3: The guy from the Blackbirds Rock Creek Park doing it, Yeah,
Speaker 3: he was, and we all went to school together. That's
Speaker 3: what we're gonna get to. His story for sure, that's
Speaker 3: another story. He's a jazz guy, okay, and you know,
Speaker 3: so that's the whole story. But uh, and just to
Speaker 3: show you the progression. Later we met up with Sylvester Rivers,
Speaker 3: who was one of our good friends too, who ended
Speaker 3: up doing all of the piano working Invictus and hot
Speaker 3: wax and the other stuff. And Sylvester had a band.
Speaker 3: For the first time, we thought we were smoking everybody.
Speaker 3: I mean, we were jamming. So now let's fast forward.
Speaker 3: It seemed like twenty years but eight years old, eight
Speaker 3: and a half years old, we're going to fast forward
Speaker 3: to eight and a half years old. The biggest thing
Speaker 3: to happen at eight and a half years old is
Speaker 3: we heard Sylvester's band. And Sylvester's band had a bass
Speaker 3: guitar and he was playing a keyboard. We never really
Speaker 3: thought about chords, right, We didn't even have a bass
Speaker 3: drum yet. So all of a sudden, now we're hearing
Speaker 3: chords for the first time, and we're hearing the bass
Speaker 3: note on the bottom. Man, that stuff seemed this big
Speaker 3: compared to just the trumpet, the clarinet and the snare drum.
Speaker 3: You know, so Ollie immediately, you know, I guess his
Speaker 3: parents borrow some money. He got a bass drum so
Speaker 3: he could get some bottom on at least the drums,
Speaker 3: so you could get a kick going, you know, foot
Speaker 3: going and our neverget Sylvester wanted Olie to join his band,
Speaker 3: which was a more phisticated band, because their drummer wasn't happening.
Speaker 3: And Ali was on the floor crying, you know, because
Speaker 3: he didn't want to leave his.
Speaker 1: Homies, you know, just so he's tried. I can't.
Speaker 3: I'll never leave. I said, man, you need to leave.
Speaker 3: I ain't gonna do this anyway, knowing something else. I
Speaker 3: still wasn't committed at that age, and by that time
Speaker 3: I was playing a little bit of saxophone. But the
Speaker 3: big thing, the big life change, was my dad bought
Speaker 3: a Magnavox tape recorder about this big, with real to reel,
Speaker 3: and I had the only tape recorder in the neighborhood
Speaker 3: that was real to real.
Speaker 6: So you were the studio.
Speaker 3: I was a studio, believe it. And I still like
Speaker 3: that today. But I was the studio. I had the
Speaker 3: tape recorder and my brother had a cheap box guitar,
Speaker 3: and I remember I had a busher saxophone. I took
Speaker 3: my brother's guitar and I put the microphone in the
Speaker 3: guitar and it amplified it.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: It was an acoustic guitar, but I put the mic
Speaker 3: in the thing, passed the strings, stuck it up in there,
Speaker 3: turned the tape recorder up, and I was like, whoa,
Speaker 3: that's cool sound. Plus I got more than one show.
Speaker 3: I can't plain things that you hit the strings, but
Speaker 3: it was more than one old at the time, and
Speaker 3: I was tired of breathing and stuff. Anyway, So Ollie
Speaker 3: left the band. Yeah, I didn't like this. And by
Speaker 3: the time, you know, I was starting to get a
Speaker 3: little taller, a little more ten years old, starting to
Speaker 3: get a little more handsome, you know, growing little head.
Speaker 3: I ain't found the girls yet, but I'm just saying
Speaker 3: I was just starting going into your own. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 3: getting taller.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: In the little clarinet's getting smaller, I'm getting taller. You
Speaker 3: know what happened. So Ollie quit the band and went
Speaker 3: with Sylvester and the bigger band. So I just decided
Speaker 3: I'm gonna play the guitar and you know, and we
Speaker 3: were still playing together sometimes, but they didn't want me
Speaker 3: to play the guitar. They wanted me to play the clarinet,
Speaker 3: you know. And I said, if you don't let me
Speaker 3: to play the guitar, I ain't gonna record y'all. That's
Speaker 3: just the way it is, you know. So that's how
Speaker 3: that went. Okay, So now I'm gonna let y'all take
Speaker 3: it back over.
Speaker 1: I know this is.
Speaker 5: Going campfire stories, so we just tell them who Ali
Speaker 5: or he keeps?
Speaker 1: Well. Now, now everything's coming to me now, because I
Speaker 1: was trying to Ollie and Jerry hooked up, and of
Speaker 1: course Jerry was also in radio, so.
Speaker 3: That oh yeah, I holked them up years later. That's
Speaker 3: way I see it.
Speaker 1: I don't want to jump that far. I don't jump
Speaker 1: that far. So okay, So were you self taught or
Speaker 1: did you have formal instruction self taught on the guitar?
Speaker 1: And is this normal for everyone in Detroit? Like am
Speaker 1: I to think that everyone's a wonder kind prodigy at
Speaker 1: their instrument? You know what?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it does seem like it. But let me tell
Speaker 3: you this. The level of musicianship was so high that
Speaker 3: before you could even tell anybody you played the instrument,
Speaker 3: you had to be good.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: It's just like I'll never get Norm Nixon told me
Speaker 3: one time. He said all his guys he went to
Speaker 3: school with, all six or eight of them went to
Speaker 3: the NBA because the level of practice that they all
Speaker 3: commanded from each other. It was so much higher that
Speaker 3: when they showed up with everybody else, the whole group
Speaker 3: was higher. And I think that's how Detroit was. You know,
Speaker 3: when I was a young kid, like fourteen, I'm playing
Speaker 3: in at twenty Grand. Well, you know, James Jamison was
Speaker 3: sitting next to me, right, So that's just the way
Speaker 3: you played. James Jamison was sitting here. You know, Jack
Speaker 3: atri over there, Robert wis sitting here. I mean, you
Speaker 3: gotta play, well, you gotta play. You know, there's no
Speaker 3: way around it. And if you're not cutting it, everybody's
Speaker 3: pointing at you. And I gotta tell the street when
Speaker 3: the notes, when the bad notes get played. It wasn't
Speaker 3: me because I was perfect, right, I had to be perfect.
Speaker 3: I'd be out, but they'd all point to me.
Speaker 1: Anyway.
Speaker 3: I get hit with the drum stick anyway, because it's
Speaker 3: the youngest. So did you play with the Funk Brothers
Speaker 3: or were you a I didn't play with the Funk
Speaker 3: Brothers on the original.
Speaker 1: Well no, no, I don't mean that, But did you
Speaker 1: ever play with those guys? Oh?
Speaker 3: Every day?
Speaker 1: So the twenty Grand was just the epicenter of musicians.
Speaker 3: I was in the house band at the twenty Grand,
Speaker 3: so it was like fourteen fifteen. It was Michael Henderson
Speaker 3: would play sometime. Bohannon was the band leader. He's the
Speaker 3: guy that brought Melton Hamilton. Bohannon brought me in the band.
Speaker 3: Michael Henderson would play when he's not on tour with
Speaker 3: Miles or Stevie or somebody. But Jamison was there just
Speaker 3: about every night. Eddie Willis would play sometime. Wow, I
Speaker 3: was there all the time.
Speaker 1: Right. Why I watch him was from the joy as well?
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, to get tired. Why wat Yeah, the
Speaker 3: thick L five that he puts the phone in and
Speaker 3: get the Winwaie pedal. Yeah, that's my guitar. That ain't
Speaker 3: wi Wis guitar. He still owed me three hundred dollars.
Speaker 3: I was going at that when I was playing jazz.
Speaker 3: I put the phone in there because Melvin Spiks and
Speaker 3: George Benson had done it, and I bought an L five,
Speaker 3: you know, to play some jazz. I was playing jazz wy.
Speaker 3: I was living with this white chick and she stole
Speaker 3: all everything he had.
Speaker 4: So he.
Speaker 3: Came home the carbet was gone. She took all the money,
Speaker 3: he would have killed her, but he didn't have enough
Speaker 3: money to go get fired her. To kill it took
Speaker 3: and while I had a thin body guitar that he
Speaker 3: was playing all the time, and so I said, look,
Speaker 3: I ain't gonna play jazz much no more. You could
Speaker 3: buy my l five and he didn't have much a choice.
Speaker 3: He gave me one hundred two hundred bucks and said
Speaker 3: he paid me the rest, which I never ever, never did.
Speaker 3: But that's how he got that guitar. And then once
Speaker 3: he started playing with it, the wa wai pedal and
Speaker 3: the boxy tire feeding back gave him his new sound.
Speaker 3: He was like, oh, I like this. So he's been
Speaker 3: playing the ever since.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 3: We had a deal because he smokes a lot of cigarettes,
Speaker 3: and so I say, if you croak early and when
Speaker 3: my guitar back, that's prit of the deal. That's probably
Speaker 3: the deal.
Speaker 1: Even though so I guess uh some previous episodes before
Speaker 1: we learned the idea of the house Span, which was
Speaker 1: various acts will come to town learn the records. Whoever
Speaker 1: you know, was how much warning did you have, Like,
Speaker 1: give us an example of you being in the house
Speaker 1: Span and someone coming to the town is this.
Speaker 3: Okay, we're in the house span and let's say Gladys
Speaker 3: Night and the Pips come to town. Chuck Jackson was
Speaker 3: the big guy that will come, Spinners will come. They're
Speaker 3: in the warning you show up there this week, they
Speaker 3: say the Spinner's showing. They put the charts up there,
Speaker 3: and it's time that you know you've rehearsed a little
Speaker 3: bit with the charts, these core charts or or actual
Speaker 3: like their cored charts with some notes. So the guitar
Speaker 3: is going d D D D ding or duram dirrtr
Speaker 3: that'll be written. Then you go back to chords.
Speaker 5: Was that the same you mentioned Chuck Jackson? Was that
Speaker 5: the same Chuck Jackson the work when Nellie.
Speaker 3: Cole was No, no, no, there was a guy singer.
Speaker 3: Chuck Jackson had a big horn section and everything. I
Speaker 3: know Chuck Jacks Marvin Yanson too. Yeah, yeah, I did
Speaker 3: some of Natalie's records.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're on sophisticated lady, right, I believe I know.
Speaker 3: I'm on our love. I remember that, okay, because she
Speaker 3: was pregnant at the time, right, Okay.
Speaker 1: So okay, so you're saying that without warning, someone puts
Speaker 1: paper in front of you.
Speaker 3: And you go get yeah, you gotta go. Okay, And
Speaker 3: I got my first gig at Motown, even before Hamilton Bohanna,
Speaker 3: even before the twenty Grand is with the Spinners. Okay,
Speaker 3: and Billy Henderson had a truck called Fascinating Rhythm. He says,
Speaker 3: I don't care how old you. You could read that chart,
Speaker 3: you got the gig. So I pulled up my guitar,
Speaker 3: I read that chart, and now I got the gig.
Speaker 3: And so he came to my mom and they take
Speaker 3: us down on weekends, you know, and we go play
Speaker 3: with the Spinners. They were nobody at the time they had.
Speaker 3: Felipe Win hadn't even gotten the band yet. So this
Speaker 3: is the Detroit Spinners, Detroit Spinish. Yeah, but at the twenty grand,
Speaker 3: which is interesting, Felipe Win got in the band at
Speaker 3: the twenty grand. They didn't have no hits and they
Speaker 3: weren't signed to Philadelphia. But I do remember Felipe Win
Speaker 3: turning out the audience two shows a night with no hits.
Speaker 1: He just started doing that.
Speaker 3: Half half yeah, I heard it, and he was just
Speaker 3: the most energetic guy you ever seen, and we nobody
Speaker 3: knew what he was singing, right it was like exciting anyway,
Speaker 3: I've heard the level of performing was unbelievable.
Speaker 5: Yeah, sol bay Wind was off the Chaine and I
Speaker 5: heard he was like the greatest, like ad Liver. He
Speaker 5: would just come up with stuff off the cuff.
Speaker 3: But they said they wore tom Bell would shortened all
Speaker 3: the songs to leave a long faith because they just
Speaker 3: would let him have the fade. So if you look
Speaker 3: at the Spinner songs, they you know, two minutes it
Speaker 3: starts to.
Speaker 1: Just go to the fath he there's a formula one
Speaker 1: Spinner songs because when you're the same with Slim and
Speaker 1: family Stone, like I used to think that Fleebe sang everything,
Speaker 1: whereas you know, I noticed that uh, one of the
Speaker 1: other singers would sing the main lyrics and then when
Speaker 1: it was time for the end straight he rarely would
Speaker 1: get a song by him, stuff like rubber a band
Speaker 1: man or maybe one of a kind. But it's kind
Speaker 1: of like a formula at the twenty grand, So could
Speaker 1: you describe what what a typical night there was like, Like,
Speaker 1: first of all, I was at the nightclub. Is it
Speaker 1: it was.
Speaker 3: A night theater or we need another nightclub like that?
Speaker 3: It was an all black nightclub in the center of
Speaker 3: the ghetto. Capacity probably four or five hundred people, but
Speaker 3: it would be packed. I mean this place would be
Speaker 3: packed seats everywhere. Gladys night would have a line going
Speaker 3: outside in the wintertime all the way around the block.
Speaker 1: So if it's in the center of the hood, was
Speaker 1: there any concern where once you became of a certain stature, Say,
Speaker 1: if you're like Diynald Ross, right, are you still going
Speaker 1: to the twenty Grands?
Speaker 5: Ye?
Speaker 3: See, Norman Wifield's there every night. I mean he used
Speaker 3: to pick on me as a kid, saying what's he
Speaker 3: doing here? And I said, shit, you the drink?
Speaker 1: Shut up?
Speaker 3: Call me out routinely.
Speaker 1: You know you're coming underage? Like yeah, yeah, I was
Speaker 1: way under age.
Speaker 3: I mean me and Norman Widfield we couldn't be friends
Speaker 3: for like another four years because he was called he
Speaker 3: was just calling me out just you know, it.
Speaker 1: Took a while. I used to check.
Speaker 3: I don't know, he was just picking on me, and
Speaker 3: then he talked to me like third party too. He'd
Speaker 3: be like, why is he here? He's obviously too young.
Speaker 1: He was just picking you know.
Speaker 3: I was like really like initiation, Yeah, like I guess, you.
Speaker 1: Know, he didn't know through you he might have someone
Speaker 1: that was sort of on level.
Speaker 3: With Dennis or no, he didn't feel none of that.
Speaker 3: He wasn't feeling. So it was all about Dennis and
Speaker 3: no one else. That was thet kid pumped out on
Speaker 3: the stage. I mean, just what that was. It wasn't
Speaker 3: headed that way. But the typical day is, you know,
Speaker 3: we go in rehearse the songs, or like I say it, showtime,
Speaker 3: we do the first show almost like clockwork. Every night
Speaker 3: in the middle between the two shows, me and Jamison
Speaker 3: would hang out. James had a black fleet with bro him.
Speaker 3: We go to his car, you know, and I was
Speaker 3: a really nice kid. Jamison would go in his glove
Speaker 3: box and that's winter time, so we got the windows
Speaker 3: rolled up, we got a little bit of heat on
Speaker 3: co and and then he have a bag of weed.
Speaker 3: Then the bag of weed was sitting on his gun.
Speaker 3: You know, the gun. I'm sorry, the gun was sitting
Speaker 3: on the bag. First of all, everybody just by everybody
Speaker 3: in the gun got get used to that. You don't
Speaker 3: go nowhere without your gun in the glovebox, you know.
Speaker 3: But he had a weed undergun, so he would get
Speaker 3: the weed put in the primary starts smoking weed. So
Speaker 3: I told my mother on James Jameson what I said,
Speaker 3: you know, because it was making me feel weird. You know,
Speaker 3: it's you know, contact, It just wasn't happening, you know.
Speaker 3: So you know, I had to talk with my parents
Speaker 3: and they told me what to say because they didn't
Speaker 3: want me to get I'll get him in trouble. So
Speaker 3: I went back and I said, you know, mister Jamison,
Speaker 3: mister Jameson, how old was he at the time. I
Speaker 3: don't know, he probably is in his late thirties. I'm guessing,
Speaker 3: you know. And yeah, I think I was fourteen fifteen.
Speaker 3: I said, you know, I can't sit in the car
Speaker 3: with you no more because you know, you're smoking these
Speaker 3: things and I can't, you know, I feel weird.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3: He promised me he'd never do it again, you know,
Speaker 3: he said, you know, this is a week lady said,
Speaker 3: he missed our hangout in the car, you know, because
Speaker 3: nobody else is hanging out with because he liked to
Speaker 3: drink a little bit. People gone. So he told me
Speaker 3: he never do it again. So I said, okay, cool,
Speaker 3: and then we got back together and we go to
Speaker 3: his car listen to some music kick it. You know,
Speaker 3: I didn't know he's going to be famous or anything.
Speaker 3: I just just the bass player.
Speaker 1: What I was going to say was he I've never
Speaker 1: heard any James Jamison stories whatsoever. For those that know,
Speaker 1: James Jamerson is like the standard for which I personally
Speaker 1: judge every bass player I ever played with. For those
Speaker 1: of you that are fans of of d'angelo's Voodoo and
Speaker 1: you praise Pinal Palladino, Pino Palladino's basically the second coming
Speaker 1: to James Jamerson. Like his his finger game is far none.
Speaker 1: I mean, he's emulating James Jamerson.
Speaker 5: In the Shadows of Bowtown documentary is a good one
Speaker 5: day Jamison everybody.
Speaker 1: And they talked about the twenty grand as well.
Speaker 3: So was it a generation separation? That's what I want
Speaker 3: to know, Like it was sort of a generation separation,
Speaker 3: you know, but they were they were good guys, the
Speaker 3: Funk Brothers. You know, my mouth was probably a little
Speaker 3: too big. I remember the first song learned to play
Speaker 3: was I'm Losing You, and I had I had it down.
Speaker 3: I mean, I had my Red three thirty five back
Speaker 3: picker jink Lean in the bottom note. I had the
Speaker 3: whole thing put together. And so I was showing Robert White.
Speaker 3: You know, we were sitting in the studio and I'm
Speaker 3: showing Robert White sort of not just playing for him,
Speaker 3: but sort of like, look at me, watch this. You know,
Speaker 3: I'm the man, you know. And Robert White looked at
Speaker 3: me and says, he says, he says, that's really nice,
Speaker 3: young man. I played on the original record.
Speaker 1: You know, master.
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, I'm like, really you playing on that?
Speaker 3: I says, well, then he I found he played mocked on.
Speaker 3: That's him on my girl. I mean, I was like,
Speaker 3: I got quiet, you know, I got shut up. But
Speaker 3: those guys were teaching us. So you know, Robert White
Speaker 3: taught me a lot of rhythm stuff and and tricks
Speaker 3: and how to phrase it and how to use the thing.
Speaker 3: So they were real helpful. They were real good guys,
Speaker 3: all of them.
Speaker 1: So am I just assuming that there is what I
Speaker 1: think are three classes, because obviously when Norman Woodfield really started,
Speaker 1: UH kind of taken over where Holland DOJ or Holland
Speaker 1: left off. If Holland DOJ Holland really utilized the Funk
Speaker 1: Brothers to their full ability, I feel like Norman Woodfield
Speaker 1: took Dennis Coffee's band.
Speaker 3: And wait wasns Coffee's band or but he just took
Speaker 3: Dennis Coffee and wah wah basically. But the even the
Speaker 3: rhythm section was was different than he was some of
Speaker 3: the same guys sometimes. Yeah, Jamison was on some of
Speaker 3: his stuff before they could not get along.
Speaker 1: They had some fights, you know, right, So I mean
Speaker 1: by the time that they had made in their exodus
Speaker 1: to Hollywood, what were you facing?
Speaker 3: Then? That was a godsend that Holland dojoh Honald left
Speaker 3: Motown really because yeah, because Jack Ashford, Dennis Coffee, Robert White,
Speaker 3: they had Motown sold up. I did some Marvin Gay
Speaker 3: albums when Marvin wanted to be different. I did one
Speaker 3: thing with Smokey and the Snake Pit, but most of
Speaker 3: the sessions were done by the Funk Brothers. So when
Speaker 3: Holland Doja Holland left, the Funk Brothers weren't supposed to
Speaker 3: be there. So that left me and my boys, me
Speaker 3: and selvester step By, Oh yeah us one at the
Speaker 3: young Man single in Free so we hit all that.
Speaker 3: Of course, it is, yeah, all that.
Speaker 1: Kind of stuff.
Speaker 3: Chairman of the board, Laura Lee Free to pay I mean,
Speaker 3: that's us doing all that those records. So that led
Speaker 3: us in on the thing, you.
Speaker 1: Know, job so you were the house band for it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm I'm on money. Yeah, that's all that's me. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so we're having a good time. Marvin get cut a record.
Speaker 3: I remember the first release was You're the Man, which
Speaker 3: I'm playing two or three guitars on. That's me at
Speaker 3: fifteen sixteen, and I'll never forget I made like twenty
Speaker 3: grand in a month. My father worked at Ford. He
Speaker 3: only made sixteen grand all year. So this posed a
Speaker 3: real interesting problem. More money than fox, right, my dad?
Speaker 1: My dad?
Speaker 3: No. I had already told my dad I don't need
Speaker 3: no money. I told him that at thirteen years I
Speaker 3: got the money.
Speaker 1: Damn good.
Speaker 3: You don't have to pay nothing for me no more.
Speaker 3: But what was interesting is now I'm starting to make
Speaker 3: so much money. My dad thought for sure I was
Speaker 3: selling drugs. He was one hundred percent sure, so he
Speaker 3: hired my older cousin to follow me around. Now this
Speaker 3: may have been prompted by if you ever saw the
Speaker 3: movie Superfly, the blue Cadillac with all the stuff on it,
Speaker 3: Marvin Gay had one just like it, but it was
Speaker 3: burgundy with a burgundy top. It was cold bloody bug eyes.
Speaker 3: I mean, you know this thing was that. So Marvin's
Speaker 3: at the studio one day and he's smoking a joint
Speaker 3: and I'd already kind of said, you know, I think
Speaker 3: Bohanna or somebody told him, you know, Ray what to
Speaker 3: join him. So Marvin felt bad, but he wasn't gonna
Speaker 3: stop smoking his joint. He just felt bad about it.
Speaker 3: So I'll never forget what he did. Man, I don't
Speaker 3: know if I had a driver's license or not at
Speaker 3: the time, but he looked over at me and says, man, Ray,
Speaker 3: why don't you take the car for spend, go out
Speaker 3: for a couple of hours to have a good time.
Speaker 3: And I'm like, really, man, let me tell you. Let
Speaker 3: me drive the pitmobile in Detroit. It was leaning so hard.
Speaker 3: I think me and the mirror were like.
Speaker 1: Sent it up.
Speaker 3: You know, I'm driving through the neighborhood, so I know
Speaker 3: because so I'm just trying to protect my dad. Now,
Speaker 3: you know, he saw that too, so he at least
Speaker 3: heard about it. He said, Man, we saw your son
Speaker 3: driving a fifty thousand dollars cap. Now you said he
Speaker 3: made how much money last night? You need to check
Speaker 3: your own home, talk about us. So I'm pulling up
Speaker 3: to the high school. I'm leaning hard, right, I can't
Speaker 3: get not no girls in the car because I can't stop,
Speaker 3: because I'm scared to stop. I'm just leaning. And if
Speaker 3: the police come, I don't care. I'll take it. I
Speaker 3: shot at it. But I drove around for a couple hours,
Speaker 3: went back to study your best time in my life,
Speaker 3: you know.
Speaker 1: So your father just had no clue that you were
Speaker 1: pretty much a genius at your craft at this point.
Speaker 3: He thought that, first of all, if you weren't playing
Speaker 3: the saxophone while you playing any music, he says, nobody
Speaker 3: wants to hear anything about the saxophone. And my father
Speaker 3: was much older than me, by the way, I should
Speaker 3: say that he had me at forty six forty seven.
Speaker 3: So in his mind all he knew was the jazz
Speaker 3: musicians of the old days. They live out the suitcase,
Speaker 3: they make five dollars, and they broke right.
Speaker 1: So that's all.
Speaker 3: He didn't understand what recording was or any of his stuff.
Speaker 1: Okay, so what would a session musician in Detroit make
Speaker 1: on a typical session? First of all, are you your
Speaker 1: own agent?
Speaker 3: Yes, okay, we had no agents. They just call you
Speaker 3: on the phone. McKenley Jackson for Invictus would call up
Speaker 3: and say, hey, we're cutting at such and such a time.
Speaker 3: Can you make at ten o'clock ninety dollars for three
Speaker 3: hour session?
Speaker 1: How long do you have to learn the song?
Speaker 3: You don't have long. They spend half an hour on
Speaker 3: the drum sound.
Speaker 1: You go in.
Speaker 3: There wasn't no amplifiers. Everybody had a little ortone speaker
Speaker 3: next to them, and in the main room at Motown,
Speaker 3: everybody plugged in the same speaker, clapping that bass guitar,
Speaker 3: everybody plugging the same thing. Then they had a drum
Speaker 3: booth for the drums, so they you run the song
Speaker 3: down a few times. But you gotta get three songs
Speaker 3: in three hours, or don't nobody want to see you
Speaker 3: no more. You gotta get three songs whatever. So you
Speaker 3: got a half an hour setting up the thing. You
Speaker 3: got to change the string, whatever, y'all got to tune
Speaker 3: up whatever.
Speaker 1: That's it.
Speaker 3: Now, let's play and they come in and change the
Speaker 3: parts and they run it down and you had to
Speaker 3: get it. But what was exciting is you could hear
Speaker 3: your song on the radio. Within ten days. They get
Speaker 3: it out really quick back then, you know, and it
Speaker 3: was a singles world. Back then, it wasn't a lot
Speaker 3: of albums, so everything we cut was supposed to be
Speaker 3: a hit single.
Speaker 1: All right. So during this period, what is your proudest
Speaker 1: moment of like, ah, that's my guitar? Like, what's what's
Speaker 1: your man?
Speaker 3: When I heard everything Good is Bad and Everything Bad
Speaker 3: is Good come back? It had four of my guitars
Speaker 3: on that overtop and I was up loud.
Speaker 1: How many wait? How many tracks? Were?
Speaker 3: Sixteen tracks?
Speaker 1: Okay? So what year is this now?
Speaker 3: This is nineteen seventy, I guess sixty nine seventy.
Speaker 1: Okay. So the studio used is this god it sound?
Speaker 1: Or is it no? No?
Speaker 3: This was Holland Doja. Holland had their own studio and
Speaker 3: it was in a burned down movie theater on Grand
Speaker 3: River and Joy Road, which was happening to be two
Speaker 3: blocks over from the Grandy ball Room, which was interesting
Speaker 3: because I always wondered why they had a burnt down
Speaker 3: movie studio and why they put all this sand under
Speaker 3: the control room floor. And when I first built my
Speaker 3: studio in Hollywood American studios, I didn't want to burn
Speaker 3: down movie theater. But I did put sand under the floor,
Speaker 3: which made it work right. And now that I'm older,
Speaker 3: I traced it back to Memphis. The old Royal Studio
Speaker 3: was in a burned down movie theater and they got
Speaker 3: saying under the control room, and so it all really
Speaker 3: started in Memphis. They were trying to imitate you know,
Speaker 3: Sack exactly and Willie Mitchell during the Hollandojoh Holland period
Speaker 3: and the Marvigay period. And I was just graduating out
Speaker 3: of high school. You know, I got out of high
Speaker 3: school at seventeen, so I'm now doing a year of college,
Speaker 3: as I say, at the first In the middle of
Speaker 3: the first year, which I hated, now, I was drafting
Speaker 3: car parts for Ford Motor Company. I mean, if you
Speaker 3: can imagine me with a suit and town, you know,
Speaker 3: drawing car doors and trying to make it fit. You know,
Speaker 3: that didn't work out for me, and Stevie Wonder called
Speaker 3: me on the telephone and I had never met Stevie Wonder,
Speaker 3: but Music from My Mind was my favorite album, you know,
Speaker 3: of all time, which they recorded in this building.
Speaker 1: By the way, What effected what effected music on my mind?
Speaker 1: Have on you like, I never heard those sounds just
Speaker 1: to hear, like, I never heard someone that was in
Speaker 1: that era describe it. I mean, I know what it
Speaker 1: is in hindsight and as an adult.
Speaker 3: But by the way, that's my favorite album that he's
Speaker 3: ever recorded, and it's him playing all the instruments, but
Speaker 3: it's all these experimental sounds, and it's a breakaway from
Speaker 3: the traditional motown sound. It's just him experimenting one hundred
Speaker 3: percent free and experiment and just trying something totally new.
Speaker 3: And so I had pretty much, you know, when I
Speaker 3: first heard it, I'm not sure I liked it that
Speaker 3: much because it was so new then as I then
Speaker 3: a month later, I had thrown away every other record.
Speaker 3: I had just had the eight track of that in
Speaker 3: my car play along which.
Speaker 6: One which one grabbed you the most? On the album,
Speaker 6: like the first you know what?
Speaker 3: I can't Marry wants to be super I can't. I
Speaker 3: can't even say. I just would play the whole a
Speaker 3: track and just let it play. And I used to
Speaker 3: drive from Detroit to Cincinnati and back in eight hours
Speaker 3: just so I could just nobody could talk to me.
Speaker 3: I just turned up loud and just drive and just
Speaker 3: listen to it was that, you know. So what happened
Speaker 3: to me is right around my birthday in seventy two,
Speaker 3: right before my eighteenth birthday, I got a phone call
Speaker 3: from Stevie Wonder. And this is a true Strive told
Speaker 3: before I hung up on him, you know, because.
Speaker 1: I that's a common thing before ever. Yeah, no one
Speaker 1: not believing.
Speaker 3: I mean, I'm playing the song the album in my
Speaker 3: car every day. I ain't got nothing but that, So
Speaker 3: it's got to be one of my boys messing around
Speaker 3: with me, got it, but you know, And he called
Speaker 3: two or three times. I hung up two or three times.
Speaker 3: Four times he called back. I said some not some
Speaker 3: nice things, and then still hunt good thing. He had
Speaker 3: a sense of humor, so he called back and fifth
Speaker 3: times says, look, he says, we ain't we ain't communicating this,
Speaker 3: Steve Wonder, he says, listening to this. And he played
Speaker 3: me the rhythm track he had just started with Superstition,
Speaker 3: and I almost hung up again because the rhythm track,
Speaker 3: the Superstition starts off with marching drums, and I was like, oh,
Speaker 3: that's bulls, you know. Then before I could hang up,
Speaker 3: I heard thought I heard that, and I went, oh,
Speaker 3: my god, I'm hanging up the phone, and there was
Speaker 3: still this shoe of the college with the door parts
Speaker 3: and learning that thing, you know, And there's major problem
Speaker 3: there because my dad wanted me to finish college and
Speaker 3: get a real job and have a pension plan.
Speaker 1: This still wasn't a real jobs.
Speaker 3: Dollars No twenty in one month right now. I remember,
Speaker 3: I'm doing the twenty grand, making three fifty a week
Speaker 3: at the twenty grand and cash no taxes. We didn't
Speaker 3: pay taxes in Detroit three fifty weeks. He's right here, lazy.
Speaker 3: Let's shoot ten years ago to mayridaon and paid tax
Speaker 3: don't go back to hip hop. Make so we make
Speaker 3: three fifty, So three fifty a week at twenty grand,
Speaker 3: ninety dollars every three hour session at Hollands in Holland,
Speaker 3: and then that one month with Marvin Gay and Jewish
Speaker 3: bar misisfais and weddings on the weekends pay like thirty
Speaker 3: five forty bucks and we could do three, four to
Speaker 3: five of those easy. So we're making money in Detroit.
Speaker 6: Want your dad a house for some of this money?
Speaker 3: Likes pretty much? Yeah, But instead I bought myself a
Speaker 3: really nice con.
Speaker 1: It's crazy.
Speaker 3: In the first house I bought, I bought my dad house.
Speaker 3: I did do that, so just so you'll know, when
Speaker 3: I made some real money, I bought my dad house.
Speaker 3: Mom took care of everybody, paid all the bills. They
Speaker 3: never paid a pen anymore for the rest of their life.
Speaker 6: And he still didn't he didn't say you should still
Speaker 6: finish college.
Speaker 3: By that time I was twenty two, he was done talking.
Speaker 1: Okay, parent gave all that parents do that like just
Speaker 1: siding deep deep into Hiladelph half life. My dad was
Speaker 1: still getting it. You gotta get a real job exactly
Speaker 1: like it's my third record.
Speaker 3: He's like, you gotta get a real job, your son
Speaker 3: and I love you. Gotta come on straighten up.
Speaker 1: Yeah I got that. I didn't get it.
Speaker 5: It didn't get real to my mom until she saw
Speaker 5: me on the cover of Double XL, Like when she
Speaker 5: like when she saw us on double x L and
Speaker 5: then like the sowreds like see me in magazines.
Speaker 1: That was when somebody your second album.
Speaker 5: It was like it was like, okay, it's it's real.
Speaker 5: So with Stevie, did you.
Speaker 3: You finally moved? When did you move to Los Angeles?
Speaker 3: I moved to Los Angeles soon as I quit Stevie's band,
Speaker 3: and I stayed in the band a good eight months.
Speaker 3: I guess something like that. You know, I always wanted
Speaker 3: to go to l A. I just I felt like,
Speaker 3: you know, even in Detroit it's good. It was always
Speaker 3: felt like the stork made a mistake and like dropped
Speaker 3: me in the wrong neighbor. It just felt like that
Speaker 3: for some reason. You know, Like I saw the Beverly
Speaker 3: Hills Billies on TV and I was like, wow, that's
Speaker 3: I like that restaurant rod, you know, swimming pools, movie
Speaker 3: stars in the sunlight, and you know, I remember seeing
Speaker 3: Leave It to Beaver. Nobody ever stole Beaver's bike and
Speaker 3: he rode it to school. You know, I was getting
Speaker 3: nice for my jacket. I'm getting knife stuff for my jacket,
Speaker 3: and everybody got guns and we're going to pick each
Speaker 3: other up in the alley and go to school and
Speaker 3: the group and all that kind of stuff. Beaver didn't
Speaker 3: have to do none of that stuff, you know, So
Speaker 3: I just I didn't know the difference. I just would
Speaker 3: ask my parents where's that at, and they'd all stay California.
Speaker 3: I mean, everything was movies were done in Califoria. I
Speaker 3: just thought, well, they don't rob you in California, so
Speaker 3: I mean it should be cool. Yeah, they sure do.
Speaker 3: And I learned that when I got there too. They
Speaker 3: steal your money and it takes your year or two
Speaker 3: to figure out that you lost, like what happened.
Speaker 1: So when you're touring with Stevie, I mean you're with
Speaker 1: the heavy I mean again, in hindsight, I don't think
Speaker 1: you saw it as man, these are the heavyweights. But
Speaker 1: I mean it's like, you.
Speaker 5: Know Williams, Denise Williams, and was Raymond Pounds with you
Speaker 5: or was like he wasn't was somebody before Ali?
Speaker 3: I got Ali in the band. After Stevie and the
Speaker 3: drummer things name is Chris, they had a fight and
Speaker 3: the drummer said, blind for me, I'm gonna kick Steve.
Speaker 3: How about this, Stevie want is used to being blind.
Speaker 3: The drummer thought he could put a thing around his
Speaker 3: eye and make it even, and so he went for
Speaker 3: blows and Stevie every time he wait a minute, they
Speaker 3: he fist fought. They got into a.
Speaker 6: Fist exclusive.
Speaker 3: So I didn't think that was even in let. But
Speaker 3: they ended up and of course, you know Stevie. Every
Speaker 3: time the guy even turned his head, Bawn Stevie was.
Speaker 1: Left. It was it was baby.
Speaker 5: Was like bang and so we all had accepted to
Speaker 5: the darkness.
Speaker 3: Wait a minute. It didn't take long before we had
Speaker 3: to stop the fight. And then this guy still got fired,
Speaker 3: so he lost this game. That's what they got in
Speaker 3: the band. But we did have Randy Brecker, David Sanborn,
Speaker 3: Denise Williams, you know. So it was it was a
Speaker 3: lot of people in this band, Heavywey, Scotti, Edwards, you know.
Speaker 3: It was a great band.
Speaker 1: So were you part of the infamous uh Rolling Stones tour?
Speaker 3: Absolutely his first tour. I've been on the big tour, coy,
Speaker 3: why not? Just was the reception like the reception, yes, no, no, no,
Speaker 3: Well this is the thing.
Speaker 1: So we we interviewed the Revolution, uh some episodes back
Speaker 1: and of course, and I've heard mixed side of the
Speaker 1: story as well, and he was like, well, you know,
Speaker 1: he's on stage in his underwear, so of course they're
Speaker 1: going to throw stuff at him. The Revolution was basically
Speaker 1: saying that, you know, Rolling Stones audience wasn't receiving them well,
Speaker 1: and they got booed and pelted with Jack Daniel bottom.
Speaker 3: I was there when when Prince got hit with the jack.
Speaker 3: Daniels got hit in the head with the bottle. He
Speaker 3: got that head somewhere in l A. He got hit
Speaker 3: in the head with the jack. I had to get
Speaker 3: off the stage. He got hit in the head. They
Speaker 3: said play them and roll. I mean it was like bad,
Speaker 3: you know.
Speaker 1: I mean he came out the gates smoking with the guitar.
Speaker 3: Solo was still.
Speaker 1: And there's theories behind that.
Speaker 3: But like with you, was there fear like we might not.
Speaker 3: First of all, I was too young to know anything.
Speaker 3: I thought that Rolling Stones had already come on. I
Speaker 3: thought Stevie was the headlined okay, So it took me
Speaker 3: a minute or two. By the time the tear gas
Speaker 3: got in the limousine, I figured out, okay, something else
Speaker 3: is happening here, and the.
Speaker 1: Whole thing, you know.
Speaker 3: So the whole thing, now, you gotta remember, this was
Speaker 3: I haven't really discovered girls yet, but I was about
Speaker 3: to discover lots of girls. So this is the first
Speaker 3: really big tour, like go away from home and state
Speaker 3: for more than a week that I'd ever been on.
Speaker 3: Was the Rolling Stones tour in nineteen seventy two, and
Speaker 3: they were wonderful guys. We all had a great time.
Speaker 3: No one bowed Stevie Wonder off the stage, that told
Speaker 3: him to get off. We didn't have that same experience
Speaker 3: as some of the other groups had, you know, maybe
Speaker 3: because he got the respect. And then we'd always go
Speaker 3: play a few songs with the Stones, and you know,
Speaker 3: we got to go to Playboy Mansion, which I had
Speaker 3: never been before.
Speaker 1: Eighteen eighteen. Yeah, there's a documentary of it called the
Speaker 1: You ever see the Cocksucker's Blues?
Speaker 3: The Rolling Stones documentary?
Speaker 1: Yeah, they show I guess you guys playing satisfaction with.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the little skinny kid with a rig good time.
Speaker 3: He really skinny baffro that be me? So were you
Speaker 3: ever like on their airplane? And that's supposed to be
Speaker 3: the penultimate standard of just rock excess? Yeah, yeah, that's
Speaker 3: supposed to be the beginning. It was pretty bad. There
Speaker 3: was a lot of going on. There was a lot
Speaker 3: of things.
Speaker 6: Because if you don't like to smell of weed like.
Speaker 3: That, you know, I didn't do that. I didn't partake
Speaker 3: in that type activity. Let you do it, and I
Speaker 3: do remember that, you know, last I had checked cocaine
Speaker 3: was white. Their cocaine was crystal clear, and it was
Speaker 3: clear and it went up in a cone like that
Speaker 3: high and people could just go back and just get
Speaker 3: all they want. So this was only for eight months.
Speaker 3: The Roalinstones tours for about four months, but I mean
Speaker 3: your college tour with Stevie after that.
Speaker 1: So this is also I mean his morphing into something
Speaker 1: other than little Stevie Wonder or just a big time Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he had changed and he became a he's an
Speaker 3: interesting guy, but he really was. We used to hang
Speaker 3: out all the time, like we raced cars, you know,
Speaker 3: and we crashed.
Speaker 1: Drive.
Speaker 3: Oh if you didn't let him drive your fifty dollars fine?
Speaker 3: Wait what yeah?
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is like this episode is gonna
Speaker 5: fuel all the STEVIEE ain't blind.
Speaker 1: Con don't believe the STEVIEE is blind. It's not gonna
Speaker 1: If you're.
Speaker 3: Sitting next to STEVEE, you know he's blind and he's
Speaker 3: driving the car. Now he insists on driving.
Speaker 1: Because he insisted when you being in the passenger instructions.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and what's worse than that is he insisted on
Speaker 3: me driving and then we'd have to race the car
Speaker 3: next to us, and he didn't care about hitting the car.
Speaker 1: He said, we'll hit him.
Speaker 4: Then I was about to say he's been and he's
Speaker 4: been in car accidents and he still drives.
Speaker 3: Let me tell you something. He hadn't been in the
Speaker 3: car incident yet. This was I still got some reservations
Speaker 3: about what happened. I'm gonna leave that alone because I
Speaker 3: wasn't there. Now that was a couple of years later.
Speaker 3: I wasn't there. But you know how you hear something
Speaker 3: on the radio like all that car dashus, You're like, well,
Speaker 3: what really happened?
Speaker 1: What happened? How does a limousine crash into a log thing?
Speaker 5: And?
Speaker 3: Oh boy, so I mean you just you know, come.
Speaker 6: On on the cost.
Speaker 1: Show you getting the side now that we're in the seventies.
Speaker 1: Was Barry White next?
Speaker 3: When first I left, See, I left Stevie's band because
Speaker 3: he was teaching me how to write songs. I had
Speaker 3: Buddy Miles playing the guitar upside down on some of
Speaker 3: my songs, and me and Stevie cut a bunch of
Speaker 3: stuff with us singing. But somehow he wasn't gonna release it.
Speaker 3: I figured it took me a minute, but I figured
Speaker 3: out he really wasn't gonna let me put it out,
Speaker 3: and so that sort of broke my heart because he
Speaker 3: didn't want me to lead a band, you know, so
Speaker 3: I wanted to lead a band again. Ray Parker Junior, man,
Speaker 3: you're too valuable. Well, at the time I was his
Speaker 3: guitar player. You know, he wasn't feeling it, you know,
Speaker 3: was supposed to be his boy. So he took it
Speaker 3: kind of personal that I left the band. But we
Speaker 3: were still really good friends because after that, I got
Speaker 3: Nathan in the band, which is our story into itself.
Speaker 3: Let's talk about it. Still in the band, right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: what's interest. Nathan's the band leader. He's been there forty
Speaker 3: three years.
Speaker 1: But the great Nathan Wats by the way, yes, master
Speaker 1: bass player. I had got this is a year and
Speaker 1: a half after I left the band. Me and Stevie
Speaker 1: would still drive around LA and we parted in hangout
Speaker 1: and I got Reggie McBride in the band because me
Speaker 1: and Reggie used to play together at twelve years old.
Speaker 3: Wow, the time this got tom Gary used to play
Speaker 3: at twenty grand in the other room. And so Reggie
Speaker 3: left the band and went to Rare Earth. And then
Speaker 3: Stevie said, well, I want somebody else from Detroit in
Speaker 3: the same neighborhood. He wants that type of human being,
Speaker 3: that type of vibe. The only person left was Nathan,
Speaker 3: who played the trumpet, right, And I said, well, I
Speaker 3: got my buddy Nathan who plays the trumpet. He wants
Speaker 3: to play the bass.
Speaker 1: Head.
Speaker 3: I said, he can't play the bass yet. You just started,
Speaker 3: you know, And Stevie said, we have him come out there.
Speaker 3: He says, he you a fast learner. I said, well,
Speaker 3: he's a fast learner, but he he ain't got the
Speaker 3: bass yet, right, So he had some kind of cheap
Speaker 3: harmony bass, and I remember Stevie heard him at audition
Speaker 3: Saivent sounds really weird, you know. So then Nathan took
Speaker 3: my bass and went on this stevee on my base.
Speaker 3: And the way the story goes, Nathan told me he's
Speaker 3: eighteen other bass players there and everybody could outplay him
Speaker 3: ten to one, but he still got the gig.
Speaker 1: You know, what do you think?
Speaker 3: So he learned how to because Stevie just wants somebody
Speaker 3: from Detroit in the club down the street from me,
Speaker 3: the whole bit, and so he basically taught Nathan how
Speaker 3: to play, but not how to play the bass. It's
Speaker 3: his first gig, his first gig.
Speaker 1: Ever in life. So how does he because he can't see.
Speaker 3: Is it a lot of or can he cannot see?
Speaker 1: So how are you guys learning? First of all, how
Speaker 1: is he writing these songs?
Speaker 3: I've heard he writes him in his head and he
Speaker 3: just play. He remembers every part, every everything, and he
Speaker 3: could play all part like I was in the studio
Speaker 3: with him one hundred percent the whole time when he
Speaker 3: did Living for the City, and he started with the
Speaker 3: Fender Rose no click track, with no click tracks at
Speaker 3: those times, so he just played it like this and
Speaker 3: it really got weird when it done. And then you know,
Speaker 3: those chords going off beasts, you know. I was like, oh, homeboys,
Speaker 3: you know, might be smoking. But I mean, you know,
Speaker 3: then he would layer it and then we'll come together.
Speaker 3: Put the drums on last. Always put the drums on last. Really, yeah,
Speaker 3: you always put your drums on last, usually the drums
Speaker 3: and drums.
Speaker 1: But that's interesting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, see me, I put a couple of parts down,
Speaker 3: but I need to put the drums down then locked,
Speaker 3: relock the base and everything back to whatever it is.
Speaker 3: But he just puts down putsing drums on last.
Speaker 1: I always wanted to know how does he not tape ideas,
Speaker 1: especially when he can't. Well, I'm sure that he writes,
Speaker 1: but I mean for you guys to know what he's thinking.
Speaker 3: He hears it in his head and he'll give it
Speaker 3: to you, but mostly on his records. That's him playing
Speaker 3: most of the stuff a lot of the time. Then
Speaker 3: he'll overdub what he needs.
Speaker 1: So you're only getting the finished product. Then.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, he plays the drums and stuff. Like when
Speaker 3: we did Maybe a Baby, the track was pretty much
Speaker 3: done okay, and more trivia. It's funny the second engineer
Speaker 3: we did that crystal sound in La turns out years
Speaker 3: later second engineer with Steve Perry from Journey Second. Yeah,
Speaker 3: he was the second engineer on the date.
Speaker 1: That's crazy.
Speaker 3: Wow. So you know old Sherry thing.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of.
Speaker 3: Stuff going on at that time. You know, it's an
Speaker 3: interesting time period in life, you know. I mean, I
Speaker 3: look back on it as a whole bunch of gread,
Speaker 3: but at the time, just what was happening that was it?
Speaker 6: Well?
Speaker 1: I wanted to ask about that. When you did Barry White,
Speaker 1: was it just studio sessions or was it also touring
Speaker 1: with him.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I did both. Okay, how did y'all get paid?
Speaker 3: Because Money had like seventy people on the band like
Speaker 3: every show. I don't know about the other guys, but
Speaker 3: I was getting triple scale playing with Barry White in
Speaker 3: the studio. But it was I came a little late,
Speaker 3: like I missed a dude, because I was playing with
Speaker 3: Stevie one tour and I met Barry White the next year,
Speaker 3: the following year, and he was my first, my last one,
Speaker 3: everything even before that. But he was like a rough
Speaker 3: neck kind of guy. I was going to gangster from
Speaker 3: the hood and you know, and I was a Detroit boy.
Speaker 3: I wasn't you know that clean, you know. So I
Speaker 3: had my afro, had my Lincoln content and gene Page
Speaker 3: famous ring. He needs we need to get him an
Speaker 3: award on he needs a pro here. Yeah, he's unbelievable,
Speaker 3: all Lionel Richard. He even did the the Righteous Brothers song. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so he's a he's He was a good friend of
Speaker 3: mine from Detroit. I mean he lived out here, but
Speaker 3: I worked with him in Detroit and he brought me
Speaker 3: to the session. You know, Barry Waite wasn't paying me
Speaker 3: no attention. I wasn't on the session. And Barry White
Speaker 3: like to play his music back loud, neve console speakers
Speaker 3: all the way up. You know, stuff's whacking orkster jam
Speaker 3: and that stuff is going. And I had an idea
Speaker 3: for a tune, and you know, what did I have
Speaker 3: to lose? I was off coming from the truck. What
Speaker 3: do I care? You know?
Speaker 1: So I push stop on the tape recorder, you know,
Speaker 1: and all the music stop, you know, and he got
Speaker 1: rid of yourself. I did it?
Speaker 3: Oh lord, Barry session? And Barry White looked over, he says,
Speaker 3: he says, oh, yeah, it was nightment big. First of all,
Speaker 3: he says, what Frank, what happened? And then he looked
Speaker 3: around there to me in the corner. I said, excuse me,
Speaker 3: mister White, and it was got real quiet, and and
Speaker 3: he said he looked at somebody. He says, who? Then
Speaker 3: is that right? And then he looked at Gene Page,
Speaker 3: like you brought him here? And I said, excuse me,
Speaker 3: mister White, and that's a really nice song, but it's
Speaker 3: missing this guitar part. And he looked at me and
Speaker 3: before he could punch me or kick me out, he said, well,
Speaker 3: didn't get the funk in there and play it, you know.
Speaker 3: So I went in.
Speaker 1: Joe Jackson jack with you ask first, and I'm gonna
Speaker 1: start an empire.
Speaker 3: So the tensions rise, original tensions rise, right. So I
Speaker 3: go out there and uh, you know, I'm starting to
Speaker 3: play the part, and I think, like anybody else, you know,
Speaker 3: I hope he likes it, because I like, I know
Speaker 3: what I gotta do. So I hit this line. The
Speaker 3: line was dude, dude new that kind of thing, you know,
Speaker 3: And he loved it, and and so I said, okay,
Speaker 3: we'll roll the tape back. He says, fuck you keep
Speaker 3: playing it now. So the only thing that's missing on
Speaker 3: the record is fuck you keep playing now. But you
Speaker 3: hear me out for a bar, and I have two bars, right,
Speaker 3: and then he's liked keep playing. So I just started
Speaker 3: back up playing it. And he just left it like
Speaker 3: that because he didn't believe in fixing it. He just
Speaker 3: left it really yeah. On the record, it drops out
Speaker 3: for bar half way.
Speaker 1: He told me.
Speaker 3: The son is White Gold album, they mean Berry White.
Speaker 3: I'm not gonna say we were boys, but I thought
Speaker 3: we were boys, right, And you know, so his thing
Speaker 3: was he got all these riders down he said, nobody
Speaker 3: gets a song on bar White. No way, know how
Speaker 3: y'all right for these guys, right, for these guys, right
Speaker 3: for all that time, And so mine was determined to
Speaker 3: get a song on Berry White. So I got Gene
Speaker 3: Page to write out the charts, and I had the
Speaker 3: music demo tape cutting all the stuff. So I put
Speaker 3: Barry while I had a little Mercedes convertible by this time.
Speaker 3: This is later in seventy four, and Barry came out
Speaker 3: the street. I said, Barry, listen to this, and I
Speaker 3: pushed him in my car on by accident. I had
Speaker 3: the door open, you know, push him in, but I
Speaker 3: didn't know he's gonna cut himself, so damn the window.
Speaker 3: Because he was too big to get in. The Mercedes
Speaker 3: comes too big, you know. But he got in there,
Speaker 3: but he didn't want to acknowledge that he was too
Speaker 3: big to get in, so that worked in my favorite
Speaker 3: But anyway, I got to play on the track, you know.
Speaker 1: He said, yeah, right, that's nice. So what about it?
Speaker 3: I said, well, you need to cut the track. He said,
Speaker 3: he said, man, we do it. So we went back
Speaker 3: cut the rest of his stuff, you know, Da da
Speaker 3: Da and Barry White had a specific and he says,
Speaker 3: everybody's getting triple scale. I'm cutting eight songs today. I
Speaker 3: ain't paying y'all pen anymore. You can cut it in
Speaker 3: one hour, you can cut it in ten hours. I
Speaker 3: don't care what you do. But once we get these songs,
Speaker 3: sessions over. So this is one of those days. We
Speaker 3: were done already, right, we got like two or three
Speaker 3: hours left. Everybody want to go home, but they all
Speaker 3: my boys, David T. Walker, you know, Lee Ridding, Jay Graydon,
Speaker 3: Dean Parks.
Speaker 1: And Mary over in the corner.
Speaker 3: And to show you what kind of guy Jean Page was,
Speaker 3: I owe him way too much. He had already the
Speaker 3: night before written all the charts out for me for
Speaker 3: the whole band. Right, And so when we got done,
Speaker 3: I said, Barry Man, you remember a song. Please let
Speaker 3: me cut the song.
Speaker 1: Man.
Speaker 3: He says, Ray, we're done here, man going home. I said,
Speaker 3: why don't you do this? Why don't you go home?
Speaker 3: And I cut the track. He looked at me like
Speaker 3: that little snotty nosed kid. I mean, he's really pushing hisself,
Speaker 3: you know. And so he went home and I got
Speaker 3: Joe Sample and Wildon Felder, all the guys. You know,
Speaker 3: stay there to stay back with me and cut the track.
Speaker 3: So we cut the track in like twenty minutes, and
Speaker 3: I drove it up to Barry's house and he listened
Speaker 3: to what he says that's on the album. Wow, that's
Speaker 3: how I got to cut on the White Gold album,
Speaker 3: which did really well. Wait, what's the title of the
Speaker 3: song Always thinking of You? All right, let's go into
Speaker 3: always thinking of You? Written by Ray Parker Jr. For
Speaker 3: Barry White, White Gold, to Love and Limited Work, Sports
Speaker 3: Left Supreme Candor.
Speaker 1: That's Amazian reasons. Why why not always? Always? Flanker? Bill
Speaker 1: Hm who engineered this? Who? Frank Keshmar? Frank Keshmar? Who
Speaker 1: else was on the sessions? Well?
Speaker 3: On the Barry White sessions was Ed Green played the
Speaker 3: drums all right, all the time. Wilton Felder, who was
Speaker 3: a saxophone player for the jacks SAIDs played the bass,
Speaker 3: and for those who don't know, he also played on
Speaker 3: all the Jackson five hits too, and a whole bunch
Speaker 3: of other stuff. So when you hear ABC, that's Wilton
Speaker 3: Felder the sax player playing the bass.
Speaker 1: Really yeah, okay.
Speaker 3: Joe Sample played the keyboards. Gary Filman played the vibes,
Speaker 3: had the vibes and on guitar would would be myself.
Speaker 3: Wah wah, David T. Walker right, Dean Parks sometimes either
Speaker 3: Jay graydon or Lee written now time out Dean Parks. Yeah,
Speaker 3: the great theme Parks was my boy, Dean Parks. We
Speaker 3: played together many years on whole bunch of stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 3: what is Dean Parks doing in the Barry White session?
Speaker 1: It was on all the rare White sessions. No, just
Speaker 1: that's just I can't imagine Parks.
Speaker 3: Just when you the song you mentioned du Yeah, that's
Speaker 3: that's Jane Parks. I'm playing on there too, But but
Speaker 3: that's I think that's me, Dean and Lee and but
Speaker 3: we're playing one note to piece, but they're all sunk
Speaker 3: together because Barry wouldn't let you play the whole part.
Speaker 3: So we're playing one note to d and we're sliding
Speaker 3: it up and that's all three of us. That's overdubbing. No,
Speaker 3: he didn't like to overdub.
Speaker 1: So it's just normal to have four guitarists playing five.
Speaker 3: Four.
Speaker 1: Don't stop it for He just didn't want to overdub
Speaker 1: for monetary reasons.
Speaker 3: No, he just didn't like it. He mixed on the
Speaker 3: need console where all the faders are here in the
Speaker 3: monitor section here. Yeah, and he just he believed that
Speaker 3: he should to mix up here and if he didn't
Speaker 3: hear the echo on the drums, take the whole takeover.
Speaker 3: So he wanted everything to sound like a record right here.
Speaker 3: He says, forget all that, do it later. I want
Speaker 3: If I can't get it here, I ain't got no record,
Speaker 3: So it's up to the band, the engineered everybody else
Speaker 3: to give him his record on those fades. And all
Speaker 3: he wanted to do is play with the volumes on
Speaker 3: those fades. But if he couldn't get the snare, he
Speaker 3: couldn't get it cut over.
Speaker 1: So even mixing like, there's no like, okay, let's take
Speaker 1: a day out to mix and stuff.
Speaker 3: You already mixed it. It's already over there, so you're
Speaker 3: hearing it the way he wants to hear it. What
Speaker 3: happened afterwards? By this time I would have figured you
Speaker 3: guys had figured out my ego. Of course I want more.
Speaker 3: I want a song that Barry White sings and me
Speaker 3: and him do together. I went through something very similar
Speaker 3: at my apartment where I lived upstairs. Barry White's one
Speaker 3: of his manager. Guys lived there, so I figured out
Speaker 3: from the manager when Barry was just going to show
Speaker 3: up right, and I was going to pull the car
Speaker 3: real fast and play him this new cut ahead right.
Speaker 3: I know most people said you should quit while feeling.
Speaker 3: So here it comes. I see Barry White pulling up.
Speaker 3: I can't wait now I know where he's going. But
Speaker 3: I don't want him to get out of his car
Speaker 3: and go ring the buzz and go upstairs. I want
Speaker 3: to catch him while he's downstairs. So I see him
Speaker 3: come up the street because I've been waiting all this time.
Speaker 3: So as soon as I see him come to the street,
Speaker 3: I leave my parate, go downstairs, get in the car,
Speaker 3: and I pulled to the front. But when I pulled
Speaker 3: to the front out of the parking lot, it opens
Speaker 3: the gate. Barry White had parked his White Mark seven
Speaker 3: and the front of the gate illegally, but it was
Speaker 3: too close and I had already triggered it. When I
Speaker 3: saw it was too late, it lifted. The gate was rising.
Speaker 3: He had parked and was getting out. The gate lifted
Speaker 3: up the front of his car. The car was too
Speaker 3: heavy car went back on the gate. It ripped the
Speaker 3: gate off the thing and it fell on top of
Speaker 3: his Mark selling. So I wrecked his Mark seven.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 3: But I did get to play him the song. I
Speaker 3: saw that Reid it Miller, He says.
Speaker 1: Thanks three.
Speaker 3: I needed that, but it was his fault, he parking
Speaker 3: wrong space. But anyway, I did get him to listen
Speaker 3: to the song, and he did cut the song. And
Speaker 3: so I was one of the first people to ever
Speaker 3: get a song that I wrote with Barry White, maybe
Speaker 3: the only, and it's called you See the Trouble with Me,
Speaker 3: And we sold like seven or eight million records. And
Speaker 3: then a group called Black Legend redid it in two
Speaker 3: thousand and two or something and it went number one
Speaker 3: around the world again, so it's on all his greatest
Speaker 3: hits records. And I think he was just very kind
Speaker 3: to me to do it. First of all, he did
Speaker 3: was kind enough not to beat me up after I
Speaker 3: trashed his White Mark seven.
Speaker 1: You know. So he's a good dude. That's crazy, so okay,
Speaker 1: So eventually you quit while you're head, But we skipped
Speaker 1: Rufus and Shaka, How did you get tell Me something good?
Speaker 1: That's Stevie's song.
Speaker 3: He was Let's go, let's get some more drama now
Speaker 3: because you guys, I know you guys liked Okay, So
Speaker 3: I wrote the song for Barry White and Stevie. None
Speaker 3: of them will cut it. So next door to me
Speaker 3: is this girl Shaka Khan and Andre Fisher who I'm
Speaker 3: working with, And so me and Andre Fisher and David
Speaker 3: Foster doing sessions for thirty five bucks for Flat Top
Speaker 3: and Cookie at Ion Tina Turn Studio. That's how it's
Speaker 3: just starting out in seventy four. We're doing budget day,
Speaker 3: you know, we trying to make some money. David Foster, Yeah,
Speaker 3: well he won't then. He was like sixteen, No, she was,
Speaker 3: he was. He's older than me. He's about twenty three,
Speaker 3: twenty four. But I don't know if you know he
Speaker 3: wrote that song don't Cry, She's a lady sweet trying.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Watch that's how you got my respect you. David Foster
Speaker 3: wrote that. I was like, man, we used to play
Speaker 3: that when I was a kid in the band. Were
Speaker 3: talking about you wrote that, David Foster. Yeah, he wrote
Speaker 3: don't Crash.
Speaker 1: He's lated.
Speaker 3: Everybody used to play in their band, all the rest
Speaker 3: of stuff. Yeah, And so it was one of those
Speaker 3: things where nobody would cut the song so me and
Speaker 3: Andre we go in the studio and we lay it down.
Speaker 3: I played the guitars and the rest up. He says,
Speaker 3: his band of Roof is gonna cut. I'm like, unknown,
Speaker 3: whatever cutting my unknown band? So we cut the songs
Speaker 3: and sings on it and she's sing's really really I'm like,
Speaker 3: who's that singing?
Speaker 5: Is?
Speaker 3: This is gonna be something. I'm thinking, Oh man, it's
Speaker 3: gonna be hot. And then she tells me the story.
Speaker 3: She says, you don't even remember me. Huh, I said,
Speaker 3: what are you talking about?
Speaker 1: I remembered you.
Speaker 3: She says, well, you know when you back last year
Speaker 3: when you were playing with Stevie Wonder, me and my
Speaker 3: sister I gave you the tape to listen to. You
Speaker 3: gave me an address to your house to mail it
Speaker 3: to in San Francisco, she says, And you don't even
Speaker 3: live in San Francisco, and you were trying to bang
Speaker 3: me and you would you.
Speaker 6: So by then you discover women.
Speaker 3: And I was like, guilty, yil tea, yell tea. But
Speaker 3: you know, I said, you really sang it. But she
Speaker 3: was pregnant with the time. To make a long story short,
Speaker 3: the record was gonna be the first single called You
Speaker 3: Got the Love. I mean we were jamming and her
Speaker 3: sister be in Ta taka boom, Yeah, yeah, yeah, Okay,
Speaker 3: so here comes Sha Khan. She sang the heck out
Speaker 3: the song. I'm liking the song, but nobody knows who
Speaker 3: know rufus Is. They're invisible band. Nobody ever heard of it. Now,
Speaker 3: I just quit Stevie's band. So you know, Stevie's gotta
Speaker 3: teach me a lesson, right, I mean, because he's upset.
Speaker 3: Now I'm gonna ask you this question. How in the
Speaker 3: world does Stevie Wonder, who just won eight Grammys find
Speaker 3: if he's going to cut a song, why does he
Speaker 3: cut it on the most unknown singer on the planet
Speaker 3: because he.
Speaker 1: Found out that you were.
Speaker 3: I'm not saying that, I'm just saying, well, I'm just fine.
Speaker 3: I'm just telling you that, out of all the records
Speaker 3: on the planet Earth, somehow he ended up with a
Speaker 3: single in front of mine.
Speaker 6: Y'all must have had this conversation you got to.
Speaker 1: Love first, yes, and then where he got to Stevie.
Speaker 3: I'm just saying, out all the records in the world,
Speaker 3: he can have his choice of doing anybody on the
Speaker 3: planet hey, somehow he migrated all the way to mine,
Speaker 3: which was wonderful because tell me something good, open up.
Speaker 3: The album made it, and then my single came out
Speaker 3: and blew up.
Speaker 6: And did y'all ever have a conversation you Stevie?
Speaker 3: Well, whenever we have those conversations, it's like the Queen
Speaker 3: of England.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 3: Did you see the movie?
Speaker 1: No? Okay, well I didn't see it either. I mean,
Speaker 1: it was an amicable parting. I assume it wasn't so
Speaker 1: bitter to the fact that, you know.
Speaker 3: We love each other, but we've had some interesting, you're
Speaker 3: not going to speak to each other for a long
Speaker 3: time sessions. Then he apologized, then we hugged and kiss it,
Speaker 3: and then you know, then I was nominated for an
Speaker 3: Oscar with him. He wouldn't speak to me again until
Speaker 3: until he won, kissed me and we were good again.
Speaker 3: You know what we nominated for with the Oscar because
Speaker 3: he was woman yeah and woman in red yeah.
Speaker 1: I just called.
Speaker 3: So I won the British Oscar and the fifty seven
Speaker 3: Oscars opened up with me performing what they spent like
Speaker 3: a half a minute, but they didn't ask him to perform,
Speaker 3: and I sat they sat me in back of him.
Speaker 3: I mean, I had my hands on Ned Prince was
Speaker 3: over here, had my hands on Stevie here, and you know,
Speaker 3: I mean he wasn't saying anything. Yeah, I had a
Speaker 3: funny suspicion that if I had won that Oscar, I
Speaker 3: think that would have been the end of the relationship.
Speaker 1: I think that was forgiving.
Speaker 3: Well, I think we'd be done, be done by this point.
Speaker 1: Do you have like personal aspirations of you're own the
Speaker 1: BV artists or you're just no, Like, what do you
Speaker 1: want to be? Do you want to be the consummate sidemen?
Speaker 1: Do you just want to songwrite and publishing is that
Speaker 1: where it is? Or do you want to be the star? Well,
Speaker 1: first I wanted to be the guitar player. Then I
Speaker 1: figured I might not make enough money doing that. And
Speaker 1: I really like nice things, so I thought, wow, And
Speaker 1: when I work with Stevie, I liked the songwriting and
Speaker 1: all that kind of thing.
Speaker 3: I said, why you write the song? That works us
Speaker 3: to write the songs. But it really wasn't until I
Speaker 3: took that Shaka Khan record home in the Very White,
Speaker 3: White Gold album to my mom and dad because they
Speaker 3: thought I was failing in California.
Speaker 1: I should move back home. You know.
Speaker 3: I lost my Lincolcondmal for this little small Mercedes that
Speaker 3: didn't have electric seats and stuff, you know.
Speaker 1: Barry then put it.
Speaker 3: They came out to my house, which I thought was cool.
Speaker 3: But my house was on top of a hill, swimming
Speaker 3: pool view of the city, and my dad looked at
Speaker 3: it said he couldn't afford the house on the bottom.
Speaker 3: With everybody else, they stuck their way up in the
Speaker 3: middle of nowhere. We had to go down this windy
Speaker 3: road and his house wasn't even made out of bricks.
Speaker 3: He's had some stuck old you know, bluod built house
Speaker 3: they put together. So they were really they were depressed,
Speaker 3: and they thought I wasn't doing so well. Then I
Speaker 3: brought the record home to my mom, and it was
Speaker 3: really my mom that gave me the rude awakening.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 3: My mom said, uh, you know, I said, hey, Mom,
Speaker 3: I got this big hit on Shaka Con I mean
Speaker 3: on Rufous.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 3: She was what's a Rufous? I said, that's the name
Speaker 3: of the band. I guess she thought it was my band.
Speaker 3: I don't know what she thought, but so I gave
Speaker 3: my mom the record, and she took the record and
Speaker 3: she looked at it, look at the front, she saw people.
Speaker 3: She said, I don't see you right now. You gotta understand,
Speaker 3: I'm going home with an ego I like making I'm Hollywood.
Speaker 3: I thought the Bear song, ary white song.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: She says, I don't see you. Then she took the
Speaker 3: very white wricks. She looked at it. I don't see you.
Speaker 3: I said, that's because ma I wrote the song. Now
Speaker 3: I'm still feeling high and mighty and justified. So she
Speaker 3: pulled out the record and I'll never forget ABC Dunhill
Speaker 3: at the time had a black label and they write,
Speaker 3: your name is silver and I said, see. Mom says
Speaker 3: right there, Ray Parkage, you know me. And she looked
Speaker 3: at it. Now, my mother's in her late sixty a time,
Speaker 3: and she was like, boy, go get my magnifying glass.
Speaker 1: I know she wasn't.
Speaker 3: So she gets her magnifying glass and she holds it
Speaker 3: back and she's doing like that and it says our
Speaker 3: period Parker, and I'll never forget these words.
Speaker 1: This is where I got it.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 3: Sometimes simplicity, like you said, simplicity of a song, simplicit
Speaker 3: simplicity is better. She said to me, She says, is
Speaker 3: that you are Period Parker. I said, yeah, that's me, mister.
Speaker 3: She said the Period took one space. Couldn't they just
Speaker 3: give you another space? And uh, you know, so when
Speaker 3: I left home with a lot smaller head than when
Speaker 3: I got there, you know, I figured, I said, you know,
Speaker 3: I'm not coming back till I get a record. I
Speaker 3: gotta get my face on the record.
Speaker 1: That's just it.
Speaker 3: My mama does not understand what it is I'm doing.
Speaker 3: I couldn't even explain to my mom what I did,
Speaker 3: and my mom couldn't even see me. My name was
Speaker 3: so small. I didn't like the way it felt.
Speaker 1: By this point, you were also on the silver screen
Speaker 1: correct a little bit and Saturday Night.
Speaker 3: Yeah that's too brief. Well, I mean it was still like,
Speaker 3: you know, yeah, that's too brief, mama blink.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Did you explain to your mama that the little name
Speaker 4: on the back of the album makes a lot of
Speaker 4: time more money than the big face on.
Speaker 3: The cover, You know what. I could have explained it,
Speaker 3: but money wasn't the issue. The issue is my mam
Speaker 3: was sitting there like she didn't even know what I
Speaker 3: was doing. She's sitting there like you know, I'm coming
Speaker 3: home tomorrow.
Speaker 1: I got it.
Speaker 3: I want, I want you like what you know? It's
Speaker 3: like what I don't see nothing, you know? So that
Speaker 3: that struck a quarter message. I'm going to cut. I
Speaker 3: gotta cut something that my mama can see me on
Speaker 3: the cover. That's just the way it's got to be.
Speaker 3: You know, this is a question Love Supreme wor and Pandora.
Speaker 1: If you're just joining us, we're almost through hour two
Speaker 1: of our conversation with our guest, Ray Parker Jr. We
Speaker 1: learned about his work with Stevie Wonder, Barry White, Chaka Khan,
Speaker 1: and we're digging deeper and to his attempts after years
Speaker 1: of working in the music business to prove to his
Speaker 1: parents that he was a success. I guess my question
Speaker 1: is who did you fish for to get a record deal?
Speaker 1: I want nobody. Okay, well, okay, this is what I
Speaker 1: want to know. I want you to describe Clive Davis.
Speaker 3: Now, we got to lead in the class. Okay, gotta
Speaker 3: let me lead in the client days and I'm going
Speaker 3: to try and make it as brief as possible as
Speaker 3: long as Okay, after that, you got to love very
Speaker 3: white all that kind of segment. I got a singles
Speaker 3: deal with A and M Records to do this girl
Speaker 3: Anita Sherman, which she sang one song and the secretary
Speaker 3: at the studio said a few words to me. She
Speaker 3: burst out in tears. I had four hours of studio
Speaker 3: time left, and I had to sing the song myself
Speaker 3: because she was crying. She blew my entire record deal.
Speaker 3: And when I went to the A and M lot,
Speaker 3: at the corner of my eye looked like in the
Speaker 3: next building over there was Quincy Jones standing there, and
Speaker 3: I was like.
Speaker 1: Quincy Jones.
Speaker 3: Oh my godness, Quincy Jones standing over there. I mean
Speaker 3: Quincy Jones. I didn't know what to do with myself
Speaker 3: because we played Killer Joe in the band when I
Speaker 3: was a kid with Bohannan and all the stuff. So
Speaker 3: I gotta I gotta go meet Quincy. I gotta go
Speaker 3: say something to Quincy Jones. So I just got this
Speaker 3: record on A and M. My egos. I had plenty
Speaker 3: of ego at the time, maybe a bit much. So
Speaker 3: I went over to Quincy Jones and I said, Hi,
Speaker 3: you don't know me, but I'm the guy who's gonna
Speaker 3: teach you how to produce hit records. I'm the guy
Speaker 3: who's gonna teach you how to produce hit records. Well,
Speaker 3: to make a long story short, a couple of months later,
Speaker 3: the Brothers Johnson came out. He was number one on
Speaker 3: the pop charts and IRV charts, and they had sent
Speaker 3: me to Bernie Grummings, which happened to be in the
Speaker 3: back of the an M lot to get the box
Speaker 3: of records, the only ones in existence besides the radio
Speaker 3: and the swamp radio in Florida that played my record.
Speaker 3: And as I was being escorted off the lot, the
Speaker 3: one thing that that was good for when I said
Speaker 3: that's Quincy Jones saw me like this with my records
Speaker 3: going off to the lot. And now, by the way,
Speaker 3: by the time I got to Bernie Grumman's thing, and
Speaker 3: they had already told me I was fired. Okay, so
Speaker 3: I'm doing a really good job at this. I'm trying
Speaker 3: to get to Bernie Grummans, get the records and get
Speaker 3: to my car, and my Adams Apples all choked up.
Speaker 3: I mean, I'm about to cry. I mean, I'm holding
Speaker 3: all this in, but my Adam Appers is hurting right here,
Speaker 3: choked up. So much, you know, a little kid. So
Speaker 3: I mean, so I'm just trying all I want to
Speaker 3: do to get my records and make it. And I
Speaker 3: was almost to the gate where they let you in
Speaker 3: and out, and I was getting ready because my cars
Speaker 3: parked out, so I can't get on a lot no more.
Speaker 3: So I was about to leave, and then somebody said, hey,
Speaker 3: young man, I'm waiting on my production lessons. Hey, all
Speaker 3: I can say is I look like Linus with the towel.
Speaker 3: And he felt so bad he immediately stopped whoever he
Speaker 3: may have been talking to her about before, but he left.
Speaker 3: Those guys immediately came over to me, put his arms
Speaker 3: around me and says, now, now, son, I didn't mean that.
Speaker 3: He said, it ain't that bad. And he says, he says,
Speaker 3: I don't know who you are. He was just joking
Speaker 3: with me because he had a hit and me getting
Speaker 3: kicked off late. But he did not take it that bad.
Speaker 3: He says, I don't know who you are, but you
Speaker 3: know you're obviously doing something right, or else you wouldn't
Speaker 3: be on this lot. That's what he said. And he says,
Speaker 3: what you need to do now is just pick yourself
Speaker 3: back up and get back in the game and do
Speaker 3: it fast. He says, don't take all day. He says,
Speaker 3: get back in it and do it quickly.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 3: And then I left that lot, went to HB. Barnham
Speaker 3: and Wildwa at the studio where they gave me another
Speaker 3: ragging on and made me cry again.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: So it's a bad day for it. So at the time,
Speaker 1: was herb Albert and Jerry Marsh were they name only
Speaker 1: executives in those days they were running it. So what
Speaker 1: do you think it was like? They just didn't see
Speaker 1: I didn't have a hit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was get off the lot, you don't have
Speaker 3: a hit, Get out here, get fired. Hey, And the
Speaker 3: guy A and M told me, he said, mister Parker.
Speaker 3: And I only sang because the girls started crying. She
Speaker 3: messed up my record deal. I'm like everybody else, I'm
Speaker 3: blaming on somebody else.
Speaker 1: It wasn't me.
Speaker 3: But she didn't sing the song. She started crying when
Speaker 3: the other girl was hitting on me, you know. And
Speaker 3: I was like, oh no, no, she didn't even sing anything.
Speaker 3: Come on, you know, in those days you only had
Speaker 3: X amount of hours for studio time. They let you
Speaker 3: in the studio for six hours, six hours you've done.
Speaker 3: So I had to sing the song and the guy
Speaker 3: looked at me. Kipt Comb was his name. I'll never
Speaker 3: forget his name. He says, mister Parker, you do a
Speaker 3: lot of things, right, guitar. We like what you write,
Speaker 3: they said, he said, but you got to let this
Speaker 3: singing thing go. This. You ain't gonna be no star. This,
Speaker 3: ain't you. He says, that ain't gonna happen.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: He says, that ain't gonna happen, and the famous last words.
Speaker 3: So now we're going to get we're leading into Clive
Speaker 3: and all that stuff. So hold on, here we go. No,
Speaker 3: that's between it. That's what leads me to climb. So
Speaker 3: then I'm working with Richard Perry all the time, doing
Speaker 3: a bunch of sessions. He's paying me triple scale. He's
Speaker 3: got a studio at the Paramount Lot with Paramount Universal Lot,
Speaker 3: and so he had my name on the concrete, says
Speaker 3: Ray Parker Junior. Whereever I I pull on Paaramount Lot
Speaker 3: park right there in the Rape Parker Junior space.
Speaker 1: We were boys.
Speaker 3: Man, we're cutting Barbara Streis saying, Karl Simon Lil say,
Speaker 3: I mean everybody whatever.
Speaker 1: He did, I was. I was just got.
Speaker 3: He had Dave the juice man come every day. They
Speaker 3: bring him cocaine and weed, and they bring me watermelon juice.
Speaker 1: You know what I mean.
Speaker 3: Just I was like, eventually he's juice, right, like watermelon
Speaker 3: juice for Rekular. And so in those days, we didn't
Speaker 3: have like tape recorders and stuff like you have now
Speaker 3: with your iPhone. So I had a song that I'd
Speaker 3: written at home with the little click drum machine, and
Speaker 3: I'm beating on the thing on my Maestro rhythmace and
Speaker 3: I just wanted to see what it sounds like. So
Speaker 3: I told y Green, you play this, John Barnes, you
Speaker 3: play this. And so we all played our parts and
Speaker 3: then Richard comes in to lunch break and says, man,
Speaker 3: that's jamming.
Speaker 1: What is that?
Speaker 3: I said, well, that's the song. I wrote it home,
Speaker 3: you know. But we're just on lunch break. He says, well,
Speaker 3: can we cut that on leos heir And I said, well,
Speaker 3: I don't know. Yeah, he says, but but I mean
Speaker 3: I got to get my party song. So he promises
Speaker 3: me my part of the song. It's not like it's
Speaker 3: a mystery issue. I didn't know that I wasn't get
Speaker 3: my part of the song til the record came out.
Speaker 3: So the record comes out, it's jamming, and I don't
Speaker 3: see my name on anywhere. I stand in Tower Records
Speaker 3: for two hours trying to find my name on a
Speaker 3: forty five. If you can imagine that. I just knew
Speaker 3: it was going to appear. But I'm there for two
Speaker 3: hours and the lady there was a security guard comes
Speaker 3: down to me who ended up being burned at the
Speaker 3: meeting in the lady's room.
Speaker 1: Girl, you know climax.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Bernie at Cooper was the security guy.
Speaker 6: Because I'm not in the move, she was a security guard.
Speaker 3: She's about to rest me. She said, you're gonna buy
Speaker 3: this record or what?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 3: I'm telling her, I'm about to start crying again. There
Speaker 3: was a lot of crying for a big dude, So
Speaker 3: I'm about to start crying again. She said, you know,
Speaker 3: buy this record.
Speaker 5: What?
Speaker 3: Then she finds, are you rape Parker?
Speaker 1: What you're doing?
Speaker 3: She knew me from being a guitar player. She says, well,
Speaker 3: you got to listen to my music. I'm like, I'm
Speaker 3: not listening to anything right now. I'm trying to figure
Speaker 3: out what happened to my song, you know. And so
Speaker 3: I had given him two songs. I given him that
Speaker 3: one and Jack and Jail right. And so Carol Childs,
Speaker 3: who is his head of his publishing company, felt so
Speaker 3: bad because she kept saying with Rickard, that's a mistake.
Speaker 3: Richard's gonna make it right. And Richard also told me
Speaker 3: that he's gonna do a whole album on you. I like,
Speaker 3: you know, I like that, feed them, feed them, feed him,
Speaker 3: just postpone, postpone promise from the world. He says, you're
Speaker 3: gonna be Barbra Streis. He's gonna cut a whole album
Speaker 3: on you, and I'll be by Richard Pierre and you'll
Speaker 3: be on Warner Brothers. And that's be the end of that, Okay. Well,
Speaker 3: then the contract came. It was like everything for him,
Speaker 3: nothing for me, you know. And I was broken hearted
Speaker 3: because I'm.
Speaker 1: Like, how could you do this?
Speaker 3: I thought we've been working together on records. I've been
Speaker 3: helping you out give him more ideas than maybe I should.
Speaker 3: And he promised me a piece of the song. Wasn't
Speaker 3: like he had to give me all the song, just
Speaker 3: give me my share of the song. So he didn't
Speaker 3: do that, and Carol felt so bad. Carol chiunds is.
Speaker 3: Her name at the time was Carol Pinkins. She felt
Speaker 3: so bad about it that she took the song to
Speaker 3: Roger Burnbaum, who when I was at a and m
Speaker 3: used to go get the hot dogs. Right now, he
Speaker 3: owns the whole planet, you know, But at the time
Speaker 3: Roger Burnbaum was the guy who got and got pizzas
Speaker 3: and stuff for us when we had to meet and Rody, yeah,
Speaker 3: but I always treated him nice. Now he's the vice
Speaker 3: president of the Arista. So he played If clivee Clyde
Speaker 3: falls in love with Jack and Jill, Clive calls up,
Speaker 3: I don't want to talk to any more white people
Speaker 3: in a suit and time just don't you know what
Speaker 3: I mean? So I won't even meet with Clive. So
Speaker 3: this goes on for a month or so. Then Clive
Speaker 3: is very clever guy. He calls back and he says,
Speaker 3: you're a respectable guy in the music business. I'm a
Speaker 3: respectable guy in the music business. Let's say we don't
Speaker 3: talk about any of this stuff and we just have lunch.
Speaker 3: He says, that makes sense. He says, how could you
Speaker 3: refuse just having lunch. I was like, okay, He's gonna
Speaker 3: come correct, Okay, we just go go have lunch. So
Speaker 3: Carol comes with me. We go to lunch and one
Speaker 3: thing leads to another. Clide says, so what are you
Speaker 3: planning on doing with all the time. Before he gets
Speaker 3: finished talk, Carroll says, Rahul, make a record. They starting
Speaker 3: to negotiate ninety I thought like, yeah, like this has
Speaker 3: been prepped and ain't I'm part of it. I'm out
Speaker 3: the loop again once again. And so that's how we
Speaker 3: started talking about that stuff. And you know, he said,
Speaker 3: I'll get you the best.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: We were talking about what to do, and to me,
Speaker 3: I said, I don't want to have an album like
Speaker 3: David T. Marker where they just kind of played on
Speaker 3: the jazz stations on that. I said, I want to
Speaker 3: be on Kiss FM, Top forty radio d DA da DA.
Speaker 3: And so he told me what had to happen if
Speaker 3: I want to be on top for the race. He said, well,
Speaker 3: if you make you don't make a record like all
Speaker 3: of them with all them notes and chords da da.
Speaker 3: If you cut it like Jack and Jill, I get
Speaker 3: the three chords, boom, we got it. So we made
Speaker 3: a deal. I told him I'll never write a song
Speaker 3: have more th three chords. Okay, it's gonna be intro
Speaker 3: verse card, it's gonna be very predictable, intro verse course
Speaker 3: verse chors bridge, and you know, I said, I'm gonna
Speaker 3: do that. It'll be three minutes and forty five seconds long,
Speaker 3: and it'll be some chords, and we have some great
Speaker 3: lyrics and story and that's the end that we see
Speaker 3: the melody being gonna cover up the melody with a
Speaker 3: bunch of playing and that. He was like, okay, I said,
Speaker 3: but can you get I want to be on Kiss
Speaker 3: FM and Da Da Da d they told him. So
Speaker 3: we had that conversation and then we had an interesting conversation.
Speaker 3: He said to me, I'll get you the best producers,
Speaker 3: I'll get you the best studio of record plan, I'll
Speaker 3: get you the best ring, I'll get you the best
Speaker 3: of everything. And I just told him, you know, I
Speaker 3: really don't want none of that. What I like to
Speaker 3: do is just go home and cut it home. Because
Speaker 3: by this time I put a little sixteen track and
Speaker 3: board and all that stuff, and me and Reggie Doser
Speaker 3: with my Dosie brother, we wired the whole thing ourselves.
Speaker 3: Took us two months. I mean when I say wired,
Speaker 3: I don't mean plugged in. I'm talking about all the
Speaker 3: solder and George wired everything did the whole. I had
Speaker 3: to give him my TV set to keep going. At
Speaker 3: one point I wish I had a video crack deal,
Speaker 3: pretty much like a crack deal, you know. And for
Speaker 3: those who think I wasn't dedicated, I recorded my brother's
Speaker 3: band in ABC in early seventy four, wiped out twenty
Speaker 3: seven thousand dollars, which was a lot of money in
Speaker 3: nineteen seventy five cent. And then I had spent eighty
Speaker 3: seven thousand dollars on studio equipment and putting the studio
Speaker 3: in the house, at which everybody then was one hundred
Speaker 3: percent sure I had lost my mind. At the same
Speaker 3: time I lost the song with litls hair and getting
Speaker 3: kicked out of A and M just a whole bunch
Speaker 3: of things going wrong. So at that point, everywhere I went,
Speaker 3: they would say, there he is, there is I can't
Speaker 3: believe that's the idiot, right They spent all his money,
Speaker 3: plays the hell of a guitar, but he's letting all
Speaker 3: his money doing other stuff, you know.
Speaker 1: And just to clarify, what was the song with wil said,
Speaker 1: you make me feel like I feel like dancing. You
Speaker 1: make me feel like dancing. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So things are going like really south in a fast sense.
Speaker 3: So we wired a studio and I just told Climb,
Speaker 3: I like to cut it home if you don't mind, right,
Speaker 3: and his words to me. He thought about it and
Speaker 3: he said, okay, he says, but if you screw it up,
Speaker 3: you know we'll listen to it. If you screw it up,
Speaker 3: then let's do it the other way. I thought that
Speaker 3: was fair. That was fair, right, So give me a
Speaker 3: good shot at and I thought I could deliver it.
Speaker 3: The next thing that happened. I had done Boss gags
Speaker 3: and a bunch of other stuff with Bill Shane, who
Speaker 3: was the really prominent engineer there. I think he did
Speaker 3: the Asia album for Steely Dan Need won Grammys, and
Speaker 3: at the time he was probably the most prominent engineer
Speaker 3: in the business. All of a sudden, Bill Shane, who
Speaker 3: I've been working with for years, he shows up at
Speaker 3: my house right now, I know this is the work
Speaker 3: of Kavala Ruffalo and Carrol Childs and everybody else. They're like, Bill,
Speaker 3: you management, yeah, everything.
Speaker 1: Wait a minute.
Speaker 3: They were with Earth when a fire and Earth Fire okay.
Speaker 3: So so they come over to my house to listen
Speaker 3: to the music, and so they had no chair from
Speaker 3: the city, and so they'll stand up and they're thinking,
Speaker 3: what kind of place is this? I got cables on
Speaker 3: the roof, the stuff, the drums in the bedroom, and
Speaker 3: Mike's hanging in front of the things. We don't have
Speaker 3: enough money for Mike's stands, you know. So things are
Speaker 3: looking pretty raw and rough, and so they send Bill
Speaker 3: Schnee over in my house to talk me out of it, basically,
Speaker 3: and Bill listens to the song where I cut it,
Speaker 3: and he goes back. He says, well, besides, the eight
Speaker 3: of the tracks are out of phase, and you don't
Speaker 3: sound that bad, he says, not what I would do,
Speaker 3: he says, But if it's a hit, it's a hit.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: I'm mentioning this because the turning point at that stage
Speaker 3: is when before then everything I did was stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid,
Speaker 3: stupid except write some good songs to play the guitar.
Speaker 3: Once Bill Schnee said that that record was gonna be okay,
Speaker 3: nobody ever questioned about any of my studio stuff again
Speaker 3: ever in life. That was the end of it. Blessing
Speaker 3: I had the big boy come over and he's put
Speaker 3: he put his hand on me.
Speaker 1: That was it. Right.
Speaker 3: Next thing I know after that, Prince was coming over
Speaker 3: right because he came over and he was like what
Speaker 3: is He came to Caballo Ruffalo and they were trying
Speaker 3: to sign Prince and he wasn't signing. He says, what
Speaker 3: y'all can do for me is take me over a
Speaker 3: race house because I hear he's got a studio. That's
Speaker 3: all he wanted to do. So they called me up.
Speaker 3: They said, man, Prince wants to come over your house.
Speaker 3: We're talking to him about that. He says, but he
Speaker 3: just wants to see the studio.
Speaker 1: In the house.
Speaker 3: He ain't saying nothing else but that, right, And they said, well,
Speaker 3: you know he's gonna come over and he ain't gonna
Speaker 3: talk much. You know, he's gonna say much. It wasn't
Speaker 3: like that all. When I got done and I said,
Speaker 3: he didn't want to talk to you guys, we went hang.
Speaker 3: I was take him for a ride in the Rose
Speaker 3: Royce and we were cruising the Sunset Boulevard and you know,
Speaker 3: and he just wanted to get the studio equipment his house.
Speaker 3: So we he didn't have quite as much money. So
Speaker 3: we didn't get him a Jage twenty four like I
Speaker 3: had the MCI stuff. So we got him a Soundcraft board.
Speaker 3: Then I got my I got Yeah Soundcraft, and I
Speaker 3: got Steve flew back to Minneapolis and we put it
Speaker 3: in there.
Speaker 1: And I remember he had a BMW.
Speaker 3: Six thirty six, and so I got a stereo system
Speaker 3: done in the car like my stereo system was done
Speaker 3: in the car. And we were hanging out, you know.
Speaker 3: And so Warner Brothers wanted me to produce the next album.
Speaker 3: I think it was sexy dance on all that stuff, right,
Speaker 3: So he comes back to my house the next trip
Speaker 3: to LA and he plays me what he got. You know,
Speaker 3: we're supposed to be working on it. And you know,
Speaker 3: I mean, I probably talked myself out of a lot
Speaker 3: of money, but I just told the truth. I was young.
Speaker 3: I heard the album. I said, I don't know see
Speaker 3: what to do with this. This sounds great like it is,
Speaker 3: you know. So I told Warner brother y'all should leave
Speaker 3: him alone. This sounds great just like it is. And
Speaker 3: so they put it out like it wasn't. The rest
Speaker 3: is History is a hit. The rest is history. Yeah,
Speaker 3: In fact, I'm finishing a studio now, and what's so
Speaker 3: sad about it is every studio I've ever built, Prince
Speaker 3: was one of the first guys there. Well, he is
Speaker 3: not coming to this one, unfortunately. I was planning on
Speaker 3: you know, when I started working on this one was
Speaker 3: like a year, so going like, oh yeah, we'll get
Speaker 3: hing my boy over here. Blessed, you know, we go
Speaker 3: back to the right the way, with the old days,
Speaker 3: the way we used to do it, you know, and
Speaker 3: this will be the first one. He ain't making it too.
Speaker 3: That was important to me because here's another guy that
Speaker 3: was that had one head record at the time. But
Speaker 3: at least what it made me think is I wasn't
Speaker 3: a complete idiot, because remember, everybody's making me feel like
Speaker 3: an idiot. So now here comes Prince coming over, and
Speaker 3: the only thing he cares about is what's he doing
Speaker 3: over there? I want to do that. Then Larry Graham
Speaker 3: came over and he got the same stuff I got
Speaker 3: and cut one of the one in a million on
Speaker 3: the same same system.
Speaker 1: Same way. Wow, And it's like in his home.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, he put the same he said he did.
Speaker 3: Larry told me he did exactly what I did. Put
Speaker 3: in the bedrooms. Boom, cut it and that was it.
Speaker 1: But what's the sound that radical back then too?
Speaker 3: To what was what was wrong in the studio is
Speaker 3: unlike it is today. You guys have applefires. Everybody brings
Speaker 3: in their own gears bringing there. Each studio there had
Speaker 3: its own sound sort of and each the engineers all
Speaker 3: stayed with sort of one studio, and so you would
Speaker 3: be with their sound. And it's not that the your
Speaker 3: sound was bad, but if you wanted to do something
Speaker 3: different or you had something different in your head, if
Speaker 3: you're paying two hundred dollars an hour, you can't think
Speaker 3: about it.
Speaker 1: You know, you got to move.
Speaker 3: So yeah, yeah, So what Prince want to do is
Speaker 3: just play with the guitar sound. Let me play with
Speaker 3: a different sound, Let me play with a different drum
Speaker 3: sound for men. Let me see what that would do.
Speaker 3: And so when you had the equipment at your house,
Speaker 3: they would allow you to do that, fucking out the system. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and it was just the beginning of it. So everybody
Speaker 3: kept saying, you can't do it. The walls don't work,
Speaker 3: this don't work, and it just wasn't true. Everybody said
Speaker 3: the equipment would break. You need a tech person. Now
Speaker 3: I never had a tech person. Nothing broke, and so
Speaker 3: it was you know, it turned into a different scene.
Speaker 3: You know, if you read Clive's book, was nice about
Speaker 3: his book. First thing he says is, yeah, we did
Speaker 3: this a year before Prince and the year before anybody
Speaker 3: did it. We'd experimented with that and did it, you know,
Speaker 3: and it made me feel better by myself, just to
Speaker 3: see some other people that I respected thought that I
Speaker 3: wasn't crazy because I had been hearing you're crazy, you're
Speaker 3: crazy for so long. To hear two other guys say yeah,
Speaker 3: I don't think it's that crazy, that's all that good
Speaker 3: idea and then they go do it and have success
Speaker 3: with it too, was really rejuvenating.
Speaker 1: Well, I would figure, especially this is the error in
Speaker 1: which Stevie, who's constantly reinvented himself and doing the one
Speaker 1: man thing by himself. I would figure that all the
Speaker 1: labels would have been salivating for, like, you know, we
Speaker 1: want to armor.
Speaker 3: You know, yeah, you would think so. But they just
Speaker 3: wanted somebody, and they didn't understand that. They just want
Speaker 3: somebody in their box and you know, send them to
Speaker 3: the record plant. You know, they think was get this engineer,
Speaker 3: get this arrange and send them to the plan. Let's
Speaker 3: see what happened. Get this producer, get your you know someone,
Speaker 3: so the producer, let's go.
Speaker 1: You know, I got I gotta tell a funny story
Speaker 1: about this. I don't. I don't even think Ray knew this.
Speaker 1: When Ray's sitting with us at the Tonight show and
Speaker 1: we're going over this right now. This is about like
Speaker 1: four months after like my dad's passing.
Speaker 3: It was weird.
Speaker 1: I knew one of these days someone's gonna trigger the
Speaker 1: floodgate of tears, but I think it's going to be
Speaker 1: the sound of rape party.
Speaker 3: You said that at the time, he said, Man, it
Speaker 3: just broke me up.
Speaker 1: My whole goal was just like you wanted to escape
Speaker 1: A and M Records without like people saying you freaking
Speaker 1: down and cry. I was like, all right, I gotta
Speaker 1: get out this moon and I gotta make it to
Speaker 1: my office. You know, none of the Roots series, so
Speaker 1: they don't clown me.
Speaker 3: I try to get glad. I didn't, no glasses nothing.
Speaker 3: I'm like balling like a mother. So I think I
Speaker 3: just ran out the room like I.
Speaker 1: Was dabbing, like.
Speaker 6: And it was this song Jack and Jail particularly that's yeah,
Speaker 6: it's like just.
Speaker 1: To hit him, just hit it. Just it just well
Speaker 1: because that was the first song I sang. I sang
Speaker 1: in the second grade pageant. Like at performing arts you
Speaker 1: have to display some sort of talent or whatever. And
Speaker 1: so I remember I sang.
Speaker 3: Jack and Jail the second grade and I see my
Speaker 3: parents and right, yeah, right, and so it was just
Speaker 3: a memory.
Speaker 1: But I mean there's nothing like the song like make
Speaker 1: me sad whatever. It was less grief though, man, Like
Speaker 1: remember I expected like that, it just put you in
Speaker 1: that place. Yeah, but it was just such an unexpected thing.
Speaker 1: And like I was like, man, I cannot see the
Speaker 1: roots and Steve and Ray Parker Jr. Seeing me crying.
Speaker 6: But don't you think it's interesting?
Speaker 4: Because I was thinking about about your music, and I
Speaker 4: feel like Ray Parker Junior's music, especially for seventy late
Speaker 4: seventies eighties babies, it gives them their members of an era,
Speaker 4: like it's kind of like a joyful time when you were.
Speaker 6: No worries and you was my mama's first crush.
Speaker 1: That was when my aunt had money.
Speaker 5: My aunt like she loves you, I mean she was
Speaker 5: how I first got introduced to your music and she
Speaker 5: would always buy, you know, the records and stuff, and
Speaker 5: like she had all the radio albums and everything. And
Speaker 5: it was interesting to me hearing you talk about your
Speaker 5: journey to becoming a singer. How you know that was
Speaker 5: something that I guess maybe you were a little reluctant
Speaker 5: to do, but I always thought you were like the
Speaker 5: coolest one for ever.
Speaker 3: Right, here's the trick I was. I was a musician first,
Speaker 3: and I knew it was supposed to sound like So
Speaker 3: when I first started singing, it was out of two.
Speaker 3: I mean, I don't need nobody to tell me. I
Speaker 3: heard myself. So I surrounded myself with people who could sing,
Speaker 3: and then I started working on it. It's just like
Speaker 3: lifting weights. If you do it long enough, you get
Speaker 3: your voice and you get to go. But it wasn't
Speaker 3: until I think the third album when I did, and
Speaker 3: Woman These Love is the first real commercial record I
Speaker 3: sang all the way through by myself, you know, like
Speaker 3: Jack and Jail is me, but it's also Jerry, and
Speaker 3: it's also R and M and Jerry sitting up behind
Speaker 3: notes by the way.
Speaker 6: Woman Need Love album, that's the one with the white
Speaker 6: pants and the peach back and.
Speaker 1: The other woman was the one.
Speaker 6: That's why I said somebody was doing that was that.
Speaker 3: Was like I just can't get over loving you.
Speaker 1: That's like.
Speaker 3: We gotta We're still in recreation cocaine period.
Speaker 5: Right, Why are we always associated with drugs?
Speaker 1: But I don't do any drugs, just saying no, no,
Speaker 1: I know that I didn't do it, but but you're
Speaker 1: absolutely the worst tragedy to black people, just like this
Speaker 1: recreational drug period.
Speaker 5: But yeah, that was the thing, like my an would
Speaker 5: always pay your records. And the thing that later on,
Speaker 5: I mean, I'm listening to this stuff as a kid,
Speaker 5: but listen to it later on. The thing that I
Speaker 5: always thought was jenius about what you did is that
Speaker 5: your presentation was very like smooth and like very sophisticated.
Speaker 3: But the lyrics like you'll be saying by somebody.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I was like, damn, Like the I don't want
Speaker 5: to know about yours, you don't know about mine.
Speaker 3: It don't make sense to look too hard for what your.
Speaker 1: Heart don't want to love. He made affairs sound like, yeah,
Speaker 1: a woman needs loves, it makes sense.
Speaker 5: It's like she yet, yeah, your woman should get you'll
Speaker 5: get your heart broke out.
Speaker 3: The homie yeah, don't get.
Speaker 1: So how did you how did you organize radio? I mean,
Speaker 1: at what point did you bring? Uh was Arnel Carmichael
Speaker 1: and now.
Speaker 3: He was in my brother's band, Rnel and Vincent What
Speaker 3: was your brother's band's name?
Speaker 1: Energy? Perry Coomu had had a really good quote and
Speaker 1: they said like, what's the secret to your success? And
Speaker 1: he says, well, I never reach I mean I don't
Speaker 1: try too hard. But again it's it's that where it's
Speaker 1: where did our love go? Theory? You you had it,
Speaker 1: especially with with with Jerry Knight, someone that can sing,
Speaker 1: s a and g you know, to provide that. But
Speaker 1: what gave you the wisdom especially on your first album?
Speaker 1: Because I'll be honest with you, I didn't learn this
Speaker 1: lesson until twenty years into my career. Like I've yet.
Speaker 1: Now that I have a wisdom, I'm gonna try and
Speaker 1: apply it to the next album. But it took seventeen
Speaker 1: records from me to figure out, Like, no, all this
Speaker 1: complex stuff you're doing, like you gotta do something simple,
Speaker 1: But there's an art too simplicity, Like I like, people
Speaker 1: tend to look down on it. But what gave you
Speaker 1: the wisdom to keep it at a digestible level that
Speaker 1: wasn't so complex that it wasn't alienating. I mean, but
Speaker 1: it was still appealing.
Speaker 3: But yet here's what took me down a path, let's say,
Speaker 3: and I think it was a small tunnel.
Speaker 1: And this is why I asked your opinion on Clive
Speaker 1: because I know that he has a very narrow tunnel
Speaker 1: of this is a hit, this is not a hit exactly.
Speaker 1: He just you stayed with him for the longest, so
Speaker 1: obviously you had out. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well it's a narrow tunnel. Especially when you think
Speaker 3: about music. You have to think about what is your
Speaker 3: gift to music? What are you talented at doing?
Speaker 1: What can you do?
Speaker 3: What can you not do? I can't dance like Michael Jackson,
Speaker 3: still can't. You can put me on Dancing with the Stars.
Speaker 3: I'm good for the first week, but you know I
Speaker 3: can't do the spin. I can't just can't do it.
Speaker 3: I don't have my bones, don't beat with the drums
Speaker 3: like they ain't gonna happen. I ain't gonna go So
Speaker 3: I figured out a long time ago. I don't think
Speaker 3: I'm ever gonna sing like Luther van Drus I'm not
Speaker 3: gonna sing it like Gladys Night. I'm not gonna so therefore,
Speaker 3: take that away from the plan. I ain't gonna get
Speaker 3: like Marvi. Take that out the puzzle. The people who
Speaker 3: played way too many notes and way too much jazz
Speaker 3: at which I could have done, they never got on
Speaker 3: top forty radio, So take that out the mix, right,
Speaker 3: can't do that. Now you got the musical genius guys,
Speaker 3: the Stevie Wonders and all that kind of stuff. They
Speaker 3: can figure out complex chords Maurice White Earth and find
Speaker 3: it somehow get back to another chord eighty chords later
Speaker 3: and it still works on the radio. Steely Dan, I
Speaker 3: don't know what they're doing. I don't understand that. Take
Speaker 3: that out the mix. So now you left with my
Speaker 3: hero that I try to patter myself off of on
Speaker 3: the first record, Casey in the Sunshine Man. Wow, this
Speaker 3: came out of wow. But you are right. I don't
Speaker 3: want you all to go to sleep. I'm trying to
Speaker 3: keep you awake. I heard k C sing get Down Tonight, right,
Speaker 3: it was a number one record. It was jamming the
Speaker 3: people up dancing, and I said, he's singing two notes.
Speaker 3: Do a little dance, meg, a little love, get down today,
Speaker 3: even the verse honey, honey, me and you and every
Speaker 3: now and then woo woo woo woo woo. That was
Speaker 3: the big one, but everything else fade out there to do,
Speaker 3: you know?
Speaker 1: And I thought about it.
Speaker 3: I said, well, you know what, he ain't singing all
Speaker 3: the notes like everybody else.
Speaker 1: He's got to hit. I could do that.
Speaker 3: I may not be able to do that gladys Night,
Speaker 3: but I can do that. And so I said, you know,
Speaker 3: there's gotta be a where you just gotta channel it
Speaker 3: right to get those simple chords and to get it
Speaker 3: to move in such a way that it's comfortable for you,
Speaker 3: which I think Mick Jagger and a whole bunch of
Speaker 3: other people have really done, really really well. They figured
Speaker 3: out their style, their sound, and just play those chords
Speaker 3: that work for you.
Speaker 5: Man, the things you learned on question only on I
Speaker 5: never I wouldn't have put that one together as well,
Speaker 5: two notes.
Speaker 1: But you're making absolute sense both off. My career is
Speaker 1: not ship, man, I got add.
Speaker 3: Life to it, that's right. And the lyric thing for me,
Speaker 3: which we were talking about, I'll never forget. If a
Speaker 3: couple of companies I went to early on they kept
Speaker 3: saying your lyrics suck. I got tired of hearing your
Speaker 3: lyrics suck. So I started period when I was like
Speaker 3: eighteen nineteen years old. They kept saying your lyrics suck.
Speaker 3: Your lyrics suck, you know, And I said, you know what,
Speaker 3: I already got the music thing. I'm gonna work on
Speaker 3: this lyric thing, listener. So I started listening to Like
Speaker 3: Me and Missus Jones from a whole new standpoint. When
Speaker 3: I heard it was a kid, I heard the orchestra
Speaker 3: bump bub bu bu. But but but I said, this
Speaker 3: sounds like Lawrence welk, what are they doing in Philadelphia?
Speaker 4: You know?
Speaker 3: Then I never heard we needed the same cafe every day.
Speaker 3: I mean, I was just too young to get it,
Speaker 3: you know. Then I started listening to the songs like
Speaker 3: I saw the hell of the story, No Mo Didy like.
Speaker 2: That, you know.
Speaker 3: I re listened to Let's Get It On. I was
Speaker 3: listening to a different way that was going, and it
Speaker 3: seemed like all the songs had deeper meaning to me,
Speaker 3: especially the hollandoja holland songs okay, which they always had
Speaker 3: nursery rhymes and they tongue in cheek. If you could
Speaker 3: beat me rocking. You can have my chair feed five
Speaker 3: four fun. I can smell the presence of somebody, you know,
Speaker 3: somebody else's been sleeping in exposure. What was their secret
Speaker 3: to did they tell you our formula is? Well, they
Speaker 3: ain't had no for hi. First of all, Lamont and
Speaker 3: Brian and they get in the week. They said, they
Speaker 3: just go, you know, sit in the house for two
Speaker 3: or three hours and write four or five hits and
Speaker 3: be done with it. You know.
Speaker 1: That's what I said. That's what I said.
Speaker 3: I said, it ain't a lot of encouragement. Lama I down.
Speaker 3: They sitting down. Brian had the classical stuff, so that's
Speaker 3: him putting on them classical chords. Lama would come up
Speaker 3: with ridiculous lyrics, and Eddie did a little bit of everything,
Speaker 3: you know, so he had stuff. But they do really
Speaker 3: just sit down and say, well, you know, Barry called
Speaker 3: us up, said we need one on the four times
Speaker 3: with on dyn Ross. You know, we know it's a
Speaker 3: big meeting with smoking everybody there. So we just write
Speaker 3: four five up, you know, not that, and then we
Speaker 3: go back to the rest of what we're doing.
Speaker 1: He said.
Speaker 3: The records were coming in so fast, they were just
Speaker 3: giving them out to their friends, you know, said Gold Records.
Speaker 3: They would come every weekend. We just get rid of them,
Speaker 3: get out of the house. So there's and again that's
Speaker 3: a different group. Now Prince was in that group. You know,
Speaker 3: we have a men and him would have a lot
Speaker 3: of dead space on the phone because I call him
Speaker 3: up and I'm cutting a woman. He's loft and I know,
Speaker 3: I got a smash. I'm working on this album. I'm
Speaker 3: polishing and I'm getting it right. And then he'd be
Speaker 3: talking about, you know, I cut twelve So he's talking
Speaker 3: about he cut eighty songs. So we sitting on the
Speaker 3: phone and I'm like thinking myself, hell you do that
Speaker 3: for why don't you just cut ten good ones? You know,
Speaker 3: when controversy was out, he sent me all the nineteen
Speaker 3: ninety nine, all the Purple Rain and all of the time,
Speaker 3: all of the girls. I got all this music. I'm like,
Speaker 3: what the heck is this right? He says, He says,
Speaker 3: he says, well, a nineteen ninety nine album is a
Speaker 3: double pack album. I said, why you that double pack album?
Speaker 3: Nobody's buying that from no black folks at the time.
Speaker 3: You can't tell it. He says, and I'm gonna sell
Speaker 3: it at this regular price. He says, I just Warner
Speaker 3: Brothers taking them too long to put the records out.
Speaker 3: I don't want the stuff to get old, so I
Speaker 3: got to just put them in the record. He say, said,
Speaker 3: I got the second record. So he's trying to work,
Speaker 3: and he says, this is the movie. So he's trying
Speaker 3: to do the movie when controversy just came out. It
Speaker 3: ain't nobody even heard in nineteen ninety nine. Yea, And
Speaker 3: I'm like, I like that little red Corvette song, But
Speaker 3: but what's this?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 3: Down here? Do Doo do do do doo doo dooo. Dude,
Speaker 3: I'm like, what the heck is that?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 3: So he would just write that many songs, you know,
Speaker 3: then it became apparent to me later. You know, I
Speaker 3: think I was Soliarity and he was Mozart.
Speaker 1: You know, you get that. I watched the movie.
Speaker 3: I was like, ah, feels familiar there, and you know,
Speaker 3: I forget. You know, there was one time, like Hollando Johanna,
Speaker 3: the same thing. There's one time he went to Rio
Speaker 3: and he wont the piano at the top floor, so
Speaker 3: they took a helicopter flew the piano and knocked the
Speaker 3: windows out. We heard, yeah the windows up.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 3: So he's supposed to be there week doing whatever. He
Speaker 3: stays a week and they knocked, They tear the knock
Speaker 3: it out, take the piano. He comes back and say,
Speaker 3: I wrote a couple of albums.
Speaker 1: So you know what?
Speaker 3: And how about this? It sounds crazy, but if that
Speaker 3: motivated you to write a couple of albums, I wish
Speaker 3: I could. I knocked the windows out if you can
Speaker 3: get me two smash albums. You know, even a good
Speaker 3: friend of mine who just died, Rod Temperton, always said
Speaker 3: he don't write nothing unless he's at his apartment on
Speaker 3: the freeway in worms, Germany.
Speaker 1: This is Quest Love, Supreme Ware and Pandora. And if
Speaker 1: you're just tuning in, we're into hour three with our
Speaker 1: special guest Ray Parker Jr. And we're talking about the
Speaker 1: process for finding the right lyrics for a hit song.
Speaker 1: So where's your sweet spot?
Speaker 4: Like?
Speaker 1: Where did these hits come from? Where do you have
Speaker 1: to be?
Speaker 3: I started with the lyrics.
Speaker 1: I like a good story.
Speaker 3: You could be telling me about you and your old lady,
Speaker 3: and you could let something slip out and I go, oh.
Speaker 1: So you're sourcing information from your friends. Ye.
Speaker 3: I don't like to be singing about myself.
Speaker 1: That ain't good.
Speaker 3: It's like taking your underwear down in.
Speaker 1: Public, you know.
Speaker 3: I like to expose, you know, especially if you put
Speaker 3: two or three relationships together, you can see a path
Speaker 3: in the pocket. Then I take that. Oh yeah, we're
Speaker 3: going with this because like a woman needs love. I
Speaker 3: don't even know how much of that I wrote. I mean,
Speaker 3: I had five girls in the studio, and while I
Speaker 3: went out to start how about this, I came back.
Speaker 3: I'm sitting at the board and they're just gossip. Yeah, honey,
Speaker 3: he got things coming. If you can think that, that's
Speaker 3: the way things used to be. You know, you can
Speaker 3: hear him talking about you know, back in the day.
Speaker 3: Back in the day, you know got to me. I
Speaker 3: used to tell people, don't tell nobody, don't tell noybody.
Speaker 3: Now I don't care if you're tell or nothing. If
Speaker 3: he could do it, I can get me some too. Now,
Speaker 3: you know, he getting I'm getting it. I was like,
Speaker 3: look at this, And then Gloria already was on the
Speaker 3: news at the time. All this stuff is going. She
Speaker 3: was a studio but the girls were writing the song.
Speaker 3: They were talking about tigns of change, things ain't the same.
Speaker 3: I'm like, oh, no longer will we be taking Oh
Speaker 3: I like that? Yeah, And one girl's like, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: he could do that if you want to come and
Speaker 3: leave me, come home and get his feelings her.
Speaker 1: I said, oh, I like that.
Speaker 3: One day you come from work, you're feeling her. I
Speaker 3: just imagining the thing together. No longer will the women
Speaker 3: are today be accepted that All of a sudden, I said,
Speaker 3: this is it. It's a song. This is it, you know,
Speaker 3: And I tell you the biggest thing in the song,
Speaker 3: And this is why women are so sensitive to the lyrics.
Speaker 3: I said, she will fool around just like you do.
Speaker 3: Was not a hit, didn't work. She will fool around
Speaker 3: meant that she was. She will fool around. That's wrong.
Speaker 1: She can fool around. She has the option to.
Speaker 3: She has the option to. Let me tell you when
Speaker 3: I changed this, she will so she can.
Speaker 1: All the girls smiled in the studio.
Speaker 6: You gave us the option.
Speaker 3: If I had said she will on the radio, I
Speaker 3: don't even know if that would have worked. But when
Speaker 3: I went to she can, it was a crowd pleaser.
Speaker 3: All the girls are like, what do you mean she
Speaker 3: will fool around? I was like, well, you know, I'm
Speaker 3: trying to say that she can't to his can over
Speaker 3: that work all the girls whatever, so that she can.
Speaker 3: And I was like, really, y'all, just over one word,
Speaker 3: I either got to she can, mean you did it.
Speaker 3: It puts it back on you.
Speaker 1: You did it.
Speaker 3: If she will, she's already doing it. And you know what,
Speaker 3: I at that point in my life, all my songs
Speaker 3: were so beautiful and romantic, and the girls and everybody
Speaker 3: loved me. You know, I wanted to be the bad
Speaker 3: boy a little bit.
Speaker 6: Now, I just you know, it helps them.
Speaker 3: I just you told I wanted to show just a
Speaker 3: little other side. I mean it's like, you know, yeah,
Speaker 3: I got it.
Speaker 1: Did you feel a little pressure that, like, okay, it's
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty two. Times are changing, Like I better come
Speaker 1: out with some I mean, because you didn't even really
Speaker 1: feature your your your guitar mastery, let alone your rock
Speaker 1: guitar mastery.
Speaker 3: All that much on these records. You really contained but
Speaker 3: that song, yeah, it was because I want to make
Speaker 3: sure I wasn't a guitar on the record first. But
Speaker 3: I started saying, yeah, I could play a little more guitar.
Speaker 3: But I heard I tell you what inspired that song was.
Speaker 3: Rick Springfield had a tone called jess Girl, right, just
Speaker 3: I wish I had a girl like Jessic's girl, you know,
Speaker 3: And I thought that what a punk attitude that is.
Speaker 3: You know, I wish I had go take the bitch.
Speaker 3: I just thought that, ain't no, ain't the attitude.
Speaker 1: I wish.
Speaker 3: And he's sitting back dreaming about wishing when he hit
Speaker 3: what he had go get up it.
Speaker 5: But you kind of had that attitude as well. On Jamie,
Speaker 5: Well you you met it up saying she always minds.
Speaker 5: But he also said, like, you know, keep it to yourself,
Speaker 5: like I don't hear, like when you had to bust
Speaker 5: somebody up.
Speaker 3: I saw your lady the other day, but you know
Speaker 3: the other woman. I'm just the average guy, fool around
Speaker 3: a little on the side. Never thought it would him
Speaker 3: ount too much, never met a girl who was so tough. Now,
Speaker 3: who would have thought of one night stand could turn
Speaker 3: into such a hot romance. But when she did it
Speaker 3: to me, I slept and fell in love. I mean,
Speaker 3: it was just a true statement. You know that, And
Speaker 3: then you know the reason I knew the rules of
Speaker 3: the game. You hit it once, breakaway clean. I should
Speaker 3: have never gone back, I know, but I had to
Speaker 3: have just a little bit.
Speaker 1: My friend.
Speaker 3: My friends laugh, and that's all right. I may be
Speaker 3: a fool, but I know what I like. I hate
Speaker 3: to have to cheat, but it feels better when that's sneak.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 3: Then the dender line Clive Davis likes, Oh, this affair
Speaker 3: is unique. All my life, I never met such a freak.
Speaker 3: And she keeps me going strong for so long that
Speaker 3: by the time I get home.
Speaker 1: It's all gone.
Speaker 3: Makes me want to grab my guitar and play with it.
Speaker 1: All okay, So when you're taking this to clad, he
Speaker 1: heard that, it just went, oh that's it.
Speaker 3: I love that he heard that. He said, Oh, that's it,
Speaker 3: he says about it. By the time we got to
Speaker 3: make me want to grab my get he says, play
Speaker 3: it out again and want to play with it all
Speaker 3: night long. He says, oh, that's smash.
Speaker 1: But do you know what a.
Speaker 3: Unique position that is?
Speaker 1: Because the legend of Clive Davison being so hard to please,
Speaker 1: as far as I know him, knowing instantly when there's
Speaker 1: a hit like that's some rare rare ship to make
Speaker 1: him that enthused about anything.
Speaker 3: He loved Jack and Jill. It was his most enthusiast.
Speaker 3: He said, smash. He loved the woman these love, loved
Speaker 3: the other woman. He was not so into. Can't change
Speaker 3: that m hm.
Speaker 1: That was what he didn't like.
Speaker 3: He didn't liked that. He wasn't into that. In fact,
Speaker 3: that they were canning the whole album. He said, okay,
Speaker 3: pick one, we put it out. If it's a hit,
Speaker 3: we put the albount If not, go back and record.
Speaker 3: That was that kind of year, so you.
Speaker 1: Just turn change that.
Speaker 3: That's what got that album released.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: But what was interesting, and and it's me bragging on Clive,
Speaker 3: is that he really did do the right thing. He said, okay,
Speaker 3: you you picked one, you think that's it, let's put
Speaker 3: it out. And he didn't like, let's teach him and
Speaker 3: not put no money behind all. He actually went and
Speaker 3: promoted and gave it it's all and the song blew
Speaker 3: up and he said, okay, was it? That's any of that?
Speaker 3: Put the album out. Another one he didn't really like
Speaker 3: that much was Ghostbusters.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 3: He said, you can take that to Giff and when
Speaker 3: you go.
Speaker 1: The shade rock corn album at all.
Speaker 3: No, he didn't like that. He wanted to start over.
Speaker 3: Really yeah, what didn't you like about it? Hen't like
Speaker 3: nothing about it. He didn't hear no hit like anything, nothing,
Speaker 3: And you know, there was everybody was because Jack and
Speaker 3: Jill was a novelty song. They thought it was, you know,
Speaker 3: and which I thought was Here's what I thought was funny.
Speaker 3: Lamon Dojan and McKinley Jackson were teasing me about writing
Speaker 3: a nursery right myself. But I learned it from you guys,
Speaker 3: you know, y'all the guys taught me how to wanted
Speaker 3: young man singling free of me. Y'all taught me this stuff.
Speaker 3: So I was writing imitating them, you know. So can
Speaker 3: I ask you when did you.
Speaker 1: Dissolve radio like and what was the range rem where
Speaker 1: you guys like, Okay, are we really a band.
Speaker 3: Or is it just like let's let's talk about that
Speaker 3: because that's fun. First of all, I love all the
Speaker 3: guys in the radio and we're best of friends today
Speaker 3: the ones that are left. And when I first put
Speaker 3: the band together, I was a young kid and I
Speaker 3: just wanted to split everything. Now even though it was
Speaker 3: my record deal, they were signing me. I had the studio,
Speaker 3: I paid all the money, I wrote a song. It
Speaker 3: didn't matter at me. I was like this, let's let's
Speaker 3: get five guy, let's split everything. That was my thing,
Speaker 3: good thing. God made sure that didn't happen. The band
Speaker 3: led by Jerry. The funny thing about Jerry Night he's
Speaker 3: the biggest trouble maker, but he was my best buddy
Speaker 3: and he would apologize for it later. He didn't hold back.
Speaker 3: He would say, man, I don't know why I did
Speaker 3: something that stupid. You know, he broke up with Jerry
Speaker 3: and Olive. But so the whole thing was Jerry was
Speaker 3: the first guy to put the pool the band again
Speaker 3: and say, look, we don't want to be signed to
Speaker 3: that white label Arista that has the Bay City Rollers
Speaker 3: and Barry Man. We don't want to be signed. Why
Speaker 3: don't you sign? We just want to get paid a salary.
Speaker 3: So that took me off of to split the money thing. Wait,
Speaker 3: that was his words, that was their words. They all
Speaker 3: collectively got together.
Speaker 1: Well, what was another option for them?
Speaker 3: The option for them was to sign the record they
Speaker 3: only take one fifth and one piece of the band.
Speaker 3: They didn't want to do that. They didn't want no
Speaker 3: piece of the band. They want cash, and I'm sure
Speaker 3: either the big picture the final was spearhead by Jerry.
Speaker 3: I tried to talk him out of it. They weren't
Speaker 3: hearing it. They all wanted money, and they wanted money
Speaker 3: I didn't have. I think they wanted five hundred dollars
Speaker 3: a week on tour or something like that, and me
Speaker 3: by the instrument. So I went and borrowed like two
Speaker 3: hundred grand from tour support from Ariston to pay these
Speaker 3: guys ahead of time. Because the record has just came out.
Speaker 3: I had no money. And what was interesting is when
Speaker 3: the record hit, the single went goal, album went go
Speaker 3: Jack and Jail album went gold in London. Now we're
Speaker 3: playing Hammersmith Ody in London and I go out with
Speaker 3: the head of the British company, right, and then we
Speaker 3: go out to some club and he's saying, yeah, man,
Speaker 3: things are gonna grasp the man. Life couldn't be better.
Speaker 3: It's just like a dream come true. He says, well, so,
Speaker 3: I don't know how to tell this, but your band
Speaker 3: wants a separate deal without you because they had met
Speaker 3: some British producers. I forgot who he was inspiring them
Speaker 3: to leave some of your guys, he said, some of
Speaker 3: your guys are leaving. And I'm like, I'm looking, this
Speaker 3: is what is the president? The President of England, not Clyde,
Speaker 3: but the President of England. British up and he's speaking
Speaker 3: of British accent. I'm like, he thinks something. He thinks
Speaker 3: black people all look the same. He thinks somebody else?
Speaker 3: What's he talking about? Right then he names the names. Man,
Speaker 3: I was about to cry so hired again. I had
Speaker 3: to get up and go to bathroom. I had to
Speaker 3: get him go to the bathroom. I'm choking. I had
Speaker 3: to go recompose myself and come back tell me what
Speaker 3: you just said again. I couldn't wait to get back
Speaker 3: to the hotel. So then we have our blowout meeting
Speaker 3: at the hotel and I'm sitting with the guys. I'm
Speaker 3: saying what I said, what is this that you want
Speaker 3: to deal by yourself? What is the what are you doing?
Speaker 3: Then it all came out, well, you're getting all the
Speaker 3: royalties and we get nothing. I said, you're getting the
Speaker 3: money you asked for that I borrowed and I'm still
Speaker 3: paying off on the last tour all the money that
Speaker 3: you took, and you took the keyboard, threw it off
Speaker 3: the stage. That was three grand of my money, you know.
Speaker 3: And I bought all the instruments.
Speaker 1: Off the stage, threw it off the stage.
Speaker 3: All who they must have saw the movie or something,
Speaker 3: you know, So it was interesting. And then you know,
Speaker 3: Jerry looked at him and said, no, he's made five
Speaker 3: million on NET on the tour, five million on the
Speaker 3: first two. They were eating popcorn when we were playing,
Speaker 3: you know. But he thought I made five million net
Speaker 3: on the tour and another five men on the album.
Speaker 3: I was like, really, because I'm in the whole right
Speaker 3: surface above and it wasn't so immediately three guys in
Speaker 3: the band quit right after the first album. And think
Speaker 3: it was Charles, Jerry, and one Vincent and Vincent wasn't
Speaker 3: even studio guy. I said, please don't leave, Vincent, you know,
Speaker 3: they can't use in the studio. Not gonna do anything.
Speaker 3: Don't worry. We going with Jerry. Jerry's gonna sign in
Speaker 3: to a deal. Well, Jerry got a deal and didn't
Speaker 3: sign none of the guys.
Speaker 1: So they're on Overnight Sensation, none of the Jerry Jointed.
Speaker 3: They're not on none of that stuff, none of that
Speaker 3: and so Jerry, Jerry got in with Don curshion Bum.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the producer.
Speaker 3: Was it brainstorm? Was he I'm messing him. I'm messing
Speaker 3: up to name. But that's the Don not Curshionbaum. Yeah,
Speaker 3: David Kirshenbaum.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry.
Speaker 3: And he had cut a rock and roll record, so
Speaker 3: you know then, but Jerry came out here. Man, I'm
Speaker 3: sorry to this. So I looked at Jerry. I said,
Speaker 3: you know, Jerry, this is nineteen seventy whatever. I said,
Speaker 3: you heard a crossover. You got get on R and
Speaker 3: B radio first figure top for the radio, sayce thing,
Speaker 3: he'll play none of this stuff.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 3: So I talked to him in the cutting over a
Speaker 3: nice sensation because he didn't have that on the album.
Speaker 1: I always thought that was a radio record.
Speaker 3: Of course, it sounds like a radio record.
Speaker 1: How about this.
Speaker 3: Even though he broke up the band, I'm still trying
Speaker 3: to save his but right, I said, man, look the
Speaker 3: record you played me. Ain't nobody playing that? It was
Speaker 3: all rock and roll. I said, you need to cut.
Speaker 3: Why don't you cut one and stick it on the
Speaker 3: back and see what you know? And the one record
Speaker 3: was over nice sensation. That saved him. Then we started
Speaker 3: Ray Parker Junion Radio. And then when I think another
Speaker 3: guy left and Clive just said, that's enough, all this
Speaker 3: personnel change. We're going to rape Parker Jr.
Speaker 1: That's it. So he switched it like that.
Speaker 3: But in the meantime, after Jerry messed up his album,
Speaker 3: then he got out and he didn't hire none of
Speaker 3: the guys in the band, so they were left in
Speaker 3: the cold. Man so they didn't have my gig, and.
Speaker 1: They didn't.
Speaker 3: The leader is like for them, it was terrible. They
Speaker 3: never recovered, you know. So the leader left them in
Speaker 3: the coal and the next thing was was hooking g
Speaker 3: Area up with Oli, you know. So I got those
Speaker 3: two together and they looked out for him again with
Speaker 3: with and so him and Ali they cut a big
Speaker 3: smash record with you know, there's no stuff, and then
Speaker 3: Jerry would go on stage without Ali, but Ali being
Speaker 3: in the dressing room with Jerry's already out there performing
Speaker 3: and he would just do crazy stuff, you know, he
Speaker 3: was he'd come up front, he was clean with he says, man,
Speaker 3: I did it, you know, even before he died. I'm
Speaker 3: the one that got him out the hospital. A few
Speaker 3: days before he died. He passed away cancer. He don
Speaker 3: in nineteen ninety seven, and we spent most of that
Speaker 3: year together. He probably knew he was sick, and I
Speaker 3: didn't know he was sick, you know. And he told
Speaker 3: me some things that I never never dreamed of because
Speaker 3: in my mind I was always trying to help everybody,
Speaker 3: because there's plenty of money for everybody, y'all go do it.
Speaker 3: But he always wanted me to sign him and take
Speaker 3: his publishing, and he always wanted me to do it
Speaker 3: nice sent men.
Speaker 1: I can't do that.
Speaker 3: I'll show you how to do it. You can take
Speaker 3: the money. Like he did a bunch of songs with
Speaker 3: the Jets. I was gonna say he broke Curiosity, Oh
Speaker 3: met those jets, Jet Jet Hero, Curiosity and a two
Speaker 3: or three other big hits for the Jets, On You,
Speaker 3: Rush On You. And when he played me those songs,
Speaker 3: they sound like Jerry Night records, right. And then all
Speaker 3: of a sudden he was fifty to fifty writer with
Speaker 3: Aaron zigg I said, who's Aaron Zigmund? The song sound
Speaker 3: the same as it did last week that you played
Speaker 3: for me.
Speaker 1: Well he got the deal. He can get it.
Speaker 3: Places what you're talking about, what you're talking about it's
Speaker 3: the same song amateur hour. Yeah, And so he ended
Speaker 3: up splitting it and giving him all the production and
Speaker 3: the rest. And in the end it was an interesting conversation.
Speaker 3: Jerry looked at me. He says, he says, you know what,
Speaker 3: I'm a genius number two guy.
Speaker 1: And he was.
Speaker 3: Even after he left the band, we would always talk.
Speaker 3: He'd coached me on lyrics on the Other Woman, and
Speaker 3: he said, no, you can write a better verse, so
Speaker 3: you can write.
Speaker 1: He was just guy.
Speaker 3: He says, I'm a genius, number two guy. He says,
Speaker 3: but you're the number one guy. You should have signed
Speaker 3: my publishing. I would have been better off. And in hindsight,
Speaker 3: you know what, He's right. I didn't see it. Maybe
Speaker 3: he saw it. My thing was where everybody can do this,
Speaker 3: let me just show you how to do it. But
Speaker 3: everybody can't do everything. You know, everybody. It would have
Speaker 3: been better off because I would have paid him on time,
Speaker 3: represented songs. He would have been cool. But he said,
Speaker 3: he says, I'm a number two guy. He says, he said,
Speaker 3: leaving by myself. He says, I'll destruct everything destruct. He says,
Speaker 3: how I am, It's that sabotage. I told you, I
Speaker 3: can't help what happened. He was conscious of it, and
Speaker 3: he said, that's what it is, he said, an change,
Speaker 3: that's it, he said. But if you had led it
Speaker 3: and you had taken it, we would have got through this.
Speaker 1: You know, for those just joined us, we're still talking
Speaker 1: to the Great Ray Parker Jr. Uh going down, uh,
Speaker 1: not even going down, getting life lessons this quest Love
Speaker 1: Supreme on Pandora getting life lessons. And we haven't even
Speaker 1: gotten the Ghostbuster. I know, let's jump in the pool.
Speaker 1: Let us jump in the pool. Are you allowed to
Speaker 1: tell the Ghostbuster story? What Ghostbuster story? Exactly? I won't
Speaker 1: tell you.
Speaker 3: I will tell you everything you want to know, oh
Speaker 3: the best of my ability. Okay.
Speaker 1: So, as as a guy who he's done a little
Speaker 1: bit of scoring work and whatnot, you know, often have
Speaker 1: clients that will say, you know, let's take a song like,
Speaker 1: let's take Drake's hotline blink like you know for my show,
Speaker 1: cut us something like that, yeah, cut us something exactly.
Speaker 1: So to lease here Hughey's side of the story, who's that?
Speaker 1: Who's that?
Speaker 3: All?
Speaker 1: Right? To hear Huey Lewis's version, Am I to believe
Speaker 1: that they pitched him the Ghostbusters movie. He thought it
Speaker 1: was rather silly and didn't want to license I Want
Speaker 1: a New Drug to them because he thought the movie
Speaker 1: was silly and kind of dismissed it, and you know,
Speaker 1: just took his ball and went home. And then is
Speaker 1: this where they come to you, like, well, first of all,
Speaker 1: well give me the let me give you my my
Speaker 1: take on it. Yes, give me.
Speaker 3: I didn't even know. I never heard what you heard
Speaker 3: that song ever ever thought that Ghostbusters sounded like I
Speaker 3: want to still think it, so I don't either. I
Speaker 3: never thought it did. But yeah, but just here's what
Speaker 3: I found out later. And this was only after I
Speaker 3: heard that they were doing a lawsuit something like that.
Speaker 3: I guess they approached him first to write the song,
Speaker 3: to write a theme song. I don't think they wanted
Speaker 3: his song, but I think they want him to write
Speaker 3: a theme song. And then they put his song in
Speaker 3: the temp track along with three other songs that sound
Speaker 3: just like that song. They also have one, four or
Speaker 3: five chords bar band cords. Right, So if you were
Speaker 3: if you were in the room as a musician, you
Speaker 3: would know not to write neither one of us a ballad,
Speaker 3: because you know, that the guy wants up tempo barbers song,
Speaker 3: so hit the heade in that direction. I had no
Speaker 3: idea to approach him. I had no idea about any
Speaker 3: of that kind of stuff. I think it was unfortunate
Speaker 3: that he named me in a lawsuit and named you
Speaker 3: know and all that stuff. I tried to take him
Speaker 3: to dinner in Germany, but I guess this guy said,
Speaker 3: don't talk to that reg guy. You know we're about
Speaker 3: to get mad. Yeah, yeah, yeah, don't talk to that
Speaker 3: reg guy. I had no idea what they were talking about.
Speaker 3: When I go you, I ain't free, No got none
Speaker 3: of that sounds like the same song to me. But
Speaker 3: I think that maybe he had a case because they
Speaker 3: called him first and they put his song in the
Speaker 3: temp track. I think that's a thing for him in
Speaker 3: the movie company to discuss now on that on the
Speaker 3: settlement or whatever you call the settlement or whatever they
Speaker 3: got for it. And I can't talk about the case.
Speaker 3: And I'll tell you what because I have a genius
Speaker 3: lawyer named Don Passman and wrote the book. I was like,
Speaker 3: what book? Donald Passman is lawyer?
Speaker 5: You wrote a book called Everything You Need to Know
Speaker 5: about the Music Business and the music business class I.
Speaker 1: Took in college. That was our textbook. It was that
Speaker 1: and the Kashif book. Those were two, but that was
Speaker 1: like the bible for well.
Speaker 3: Donald Passman's oldest client is me. I've been with him
Speaker 3: since the beginning. And that's a whole nother story that
Speaker 3: goes through Bill Cosby back to Bill Cosby begin because
Speaker 3: Bill Cosby was represented by this firm that's not in
Speaker 3: the Yellow Pages or anything like, you know, and the
Speaker 3: only way you get into the firm is somebody brings
Speaker 3: Bill Cosby brought me into the firm, and that's how
Speaker 3: I met Don Passman. It's at the beginning. It's very
Speaker 3: much like Tom Cruise. The frame is very much like
Speaker 3: that because there was a couple of people I told
Speaker 3: hibout it says, I can't find a phone umber. I
Speaker 3: don't see any advertising. They don't you know, they don't advertise.
Speaker 3: They handle very elite group of people. And so min
Speaker 3: lawyer came to me. He says, okay, things have worked
Speaker 3: out or whatever. He said to me, do you want
Speaker 3: to know what happened?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 3: Ray Parker answered to do you want to know what happened?
Speaker 3: Is guy anything to do with me? I mean, what
Speaker 3: we're talking about it, right, he says, nothing to do.
Speaker 3: I said, oh, that's interesting. So and then he says,
Speaker 3: I just prefer not to tell you. He says, because
Speaker 3: at the end of the day, we have a gag
Speaker 3: rule on this finding for whatever they're going to do.
Speaker 3: He says, doesn't affect you. And if I don't tell
Speaker 3: your daughter, you can't talk.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 3: So I've never broken the rule because I don't know
Speaker 3: anything about through. I don't know what anything of it was.
Speaker 3: It has nothing to do with me. My name's on
Speaker 3: the song, I get paid.
Speaker 6: I don't know what are your pockets?
Speaker 3: Nothing to do with me. I don't have So I
Speaker 3: never talked about it because I don't know anything about it.
Speaker 3: But he talked about it.
Speaker 1: Why the gaggro, like, who's it protect? I don't know.
Speaker 3: I don't know anything about it. My lawyer said, you
Speaker 3: can't talk about it because you don't know. That's a
Speaker 3: smart lawyer. He says, I know you ain't gonna talk
Speaker 3: about it because you don't know nothing about it, which
Speaker 3: he's correct. So now, in two thousand and three, I
Speaker 3: think it was VH one was coming calling me several
Speaker 3: times a week, which I thought, Wow, I ain't that popular.
Speaker 1: Why am I.
Speaker 3: Getting some any phone calls to be on TV? And
Speaker 3: come to find out they had his version where they're now?
Speaker 3: They want to have me on Wordy now and play
Speaker 3: them back to back.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: So he said a bunch of stuff in which I
Speaker 3: sued him and I won. He broke the gagri. It
Speaker 3: was on TV. And how about this, I like Huey
Speaker 3: Lewis in the news. I don't have anything bad to
Speaker 3: say about him. I never met him.
Speaker 1: You guys seen each other in last years.
Speaker 3: We've never seen each other ever. And I think the
Speaker 3: sad part, in the irony part of I think he
Speaker 3: takes it more personal because of however it happened. It's
Speaker 3: one of those things. Just the bomb built it self.
Speaker 3: But I really had nothing to try to do that.
Speaker 3: And I think if he had any right, maybe he
Speaker 3: should have had it with the other guys that did it.
Speaker 3: But for some reason it seemed to be directed in
Speaker 3: my direction more than I think it should have been.
Speaker 3: Like I hear people talk about him, they say he's
Speaker 3: a nice guy. Other people say I'm a nice guy.
Speaker 3: Now when they're approaching you to do this, yeah, and
Speaker 3: I okay.
Speaker 1: So the result is. I mean, it's it's it's really
Speaker 1: a dead and it's it's a dead heat tie between
Speaker 1: who owns the national Halloween anthem. I mean, it's either
Speaker 1: you or Michael Jackson, neck and neck. But I prefer
Speaker 1: to think I'm the winner.
Speaker 3: I mean Rod temper then just passed. I love Rod,
Speaker 3: you know, like I took a picture.
Speaker 1: I'm just saying, around this time is when your check
Speaker 1: start looking real nice.
Speaker 3: Around this so you're thinking like that, I'm starting to
Speaker 3: get concerned because I'm the only living songwriter from Halloween left.
Speaker 3: My Bobby bors pick I did some shows. What he's
Speaker 3: gone now? Rod Templeton is gone.
Speaker 1: I mean, you're kind of lonely here.
Speaker 3: I mean, but I guess if who you're gonna call
Speaker 3: for Halloween? I mean Ray Park, you run out of
Speaker 3: still here.
Speaker 1: So I mean, at the time, were you thinking like, yo,
Speaker 1: if I write the right song, this will be played.
Speaker 1: This will be the happy birthday to you Halloween. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: but you got admit that it's never died. You're talking
Speaker 1: about that, and is it a burden? Is it a
Speaker 1: burden that no is the winning lotto ticket of bird?
Speaker 1: Does it ever get too heavy?
Speaker 3: The whole I love you.
Speaker 1: What do you say? You know I love you?
Speaker 3: Because dude, my ring tone, I mean, tell the people
Speaker 3: what they want. Oh my god, you know, give the
Speaker 3: people what the people call me they tell me. Don't
Speaker 3: answer the phone. Let it ring through, you know, And
Speaker 3: so it's just you know, the screen logo for those
Speaker 3: you can't see that.
Speaker 1: And if you ring the.
Speaker 3: Phone, it plays not who you're gonna call, but who
Speaker 3: you're trying to call. Leave your name and number after
Speaker 3: the tone. Who you're trying to call. I mean, you
Speaker 3: know by calling right now, I was call me, call
Speaker 3: me Nick, call me.
Speaker 1: You're gonna like this? Of course another question Ray Parker
Speaker 1: Junior's ring tone. Yes, leave your name and number after
Speaker 1: the tone.
Speaker 6: That's that available on.
Speaker 3: We should make that available. But as with all Ray
Speaker 3: Parker stories, you do want the juice right always, you
Speaker 3: guys are leaking for but you're way over there and
Speaker 3: it starts over there, all right. In the Berry White days,
Speaker 3: there was a guy named Gary Lamel who ran Berry
Speaker 3: White's publishing company Aaron Schroeder at the time. Right, okay,
Speaker 3: the other woman got a temp job working for Mary
Speaker 3: Lemel the Columbus Pictures. Who I just happened to be
Speaker 3: me and her were doing whatever we were doing. And
Speaker 3: so that hooked me back up with Gary Lynmel, who
Speaker 3: wanted me to save him by writing a song.
Speaker 1: Oh my old friend.
Speaker 3: That's how we made the connection. Wow, Okay. So he
Speaker 3: brought the project to you. Yeah, and so he figured
Speaker 3: that I could. He says, you got the right humor,
Speaker 3: you got the right thing, he says, I think you're
Speaker 3: right for the job. I'll give you fifty grand. Just
Speaker 3: go write the song whether we if we don't use it,
Speaker 3: you keep the money.
Speaker 1: What the heck?
Speaker 3: They had it like that, you know. And it wasn't
Speaker 3: gonna be no record. It wasn't gonna be into this.
Speaker 3: It was twenty seconds of music at the library scene.
Speaker 3: So I wrote a minute and fifteen seconds of it,
Speaker 3: just because I don't know how to do twenty seconds
Speaker 3: of music. You know, by the time I do one
Speaker 3: group and go to the other group, I got a
Speaker 3: minute and a half, you know, men in fifteen seconds
Speaker 3: of men and ten seconds something like that. And so
Speaker 3: I played the guy a little snippet I had, and
Speaker 3: that's what he loved and write. He just loved it right,
Speaker 3: and went to the meeting he loved it, called me
Speaker 3: at three in the morning. I was sleepy getting the stuff.
Speaker 1: Girl.
Speaker 3: Now there's some magic to those girls yelling go but
Speaker 3: there it's really hot.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 3: So now I was dating little valley girl.
Speaker 1: In the valley.
Speaker 3: I woke her up at five in the morning, told
Speaker 3: her to get her high school friends together because the
Speaker 3: messengers coming at eight thirty nine o'clock and I need
Speaker 3: to get these voices on. And it was their first
Speaker 3: time there being a studio, so they were excited as
Speaker 3: they could be, like six to seven of them. This
Speaker 3: is your recording at your house is no, this is
Speaker 3: recording at the American studio for them, So they're screaming
Speaker 3: and yelling ghostbusters, which I think made the magic in
Speaker 3: the record.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: That's how the song came about. And then we took
Speaker 3: two tape recorders and started linking the tracks together to
Speaker 3: make the song four minute song because I only had
Speaker 3: a minute and fifteen seconds of it. And then the
Speaker 3: breakdown section that's just me playing some stuff over the
Speaker 3: same groove without the guitars and the bass and over
Speaker 3: dubbing and just making sections out of it. But it's
Speaker 3: really only a minute and ten seconds of music, see Kent.
Speaker 1: You can't. But not that I think that when you
Speaker 1: tend to overthink it or try to like concoct like
Speaker 1: I'm gonna make an anthem for hollowing, it never happened.
Speaker 3: No, you just gotta do it.
Speaker 1: But he just wasn't even overthinking it was just like
Speaker 1: to you, was this just some arbitrary he grabs his
Speaker 1: fifty grand and see.
Speaker 3: Exactly, I take the money. I told my account you
Speaker 3: ain't gonna see it. I'm spending this because my bonus.
Speaker 1: My magave.
Speaker 3: So at what point did you? At what point was
Speaker 3: the oh god, like the holy shit, the this is
Speaker 3: my he's going too fast. Let me tell you how
Speaker 3: the best idea of my life came. Okay, okay. The
Speaker 3: first thing is I got the music really quick. I
Speaker 3: had all this stuff I was jamming. I could not
Speaker 3: The guy wanted the words ghostbusters in the song, or
Speaker 3: I don't get my fifty grand. Well we're front Detroit.
Speaker 3: You don't get your fifty grand, just don't get it back.
Speaker 3: We ain't get it back. I'm gonna put it in there.
Speaker 3: But it was impossible to sing ghostbusters, right, I mean,
Speaker 3: it was just it wasn't even Ghostbusters. I created that
Speaker 3: it was Ghostbusters. That's what they kept saying, Ghostbusters. We
Speaker 3: want Ghostbusters in the song. You heard it now, So
Speaker 3: it's not fair. But at the time, they hired plenty
Speaker 3: of writers over the time span of a year, and
Speaker 3: nobody could get that word in the song. It was
Speaker 3: a stupid word to sing. You can't sing Ghostbusters. It
Speaker 3: just doesn't sing. So you're saying other people were trying
Speaker 3: to demo and yeah, the guy said they had been
Speaker 3: doing this a year.
Speaker 1: They don't like.
Speaker 3: None of the song. Directed don't like none of who tried.
Speaker 3: I don't know some famous people tried.
Speaker 5: But it's interesting he says that because that's the same
Speaker 5: thing like Bobby Brown did on the second Ghostbusters.
Speaker 3: He didn't sing it either on our own joint. Well,
Speaker 3: he didn't sing it either.
Speaker 1: See he was off Yeah, but he.
Speaker 3: Was off the hook. They wanted Ghostbusters in the song.
Speaker 6: Right, because he didn't have to say Ghostbuster got a
Speaker 6: theme song.
Speaker 3: So here's what. So here's where we're at and I'm
Speaker 3: sitting there. So I got the song done and I
Speaker 3: haven't called the girls yet because I don't have anything myself.
Speaker 3: So it's like now it's three thirty four o'clock in
Speaker 3: the morning, my fifty grand starting to float out the window,
Speaker 3: you know. And then this commercial comes on TV, of
Speaker 3: which I wasn't really trying to write a commercial, but
Speaker 3: I remember the part of the film they had the
Speaker 3: Ghostbusters with the backpacks and they had the phone number
Speaker 3: under it. And when I was half asleep trying to
Speaker 3: stay awake but trying to write this lyric, I was
Speaker 3: dozing off, half asleep, and on comes this commercial on
Speaker 3: TV with like some insect repelling guys or the you know,
Speaker 3: the exterminator guys, and they got their backpacks.
Speaker 1: They look just like the Ghostbuster guys.
Speaker 3: To me, or to wash this troubles down the drain
Speaker 3: or whatever that you know, roller router guy something, some
Speaker 3: kind of guys like that. And so I'm looking at
Speaker 3: it when they got the phone number, who do you call?
Speaker 1: And I went, that looks just like the Ghostbuster guys.
Speaker 3: We're gonna make it who you gonna call?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 3: So that's Detroit, I said, yea. I said, well, I'm
Speaker 3: just gonna like not seeing the words Ghostbusters. I'm gonna
Speaker 3: let the crowd go go Busters, and I just go
Speaker 3: who you're gonna call? So my song is who you
Speaker 3: Gonna call? I had no idea what it was gonna
Speaker 3: be commercials and rested, I mean didn't take it, but
Speaker 3: that call on like wildfire. As soon as I sung that,
Speaker 3: the director loved it. He says, oh, man that I
Speaker 3: like the way you're going. And he was a Jewish guy.
Speaker 3: So he says, I'm not afraid of any ghosts. He said,
Speaker 3: but you going, what are you saying? I said no,
Speaker 3: it's like, I ain't afraid no ghosts.
Speaker 1: Man.
Speaker 3: He says, I like how you phrasing that. He says,
Speaker 3: I like, I like the phrase. He says, I said,
Speaker 3: y'all had a background. He says, no, I like how
Speaker 3: you're saying it. I like, you go out, I'm not
Speaker 3: afraid of any ghosts. I'm like, and I'm looking at
Speaker 3: him like I'm looking at where we at, Dude, where
Speaker 3: we at? And I'm saying, no, I ain't afraid no ghosts.
Speaker 3: He says, say it again slow, I said, I ain't.
Speaker 1: Afraid no ghost.
Speaker 3: And I hadn't really thought about what I was saying.
Speaker 3: I said, no, I ain't afraid no ghost. He said,
Speaker 3: I like that, man. So we did re redid that
Speaker 3: and that's what changed the whole world because when they
Speaker 3: when they licensed the song for commercials, it has nothing
Speaker 3: to do with the movie because they don't license Ghostbusters.
Speaker 3: They license who You're Gonna Call, and they put their
Speaker 3: own name in the back of it.
Speaker 1: Ah that's real. Okay. My question is are you is
Speaker 1: this your song? Or is this like whenever someone wants
Speaker 1: to utilize Ghostbusters, do you have to go through a
Speaker 1: whole protocol of getting the movie company?
Speaker 3: And I know it, he was on it.
Speaker 1: It's pretty much myself now.
Speaker 3: Now there are protocols. Okay, if the movie was released
Speaker 3: like this film, there's a three month moratorium on each side.
Speaker 1: Dude, I totally forgot. Ghostbusters got released again this year.
Speaker 3: There's a three month moratorium on the front where they
Speaker 3: didn't want people to do it. But I have such
Speaker 3: a wonderful deal that if you offered me a million
Speaker 3: dollars to do it within that three month period, they
Speaker 3: can say no, you can't do it, but then they
Speaker 3: give me a million dollars. Oh so I still don't
Speaker 3: lose the money. Oh, but I mean doing it as in,
Speaker 3: you can't perform it anywhere or are you for me?
Speaker 3: I'm just talking about that if they want to use
Speaker 3: the commercials and other stuff.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: You know, when you do a film thing, they don't
Speaker 3: want you in conflict with the film, right, so you.
Speaker 4: Can't do any commercials for the first three months after
Speaker 4: it comes out. Now, but you on the words too,
Speaker 4: like the merchandising. The merchandising.
Speaker 3: So we're coming out with a clothing line of Ray
Speaker 3: Parker Junior Collections clothing line because I think they figured
Speaker 3: out that on the words. So they want to put
Speaker 3: the words with the characters. So we have a t
Speaker 3: shirt line and clothing line coming out.
Speaker 1: Did they use the yours in the two I haven't
Speaker 1: seen part the new one.
Speaker 3: This is probably three by the way, Oh part they
Speaker 3: used a snippet of it. In my opinion, they should
Speaker 3: have played the themes every time. No, but they put
Speaker 3: it in there some parts. But you know every time.
Speaker 3: To me, Indiana Jones, that's how you know, the good
Speaker 3: guys a client just play the same thing, some of it.
Speaker 3: I think, I hope next time they do that, you know,
Speaker 3: But they played a little bit of mine. Then they
Speaker 3: have twenty other versions where they mixed it up and
Speaker 3: did it different ways, you know, and then they cut
Speaker 3: a whole album with these guys. I mean I got
Speaker 3: writs probably ten songs on the album, but nobody had
Speaker 3: a hit.
Speaker 1: On the album.
Speaker 3: The movie did well, you know, they tried it.
Speaker 1: They tried it.
Speaker 3: Maybe next time they'll just go. So when you're turning
Speaker 3: in this master, at what point do you realize.
Speaker 1: I have the national anthem for Halloween two weeks after
Speaker 1: it comes, and it will never die.
Speaker 3: It will never Halloween. We didn't know till later. I
Speaker 3: didn't even think about Halloween. But so you're not seeing
Speaker 3: a grand level Halloween. The only thing I knew is
Speaker 3: the record came out. Well, I had already been told
Speaker 3: what's going to happen. You know, the movie in those
Speaker 3: days will come out almost nine months later overseas in
Speaker 3: different places. So Clive had already said, okay, we released
Speaker 3: a single in front of the film, and then when
Speaker 3: the film comes out, we'll wait and release it overseas da.
Speaker 1: Da da dah.
Speaker 3: And they in those days they want to stop as
Speaker 3: many imports as possible, so they just let it lo
Speaker 3: lo And within the first two weeks we had sold
Speaker 3: so many records, and clients says, what do you think
Speaker 3: is happened to their export and the records. We gotta
Speaker 3: ship it out overseas, he said, But the movie's not
Speaker 3: coming out for eight nine months. We're going to be
Speaker 3: way ahead of the film, he says. I'm torn between
Speaker 3: putting it out, he said, but my distributors are making
Speaker 3: me put it out because they're selling so many of them.
Speaker 3: And I think within the first few weeks we had
Speaker 3: sold three and a half million records overseas. There were exports,
Speaker 3: so they forced him into release in it, he says,
Speaker 3: why do you think they're buying it? They don't understand
Speaker 3: what you're saying in Italy or other places. I said,
Speaker 3: if I knew that, I would have cut.
Speaker 1: A bunch of them.
Speaker 3: We were talking about, I don't know why they buy
Speaker 3: the record. Put the record out, you know so and
Speaker 3: by meet Them. When Meet Them came that February, were
Speaker 3: repped to like I think they gave me a record
Speaker 3: with fifteen million sound albums or something like that.
Speaker 1: Was just crazy.
Speaker 3: It's one of those songs that took off every everybody.
Speaker 3: There was something in the song that so infectious, are
Speaker 3: so happy that you didn't need to know what language
Speaker 3: it was, You didn't need to understand everything. It just
Speaker 3: went number one and fifty two con trees. It just
Speaker 3: just went everybody, and it wasn't a burden on you, like,
Speaker 3: oh no, all that money to me to the.
Speaker 1: Weigh in my pocket, down my pants. What's your family saying?
Speaker 3: Now?
Speaker 5: Oh then, oh yeah, yeah, he's all right, he's gonna
Speaker 5: be alright. Aside from the Ghostbusters. Uh, we read that
Speaker 5: like you're I think the highest paid guitar, Like the highest.
Speaker 3: Oh that's nonsense. I read that thing. Yeah, well, you
Speaker 3: know what what I like about it is, you know
Speaker 3: you read. You can't believe everything you read. First of all,
Speaker 3: my kids they come up to me said, Dad, we
Speaker 3: read your net worth two million dollars, right, all these
Speaker 3: different things. Two million dollars. I thinking, where do you
Speaker 3: get that number from? We just spent a million dollars
Speaker 3: just on the studio in the backyard. Okay, what about
Speaker 3: the rest of the place or whatever they do? And
Speaker 3: then that article comes out, he's the highest thing he made,
Speaker 3: He's worth four hundred million dollars. He just made an
Speaker 3: eighty nine million last year. I'm like, I did know.
Speaker 1: Somewhere in the middle, I don't even know if it's.
Speaker 3: The middle somewhere between this. It's kind of crazy, this thing.
Speaker 3: I mean, who comes up with this stuff? Who writes
Speaker 3: this stuff on the matter? And then my neighbor he's
Speaker 3: worth like eighty million, I mean, all these different and
Speaker 3: Denise Wims was worth almost a billion dollars. Yeah, she's
Speaker 3: worth like nine hundred and fifty billion dollars on the
Speaker 3: same website, the same website.
Speaker 6: Silly, get it.
Speaker 3: So I'm just singing there's all these numbers and telling
Speaker 3: my kids, I said, you can't believe everything you read.
Speaker 1: Look at this right here.
Speaker 5: You know what other stuff were you able to put
Speaker 5: your money in and like investing and stuff just to
Speaker 5: stay you know.
Speaker 1: Stay well.
Speaker 3: You know, I lost lots of money years ago, especially
Speaker 3: in stock market when I got too greedy. But recently
Speaker 3: I had a really a good landfall. I bought a
Speaker 3: boat bunch of a Tesla stock when it was that
Speaker 3: twenty seven dollars, I mean a meaningful a lot enough
Speaker 3: where I made in five months few million dollars.
Speaker 6: I got to leave.
Speaker 3: And you know what's even better, because I'm older and
Speaker 3: wives are actually cashed me. I still got a lot
Speaker 3: of it, but I cashed in and took most eighty
Speaker 3: percent off the table. I was smart enough to finally,
Speaker 3: you know, so I look for little things like that.
Speaker 3: I mean, I do the safe stuff now, real estate,
Speaker 3: a little bit, bonds, you know that kind of stuff.
Speaker 3: Stay out of trouble, pay your taxes, get done. You
Speaker 3: want to be going to jail like the other guys,
Speaker 3: you know, keep the country rolling, and just just do
Speaker 3: normal stuff. If you, if you, if you pay attention.
Speaker 3: The key thing with money is just not to buy
Speaker 3: more stuff than you got money for. Everybody wants to
Speaker 3: look like this. If you like this, it's okay, look
Speaker 3: like that. Don't go up there, you know, just don't
Speaker 3: get out of hand with it and get stupid, you know,
Speaker 3: life lessons life.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so okay, I guess during the tornado of the
Speaker 1: success the single, I noticed that in eighty four you
Speaker 1: didn't put a record out though, no Ghostbusters, and they
Speaker 1: had me all over the place and did I section
Speaker 1: single man Matt. Year or later we did.
Speaker 3: Put a record out Chartbusters, right, And that was Clive
Speaker 3: Davis's thing.
Speaker 1: I never get.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was the Greatest Hits, which we'd already had
Speaker 3: the Greatest Hits album the year before. I said another
Speaker 3: Greatest Hits. Let me tell you something. We packaged the
Speaker 3: greatest hits. I had a cold on one of the songs.
Speaker 3: He said, just put the thing out of cut The
Speaker 3: stuff sold a million plus albums.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 3: Right, So Clive was right again. I mean, it was
Speaker 3: an unbelievable payday for not a lot of work. So
Speaker 3: that really happened great.
Speaker 1: You know. Was I don't think that man should sleep alone?
Speaker 1: Was that on sex album? Second? What was the end
Speaker 1: of Arister? The next record?
Speaker 3: Second? And that was the end of Arister. Yeah, that's
Speaker 3: why they didn't promote anything. They just kind of let
Speaker 3: it go bye bye.
Speaker 1: But okay, that was just one slight blimish and you
Speaker 1: wanted it off or was it? Oh no, No, I
Speaker 1: was off for Arista in eighty three before Ghostbusters. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: and it was.
Speaker 3: It was one of those things where I think it
Speaker 3: was a missing standing. I never wanted to leave there,
Speaker 3: but Clive wanted me to do a Dion Warwick album
Speaker 3: and he called my manager and somehow they were arguing
Speaker 3: about the price, and he says, well, if it's gonna
Speaker 3: cost down, I want to know what did it take
Speaker 3: to renegotiate Ray? And we think, what do you Ray for?
Speaker 3: I got four more years left to the contract, and
Speaker 3: somewhere in there he wanted me to do an album,
Speaker 3: and to me, it was a total misunderstanding and things
Speaker 3: got out of hand and he'd offered some really low
Speaker 3: amount of money and everybody got nervous, and David Geffen
Speaker 3: offered like an enormous amount of money and it was
Speaker 3: too late to turn back.
Speaker 1: Sort of a deal.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So I ended up signing with He hate losing
Speaker 3: your yeah, but we remained friends. I actually went back
Speaker 3: to him a little bit later. And uh so when
Speaker 3: I cut Ghostbusters, I was really already sort of leaving,
Speaker 3: so it could go either way. But I gave it
Speaker 3: to client because I said, well, you could put it
Speaker 3: out fast, and he didn't like it. I said, well,
Speaker 3: you don't have to like it. They're gonna pay you
Speaker 3: all the money to promote it. Just take it and pressing,
Speaker 3: fill it full of your album, fell down, full of
Speaker 3: your artists, and go in, which he was wonderfully happy about.
Speaker 1: You know, Okay, I'm the greatest part of the gift ever.
Speaker 3: Let me tell you something. I'm a very fortunate guy.
Speaker 3: Because after that I went to Geffing and we had
Speaker 3: that I don't think man should sleeping on that in
Speaker 3: the Dark album, which did well went gold in England.
Speaker 3: They kind of dismissed the ball here, crossing it over
Speaker 3: pop the usually the way that we do all my records,
Speaker 3: because David Geffen was selling the company at the time,
Speaker 3: and I remember the numbers. I think he gave me
Speaker 3: a million dollars up front and another million do the record,
Speaker 3: and he said, I'm getting out the music business. I'm
Speaker 3: selling the whole company. And if you go to MCA,
Speaker 3: you can keep all the money. You have to pay
Speaker 3: it back. I was like, I'm down for that. Just
Speaker 3: keet the money off to pay it back, you know.
Speaker 3: So that meant I went through MCA, but I kept
Speaker 3: my contract, but they owe me all the money and
Speaker 3: I'm free and clear, and I'm starting a zero.
Speaker 1: Oh it's all the same.
Speaker 3: I'm starting at zero. So I said, that works. The
Speaker 3: only problem is I got to m c A and
Speaker 3: even though I had to it on Bobby Brown and
Speaker 3: those guys, you know, I had another I was but yeah,
Speaker 3: I had another artist, and I had an artist Randy
Speaker 3: Hall signed there too, your artist or yeah, yeah, he
Speaker 3: was signing me and I signed him the MC and
Speaker 3: so now I'm going to MC after all of this
Speaker 3: a while that's going on, and they were like they
Speaker 3: wanted to have an A and R meeting and listen
Speaker 3: to what I was going to record and all that,
Speaker 3: and that just one't feeling that. It's like kind of
Speaker 3: like making an actor audition. After my contract said I
Speaker 3: could do whatever I want to do and you give me.
Speaker 3: I think it was a million bucks up front, Just
Speaker 3: give me a million bucks when I start. So I
Speaker 3: hadn't got my money right, and they were talking about, well,
Speaker 3: you can come on in. I said, come in where
Speaker 3: come into word? It is my million dollars. And I
Speaker 3: had a bunch of more albums that they had to take,
Speaker 3: like several more albums, and so the conversation came up
Speaker 3: as too. And my parents were sick at the time.
Speaker 3: So I really want to spend more time Detroit. It's
Speaker 3: hard for me to record. And so that's why I
Speaker 3: say this worked out perfect time. They decided to get
Speaker 3: rid of me, right, but they was this under Joe
Speaker 3: Busby or no he had just left Ernie Singleton and
Speaker 3: love both of those guys. But they were gonna do
Speaker 3: it this way, which was fine. So that the idea came,
Speaker 3: let's buy ral so believe it. I thought my Lord
Speaker 3: thought he was crazy. I said, they'll never do that.
Speaker 3: You know, they'll just make me cut all the records
Speaker 3: and they'll go sell them and do whatever. Well, you
Speaker 3: know what, they wrote me a big fat check for
Speaker 3: all the next several albums. They don't have to do anything.
Speaker 1: That is unheard of. I mean, how do you deal
Speaker 1: with the changing times and when the advent of hip
Speaker 1: hop coming in? And like, how are you dealing with this?
Speaker 1: I've heard various Uh if you heard the infamous Michael
Speaker 1: Henderson rant, and there's a there's a famous Michael Henderson
Speaker 1: and wreking it down. Yeah, a Japan rant where motherfucker
Speaker 1: down twelve we wreck it down where he's just, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of ranting over the changing times of music and
Speaker 1: how it's it might be leaving him behind, Like how
Speaker 1: are you.
Speaker 3: Taking it at that moment? You know what, It's an
Speaker 3: interesting thing. I never really thought about getting left behind,
Speaker 3: and I never really thought about changing. I think I
Speaker 3: do so many things in the music business. There was
Speaker 3: a time I took the life along vacation, which is
Speaker 3: probably after that my check. I just felt like you know,
Speaker 3: I moved to the mountains, I bought an airplane. I
Speaker 3: started flying around the country. You know, water so you
Speaker 3: just wanted to take it easy and chill. I bought
Speaker 3: a really nice airplane that I could fly like twenty five.
Speaker 3: I could fly to New York and back. You know,
Speaker 3: some people take vacations of me. I know, it's amazing, right,
Speaker 3: all right, you know Stevie Wonder. Yeah, airplane, so I
Speaker 3: got a little yeah, making flames, so I got a
Speaker 3: little lot of not a lot of control. But you know,
Speaker 3: I was like water ski everything that I dreamed about that.
Speaker 3: I bought a house in the mountains and lived up
Speaker 3: eight thousand feet overlooking the lake and the fresh air,
Speaker 3: and ride with snowmobile ski.
Speaker 1: Eighty days a year.
Speaker 3: Just had a wonderful time of it. You know, girls
Speaker 3: couldn't even find me because the didn't know where I lived.
Speaker 3: I fly my airplane to the girl's house, have a date,
Speaker 3: and I split and go back home.
Speaker 1: Nobody find life.
Speaker 3: I was having a great time, and I did that
Speaker 3: for several years. That's a whole Yeah. If you got
Speaker 3: a plane, I had motorcycles, dirt bikes. I mean, I
Speaker 3: just was having a great time. This went on for
Speaker 3: a while, you know, until I met my future.
Speaker 1: Wife finally made you decide to get married. I don't know.
Speaker 3: I met a girl like none other that I would
Speaker 3: rather watch TV with than go bang a couple of
Speaker 3: other ones.
Speaker 1: That's real.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was just just a true man. Yeah, it's
Speaker 3: real romance, I think, you know, and I feel that
Speaker 3: way today.
Speaker 1: I want to say that wedding.
Speaker 5: You have a record a song on the Mexico talk
Speaker 5: about that. Was that inspired by her?
Speaker 3: Or No, I was just in Mexico rights some songs,
Speaker 3: just food around you. Wait you hear the next record.
Speaker 3: I mean, I'm almost halfway done with it. It's funky.
Speaker 3: It's nineteen eighty three.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 6: He said he don't write about his life.
Speaker 1: He do people.
Speaker 3: And then what I'm doing now this is I'm cutting me.
Speaker 3: What am I cut? This new record sounds like me
Speaker 3: Funkadelic Rick Jamee. I mean, it's it's that era. You know,
Speaker 3: it's back to my ear. If the instruments were created
Speaker 3: much after that, I ain't gonna.
Speaker 1: Have it on there. I mean, it's our.
Speaker 3: And you know what's interesting, I don't feel the least
Speaker 3: bit because I'm not really money motivated to make the record,
Speaker 3: so I don't feel the least bit. I gotta listen
Speaker 3: to what's on the radio, try to go boo bah
Speaker 3: boo boo boo.
Speaker 1: But if they go boo bah.
Speaker 3: Boo boo boo ba, I just want to do it
Speaker 3: my way, you know, and just keep it true to
Speaker 3: what it is, you know, and people if somebody says,
Speaker 3: I don't know, maybe we sell it.
Speaker 1: Maybe.
Speaker 3: But I never really made music to try to make money.
Speaker 3: I was always trying to make music because I love
Speaker 3: the music.
Speaker 1: How do your kids feel about your career? Like, do
Speaker 1: they know that you're the coolest dude walking the planet?
Speaker 4: Or no?
Speaker 1: Was it?
Speaker 3: My kids thought nothing until they saw me get a
Speaker 3: star on Hollywood Boulevard, and really that got let me
Speaker 3: tell you something. I never they don't move over anything, right.
Speaker 3: But we came home from the star ceremony and my
Speaker 3: youngest son took the picture of somebody down and hung
Speaker 3: hist star up that I gave, you know, and I
Speaker 3: was like, really, I mean, y'all, really we got to y'all.
Speaker 3: I mean we finally tapped you just a little bit.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 3: I got a thirty year old twenty eight sixteen and eighteen.
Speaker 3: So the younger ones, you know, the older ones, you know,
Speaker 3: they grew up with all this nonsense.
Speaker 1: They ain't getting it.
Speaker 3: But for some reason. Yeah, but for some reason, even
Speaker 3: the older kids, the star on Hollywood Boulevard was a
Speaker 3: life changer. That was the game changer. Forget all the money,
Speaker 3: forget all that stuff. They know they live in the
Speaker 3: house that the money bought. They got that, but that's
Speaker 3: just their thing. But for some reason, the star thing
Speaker 3: everybody got. You know, even my wife. We were driving home.
Speaker 3: I said, I don't know about your other boyfriends, but
Speaker 3: I bet you they want to know Hollywood. Let me
Speaker 3: tell you something. I thought we were gonna have something going.
Speaker 3: And she looked at me, she says, I'll let you
Speaker 3: slide with that one that put the blind you know,
Speaker 3: she let me.
Speaker 1: She let it go.
Speaker 3: She even let that one go. So that was an interesting.
Speaker 5: Thing with your kids, Like how do you because they
Speaker 5: grew up, you know, particularly the old ones, growing up
Speaker 5: growing up in that kind of goal, how do you
Speaker 5: teach them like the importance of work ethic and like
Speaker 5: what are they into?
Speaker 3: I turned them out of the house and cut them
Speaker 3: off like years ago. Well, you know they started.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 3: The problem is the kids. They think your money is
Speaker 3: their money less.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, you know.
Speaker 3: So I kicked my kids out, and you know what,
Speaker 3: they all fell to the ground. And now they're all
Speaker 3: making a lot of money, doing well, and so hopefully
Speaker 3: the younger ones will do the same thing. And it's
Speaker 3: really painful to the fire. I told my kids the
Speaker 3: old story. It's got it's gonna hurt you, but guess what,
Speaker 3: you get the fuck out. I came home one day
Speaker 3: and both of them were supposed to be looking for
Speaker 3: a job. One and graduated college. Won had dropped out,
Speaker 3: and they were at the swimming pool drinking margaritas and
Speaker 3: it was now I said, what with the job? They said,
Speaker 3: we searched all day, all day. It's twelve o'clock. So
Speaker 3: finally put them out. They were twenty two and twenty four.
Speaker 6: Okay, it's reasonable.
Speaker 1: You get lessons every you got.
Speaker 3: It may have been twenty one and twenty because the
Speaker 3: oldest one had graduated, so maybe it's twenty three, and
Speaker 3: why you.
Speaker 6: Give them an extra year?
Speaker 3: The other one dropped out. I said at the time,
Speaker 3: y'all can move together, share my spl.
Speaker 1: Bro. That's that's real. Like, did you ever have a deadline?
Speaker 1: Like when I was twenty, my dad was like, Yo,
Speaker 1: something gotta happened.
Speaker 5: I wasn't lucky. I got my record deal like within
Speaker 5: a year and a half, Like, but I got super lucky.
Speaker 5: It was eighteen for me, and I knew. Once I
Speaker 5: graduated high school, I was just like, yeah, I can't
Speaker 5: come back. So then I went to college and even
Speaker 5: coming back for the summers was tough.
Speaker 1: You know what I'm saying. Able to pay something?
Speaker 3: Yeah, totally. I was working everything.
Speaker 5: So then finally my senior year, me and my buddy,
Speaker 5: we got our own apartment and so that was then.
Speaker 1: I also had a kid on the way. I had
Speaker 1: my son on the way, so that kind of so
Speaker 1: I was. I was hustling.
Speaker 5: And then I graduated and then we signed that first deal.
Speaker 5: We completed the list in like a couple of months
Speaker 5: as I graduated.
Speaker 3: So what about you paid Bill and Steve? Your parents
Speaker 3: were like, I get the funk out. He's like Roger Dangerfield,
Speaker 3: don't stay home.
Speaker 1: School are the last I have one last question, but
Speaker 1: I have to rewind back a little bit on because
Speaker 1: it means so much to me. But I just have
Speaker 1: to say like your your theme The Prior's Place, Yo
Speaker 1: that that was one of my favorite shows ever, Like
Speaker 1: what was it like working with Richard Pryor? And how
Speaker 1: did how did you?
Speaker 3: Man? That was wonderful. I got that because I was
Speaker 3: dating the director's daughter. I need one more like campfire
Speaker 3: story about rain the ladies leave the rest of that alone.
Speaker 6: To the white pants and the peaches back.
Speaker 3: So her dad asked me to come in and write
Speaker 3: the song, you know, and working with Richard Pryor was
Speaker 3: wonderful and it was like a dream come true. Then
Speaker 3: they put me in the video and I'm bouncing the basketball.
Speaker 1: Richard.
Speaker 3: I'm like, oh man, this is as cool as you
Speaker 3: can get, right, And all of a sudden, I don't
Speaker 3: know where the ratings come out. The thing is going
Speaker 3: great and it's us kids cartoons, I mean kids think
Speaker 3: So I'm thinking, wow, this is every everything, This is it.
Speaker 3: I got it. Then Richard probably just says I want
Speaker 3: to do no more, man like after several episodes and
Speaker 3: everybody's like, yeah, what happened. I thought if we said
Speaker 3: the ratings, the ratings are, Richie just doesn't feel like
Speaker 3: doing it anymore, you know. No, he just didn't feel
Speaker 3: just changed his mind.
Speaker 1: It was the Black Sesame Street.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he just changes his mind.
Speaker 1: He came on eleven thirty ripe before a soldier.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he just decided, I'm not gonna do no more.
Speaker 2: Wow. You know.
Speaker 3: And then when that happens, you know what about us
Speaker 3: little guys? You know, come on, you know it must
Speaker 3: be nice, It must be nice. Just walk away right
Speaker 3: in the middle of it. Don't care. Let's go So
Speaker 3: okay any any I mean your new addition session.
Speaker 1: Was okay, you're gonna like this.
Speaker 3: So I wrote mister Telephone Man right alongside Jack and
Speaker 3: Jill and some other stuff all at the same time, right,
Speaker 3: and I thought, stupid song, mister teller.
Speaker 1: I don't know why did I write that?
Speaker 3: So I can it and I don't do anything with it,
Speaker 3: and we end up recording it on this kid on
Speaker 3: Geffen Records, Kid Junior Tucker, and they for some reason
Speaker 3: they throw his album with David Foster cuts some first
Speaker 3: Jay Graden that comes some They didn't like anything, and
Speaker 3: they gave it to me at discounted budget, and I
Speaker 3: actually finished the record for him, got it done, and
Speaker 3: then they just canned the thing and they didn't do nothing.
Speaker 3: With it, but somehow the new addition heard it through
Speaker 3: this guy Dale Konwa Shimo used to work for Michael
Speaker 3: Jackson and they loved the song. I didn't know that
Speaker 3: they had heard it. So Gerald Buzzby called me up
Speaker 3: in Detroit while my parents were sick, and he says,
Speaker 3: I want you to fly to New York Boston and
Speaker 3: hear these kids singing, because you know, they want you
Speaker 3: to work with him on a song. That's why he
Speaker 3: didn't say right it. He said work with him on
Speaker 3: a song. And my parents were sick. I've been in
Speaker 3: Detroit for months, it's freezing cold, and he wants me
Speaker 3: to go to Boston. It's January, not even not feeling
Speaker 3: it right. So I tell Gerald, thanks of the man.
Speaker 3: I don't think sothing man feeling So Gerald, being the
Speaker 3: smart guy, he was called back a month later. A
Speaker 3: few weeks later, he says, how about we take the
Speaker 3: jet and go to the Bahamas and stay at the
Speaker 3: Trump thing there and go to the restaurant and we party.
Speaker 3: I said that works to do that, So we fly
Speaker 3: down to the Bahamas, we rent motorcycles, we go in
Speaker 3: the casino, we eat at the same restaurant. Donald trump
Speaker 3: stand over there. We're sitting here and we party so hard.
Speaker 3: We get to the kids concert. They walk off the stage,
Speaker 3: right there's mister Parker. How did you like our song?
Speaker 3: I ain't even heard it yet. Gerald looks at me.
Speaker 3: I'm looking at him like, whoa, man, we're late. We
Speaker 3: missed the whole thing, you know. And we're like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 3: that was great.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And so I go back and I'm feeling bad now
Speaker 3: because I'm like, man, Gerald, man, my parents are sick,
Speaker 3: really not feeling this.
Speaker 1: Write the song thing and go back to you know.
Speaker 3: Just He says, oh, man, you ain't got to write
Speaker 3: the song. He says, they were playing your song. They
Speaker 3: just want you to re record it.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: I was like, what song, mister telephone? I said, how
Speaker 3: did they hear that? He says, no, they worked out there,
Speaker 3: they know what. They want you to cut it, just
Speaker 3: like those stuff. So we got went to back in
Speaker 3: California and uh, the kids say, look, just cut it
Speaker 3: just like in fact, can we buy the old track?
Speaker 3: I said, no, that blongs you can't buy it over chain.
Speaker 3: But it's me playing all the instruments. So I'll cut
Speaker 3: it again. So I put all the instruments together. He said, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: so that's me playing. I play the drums and over dub.
Speaker 3: I'm like Steve. I put the drums on last, you know,
Speaker 3: So I played the bass and all the rest. Well
Speaker 3: that's how the master taught me. I'm just doing it
Speaker 3: like he did it. So I put all the stuff on.
Speaker 3: We get the track done. We get to singing on
Speaker 3: Ralph sings the verse. It sounds great. Nobody can sing
Speaker 3: the chorus, and said Bobby because he's he didn't want
Speaker 3: He said, I don't sing. I rap right. I said,
Speaker 3: well you got to sing because ain't nobody else singing it.
Speaker 3: So he's yelling and screaming up how, I said. We
Speaker 3: get him on up high. Later he tells me, you know,
Speaker 3: I saw him a few weeks ago.
Speaker 1: He told me.
Speaker 3: He says, well, Ray Parker Junior said I can sing
Speaker 3: someth fuck it, I quit the band said, I do
Speaker 3: my own album. I said, boy, that was a confidence
Speaker 3: building Yeah, I'm gone, you know, but uh it was interesting.
Speaker 3: Uh they cut, we cut the record, turned it in
Speaker 3: and they were a little out of tune on some parts,
Speaker 3: and was worked to get the vocals done. So Jero
Speaker 3: Buzzby looks at me. He says, man, can you cut
Speaker 3: four or five more songs?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 3: I said, man, I can't do that.
Speaker 1: I'm doing this.
Speaker 3: He says, well, get your boys, Allie, and wasn't name
Speaker 3: of them to do it. He says, they can ghost
Speaker 3: it for you. He says, you got my permission. So
Speaker 3: I go to my boys. I said, man, y'all, y'all
Speaker 3: want to cut the stuff. I got a pockets full
Speaker 3: of cash burn here, you know, do this. We don't
Speaker 3: want to do that. We don't want to do it.
Speaker 3: I said, yep, but we don't want to. Nobody want
Speaker 3: to do it. Why I just didn't want to do it. No,
Speaker 3: I couldn't get all I mean people needed integrity. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 3: too much integrity or too much poor judgment. So nobody
Speaker 3: would take the money to do it. So that's how
Speaker 3: I ended up with just the one song. I turned
Speaker 3: the song in and believe or not, that's the same
Speaker 3: week when they called me for Ghostbusters. So when Gary
Speaker 3: Lamel called me from Ghostbusters, you know, I had been
Speaker 3: to Spargo's and I was sitting.
Speaker 1: With the lady right there, Claire.
Speaker 3: We were looking at that read I mean black poster
Speaker 3: with it just had to circle on it something like that.
Speaker 3: I said, what is that? And I said, I got
Speaker 3: a phone call from my friend about that, and what
Speaker 3: Gary was saying it was, you know, spent a couple
Speaker 3: of days.
Speaker 1: I paid it right.
Speaker 3: So I says, Man, I'm not doing this song. I'm
Speaker 3: going back to Detroit.
Speaker 1: He says.
Speaker 3: He says, you're not doing music. He says, what are
Speaker 3: you doing here? Now? Says I'm doing a new edition.
Speaker 3: He said, were doing doing music? Then what are you
Speaker 3: talking about? My money ain't good for their you know.
Speaker 3: So that's how he talked me into doing this. I
Speaker 3: was already in town doing a new edition. So he said,
Speaker 3: stay two more days. Fifty grand. Ye. So that year
Speaker 3: I had missed the telephone Man and Ghostbusters came out
Speaker 3: the same year.
Speaker 1: Man, Game Changers, Game Changers. Yeah, Ray Parker Jr. Thank you,
Speaker 1: Thank you, Man, thank you. One of the new edition.
Speaker 1: Ray Parker almost didn't happen, just like Ghostbusters almost didn't happen,
Speaker 1: just like Jack and Jill almost didn't happen.
Speaker 3: Man, I don't know what lesson like.
Speaker 1: There's so many I don't know if it's that I
Speaker 1: should start dating all the daughters of all the mine
Speaker 1: is I'm kicking my kids out the house.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you really have to know that information. You're like
Speaker 3: exactly what I'm like, what was the day?
Speaker 5: I mean, that's the lesson because three days after yet
Speaker 5: to roll right Ghostbusters?
Speaker 3: So yeah, yea myself. They got to go.
Speaker 1: They stay numbered already.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, that's what you're taking for this, Ray Parkers. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: they gotta get out.
Speaker 1: They gotta go.
Speaker 6: I mean once they they're not legal yet, they're not.
Speaker 3: At fifteen and ten.
Speaker 1: But I'm basically saying seven three to seven years fifteen,
Speaker 1: gotta get out.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, oh yeah really, oh yes, I mean
Speaker 3: it was like that for me. You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: I did right.
Speaker 3: I ended up in the room with you motherfuckers.
Speaker 1: So I see something a child has to suffer to
Speaker 1: make it in life.
Speaker 6: I don't.
Speaker 3: Is there thing you gotta suffer?
Speaker 5: I just you know what, man, It's it's tough because
Speaker 5: like we were talking about this to Cardoon Knight, like,
Speaker 5: you know, looking at what was it? It was you
Speaker 5: god right, saying like his kids are like super nerds.
Speaker 5: Nerds so a lot of ways like hip hop and
Speaker 5: the kids have entertainers. Hip hop has afforded the kids
Speaker 5: way better lives than the fathers and mothers, you know
Speaker 5: what I'm saying. So that's the good thing. But then
Speaker 5: in some aspects you kind of lose that thing that
Speaker 5: made your dad you know, right or whatever, hunger drive, whatever,
Speaker 5: So you kind of gotta walk that line. It's like, Okay,
Speaker 5: do I want to give my kids everything that I
Speaker 5: didn't have or do I want to make them live
Speaker 5: like Antoine Fisher.
Speaker 1: So I'm just kind of like, I mean, not like
Speaker 1: not white.
Speaker 3: It here, I'm still strong. Oh nigga, I don't know
Speaker 3: who will people be?
Speaker 2: So nah?
Speaker 5: I mean, so that's that's my that is my conflict
Speaker 5: because I want to get in the things. I mean,
Speaker 5: I don't want my kids to like grow up like
Speaker 5: in the crackhouse and ship like I experienced. But at
Speaker 5: the same time, I don't want them, you know, to
Speaker 5: just be soft and mark.
Speaker 3: God damn job.
Speaker 1: Yeah no.
Speaker 3: So so that was my list from break kick your
Speaker 3: kids out there.
Speaker 1: And children. I'm sorry, I just wanted to radio show
Speaker 1: to nerd out a little bit. I didn't want this
Speaker 1: to be the moment of your life changing. Uh so, Bill,
Speaker 1: you seem to agree about kicking my kids out of
Speaker 1: the house. You would kick one daughter out with do
Speaker 1: you know it like tomorrow?
Speaker 3: No, I'm playing, uh, but you're not.
Speaker 1: I'm not. I don't you know.
Speaker 3: I haven't given much thought to kicking my kids out
Speaker 3: of the house.
Speaker 1: I feel like a few years ahead of me.
Speaker 3: So, yeah, your kids, your daughters are much young.
Speaker 1: So I mean there are days late, Jordans. There's two kids,
Speaker 1: and I'm paid Bill's life, and one might be testing
Speaker 1: his patience just a little bit more than the other one.
Speaker 3: Everybody's patients, not just me. But do you feel I mean,
Speaker 3: is it too late? She's only three, right, she's four?
Speaker 3: Is it too late to do what?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Give her back? Yes, it's too late for that.
Speaker 1: I have about three friends who thought. One one of
Speaker 1: them infamously said, you know, he had a son and
Speaker 1: a daughter and he says, well, you know, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: save my baill money up for my son to college
Speaker 1: tuition up for her. And now they're older, it's the
Speaker 1: complete opposite. The angel is now a nightmare. I heard
Speaker 1: that they switch and right, so as who knows, like
Speaker 1: the apple of your eye, might you know it might
Speaker 1: be bail money time. I mean, I hope.
Speaker 3: You about girls to keep him off the poles.
Speaker 1: The only thing you need to do. I've heard that,
Speaker 1: all right. So Steve drops droptsman, science man, would you learn? Man?
Speaker 8: I thought some of the interesting things he was talking
Speaker 8: about was the Stevie Wonder playing drums on his stuff last.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that is that all?
Speaker 8: I mean, that's that makes a lot of sense. And
Speaker 8: it's just so it's just mind blowing. How does it
Speaker 8: make no click? So he's playing to what well?
Speaker 3: Because Steve is one of the most adventurous uh.
Speaker 1: High hat players all time, that just makes a lot
Speaker 1: of sense that the fluctuation of his drumming is because
Speaker 1: he does it last. And I try that same. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna cut a song on this album's album.
Speaker 3: Every That's what I was thinking the whole time.
Speaker 1: You know, I gotta try this.
Speaker 3: I love that in two weeks. Let's listen.
Speaker 1: Listen, listen. That's something cool.
Speaker 8: And and also Stevie Wonder's apparent competitiveness with with Ray
Speaker 8: Parker and trying to that on the Sha Ka Khan
Speaker 8: thing and all that, and then the Hugelism skills as well,
Speaker 8: and that Barry White didn't like overdubs and he was
Speaker 8: he was doing all that. No, but in general, we're
Speaker 8: choosing people here that seem to know everybody, who have
Speaker 8: seemed to have done everything, and it's like it's just
Speaker 8: so much data going, you know, we need to choose
Speaker 8: somebody who just did like a one hit wonder.
Speaker 1: So, lie, what did you learn besides the fact that
Speaker 1: you might possibly want Ray Parker Junior to be your
Speaker 1: baby dad, just at least.
Speaker 6: The soundtrack to you Know Me and My Baby. You
Speaker 6: know what I learned?
Speaker 4: And I learned this every week on this show. Excuse me,
Speaker 4: not jokes, but I learned you gotta pay attention. And
Speaker 4: it's funny because y'all made the joke about having a
Speaker 4: one hit Wonder on the show, and I'm like, you know,
Speaker 4: a lot of people listening might think that Ray Parker Jr.
Speaker 6: Was a one hit one.
Speaker 4: So it just goes to show that you and not
Speaker 4: to plug our own show, but you need to pay
Speaker 4: attention to Quest Love Supreme because you will find out
Speaker 4: some ship that you never knew. And then I think
Speaker 4: at the same time, you should have your phone open
Speaker 4: on Google and discogs or whatever else you need to do.
Speaker 6: So that you can be, you know, more musically educated person.
Speaker 1: Bill. Yeah, what's up? What did I learn?
Speaker 3: I learned that it's a good idea to maintain relationships
Speaker 3: because you will never know when you will need certain
Speaker 3: people again. Any other last words of Boss Bill like
Speaker 3: as far as the relationships maintained relationships, Ray Parker Jr.
Speaker 3: Is still one of the coolest dudes on the planet.
Speaker 1: Still he talks like, right, You'll think Drake's going to
Speaker 1: be that cool when he's sixty something, isn't there just rerailised.
Speaker 3: We forgot to ask him Ray Parker, what it was
Speaker 3: like to uh, to be Land of cal.
Speaker 1: Good night, ladies and gentlemen.
Speaker 3: There is another episode of Quest Loves Supreme.
Speaker 1: Boss Bill. Tune in next week. It wasn't Lando Covers,
Speaker 1: It wasn't that wasn't him, Sugar Steve, I'm bay Bill
Speaker 1: Fante Edit Scott Spread Wait, yeah, yeah, Scott Spurn.
Speaker 3: Think about the baby.
Speaker 1: This is a Quest Love come next week again at
Speaker 1: one pm Eastern Eastern Standard times, ten am Specific Standard time.
Speaker 1: And uh, we hope you still are listening Quest Love
Speaker 1: Supreme Pandora, Thank you. Quest Love Supreme is production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: This classic episode was produced by the team at Pandora.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the i heart
Speaker 1: Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
Speaker 1: favorite shows.