White cane lying in a gutter in the lane if you’re walking home alone . . .
—“Don’t Let It Bring You Down,” Neil Young (1970)
Now free of his obligations to RCA, Rick and two Heaven and Earth members, Denny Gerrard and Ed Roth, started a new band in early 1972: White Cane.
The source of the name has long been disputed by Rick’s former bandmates. Because Rick liked cocaine, which is white, and Cane can be read to mean ’Caine, many believe the name reflected Rick’s enthusiasm for the drug. The theory that White Cane and white cocaine were linked was strengthened during the band’s first rehearsal in what guitarist Nick Balkou calls the “dingy little basement” of a house Rick was renting in Toronto. The various band members, some of whom did not know each other well, were trying awkwardly to get acquainted in the house’s smoke-filled, unventilated basement when, Balkou says, “Rick came downstairs in a flurry and plumped this bag on the table.” It was a quarter ounce of cocaine.
Rick said, “‘OK, boys, come on, line up, then we’re rehearsing,’” Balkou says. He thought Rick might be kidding. “This was my first exposure to cocaine, let alone anything else, and we dove right in. Of course we all thought we were amazing after all that coke.” Even decades later, Balkou seemed grateful to Rick for exposing him to a new world. “Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll . . . that was the essence of what Rick was all about,” Balkou says.
On the Great White Cane album the band produced, its members were identified as Rick, singing lead vocals and playing congas, timbales, and percussion; J. Cleveland Hughes, an African Canadian, on percussion and vibraphone; Ian Kojima, an Asian Canadian, playing saxophone; Ed Roth on flute, piano, and organ; Nick Balkou (now using the name Sonny Nicholas) on lead and rhythm guitar; Norman Wellbanks on drums and percussion; Bob “Cool Breeze” Doughty on trumpet and euphonium; and Denny “Pookie” Gerrard on bass. Balkou was also listed as a songwriter and arranger, though under his given name.
Doughty says that after that initial rehearsal, the band reworked some of the songs from Milestone, Doughty’s former band, as well as some Heaven and Earth songs, and recorded a sixteen-track demo tape. Shortly thereafter, the White Cane musicians moved to LA. to seek a record contract.
They started their new stay in town with a scam. According to their financial backer, Weisman, “I’m renting all this stuff for them and the van to take it down there to L.A. They call me, tell me they’re renting two apartments, and send me pictures of the apartments.” The band told him they needed rent money each month, so Weisman sent it for an extended period. Then he found out they were living in two condemned apartments for which they paid no rent.
With eight band members—plus Rick Abel, girlfriends, and pets—the two apartments were somewhat crowded. Abel considered himself lucky to be given the hall closet in the entranceway to one of the apartments as his sleeping area. His dog, a Great Dane, slept outside the closet door, protecting his privacy. Rick James lived elsewhere. The band members occupied the two apartments for about seven months while searching for a record deal.
In Abel’s view, Rick James’s modus operandi at the time, while seeking a record deal, was “to bring in musicians who were good players but nobody of repute, set them up somewhere where he would more or less provide housing for them, and more or less provide them with the common necessities.” The necessities provided in this case, Abel says, were basically one meal a day and all the pot you could smoke. Whenever one of the band members would receive five or ten dollars in the mail from their parents, “we’d go down to the grocery store and buy old dented cans of SpaghettiOs or whatever,” Abel says.
The apartment they were living in certainly provided them with entertainment. According to Abel, the building next door was a house of prostitution, and the windows of the apartments in which the women entertained their guests were at most ten feet away from theirs. The band members needed only to open their windows on a nice evening to be serenaded by the sounds of active sex from their hardworking neighbors. A similar operation was going on down the hall from their own digs. On one occasion the band members heard screaming in the hallway only to see one of the prostitutes bolting out of her apartment and running down the hall until she was tackled by a man, presumably her pimp, who then dragged her back into the room by her hair.
The most dramatic event, however, occurred one night when the band was sitting around one of their apartments smoking pot. Suddenly a pot smoker’s worst nightmare occurred: two LAPD cops in uniform with drawn guns burst through the door. The toking band members were instantly paralyzed with fear, but then they noticed the cops had their fingers over their lips, warning them to keep quiet. The two cops crept up the apartment’s internal stairway to a door leading to an upper hallway that ran behind a higher apartment, where they soon arrested some of the band’s neighbors. They did not return to the band members’ apartment, throwing those musicians who had seen them into a cascade of relief.
In return for this level of existence, all the musicians were required to do was rehearse, except on the rare occasions they landed a club gig somewhere. But mostly they sat around and smoked pot. When asked why he stuck around, Abel says, “It was just that I had nothing else going on. I was nineteen and dumb, and ambitious at the time but not exactly an overachiever.”
Also keeping him around was his admiration for the band’s skill. They had recorded a cassette tape of their musical numbers and played it for him when he joined the band’s crew. “I was like, ‘These guys are wow! They are actually good.” He was impressed that they weren’t doing cover tunes, that each and every one of the tunes they were rehearsing was an original composition, and that Rick had written most of them.
Abel says the band’s music was reminiscent of the music produced by Chicago, rock music with brass and soul in it. He also says he heard the California rock of the time in the music, a sort of Mother Earth theme, because Rick “liked to get real cosmic and all that.”
Abel, whose job at the time was restricted to setting up and taking down the band’s equipment, says, “It wasn’t like we had a lot of things to do besides practice, so Rick would regale us with his stories of playing in Toronto with the Mynah Birds and Stephen Stills and them, and how he really got a little bit of that California rock ’n’ roll under his skin.”
Although the White Cane’s music was good and they had hopes for the future, the band members were not exactly living the American dream. So they were thrilled when they were invited through a friend of a friend to a huge barbecue party at the expansive Beverly Hills house of the Chambers Brothers, who had been very famous during the 1960s and were still hanging on in the 1970s.
“This was like Christmas, New Year’s, and everything else rolled into one,” Abel says. “We were going to a party!” Unfortunately his car had broken down and been towed away, and he certainly did not have the money to recover it. But a friend of his was visiting from Toronto and agreed to ferry the band members across town to the party in his Volkswagen in groups of two or three.
The party was not scheduled to start until 2:00 PM, but the hungry band members showed up at noon. “We arranged to get there at the earliest moment we thought we could arrive without being way out of line,” Abel says. Although the caterers were still setting out the huge feast for the 150 or so expected guests, the band members were grudgingly allowed in. They were ecstatic to encounter large barrels filled with ribs, chicken, and shrimp and other barrels full of beer and wine, and immediately began an eating and drinking marathon. By the time various celebrities arrived, including Three Dog Night, the White Cane musicians were close to unconsciousness.
After darkness fell, Abel was sitting in the dining room talking to the other guests when, he says, “It sounded like someone was spilling a pitcher of water on the carpet,” and he heard people gasping. He shouldered his way to the scene of the disturbance and found out that one of the White Cane band members, who had been snoozing in a chair in the living room “in a comatose, catatonic state” after eating and drinking heavily, had suddenly stood up, pulled out his penis, and urinated for some time on the carpet in front of all and sundry, including many who had brought their small children to this allegedly family-friendly event. Several guests frog-marched this band member, who still seemed to be asleep, out the front door and shut it behind him.
The Chambers Brothers’ manager, livid and embarrassed, ruled that would be the very last party to which he would ever invite White Cane.
Perhaps inspired by the need to escape their decidedly down-market accommodations and attend more Chambers Brothers–type parties, the band performed well at several local gigs. Weisman, while admittedly not a musician, was definitely a music fan, and he liked White Cane. He called them “a horn band, a more driving band, a bigger band” than he’d been involved with before. “It was an exciting band indeed,” he says. Motown later called White Cane “an eight piece jazz-rock-funk band.”
Weisman particularly complimented the bass player, Denny Gerrard, calling him “phenomenal and fantastic. He had fingers. Gerrard’s bass playing would come out so loud, you could hear it clearly over all those nine musicians.” The band played so well it was invited to negotiate an album contract with Mike Curb, the president of MGM Records, for that company’s Lion Records label.
Curb took exception to the band’s name because he said it promoted the use of illegal drugs. (In 1970 Curb had dropped eighteen MGM acts he said promoted drug use through their music. Partly due to his antidrug stance, he was elected lieutenant governor of California in 1978.) Rick attempted to overcome Curb’s objections by telling him Cane referred to sugarcane and that the band was “sweet as sugar.” Curb was not convinced. When Rick said the band would leave if Curb insisted on a name change, and promised to produce no songs promoting drugs, Curb finally backed down.
Balkou says the name of the album the band produced, Great White Cane, was actually meant to indicate disgust with society in general. He points out that the cartoonish cane-like figure on the cover of the album the band eventually produced had a third eye, and that third eye was blind, indicating society’s alleged blindness. This interpretation is clouded by the fact that it’s not clear which, if any, of the figure’s three eyes is not functional, and the “eyes” are actually drawn as sunglasses.
Some saw the name and the figure as a direct reference to blind and other visually impaired people, who often carry white canes, and Rick was aware of this potential meaning. When he and Bob Doughty drove past a big banner with a white cane on it that was being displayed by the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, Rick joked about the banner being a reference to the band.
Abel supports the idea that blindness, rather than cocaine, was the origin of the name, claiming that it was lifted from a verse from the Neil Young classic “Don’t Let It Bring You Down”: “Blind man running through the light of the night with an answer in his hand . . . white cane lying in a gutter in the lane if you’re walking home alone.” Maybe Rick wanted to let his former bandmate know that Rick remembered him.
When the band members, still living in abandoned apartments, were told they’d been signed by a big record company, “Oh God, it was like nirvana,” Abel says. Abel, as the band roadie, received $500 as his portion of the advance, “which seemed like a fortune at the time,” he says. Each musician received approximately $1,000. This wasn’t much, considering the advance was for $250,000, but Rick said at the time that the band would have to pay production costs out of that amount.
“It was nothing really much, but to us it was owowowowowowow,” Abel says, “and we just went shit crazy. I don’t think anybody ever appreciated money more in their lives than that time.” Everybody had been wearing the same clothes for months and eating communal stew, so the first thing they did was go out to eat up a big storm at the local Howard Johnson and then buy clothes. Abel bought two double-knit jumpsuits and some high-heeled sneakers. He then bought a big kidney belt, like a weight lifter would wear, at a leather store and had his nickname, Tex, hand-tooled on the back of it. “I was a sight,” he says.
In February 1972 the band began recording the album at The Village, a big studio off Wilshire Boulevard. With eerie predictive power, at least as far as White Cane was concerned, the outer wall of the studio displayed a mural showing the ruins of an elevated portion of a huge L.A. freeway after an imaginary giant earthquake. Cars were driving off the ruined road into the ocean.
The studio itself was state-of-the-art. The songs the band recorded there that ended up on the resulting album are “Country Woman Suite,” consisting of the three songs: “Country Woman” and “Get On Down” written by Rick, and “Time Is My Keeper,” by Balkou and Rick.
Also on the album are the slow, bluesy, eight-minute-long, environmentally concerned “Mother Earth,” by Rick and Roth, and “Find It” by Rick and Balkou. The album also contains three songs that are rerecordings of tunes already sung by Heaven and Earth: “You Make the Magic,” by Rick and Mike McKinnon, and “Don’t You Worry” and “Big Showdown,” both by Rick.
Abel says that because Rick had been playing with Neil Young and Bruce Palmer just before they pole-vaulted to superstardom, the band’s songs were heavily influenced by the styles adopted by both musicians. “You listen to that album,” Abel says, “and you hear a lot of ‘Country Girl’ [a Neil Young song performed by CSNY]. It certainly isn’t ‘Super Freak.’”
Indeed, on first listen, the tunes on The Great White Cane seem to be standard rock ’n’ roll songs of the era with some psychedelic and reggae sounds mixed in. But they contain hints of the sound that would make Rick famous, including a sarcastic whine he would later develop into his signature style.
The recording process was chaotic. During the early stages, “Rick kept getting carried away,” and the band would lose track, Balkou says. “We’d be jamming out the song, and start off with one thing, and then halfway through it would go someplace else.” Balkou says the band “thought that was wonderful because we were so high and didn’t know any better, and by the time we came back around to the song, we forgot what the song was about.” While the band members “all thought it was fantastic,” the result “just never really translated into a recorded song.”
At this point, Rick’s growing thirst for women, and his willingness to act on it, began to emerge. The band had a communal Volkswagen Beetle, and Balkou says Rick once asked him to use it to drive him to the house of “a couple of ladies in Pasadena.” Rick had sex with one, and then the other, while Balkou waited in another room. “I kept asking, ‘Where’s the fun for me?’” Balkou says, but he never pressed the point.
Another time, the band members were in a restaurant before beginning a recording session. “There was a poor waitress there, in her midforties, maybe fifty,” Balkou says. “Rick took her to the back . . . and he did her in the kitchen. Our instructions were to watch the restaurant.” Balkou points out that Rick wasn’t famous then, and had never met her before, but he did have charisma.
In an attempt to put Rick’s sexual exploits in context, Balkou talks about “a Puerto Rican drummer who played with me for a number of years. His name was Mike, he could barely talk, he had a stutter, and he couldn’t keep time to save his life. He would start playing and become a runaway train by the end of the song, so we’d get through a set fast. . . . He’d sweat, and he never wore a shirt. But he had a body we’d all kill for, the abs and six-pack.” This drummer, Balkou says, would walk up to a group of girls in the audience, sometimes sweating, and say, “Hi, my name’s Mike, I’m the drummer, you wanna fuck?’” and often, one of the women would say yes. “He was so cocksure of himself,” Balkou says, “yet Rick was one hundred times worse. He knew he was all that and a bag of chips.”
Although in later years Rick was accused of abusing women, one musician who lived with him for a year at around this time said he saw no instances of physical abuse. The two men shared a room divided down the middle by a bamboo curtain. From what he could discern through the curtain, this musician says, Rick was “very physically gentle . . . like a lamb” with his female guests. Rick’s bandmates were very surprised when they heard much later that Rick had been arrested and charged with abusing women.
In an effort to prep the public for the release of the upcoming album, White Cane soon began touring as an opening act for blues master B. B. King, joining him on his thirteen-city tour. Abel, as a road manager for a mostly white band, wondered why the band was on a B. B. King tour, especially on a bill that also included Gene McDaniels, an older R&B singer. As Abel remembers it, the tour hit the major stops on the so-called Chitlin’ Circuit throughout the South, in states such as Mississippi and Alabama. These weren’t typical venues for white rock ’n’ roll bands, and the usual audience was mostly older black people with just a scattering of white kids. The tour took the band to, among other places, Tacoma, Seattle, Salem, Salt Lake City, Charleston, Jackson, Toledo, Toronto, Providence, Roanoke, Greensboro, Chattanooga, and Vancouver.
Abel admits that the audience “kinda liked” White Cane’s performance. He notes, however, that the band’s reception was more enthusiastic in major southern cities than in the region’s smaller towns.
When the B. B. King tour reached Vancouver, Rick, apparently blind to obvious audience preferences, made a strange mistake. With Rick leading the band, White Cane did their first song, the crowd applauded enthusiastically . . . and then the trouble began. Rick insisted that the group’s second song be an a cappella version of the Bob Dylan song “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” with the crowd clapping in support. But as Ed Roth noted, it was a B. B. King crowd; people weren’t there for folk songs. People refused to clap.
Rick said, “All right, everybody clap their hands!” the musician says. “And no one would clap. He’d say, ‘C’mon, put your fuckin’ hands together,’ and nothing would happen.”
After the show, King’s road manager visited the band and said to Rick, “Please don’t do that,” and “Please don’t talk like that.” Rick’s response was, “Don’t tell me what to do.”
As the tour progressed, the musician says, Rick did exactly the same thing. “It was Groundhog Day in slow motion,” the person says. “We played every night, and it happened every night, and I don’t know how many gigs we did before Toronto. We played Massey Hall in Toronto, which should have been a thrill, but it was the same shit, with him doing that one thing. We’d start with one number that always got a great reaction, and then he’d do this. We’d ask him ‘Why are you doing this?’ and he’d say, ‘Don’t tell me what to do.’”
A partial answer to that question may be Rick’s feelings about King. Rick complained to Weisman that when King “[came] onstage and start[ed] singing . . . all these old ladies, they [took] off their panties and they [threw] them up there.” Weisman’s conclusion: Rick was jealous.
Another theory came from Doughty. “Everybody was smoking pot,” he says, “but Rick liked the powder [cocaine].” His growing use of the drug may have been swelling his ego at the cost of his rationality. Doughty speculates Rick figured the folk song would hit one night and enable him to become a solo star, which was, after all, his dream. If his plan had worked, according to Doughty, “he’d have cast us off in a minute. With Rick, it’s like the first night in a Turkish prison. You’ve got to watch your back all the time.”
But years later, after Rick was a big star, he still occasionally performed such self-destructive singing stunts. A video of Rick performing his later hit song “Super Freak” before an elite music business audience shows him going silent in the middle of the tune. While the background music continues, he then woop-woops like a police siren into the microphone and attempts to get the members of the audience to woop back. Cameras on the audience show them looking puzzled and not sure what to do. The song and the video then end. “He was like the angel and the demon all in one person,” another musician says of Rick. “You never knew which one was going to show up.”
Other moves Rick made with White Cane seemed familiar to his associates in previous bands. He had hired Sarns as the band’s equipment manager on the tour, and with the last week of that tour approaching, Rick told him, “You don’t really expect to get paid for this last week, do you?” Sarns says he “hemmed and hawed” so Rick pocketed Sarns’s final check.
Nevertheless, all the band members, including Sarns, stuck with Rick. “Although he went very low, you know that somebody who just keeps pushing like that is . . . going to make it big,” Doughty says.
MGM seemed to think Rick and White Cane were on the way to the top. The company made a sincere effort to sell the Great White Cane album, sending courtesy copies to numerous media outlets. Its ads for the album called the band “enormously powerful” and “full of thunder and spirit.” The ads also touted Rick as “a singer of limitless drive and fire.” MGM told Billboard they planned to release the tune “You Make the Magic” to promote the album.
The tour, aimed at paving the way for the album, was also going well, in spite of Rick’s insistence on trying to convince every audience to clap along. But when the band members reached New York City, spent the night, and gathered at that city’s Port Authority Bus Terminal for the Pennsylvania leg of the trip, Rick wasn’t there. He had deserted the band, leaving it without a singer.
Weisman was especially frustrated by Rick’s disappearance. White Cane “had all the money behind them, the promotion was going on, the album was about to be released, and I think they would have made it to the top this time because that was a hell of a band,” he told writer Nick Warburton.
What had happened was that someone had discovered Rick had sold some of the tunes on the MGM-financed album to another record company. “We were all slack-jawed on that one. How could you possibly think you could get away with that?” Doughty says. This wasn’t the last time Rick signed contracts for the same music with two or more different companies during his career, a maneuver that pushed this intelligent, ambitious man back toward the bottom of the greasy pole he had been exerting all his energies to climb. The only possible explanation is that he needed the money to feed his drug habit, which had grown into an obsession now that he was using cocaine.
Balkou estimates that by the time Rick disappeared, MGM had already sunk at least $100,000 into the band to press the album, promote it coast-to-coast, and support the band’s tour with King. In the end, MGM actually put out very few copies of the album.
Because of commitments already made, the tour continued as planned, without Rick. “Being twenty and naïve,” Doughty says, “we figured there’s got to be some way to work it out.” Balkou says that from then on, he did all the vocals. He says, “The band actually sounded fantastic because we went back to the way we actually rehearsed the songs.” But the tour ended in Mississippi and, in Balkou’s words, “that was the end of us [as a band].” Along with the rest of the band members, Doughty went home to Toronto. “I don’t play in a band anymore,” he says.
This ending seemed particularly cruel to the remaining band members, because during the tour, their songs had begun to get airplay, a sign that the album might well have succeeded and elevated them to big-time status.
Rick never took the blame for the mess. In 1978 he told an interviewer that the MGM album and a cross-country tour with B. B. King remained “some of my best musical experiences to this day.” He told author David Ritz that Jimmy Ienner, the album’s producer, “massacred the band’s music,” and that production costs, rather than Rick’s own nose, had eaten up the $250,000 advance. He said when the album appeared it failed miserably, and MGM president Mike Curb had dropped the band.
Rick also told Ritz that when the record came out in 1972, the music magazines said the band had potential but production of the record sucked. In reality, MGM—aware that Rick’s desertion would be fatal to the band and that a functioning band was needed to promote the album—released only the minimum number of album copies required by the contract plus a few promo copies for DJs.
Although cuts from the album are playable on YouTube, many of the album copies now available for purchase are stamped SPECIAL DISC JOCKEY RECORD. NOT FOR SALE.