We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.
—Arthur O’Shaughnessy
Rick soon decided to vary at least part of his pattern by recording his tunes in Toronto and then trying to ride them to fame in the United States. In January 1973 he recorded four songs at the Manta Sound studio in Toronto: “Grim Reaper,” “Your Old Man,” “Rock and Roll Baby,” and “Sally Walker,” about Bruce Palmer’s wife. It’s not clear who played the background music on these recordings, and there’s no indication they were ever released.
Rick also became a regular at Daniel Lanois’s basement recording studio in Hamilton, Ontario. He sang backup vocals on advertising jingles, then traded his work on the jingles for studio time that he would use to record demos of tunes he was writing. In spite of Rick’s somewhat low economic status at the time, he greatly impressed Lanois. Working three hours with Rick, Lanois told the Los Angeles Times, was “like five years in a university studying record-making. Inside of 40 minutes you’d have a fully finished production.”
Rick also tried his hand at concert promoting. In September 1973 he signed up Kool & the Gang and the Ohio Players to do a concert in Buffalo. These bands were popular at the time, and the planned concert should have done well. But a week prior to the concert, somebody got shot in the theater where the groups were going to perform. Because of that, Weisman says, “mothers would not allow their daughters to go see Kool & the Gang, and the place was half empty.”
Rick did only slightly better with his next project. He spent some time in a recording studio, and then called Artie Wayne, an A&M Records executive in Los Angeles, in early 1974 and asked if he could bring in a demo to play for him. “I didn’t know him,” Wayne wrote in his book I Did It for a Song, “but he had been so engaging on the phone that I agreed to listen to his music. I put the needle on the steel acetate, and when the intro started I leaped out of my seat onto the dance floor.” (At Stevie Wonder’s suggestion, he said, he’d installed a dance floor in his office.) “I could have danced on the ceiling,” he wrote.
The record was a bouncy upbeat single called “My Mama.” Written by Rick, it included admonitions from his mother that Rick apparently believed with all his heart, such as, “Mama told me to try . . . you can make it if you try.” Wayne and A&M executive Kip Cohen immediately offered Rick a record deal and a five-year exclusive songwriting contract.
At this somewhat upbeat point in his up-and-down career, Rick married his girlfriend, Kelly Misener, on April 14, 1974, in a ceremony at his mother’s house in Buffalo. Rick’s mother put on a big wedding feast. “It was the first time I ever tasted collard greens,” Weisman says.
“My Mama” was released shortly thereafter, backed by the funky instrumental “Funkin’ Around.” The record didn’t chart, and there’s no indication Rick offered A&M any more tunes.
Rick told author David Ritz that when he recorded these songs, it was the first time he played bass during a session. He also said the single died quickly because he wouldn’t agree to sign an exclusive deal with A&M until they guaranteed him an ad budget. Therefore, “they stopped all promotion.”
“My Mama” was very popular in England, Germany, and France for a while, Rick also told Ritz, “so I got my ass in gear, put together a four-piece band, and flew over.” He said he found a promoter who booked the band on a nice tour and in good-sized clubs.
Rick and Kelly told author Nick Warburton that Rick toured Sweden around 1974 and 1975 with keyboardist Billy Preston. Rick also told several authors he lost momentum because he began having ménage à trois sex with a mother and daughter in Stockholm. Rick said he stayed abroad for a year. When he returned, he was unable to get along with Kelly and moved out of the house they shared in Toronto and into his own apartment. He told David Ritz that “marriage killed the happiness” between him and Kelly.
His next step was to write three new tunes and take them to a casual Toronto friend named George Semkiw, who would become Rick’s producer and manager for the next two years. Their first project together was producing two versions of a bouncy dance tune titled “Hollywood Star.” One version was longer than the other, and the two parts appeared on opposite sides of the same disc. The lyrics of both, written and sung by Rick, detailed his ambitions more explicitly than any of his previous tunes. “Tell Momma it won’t be long,” he sang, “everybody here gonna sing my song.” He boasted, “I’m gonna be a Hollywood star, riding the hills in a long fine car.”
The record label credits the performance of the tune to “Rick James and Hot Lips,” implying that Rick had organized a new band. Semkiw says the members of Hot Lips were actually studio musicians he’d hired on a one-time basis.
Rick and Semkiw followed up “Hollywood Star” with “Sweet Surrender,” a disco-style love song, and “Changes,” a well-done love ballad that included such lines as “Meditating on the thought of you.” Rick sang the lead on “Sweet Surrender,” backed once again by studio musicians, plus Semkiw, who played guitar and bass. Rick also was lead singer on “Changes,” and backed himself on the song by playing drums, bass, and keyboards, Semkiw says. Quality Records, a Canadian company, recorded and released all the tunes in 1976, crediting Rick as the writer of all three. But although Rick was also the vocalist on every song, he was credited as the vocalist only on “Hollywood Star.”
This was apparently due to one of the self-defeating aspects of Rick’s personality rising to damage his career once again. After Quality released “Hollywood Star” (with an instrumental B side), but before it released the record with “Sweet Surrender” and “Changes” on it, Rick told Semkiw that Quality couldn’t release those two records with labels naming him as the vocalist because there was “legal action against him” in the United States. What Rick probably meant, Semkiw says, was that he was “contractually tied up” with another company. In other words, Rick probably had sold his recording of the songs and had pocketed the advance the other company had given him.
Quality “wasn’t too happy,” Semkiw says, partly because it immediately faced the task of reprinting the record labels on two records. The company tried to salvage what it could from the situation by coming up with the name Gorilla to replace Rick’s name as the vocalist on the record labels, although it was far from anyone’s ideal name for a singer of two romantic songs. The company released the records but, worried about putting its weight behind the tunes for fear of possible legal consequences, it let them die. Once again, Rick had outsmarted himself. (Rick told author David Ritz that Quality “didn’t know shit” about distribution or promotion, and that was why both songs tanked.)
From then on, Semkiw says, his relationship with Rick went downhill. “Things started to come apart because he’d been lying to me. Rick became an asshole, bugging me for money and drugs,” he says, sometimes calling at 3:00 AM. “I told him, ‘Our deal is for us to produce a record, not for me to support you.’” Rick soon stopped calling Semkiw or contacting him in any way.
Rick could have formed another band. Instead, he took it easy for a while, singing with already established local groups rather than forming one of his own. He remained an excellent musician and a great entertainer, but due to his double-dealing and his constant need for drug money, he was back where he’d been years before: riding the velvet rut in Toronto.
It was the proverbial darkness before the dawn, because Rick’s next record made him a success. This time, however, he had some highly questionable help.