Gonna find my way to Heaven ’Cause I did my time in Hell . . .
—“Before They Make Me Run,” Rolling Stones,
by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards (1978)
While hanging at the Penny Farthing, an old club in Yorkville, Rick met a white Canadian named Tony Nolasco. Rick stood out at the club because he was wearing a cowboy hat and a red bandanna. Although both men were musicians (Nolasco was a drummer and vocalist), they were at the club that night chasing women instead of performing on its stage. “He liked blondes and I liked black girls,” Nolasco says, “so we had a nice little balance there.”
He and Rick “hit it off instantly,” Nolasco says, and often cruised numerous clubs in tandem. “Rick would say, ‘Clothes get pussy,’” Nolasco remembers, “but I began to notice that he was wearing a lot of clothes that hadn’t been dry-cleaned in six months, so obviously dirty clothes got pussy too.” Beyond Rick’s success with women, Nolasco also noticed that “musicians really respected Rick’s talent.” When he walked into a room, “his presence was felt,” he says, but because of Rick’s various financial antics, “he was never really well-liked.”
According to Nolasco, Rick could and would create music with a guitar with a string missing or with a broken keyboard leaning on one side of his leg. He “was a poet with words,” Nolasco says. “He could come up with the melodies and the hooks, he had the personality, he had the mic moves down, and he knew how to dress.” At three in the morning “with a little reefer going, Rick would be recording and writing some awesome stuff. He was ready for prime time.” In fact, Rick seemed to be writing more original material than ever before. He claimed the reason was that living in Europe had given him a worldlier outlook and more exposure to different kinds of musicians.
Before meeting Rick, Nolasco had been a member of the band McKenna Mendelson Mainline, which had toured England, found success on the stage there, and recorded an album titled Stink on Liberty Records in 1969 before returning to Toronto. When the lead singer of McKenna Mendelson Mainline left the group, Rick was invited to sing on some of the band’s scheduled gigs. He “did a great, really dramatic job,” at a performance at Ottawa University that garnered the band a sixty-second ovation, Nolasco says. Soon after that, the group broke up.
Nolasco then raised money from what he said were shadowy sources “to do a major project” to make Rick a star in the United States. On this project, Nolasco would serve as Rick’s agent, manager, and fundraiser. The two men agreed, Nolasco says, that they were going to get Rick off the ground and then work on Nolasco’s career.
Nolasco recruited a friend, South African guitarist Aidan Mason, who later became the guitar player for Canadian superstar Anne Murray, to work with them. Rick and Mason wrote a tune that sounded commercially viable, and Rick put words to it and sang lead. Mason played the guitar, Peter Cardinali played bass, Ed Roth played the keyboard, and Nolasco did the drumming. The song was called “Get Up and Dance.”
This bouncy, minor-key song sounds much more like the Rick who became legendary than any of his previous songs, with hints of his soon-to-be-famous sarcastic whine and lines that in those days probably shocked a few listeners, such as “Feel like gettin’ your rocks off?” and “Is the music got your body wet?” Late in the song he sings, “I feel like doin’ it to you.”
Although Rick told the Toronto Globe and Mail in 1982 that the profits from “Get Up and Dance” enabled him to record the first version of his first album, Come Get It!, Nolasco says he and Rick had begun receiving money from what Nolasco calls “the dark side.” (In 2004 Vibe magazine referred to the Come Get It! album as “independently financed.”)
Nolasco started a label called Mood Records to press 45s of “Get Up and Dance,” the company’s first and last product. After Mood had made about ten thousand copies of the record, Nolasco says, he loaded the trunk of his black Cadillac Eldorado with about two thousand of the records packed tightly into cartons and headed for the US border. A US customs officer told Nolasco he couldn’t bring the records across the border because they didn’t say MADE IN CANADA on them. So Nolasco turned around and drove back to Toronto, stuck on new labels, and took the records across the border to Buffalo in 1978.
Nolasco then opened a Mood Records office in Buffalo to promote their product. He also rented apartments there for Rick and himself. Nolasco created a logo and printed posters, and soon the record was playing on WBLK, Buffalo’s hot soul station. Disc jockeys in the nearby cities of Syracuse and Rochester began playing it as well. “Get Up and Dance” became a top 10 song in western New York State. Pretty soon, Nolasco says, “Rick was hearing himself on the radio. He was really buzzed. ‘I’m on the radio!’ he kept saying.”
Nolasco says he had a great time “because I’m in the element of black music,” which is something he was raised with. “Rick was prancing around the clubs . . . he’s got a song on the radio.” Nolasco himself was “getting sick [with happiness] because I’m hearing a lot of bands that I love.” Among these bands was Sabata, a local band, and the Cause, a Buffalo band featuring Rick’s friend Levi Ruffin. Soon there was an interview in the Buffalo News about how hometown boy Rick was doing real well, illustrated with a photo of Rick, his high school buddy Luther Rutledge, and a young woman running down the street.
But Rick reverted to form by trying to sabotage the entire effort for his own immediate benefit. Without notifying anyone, he flew to Montreal with the demo recording of “Get Up and Dance” and signed a record deal with Polydor Records for an extended-play 12-inch version of the song. As part of the deal, Polydor gave Rick a $5,000 advance. This was, of course, the same trick Rick had played previously on other groups and companies numerous times.
When Nolasco found out, he was mortified. “I wanted to punch his lights out,” he says. When he confronted Rick, Rick said, “Well, man, I was gonna tell you . . .”
“We could have just canned the whole thing right then and there, but we didn’t,” Nolasco says. Instead, he contacted attorney Stanley Weisman in Toronto and asked him to speak to Polydor. When Weisman pointed out to Polydor that Rick already had a contract with Mood Records, Polydor agreed to drop the whole matter and write off their $5,000 as a loss, since Rick had already spent it.
Having sidestepped a major hassle, Nolasco decided to move ahead with Rick on their next step: making an album. Nolasco had noticed the talented musicians playing their hearts out in Buffalo nightclubs and hired saxophonist Jay Beckenstein, one of the founders of the group Spyro Gyra, which was beginning to get exposure on WBLK at the same time as Rick’s tune. Nolasco also flew the renowned session musicians the Brecker brothers—saxophonist Michael and trumpeter Randy—in from New York City. The group started cutting tracks at Cross-Eyed Bear Studios in Clarence, New York, near Buffalo, where Spyro Gyra also recorded its tunes. “It sounded really good,” Nolasco says. “Not because I was involved but because I thought it was the best Rick had sounded to date.” Among the songs they cut was “You and I.” The album they made became Come Get It!
They decided to take their act to Los Angeles with the hope of signing a record contract there. Before they flew to L.A., however, Rick took two other out-of-town trips, both grudgingly authorized by Nolasco. First Rick went to New York City because in order to make a smash in L.A., he said, he needed a new wardrobe. “He blew a few Gs, and I was aware of it and I let him do it,” Nolasco says. “Then, because he needed to clear his head because he was under a lot of pressure, he wanted to go to Bogota. . . . So he went to South America and partied it up and snuck back an ounce of coke in a hairbrush.” Nolasco was again mortified.
On their subsequent flight to L.A., where they planned to spend only one week, Rick kept pledging his fealty to Nolasco. “‘You’re my man,’ he kept saying. ‘You decide now. I don’t do that shit’ [make management decisions].” Rick had told Nolasco that he had a couple L.A. contacts: Ralph Seltzer, a former Motown staff attorney, and Lanny Sher, a public relations man with record industry connections.
Seltzer listened to the whole album twice, loved it, and told Rick and Nolasco he’d shop it around town if they wanted. “We figured this is great,” Nolasco says. “This guy’s connected [with the record industry], he’s bona fide, he’s the real deal, we’ve got a record that we think sounds great, we have the charts, we’ve made a little bit of noise in a secondary market, it’s all good.”
They saw Lanny Sher a day or two later. “He listens to the album and he’s all excited,” Nolasco says. “‘I know somebody at Fantasy, I know somebody at Warner’s, geez, I’d love to shop it,’” he says.
“I pull Rick aside and say, ‘We can’t have both these guys [Seltzer and Sher] walking into the same offices.’ Rick says, ‘Naaaaaa, just let ’em go.’ I said, ‘Rick, that’s not the way you do stuff,’ but we didn’t have a tiff over it. I thought, ‘We’ll just sleep on it and maybe we can revisit it.’” By now Nolasco had spent a rather large amount of shady money.
When their week in Los Angeles was up, he and Rick were driving to the airport when Rick said he wanted to stop in at Motown. (Motown had moved its headquarters from Detroit to Los Angeles in 1972.) “I said, ‘Why didn’t we do that before? We’ve gotta go. We’re gonna miss the flight,’” Nolasco says. But they stopped at Motown and went in, and “as fate would have it, the elevator door opens and there’s [Motown producer] Jeffrey Bowen” and his then-wife, Bonnie Pointer of the Pointer Sisters. Rick and Bowen recognized each other from Detroit days.
Rick jumped into Bowen’s Rolls-Royce with him and Pointer, Nolasco stayed in the rented car behind them, and they all drove to Bowen’s house, with Rick playing the album in the car for his companions. By the time they all got to Bowen’s, Bowen was really excited and wanted to play the album for Berry Gordy. “I’m thinking, ‘This good trip just got better; we shouldn’t be worried about making the flight,’” Nolasco says.
Rick, Nolasco, and Bowen made an appointment to see Gordy the next day. A Motown representative met them back at the hotel and told the hotel, according to Nolasco, “Everything’s on Motown. Give them whatever they want.’ Rick and I look at each other sitting on the two double beds and say, ‘Let’s order some alcohol and some lobster.’”
Nolasco continues, “[I said,] ‘We gotta shop every label in town.’ But Rick said, ‘I don’t want to shop anything now.’ This was the first indicator of noncooperation [from Rick], but I didn’t think anything of it. . . . It was a typical Rick response.” Nolasco told Rick now was the time to create a bidding war. “Unique artists come along every once in a while and that’s when they’re willing to open the vault,” he says he told Rick.
When the two men went to Motown on Monday to negotiate, however, “there was nothing to negotiate,” Nolasco says. Nolasco feared that Rick would accept less money from Motown than Nolasco and his backer wanted because Rick wanted to be a Motown artist and Motown’s negotiators knew it. Bowen and Motown executive Lee Young Jr. jumped on Nolasco “like wolves on the jugular vein,” Nolasco says.
One of Nolasco’s financial backers flew down, and he and Nolasco visited a high-end music-industry attorney in Beverly Hills, who told them, “If you don’t sign a deal with Motown and get some money, you’re getting no money. Get what you can and get out . . . or they’ll drag you through court for years.”
Back at the negotiating table, Nolasco says, Motown offered him $30,000 and promised him that if the record went gold—that is, if it sold five hundred thousand copies—they would pay him and his backer another $20,000.
The record did go gold, and Motown ended up paying the extra $20,000. “The problem was $50,000 didn’t come even close” to covering Nolasco’s debt to his backer, he says. In Nolasco’s words, “That was lunch money.”
He noted that Motown paid an especially low price, considering they were handed a complete, ready-to-play album. And as Nolasco predicted, “You and I” became a hit, and the album Come Get It! would go on to become the second-biggest-selling album in Rick’s career. “Common sense in business would have told you to shop around,” Nolasco says.
Aside from what Motown paid Nolasco, the company paid Rick $250,000, Rick claimed in The Confessions of Rick James. And as the sales of his later records and his wealth indicate, Motown was good to Rick.
Years later, Rick told a radically different version of these events to Oui magazine. When he and Nolasco took their sales trip to L.A., Rick said, “Motown was my last choice of label for the Come Get It! album because I knew they wouldn’t like it.” However, he said, he ran into an old friend there, who telephoned Motown executive Suzanne de Passe, and “they signed me.” Nolasco says this version of events is totally untrue. De Passe herself told VH1’s Behind the Music that her reaction when she heard Rick’s Come Get It! album was that “we’ve got to meet him and we’ve got to sign him.” She called his music “very infectious” and “very hot.”
When Rick called Levi Ruffin and told him he would sign with Motown, Ruffin remembers saying, “Damn it, Rick, why? What about Warner Brothers?” and Rick saying, “Motown gave us a good deal.” But, Ruffin adds, Motown “was the greatest black record company in the history of mankind, and most of my heroes were with Motown: the Tempts, Stevie, all those. So I said, ‘Damn, this should be fun.’”
Rick went on to music biz glory, leaving Nolasco behind and in deep financial trouble from which it took him years to recover. Nolasco had succeeded, however, where Rick and others had failed: in placing Rick in the position to become the superstar he then became.