I’m in love with Mary Jane. She’s my main thing. She makes me feel all right. She makes my heart sing.
—“Mary Jane,” by Rick James (1978)
The Los Angeles Times panned the Come Get It! album, calling it “massively flawed” because it consisted of “a great disco song, ‘You and I,’ flanked by numerous mediocre tracks.” As it turned out, however, another tune on the album, “Mary Jane,” became one of Rick’s most famous songs, and remains today the second-most-popular tune he ever recorded.
Everyone assumed that the tune was about pot, and they were right. Rick, saying he was “not afraid to admit it,” proclaimed marijuana “the greatest thing since ice cream” in several interviews. He also said the reason he sounded like he was singing about a girl when he was singing about marijuana was that he wanted to treat the drug “like it was a girl, because I look at it like it’s a girl.”
The subject of the song reminded many of “Cocaine,” written and recorded by J. J. Cale in 1976 but made famous in 1977 by Eric Clapton, who covered it for his album Slowhand. Cale’s tune was a love song to that drug, which he dubbed a female, and included such lines as “If you want to hang out, you’ve gotta take her out / cocaine” and “She don’t lie, she don’t lie, she don’t lie / cocaine.”
Rick told one interviewer, “Marijuana hasn’t made me crazy, it hasn’t lowered my IQ, nor has it been detrimental in any way, shape or form.” Rick also claimed that taking drugs could lead to a greater appreciation of music. When people protested that his audience for the song included children, Rick responded that “kids are no longer kids. They are able to decipher and decide what they want. You can’t sit down and tell a thirteen-year-old anything about anything because they pretty well know what’s going on. Their brothers and sisters were junkies and/or prostitutes, they’ve been through the marijuana trip, and they may even smoke it.”
To those who complained that smoking marijuana was illegal and sometimes harmful, Rick argued, “I don’t propagate anything. I don’t say, ‘Everyone smoke grass.’ I say, ‘I love Mary Jane.’
“Mary Jane” climbed to number 3 on the Billboard R&B chart and stayed on the chart for seventeen weeks. On the pop chart, it rose to number 41, just short of the Top 40.
“Dream Maker,” another notable tune on Come Get It!, begins with a spoken-word poem and becomes a sensitive, self-abnegating love song from a man to a woman that starts softly, reaches an energetic peak, and then trails off slowly, ending with the sound of a woman’s orgasmic moaning. One reviewer who may not have listened to the entire song hailed “Dream Maker” for its “ethereal sensitivity.”
In the song “Hollywood,” a mournful, seven-minute-and-twenty-seven-second ballad, Rick sadly tells his parents that he’s leaving the ghetto to “do good in Hollywood.” The song includes repeated unconvincing assertions that he “won’t be lonely, won’t be lonely, won’t be lonely.” It’s the polar opposite of “Hollywood Star,” Rick’s previous song about the neighborhood, which Quality Records released in 1976. That song was a happy, bouncy tune in which the singer is standing at the corner of Hollywood and Vine in the bright sunshine and exulting in what he’s sure will be his future fame and fortune.
With “You and I” and Come Get It!, Rick finally achieved the fame and fortune for which he had hungered for years. His first royalty check from Motown was for $1.8 million. Unfortunately, as Rick later told California court-appointed psychologists, he used that check to buy “all the drugs [he] could afford.”