Mr. James was an explosion of decadent excess.
—Washington Post, August 7, 2004
In March 1979 Rick and his now-thirteen-member Stone City Band embarked on their first Motown odyssey, the Rick James Stone City Band Magical Funk Tour. This forty-city trip, his first as a Motown artist, was the beginning of the series of tours that would make his reputation as an unforgettable stage performer. Rick’s recently acquired manager, Shep Gordon, had booked him for the four-month coast-to-coast excursion.
The group, described by the Cleveland Plain Dealer as “outstanding, peerless, first-rate instrumentalists,” comprised the same musicians who had recorded Rick’s songs with him in the studio. Back then, in an industry in which the studio band was not necessarily the touring band, this gave the group what another Stone City Band member, Daniel LeMelle, calls a “home-grown sound” that appealed greatly to concert audiences.
After Bustin’ Out of L Seven was released, Rick had decided to add a horn section to the band. LeMelle, who honchoed a horn section, remembers that in 1979 Norman Whitfield, a Motown producer, put Rick in contact with him. When Rick and LeMelle and their groups first met, Rick pointed out that he and his associates all dressed like rock stars, while LeMelle and his group, which included LaMorris Payne and brothers Cliff and John Ervin, “were all Joe College.” Nevertheless, he invited them over to his house, telling them he wanted to “see what you West Coast boys can play.”
Stung by Rick’s sneering attitude, LeMelle decided to play a trick on him. As he recalls, “I went to the record store, bought Come Get It!, and we learned every part on every song.” LeMelle says once they were at Rick’s house, when Rick asked them to play something, “We started making noise, honking, and playing stupid stuff. They were looking at us like ‘What the fuck?’” But when Rick then asked them to play the first song from Come Get It!, “We did beyond well. We played it like we had recorded it.” They were hired instantly and dubbed the Punk Funk Horns, with LeMelle as their leader.
When hired, they joined a band whose members all imitated Rick’s general style of dress. Every male onstage usually wore glitter-spattered braids and shirts unbuttoned to the waist, silvery thigh-high boots, skin-tight lamé bodysuits, leather pants, rhinestone belts, and silk shirts on occasion.
The band’s costumes, along with the falsetto voice Rick often used and the somewhat feminine look of his hands-on-hips stance, played into the gender-bending androgyny that was popular among bands of that era. As Eddie Murphy’s brother Charlie Murphy remarked on Chappelle’s Show years later, with only some exaggeration, “The most feminine guys in those days got all the girls!”
Guitarist Tom McDermott appeared to be pushing androgyny to its outer limits. With his clear-white hairless skin, much of it on display, his long blond hair, and his sometimes feminine gestures and expressions, he often seemed ready to jump the gender barrier at the earliest possible opportunity. When Rick and the band performed Rick’s song “Love Gun” on Soul Train, for instance, McDermott wore a tight, figure-hugging top that bared one underarm and exposed his other shoulder completely. His explicitly bulging crotch, while alluding to the title of the song being performed, may have suggested to some that this was a performance for gay men. Except for the female backup singers, who wore dresses, the other band members were similarly attired. At least one apparently gay male couple danced enthusiastically in the audience.
All this fit into an ongoing transition in R&B from musicians like James Brown, Wilson Pickett, and Otis Redding to singers like Rick, Prince, and Michael Jackson. As writer Nelson George has pointed out, while Brown, Pickett, and Redding were tough-looking macho men, these newer vocalists were softer guys with long hair, baby faces, and glittery costumes.
Onstage, Rick unmistakably and frequently indicated his enjoyment of performing oral sex on women by holding his fingers in a V in front of his mouth and thrusting his tongue back and forth through them, a gesture his macho predecessors would never have considered. His stage costumes combining the 1960s hippie look with ’70s disco wear provoked comparisons to P-Funk and Sly Stone. Rick was cunningly using his considerable onstage charisma and his exuberant style to make up for his less-than-stellar voice.
He conducted chants, told stories, and developed himself as a flamboyant onstage character. He also concentrated on the concerts themselves, which soon became outrageous extravaganzas that included fireworks, lasers, flashing lights, colored smoke, confetti bombs, phosphorescent costumes, spark-spraying rockets, and scantily clad women dancing and rolling around onstage in front of twenty-foot-high papier-mâché joints that belched smoke. A mist created by dry ice floated overhead.
Ruffin said he invited his father to one of these concerts and remembered that the older man’s reaction was total amazement at all the activity onstage. “He had thought it would be just like a giant jazz combo sitting there grooving,” Ruffin said, “but we were flying all over the stage. There were explosions. I’d jump on a trampoline, and pretend I was flying an airplane. . . . My father didn’t understand how we could work that hard for an hour and a half.” Ruffin would lose so much weight while touring, he said, that when the tour was over people would look at him and say, “Where’s your ass?”
The giant joints, plus real drug use onstage and by audience members, only added to a perception that Rick and his audience were in a gigantic bong. At almost every concert, Rick lit up a joint onstage. He’d also kneel and accept joints from fans, especially while or after performing “Mary Jane.”
At one concert, one of Rick’s warm-up groups, Cameo, told audience members to “light a match, a lighter, your fingers, or a joint” and let those lights shine while they danced. According to a Greensboro (NC) Daily News review of one of the performances, the arena was “aglow with jiggling and bouncing lights as marijuana smoke filled the air.”
All that pot smoking would have mellowed out most people, but not Rick. Another concert review said that despite his drug use, Rick “had enough ribald humor and fierce energy to maintain a first-rate performance,” and the review praised his “knockdown stunts with the microphone” à la James Brown.
Rick’s hair was also an onstage attraction. Offstage he often wore a Jheri curl, a permed hairstyle that gave him a loosely curled look. Onstage, however, he often wore a beaded cornrow hairstyle with Cleopatra-type braids, saying it was inspired by the African warriors of the Maasai tribe—and the rock band KISS. Later he traded in the braids for a full shoulder-length Louis XIV–type hairstyle.
Rick’s hair had to compete for attention with his clothes. One outfit, which a critic for the Rockford (IL) Register Star said made the singer look like a “flamboyant Viking,” combined a black-and-white shimmering hooded cape, a red-and-silver sequined jumpsuit, and knee-high platform boots, all decorated with flying hearts and lightning bolts. He often changed up his look by appearing in tight Spandex or leather pants for one song, then wearing sandals, jeans, and turquoise jewelry and looking very much like a 1960s hippie for the next. On some occasions, as the theme from Superman echoed through the hall, Rick played the part of the inner-city superhero, wearing a blue suit with red hearts as he strutted and dived across the stage. He made at least three costume changes during an average performance, with his stage wear depending on the song he was performing and the album he was promoting. When singing his later song “Big Time,” for instance, he wore a top hat as a prop.
Performances also included skits based on Rick’s most recent hits, some so elaborate that they relegated much of the music to the background. In one skit, for instance, Rick and company employed a lamppost, a fire hydrant, a mural, and a complete cardboard automobile to simulate a street scene while he sang his song “Mr. Policeman.”
Rick’s concerts were sexual as well as pyrotechnic extravaganzas. He often used his microphone as a phallic symbol, boasted about his sexual triumphs, strutted arrogantly, and swung his hips. He hoisted female fans onto the stage, climbed on top of them, and pretended to have sex with them. Meanwhile, as the Miami Herald pointed out, “male and female silhouettes would writhe behind triangular screens in mock lovemaking.” Rick told one crowd that his biggest thrill in life was “to hear a woman scream in ecstasy,” and spent a lot of time onstage either preening or stroking a female singer while the two sang a particularly suggestive duet.
Often Rick would appear before audiences displaying his tongue in the manner of Gene Simmons of KISS, whose signature move in concerts was to waggle his tongue wildly at the audience. Rick’s tongue movements, along with the lyrics of some of his songs, recalled oral sex more vividly than Simmons’s, however, especially when Rick flashed his tongue in and out of his mouth like a lizard and thrust his pelvis back and forth. Don Waller of the Los Angeles Times called Rick “a marvelously greasy vocalist and a frank performer whose bumps ’n’ grinds, not to mention his gladiator smirk, would have brought out the town marshal in years past.” Author Gerri Hirshey noted that Rick’s “X-rated lyrics would have caused ’60s young America to swallow its retainer plate.”
The Philadelphia Inquirer decided it was Rick’s “considerable achievement to have made sleaziness into an alluring stage persona” and complimented him on his ribald humor. Rick, onstage, made sex seem less serious and more like fun.
As another reviewer put it, in Rick’s lyrics, women were sex toys—the younger the better—drugs were fun, and life was one long, overnight party. The New York Times, however, described Rick’s embodiment of himself onstage as “a leering stage persona” unrivaled even in the age of Prince and George Clinton. It called his voice on some of his records a “salacious whine” and said his hits were “paeans to debauchery and the women who made it possible.”
Asked years later about his onstage sex antics, Rick told one interviewer that “Things were simpler. . . . We didn’t have to worry about too much sex because there was no HIV. We didn’t have to worry about anything other than getting into discos and dancing and having fun and whose body we were going to jump on that night.”
Rick loved performing. “I get higher than I ever got on any drug when I’m onstage,” he said. When asked about his performing preferences, Rick replied, in a profound understatement, “I’m very energetic. I’m not your organic, laid-back tree.” As he said near the end of his life, “I tried to make the audience forget all their problems.” He said he wanted his performances to free his audiences “from themselves, and from space and time and consciousness.”
Rick may have been more successful at doing this than he thought. In 1982 a Boston city official, Richard Sinnott, who was in charge of granting entertainment licenses, said that after attending rock concerts by Rick and the Who, he “was reduced to a shell of myself, barely able to function.” Sinnott did not mean this as a compliment.
Most audience members reacted to the concerts even more strongly than Sinnott did. Many got up to dance, and many security guards tried to prevent them from doing so, causing a reviewer for the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate to write that “to require an audience to sit passively in its cramped seats while the star on stage is trying to incite a marijuana-soaked dance orgy seems ridiculous.” Sometimes the guards didn’t bother to try.
One of Rick’s concerts was enlivened not by his onstage behavior but by a commercial dispute. As a result of a charge that Rick allegedly owed $250,000 to a concert-related business, ten police officers were sent to serve a summons to him at a concert in Dallas. While they were there, the police threatened to arrest him if he did what he usually did onstage: smoke a real joint. When Rick told the audience about the threat, they screamed out that they’d riot if the cops carried out the threat, and the officers decided to wait until the concert was over to confront him. Informed of their plans, Rick changed clothes during a break in the show, put his braids under a Rasta hat, and walked out of the arena unrecognized and unserved.
Meanwhile, Rick’s crew put one of Rick’s aides in a hooded costume and sent him out onstage at the end of the show. The police went to arrest the aide but drew back when they noticed that unlike his boss, the aide was bald. Rick completed his escape, but the incident led to several printed rumors that Rick—who prided himself on his real, long, and frequently braided hair—was bald. Fifty thousand dollars worth of equipment was seized, the next night’s concert had to be canceled, and equipment had to be borrowed for the night after that—but what most annoyed Rick were the erroneous reports that he was bald.
His opponents in the dispute had “defamated [sic] my character and professionalism, saying I had a bald head,” Rick told the Washington Post. Rick spat out the words “bald head” while tugging at his braids to show they were real. His enemies, he said, “were wrong, and they’re going to suffer for it. That tears down my character, anybody says I got a bald head.” The monetary dispute was eventually resolved.
On this tour, Rick was finally able to accomplish what he had been trying to do on his tour with B. B. King: get the audience to participate by clapping their hands. He did this by encouraging the crowd to slam their right hands on their left hands while imagining that their left hands were either the Ku Klux Klan or Ronald Reagan.
Some of Rick’s onstage effects were a little too over-the-top, however. He created a lot of his pyrotechnics with “flash pots,” powder-filled containers that were lit up to create a big flash, smoke, or sparks. According to Rick Abel, Rick’s road manager on several tours, Rick “wanted this stuff going off all the time. Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!” Abel hired his best friend, a Vietnam vet named Paul who loved explosions, to handle this part of the production. The problem was that Paul would overdo it by putting too much powder in each pot. This was dangerous, Abel says, “because if you put powder in them after they’ve just been ignited, they’d go off on you.” But according to Abel, “Rick kept saying ‘Do it again! ‘Do it again!’ ‘Do it again!’”
Rick and Paul would get carried away, and several times during the course of a tour the pots would ignite while Paul’s hands were still in them. The burning phosphorous would get under Paul’s skin and, Abel says, “He’d be screaming. It was insane. I’d have to take him to the hospital.”
Rick described his own concerts as “like going to a concert on the Fourth of July.” He noted that while rock groups like KISS had brought their pyrotechnic performing style to white kids, most black kids hadn’t been exposed to such extravaganzas until he brought it to them. Although the audiences at Rick’s concerts were somewhat mixed, his big stage productions were aimed particularly at black people. He believed that because most black musicians at the time favored conventional attire and relatively conventional onstage performances, their mostly black audiences never got to see the type of go-for-broke spectacle that white audiences saw.
Fans lined up for hours to gain entry to Rick’s performances. In April 1979 several hundred people who had been unable to squeeze into his show when it played Boston’s Orpheum Theatre allegedly broke store windows and assaulted Boston police officers in frustration. The problem was that the only way to enter the theater was through a small entrance at the end of a narrow alley. Rick wrote in The Confessions of Rick James that he watched mounted police officers “beating on Black sisters and brothers from their horses and just cried. I felt responsible and promised myself from then on I would only play places that could hold the kind of crowds we were getting.” The Boston Globe called the incident a “wild melee.” Rick didn’t return to Boston until 1988, when he performed at that city’s Channel nightclub without incident.
This police clash with Rick’s fans, who were mostly black at the time, undoubtedly scared off some white attendees, but Rick wanted white fans as well as black ones and tried to attract them. One white reviewer, calling the onstage Rick “pure kitsch” and “a cartoon,” wrote the persona Rick presented was that of “a lovable goon who poses a minimal threat to Caucasian life.” All Rick seemed to want to do, this reviewer wrote, was “take his freaky chick to Hollywood and smoke a couple of tons of reefer.”
All this was a big change for Motown. Referring to most of Motown’s previous hit-making groups, Rick said, “Black musicians no longer have to put on suits and sing doo-wop, with all of them doing the same choreography and same robotic moves.” Putting on his new choreography required a lot of energy, however. According to LeRoi Johnson, Rick would work out for months before leaving on tour, stretching, playing basketball, and jogging up and down hills. This preparation was definitely necessary.
Occasionally, like all creative efforts, Rick’s shows failed. The San Diego Union called Rick’s 1983 performance in that city “unimaginative” and said it was the sort of concert that “doesn’t engage the crowd so much as divert it.” According to the paper, too many of Rick’s songs “seemed to peter out or segue into other tunes before they could generate more than a perfunctory impact.” The paper also noted that Rick seemed to be sharing the stage “with a harried stagehand” who kept running out to adjust mic cords and stands. The Union ended this condemnation by noting that the only showstopping moment belonged to one of Rick’s male backup singers, “whose extraordinary falsetto packed into a few bars all the piercing, crowd rousing emotionalism Rick himself couldn’t generate all night.”
And Rick Abel insists that Rick “didn’t know how to leave people wanting more.” Near, at, and beyond the scheduled end-of-concert time, Abel says, he’d be flashing Rick the “five minutes left” sign again and again, and Rick would ignore him and try to get the audience to sing along. “He’d keep doing it and doing it,” Abel says, “but of course you could never critique the show because it was his invention. I’d say, ‘Rick, maybe only do that once or twice?’ and he’d say, ‘What the fuck do you know?’ He couldn’t look at it from a perspective of building up slowly to a peak, then maybe bringing it back down for a short period of time, then kicking it back up for the final installment.”
When everyone was working together, however, Rick’s concerts were gigantic crowd-pleasers that made lots of money, with the max as high as $250,000 per event. This was an “unheard-of” total during the 1980s, according to Rick’s accountant, Dick Romer. He says expenses for a $250,000 concert were about $100,000, leaving Rick’s earnings for the evening at $150,000 before taxes.
That trend continued for Rick, and in 1985 Motown announced that his recent concert tours had grossed more than $50 million.