Yeah, we’re goin’ to Surf City, ’cause it’s two to one You know we're goin' to Surf City, gonna have some fun, now Two girls for every boy.
—“Surf City,” sung by Jan and Dean, written by Brian Wilson and Jan Berry (1963)
From his earliest days in the music business, Rick had always worked at attracting as many women as possible. In Toronto, Stan Weisman says, he and Rick would walk down Yonge Street, where there were all kinds of interesting stores, including leather and clothing shops. Along the way, Rick would “walk into every door and talk to the sales lady, and chat them up all the way down the line, getting their phone numbers.”
As Rick’s star rose, attracting women became progressively easier. When Weisman was visiting Rick at Motown headquarters on one occasion, he says, a Motown mail clerk hauled out two huge canvas bags of mail for the singer. Rick invited him to open some of the envelopes at random. “I pulled out a couple of letters, and it’s all from women enclosing nude photos of themselves and their home phone numbers.” The nude pictures Weisman saw were mild demonstrations of affection compared to the female frenzy on view at Rick’s concerts. Hundreds of women would throw crotchless panties onstage or otherwise indicate they wanted to have sex with the singer. The problem for Rick became how to select the best-looking women from this mob for his own enjoyment.
Sometimes his trysts with willing women were handled discreetly. As Rick’s accountant, Dick Romer, describes it, the procedure for hooking him up was for some security people to “go out and give some of the better-looking women backstage passes. The best of them got the opportunity to meet Rick.” After the weekend, these women would “get a plane ticket back or clothing or whatever. Rick was always very generous with the women who hooked up with him.”
Outside of a very small handful of serious relationships, “Rick had a bimbo of the week,” says screenwriter Richard Wesley, who worked on a film project with Rick. “He never allowed the same woman into his hotel room twice. His attitude was ‘I’m in town to do a concert for three days, and for those three days it’s me and you. But next time I come back, I don’t know you.’ It was one trip and you’re done.”
Rick loved getting high and having group sex with two or three women at a time. This was not exactly unusual among rock musicians—or anyone else who could manage it—during this era. As Peter McGraw, one of Rick’s fellow Toronto musicians, remarks, “Every musician had experiences with two or three partners. . . . It’s rock ’n’ roll.” Somewhat more unusual was Rick’s enjoyment of cunnilingus, especially when he could inspire a woman to produce so much fluid in response that she would squirt it out. He also enjoyed ordering an excited woman to insert her hand in her own wet vagina and then insert that soaking hand in her own mouth.
Rick was so voracious that the problem for the members of his entourage became how to keep some of the best-looking women for themselves. Just as interested in sex as Rick, the members of his entourage engaged in what LeRoi Johnson calls “a two-minute rap” contest. You had to be able to get a girl as fast as you could snap your fingers. He says, “I would see a girl I wanted and I would send somebody with the key to my room, and I’d say, ‘Take this key to her and I don’t care what you say, she had better be there.’”
Even if the gambit succeeded, however, Rick often “would send his security people to take the women for himself, because Rick felt that everything belonged to him,” Johnson says. On one tour, Johnson remembers, he and two other members of Rick’s entourage were in a hotel room with three girls. One man was in the bathroom with one girl and Johnson and the other man were in the bedroom with two other girls. Rick’s valet, nicknamed California, came around, and a few minutes later “Rick’s security people kicked the door in and took the two girls and left,” Johnson says. “We said, ‘Fine, we’ve still got this one who’s in the bathroom’ with guy number one. Ten minutes later, however, the security people came back, announced that ‘California said you had three girls,’ and took the other girl.”
Another contest over a woman occurred on tour in the 1980s, at Leviticus, a club in Manhattan. A fellow staffer pointed out a woman who “looked like an angel,” Johnson says. “She was absolutely drop-dead gorgeous. She was with a guy about six foot five.” Johnson walked up to the woman, told her he had to talk with her, separated her hand from her companion’s, and took her aside.
“One of the security guys saw me, and went back to Rick and said, ‘Roi’s got this gorgeous girl,’” Johnson says. Rick ordered security to drag Johnson out of the club and take the girl. “The next time I saw her we were on the bus, on the road,” Johnson says. “Rick had had her in the back, and she came out in a negligee—a negligee! I wanted to kill Rick. This girl was a once-in-a-lifetime beauty, but once any girl went with Rick, she was finished for me.”
Rick didn’t restrict himself to the girlfriends or sex partners of his entourage. As Rick’s friend Peter Kelly says, “Rick took everybody’s girl.”
Rick restrained himself in some situations, however. He once met a girl at a farm owned by one of his former band members, Stan Endersby. Shortly thereafter, the fifteen-year-old began flirting with Rick at a bar. Rick immediately shooed the girl away, then phoned Endersby and asked him to drive over and pick her up. He also wrote in The Confessions of Rick James that he “stayed away from married chicks. I practiced that art with a lot of fortitude, maybe because of my Catholic upbringing, maybe because my Dad cheated on my mom.” He violated even this rule on occasion, however.
Even years later, when Rick was out of shape, no longer making hit records, and rarely touring, women would still migrate to his house wherever he was living and join the large party that was always going on (likely partly a result of the masses of cocaine Rick kept on hand). When Rick wanted one of the women, he would just step out of his bedroom and point at her. After he’d finished with her, he’d point at the next woman he desired.