I have a different mentality when it comes to catering to a man. I just won’t allow it. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll do for you but I’m not taking care of no man and catering to him for life; he better be bringing something to the table.
—Teena Marie
Several songs on the Street Songs album besides “Super Freak” became major hits as well as subjects of widespread controversy. Among them was the ballad that Rick and his protégée Teena Marie performed on the album, “Fire and Desire,” which one reviewer called “stunning” and “first rate” and Connie Johnson of the Los Angeles Times called the best tune on the album.
Vibe magazine rated the song number four among the 50 Greatest Duets of All Time. After hearing Rick and Teena perform the scorching ballad, the New York Times said the couple had “sustained a level of erotic intensity seldom seen in a large arena.” Slate magazine, referring in part to “Fire and Desire,” complimented Rick on his ability to craft the kind of “slow-grind ballads that cause birthrate spikes.”
In the song, Rick and Teena impersonate a former couple meeting by chance. Rick tells Teena he has a new girlfriend, that he regrets the way he behaved with Teena, and that she changed him by showing him so much “love and sensitivity.”
Irony, plus a dramatic incident, underlies the great success of this song. Many reviewers had criticized Rick for hitting the peak too early on the ballads he himself sang. Apparently unable to apply this criticism to himself, he passed it on to Teena Marie, telling interviewer Brian Chin that his new protégée made her songs peak too soon. “I wanted to teach her to tell the story. First let people hear the story of what you’re trying to sing . . . then you can give them your stuff. It was very hard for her to get that, but she did.” As Teena put it, “He taught me how not to give everything to everyone right away, how to build up to a climax.”
Considering the success of “Fire and Desire” as Rick and Teena sang it, it’s surprising in retrospect that Rick hadn’t intended to record it with her. “I didn’t ask Teena to sing on it,” he wrote in The Confessions of Rick James. “In fact, I had found a local girl with an amazing voice who was going to record the female vocals. Teena was . . . sick with a fever of 108 degrees, but when she heard I was going to use somebody else she immediately got out of her sick bed to sing on the track.”
Rick said he was grateful to Teena for performing on “Fire and Desire” and for helping to make the song a hit. Nevertheless, Teena’s excellence on the track backfired on him. USA Today said her “soulful bellows outshine Rick’s” on the tune.
Teena, doe-eyed, five feet tall, and somewhat chunky, was a dazzling onstage performer. She ended many concerts Rick headlined by performing her songs “I’m a Sucker for Your Love” and “Square Biz,” as well as singing backup on many of Rick’s songs and performing with him on “Fire and Desire.” Reviewing one of her 1981 appearances, the Los Angeles Times noted that “her fervent, frenzied performance sent the crowd into ecstasy.” The paper noted that while it was rare to see a young black audience “treat a white performer with such reverence, it was certainly deserved. A tiny young woman with a powerful voice, Marie is a terrific singer and, quite frankly, better than nearly all her black competitors.” Rick seemed to agree: “White people should be real proud of her,” he said.
The New York Times reviewer seemed determined to go the Los Angeles Times one better in his praise of Teena, calling her “the most powerful white female soul singer that this observer has ever seen” and saying she was “capable of executing great whooping melismas in perfect pitch.” The paper said “this tiny redheaded woman passed one of the ultimate tests for a pop singer in being able to deliver a ballad in a large arena and keep the audience riveted.” With her strong voice and unabashed sensuality, Teena anticipated Madonna.
Although Rick hadn’t written “Fire and Desire” about Teena, but rather about an Ethiopian woman he’d had an affair with on a visit to Paris, rumors of a Rick-Teena romance started immediately after they began singing the song together. Rick didn’t seem enthusiastic about the idea. “T and I are like brother and sister,” he told Jet magazine. “I do love her and she loves me but it’s a musical love; we don’t have a hot and heavy romance.” From a male point of view, this was understandable. Rick’s preference in women ran to lanky supermodels with nuclear-grade looks; Teena, although a great and determined artist, didn’t make that bar. Rick wasn’t above adding to the speculation, however. He told one interviewer, “If there was a woman I would choose to be my wife, one of the first ones on the top of my list would be Teena Marie. She’s a lovely lady.” He also called Teena the one woman who could quite easily slip into his “space of craziness” and understand him.
So it was to the surprise of absolutely no one that the two hot-and-heavy vocalists did yield to love and lust shortly after “Fire and Desire” became a hit. Ebony magazine wrote that Teena dated Rick for a year around this time and was engaged to him for two weeks. Interviewed in Las Vegas in 2013, Levi Ruffin said Teena lived at Rick’s house in Orchard Park “for a couple of months.” He said he and the other band members rehearsed at the house for months, and that his wife and daughter socialized with Teena.
One day, Ruffin found out that Teena “was talking to my daughter and wife about what kind of bridal shit she was going to wear,” he said. “She just knew she and Rick were getting married. You could see it in her soul.” Ruffin said he told her that Rick wasn’t ready for marriage, and one day Rick finally told her the same thing “and broke her heart.”
Teena told Vibe magazine in 2004 that Rick was her best friend, and said, “We made the mistake of having a relationship.” She said there “were too many women” around Rick, and while “I always knew that I would be number one, I didn’t like that there would be a number two, three, four, or five.”
Teena told interviewers later that she and Rick broke up in mid-1981, either temporarily or permanently, on the first night of their Street Songs tour. That meant they still had to sing “Fire and Desire” to each other onstage, projecting major positive emotions, for the next several weeks. Paradoxically, this added to the performance, because in Teena’s words, “we’d be fighting onstage, and the audience thought it was part of the act.” She said “the theatrical part of both of us saw how that was working [by making our art] even more intense each night.” Right On! magazine seemed to agree. “Their voices blend and their bodies lock together in tight embrace, leaving little to the imagination, and the sparks that fly onstage are not just the lights reflecting from their sequin costumes,” the magazine said.
While the lyrics of “Fire and Desire” were not about Rick and Teena’s romance, some other songs were. The first song either of them wrote specifically about their relationship was a song Teena composed in 1981, “Portuguese Love.” (She was part Portuguese, and the song describes a lovemaking session in Pittsburgh. )
Referring in Confessions to the lovemaking session that inspired the song Rick wrote, “[Teena] told me I was the first one ever to give her an orgasm. She came like the pouring rain.” The later tunes “Casanova Brown” and “Square Biz” are also about Rick and Teena. With verses such as “You made love to me like fire and rain / Ooh, you know you’ve got to be a hurricane / Killing me with kisses, oh, so subtly / You make love forever baby / You make love forever,” “Portuguese Love” certainly qualified as a love song. According to one source, Rick contributed a brief, uncredited vocal to the piece.
In his 1997 song “Good Ol Days,” Rick sings that he and Teena “were burning up with Fire and Desire,” but that he “just couldn’t hang around.”