Pile it up! Pile it up! Pile it high.
—“Shattered,” Rolling Stones, by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards (1978)
We would eat dinner and do cocaine. We didn’t know anything about the Betty Ford Clinic then. The biggest mistake I made is that I tried to become my alter ego. I wanted to be . . . wild man, party machine, lady slayer, and the cocaine told me I could.
—Rick James, Detroit News, 2004
Rick had been smoking pot and snorting cocaine for years, but in 1981, just before his Street Songs tour began, Rick took a step that greatly increased the damage his drug use would do him. In that year, he and LeMelle met Sly Stone.
Stone had been their “rock god,” LeMelle says, “but when I saw him, he was just a dude sitting in the corner of his dressing room freebasing,” who “couldn’t even stand up.” Rick, realizing that he and LeMelle were watching a man smoking himself to death, told Stone that “the fucking cocaine, man, has darkened your senses. You’re not making the music that you used to make.” He told Stone that the pipe was the reason for his demise. Stone had deteriorated to the point that he could barely make it onstage and “was late for every bloody gig he did for years. He demanded coke before he would go on,” one anonymous Toronto musician said. In 1970, at the height of his popularity, Stone missed more than twenty-five shows.
Rather than protest Rick’s denunciation of him, Stone urged Rick not to freebase. According to LeMelle, after the visit, “Rick said, ‘We will never let this happen to us.’ And then we hugged.” But instead of following through on that promise, Rick started imitating his musical hero. He and Stone would lock themselves in a back room and “become the highest people in the world,” LeMelle says. Soon, Rick was spending more and more time smoking his cocaine pipe—and hundreds of thousands of dollars a year keeping it filled.
Freebasing was “when the hideousness of my addiction really started,” Rick told the Washington Post in 1998. “When I was snorting I was in trouble, but I wasn’t in that much trouble.” He said he went from spending $200,000 a year snorting cocaine to between $300,000 and $400,000 a year smoking it. “I soon had a guy traveling with me who I hired just to cook it up for me. And then I was gone.”
Snorting cocaine was widespread in the music business. Legitimate record companies gave out little coke mirrors, from which coke could be snorted, as promo items. Framed gold records were dusted with coke and partygoers invited over to use straws to snort up the drug. At the time, snorting coke was thought to be harmless, but freebasing was a different matter, and was seen as such.
Rick told several interviewers that he snorted and smoked cocaine to “fill the empty hole” inside him and to ease the terrible pain of loneliness. When Rick met a beautiful TV actress who also smoked cocaine, he noted in The Confessions of Rick James, “She was in a lot of pain, just like me. She had everything she could want, yet she was as lonely as could be. . . . She and I were duplicates. Soul mates in pain.”
Smoking cocaine is rapidly addictive, as convicted stock manipulator Jordan Belfort describes in his book Catching the Wolf of Wall Street: “I put the glass pipe to my lips. . . . I took an enormous hit and held it in for as long as I could. An indescribable wave of euphoria overtook me. It started in the base of my aorta, shot up my spinal column and bubbled around the pleasure center of my brain with a billion synaptic explosions.” Belfort makes the first few seconds sound amazing, but any Stone City Band member would disabuse you of the notion that this kind of drug use was glamourous. “He used to stink,” Levi Ruffin says of Rick. “You could smell him a mile away.” When Rick’s mother asked Ruffin why Rick’s bus stank, he told her, “That’s what cocaine does—it comes out of your pores. She was crushed.”
Those who loved Rick tried to protect him. LeRoi Johnson remembers beating up a drug dealer in the Peabody hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, who was trying to get to Rick. “But after a while,” Johnson says, “you ask yourself, ‘Why am I out here doing all this when somebody’s not protecting himself?’ You can’t fight all the drug dealers.” Ruffin says Johnson would ask him to stop Rick from freebasing, and his reply would be, “How are you going stop a multimillionaire from doing what the fuck he wants to do?”
A few Stone City Band members half-seriously insisted that the only way to protect Rick was to smoke up all his dope. A few band members tried that when they were on tour in Dallas and on other occasions, but after they finished, Rick would just want to order more. As they left, Rick would be looking for more coke on the floor and they’d have to tell him, “Rick, that’s not coke, that’s lint.”
In an interview with Soul magazine, Rick blamed his increased consumption of drugs and alcohol on the responsibilities that had come with success. “A lot of people’s lives were suddenly in my hands—the band, the crew, the record company,” he told Soul. “Those people have to eat by the things that a performer does. If I’m not doing anything, they starve. Success is a big responsibility and I’ve never been a very responsible person.”
Rick would spend day after day, week after week, closeted in his room at his house in suburban Buffalo while freebasing thousands and thousands of dollars of coke and allowing no one in. His housekeeper would leave meals outside the door for Rick to eat, but he would rarely open the door to receive them. On one occasion, when his hunger returned with a vengeance after an extended freebasing session, he gobbled down a plate of bacon and eggs that had been sitting outside his door for four or five days, his friend Peter Kelly says. Years later, Rick tried to explain to California court psychiatrists that “doing coke was not a social thing with me.” He said he did it by himself in a back room a lot of the time. “I felt like I had a big hole inside me and getting high seemed to fill it for a while,” he said.
But as Peter Kelly also points out, Rick often combined dope and sex. “He wanted girls to get high with him and get involved in a ménage à trois,” Kelly says, although he adds that on some occasions, “Rick would get so fucking high and was so hyped he couldn’t talk and couldn’t have sex.”
When Rick and Jan Gaye, Marvin Gaye’s estranged wife, formed a romantic attachment soon after Rick’s Street Songs tour, Rick was often able to talk to Jan but unable to have sex with her because smoking cocaine had rendered him impotent. In her book, After the Dance: My Life with Marvin Gaye, Jan Gaye writes that after one such incident, Rick “was embarrassed, but I reassured him. God knows that each of us had had enough sex to last a lifetime.” It’s doubtful that Rick felt the same way. Rick later acknowledged to an interviewer during one of his periodic attempts at giving up drugs and alcohol that his sex life had suddenly become “much better.”
But worse than some embarrassment over impotence were the times Rick would overdose, collapse, come very near death, and wake up in a hospital. Johnson remembers this happening on numerous occasions starting on the Street Songs tour. Once, Johnson says, Rick OD’d so badly at the Sunset Marquis Hotel in West Hollywood that “he was probably dead, and his security and everybody panicked. We called 911, stood him up, and put him in the shower, and although he was blue from OD’ing, we got him back. I can’t remember exactly how many times we did that.” Johnson says he and Rick’s two other brothers rescued him from similar near-disasters at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, and L’Ermitage in Beverly Hills.
Freebasing, and drug use in general, soon began wounding Rick’s career in the same way it had hurt Sly Stone’s. Abel, Rick’s road manager, remembers when Rick signed on to play at the San Diego, Houston, Atlanta, and Philadelphia appearances of the Kool Jazz Festival tour that R&B star Teddy Pendergrass was headlining. Seven or eight acts had been scheduled for the San Diego performance. “It was a real tight setup,” Abel says, “because each act had only a half hour or forty-five minutes to play. . . . Basically you came on, played, and got off. No extending the set, no stretching it out; you had to follow the clock.”
Before Rick’s scheduled appearance time, Rick noticed Pendergrass’s tour bus in the parking lot and began chatting with him, and Pendergrass invited him to visit with him in the bus before his appearance. Abel said to himself, “Oh, shit, Teddy’s a big coke guy.”
When it was time for Rick to go onstage, Abel knocked on the bus door but couldn’t get anyone to answer. Without Rick, the show simply went on to the next act. When it was time for Pendergrass to go onstage, however, he kicked Rick out of the bus, Abel says, and went onstage and performed. Rick, meanwhile, “stumbled out an hour and a half after his appearance had been scheduled” and his act was canceled.
Two weeks later, when Rick was scheduled to appear with the same tour in Houston, Rick wasn’t ready to go onstage. “He just blew it off,” Abel says. “He didn’t want to go on until he was ready, and he thought they would make room for him. But instead they said, ‘We’re done. He’s not doing anymore.’”
On a later tour, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Abel was assigned to visit the box office after the show to collect $23,000 in cash due Rick and the band. It was too late to deposit it in a bank, and Abel, nervous about keeping it in his room overnight, hid it above the false ceiling in his motel room. Abel says he was nervous not only about thieves, but about Rick, because it was Abel’s job to pay off the band and crew members the next day, and he needed most of the money to do just that. He knew, however, that Rick would want to spend an undetermined portion of the cash on coke and wouldn’t care what other, more legitimate, uses for it Abel had in mind. Rick, however, found a way to access that money anyway. He accepted a delivery of coke from a dealer, then told the dealer to visit Abel in his motel room. “So it’s one AM and someone’s knocking at my door,” Abel says. He opened the door, keeping the chain on, and the dealer said, “Rick sent me to you to get my money.” Playing dumb, Abel said, “Money for what?” and the dealer put his finger up to his nose and sniffed. Abel gave him the appropriate amount.
These sorts of scenes became more and more common as Rick’s addiction spiraled out of control.