Rick was probably one of the greatest producers I ever met.
—Berry Gordy
Teena Marie was only one of the artists Rick successfully produced. He also produced individual songs for already established groups that he idolized, such as the Temptations. But what really attracted Rick was producing entire albums by performers he created or discovered himself, such as Teena, his own backup group the Stone City Band, the Mary Jane Girls, Process and the Doo-Rags, and Val Young.
Rick loved producing because he was a control freak who liked being in charge of every aspect of a record. Stan Endersby also notes that Rick took pride in the songs he wrote and enjoyed watching other people perform his work.
And at this time, Rick was also exhausted. As Endersby and other musicians have pointed out, endless touring takes a tremendous toll on entertainers, and Rick already had collapsed and been hospitalized at least twice while touring. But when he produced groups, they could tour without him and he could stay at home “while they were out on the road doing his stuff and he was just getting the check,” Endersby says. Rick also was aware that producers usually have much longer careers than vocalists.
Rick loved producing in spite of the fact that when he started putting tunes by his protégés on his albums along with his own tracks, the Los Angeles Times noted that he was voluntarily sharing the spotlight “with folks fully capable of singing him off the record.” Rick’s only problem as a producer, in Ruffin’s words, was that “when Rick produces you, who do you think you’re gonna sound like when you come out of the room? Rick! Not vocal-wise, but in the way you’d approach the vocal.” Others also noted this, but it’s impossible to determine if this added to or distracted from the popularity of the songs and albums Rick produced.
Rick worked at a feverish pitch when he was producing. Levi Ruffin offers one reason for this: cocaine. “What kept us going was cocaine. We called it ‘producing powder.’ That was the name we had for it. ’Cause you had to take it to keep up with Rick,” he says.
But Rick came by most of his producing skills naturally. He was demanding, and a perfectionist, as a producer. In an interview for Mike Sager’s 2003 book Scary Monsters and Super Freaks: Stories of Sex, Drugs, Rock ’n’ Roll and Murder, Daniel LeMelle—who from 1979 to 1986 was arranger and director of the Stone City Band horn section, and who worked on nine albums Rick produced—tells a story that perfectly illustrates this. He says that on one occasion, after Rick had put the band through a long recording session, they were all driving on a California freeway, listening to the final cut of a song. Everyone was relaxing when suddenly Rick told the driver to stop the vehicle and pull it off the road. “Did you hear that?” Rick asked. Angered no one knew what he was talking about, he played one section of the song again and again, rewinding the tape each time. They all sat on the side of the freeway for an hour while Rick cursed and threatened to leave the band members beside the road unless they told him what was wrong. Finally, he revealed that for several bars in one portion of the song, the horns, which had supposedly been recorded in stereo, had been mistakenly recorded in mono. This mistake, he told them, would have been pressed into the distributed records if he hadn’t caught it, meaning “it would have been out there and it would have been wrong.” He concluded by saying, “My shit has got to be perfect.”