Ronnie find the cure, this is just too much for us to endure.
—“Money Talks,” by Rick James (1982)
Throwin’ Down, the title of Rick’s next album, had at least two possible meanings. Among them was “throwing a party,” which was certainly appropriate, considering the album included mostly dance numbers. Another slang meaning of the phrase at the time was “smoking cocaine.” In fact, Rick claimed that he invented that meaning of the phrase. Whether or not that was true, Rick produced the album in a haze of cocaine smoke.
Nevertheless, Rick managed on this one album to attack the sitting president, Ronald Reagan, for his economic policies; collaborate on a major song with the Temptations; and sing three catchy pickup songs. With the most controversial tune on the album, the political song “Money Talks,” Rick made an explicit break with his previous musical history, which had been entirely nonpolitical. One critic called “Money Talks” a “verbal assault” on President Ronald Reagan. Rick told an interviewer “Money Talks” was “basically a song about how Reaganomics is screwing up the country.”
In fact, it was a lament for how hard it was to make a living during the recession of 1981–82. Unable to avoid a sexual reference, Rick told Right On! magazine that the song was a “simple tune dealing with how even working girls on the street” were finding it difficult to make a living, and added, “My heart goes out to” them. The lyrics run, “She works the corner of Twelfth and Vine / Making her tax-free money, pinching every dime / She has to hustle to make ends meet, / Even a workin’ lady finds it hard to eat.” A reviewer who listened to “Money Talks” noted that Rick not only named Reagan explicitly as the culprit in the song, something that only black artists seemed courageous enough to do, but that the singer also had joined Prince in calling the president “Ronnie” with “unawed casualness.”
Rick said that he wasn’t happy with “Money Talks” because it didn’t tell anyone anything new. “People are already aware . . . because when they wake up they’ve got to . . . look for a job,” he said in July 1982. He also said he didn’t plan to write any more songs about current events because “the situation is not going to be better” as a result of them. “People just want to temporarily ease their minds,” he said, presumably with nonpolitical music, which he immediately returned to creating. (He later wrote and sang more political songs, however.)
Britain’s New Musical Express opined that all “Money Talks” did was “lick up the crumbs” of the Street Songs tune “Ghetto Life.” The magazine also said the song “stumbles over an uninteresting melody and fails completely” because Rick’s “shouts of protest” in it are “utterly unconvincing.” Rick didn’t actually shout in the song, but the melody is so uninteresting that a listener focuses on the singer’s voice during most of the recording. In any case, as in many of Rick’s songs, the hard-driving dance music in “Money Talks” more or less wiped out its verbal protest message.
“Standing on the Top,” Rick’s collaborative vocal with the Temptations, became the second-most-popular song on the album. Rick said he was inspired by the fact that by including four of the Temptations among the background singers on his previous single, “Super Freak,” he had caused fans to ask, “What happened to them? Why haven’t we heard from them?”
What had happened, as the Washington Post noted, was that the Tempts had slipped into “the netherworld of nostalgia.” Amid numerous personnel changes, they had left Motown in 1976. In 1980, however, Motown had re-signed the latest iteration of the Tempts, consisting of Eddie Kendricks, David Ruffin, Otis Williams, Melvin Franklin, Dennis Edwards, Richard Street, and Glenn Leonard, and assigned them to cut an album appropriately titled Reunion.
Rick said that when he heard the album while it was being produced, he felt it needed a hit single. He already had written the song “Standing on the Top” and had planned to record it himself, but the Tempts loved it, and he proceeded to produce, arrange, and record it with them. “Standing on the Top” appeared on both Throwin’ Down and Reunion.
“It was strange producing them,” Rick said of his work with the Temptations. “I grew up listening to them. . . . I didn’t feel self-conscious; only a little strange in the beginning. But I tried to fit in because it was business. . . . The outcome of it I knew would be so strong that it took away from all the strangeness or emotions.”
Adding to the tension Rick felt while producing “Standing on the Top” was the fact that about one hundred people were watching him do it, including Berry Gordy, actor Timothy Hutton, and Jim Brown. It was the largest number of people he had ever seen in a studio, he said, and he found himself surprised that he was still able to teach the Tempts the song.
There were some emotional moments, however. As Rick told one interviewer, he sang all the Tempts’ parts onto cassettes and asked them to take the cassettes home and learn the parts. It was evident the next day, however, that two of the Tempts hadn’t done what Rick asked. “They didn’t know anything,” Rick said. “They hadn’t even listened to the tune.” He said he was “very upset” and “gave them a long speech about how this was their careers and [he was] already rich and [didn’t] need this aggravation.” They got the message and cooperated from then on.
It could be argued, though, that the song was a dis on the Tempts. This comes through clearly in the video of the tune. When the Tempts sing the words “on the top,” they turn and point to Rick, who’s literally higher than they are because he’s standing on a riser to their right, as if they’re acknowledging that their day has passed. They then immediately go on to sing, “We understand it,” with “it” presumably being the ups and downs of life.
The Tempts also could be heard as singing about Rick’s present or eventual decline. In the song they note that when you’re down, people ask you stupid questions, like “What does ‘L-7 square’ mean?” a reference to Rick’s earlier album Bustin’ Out of L Seven, and “Do you braid your hair?” also a reference to Rick and not the Tempts.
Rick was proud, however, that “Standing on the Top” did well, rising to number 6 on the Billboard R&B singles chart. It gave the Tempts their first Top 10 R&B hit in six years, and stayed on that chart for seventeen weeks. It also rose to number 66 on the pop chart.
Although Rick earned some money from “Standing on the Top,” he probably took in less than he would have had he recorded the song himself. In contrast to his image, Rick had acted as altruistically in giving the tune to the Tempts as he had in asking them to back him up on “Super Freak.” “I grew up listening to them and felt it was an honor to work with them,” he said.
This wasn’t the only instance of his going out of his way to help out a legendary Motown act. At one of Rick’s concerts, his opening acts were scheduled to be Marvin Gaye and the Gap Band, in that order. Rick told the promoter it should be the other way around, with Motown legend Gaye having the place of honor. (The first opening act for a star’s concert is traditionally performed by the least popular group, and as the star’s appearance nears, more popular acts play.) The promoter refused because Gaye hadn’t had a hit record recently. According to LeMelle, Rick said, “This isn’t going to happen.” With the concert scheduled to open shortly, LeMelle says, “We packed up all our stuff, got in a car, and went to a movie. While we were in the theater, Rick got a call from the promoter, telling him, ‘It’ll be like you said.’”
Rick also performed with Grace Slick on Throwin’ Down, with the two musicians singing together on “She Blew My Mind (69 Times).” The tune actually did better than making it to number 69 on the top R&B singles chart, rising to number 62 and staying on the chart for six weeks. It didn’t make the pop chart, however. (Although the tune was titled “69 Times” on the album, it was called “She Blew My Mind (69 Times)” on the single.) It might have done better without the titillating title, especially because the pornographic implication is deceptive: mutual oral sex is not the song’s subject. The song is actually about a girl who dumps her boyfriend for another guy, thus blowing his mind.
Also highlighting the album were the pickup songs “Dance Wit’ Me,” “Throwdown,” and “Hard to Get.” The Washington Post claimed that “Dance Wit’ Me” “owed more than a little” to Funkadelic’s “(Not Just) Knee Deep,” with a rhythm guitar pattern and synthesizer riff that were “very similar to ‘Knee,’” adding insult to injury by saying that it “lacked the complex arrangement and quality singing of the Funkadelics’ single.” Some of these specifics were technically correct, but “Dance Wit’ Me” is much more energetic and creative than “(Not Just) Knee Deep.” Meanwhile, a different reviewer probably made Rick feel better by calling the tune “a funk-laden thumper that exudes fun.”
Creem magazine scored some humorous points against Rick with this song by asking how listeners could distinguish a song that starts “Pretty little thing, girl you’re looking fine” (“Dance Wit’ Me”) from the beginnings of two other tunes on the album: “Say little girl, know you’re lookin’ good” (“Throwdown”), and “Girl, you’re cute, you’re sweet, you’re such a sexy treat” (“Hard to Get”). Critics also noted that Rick sounded distracted on Throwin’ Down “when the subject wasn’t himself, or doesn’t lead to the bedroom.” The Washington Post said most of the songs on the album were “populated with voluptuous women eager to bed down with the singer.”
Nonetheless, “Hard to Get” rose to number 15 on the R&B chart without making the pop chart, and “Dance Wit’ Me” reached number 3 on the R&B chart and number 64 on the pop chart.
Perhaps Rick should have produced a topical cover for this album, like an illustration of starving zombies stalking the ghetto or the Stone City Band members in rags as a result of the Reagan recession. Instead, the album’s cover reeks of druggy fantasy. The cover of Street Songs had shown Rick with a cop and party girls on a slum street, emphasizing his origins as a ghetto resident, as did the songs themselves. In other words, the album cover represented something real. But on the cover of Throwin’ Down, Rick looks like a funk version of Conan the Barbarian. Standing on the steps of a castle amid furs and bones, he is wearing shorts, studded leather boots, a very wide decorated metal belt, and gold amulets around his neck. A skeleton of a human head next to him looks like a person who might have died under a hair dryer in the year 1000 BC. In one hand, Rick carries a metal shield with a godlike face hammered into its center. His other hand touches an electric guitar painted to look like a bloody battle-ax.
On the back of the album jacket, Rick appears to be dragging a Valkyrie-like black woman up the heavy stone castle stairs. She is wearing furry cut-back shorts, a metal bra, a heavy spiked bracelet, and metal wings on her head.
On the record sleeve inside the album Rick is standing and the woman is sitting on the ground between his legs, facing outward. Her arms are chained, and Rick, looking somewhat defiant, is pulling her hair with both hands, although she does not seem to be feeling pain. The design of the whole album package reminded many of George Clinton, whom Rick had criticized for producing albums that were definitely detached from reality.
Rick was credited with writing, arranging, and producing almost all the songs on the album, with the exception of “My Love,” for which he shared credit for both the words and music with his brother LeRoi Johnson. Rick called the song “a family affair,” not only for that reason but because the “jazz lilt” to the melody reminded Rick of his mother’s jazz vocal albums, which he had described to an interviewer as “the musical textbooks of my youth.”
Reviewers in general had a field day dumping on Rick’s voice and most of the melodies in Throwin’ Down. The Post said his “weak singing undermined every cut,” calling it “flat” and “characterless” and accusing him of adding female singers as well as horns and strings to the album to disguise his voice’s shortcomings. Creem, piling on, said Rick sounded “like a Looney Tunes imitation of Edward G. Robinson.”
Despite such harsh critical reactions, Throwin’ Down rose to number 13 on the Billboard top pop album chart, stayed on the chart for twenty-three weeks, and was certified as a gold record by the RIAA. It rose to number 2 on the R&B chart on the same date, and spent thirty-nine weeks on that chart. The album sold 817,591 copies through mid-1988, Motown said in its 1989 suit against Rick. That the album sold this strongly was impressive but was disappointing compared to the 2,376,714 copies Street Songs had sold.
Rick admitted to the Los Angeles Times in 1983 that Throwin’ Down wasn’t as good as his previous albums, but he blamed it all on Motown. “It should never have been released,” he said. “In fact, it should never have been recorded. I made it too soon after Street Songs. I was getting pressure from Motown to put out another album.” Still, Throwin’ Down was certified gold. The album also was nominated for (but did not receive) the 1982 American Music Award for Favorite Soul/R&B Album. Rick thought this may have been because he had achieved his goal for this album, which he said was to make people happy: “Right now there is enough heavy stuff going on in the world, and people don’t want to hear it in music,” he said. “I just want people to have fun and to escape for a little while.”
Rick responded to the nomination with a remote broadcast from his home studio in Buffalo. “R&B is as important to black people as life itself,” he told the camera in a quiet voice. “It is the foundation of all music today.” While his long-haired white dog, Ganja, gazed at him adoringly, he strummed his guitar and sang, “Music is something that will never stop beating, music is something that will never disappear. I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for all these years.” That Rick thought of 1978 to 1983 as “all these years” showed a lot about his accurate perception of the length of the average rock star’s career.
Rick’s tour in support of Throwin’ Down drew huge audiences and was a monster success. In April 1982 at the Grugahalle in Essen, Germany, he performed before the biggest audience any rock artist had ever attracted in Europe: 7,200 ticketholders plus about thirty million TV viewers in other countries. The event was the tenth all-night concert staged by the German TV show Rockpalast. Just before the departure of the flight from the United States to Germany, Rick demonstrated his continuing (if drug-related) concern for his Stone City Band members by standing at the door of the aircraft and giving a Quaalude to each one as they filed in. He wrote in The Confessions of Rick James that they all wanted the pill because the flight was so long and they, like Rick, were afraid of flying. “I just put it in their mouths, like candy,” he wrote.
In Greensboro, North Carolina, a year after his appearance in that city in support of Street Songs, Rick attracted 13,500 fans. And in Augusta, Georgia, in July, more than eighty-five hundred people with an estimated average age of sixteen danced in the aisles and on the seats of the sold-out Augusta–Richmond County Civil Center as Rick sang “Ghetto Life,” “Mary Jane,” and “Super Freak.” (It should be noted, however, that none of these songs were from the Throwin’ Down album.) Wearing long braids and clad in a black skintight suit studded with sequins, Rick doffed his jacket, “baring glittered chestnut skin much to the delight of thousands of his mini-skirted female fans,” a local reporter wrote.
A reporter for the Augusta Chronicle wrote that Rick “stunned, aroused, insulted and challenged the hyper-ready audience,” and used “pantomime, gesticulations and outrageous sexual overtures” against a background of “loud explosions and fireworks” to rouse the screaming audience to “sheer hysteria.” After the show, Rick changed into a lounging costume consisting of a tight green outfit, snakeskin boots, and a white safari hat.
This was Rick at his performing peak. But despite his triumphs with fans, there was a warning of troubles to come when he told a reporter immediately after this Augusta concert that this would be his last tour. “I don’t need this,” he said. He talked about going into movies full-time and complained that he was “really tired of performing live.”
Before long, it became obvious that Rick was pushing himself too hard. Although he had been suffering from abdominal pain for several days prior to a scheduled appearance in Dallas in August, his thirtieth show of the tour, he refused to cancel the sold-out event at the Reunion Arena, where nineteen thousand fans awaited him. Observers said the thirty-four-year-old musician didn’t look good before he went onstage. He planned to go to the hospital immediately after the show, and he was given oxygen during a break. Finally, after performing for a total of forty-five minutes, he collapsed unconscious onstage and was rushed off in an ambulance as the audience erupted into pandemonium.
Tests at Dallas’s St. Paul Hospital indicated Rick suffered from exhaustion, and he canceled two of his upcoming concert dates. His abdominal pains slowly worsened during his next twelve concerts, however, and after a Denver appearance he canceled the final five weeks of the tour and returned to Buffalo for medical treatment.
Rick later told an interviewer that his drug use was the problem. Even before the Throwin’ Down tour started, he said, “I was doing too much partying. I’d wake up at noon, take drugs to get myself together, drink cognac, smoke weed and do some other things I ain’t too proud of, into the wee hours of the night. I’d drink myself to sleep, and at noon the next day, the cycle would begin again.”
Rick said he’d stopped ingesting coke and alcohol after his collapse and that doing so was “a case of live or die.” He said his creativity had been heightened and his sex life improved by avoiding both substances. But he didn’t stay abstinent very long.
He soon scheduled another tour, including a return to Dallas in October 1983 to perform at what he called a “payback” concert to make up for the one at which he had collapsed. Once again, his audiences responded. And when he went on to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the Baton Rouge Advocate wrote that much of the audience “reacted with religious fervor as the preacher of lust and love gyrated and teased in an effort to incite a marijuana-soaked dance orgy.”
Now that Rick was near the top of the music business. he began to wonder what had been happening during the previous decade to his daughter Tyenza and his son Rick Jr. Their mother, Syville Morgan, had been raising them alone without any contact with Rick.
“I was starting to miss my daughter,” Rick wrote in The Confessions of Rick James. “I hadn’t seen her for years,” and he also had never seen his son. “As time went on,” he wrote, “I felt more and more guilty that my own kids were poor and struggling.” Since he knew nothing about where they were living or how they were doing, he hired a private detective to find them. When the detective told him they were living in a poor neighborhood in the L.A. area, a conscience-stricken Rick visited them there with Levi Ruffin.
“So we go over there,” Ruffin said, “and she’s got this little small apartment, really tiny, and there’s little Ricky and Ty and Mom, nice and clean and neat.” Ruffin noted, however, that “they definitely lived in the hood, like Compton kind of shit, deep hood. . . . I met her and she was very cordial. Rick was just asking to get a chance to see the kids. You could see she was mad as shit because she needed money. She was raising two goddamn kids and this son of a bitch is on television, and now he comes around.”
Shortly thereafter, Rick asked his brother LeRoi Johnson to provide Syville and the children with funds and relocate them to a house in a better neighborhood. Rick then invited Ty and Rick Jr. to Buffalo for a three-week visit. Rick went to the airport to meet them but was so anxious about seeing them again that when he saw a young girl and a little boy holding hands, he rushed up and hugged them, only to be told they were not his children. Ty and Rick Jr. were on the same plane, however, and Rick finally found them. They continued to visit Rick for the rest of his life, and Ty, a rapper, and Rick Jr., an artist, still live in the L.A. area.
Today Syville heads the House of Syville Couture in L.A. and sings in a Christian rock group called the Rapture. “We sing very edgy gospel,” she says.