Oh, something’s got me so excited, baby A feeling I’ve been holdin’ back so long . . .
—“All Night Long,” Mary Jane Girls (1983)
The Mary Jane Girls were far and away the most controversial group Rick ever created. They were also the closest to his heart. This made complete sense, because they were women named after a drug, and he was obsessively interested in both. The onstage personalities Rick created for them, and their onstage performances of songs he wrote for them, called forth a wave of condemnation as well as a torrent of congratulations and made their relatively brief career an outstanding one.
Rick had hired female background vocalists in the late 1970s and called them the Colored Girls, after the line, “And the colored girls go ‘Doo do doo do doo do do doo’. . .” from the Lou Reed song “Walk on the Wild Side.” That group at various times included Levi Ruffin’s wife, Jacqueline Ruffin, Lisa Sarna, Tabby Johnson (not related to Rick), Joanne McDuffie (later JoJo McDuffie Funderburg), Teena Marie, and the sisters Maxine and Julia Waters. They’re credited for background singing on various albums by Rick and by various groups he produced. However, though they were referred to as the Colored Girls on albums, amongst musicians and themselves they casually adopted the moniker the Mary Jane Girls.
In the early 1980s Rick decided to turn the Mary Jane Girls into a full-fledged group, one that would perform on its own, as opposed to singing behind him onstage. Rick’s original idea for the new group sounded much more interesting than the Mary Jane Girls turned out to be. He told Jet magazine in September 1983 that he wanted to create “a black female group . . . that could express more reality with relationship to men,” explaining that he “wanted black girls who could really speak about love, the pain, money, power, hate, and everything.” On another occasion Rick said he wanted the Mary Jane Girls to sing about issues “that are sex-related but not actually about sex, such as honesty, jealousy, and emotional security.”
Rick also said he wanted the new group to consist of “female characters that women could identify with.” Many of his own songs addressed sexual issues, he said, and he was looking for a way to address them from the other side of the gender gap.
Rick planned to write the songs the new group would sing, however. When asked why he thought he could speak for women, he pointed out that Smokey Robinson, the Motown writing team of Holland-Dozier-Holland, and many other songwriters had written songs for females with great success. This was initially derided as old-style thinking: a man arranging for women to express their feelings. “C’mon ladies,” the Washington Post sneered, “it’s the ’80s. You don’t need a Phil Spector these days to merchandise your talents.” (Spector, a record producer, started the girl-group craze in the late 1950s and early ’60s.)
When he actually created the Mary Jane Girls, Rick also seemed to be thinking about appealing more to white audiences than to black people, however. He told one interviewer before creating the group that he “might go over better in Montana and Nebraska” with a female group that sang about gender-related issues. In any case, one of the four Mary Jane Girls he selected was white, one was of mixed race, and the other two were light-skinned black women. After all this theorizing about singers who would address issues or illustrate them with their appearance, however, Rick eventually settled on what he had said early on would be a possible alternative to this ambitious plan: three girls in skimpy clothing “doing the punk thing.” The only change was that he added a fourth Girl.
Rick selected Joanne McDuffie Funderburg, the former Colored Girls singer, from Buffalo; Candice “Candy” Ghant, a Motown session singer from Detroit and a former member of the girl group SofTouch; Kimberly “Maxi” Wuletich, a white woman from Pittsburgh; and Cheryl “Cheri” Bailey Wells, from New Jersey. Wells, who originally played the Valley girl character in the group, was later replaced by Yvette “Corvette” Marine (now Yvette Barlow), the daughter of disco singer Pattie Brooks. The group reminded the London Telegraph reviewer of a female version of the Village People.
Rick claimed that although he loved to smoke marijuana, he hadn’t named the Mary Jane Girls after the drug. He said he had “named the group after [Mary Jane] candies, because the girls are as sweet as candy.” He was likely lying.
Rick selected the role each girl would play in the group based on his own fantasies about different kinds of women. McDuffie Funderburg was the “powerful woman” fantasy. After all, Rick explained, “she wears braids, like me.” She was also known as the “street-savvy, ’round-the-way girl” and said in a 2013 interview for this book that this was her real personality. Wells was the adorable Valley girl fantasy, the cheerleader, the young wild girl who liked to boogie and go to new wave clubs (like her later replacement, Marine). Ghant was the “sophisticated vamp” fantasy, the runway supermodel who wanted Rolls-Royces and diamond rings. Wuletich, the white girl, was “the dominatrix” fantasy, the leather queen. She often wore a badge and a police hat, plus handcuffs dangling from the belt of her leather jacket. She also often carried a whip. “There’s a hardness about her personality that I find intriguing,” Rick said. That the only white girl in the group played a dominatrix and dressed like a police officer says a lot about Rick’s view of race relations in America.
Wuletich may have played a dominatrix, but Rick really dominated the group. Ghant told author Mike Sager that Rick was very strict with the Mary Jane Girls while they were on tour as well as in the studio. They worked with a choreographer five days a week as well as with a vocal teacher. “Whatever it took,” Ghant says. “With him there were no hours.” McDuffie says the group would sometimes start work in the studio at 2:00 PM and not get out until 4:00 or 5:00 the next morning.
“Rick was like a slave master,” Ghant told author Mike Sager for his book Scary Monsters and Super Freaks. “We didn’t party, we didn’t go wild. We weren’t supposed to have boyfriends. After the shows it was interviews, pictures and we were escorted to our rooms. And they would take a bed check to make sure you were in there. He was like a boss, a husband, a mother. He was hard on us.” She notes, however, that if Rick hurt one of the girls’ feelings, “He always gave you a gift to say he was sorry.”
McDuffie Funderburg paints a more nuanced picture of Rick. She told the Los Angeles Times that while he was in “creative control” of the group, he was flexible and treated the girls fairly. She said, “I don’t know anything about writing and producing, but Rick does—he’s very knowledgeable in those areas. I like the fact that somebody who knows what they’re doing is in control.”
After the Mary Jane Girls began performing, the Washington Post charged that Rick, “always quick to jump on someone else’s trend,” had put together the group in imitation of three female groups created by George Clinton and one called Vanity 6 (later renamed Apollonia 6 when frontwoman Vanity left the band), created by Prince. (The three girls were called Vanity 6 because that was the number of breasts among them.)
The Post called the Mary Jane Girls “a second-rate version of Vanity 6,” and the Los Angeles Times sunk so low as to aver that the Mary Jane Girls had failed as imitators, lacking “the focus or seductiveness” of the admittedly very sexy Vanity 6. And indeed, onstage, the Mary Jane Girls just wore revealing costumes, wiggled a lot, and didn’t sing all that well, with the exception of McDuffie Funderburg. One critic for the Washington Post did note, however, that thanks mostly to what he called Rick’s “sweetly sensuous songwriting,” the Mary Jane Girls were “considerably less shrill about their sexuality” than Vanity 6.
In several published interviews, Rick furiously rejected the suggestion that he stole the idea for the Mary Jane Girls from Prince. He said he’d come up with the concept of a girl group six years previously but had temporarily shelved it for lack of time. He told one of the Mary Jane Girls that Prince had actually stolen the idea from him when Prince was the opening act on Rick’s tour and Rick told him his plans. McDuffie Funderburg indignantly seconds Rick’s argument that the group had been Rick’s idea first. She says the only similarity between Vanity 6 and the Mary Jane Girls was that both were female groups doing club or dance music.
Rick also claimed the Mary Jane Girls were much more skilled than Vanity 6. “The selling of human bodies is one thing,” he said in reference to Vanity 6, and indeed, the Washington Post wrote that the Mary Jane Girls “sing better than Prince’s stable of undie-clad crooners.” McDuffie Funderburg insists the Mary Jane Girls should be compared to “real singers,” such as the Pointer Sisters or the Supremes. She’s right about herself, at least. Judge Sweet noted in his 1989 opinion that McDuffie Funderburg “was the group’s only member with significant singing skills and she had sung most of the lead vocals” on the group’s recordings. The judge said she had “furnished the distinctive sound of the Mary Jane Girls” and that “her voice . . . was essential to the ‘sound’ of the group.” A nonjudicial critic added that the other Girls only provided “adequate whispery backup” for McDuffie Funderburg.
The Mary Jane Girls’ costumes and sex appeal became additional objects of controversy. While some observers called the group a “lingerie-clad quartet,” others criticized them as “sleaze-dressed beauties.” A Philadelphia Inquirer reviewer charged that in their tiny miniskirts and high heels, “wiggling ostentatiously to every third beat or so, the Girls are little more than an adolescent boy’s fantasies come to life.” The Los Angeles Times, however, suggested the Mary Jane Girls weren’t even good at being sexy, opining that their “clumsy blend of ‘Valley Girl’ humor and bump-and-grind flirtation seemed hopelessly laborious.” But English pop music critic and author Sharon Davis praised Rick for giving the Girls “no-nonsense lyrics and bold sexual personalities without being obscene.” Vibe magazine chimed in, praising the Mary Jane Girls for “flaunting their femininity.” There was “no shame in their game,” Vibe said. “They freely articulate their needs and desires.”
Rick was determined to make the Mary Jane Girls’ first album a success. As Levi Ruffin remembers it, on Christmas Eve 1982, Rick called him and said, “Look, man, you ready to go to Cali, back to Sausalito, and cut a record?” Levi remembers, “I said ‘No problem. How long we gonna be gone, Rick?’ He said, ‘I want you to pack for a week, maybe a week and a half.’” But that wasn’t how it went down, according to Ruffin. “Right after New Year’s Eve, me and him, we fly out there with a couple of guys. That was January. March, we were still there. First Mary Jane Girls album was done. Very successful week and a half, right? March we came back home.”
In April 1983 Motown released that album, which was self-titled. The Washington Post called it “one of the most dubious projects ever released by Motown,” saying that “the four women show off their chests and legs on the cover but show little talent on the vinyl inside.” By today’s standards, the women were dressed with extreme modesty on the album cover.
The album highlighted the fact that the Mary Jane Girls were Rick’s fantasy of how women should treat him. The Washington Post noted that in every song on the album, the “girls explain how they’re going to do it all for their man.” Davis, however, called it “a musical landmark” and “a superb release crammed with excitement.” Rick was the sole writer, producer, and arranger of all the songs on this and the next album by the group, with the exception of the song “Leather Queen” on the second album—1985’s Only Four You—which was cowritten by Daniel LeMelle (credited as Danny LeMelle).
Davis also wrote that the Mary Jane Girls “were an extension of Rick’s own personality and would record repertoire unsuitable for his own use.” This was a credit to Rick’s marketing savvy: he knew what he wanted women to say and do in sexual or romantic situations, but since he couldn’t say it himself without switching genders, he had the Mary Jane Girls do it for him. The group reflected Rick’s marketing savvy in a different way as well: they became so popular that Rick’s managers developed a line of action wear in their honor, the Ultimately line, which Rick’s brother LeRoi Johnson says earned between $300,000 and $400,000 in 1985.
The Mary Jane Girls’ eponymous album rose to number 6 on the Billboard top R&B album chart and remained on the chart for forty-seven weeks while rising to number 56 on the Billboard top pop album chart. The RIAA certified it as a gold record.
Reviewers disliked the album as a whole, but they loved its best tune, “All Night Long,” which the Los Angeles Times called “smoldering.” Vibe congratulated the Mary Jane Girls for recording the song, which, it said, urged women to throw off their inhibitions. Appearing on the top R&B singles chart on July 23, 1983, the song remained there for eighteen weeks, rising to number 11, while rising to number 101 on the pop chart. McDuffie Funderburg was the lead vocalist on the track, as well as on three of the other seven tunes on the album.
“All Night Long” also rose to number 13 on the British charts and remained on that chart for nine weeks, becoming the group’s most popular British song. Davis said the Mary Jane Girls delighted the public with their “outrageous stage act” and “warm off-stage manner,” a combination calculated to appeal to the English public, and that the group would remain popular internationally as long as Rick “could keep his fantasies alive.”
Vibe magazine insisted the Mary Jane Girls “stand as the bridge between the Shirelles and the Supremes and the R&B divas of the 21st Century,” noting the Mary Jane Girls’ impact on groups such as En Vogue, Destiny’s Child, 702, TLC, and the Spice Girls.