I see the girls walk by, dressed in their summer clothes I have to turn my head until my darkness goes.
—“Paint It Black,” Rolling Stones, written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards (1966)
The highlight of Rick’s next album was his song about his night of love with the seventeen-year-old girl he met on his visit to New York City. He described her as a six-foot-one white woman with long brown hair, whom he called “young and fine and oh, so tender.”
The song, “17,” became the third-biggest pop music hit of Rick’s career, after “You and I” and “Super Freak,” although, or because, its lyrics horrified some reviewers. Rick told author David Ritz that just before writing “17” he had purchased a Yamaha DX7 keyboard and “that between the new woman and the new instrument, [he] was highly stimulated.”
When Rick sang in “17” that the young woman he spent the night with was “almost” jailbait, he signaled his awareness that in New York State he was not breaking the law but that he would have been committing statutory rape had she been any younger. The Chicago Metro News charged that Rick was “a man in his 30s singing about committing statutory rape,” and indeed, in twelve American states, an adult having sex with a seventeen-year-old is a criminal act.
The News went on to ask the purpose of a song like this. If its purpose was to sell records, it succeeded. The song rose to number 6 on the R&B singles chart and remained on the chart for sixteen weeks. It rose to number 36 on the pop chart and stayed on the chart for three weeks.
Reflections, the album that “17” appeared on, was primarily a greatest hits collection. Released in August 1984, the album wisely concentrated on Rick’s most popular songs, which were his dance tunes and his sex singles, and included no ballads. Rick agreed to Reflections only after demanding his usual $1 million per album, even though he recorded only three new songs rather than the usual six to eight. Motown grumbled but finally ended up paying Rick what he wanted.
Reflections appeared on the Billboard pop chart on August 25, rose to number 41, and stayed on the chart for nineteen weeks. It did better on the R&B chart, hitting number 10 and staying on the chart for twenty-three weeks. The Philadelphia Inquirer called it “an outstanding example” of a greatest hits collection. But while it was more popular than Rick’s Garden of Love album, which wasn’t saying much, it didn’t go very far beyond that. Reflections sold only 284,426 copies, many fewer than Cold Blooded.
But Rick’s disappointments were larger than the lackluster sales of Reflections: both Michael Jackson and Prince had swept past him in album sales. Prince also had dealt a fatal blow to Rick’s moviemaking ambitions by releasing his successful autobiographical movie, Purple Rain, in 1984. The film won an Academy Award for best music and original song score, and the record of the score won a Grammy Award for best album of an instrumental score written for a motion picture. Rick was still interested in making movies but was worried that a similar movie released by him would be tagged as a “me-too” production. Rick’s brother LeRoi Johnson alluded to this when he told Nelson George of Billboard magazine that the field of black movies was overcrowded. “We know there have been and will be more black films with music geared for release,” he said. “We don’t want to get lost in a crowd.”
Johnson added that one of the problems with Rick’s movie effort was the difficulty of coming up with a decent script: “We’re spending a lot of money developing a script we can be happy with,” he told George. He added, “Rick knows that it’s music that generates the dollars for him and we don’t want to get too far away from it.”