Rick obviously had a hot-and-cold relationship with Motown.
—Chuck Stokes, Rick’s second cousin and a Detroit television broadcaster
On September 26, 1986, Rick reentered the McLean rehab facility, telling a doctor there he had returned because his use of cocaine was becoming too “time-consuming” and because when high, he became lackadaisical and “neglectful of his business.” Unfortunately, McLean discharged Rick less than a month later, before his treatment was completed, because he had a fight with another patient.
His drug addiction certainly was interfering with his business as a Motown recording artist. Daniel LeMelle notes, “Cocaine helps you as a musician,” but only up to a point. He said he quit using coke before Rick did and never used it again after Grace Slick, who had been the lead singer of the Great Society and Jefferson Airplane in the 1960s and Jefferson Starship and Starship in the 1970s and 1980s, suggested he stop.
“You’ve already seen what you need to see,” LeMelle says Slick told him. “You know what [getting high] sounds like, you know what it looks like. You have heard different notes in rainfall. . . . Whenever you need to recreate it you can, but come out of that room or you’ll be lost in it.” LeMelle says the conversation with Slick “was like she’d hit me in the head with a baseball bat.” In the long run, drugs and alcohol are depressants, and, Levi Ruffin says, “It seemed like the more money that Rick got, the less happy he was. When Rick and me were broke, we had fun. When we got more and more income—we called it ‘nigger rich’—he had everything he was dreaming about. Cars, bitches, go anywhere you want when you want, but the more he did, the less happy he got.”
Rick agreed with a vengeance. “My world was crumbling right in front of me and I didn’t give a fuck,” he wrote in The Confessions of Rick James. “I was even angry with God. I felt He had deserted me. . . . Why when I was so low wasn’t He there to help me out? . . . I felt there was no hope, only death.”
At one sold-out concert in Dallas during the 1980s, before an audience of eighteen thousand people, dope’s hold on Rick was obvious. According to Ruffin, Rick was getting ready to perform when he fell over, without even trying to catch himself, and hit his head on the stage. “People thought this was part of the show, but when they realized it wasn’t, they started booing,” Ruffin says.
In 1986, while Rick was getting high in his bedroom, his Stone City Band was recording albums in the basement, supposedly under his direction. They waited and waited for Rick, but he never came downstairs. Finally, they gave up, disbanded, and left his house for the last time. As Rick told Behind the Music years later, “They had to make a living. They couldn’t depend on me.”
That same year, a woman named Gina Perry said Rick beat her in Buffalo after accusing her of stealing a $15,000 diamond ring from him. Rick’s attorney in that case, William Gersten, admitted Rick had slapped Perry at his Buffalo ranch but argued Rick had struck her after she “went nuts” and began slapping him and screaming when he demanded to see if she had put the ring in her purse. Perry sued for $2 million and the jury awarded her $25,000. This scenario, featuring a cocaine-using Rick attacking a woman he believed had stolen something from him in his own home, would reoccur at a much greater cost to him a few years later.
In February 1987 Rick told Jet magazine he had become a “born-again Christian” in reaction to his drug problem. “God has saved me from overdosing,” Rick said. On March 2, however, when Rick appeared for a deposition related to a legal proceeding, Motown attorney Marc Gottridge wrote in a a later affidavit that Rick’s “eyes were glazed over, he was unable to sit upright in his chair, and he appeared not to comprehend what was going on.” One of Rick’s attorneys said Rick’s condition was “the worst he had seen in some time.” At about 1:00 AM the next morning, Rick entered BryLin Hospital, a private psychiatric and drug abuse treatment facility in Buffalo, for “depression with associated cocaine dependency.” He checked himself out the next day, however, against medical advice.
Rick told an Associated Press reporter in 1988 that his cocaine habit was costing him $10,000 to $15,000 per week, but he wasn’t really aware how much he was spending. He began doing drugs twenty-four seven, stayed awake for days at a time, and had aluminum foil mounted on the windows of his house to keep out the daylight. He began waking up with several strange women in his bed, uncertain whether it was day or night. Basically a hermit, he rarely left his house and rarely mixed with people unless they came to his house to get high. He had virtually no new song ideas and wrote less and less music.
Even when Rick did go out in public, it was easy for him to keep doping himself. He told an interviewer, “I could walk on the street and smoke a joint and do cocaine in a restaurant . . . and people would say, ‘That’s cool, that’s Rick James.’” Although he had been arrested for marijuana possession as a youth, there’s no indication he was ever arrested as an adult for consuming mountains of Peruvian marching powder.
By his account, he used most of his waking hours to “snort all of Peru and drink all the cognac” he could imbibe. Then he’d pop sleeping pills at night. He said this cycle continued for about a month, until he began falling into fifteen-hour periods of coma-like sleep at home. And his addiction kept growing. “I didn’t really care about making albums anymore,” he told one interviewer. “I started to get very complacent.”
Rick’s complacency weakened his bonds with Motown. His 1986 admission to McLean Hospital’s drug treatment program had occurred while he was trying to supervise the recording of a third Mary Jane Girls album for the company, and the album—which was never released—was one of the many issues dividing Rick and Motown. That album, Sweet Conversations, resulted in only one very short conversation.
Rick sent a rough cassette of some of its tunes to Motown in August 1986. Motown executive Lee Young Jr. said “the Motown employees who heard the cassette told Rick they thought it was unsatisfactory” via telephone and “[Rick] hung up.” Motown employees heard no potential hit tunes on the album, and the company filed suit against the Mary Jane Girls for turning in master recordings that were “not suitable for manufacturing commercially saleable records.” Both sides knew most of the fault was in Rick’s continued drug use rather than in the Mary Jane Girls’ performances.
These issues became the basis of the federal court case known as Motown Record Corporation v. Mary Jane Girls. As the progress of the case revealed, both Rick and Motown wanted to end their relationship, but on dramatically different terms. The case consisted of two clashing lawsuits, one filed by Motown in 1986 and one by Rick in 1987, followed by numerous claims and counterclaims. It was tried and decided in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan over a four-year period.
According to the written decision issued by the presiding judge, Robert W. Sweet, in 1989, Motown’s major issue was that Rick didn’t adhere to deadlines, and the company “no longer had confidence in [Rick’s] capacities to perform his contracts.” Meanwhile, Rick “complained that he wasn’t receiving adequate promotional support.”
In a larger sense, however, the two suits were the culmination of longtime mutual dissatisfaction. During the course of the case, Judge Sweet argued, somewhat surprisingly, that Rick’s drug use may not have been all that bad for him as a recording artist or a record producer during the early part of his Motown career. “Given the reportedly widespread drug use in the music industry,” Sweet wrote in his 1989 decision, “it is not unlikely that some of this generation’s more successful albums were recorded by persons under the influence of drugs. Indeed, Rick James’s own history of drug use makes it conceivable that he achieved some of his earlier successes while using drugs.”
Drugs were not the only issue in the case, however. Judge Sweet noted that the parties’ differences over specific issues were sharpened by Rick’s “outspoken comments, his need for funds, his belief in his own efforts, and his suspicion that Motown was not treating him in the fashion which he merited based upon his work.”
Rick’s brother LeRoi Johnson says he agreed with the judge that one reason Rick was unpopular at Motown was that he would “go into the [Motown] offices and insult people, loud-talk them.” Rick “wasn’t a diplomatic person. He would say, ‘Either do it this way or I have no use for you.’”
In a 1979 interview with Jet magazine, Motown president Berry Gordy had hinted at this problem while still expressing warmth toward Rick: “He thinks he knows everything there is to know, and we argue.”
Rick’s former road manager Rick Abel expressed the same opinion, although he may have overstated it. During an interview for this book in 2013, Abel said he’d just finished reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer and said to himself after he read it, “Adolf Hitler is Rick James with immense power and immense evil behind him. Nothing could be right unless it came from his lips. Nobody could control him. Nobody could tell Rick, ‘Great idea, let’s try taking it in this direction.’ He thought that his ideas were first and last the best things that ever came to light.”
There was also speculation that Rick was unpopular at Motown simply because he was too sexy for the still somewhat staid company. “The sexually graphic themes of his music conflicted with the company’s conservative approach,” one AP interviewer wrote. In the 2013 Broadway production of Berry Gordy’s Motown: The Musical, an onstage history of the company, the actor playing Rick, Eric LaJuan Summers, spent much of his brief time onstage sticking his tongue in and out of his mouth like a frog in heat.
Rick put the issue in a different way to the interviewer, charging Motown with “never totally understanding what I was trying to do.” The company “just didn’t allow me to have the freedom I needed to really make the kind of records and do the kinds of things in the industry I wanted to do.”
In his autobiography, To Be Loved, published in 1994, five years after the suit was decided, Gordy was very complimentary about Rick: “Rick did it all—singer, musician, writer, arranger, producer. Watching him work in the studio was amazing. He was innovative, and could come up with some of the greatest rhythms and vocal arrangements in his head, on the spot.” But the Motown president also wrote that Rick was “outrageous . . . cocky and wild” and coined “phrases that I had never heard before.” His “live shows were so daring they shocked me.”
Rick argued that his ties to Motown had never been that strong in the first place. “I’m not a cat who came up with Berry Gordy” in the music business, he said in an interview with New Musical Express. “If Motown ever fucks me around, then I want the fucking money and I’m out. I’ve told Berry that.”
Motown may have felt the same way about Rick. As part of its suit, Motown’s attorneys introduced into evidence Rick’s album sales through mid-1988. The numbers revealed that Rick’s next-to-last album for the company, Glow, sold only one-tenth as many copies as his first, Come Get It, and only one-twenty-fifth as many as his biggest Motown album, Street Songs.
In Motown’s nine-page initial complaint, filed in September 1986, the company specifically charged that Mary Jane Girls Inc. had not delivered an acceptable third album by July of that year as required by its 1983 contract. Mary Jane Girls Inc. was the company that managed Rick; LeRoi Johnson was its president. Motown therefore asked the court to require the Mary Jane Girls to provide their services directly to Motown, rather than through Rick’s company. Motown also demanded unspecified monetary damages of more than $10,000.
In a fifty-page countercomplaint filed in January 1987, Rick and his lawyers accused Motown of numerous contractual violations, including “failing to use reasonable efforts to promote and sell The Flag in a manner consistent with Motown’s other top-line artists.” Rick also said Motown had failed to pay him and Mary Jane Girls Inc. $10 million in royalties due them in numerous different accounting categories, and demanded the company release him and Mary Jane Girls Inc. from all their Motown contracts.
During the four-year duration of the case, Rick moved back to Los Angeles, rented a Hollywood Hills home formerly owned by Mickey Rooney, and spent most of his time there, producing nothing and staying high on drugs. His downward trajectory became public at Hollywood’s China Club, later the setting for two of the skits about Rick on Dave Chappelle’s TV show. While drunk, Rick clambered onto the stage with Herbie Hancock to perform, then climbed onto a speaker in front of the stage to dance, and finally fell backward into the space between the stage and the speaker. The fall must have been spectacular; witnesses said “people were screaming and running in all directions,” and the rest of the concert was canceled. Rick had broken four ribs and spent the next three weeks recovering at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.
While Rick and Motown were dueling in court, his comments about Motown were completely negative. This was hardly surprising, considering the bitterness involved and the length of the struggle. “I have no good feelings—none!” he said about Motown. “Just because you’ve been married doesn’t mean you’re in love.” He referred to Motown as Notown or Lowtown. (Due to professional pride, he failed to refer to the company as Hotown, which others have delighted in doing.) When he was asked to comment on rumors that Gordy might sell the company, he remarked, “All bad things must come to an end.” Gordy sold Motown in 1988 to a joint venture of MCA Inc. and Boston Ventures.
Rick’s put-downs of Motown ignored the ten years he had spent profitably with the company, and the fact that while he was there he had become a superstar. The only charitable remark he would make about Motown was that it had given him the opportunity to work with Stevie Wonder and the Temptations, and that he had found Teena Marie there.
Over the course of the more than three years of dueling suits, hundreds of pages of legal briefs and deposition transcripts changed hands and numerous interim rulings were handed down. A twelve-day court trial then took place in June and July 1989, including testimony from thirteen witnesses and several hundred exhibits. On December 6, 1989, Judge Robert W. Sweet, in a thirty-eight-page decision, decided in favor of Motown in seven of ten legal areas.
Regarding Rick’s charge that Motown had been legally required to do more than it did to promote The Flag, the judge noted that Rick “was indisputably a top Motown artist” and that “Motown’s promotional efforts on The Flag paled in comparison” to the company’s similar expenditures on Rick’s three preceding albums, and in comparison to what the company had spent to promote its other top artist of the era, Lionel Richie.
Judge Sweet ruled, however, that the contract allowed Motown to consider the prior sales of the artists involved when it decided what to spend on promotion. In this context, he noted that one of Richie’s albums had sold fifteen million copies, twice the combined sales of all of Rick’s Motown albums. Rick, “as an artist, may have been in the same league as [Stevie] Wonder and Richie, but his record sales did not share the same status.” While Rick’s contract with Motown required the company to use “reasonable efforts” to promote Rick’s albums, it didn’t say the company needed to make its “best efforts” to do so. And after the public had rejected two singles released early to publicize The Flag, radio stations had refused to play them. That, Judge Sweet ruled, showed Motown had been correct to spend relatively little on promoting the album.
But two big things did go in Rick’s favor. For one, the judge decided the various contracts between Rick and Motown no longer carried any legal weight, which was one of the outcomes Rick had sought. The judge also said Motown owed Rick a minimum of $365,000 in unpaid royalties, adding that the total amount of money it owed the singer “will, regrettably, require a further hearing.” He went on to suggest the parties involved confer informally and reach an agreement on the final sum.
They did. According to Johnson, who was not only Rick’s brother but one of the attorneys representing Rick in the case, after conferring, Rick’s attorneys demanded $7 million from Motown. Motown refused, and said it would appeal a ruling forcing them to pay this amount. Instead, the company offered an immediate $2.5 million, which Rick accepted. As a result, Judge Sweet dismissed both suits on October 30, 1990.
For Rick, the suit, although long and arduous, had freed him from Motown and dumped an avalanche of money in his lap. Now, all he needed was a new girlfriend.