Rick stands tall despite the nadir his life has sunk to.
��Buffalo News, 1994
In the spring of 1994, Motown Records responded to the new interest in Rick that his trial had inspired by releasing a new double CD of his music that included some of his greatest hits, as well as four new tunes he had recorded while out on bail.
Unable to resist reusing a title it had used before but was now much more relevant, Motown titled the new collection Bustin’ Out: The Best of Rick James, a twenty-seven-track, two-disc set not to be confused with his album Bustin’ Out of L Seven, which had been released on vinyl in 1979.
On the new album, in “Serious Love (Spend the Night),” a new love song with a strong beat, Rick rhapsodizes about the women of Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, Chicago, and Detroit, in that order. In “Divine Love (So Fine)” he pays tribute to what he calls “the rebirth of Slick Rick” and to some of his former albums, songs, and associates, including Throwin’ Down, “Fire and Desire,” the Mary Jane Girls, Teena Marie, the Stone City Band, “Super Freak,” “Mr. Policeman,” and Street Songs. And in “Down By Law,” which amounts to a musical version of his recent arrests, Rick assumes a Rastafarian identity and sings about “living alone in a room,” “making money and making jokes,” and how a policeman then appears and takes him to jail because he has been a “bad boy.” Ganja is also prominently mentioned.
The Buffalo News, expressing both appreciation for Rick’s work and sympathy for its hometown boy behind bars, asserted that in this collection “Rick stands tall despite the nadir his life has sunk to. The sense of freedom, of life lived for the pleasure of living, comes through.” The paper said Rick had played the role society assigns to all artists by “portraying in his music all the vibes he picked up . . . from the streets of Buffalo’s East Side to the glitzy glamour of a rock star’s milieu.” Entertainment Weekly, praising Rick’s “vibrant body of work,” awarded the album an A-minus, but it failed to chart.
Although Rick actually had an inmate number at the rehab center, N63609, things were so loosey-goosey at that medium-security facility that in June 1994 he was allowed to participate by telephone in the release party for the new album. That event took place at Tatou, a trendy Los Angeles nightspot. As Queen Latifah, the Mary Jane Girls, and, of all people, Milton Berle, gorged themselves on pricey hors d’oeuvres washed down with champagne, Rick told everyone over the speakerphone that he felt sad (presumably because he was in rehab and not there). The Buffalo News reported that his voice sounded stronger on the phone, as well as in his new songs, than it had in years.
In rehab, Rick became an antidrug crusader via his interviews with reporters, as he always did during drug-free intervals in his life. “If I can change one person’s heart to put the pipe down and put the cocaine down and put the drugs down, then I’m more successful than when I was telling ’em to smoke mary jane,” he told the Buffalo News. He lamented the pro-drug music he had previously recorded that others were now producing. “Parents are letting their kids listen to this stuff, saying it’s only music, but this music is going to govern their lifestyle,” he said. “God knows, I know I directed a lot of people” toward drug use.
Rick pledged to stay away from bars, other “slippery places,” and from anyone who uses drugs, and to go to Narcotics Anonymous meetings. Sounding like his former nemesis, President Ronald Reagan, Rick even asserted he wouldn’t drink wine because that would lead to marijuana, which would then lead to harder drugs.
Everyone who knew Rick took all this with several barrels of salt. Later, he admitted that after each of four stays in non-mandated rehab during his life, he had stayed drug-free for only three or four months before returning to Coke City.