When the prison doors are opened, the real dragon will fly out.
—Ho Chi Minh
Tanya served only fifteen months before her release on December 4, 1994, but Rick was imprisoned for two years and twenty-three days of his five-year, four-month prison sentence.
He was released on parole on August 21, 1996, the same day he was voted into the Buffalo Music Hall of Fame. One of those voted in with him was songwriter Jack Yellen, who, appropriately enough, had written the song “Happy Days are Here Again.”
On his way out of jail, Rick told reporters he planned “to be a father and continue to funk” and said he wanted to try to get a bit closer to his family. One way Rick hoped to do so was by marrying Tanya. Plans called for the wedding to take place at a friend’s house in Santa Rosa in Northern California during the third week of August. A crowd of family members and friends, including members of the Mary Jane Girls, began to gather for the occasion.
At the last minute, however, the ceremony had to be postponed because Tanya had been arrested nearby on August 19 on suspicion of shoplifting a thirty-nine-dollar pair of boots. She also was accused of violating her probation by leaving Los Angeles without permission, and was returned to Los Angeles County jail for six months.
Meanwhile, Rick tried to reenter the business of making music. He made appointments with the presidents of three or four record companies, who “were enthusiastic when we met, but then nothing happened,” he told the New York Daily News at the time. He claimed the executives didn’t want to get involved with him because they were worried about his mental stability, or that he would go back to abusing drugs. He also complained that the charges that had put him in jail several years before had made him look like “the black Marquis de Sade.”
In truth, however, because this was the recording business and not the bible sales industry, artists frequently got into trouble for violating drug and other laws but kept on working. In 1997, the year after Rick was released from jail, Wilson Pickett was arrested for cocaine possession and Snoop Dogg pled guilty to a weapons charge. The record company executives’ real worry about Rick was that he might have lost his voice, or his talent, during his relatively long stint in prison. Therefore, they’d asked him to do demo records before they’d sign him, injuring Rick in his most vulnerable spot: his pride. Referring to the millions of dollars some of these same execs had made from his career, Rick said, “All these people who never asked me [to do demos] before when I was keeping the lights on for them, now they want to know what I sound like?” Refusing to comply with their requests, he suggested the execs listen to one of the millions of records he said he’d sold if they wanted to hear a “demo.”
Meanwhile, Rick took some time to adjust to life on the outside. One reporter noticed him in the Foundation Room, the VIP area of the Hollywood House of Blues, sipping mineral water and a little champagne while quietly watching others, behavior that would have seemed unthinkably repressed a few years earlier. Prison also seemed to have cured Rick of major drug use, at least for a while. He joined Narcotics Anonymous and told numerous reporters that his imprisonment had been “a blessing in disguise” because it shocked him into quitting drugs. “Otherwise I probably would have been dead by now,” he said. He said he was tired of his pre-prison behavior, which, he said, consisted of “hiding in the morning, being paranoid, running around out of my mind, and calling drug dealers all night.” His ability to remain drug-free was undoubtedly aided by the requirement that he take a drug test every week for his first two years out of prison.
After serving his time, Rick, by then forty-eight, had started feeling his age. Proposing as his first post-prison project an album of tunes he said he had written while inside, he said he wanted to perform less-energetic music. “I’m getting too old, man . . . to be dancing around singing ‘Super Freak,’” he told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “I want to do something where I can sit back and chill.”
After several months of freedom, Rick joined a weekly jam session at the China Club in West Los Angeles. His trademark braids were instantly recognizable and he stuck his tongue out as provocatively as before. He dissed the rappers who had made themselves rich with his best song lines by dropping a line of MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This” into the middle of “Super Freak.” One observer noted that Rick was still working it, punching the air with virtually every beat. His twenty-pound prison weight gain was evident, however. He told interviewers he planned to slow down, especially compared to the 1980s, when he seemed to be producing endless albums for his protégés and himself.