Well I'm sitting here thinkin’ just how sharp I am Well I'm sitting here thinkin’ just how sharp I am I’m an under assistant West Coast promo man
—“The Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man,” by the Rolling Stones, written by “Nanker Phelge” (1965)
Rick claimed he had written three to four hundred new songs during his three years in prison and initially wanted to record an album consisting of all the acoustic, angry, and introspective ballads he had written while sitting in his cell. But he dropped the idea, telling USA Today he did so partly because he wasn’t sure how his fans would react to such a sudden shift in tone, instrumentation, and story line. After all, many of his earlier tunes had been happy ones about sex and romance.
He also said he didn’t want to record tunes that would make people say “poor Rick.” That was probably wise. In the end, only five songs Rick wrote in prison made it onto 1997’s Urban Rapsody. What might not have been as smart, in terms of Rick’s image, was teaming up with another controversial music biz figure, Joseph Isgro, to produce that album. It’s easy to see what Rick and Isgro saw in each other, however, aside from talents of different sorts: Isgro’s reputation was in some ways worse than Rick’s. Isgro also had been a long-term prison inmate (and may soon repeat that experience).
A former employee of Decca and Paramount Records, Isgro had been hired by Motown as regional director of promotion in 1976 and left a few years later as executive vice president of promotion. Teena Marie was among the Motown artists whose records he handled.
In 1979 Isgro became an independent promotion man. Recording firms hired such individuals to convince DJs to play music the companies released. In the early 1980s, the US government launched a major investigation into payola (a music-industry term for bribing radio stations to play certain records). And in 1987, federal prosecutors indicted Isgro and two codefendants for numerous alleged crimes, some of which were linked to their promotional activities. The charges included racketeering, mail fraud, money laundering, obstruction of justice, filing false tax returns, and clandestine distribution of cash and drugs.
Specifically, the government accused Isgro and two others of furnishing cash and cocaine to radio station program directors in return for airplay. Executives at four radio stations testified that Isgro or his associates had bribed them. Due to prosecutorial misconduct, however—the same phenomenon that would aid Rick four years later—a federal judge dismissed the case in 1990.
Isgro went on to serve as executive producer of the 1992 movie Hoffa about the Teamsters Union leader who also had been involved with organized crime figures and may have been murdered by them. Jack Nicholson starred in the film, which received an Oscar nomination. In March 2000, however, three years after the release of Urban Rapsody, Isgro was arrested for loan-sharking and identified as a member of the Gambino crime family. He was accused of lending money at interest rates of up to 5 percent a week, and of sending thugs to beat up borrowers who failed to pay. After pleading guilty to extortion and to running a loan-sharking business in Beverly Hills, Isgro served fifty months in federal prison.
In 2014 Manhattan district attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. charged Isgro with helping to run a sports bookie ring for the Gambino crime family in 2009. Isgro pled not guilty to gambling, conspiracy, and money laundering charges in state supreme court in Manhattan, and the case against him is pending.
When Rick and Isgro made Urban Rapsody, they claimed that they weren’t interested in exploiting Rick’s sordid past. They both knew, however, that fans would be interested in watching a performer who’d been accused of so many fascinating crimes and convicted of some of them. They also thought a new album could take advantage of the publicity occasioned by Rick’s sensational trial, prison term, and widely publicized release.
Songs Rick had recorded earlier in his career were still being played, easily recognizable samples of his work were being incorporated into the latest rap songs, and Motown’s reissues of Rick’s classics on Bustin’ Out: The Best of Rick James were still getting air time. “To see kids 16 years old saying they listen to Rick James or Teena Marie or the Mary Jane Girls really touches me,” Rick told USA Today while working on his new album. At forty-nine, Rick was older than most rock stars, but his enforced silence over the previous several years meant that all that most of his fans remembered about his music were his greatest hits of years before. Here was his chance for a new beginning.
Rick also had a money problem that Isgro could help with. Rick had declared bankruptcy in 1995, while he was serving time in Folsom, and didn’t emerge from bankruptcy until 1999, two years after Urban Rapsody was released. Rick’s signature on the insert in the Urban CD shows part of his motivation for making the album: the s in James is capitalized, and two vertical lines are drawn through it. In The Confessions of Rick James, Rick didn’t mention Isgro, writing only, “I basically paid for [Urban Rapsody] myself with the help of a friend of mine.” Another friend of Rick’s said Rick was scared of Isgro.
In 1997 Isgro revived his former record label, Private I, with Mercury Records as the distributor, as the launching pad for Urban Rapsody. It was Rick’s first album in nine years. His contract gave him ownership of his master recordings and a larger royalty percentage than he’d been earning at Motown. Things were starting to improve for Rick, and he was getting a foothold in life outside the penitentiary.