When I die, they’ll probably speak well of me.
—Rick James, 1983
Ruffin says his brother called him to tell him that Rick had died and that the conversation “was like two girls crying. It was horrible. He was gone.” Interviewed nine years after Rick’s death, Ruffin said he still misses his lifelong friend and wishes people would separate Rick’s creative life from his drug life. “He was just a fun-loving happy dude who worked his ass off and because nobody gave him shit, he worked hard to get where he was,” Ruffin said. “But all they talk about is him getting fucked up [on drugs].”
Ruffin added, “I want everyone to understand, from the depths of my heart and soul, that Rick was a beautiful brother. The drugs got him. . . . But when we didn’t have shit and when we first hit, he was the most beautiful thing, the most happy thing you could see in this life.” Teena Marie told an interviewer it was “very, very hard” to live with Rick gone. After he died, she stopped working for six months, although her career had been on the rise. Her next album, Sapphire, was titled after an unreleased song by Rick and featured “You Blow Me Away,” a duet she’d recorded with him. She died six years later.
McDuffie Funderburg called Rick “one of the few interesting people in my life.” Robby Takac of the Goo Goo Dolls put his finger on one reason why that was so: Rick “amplified his sounds with a public and private personality that was always larger than life,” Takac said. Many singers strive for this, but Rick seemed to do it naturally.
In statements after Rick’s death, Berry Gordy called him “a pioneer who took Motown in a whole new direction,” and Smokey Robinson honored him as “the original R&B rock star.”
Not all responses to Rick’s death were as serious or as sympathetic. Shortly after he died, the New York Daily News reported that some of Rick’s buddies gave him a send-off at a Los Angeles nightclub by ceremoniously blowing marijuana and cocaine smoke at his smiling portrait on the wall.
On one occasion, Rick described himself as “somebody who just stood up for what he believed in, somebody who was down for his race, who wrote some funky songs and made people dance, and who was a pretty good fucking producer.” Two years before his death, when asked how he’d like to be remembered, Rick said, “As someone who beat the odds,” a defiantly true and profoundly succinct summary of his life and career.
This statement, of course, ignored the crimes Rick had committed and served time for. Artists, however, are often outlaws. While it may seem sacrilegious to lovers of literature to put Rick James in a class with two of his contemporaries, writers Norman Mailer and William Burroughs, all three of these creative personalities were convicted criminals. Those who protest that Rick committed violent acts against women should remember that Mailer, author of The Naked and the Dead, stabbed one of his wives in the chest, barely missing her heart, and Burroughs, a drug addict and the author of Naked Lunch, killed one of his wives by shooting her in the head. All three fought society’s ban on illegal or outrageous conduct not only with their creative works but with their most outrageous weapon, their own flamboyant misbehavior.
All were needed not only for what they created, but so people could see what happened to those who broke society’s law and rules. They also were needed so that a surprisingly large number of people could express the rage and frustration they feel at the inhibitions imposed by those same rules, and allow them to imagine doing the forbidden themselves.