8

ANOTHER SAD LOVE SONG

With our massive twin successes of TLC and the Boomerang soundtrack, it’s hard to say when I first noticed that Kenny and I had been drifting apart. It was an incredibly busy time, and the distance between us was small at first. What I do know is that it didn’t happen all at once. It began gradually, but once it gathered momentum, it was impossible to stop.

Early on, it was little stuff. He started finding reasons why he didn’t like Atlanta anymore. The houses were cheap. There was no culture. The city was too unsophisticated, its citizens didn’t take well to fame. Those superficial complaints revealed other signs. He became less communicative—I could feel him inch away, resist, question in ways that he never had. It came out of nowhere and I didn’t understand why it was happening, but I could feel it.

It didn’t help that he was simply around less. After he married Tracey in September 1992, Kenny started spending more time in Los Angeles. His new wife didn’t like Atlanta, so Kenny soon sold his house and moved back to LA, earthquakes or not, although he kept an apartment in Atlanta.

While geography kept us in different parts of the country, in truth, that was just an easy excuse. After our initial run of success, LaFace didn’t have Kenny’s full attention. He felt he had to keep his presence as a writer-producer with mainstream stars like Madonna and believed it helped all of us if he stayed hot. I didn’t disagree, but that kept him from concentrating his energies on LaFace artists. As a result, a divide began to form.

The first real split in the road came with Usher, whom I had signed to LaFace as soon as I could after his sensational first audition in early 1993. I really wanted Kenny to work with him, but that was when I realized there was this undercurrent of tension between us. I asked Usher to come back and do a second audition when Kenny was there. He and Daryl Simmons were not overly impressed with Usher. They preferred Tevin Campbell, another teen soul singer Kenny had recently started working with in Los Angeles. Campbell was a fourteen-year-old vocalist whom Quincy Jones had taken under his wing, and who sang the vocal on the lead single from Jones’s 1990 Grammy-winning album, Back on the Block. Benny Medina signed him to Warner Brothers and Babyface agreed to write and produce for him without me. Tevin Campbell was cute, but he was no Usher.

Usher and I posing for a photo at the Ritz Carlton in Chicago (Raymond Boyd/Getty Images)

The growing gulf between Kenny and me was not the only problem at LaFace. TLC fired Pebbles. When TLC returned from the group’s first tour as an opening act on the 1992 MC Hammer tour, their album had sold almost three million copies and they found they did not have as much money as they expected. History has taught me that nobody makes money touring as an opening act. When they first came home, the girls came to the office and Pebbles had presented each of them with a new car. They all wore long faces and didn’t have their typical bubbly attitudes. I didn’t understand it at the time, but it wasn’t long before it all came out in the open.

They focused their resentment on Pebbles. It was girl drama—three girls in a group and a girl manager. Pebbles could be heavy-handed with the girls, very protective, making them go to bed on time on work nights, that kind of thing. These were unruly teenagers with very little life experience, so Pebbles took the lead. TLC was very much her vision, and she was hands-on with the music, their looks, the videos—everything. She played a large role in their success.

In the end, they were unhappy about the amount of money they’d made, and they fired her not long after returning from the MC Hammer tour. I never fell out with TLC. I had many uncomfortable days, but I always stayed close with Left Eye and T-Boz, and I loaned my Miami apartment to her during all this disruption. Although she had kept her condition a deep secret, T-Boz suffered from sickle cell anemia and had been in and out of hospitals since she was seven years old. The secret came out when she collapsed during the first tour and had to be hospitalized. Lisa and Chilli stayed with her and they canceled a few shows, but she soon bounced back. She was my favorite, my eyes and ears on the street, my little muse. Living next to the ocean at my place in Miami was beneficial for her condition. Chilli and I were never close, although we were accused of having an affair many times. It was up to me to broker a deal, which put me in a difficult position with my wife.

Despite what the girls thought, Pebbles hadn’t seen a dime. Arista Records hadn’t paid us yet. They had been covering the label’s overhead and recording costs, but there was a nine-month waiting cycle for royalties. Also, the girls didn’t write the songs, so there was no publishing money. Before Pebbles had a chance to properly compensate the girls, they fell out. Pebbles is a lot of things, but she is no thief.

The TLC debacle haunted us—Pebbles, Babyface, and me—for years. They didn’t get ripped off. They started screaming bloody murder prematurely. They would have been smarter to ask for an advance instead of going ballistic. It wasn’t payday.

I was caught in the middle between my wife and my record company. I felt I needed to protect TLC, our first big act, and to protect the label. Many times I took their side over my wife’s, but I also think that her relationship with the girls was a tough one to manage. I had to navigate those shark-infested waters. I don’t think Pebbles felt supported by me at all. I consciously avoided arguing about it with either party, because I didn’t think I could win that. Hell hath no fury . . .

I took dirt for it, too. The girls went public with their case. People thought I hadn’t paid them. But, truth be told, we didn’t pay any of our artists at that point, because we didn’t have the money. We were selling tons of records for Arista, but we were not seeing the money. I always had other ways of making money from songwriting and production royalties, but I was naive about the business end of the industry and didn’t really understand the control Arista exercised over our finances. Our setup was still not sophisticated. We didn’t even bring in our own finance people at the label for another year. It was the last thing we learned, because we never did it for money. We did it because we loved music and we wanted to do something special in music. I knew how to make hit records; now I needed to learn how to run a business. About that time, I signed up for a crash course at the Harvard Business School in their Advanced Management Program.

Success was proving hard to handle. The more success we had, the more complicated our relationships became. Money changed everything. When we were starting out, everything seemed simple, but as the stakes rose, distrust and envy entered the picture. We were no longer the same crazy gang that had moved together to Atlanta. The happy family had turned into several battling camps.

And yet we were still making hits. Nothing slowed down. The first Toni Braxton album hit the streets in June 1993 and blew up immediately. After two hits off the Boomerang soundtrack, the world was primed for her debut album. Kenny wrote “Another Sad Love Song” initially for TLC and was going to give it to Chilli, but Dallas Austin took the group in a different direction, so Toni cut that one. Kenny wrote another unbelievable song called “Breathe Again,” and Kenny and I did a song with Daryl called “You Mean the World to Me.” My brother, Bryant, found writers and producers like Teddy Bishop and Tim Thomas, who did “Love Affair,” or Vincent Herbert, who gave us “How Many Ways.” Kenny and I wrote “Seven Whole Days,” which remains one of my favorite records I ever made and which also, sadly, turned out to be one of the last songs we wrote together. Toni Braxton was a number one hit album that went on to sell more than eight million copies. We called her the First Lady of LaFace.

Toni and I connected musically. I love her voice. Of all the singers I have recorded, Toni remains my favorite. Though Toni and I had a special connection, it was always purely platonic. We would play-flirt, but she was seeing my brother, so she was hands-off. I pushed her and was able to pull out something special. We found her superpower.

We promoted her everywhere. Toni had a signature hairstyle, adopted from a cut originally worn by Halle Berry. We did beauty salon promotions. We went to the Bronner Bros. Hair Show, the big convention for black hairstylists. Hairstyles are a big deal in music. The target audience for an artist like Toni was the women who go to the beauty salon. That album won Toni an amazing three Grammy Awards over the next two years, Best New Artist in 1994 and two consecutive Best Female R&B Vocal Performance awards in 1994 and 1995. We were ecstatic. Toni was truly the First Lady of LaFace, and LaFace was now a Grammy-certified record company.

The same month in 1993 that I found Usher, Pebbles introduced me to a producer named Sleepy Brown at her office. He was part of a production team called Organized Noize. They brought an act over to my office called PA, which stood for Parental Advisory, but Pebbles wanted to sign them to the label she had started, so I passed. Next they brought me another act. These two seventeen-year-old kids—one named Antwan, one André—who called themselves Outkast. They stood to the side of my desk and started rapping. They were so nervous, they wouldn’t look at me. I didn’t really know anything about rap. I went by my gut instinct.

“I think you guys are really good,” I said, “but you’re not ready yet.”

They came back a couple of weeks later, stood in the same spot, and went at it again. This time was better.

“I think you still need some work,” I told them, echoing what had gone wrong with Pure Essence all those years earlier. “You’ve got to work on things like sex appeal. It’s not the singing business or the rapping business, it’s the entertainment business, and you have to entertain.”

A little later, the leader of Organized Noize, Rico Wade, called.

Rico and his two partners, Ray Murray and Sleepy Brown, were young Atlanta producers who had studied the New York hip-hop scene. They were the songwriter-producers of a local collective called the Dungeon Family, named after the basement studio in Rico’s house where they recorded. They had started Organized Noize in 1992.

“The guys don’t want to come to your office and audition again,” he said. “They want you to come to a studio. They’re going to do their audition for you onstage and we’re going to invite more people this time. We want to fill up the room because we want to show you that we heard what you said. You said it’s not the singing business, it’s not the rapping business—it’s the entertainment business. We want to entertain.”

Something about their obvious dedication the first time they showed up in my office had made me have those guys back for a second audition—little more than a hunch—but they had seriously improved, and that was impressive in itself. When they called back with this invitation, it was clear they had paid attention to what I’d told them and had absorbed the information. These were artists who could grow, that much I knew. I was curious to see how that would play out. They definitely had my attention now.

I went to the third audition at a rehearsal hall called Crossover Studios in Atlanta. When they came out onstage, it was night and day from what I’d seen before. Not only were they great, they had presence—they knew how to entertain. During the set break in the bathroom, I overheard someone say that Polygram Records was in the house. I was not going to have Polygram Records sign an act under my nose. I went to Rico that night and told him that I was ready to sign the group. Like finding TLC and Toni Braxton in the same month, I landed Outkast and Usher only days apart.

Without Kenny’s support, I needed to develop a different approach for Usher. I decided to pursue the same strategy that worked so well with Toni Braxton. Soundtrack albums had become big business, although it was not yet common to introduce new artists on movie soundtracks. Toni Braxton was one of the first unknowns to ever break out of a soundtrack, and it couldn’t have set up her solo debut better. Usher seemed like a perfect candidate for the same treatment.

I heard about a soundtrack for a movie called Poetic Justice starring Tupac Shakur and Janet Jackson, and I wanted Usher to be part of that movie. With those two stars, the movie was a ghetto story directed straight for the young black mainstream audience, Usher’s natural constituency. I happened to know the director, John Singleton. I had been in a restaurant the night he and his family were celebrating his graduation from USC film school, and there was so much joy at their table, I paid for their dinner. It was just a spontaneous gesture of mine at the moment. We became friends. His first movie, Boyz n the Hood, was a big hit, and he had been nominated for an Academy Award, making him, at age twenty-four, the youngest director and also the first black person ever nominated for Best Director. Poetic Justice was his next project.

I arranged for a meeting with John in my villa at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills, where a winding staircase leads down from the upstairs bedroom. I hid Usher upstairs while John and I talked business downstairs in the suite. He wanted TLC for the soundtrack and I assured him that would not be a problem, but there was a young unknown I wanted on the soundtrack. I put on a track we cut with Usher called “Call Me a Mack,” and Usher slowly made his way down the stairs, lip-synching the song, performing his way down. When he finished, John looked at me. “You’re a real showman,” he said.

That number from the Poetic Justice soundtrack became the first Usher single in August 1993. I hired F. Gary Gray, who had done a video with insane special effects for “Natural Born Killaz” by Dr. Dre and Ice Cube and would go on to become a major Hollywood director (Straight Outta Compton), to direct the music video. Usher was on the map.

Still, I found myself in a strange predicament: Usher’s single was mine and not Kenny’s. I had done it all without him. The label, which, admittedly, was my dream, not his, may have been exploding, but it had become plainly obvious that Kenny and I were not in it together in the same way. We didn’t have the same connection that we once did—in fact, we really didn’t have much of a connection at all.

Kenny grew increasingly remote. Finally, on one of his rare trips to Atlanta, Kenny told me he wanted to meet for dinner. Over the meal, he said he didn’t have as much money as he should and he wanted to conduct an audit. That didn’t make any sense to me. We shared the same business manager. We didn’t split everything fifty-fifty. We split fees evenly, but not songwriting royalties and his performing royalties. Still, he insisted. The audit came up with nothing, but it turned out that Tracey had gotten into his head. Something or someone had clearly driven a wedge between us.

The worst moment came when Kenny came to Atlanta to record Tevin Campbell on a song called “Can We Talk,” a song I fucking loved, and the first song he wrote and produced without me. It would have been perfect for Usher, but Kenny brought Tevin Campbell to Atlanta and recorded the song at Doppler Studios in the room next door to where I was working with Usher. That was no accident.

Tevin Campbell was an incredible singer, but he was, like I said, no Usher. Tevin had a great voice, perfect for radio, a voice that went places where usually only females could go. But Usher had a more complete package; he could sing, he was a ladies’ man, handsome, flirty, masculine, full of swagger. Usher was going to be a star.

Usher didn’t understand why Kenny was working next door on this song with someone else. He was confused and hurt. I was crushed.

Shortly after that, Kenny called me and told me he didn’t want to work together anymore and he wanted to make it official. We put out a press release in late 1993 saying that we would no longer be working together, although we would remain partners in LaFace Records. It wasn’t clear how this would work, but the songwriting production team of Babyface and LA Reid had come to an end.

We never stopped talking. Kenny clearly had mixed feelings about the breakup too. He didn’t want to do his next album without me, even though we weren’t producing partners anymore. A couple of months after the press release, Kenny hired me as a producer of his third solo album, For the Cool in You. He gave me my producing fee and travel expenses, but capped the amount so I wouldn’t overspend on hotels and luxuries. Now I was working for Kenny, not with him. It was a very good album, perhaps not as poignant as Tender Lover. I wrote a little bit. I produced a lot of the vocals for him and did my customary thing, but it didn’t feel the same anymore.

I loved Kenny. We had made so much great music together over the previous decade—the Deele, Babyface, LaFace Records, and all the success with Boomerang and Toni Braxton—and now he looked at me like I had done something to him. It broke me. It wasn’t only that I was losing a close friend. Kenny and I had battled our way to the top side-by-side. We were different parts of something that was a whole. He spurred me to creative heights I would have never known without him, and I liked to think the same was true for him. Before Kenny, I had never really been in the record business, and I didn’t know what it would be like without him.

After Kenny and I stopped working together, I never again put pencil to paper to write another song. Kenny’s departure made it clear that things had changed and my job was to concentrate on running the label. I had started writing songs only out of necessity to move my career forward. I’d accomplished that, and I was entering a different phase, a time when I needed to focus on taking the success we’d built to date and turning it into something lasting.

I’d been lucky to stumble across someone as monumentally talented as Kenny, but in many ways his departure gave me the freedom to go beyond where I’d come from. Since we started LaFace, I’d realized that one of my greatest contributions came from finding new talent—I had an instinct for it, a vision for artists that I’d come to believe in. But as long as Kenny and I were working together, I’d always have one foot in the past and be reluctant to stand on my own. When he left, I no longer had a choice. It took his departure to make me realize that LaFace’s legacy would be much bigger than anything I had to offer as a songwriter.