I think John and Danny saw me at one of the New York clubs and that hipped them to the fact that I was back working. They contacted me through a talent agent named Richard Dostal, who got the script for Blues Brothers to me. It was a long time before I looked at it because I was afraid of the way it might portray Afro-Americans. Once I read it, I could see it was going to bring back the blues and R & B performers that people had tried to put on the shelf.
From the time they started putting the script together they wanted me to play the role of the gospel-singing preacher. I memorized my sermon and lines on the airplane while flying out to California. On the lot at Universal they’d built a church that was a replica of a real church in Chicago. My sequence, with all the dancing and with John somersaulting down the aisle, took about three days to shoot because it was so detailed. It’s funny: With all the gospel I’d sung in my life, I’d never heard of the song they picked for me to sing, but it was a genuine old gospel number. Danny found a recording of it from the thirties that was done at a tempo as fast as the one we used in the movie.
People who criticized John and Danny were confused. They didn’t understand that the Blues Brothers were actors pretending to be R & B performers. I know Danny and John themselves weren’t confused about it, and you could tell from the respect they gave the real R & B performers on the movie that they knew what they were doing. They were there for every take I did, and they treated me fantastic.
The Blues Brothers is a funny movie, and it’ll never be outdated because there’s a lot of information in it. It’s as informative as The Godfather about the kinds of things people are into. It’s somewhat political too—like the part with the Nazi—and we don’t want to face the things it’s saying.
In my scene I was supposed to pull off the robe I had on, like the cape routine, but I wouldn’t do it. I was playing a character, not James Brown, and I thought to pull off the robe would destroy the character. After some discussion John Landis, the director, agreed. I think later on they were glad they did it that way. When I did my dance I didn’t get down as much as I would have if I’d been playing myself. I stayed gospel and only moved from side to side.
John wanted to do a lot of his acrobatic things, and I told him he should be careful. I’d done enough of that stuff on the stage over the years to know how dangerous it can be. He was doing a lot of those flips in my sequence, and then they used a double to do some more. John was very agile and had a lot of energy and a lot of ideas, and he seemed to be a man with so much talent that it was hard for him to define himself. I think one of the things that got to him was that he was putting on weight; he did not want to be fat. I don’t think John had any kind of drug problem at that time. If he did, I wasn’t aware of it. We talked about some of the pressures and problems in show business. He said to me, “I don’t think you’ve gotten a fair shake in show business, but after this movie comes out you won’t be able to walk down the street.”
He was right, too. That movie exposed me to young people who’d never seen me before. I was performing all the time again. Right after the movie came out I was supposed to do a concert at Madison Square Garden with the Rolling Stones, but it went sour at the last minute. Bill Graham was promoting it. He was supposed to be the world’s greatest promoter, and he wanted me to play for $5,000. I don’t think he really wanted me to come at all.
Around that same time—the end of 1980—I released “Rapp Payback (Where Iz Moses)” as a 45 and as a twelve-inch. On that record I mixed rap and funk together. I was rapping about the things that “Payback” is about. It took off real strong on the English charts, but it never did what it should have here. I still wasn’t on a major label, and it’s hard to make a record go under those circumstances.
The next year I started doing television shows—Saturday Night, Tomorrow, Mike Douglas, and others. I toured Germany and Italy. The Blues Brothers had triggered all this, but since I only played a character in the movie, people who saw the movie hadn’t seen or heard the real James Brown. So I did television and clubs and foreign tours, just like I’d played one-nighters years before. I was determined to prove that James Brown was still relevant.
Probably the most important thing in the whole long process happened when I was on Solid Gold in Los Angeles on February 2, 1982. I never will forget that date because that’s when I met the very special lady who’s my wife today. She was the hairstylist and the makeup artist for the show. It wasn’t love at first sight, it was recognition at first sight. Our souls had met a long time before.
They tape three days every other week, so they do two weeks’ worth of work in those three days. They have lots of entertainers coming in and out of there. The night I was on, most of the show had already been done. I was sitting in the dressing room with the door cracked when she walked by. Our eyes met. Right there, we exchanged a long, intense look. I went out and did my spot for the show. While I was working, I wasn’t really aware of her. I didn’t know if she was in the booth or where. We finished the taping late that night. When it was over, all the girls, the dancers and other women, were crowded around me. I looked over their heads and saw her standing off to the side. I said, “If I’m going to talk to anyone, I’ll talk to that one there.” I don’t know why I said that. Then I saw a fella standing behind her. He looked funny when I said that, so I said, “Well, I’m sorry, I don’t think this fella likes it.”
“He doesn’t mean anything,” she said.
He turned out to be her ex-husband who had come to talk to her about filling out their joint tax form for the last time. He was looking so mean, though, that I didn’t say any more. After the wrap, I was standing over in the wing, and she was over on the other side. For some reason a spotlight split on me. I pointed over toward the other wing, and it split on her. I found out her professional name was Alfie Rodriguez and her real name was Adrianne. I didn’t approach her, though, because I didn’t want to come on strong or not be a gentleman. I asked one of my backup singers to see if she’d have dinner with me and with Reverend Sharpton and his wife. She said no, she didn’t socialize with entertainers. She didn’t like to get involved with entertainers because they usually led such strange lives. I found out later the only one she’d ever dated before me was Elvis.
When I found out she was going to a cafe after the show, I went back to my hotel and called her there. I finally managed to talk her into coming over and having a late dinner with me and the Sharptons in the hotel dining room. She wouldn’t let me send the limousine to get her, though. She insisted on driving her own car over. We had a very friendly dinner, and then she went home.
A week later I called her again and invited her up to San Francisco. I let her know that Reverend Sharpton and his wife would be there, but by this time I think she could tell I was a gentleman. She came, and I took her to a city that I like—Sausalito—and we had dinner and talked some more. We danced through the streets afterward, and then she went back to her hotel. We dated right. I courted that lady.
After that I tried to fly her to meet me wherever I was performing, but she had to get right back to all the jobs she was doing for television shows. It got harder and harder to be separated, but I could see she had a good career going. She got a big offer from CBS, and it didn’t look like we had a future together, so I called her up one day and said that we should stop seeing each other. She locked herself up in her house for three weeks and just told everybody to leave her alone while she tried to figure out what was what. She’d just been through a divorce and then our breakup, and she had all these job offers. Finally, she called me and asked my advice about her offer to work on The Young and the Restless for CBS. She was going to keep the job she already had, too. I advised her not to try to do two jobs. She didn’t listen. She took the job.
A month and a half later, after she’d done two shows, I called her and she said, “I can’t take doing all this anymore.”
“I can’t take being away from you anymore,” I said.
“I can’t stay away from you either.”
That was what I was waiting to hear. I went to California for a week and flew her in to meet me after each of my shows around the state. She had to be back every morning, and we were both so tired that we barely had time enough or strength enough to say hello to each other. That was enough for a while, but then I couldn’t take that anymore, so I said, “I tell you what you do. If you love me, put your house up for sale and come be with me.” Three days later she sold everything inside her house and then sold the house itself four days after that, and she joined me on July Fourth. I think that surprised people who knew her because they’d always known her to be very solid and rooted where she was. She said, “I finally really love somebody. If it doesn’t work, so what? It’s worth the gamble.”
We found out we’re a lot alike. She’s got a lot of different bloodlines, like me. She’s Italian and Afro and Jewish and Hispanic. She could penetrate the so-called white world or the black world. My wife and I are Third World people, people who are part of all the human races. When I go to a wedding or funeral in her family, I see people of all colors, and I like that.
She was from a broken home, too, growing up in Watts without her parents. That helped us really understand each other. Most of all, she had already been in show business for a long time, even though she was very young. She was able to understand the kind of life I live, and she started working with me. And because she knew so much about makeup and hair, she was able to give me a more contemporary look. A lot of people don’t realize how important that is to somebody who’s a visual act, like me.
During the time I was courting my wife, John Belushi died of a drug overdose in a hotel room in Beverly Hills. It was a tragedy to me. John and Danny both had been very good to me, and I knew I was going to miss him. The last time I’d seen him was at Studio 54 when I was playing there. Keith Richards and John came backstage and sat around the dressing room talking with me. But John was well out of it that night, and I remember thinking I wish I could be with him more and talk to him and help him straighten out.
When I heard that Danny’s brother Peter and John’s wife Judy were planning a memorial at the Lone Star, I knew I had to go. Flying up on the plane, I thought for a long time about exactly what I was going to say, but when I got there I was so overwhelmed I couldn’t say any of it, so I let my performing speak for me. I thought John would have appreciated that.
I don’t think I saw Danny again until he came to see me at a club in Los Angeles. He was working on a movie project called Dr. Detroit that he wanted me to be in. I agreed right away. The next time I saw him was on the set. He was distraught about John’s death, very, very low. We talked about it, and I did my best to support Danny any way I could. I explained to him that I’d lost someone very dear to me when my son was killed but that you had to go on.
The more we talked about it, I think the better it was for him. He told me what he thought was bothering John in his last days—that show business was stressful anyway, that John had a lot of heavy pressures on him at the end and just tried to escape them through drugs. We talked for a long time about the viciousness of coke and drugs like that. I’d known a lot of people in the music business over the years that it had gotten to, and it was always sad, especially because it always seemed to get people so young.
Without his partner, Danny sounded like he was doubting his own future in the business, too. I said, “You’re very talented—you can write and act and do it all—and now you’re going to have to prove it all over again. People are going to wonder if you can do it without John. If you’re as strong as I think you are, you will.” I threw my arms around him and hugged him. I missed John, and I felt terrible for Danny. They really were like brothers. And they really did wind up with the blues.