RICK JAMES: SUPER FREAK OR SOCIAL CRITIC?

RICK JAMES: SUPER FREAK OR SOCIAL CRITIC?

RJ SMITH

A weird thing happened at a Rick James show I saw in Buffalo last year. Until the moment in question, the show was a typical (read: sleazy to the max) slick Rick arenafest, one that made the pursuit of groin and goods feel like humanity's obvious destiny.

But then. Some time after the Mary Jane goyls had flirted with the mikestands, and our protagonist had gotten down himself with a set of giant joints hauled onstage and, everywhere else, done his best to convince us of his kinky capacity—suddenly he put on a real serious look. Bringing out a local black politician running for office,

James urged the audience to get out and vote for "this close personal friend of mine."

You half-expected the campaigner to turn out to be another freaky prop, maybe for demonstrating with the MJ girls how to beat the bush for votes.

No go—this was for real. It showed how James was willing to use his superstardom to make himself into a politician, a spokesman for a race and class.

"Speak softly and carry a big stick" has always been James's motto, except that he doesn't speak softly: his phallocentrism has made him the man he is today. But pussy has hardly been the only thing James has been chasing since he started out. He wanted respect. And having gotten that with 1981 's Street Songs, he wants more.

What James wants at this point is influence, both with the music industry and his audience. It remains to be seen how far all the ambitions will take him, but his new album, Cold Blooded, looks like a campaign platform. On it, James get endorsements from Smokey Robinson, Billy Dee Williams, and captures the youth vote with an appearance by Grandmaster Flash. The disc culminates with a call for "Unity," and even sports on the inside sleeve a symbol of unity that smacks of massmarketing intentions ("wear the symbol if you dare/wear the symbol if you care/'bout unity").

There aren't any unity symbols on Buffalo's East Side, where James spent his first 15 years. More like racial epithets spray painted on brick walls, as one group of poor people wages gang warfare on another for the limited space they can afford to live on in this anorectic industrial town.

Born James Johnson in 1951, scarcely well-off though not in poverty, he made trouble for nearly everybody

he came into contact with. James was busted several times for stealing cars, and his mother sent him to several psychiatrists who unsuccessfully tried to calm this problem child down. Hanging out on the corner of East Ferry and Jefferson, in an indeed tough neighborhood, James sana Motown songs with his pals and schemed about getting O-U-T.

What James wants at this point is influence.

The ticket was a hitch with the U.S. Naval Reserve in 1967, leaving behind his mother's strong whip hand and Buffalo's gloom. Not unpredictably the Navy made its own demands on James's future, and it wasn't long before he thought once again about walking. He went AWOL when it seemed likely he would be heading for Viet Nam. James hung out for a while in Greenwich Village, eventually heading for Canada, where he started up a band.

The group covering his rent was a band called the Mynah Birds, which also consisted of Bruce Palmer, later of Buffalo Springfield, and a Toronto sportswriter's son named Neil Young.

"Neil and I got this little apartment and stayed together and wrote a lot of great songs together," James told a Rolling Stone interviewer last year.

"We were happy. Only thing I was worried about was...catching VD from all the chicks we were messing around with. We didn't worry about being rich."

James has previously claimed to have introduced Young to the electric guitar. No verification is available on this, or Young's reported claim that he taught James how to smartly wear a codpiece.

The Mynah Birds eventually went to Detroit, where they recorded an album for Motown. The label was enthused, but insisted that James first clear his record with the Navy. The result was that he turned himself in and spent most of a year in a federal prison in Connecticut.

Once out of the stir, James became a writer at Motown, hobnobbing with the label's top talents but finding limited success himself. He decided to travel for several years thereafter, visiting Europe and South America in the early '70s.

Upon returning to mother Betty Gladden's Buffalo house in 1976, he started working on his first album. Not surprisingly, Motown issued the record, Come And Get It, and it yielded a hit single, "You And I." "You And I" was the toughest song James was to record for several years; coming from a radio, it kicked in only like "Super Freak" was to do in 1981.

This was the mid-'70s, a directionless time for most of black pop. The period's ennui certainly infected James's subsequent releases. He was reportedly capable of terrific live shows, and frequently cleaned up at onstage Punk-Funk battles of the bands fought head-on with a spring chicken calling himself Prince. But on Bustin' Out Of L Seven and Fire It Up, the worst conventions of black radio pop dominate.

At best these records can be said to project a George Clintonian party-inprogress groove, but none of the players gets much chance to strike out on his own—it's always James's party, and he's not much of a host. The songs are supposed to be come-ons, but they end up more like nocturnal emissions— and frankly if the intention was heavyduty make-out music, the product had the power to scare you away from sex.

These records sold well. But James, staring too deeply into his mirror, next put out an album of overripe ballads, Garden Of Love. It stiffed terribly.

James liked the way he looked in spandex and leather too much to feel comfortable standing naked—and a loverman without a groove to his name had better have something more than narcissism to show. James didn't.

All of which made what came next on the order of a miracle. As James told an interviewer, "After Garden Of Love I thought I was through. Really. I idn † get into this business to number two.

"Everybody kept telling me I should go back to my roots. So I said fuck it, wrote about ghetto life and growing up, and decided to call the album Street Songs."

A miracle it was, because whatever their faults, those earlier albums were not timid—they strove mightily to put James across. There just wasn't enough of him apparent to make the effort seem like anything but egotism. But suddenly, the earlier releases looked like warm-ups for a record alternately politically pissed-off, remorseful, and largely laced with an individual lust.

The story was still one of a bigmouth who wanted to be a star. But, suddenly, he was making everybody care about it.

Even the cover of Street Songs was a departure: instead of earlier albums' man-for-all-seasons with a sock in his crotch, here James was leaning against a lamppost with his guitar, looking a little haggard, like just another person the night might steal. When he sang "one thing 'bout the ghetto/You don't have to worry/it'll be there tomorrow," the feeling cut deep, because he wasn't just reminiscing about some bad old days—he had in mind the bad old days,to come for people just like him.

The social-issues songs weren't great protest numbers; they weren't plans of action or permeating analysis. They mattered because they meant so much to James, who so obviously was stepping forward like never before. He was discovering how to be more honest just as he was finding a path to superstardom. And make no mistake, it had nothing to do with professionalism. It was the grit of the album, along with the most convincing smut of his career, that made Street Songs the biggestseller of his career.

Yes, the smut. "Super Freak" and "Give It To Me Baby" provided James with the best grooves of his career— and they made his horniness more specific and thus more interesting.

Critics will always be far more comfortable with somebody like Prince, because they can show how his horniness signifies away from itself; it stands in for power, or desire, or loneliness, or communication. But the unsettling fact of the sexy stuff on Street Songs is that it's all simply about how much James enjoys banging the box. These are great songs blatant in a way few great songs are.

The transformation apparent on Street Songs carried over into the shows of the time. James would make his stage entrance by way of "punching" out a roadie dressed up as a cop, thus garnering the audience's support in a second and taking off from there. His fans responded to him like never before, and obviously James was grooving on it. Discovering that by being a little more like yourself in public can make you a bigger star has got to be a gas.

That exhilaration has, to differing degrees, carried over to James's last two albums. 1982's Throwin' Down plundered the best of Street Songs a little too willfully, but it came through in the clutch. The same goes for the lyrics. "Shake your body all over me woman" is problematic—though I know what he means, what the hell is he saying?—but he puts it across with the confidence of the consummate smoothie. And on the record James shows he's learned how duration makes a good groove great, but can wreck a pretty good one.

"Speak softly and carry a big stick" has always been his motto.

The latest album, Cold Blooded, consolidates some more. His pah-tay tune, "New York Town," is so resolutely blowzy (like the Rick of old) that at first I didn't catch the bits about racist cabbies and Central Park muggers. James's license to be lewd should be revoked for the dopey "1,2,3, (U, Her And Me)," but elsewhere his filthy line is familiarly engaging.

Still, Cold Blooded is as larded with cameo appearances as a month of Best Of Corson reruns, and this is a bad thing. The Smokey Robinson duet is understandable at least, for if their voices are hardly compatible at least they are labelmates. But what is Billy Dee Williams doing on this record, other than making Barry White's love grunts sound like Shakespeare? And why does he get more space than Grandmaster Flash? This is an album full of goodwill gestures, and rarely have gestures dried up as fast.

Obviously James is a top-drawer star now, and he wants to work his appeal like never before. And so he's hawking unity—the name of the last Cold Blooded tune—a scam which has propped up a lot of dishonest preachers and power-hungry artists in the past. This may be cynical, sure. But somehow I just don't figure the types James has been rubbing elbows with— Vitas Gerulaitas, Linda Blair and Timothy Hutton all get thank you's on the jacket—long for unity with the likes of most of James's audience.

James made his best record, and secured his status, by revealing that he cared about a lot more stuff than he let on. But he hasn't pressed on from there—he's only institutionalized his concern, put the social commentary stuff in because the audience expects it. He's gone from caring about anything in particular to just being in love with...caring. If there isn't already a movie contract in the works for him, I think there may well be a job for James when Jerry Lewis gets too old to hiost his telethon. Both reached points in their careers when they wanted the world to know they were really men of taste just dabbling in the vulgar; both take a bath in their concern, wallowing in their satisfaction that they can still communicate because they feel bad about something. Won't you dig deep for Rick's kinky, freaky kids? Or can you walk away?