TEENA MARIE: Lovegirl! On Parade!

TEENA MARIE: Lovegirl! On Parade!

by

Laura Fissinger

FEATURES

For all the extremely pleasurable flesh pleasures in her music, Teena Marie is devoutly religious. Up until 1985, she probably drew a lot of comfort from the fact that the Lord tends to taketh away every time he giveth. He’d sho’nuff given her plenty: psychic powers; a gospel/ soul/jazz singing voice with more depth than the Grand Canyon; songwriting skills with incredible range; instrumental prowess on keyboards, bass, percussion and almost anything else she cared to try; a sense of groove that could move James Brown; and an eminently lovable personality to boot. The down side was almost as formidable—Teena Marie was a tiny white female that did big black boys’ music. For five albums of good-to-great bigblackboys’ music, she watched while people with half the talent walked away with twice the record sales, media attention and general respect.

Apparently the Man upstairs finally decided that Teena had paid enough for all her goodies. As we go to press, Teena Marie’s sixth LP, Starchild, is in the pop Top 40 and holding fast; the single, “Lovergirl,” is number four with a bullet, and the follow-up, “Jammin’,” is waiting to grab the baton and keep running the race. The hoity-toity New York Times has done a story on her, and other major publications are starting to follow suit. And now here’s us Boy Howdies, without suits, of course, but following all the same. Siddown and get comfortable, sports fans. We’ve got a lot of catching up to do.

Teena’s real name is Mary Christine Brockett; she grew up in a Catholic family of French, Portuguese and Italian extraction, in a house on the edge of that infamous outdoor insane asylum known as Venice, California. Even more than the rest of the L.A. area, that particular seaside nook is known for its crazed artists, crazed non-artists, roller-skating bonzos, and just about every other kind of unhinged door that the aforementioned God bothered to create.

Mary Christine was not exactly Joe Normal herself.

On a spookily regular basis she had dreams that predicted future events, as well as dreams that contained full poems and songs. Then there was her obsession with music. The Beatles and Stones were soaked up from the radio and from her brother’s record collection. Marvin Gaye was an omnipresent sound from the nearby streets of a black neighborhood. Sarah Vaughan became such an idol that Mary Christine tookk'Sarah” as her confirmation name. Her sisters were into Motown and played it endlessly around the house.

As for the folks, they were heavily into Broadway musical soundtracks; they had Mary C. singing tunes by the likes of Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hammerstein before she was into double digit birthdays. Matter of fact, Teena’s first pro gig came at the tender age of eight, fronting an L.A. jazz “big band.”

The first band of her own came five years later, with the rock ’n’ roll brother on board. But the R&B groove could not be denied. It was just in there, and in the dreams, too. just there, So Teena hit the grind of the L.A. bar band circuit long before she graduated from high school, jobbing around singing R&B hits by big cheeses like Rufus. Teena endured gladly—after all, how else was she gonna get the chops that would let her become the first big white female act on Motown Records?

Just in case that dream didn’t come true, though, Teena hauled her five-song demo tape around to all the major labels that would let her through the front door. Who knows what some of the big guys must have thought when confronted with this petite, blonde, white college freshman, who wrote jazzy, steamy soul music and played all the instruments herself? Thankfully, the folks at Motown thought it was just fine. Teena’s debut album, Wild And Peaceful, came out on Motown when Teena was barely out of her teens. Shades of Prince, yeah?

Motown is not exactly known for giving its artists a whole lot of control over their product—none other than Michael Jackson is said to have left Motown for that very reason. But the bosses let Teena coproduce her second LP, Lady T, and soloproduce the third and fourth. Some crucial exposure came via the tutelage of punk-funk king and labelmate Rick James, who played on some of her discs, let her sing on some of his, and took her along as an opening act on a few of his tours. On some of those dates, up to 20,000 fans got a chance to see this little white woman who could burn buildings down with the best of the soul music greats. And an even bigger audience got a chance to hear her pyrotechnics in a duet with Rick James on what might be the greatest make-out song of all time, “Fire and Desire” (from James’s hit LP Street Songs).

All things considered, the career was going OK. Tunes like “Deja Vu,” “Young Love” and “Behind The Groove” made respectable appearances on the soul charts, and a 1981 ass-kicker called “Square Biz” made it to the pop charts’ Top 20. Then again, it wasn’t so OK that black audiences couldn’t quite ignore the fact that she was white, and that white audiences mostly ignored her, period. The color barriers caught her right in the middle and kept her stuck in the crack; solid success eluded her.

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1981’s It Must Be Magic held out some hope—thanks in part to “Square Biz,” it sold over 800,000 copies. But by this time, there were hassles with Motown; a lot of the money she was earning was not finding its way to her bank account. Teena wanted her money, and she wanted to leave Motown. After a very long do-si-do in and out of courtrooms, Motown coughed up the dough and let her go. Like Michael Jackson, Teena ended up at Epic.

It didn’t happen right off at Epic either, like both Teena and the label had hoped. The Epic debut, Robbery, was her most complicated piece of work yet, full of jazz scat singing, strings, intricate arrangements, dense lyrical imagery and all sorts of sophistication that seemed to go right past audiences, black and white. The album did end up selling somewhere around 200,000 copies, but for a woman who so obviously deserved to be a superstar, that just didn’t seem like enough. Here was this incredible music, full of spiritual fever, dance-floor demolitions, great singing and all the rest, and it wasn’t even going gold, for chrissakes. Insiders were discouraged. Racism and sexism were obviously still figuring in; as Teena herself says, “those things run real deep.”

Teena thinks maybe the barrier-breaking of artists like Prince and Michael Jackson helped pave the way; she also thinks that Epic simply fought hard enough to get past the “isms.” Whatever the reasons, “Lovergirl” and Starchild started to happen from the moment of their release. At that point (the Lord taketh one more time) Teena caught pneumonia and stayed in bed for two weeks; the minute she could haul herself out of the sack, Epic flew her out to NYC for a day of interviews and a big-wig star-stuffed party at the ultrahip New York club, Area.

You probably can’t tell from this piece, but CREEM got 45 minutes with Teena that day. Among other neat stuff, she talked about spirituality; her production and songwriting work forthcoming with Patti LaBelle and Nancy Wilson; Sly & The Family Stone; her 1985 tour; videos; the time she walked right off the front of a stage because a song was taking her to the outer limits; the flow of life’s energy; Janis Joplin; past lives (one of hers was as a black woman), and more. Lots more.

But, see, we can’t get into all that here, because her basic life story had to be told. This story was remedial Teena Marie because the hits that would have prompted curiosity about her arrived about, oh, five or six years late. Well, they’re coming now, and for someone with the gifts of Teena Marie, late is infinitely better than never. Then again, Teena is smart enough to see that, on the Lord’s ledger sheet, she already giveth a whole lot.

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