Shownotes Transcript
Double Elvis. Double Elvis. About a Girl is a production of iHeartRadio and Double Elvis. Let me tell you about Rick James, a legendary performer who dragged a pack of Buffalo musicians to Los Angeles and changed the sound of funk forever. He may have saved Motown records in the process. On the mic and behind the soundboard, Rick was an innovator and a pioneer, but his voracious appetites led to one of the most horrifying downfalls in music history.
But this is not about Rick James. This is about Tina Marie, otherwise known as Lady T or the Ivory Queen of Soul, Rick's protege, paramour, and partner. She was a dominant artist of the disco era, whose bracing soprano resonated with Black audiences like few white performers before or since.
A singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer, Tina carved out a singular path through the record industry, and her legal battle for artistic freedom cleared the way for other artists to do the same. This story is about a girl.
As the girl walked up and down the Sunset Strip, her guitar slung over her shoulder like a wandering musical Ronin. She looked wistfully at a particular building on the corner of Hollywood and Vine. She didn't lack confidence. She rode the bus downtown from Venice that morning, just like she had several other mornings, convinced she had a destiny to fulfill. But this building was where her heroes were.
Like Smokey Robinson, her all-time favorite. She knew every one of his songs by heart.
As the sun climbed, rejections weighing her down along with the guitar, she saw she had no choice but to try her luck at Motown Records' new West Coast home. In the 1960s, Motown was a machine. In the Detroit studios of Hitsville, USA, work-for-hire songwriters churned out material, passed it off to an unstoppable house band, and then slapped some vocals on it. But as the final embers of the 60s fizzled, the music industry changed.
Motown founder Barry Gordy's Hit Factory was looking for a new identity. In 1972, the label pulled out of Detroit and moved its offices and studios to LA. It was a big shakeup, and the new studio was finding its feet out west. Diana Ross and the Jackson 5, artists still willing to do things the old way, were reliable sellers. But Motown needed to find their next new thing. The next big thing.
Into the Motown studio at Hollywood & Vine, demo tape in hand, walked a 19-year-old white girl by the name of Tina Marie. Born Mary Christine Brockert, Tina Marie grew up in Oakwood, a historically black section of Los Angeles' Venice neighborhood. She regularly made the trip downtown with demo tapes of the rock band she fronted.
One landed in the hands of Hal Davis, a producer at Motown who was helping the label expand into disco with hits like Diana Ross's "Love Hangover." Davis passed the demo on to Barry Gordy. He didn't care for the band, but Gordy approached making records with the same mentality as the car manufacturers in his hometown. Hits were assembled from parts, and it was all a matter of putting the pieces together in the right vehicle. Tina's voice could be big.
He signed her to a solo contract. Unfortunately for Tina, the contract was as far as it went. For two years, Motown tried to find musicians for Tina to record with. Nothing seemed to fit. Gordy even tried pairing her with his own sons in a band called Apollo. The recording sessions were a disaster. The all-male backing band swapped out Tina's lyrics for sexually explicit material, crooning lewd remarks in their background vocals.
As the only woman in the room, Tina couldn't help but assume the remarks were aimed at her. She excused herself to use the restroom, got in her car, and drove back to Oakwood, where she phoned her manager and said, "You've got to get me out of that band."
That's when Rick James stepped in. Rick had first signed to Motown in 1964 with a band called the Mina Birds. Based out of Toronto, the Mina Birds included a couple of future members of Buffalo Springfield, including Neil Young. Rick was from Buffalo, New York, but was in Canada, hiding out under an assumed name to avoid the draft. The band's former manager ratted him out after a financial dispute, and Rick eventually surrendered to the FBI.
He ended up in the Navy brig and lost his record deal. He escaped the brig, then surrendered a second time and served five months. After he finally got out, he did some writing and producing for Motown under the name Ricky Matthews, then moved to LA where his former bandmates were hitting it big. Rick couldn't find a spark though. He moved back to Buffalo and put together the Stone City Band, a group of local musicians who could out-funk George Clinton's Parliament.
When he first brought them to LA to look for a record deal, Motown was the last place he wanted to be. They were the past and Rick's raw sound was the future.
But while his raunchy lyrics left other LA record execs cold and confused, Berry Gordy still saw Rick's full potential, not just as a singer, but as a songwriter and producer. The recordings of Rick's first album, "Come Get It," circulated through the Motown offices in anticipation of the album's release.
The label knew it had gold on its hands, and even before the album dropped, Motown was trying to get into the Rick James business as much as they could. Berry Gordy told Rick there was a singer he wanted Rick to work with, someone they were struggling to find the right sound for. Out in the hallway, two women, one white, one black, walked towards Rick and Berry.
"Here she comes now," said Gordy. Rick introduced himself to the black woman, and Gordy corrected him. "No," he said, pointing to the other woman. "This is Tina." Rick decided to pass. He wanted to focus on his own stuff. He had missed out on success in the '60s, and now his moment had arrived. But the next day, he walked into the studio where Tina was recording yet another failed attempt to spark fire. He stood outside and really listened to her. He strode down the hall to bury Gordy's office.
"I'm gonna do something with that girl of yours," he said. "That little white girl." For Tina's first album, "Wild and Peaceful," Rick did it all. He wrote most of the songs, except for a "Temptations" cover and one song penned by Tina. He wrote the arrangements and played many of the instruments. He duetted with Tina on the album opener and its first single, "I'm a Sucker for Your Love," but he also showed Tina the ropes.
She sat next to him in the booth as he produced and mixed the record. She saw how he got the sound he wanted out of musicians and how, when it came to selling records, he got what he wanted from their label. Despite Rick's well-known reputation as a womanizer, his relationship with Tina during those sessions was more like a big brother and mentor. Tina Marie took notes, not just on how to craft a hit record, but on Rick's behavior.
He was creating a persona for himself that lined up with the sexually explicit content of his own songs, but he was a little too convincing playing the role of the player. "Wild and Peaceful" was released in 1979 without Tina's picture anywhere on it. Berry Gordy wanted audiences to hear Tina before they saw her. Assumptions were made. A girl with a voice like that putting out a record on Motown had to be Black.
The album had been out six months before Tina Marie made her television debut, appearing on the black showcase of the 70s, Soul Train. In between ads for the show's sponsor, Afrosheen, Tina and Rick performed "I'm a Sucker for Your Love," with Tina rocking a purple sequined suit and Rick in an outfit that might have come from the closets of David Bowie or Kiss.
Audiences gasped to hear that big voice coming out of that little white girl, to see her holding her own next to Rick James, the inventor of punk funk, whose own debut album had gone gold on the backs of singles like "You and I" and the not-so-subtle, drug-referencing "Mary Jane." In the interview after their performance, Tina hung off Rick's shoulder, catching her breath,
Don Cornelius, Soul Train's host and the picture of Laid Back Cool, asked her, "What's your background, Tina?" "Well, I was raised in Venice," she said, raising a fist toward the mostly Black crowd as she name-dropped the Black LA neighborhood she hailed from. The audience broke into applause. Tina was one of their own. The beginning of the 1980s sounded a lot like the 1970s, and that suited Rick James and Tina Marie just fine.
In music, every decade has a sort of hangover. Call it three years, disco and funk continued to dominate the charts, and Rick and Tina continued to ride that wave. They were no longer artistic collaborators. Tina had been handed over to another producer for her sophomore record, and then took the reins herself with her third album, 1980's "Irons in the Fire,"
Stop a second and think about that. In 1980, a 24-year-old white woman produced her own album at Motown Records. And it wasn't an empty credit. Tina had creative control, hiring the band herself. "Come make this record with me and you'll have a job for life," she told the musicians she recruited. It wasn't just hot air. The band that played on "Irons in the Fire" became Tina's backing band for the rest of her life.
Although they weren't working together, Rick and Tina remained friends. But it didn't go any further than that. Tina had seen Rick in action. The drugs flowed freely, with cocaine replacing Mary Jane as Rick's main thing. He had a new girl coming in the minute the last one left the room. Knowing what Rick was about should have guaranteed Tina immunity to his charm. It didn't. Tina sat in on Rick's rehearsals with his Stone City band.
Rick was meticulous when it came to production, but the song started as Living Things, formed in collaboration with the band. They were trying out a new song, Love Gun, when Tina's whole world screeched to a halt. As Rick crooned, Tina turned to her best friend, who was seated next to her. "I'm in love with him," Tina said, in hypnotized shock. "With Rick?" her friend asked incredulously. Tina nodded, hardly believing it herself.
Bang bang. The year that followed was wild. Tina and Rick recorded albums that would be their biggest hits to date. Tina Marie made "It Must Be Magic" and Rick James made "Street Songs." They recorded a duet that became their signature tune, "Fire and Desire." That track ended up on Rick's album, which meant the bulk of the money went to him. "Street Songs" came out in April of 1981 and contained his massive hit "Super Freak," while Tina's record dropped the next month.
Soon they were sitting at numbers 1 and 2 on the R&B charts, with Rick on top. The relationship quickly fell apart, for the reasons you might expect. Tina held out hope that Rick would treat her differently than he had those other girls. But it wasn't in his nature. He'd become inseparable from the oversexed persona he created in his music and on stage. His cocaine habit didn't help things.
Rick and Tina were together for a year. She sometimes claimed they were engaged, maybe even married for two weeks in there somewhere, but that's likely an exaggeration. Their constant fighting came to a head the day they were set to go on tour together. It was dubbed the Streets Tour, with Rick headlining over Tina, but it was personal rather than professional jealousy that brought Tina to end it. After chasing one last girl away from Rick, she told him they were through.
They fought about it, but her mind was made up. Their tumultuous dynamics came through on stage. Audiences who watched the pair perform Fire and Desire were convinced they were a couple. You couldn't sing like that to someone you weren't in love with. Motown leaned into the public's curiosity. The publicity around the streets tour played up the romantic and sexual vibes between Rick and Tina, teasing the are they or aren't they question. Even though the folks in Motown knew things were over between them.
What looked like love to the audience was grating on Tina, literally. Rick wore glitter in his hair on stage, but glitter in those days wasn't a kid's safe craft supply. Rick decorated his hair with flecks of ground glass that sparkled in the stage lights. But when he shook out his hair in one of those signature Jagger-esque moves, tiny shards of glass fluttered out,
They coated the stage and clung to the sweat-soaked skin of Tina's bare arms and shoulders. As Rick rubbed up on Tina, running his hands all over her as they sang, the ground glass scraped and scratched at her skin, drawing thin trickles of blood that got diluted by the sheen of sweat, the pale red drowned out by the pink glare of the lights. With Rick headlining the tour, there were cities where promoters weren't willing to splurge on the double bill.
So Tina hung around whatever city they'd just played and would join up again the following night. Rick was solo on a bill in Houston and the day of the show he called Tina and suggested she come down and watch. It turned out Rick made a side deal with the promoter to pay out extra if Tina appeared on stage. Rick called her out of the audience so they could do "Fire and Desire" and then he pocketed the extra cash. Tina came back from the tour exhausted and disenchanted.
Her record was huge, but she wasn't seeing much money from it. She certainly wasn't seeing the kind of money Rick got for his album, which hovered just a notch above hers in the charts. Rick demanded all the label's attention, which meant the bulk of his marketing budget as well. Tina felt that Motown wasn't supporting her, and Rick reinforced the idea. He told her Motown was in the Rick James business, and she'd be better off elsewhere. It wasn't mean-spirited. It was sincere advice.
even if it happened to also be condescending and self-serving. Tina had a long-standing friendship with Berry Gordy. Smokey Robinson was then Motown's vice president and still Tina's absolute idol. But it wasn't enough to keep her on the label, which just didn't feel like home anymore. Tina was ready to take advice from Smokey's mama and shop around. Word was out around LA that Tina wasn't happy at Motown.
The rumors never reached Barry Gordy, who thought of Tina as family and might have set things right if he knew she had an issue. But it did reach the ears of rival labels, and they came sniffing around. An exec at Epic Records drove to Englewood, where Tina was living, to pay her a personal visit. He didn't have Tina's address, but everybody in the neighborhood knew her.
They pointed him to the little one-bedroom apartment where Tina, a Motown recording artist who had just racked up two gold records in three years, lived. An exec from a rival label shouldn't have been surprised to find the star in modest circumstances. He wasn't directly responsible for her situation, but he was part of the system that kept money from finding its way to the artist who earned it.
Labels signed artists, and the enticement they offered was an advance against sales. A lump sum number that sounded dizzying to a 19-year-old schlepping up and down Sunset with the guitar strapped to her back. But everything came out of that lump sum. Renting studio time, paying the studio musicians, the money to market and publicize the album. In the 70s, it wasn't unheard of for even cocaine to be a line item on the ledger.
The studio set the budget and set the prices. They rented out their own studios to themselves, hired their own staff musicians. All this came out of the artist's share before the artist saw a dime. The album would have to sell enough to pay back all of these upfront costs and the label's percentage. Well, the artist didn't earn anything, and the shortfall rolled over to the next album. Rinse and repeat. The artist started out in the red, locked into the contract.
Even if there was no next album, the artist still owed that money to the label. Tina Marie had a chart-topping album, an album that glittered with her attention to detail in its production. But the album hadn't been cheap to make or to market. There were touring costs and payola payouts to radio stations. Promo copies floated to prominent DJs at Studio 54 in the Paradise Garage. Once those accounts were settled, the check in Tina's pocket barely covered rent.
Epic Records made Tina an offer she couldn't refuse, so she signed to the label. Motown immediately slapped her with a breach of contract suit. Tina might have been friends with Berry Gordy, but Motown's lawyers didn't have any friends. They had clients, and their client was not about to let a star artist go without a fight. This state of record contracts was nothing new, and long ago, the state of California had taken notice.
There was a statute on the books that record companies had to pay artists in their stables or retainer. It was a pittance. $6,000 a year. It was an obscure law most artists didn't know about, and it was such a minor amount most labels never bothered paying it. Motown Records, for instance. When Tina got sued by Motown, she lawyered up. It wasn't long before her legal team fired off a countersuit. Motown, not Tina, was in breach of contract.
They never paid her the amount required under state law. Therefore, that contract had been void before Tina signed with a rival label. Motown had no claim on her. Tina won the case, which led to a law called the Brockert Initiative. After Tina's real last name, the new law said a label couldn't bind an artist to their contract while refusing to release their records.
Tom Petty, Luther Vandross, and the Mary Jane Girls, an 80s girl pop band put together by Rick James, would all use Tina's case to find more welcoming deals at crucial points of their careers. On the books, it's the Brockert Initiative, but most people call it the Tina Marie Bill.
Out from under the shadows of Motown, Tina started the second phase of her career at Epic Records. Her first album fizzled, but with her second album, 1984's Starchild, she saw her first and only major breakthrough to white pop audiences. Written and produced by Tina, Lover Girl was the song white audiences wanted at the moment they wanted it.
It was very much in the mode of Madonna, who blew up with her debut the year before, causing labels to scurry off to find the next Madonna. Tina sounded like a viable candidate. "Lover Girl" was an outlier on the album, which tended more to Tina's comfort zone of R&B, but its pop edge cut her a new place on the Billboard charts and on MTV, where the video was in regular rotation.
Unfortunately for Tina and Epic Records, the rest of the album wasn't deemed worthy of MTV airplay. The music video channel was becoming a force in the industry and had already been met with charges of racial bias when it came to whose videos they chose to play. Black artists and labels like Motown blew their budgets making videos that MTV quietly rejected. And called on it, MTV dodged, saying they were primarily a channel for quote unquote "rock music."
A way of not saying they were primarily for white music and white audiences. One of the loudest voices talking about racism in MTV's cherry picking of artists was Rick James. News outlets and industry magazines ran interviews with Rick where he put the word out straight. MTV discriminated against Black artists. The outcry was enough that MTV was forced to add more Black artists to rotation. But they didn't add Rick James.
The price for speaking out was a soft ban on his videos, and Rick spent the 80s watching Prince and Michael Jackson get the airplay he'd argued for while his own career lagged. Tina's position was, as usual, unique. She was a white artist, but her music was indelibly black. MTV, racist without making it about race, didn't play the kind of R&B Tina performed.
She was a regular on Soul Train, whose viewership was flagging in the face of MTV's 24-hour onslaught. But her videos got passed over and her chart position slipped until ultimately she was dropped from Epic Records in 1990. The timing suited Tina, who became a new mom with the birth of her daughter in 1991. Tina was a devoted mother but struggled financially.
The terms of her deal with Epic were more favorable than they'd been at Motown, but she never replicated the sales of her late 70s and early 80s albums. She scraped together money to self-finance an album in an era before crowdfunding, but without the backing of a label, the album came and went without a ripple. Her music still made waves, though.
As hip-hop became a dominant genre in the industry, samples of Tina Marie hits found their way into tons of songs. The Fugees, MF Doom, and Three 6 Mafia, among others, baked Tina's music into hip-hop's essential DNA. While it didn't help her finances, Tina was thrilled to see her music reaching a new audience.
Rick was less than thrilled when he heard the intro to "Super Freak" blearing out of radios, only to be interrupted by MC Hammer ordering the bass line to stop. With "You Can't Touch This," Rick James' music finally made it into MTV, and Rick James was pissed. Getting sampled without permission wasn't the worst thing that happened to Rick James in the 90s. While Tina Marie settled into a quiet life of motherhood in Los Angeles,
Rick James was arrested for kidnapping, assault with a deadly weapon, and torture. He faced the possibility of life in prison. While out on bail for those charges, he and his girlfriend assaulted and kidnapped another woman. Rick was convicted of some charges, but dodged the torture charge that would have put him away for life. He served two years of a five-year sentence. Rick struggled to put his life together after prison, but Tina was ready to stage her big comeback.
She signed with Cash Money Records, a hip-hop label that was home to acts like Lil Wayne and Juvenile. Her comeback album featured guest appearances by Common, MC Lyte, Tina's own daughter, and yes, Rick James. It shot up the Billboard charts, topping out at number three on the R&B chart and number six on the Billboard 200. Tina's highest ever spot on the charts.
She was on the rise and ready to help out a friend who was struggling with his demons. In the 2000s, Tina Marie's career was back on track. She put out two albums on Cash Money Records and another on Stax, the legendary soul label second only to Motown in shaping the sound of Black music in the middle of the 20th century. She collaborated with her idol, Smokey Robinson, and with Faith Evans, who Tina said reminded her of herself.
Not just in vocal style, but in the way Faith's relationship and career association with Biggie Smalls, aka the Notorious Big, paralleled Tina's ties to Rick James. As for Rick, he was out of prison, but was having trouble staying clean. He was in and out of rehab through the early 2000s, largely forgotten by the music industry, until a sketch on the Dave Chappelle Show
in which Rick appeared as himself and Chappelle played a young version of him, brought him back into the spotlight, even if that light was a little skewed. Tina and Rick accepted an invitation to perform a surprise reunion at the BET Awards in 2004. Rick was clean at the time, but his old habits were taking their toll. The two argued in the green room, but it was an empty fight.
They were performing characters from a play the curtain had dropped on. During the show, Rick stood up from his seat and launched into the duo's biggest hit, Fire and Desire, a track that had landed on Rick's album and not Tina's, a track that brought in more money for him than her, even though they both, in a sense, owned it.
His voice was rough and breathy, more berry white than the bright baritone that topped the charts with the Stone City band. But when she got out of her seat and joined him, Tina Marie's voice lifted Rick's. The flame between them had a little heat, and the crowd went wild when they heard a song they knew by heart. Backstage after the show, Tina and Rick schmoozed arm in arm. Someone slapped Rick on the shoulder and said he was looking good.
"That's because Tina keeps me together," he said. Two months later, Rick James was found dead at home. A cocktail of drugs in his system precipitated a fatal heart attack at the age of 56. But this isn't about him. This is about Tina Marie, a white girl from Venice, Harlem, who found a place for herself in Black music through the strength of her voice, her authenticity, and her uncompromising vision.
who was practically unknown to white audiences, but beloved by Black audiences, and who became an unlikely hero in the fight to free artists from the oppressive thumb of their labels. This is about a girl.
About a Girl is executive produced by Jake Brennan and Brady Sadler for Double Elvis. Scott Janovitz is the show's producer. It was created by Eleanor Wells and hosted by me, Nikki Lynette. This episode was written by Bob Proll. For sources used and more information, go to aboutagirlpod.com. The music is composed by Scott Janovitz and Matt Tahaney. Additional music and score elements by Ryan Spraker.
The show is on Instagram at aboutagirlpod. And you can follow me on Instagram and Twitter at NikkiLamette.