Lionel Richie can't slow down, and we're all the richer for it
THE TOUR is called “All the Hits,” but Lionel Richie’s lying.
Six number ones. Twelve top 10s. A selection of “Fancy Dancer,” which peaked at 39. But all the hits? He would need to pull a Springsteen to have enough time to punch every one out. For now, the nearly 10,000 fans packed into Seattle’s KeyArena won’t hear “Still,” “Oh No,” “Ballerina Girl” or “Love Will Conquer All.”
They scream as Richie, trim and in black jeans, sits behind the piano to launch into his disco-era antidote, “Easy.” So what if he’s three months past his 68th birthday. The voice remains undiminished, and his surgically repaired knee, which delayed the start of this tour, looks game-ready as he glides along to “All Night Long.”
It is a huge arena, but the singer cosies up with his between-song banter, reminding the audience how long “we’ve” been together, (“when you fell in love, I fell in love”) and poking fun at the seductive power of his pop balladry.
“Tonight,” Richie says, “I was in the backstage area and a man came up to me. Maybe 250, 275pound man. Came up to me and he put his hand on my shoulder. He said, ‘Lionel, I’ve made love to you many times.’” The crowd howls. “And then it got worse. Because his wife or his girlfriend came up and said, ‘Oh, I was there.’”
Along with own hits, Richie delivers eight tracks by the Commodores, the group he helped form in 1968 and left, not so cleanly, in 1982. This is the only time Richie slips up, punctuating “Brick House” by calling for the audience to praise his band, whom he mistakenly calls “the Commodores.”
“Here’s what makes it so strange,” Richie explains later, after the concert. “There are moments in the show. Like tonight, you heard me accidentally say, ‘the Commodores,’ because, in my brain, with the lights in my face, I can’t tell you what year it is. And so if I just let my mind roam, it’s 1978, it’s 1982, it’s 1976.”
Where does the time go? Richie’s career has stretched across a half century, from breakfasts with Hank Mancini and Sammy Cahn to his impending judgeship with Katy Perry and Luke Bryan on the March reboot of “American Idol.”
Richie has coped with scandal and stage fright, health scares and changing fashions. And yet he is not just still here, he’s the rare pop legend who transcends genre, race, even time, an icon capable of retaining his core audience while adding their kids.
It’s no wonder he’s a member of the Kennedy Center Honours Class of 2017.
“Today when he plays at Glastonbury, for instance, and you’ll have this very hip crowd that’s into very hip things and then Lionel comes on and they lose their mind,” says Lenny Kravitz, a fan as a child who has become a friend. “That’s the power of his music.”
To understand Lionel Richie — his optimism, his aversion to conflict — you have to understand his home town of Tuskegee.
“Growing up in Tuskegee, we saw the best and the brightest,” says Milton Davis, a childhood friend of Richie’s who became an attorney. “You knew what segregation was, but you knew what it was to have an excellent education, an excellent upbringing, an excellent community environment.” Richie’s father, Lionel Sr., served in the military before working as a systems analyst. His mother, Alberta, taught at the local elementary school. “Did I ever see a white sheet growing up? No,” says Richie. “I judged a person by who they were as opposed to their skin colour. I was raised like that and I asked my Dad one day, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’” He said, ‘Because I didn’t want you to think there were limitations. If I told you the story about black and white, what comes with that story is that they think they’re superior. So I left that story out.’”
In those days, music was everywhere. The Stones, Patsy Cline and James Brown on the radio. Gospel from William Dawson’s choir at the Tuskegee Institute. And at home, Richie’s grandmother, Adelaide Foster, who played piano and taught Bach, Beethoven and Mozart.
“Three Times a Lady” is classical,” says Richie, of the song he wrote for the Commodores in 1978. “It’s a waltz. Where’d it come from? In the house. When I started writing I was going after Paul McCartney and Billy Joel. It didn’t dawn on me until we got there and started going that the man said, “Oh no, this song is too black.” In 1970, Suzanne de Passe, the Motown staffer who had signed the Jackson 5, agreed to let the Commodores audition for her. Forty-seven years later, she still remembers why she brought them to Berry Gordy. It was Richie’s turn on a Glen Campbell hit.
“I was completely blown away that he sang ‘Wichita Lineman,’” says de Passe. “It wasn’t that the other guys weren’t good and that they didn’t have their choreography together. It was that there was sort of a pop influence in this R&B cover band and I thought that was very special.”
In 1983, Richie got slicker, embracing more technology, with a GS-1 synthesiser slithering through the mix. “Can’t Slow Down” did even better, with five of the record’s eight songs landing in the top 10. At that moment, Richie was as popular as the icons he had encountered when he first came to Motown, mentioned in the same breath as Marvin, Stevie and Smokey. And it was with Michael Jackson that Richie wrote “We Are the World,” the charity single that found more than 40 singers, everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Tina Turner, trading lines in a packed studio.
Success came at a cost. Richie’s marriage, to his college sweetheart, Brenda, had begun to collapse. His father got sick. After his third album, 1986’s “Dancing on the Ceiling,” hit No. 1, Richie headed back to Tuskegee to take care of him. It would be another six years before he released another album.
But it would be a lesson from Lionel Sr., in part, that helped him get back.
One Christmas, the son handed the father a box holding a tiny piece of paper. “All bills paid,” it read.
By now, Richie’s six-pack of No. 1 hits found him earning close to US$40 million a year.
Hence, “all bills paid.”
Today when he plays at Glastonbury, for instance, and you’ll have this very hip crowd that’s into very hip things and then Lionel comes on and they lose their mind. That’s the power of his music. Lenny Kravitz, musician