Dancing on the ceiling
The Lady who changed Lionel Richie's life
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 who packed into Seattle’s KeyArena late last year 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 only three months from his 69th 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 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, who 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 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 he’s the rare pop legend who transcends genre, race, even time, an icon capable of retaining his core audience while adding their kids.
‘‘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 you have to understand his home town of Tuskegee. Booker T. Washington founded the Tuskegee Normal School in 1881 and created a cultural oasis for a deeply intellectual, African-American middle class.
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.‘‘
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,
‘‘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.’’
Lenny Kravitz
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’.’’
When The Commodores, mainly made up of his buddies at the Tuskegee Institute, got started, Richie played saxophone and stayed clear of the mic. Then drummer Walter Orange heard him singing in the shower. He pushed him out front, an experience Richie remembers as awkward and uncomfortable.
Later, as the hits flowed, they would laugh about The Temptations and The Beatles, favourite bands that couldn’t seem to stay together. ‘‘And we said, ‘We’re never going to let that happen to us’,’’ says Richie.
‘‘We never fought,’’ says bassist Ron LaPread. ‘‘We called ourselves the Fabulous Freak Brothers. Anything goes. And if you did something that was funny, you can bet your bottom dollar that all of us brothers was going to laugh at you first.’’
The Commodores established a system designed to spread the wealth. If you wrote a song, you got a 51 per cent royalty cut, the other guys splitting the remaining 49. In a band packed with writers, song selection would be democratic, each of the six guys getting a vote.That worked until Richie emerged as a hit machine.
After his No 1 on Still, Richie pitched his next ballad, a fragment for which he had only the opening word – ‘‘lady’’ – and then the melody of the verse. The Commodores voted Lady down.
‘‘We had enough ballads,’’ Orange says today. ‘‘I wanted some up-tempo material like Earth, Wind and Fire and Kool & the Gang.’’
Country star Kenny Rogers had already approached Richie for songs. ‘‘I’ve made a life and a career out of finding songs that every man would like to say and every woman would like to hear and that’s what he writes best,’’ he says.
Lady spent six weeks at No 1 and Richie noticed what it was like not to lose 49 per cent of his publishing revenue.
‘‘The cheque was enormous, the popularity enormous, and I was no longer referred to as Commodore,’’ says Richie. ‘‘ ‘Who wrote that record?’ ‘A kid named Lionel Richie’.’’ He tried to bat down the rumours. ‘‘I’ll be a Commodore forever,’’ Richie told Dick Clark on American Bandstand in 1982. But he just couldn’t stay.
And the way Richie left remains a sore spot and also gets to the root of the only, real criticism you’ll hear about Richie. He’s too nice.
Richie concedes there are things he wishes both sides had done differently. He has two daughters, Nicole, 36, and Sofia, 19, and his son, Miles, 23. Twice divorced, Richie lives with his girlfriend, Lisa Parigi.
Saying no, he concedes, has always been hard.
‘‘Now, this is a town of the ‘F’ word, you know. ‘F’ everything,’’ he says. ‘‘I have managed to maintain my relationships without using that word. So, what happens with me is, I say, ‘Do you know what? I won’t be able to make that, but I will be able to do this’.’’
In a way, the toughest question is why Richie waited so long to launch a solo career. His self-titled solo debut, released in 1982, was almost mathematical in its precision, alternating between perfectly crafted ballads and midtempo pop songs. Commodores producer James Carmichael came along with him, overseeing an organic production with lush strings and seasoned studio musicians.
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’’. ‘‘What about the loan?’’ Lionel Sr asked.
‘‘Paid for, Dad.’’
‘‘Wow, what about the house?’’ ‘‘Paid for,’’ the son responded. ‘‘Hmmm.’’
‘‘You know what he did?’’ says Richie, pausing for dramatic effect. ‘‘Four days later, he created some new bills. I went back and said, ‘Why would you do that?’ He said, ‘Always remember, man has to worry and have something to do when he gets up in the morning. You just gave me nothing to do’.’’
The story of that box, ‘‘is me’’, says Richie. It is why, instead of gazing at the Grammys that sit in the oak cabinet inside his mansion, he is filming Idol until late at night and plotting out Vegas.
It is why he can’t quite let go of The Commodores, whose glorious, funk brotherhood soured when he walked away. He hopes to one day figure out a way to bring them together again, if only for a proper farewell.
The ‘‘all bills paid’’ story plops Richie in 1986, at the height of his artistic and financial powers.
In Seattle, Richie moves like a man who has never finished anything with a question mark. Other stars prepare for a gig alone, in a dressing room, sipping camomile.
Richie is working even before he walks into KeyArena. Out back, he huddles with the tour’s truck drivers to thank them and pose for photos.
Next, he hustles to a backstage meet with fans, hugging, laughing and nodding attentively even as his handlers nervously glance at the clock.
And Mariah. The diva has been opening the US shows, though Richie treats her like a headliner. As she finishes up Hero, he hustles to the side of the stage, with a rose, to lean over and whisper into Carey’s ear, ‘‘You killed it’’.
With that, he jogs back to his dressing room. The night is just beginning. – ❚ Lionel Richie’s All the Hits Tour will visit Auckland’s Spark Arena on April 12 and Christchurch’s Horncastle Arena on April 15. Richie is also a judge on the new season of American Idol, screening on Three at 7.30pm tomorrow.