City Kid (24 page)

Because of his understanding of black music and politics, Mtume was an ideal person to bounce ideas off of on the phone, as I paced my big living room at 19 Willoughy. Equally important, Mtume introduced me to Harold Cruse's
The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual
, a blazingly brilliant analysis of the challenges, and compromises, that bedeviled the best and the brightest of our race. Cruse's book became the template for
The Death of Rhythm and Blues
, its structure showing me how to mold my own argument. It was setting the bar high to even try to follow Cruse's lead, but the only way to be even slightly good is to aspire to greatness.

The other crucial bit of info that helped me came at a black music conference in, I believe, Atlanta. Two of the music's great old promotion men, Joe Medlin and Dave Clark, men with careers that dated back to the Depression, sat me down in the hotel lobby one afternoon and schooled me on the existence of the “Harvard Report.” Joe, a large film noir character, was an intimidating man who loved fedoras and cigars, and had a voice as raw as sandpaper, and Dave, a wiry dandy who at sixty was rocking leather pants and Bally loafers, and would one day marry a woman thirty years his junior, told me about a notorious report CBS Records had commissioned around 1970 on how to penetrate the black music market.

Sounded like the tangible example I needed to illustrate my overall argument about how the culture had been altered in the seventies. Problem was, neither man had a copy. Like clockwork Joyce McCrae, a white woman who'd worked for years with Jackie Wilson, and who'd been an intimate of the Jackson family, sat down. Somewhere in her house she had a copy. After lots of follow-up phone calls, I received a photocopied version of the report in the mail, and immediately, it became my book's Rosetta Stone. Completed at the dawn of the seventies, the “Harvard Report” was a very detailed plan for how a major corporate-financed record company could invest in new labels, recruit black executive talent, and increase its overall market share via R&B/soul artists.

Though it was written some fifteen years before I acquired it, I recognized its DNA in the actions of CBS, Warner Bros., RCA, and every other major label. In retrospect, the “Harvard Report” was more a commonsense business strategy than a plan to re-create black culture. Still, its existence gave my narrative a clear demarcation line, a before-and-after snapshot of the R&B world. As happened so often during my years as a music journalist, listening to the wise old men of R&B showed me a path forward.

Inside 19 Willoughby, I grinded on that book, giving myself a goal of writing seven pages a night no matter how long it took. Quincy Jones had told me a few years earlier about “ass power” and now it was my turn to flex. With the aid of my editors,
The Death of Rhythm and Blues
grew coherent.

On its release in 1988,
The Death of Rhythm and Blues
received prominent reviews in the
New York Times
, the
Boston Globe
, and other major publications. I won some awards, and was nominated for others. Most important, it was a project that made the leap from bold idea to well-argued book, from critical formulation to a real work of history. The creative struggles of the early writing taught me valuable lessons, the most important of which was the necessity of a strong theme, an animating idea that drives the narrative, informing everything, from title to chapter, even to digressions. To me, theme—whether it's a novel, screenplay, or nonfiction narrative—determines what gets left in and what gets taken out. It's not an exact science, of course, but once you have that theme, it's so much easier to separate the forest from the trees.

I also now understood that artistic failure was an essential and educational aspect of doing great work. In a culture that craves quick results, mistakes, bad decisions, and awkward execution are paths to clarity. So many people get frustrated and stop working when confronted by failed attempts at art. You have to forgive yourself for the mess you made and, like a child, pick up your blocks and stack them up again. If you can ultimately understand why you went wrong, the correct path will reveal itself. Self-criticism in the middle of creating something can be an artistic dead end. You've got to stay open to accidents and to your subconscious, 'cause it'll tell you what you need to know.

And after the agony comes the fun. I had an amazing party for that book in the summer of '88. It was a humid summer afternoon, and all my windows were open in search of an elusive breeze, as the upstairs and then the backyard filled with friends from many worlds. The late Jack “the Rapper” Gibson, a legendary black radio personality, was profiled in the book, and he flew up from Atlanta. Debra Crable, the doe-eyed, gorgeous host of the syndicated
Ebony Jet Showcase
, rolled in from Chicago. Model Veronica Webb and a bevy of beauties came through. So did Broadway diva Melba Moore, and my pal Russell Simmons, who complained all day about the cracks in Brooklyn's sidewalks, and wondered why I still lived in the ghetto.

Those are just the names I remember off the top of my head. My memory was overwhelmed by the variety of folks who ate and drank in my backyard and living room, and on my front steps. At one point I went outside and found Russell and Melba Moore on my stoop talking, a more unlikely duo it's hard to imagine. When my mother, my sister, and my then eight-year-old niece, Ebony, arrived, the circle was complete. It wasn't a dance party like Ma's Saturday night throw-downs, but it was as close as I'll ever come. It took me weeks to get the toilet working right again after the heavy use. The energy of all those amazing people in my space lingered in 19 Willoughby for months afterward. I've always felt that there was something magical about that gathering that propelled
The Death of Rhythm and Blues
into the world, and has given it a long, successful life.

Fort Greene Park was just down the block from me, so I was still running a bit to stay fit and centered. I'd tackle those steps that you see at the end of
She's Gotta Have It
, and then run up and down the hills by the tennis courts. But most of my searches for transcendence during this period of my life were behind my primitive PC and at my stereo. For the first time in my life I had a place all to myself. Aside from listening to music professionally, to write reviews or prepare for interviews, I could play particular songs as often as I wanted, a dream come true for a kid who'd lived with family and roommates my whole life. I'd play certain records seven, eight, or nine times in a row, getting lost in them with no intention of finding my way home. CDs were just coming on the market, so most of the time it was me moving the needle back on a 45 or 12-inch single, or carefully landing on the right groove on an album.

Certain records still send me on a reverie: Aretha Franklin's “Call Me”; Led Zep's “Trampled Underfoot”; Womack & Womack's “Baby, I'm Scared of You”; Miles's
Sketches of Spain
; LL Cool J's “Jack the Ripper.” And, perhaps most of all, anything sung by Anita Baker, starting with her first hit, “Angel.” These days Anita's no longer in fashion. Two generations of soul sirens have come and gone since she first appeared. Plus, she took a long hiatus in the nineties to raise kids, which has diluted her appeal, but for me she once conjured dreamscapes like no other vocalist.

The first time I heard her voice I was lying on a friend's sofa bed in Los Angeles. KJLH, a once great hit-making R&B station, played “Angel,” and I was entranced. The tune was laid-back, with jazzy chords and a hook that was more spoken than sung by Ms. Baker. Her voice was throaty and womanly, though Baker could invoke a girlish naïveté when a song required it. Her voice harkened back to the bluesy past of black pop music, yet was also well suited to the cognac aesthetic of the day.

I found out that Baker recorded for an upstart R&B indie label named Beverly Glen. Though short-lived, Beverly Glen released two gems in the middle of the soulfully deprived eighties—Baker's debut album,
The Songstress
, and Bobby Womack's amazing come-back recording,
The Poet
. While “Angel” put Baker on the map, it wasn't until her Elektra records debut,
Rapture
, in 1986 that she exploded, and I was really able to turn my enthusiasm for her into articles. I wrote a lead review about Baker for the
Village Voice
, and quite a bit about her in the pages of
Billboard
. I even coined a phrase, “retro nuevo,” to describe the blend of old and new I felt her work represented.

When Baker made her New York concert debut at Avery Fisher Hall on the heels of
Rapture
, I was in the fourth row. That night she certainly fulfilled my need for the transcendental. Many in the crowd must have shared my eagerness to hear her, because Baker was rewarded with standing ovations after her third song, seventh song, and tenth song. Somewhere buried in my archives are my notes on that show. I don't remember what songs inspired that response, but I do know I've never attended a show for what was, in essence, a debuting singer where the audience was so passionately in love. On that particular night Baker and the audience were in absolute sync. It was on that night two decades ago that I decided that, if I ever got married (something still in doubt all these years later), Baker (or a recording of her) singing “Angel” or “Sweet Love” would be played as my bride and I walked down the aisle.

I remembered thinking as I left Avery Fisher Hall that it was nights like this that made all the bad gigs, the uninspired professionalism, and formulaic performances I endured worth it. It was why I waded through the piles of vinyl that surrounded my desk at
Billboard
. I was always looking for that music and performer who, however briefly, touched the divine and shared that feeling with me. During my prime years as a music critic there were others who did it for me (Tracy Chapman, Babyface, Bruce Springsteen, Luther Vandross, Fela, Aretha, Paul Simon, John Coltrane, and Miles), but something about Anita Baker made me feel it so profoundly.

Looking back to my late twenties, I think now that I was seeking something in art that was lacking in my life. While I gloried in these transporting musical moments, I couldn't connect emotionally with people in an equally satisfying way. I was in love at least twice during these years, and had strong romantic connections to a series of amazing girlfriends. But I never married, and rarely totally committed. I can chalk some of that up to just being a horny young man. I think that's understandable.

However, I know there was more to it. This feeling I'd had when I was a teenager, of being outside of my own emotions, and of being dispassionate about my life, affected my love affairs. I could feel a cold, distant part of myself take over. That part of me could find fault with my love for any woman. It wasn't that I attacked them, but I criticized myself out of the relationship. I wasn't listening enough. I wasn't sympathetic enough. I was too busy. I was married to my writing.

Whatever I said to them (and told myself), it was just a justification for not truly committing. It felt like something inside was blocking me, and I cried about this inability quite a bit during this period. I'd play Otis Redding and John Coltrane alone in my high-ceilinged living room, drowning in my melancholy for several spins of the record, and then I'd vow to do better and be more open the next time. It was sad and funny that I could be so damn emotional about a record, but not about the women who loved me.

While my life in Fort Greene (and beyond) was filled with the upwardly mobile ambience of art, romance, and parties, I was still deeply connected to the tougher Brooklyn of my youth, a world just a subway ride away. Mideighties New York was suffering through the height of crackmania, and all the family I cared about lived in the urban war zone known as East New York.

Back when I was in college my mother had put together enough money to buy a house, which was actually on the same street as our Fairfield Towers apartment. She'd bought a two-story home at 812 New Jersey Avenue, about four blocks from 1081 New Jersey, and just below Linden Boulevard, one of Brooklyn's main thoroughfares, the one that ran through the heart of East New York.

At some point during my college years the Fairfield Towers housing complex had reached its tipping point, and all my white friends, and quite a few of my middle-class black ones, had already split or were in the process of fleeing. Ma's decision to buy a house had many ramifications, none bigger than its effect on her love affair with Stan. She had invested herself in the relationship, half joking to me that she'd “made him a man” by pushing him to pursue an assistant principal's job. For his part, Stan had stayed in a monogamous relationship with a woman with two kids, not something every single guy would do. Over time it became clear that Stan's relatives, particularly his mother, were strongly against him inheriting a ready-made family.