Everybody's Brother (15 page)

Looking back, I believe it was probably inevitable that I eventually spread my wings from Goodie Mob and flew away to find my own musical destination. Yes, I may be a
bit of a player at heart, but my record reflects pretty clearly the fact that I am not always in the mood to be a team player. For better or for worse—and usually for both—I was born to be my own man. Love me. Hate me. Hit me. Stroke me. But you sure as hell better not ever try to confine or define me.

Leaving is never that easy, and making the big transition from being part of Goodie Mob to becoming solo artist—a man in my own right—got downright tense and pretty ugly. By this time, things were changing in the Atlanta music world, and Goodie Mob had been transferred from LaFace Records in our hometown to the larger Arista musical mother ship based in New York. L.A. Reid—who was now leaving the Dirty South and taking over the big label—decided to sign me as a solo artist on Arista. Eventually, the rest of Goodie Mob left the label and signed with another independent company, Koch Records. Our split was complete and less than friendly. And like the old song says, breaking up is hard to do, and our breakup was no exception.

As the split of Goodie Mob became real, I took my sweet time making my first solo album. Christine and I also took a long time to get around to making our marriage official. But in 2000, we finally walked down the aisle at my grandmother’s church in Cascade Heights. I remember that we later read an article about our big day and the reporter said that our wedding was “quaint and frugal.” I thought shit, I don’t even know what “frugal” is. I didn’t know that people assumed our net worth was all that great then because trust
me, it was not. People think all the musical artists they have heard of are rich and famous, but back then and especially now, they could be very wrong. L.A. Reid didn’t pay for the wedding, but he sweetly paid for our wedding reception. Larry Mestel, the brilliant manager I have now, always jokes, “Remember, that reception was recoupable!” So I probably paid for that party one way or another because that is business as usual in the music business. But to me, it was a lovely gift and like the old Bill Withers song says, “A Lovely Day,” filled with people we loved.

Of course my grandmother and sister and all the family was there, and a lot of Christine’s family and friends came down from North Carolina to be with us. Because of the tensions still raging between us at the time, Gipp and the guys from my Goodie Mob weren’t there. But we had friends including one of my all-time favorites in hip-hop history—the great Luke Skywalker of 2 Live Crew fame. That’s right, folks, Luther R. Campbell, or as everyone in the world of rap calls him, “Uncle Luke,” was at our reception. How do you like those family values?

Speaking of family values, Christine and I had always talked about having a child together, and right around the time of the wedding, we learned she was pregnant with a son.

That amazing news led me to do something I’d been meaning to do for a long time: I legally changed my name from Thomas DeCarlo Burton to Thomas DeCarlo Callaway. I wanted my son to have my mother’s maiden name, because of everything I owed to her.

Big Gipp:
I heard that CeeLo and Christine’s wedding was great, but I wasn’t there. That was during the troublesome time. But I heard CeeLo was happy, and deep down that’s all I wanted for him.

It was a very confusing time for me and Khujo and T-Mo. Not only did we love the guy—we also needed him. We were a group that had turned down publishing deals and lived off the money that we made on the road. So when we suddenly couldn’t live off the road, we all took a big hit. Without CeeLo, we were worth less in every way. We took a huge hit in terms of our livelihood, and creatively speaking, we took a huge hit when it came to how we were going to work and put out albums. It was a big mess figuring out how to work without a key player in our group like CeeLo. Whether we would have admitted it or not right at that moment, deep down we knew it was never going to be the same without him. Look at the guy; he is literally one of a kind. How the hell do you replace a man who’s one of a kind? The answer is this: You can’t, and you’re damned if you even try.

It was a triple whammy on us, because the group had just lost CeeLo and our manager, and then we lost our record company. CeeLo and I both got calls from L.A. Reid to come to New York, saying “I’m going to give both of you your own solo deals.” But
that was at the exact brief time when CeeLo and I were not talking. With us now not communicating, still being on the same label would have felt like some sort of competition thing between him and me. My instant instinct was to opt out of that. At that point, I was so mentally disturbed by the situation in Goodie Mob, disturbed by my marriage to Joi falling apart, and disturbed by everything going on in our world that I just wanted out. I wanted out from the system we were in and the whole mess that was breaking our world apart. So I left Arista and went to Koch Records to do Goodie Mob records with T-Mo and Khujo. CeeLo stayed with L.A. Reid at Arista, and suddenly the brotherhood between us seemed like it was gone forever.

In retrospect, if we had all stayed on the same label, we would have been pitted against each other and there would have been even more bad blood. But for the record, L.A. Reid was always great to us—from the day he pulled up at the Dungeon to shoot OutKast’s first video for
Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik
with Puff Daddy by his side, L.A. Reid was always the innovator, but he always listened to Goodie Mob about what we wanted to do and he put his best dollar on us being able to do that. How can you complain? So it’s amazing to look at what he’s become, and all the superstars he helped build even
after he left LaFace. It’s just a testament to how great of a record man he is, and that maybe he’s the last of the great record men who is still kicking it and making music history.

We decided on a home birth for Kingston. I was still on my extended hiatus from the road to be a husband and the head of a household. I wanted to make sure I was in place to witness the birth of my son and not somewhere else that was less significant to me. Looking back, I was so happy to be there every step of the way. Coming from where I had come from, I knew about dads who were not there—and I wanted to be there for sure. I got into the birth process just like I got into any other creative process. I truly studied the logistics.

The baby was born in the bathtub, what they call a “water birth,” and it was a truly awesome. During the whole birth process, I just tried to be very supportive of Christine, walking her up and down steps, giving her a routine so that she wouldn’t sit there idle and in pain. I was there beside her for the whole miracle. It wasn’t scary for me, but then again, I don’t scare easy. Watching our beautiful son come into the world was profound, and I was content and confident and certain about who I was and what we were doing. Maybe for the first time in my life, I was completely proud of what we had accomplished and what we aspired to do. My sister, Shedonna, was around for Kingston’s birth, and she was pregnant herself
at the time. When Kingston finally made his entrance, we all joined together to pray for this precious boy.

Right from the very first second I saw Kingston’s face, I saw my mother in him and thankfully I saw lots of his gorgeous mother in him too. I’ll tell you something real, when I first saw him, I thought about that saying “Your daddy’s rich and your mama’s good lookin’.” Well, okay, maybe I wasn’t exactly rich yet, but I was kind of famous, and I still felt like maybe on my way. And thankfully, Kingston’s mother was beautiful in more ways that one—and she still is too. The truth is that I prayed that my son would favor my wife and not me, and that prayer was heard. He was and is perfect.

In my mind, Kingston was a beautiful thought and idea that gradually became a very beautiful kid. And I knew deep down that my son would be better than me—because he has my best intentions at the core of me without all my flaws, physical and otherwise. I am a king who some see as a freak. We called him Kingston because he is royalty, and looks like it too. To me, Kingston’s arrival proved that my intentions are righteous. Those intentions go way beyond what I had to do and had to be on occasion along the way. I vowed that he would have a different life than I’d had. In my mind at least, I have had to slay dragons so that he won’t have to. I will never be a perfect man, but to me our son, Kingston, already is.

How did I learn to be a good parent? Father is written in me; it’s the way that I am. Others doubt you for long enough, you begin to doubt yourself. But now I saw that
I had it somewhere deep inside me to become the father I never had. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, no more than that.

I was definitely a diaper-changing kind of dad. I was a home dad. We were living out in Fayetteville, Georgia, and life was good. I love being at home like that. Even to this day, if I could hit the lottery for a hundred million, I wouldn’t be out and about doing half the shit I do.

In the weeks leading up to Kingston’s birth, I had played a lot of music around him and spoke to Christine’s stomach and prayed over her stomach too. Maybe that’s why my son was very quiet as a baby. He didn’t cry one bit. He’s still pretty quiet like that. But my sister remembers how worried I was that Kingston had inherited some of my less desirable traits.

“Of course, as mischievous as Lo was as a child, there was that deep fear for him that his son was going to act just as bad as he was,” says Shedonna. “And back when he was very little, Kingston would come up and hug you very close and sweetly—because he was sweet then and he’s sweet now. But then after he hugged you, and before he completed his embrace, he’d sometimes bite you just as hard as he had just hugged you. And let me tell you, that scared the heck out of Lo. He flipped out, like ‘My son is going around biting people—he’s going to be trouble just like I was!” Kingston grew out of it, but Lo was
so
worried he would be a terror. My grandmother and I had to laugh, and we knew somewhere up there, my mother was laughing too.”

As in all truly epic tales, there comes a time when the hero undergoes some terrible trials. Just when it looks like he’s about to reach his goal, he suffers a supreme ordeal. Like Luke Skywalker finding out who his father is, Han Solo getting frozen in carbonite, or even Jonah ending up in the belly of the whale, every hero has to be dragged into darkness before he can emerge in triumph. Your very own supernatural hero was no different. Just when I thought I had it made—a growing family, a new record deal, a solo career about to take off—the ever-clever Creator threw some serious roadblocks my way. And this otherwise uplifting story of redemption took some sad and ugly turns.