Everybody's Brother (18 page)

In a strange and now-distant land called 2004, the unusually dashing hero in our increasingly twisted fable of fame and misfortune found himself feeling more than a little bit lost in the wilderness. Okay, make that a lot lost. And right around this time in my story, I was getting increasingly tired of having my big black ass kicked hard and often by a truly scary monster called Life. By this point, I had already been called a promising artist many times, but for whatever reasons, it looked like those promises weren’t being kept.

To recap some of the preceding bad and the ugly—because there was not a whole lot of good coming my way at this particular time—I was by now pretty much broke. Like the old song from the eighties said, there was basically nothing going on but the rent. I was single again, and I was now trying to pay alimony and child support without getting a whole lot of support myself from anywhere. To make matters even worse, I found myself drifting back toward complete obscurity after leaving Goodie Mob to go solo—and instead heading nowhere fast.

Yet even though record companies didn’t believe in
me then, or possibly even remember me, and my phone wasn’t exactly ringing off the hook, I have always believed in myself deep down—even when there was no reasonable basis on which to do so. You have to believe that you’ve got something to offer this world in order to survive in such an insane and unknowable business. After all, I have been a long shot all of my life.

Still, when the arc of your career begins to resemble a funky free fall, you do begin to wonder a little—is my story already over? And if not, where is my next happy ending coming from, and what do I do with myself in the meantime? Here’s the answer I learned the hard way: If life gives you lemons, then you damn sure better find a different delicious flavor of lemonade to sell.

For a time there in the early twenty-first century, I got to a point where I didn’t even want to be a performing artist. So I started to write and record with another talented artist named Tori Alamaze who was from our scene in Atlanta and sang backup on songs for OutKast. Tori became my muse for a while and, to my surprise, I really enjoyed taking a giant step behind the scenes. After brutally banging my head against a few studio walls trying to transform myself into a big solo artist, I must say that I found it very pleasurable to sit back and just write and produce. As I would find out again years later on
The Voice
, when I’m not smiling for the camera, I really enjoy the process of helping others take their rightful time in the spotlight—especially when I’m getting paid well for my time. In a funny way, trying to make Tori into the star she deserves to be was a welcome
change of pace for me. I liked that it wasn’t about me being a star but simply about making music, which is what I always wanted to do in the first place. And that, as best I can figure, is how I came to help write and produce a song that you might have heard of called “Don’t Cha.”

Ladies and gentlemen of the juke box jury, there are some songs that forever define their times, powerful protest statement that speak to the underlying political truths of our society. “Don’t Cha” was definitely not one of those songs. But it was one catchy joint about the wonderful ways that women can tempt men and totally screw with, at the very least, our heads. In my mind, this instantly infectious and fittingly funky ditty was the song that would make Tori Alamaze into a household name. And for a while there, it really looked like our plan was going to come to fruition.

“Don’t Cha” became Tori’s first single for Universal, and for a hot minute there it looked like the record was going to be a big hit for her. But it got as high number 53 on the Billboard R&B Singles chart—and then just stopped. Dead. So close—yet so far away. Sadly, before long, the record label dropped Tori. But thankfully for me, you can’t keep a great song down forever. So just a little while later, the very same song, with a few new sexy touches, became a major chart smash for the Pussycat Dolls. I produced “Don’t Cha” as the group’s very first single with a strong lead vocal by the top Doll Nicole Scherzinger and the great Busta Rhymes rapping on the track—probably because no one would have cared much then about me rapping on it at that point, and I always loved Busta’s attitude. Finally,
I had my big hit—even though many people didn’t and still don’t realize that “Don’t Cha” came from my dirty mind. The song went to number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 1 on the Hot Dance Music/Club Play chart. It became a truly sexy global sensation in 2005, reaching number 1 in England, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Belgium, Germany, Norway, and Switzerland, where I’m sure gorgeous little Swiss misses are still singing along to it in some chocolate shop. This was my first taste of international success—and I loved it.

The Pussycat Dolls doing “Don’t Cha” didn’t exactly make me a star, but it sure as hell helped make me solvent again. This surprising brush with the big time meant that my family and I were able to eat a little better, and trust me, it was great news when I really needed some. At the time, I remember saying to myself, maybe I’ve finally got myself something here. Maybe I will just write and produce the rest of my life and forget about all the frustrating craziness and maddening mystery of being an artist myself. But just like other lovable crime figures before me, every time that I think that I’m done, something or someone drags me right back in.

Suddenly out of nowhere—well, almost out of nowhere—my life went “Crazy” in the best possible way, and that craziness took me to some unexpected places.

The true story of Gnarls Barkley is the unlikely tale of two complete weirdos who somehow completed one another—at
least for a little while. I am proud to say that I am one of those weirdos, and the other is the international man of mystery who would be Danger Mouse.

I first met Brian Joseph Burton—who named himself Danger Mouse after his favorite British cartoon series—back when I was with Goodie Mob. At the time, Brian was living in Athens, Georgia, studying telecommunications. He and some friends competed in a talent contest and won the chance to open up for OutKast and our Mob at a gig we did at the University of Georgia.

For better or worse, love me or loathe me, I do tend to make a big impression on people one way or another, and something about my winning personality must have made a big impression on Danger Mouse. But Danger Mouse later told me that something I had said in an interview he read really spoke to him. He explained that he was strongly attracted to the idea of working with me because he read that I loved Portishead, a very cool British trip-hop group that he just happened to love too. He thought any black man who says he likes Portishead had to be his kind of guy. He had a point too—because Portishead was everything that I wanted my music to be too—dark, moody, hip-hop, and cool on its own terms. Their sound was eerie and inventive and beautiful—all things that I look for and treasure in music and in life too.

Backstage after the University of Georgia show, Danger Mouse handed me this instrumental demo tape to check out. Something about the darkness in the music spoke to me because, let’s be real—as you have already
noticed, a lot of my life has been dark. But it was the last we really saw of each other until around 2004 or 2005, when I laid down some vocals on
Danger Doom
, a freaky album Brian was producing with MF Doom. That was when we picked up the conversation where it had left off, and in a serious way.

By any standard, Danger Mouse and I were a truly odd musical couple—with me in the role of a much less pale Oscar Madison to Danger Mouse’s Felix Unger. Thank God the two of us never tried to share an apartment. Personally speaking, we were really night and day, or at least dusk and dawn. For instance, Brian is quite slight and, as you may have noticed, I’m a slightly larger target. Back in the day, Brian was so shy that he dressed up in a mouse outfit so that he could meekly hide in plain sight. Lord knows I have been accused of many things in my life, some of those charges coming from the authorities, but being shy has never been one of them. But for all of our differences, Danger Mouse and I connected through music and found, at least temporarily, some very fertile common ground to toil on together.

By the time we started to created the gorgeous global monster that became Gnarls Barkley, Danger Mouse had begun to make his own oddly cool name thanks in large part to
The Grey Album
, an amazing and utterly unauthorized piece of work that combined the vocals from
The Black Album
by Jay-Z with the musical performances from
The White Album
by the Beatles. Originally put together for the art of it and the shits and giggles of friends,
The Grey Album
soon became one of our world’s first great viral hits. Like all things viral now, the music spread like wildfire over the Internet and eventually became one of the most talked about and argued over albums of the twenty-first century. The illegally impressive and wildly cool
Grey Album
made Danger Mouse a global star, a digital outlaw, and a world-class troublemaker—all clearly very good things in my book—namely, this book.

So how did people react in the secret hidden chambers of the music industry when Danger Mouse and I started to work together? The answer is: I don’t know, because we didn’t give one damn about what people said. We signed with an independent label, Downtown Records, that was run out of someone’s Manhattan apartment. Like LaFace, Downtown was a joint venture with a big label, in this case Atlantic, so we had a lot of backup firepower if we took off. And then we did precisely what great artists have always done so well—we just got busy creating our own shared reality and then tried that crazy quilt we made together on for size. There was no other way of knowing if this unlikely partnership would work. After all, we were not two of a kind but a couple of crazy mutants who met in the dark and created a spark of something bigger than both of us.

In retrospect, I can see clearly why we didn’t call our new musical partnership CeeLo Green and Danger Mouse—or Danger Mouse and CeeLo Green, for that
matter. Which one of our names would have come first anyway? Trust me, that subject alone is something we could have argued over for hours if we had wanted to. Instead, we just got down to what was most important—the music—and the name came second. From what I’ve heard, while Brian was tossing around names with some of his friends, he almost called the group Bob Gnarley, but he liked the sound of Gnarls Barkley better. For my money, Gnarls Barkley is as absurd as any other memorable rock and roll name, from the Goo Goo Dolls to Oingo Bongo to Kajagoogoo. Yes, our name sounded weird, but it’s also immediately unforgettable. With all due respect to Charles Barkley, I didn’t immediately like our name when Danger Mouse first mentioned it. Honestly, I immediately hated it. Okay, for the record, I still don’t like it. But however goofy it may be, the name Gnarls Barkley is pure quirk, and I have found that quirk works—at least it works for me. Although for a long time after our albums came out, people walked up and called me Mr. Barkley. A lot of them still didn’t get that we were a group.

Now with a little distance and time I can say that Gnarls Barkley—the beautiful mutant musical love child of Danger Mouse and myself—is one of the great left-field success stories of all time. My solo career taught me the hard way that try as you might, you simply cannot be all things to all people. Too often, if you try, you end up being nothing to nobody. Before Gnarls Barkley brought my voice to the world, I was going nowhere as a solo artist because I had tried so hard to go absolutely everywhere.
Somehow working with Danger Mouse gave me a kind of focus that I needed to show the world what I could do.

I’ve described Danger Mouse as the picket fence around my wildflowers, and for me at least that just about says it all. Danger Mouse is many things to many people, but somehow when we worked together, his process kept me inside some boundaries and, in the end, that framing made me look even better than I do on my own. Working with Danger Mouse was the first time someone took me and actually tried to truly produce me. And in retrospect, that made Brian look like a genius because either he was very, very strong or no one bothered to notice that I could be very submissive too. Truthfully, I think that it was a balance of the two because it isn’t like Brian is all that aggressive a dude, and I sure as hell ain’t soft. I may not be a criminal anymore, but I still won’t let anyone else ever steal my treasured sense of self.