By the time Kelly signed to Jive, he had a solid team behind him. Moonlighting from his day job with Tribune Media, attorney Darryl Porter handled legal affairs. The lawyer also worked with brothers Allen and Albert Hughes, and he arranged for the young filmmakers to include a Public Announcement song in the first movie they directed, Menace II Society. Porter did not stay with Kelly long, but his other team members did.
Long, lanky, and several years older than Kelly, Demetrius Smith served as his tour manager and personal assistant. He befriended the singer after first hearing him perform an original song called “Strong Enough to Be” during another Kenwood Academy talent show in January 1985, several years after Kelly dropped out. Smith introduced Kelly to his first manager, Chuck Smith (no relation).
Derrel McDavid, an accountant based in Oak Park, a suburb just west of Chicago, initially came on board to balance the books. Husky, biracial, and bespectacled, he compensated for his pale complexion within Kelly’s all-black inner circle by adopting a tough-guy persona that seemed to have been cribbed from watching too many gangster movies. McDavid stayed at Kelly’s side for two and a half decades, eventually becoming his fourth manager. He appears in countless photos trailing just behind the singer, but Kelly’s more camera-shy third manager, Barry Hankerson, was by far the key player early on.
Born in Harlem in 1946, Hankerson grew up Catholic and served as an altar boy. He majored in sociology at Central State University in Ohio and played safety on the football team; he later tried but failed to go pro. Tall, thin, and wiry, Hankerson had an intense demeanor and an afro worthy of Shaft that made him seem bigger and more formidable than his actual size. In college, he joined the seventies campus radicals, and after graduating, he went to work as a community organizer. Eventually, he became an assistant to Coleman Young, the first black mayor of Detroit, and there he met and began dating a Motown legend. They married in 1974 and appeared on the cover of Chicago-based Jet magazine with the headline “Gladys Knight’s New Life with a Pip of a Mate.”
Starring together in the 1976 movie Pipe Dreams, Hankerson and Knight portrayed a couple struggling to save their marriage in an Alaskan town during construction of the pipeline. The movie, which he co-produced, flopped, leaving the couple $140,000 in debt, and their real marriage ended acrimoniously in 1979, according to Jet. The magazine ran another cover story that March, using some of the same photos from its first, glowing profile five years earlier. This one was headlined, “Court Records Tell What Really Broke Up the Marriage of Gladys Knight,” and it painted a more troubling portrait of Hankerson.
“The battle behind closed doors now has erupted into Wayne County Circuit Court, Detroit, where records show that bitter struggles over Ms. Knight’s business relationship with her background singers and relatives—the Pips—started dissolving the marriage,” Jet reported in a five-page article that carried no byline. “In his deposition, Hankerson denies beating Ms. Knight, trying to strangle her, shoving her into a closet, and threatening to kill her. . . . He also says he did not try to commit suicide by drinking a household disinfectant.”
People are complicated, and divorces are really complicated. In the years after their marriage ended, Hankerson and Knight maintained a relationship that some who knew them called “a deep, real friendship.” They shared custody of their son, Shanga Ali Hankerson, saw each other’s families, and still appeared together in public. Hankerson even arranged for his ex-wife to meet Kelly’s mother, Joann.
In the years after his marriage to Knight ended, Hankerson fared better as an artist’s manager and theater producer. In 1987, he brought Ron Milner’s gospel musical Don’t Get God Started to Broadway. The following year, he first heard Kelly sing during auditions for the Chicago production of the show. Kelly claims in his book to have wowed Hankerson with an a cappella rendition of “Amazing Grace.” The producer offered him $700 a week to appear in the musical, but Kelly says he told Hankerson he couldn’t read or memorize the lines. Instead, he gave Hankerson the demos for several songs, including “If I Could Turn Back the Hands of Time” and “Honey Love,” and Hankerson took him on as one of his client artists. Kelly joined a roster led by gospel singers the Winans.
A former colleague of Hankerson’s describes part of what he did for Kelly as Pygmalion meets Berry Gordy’s famous “polishing school” at Motown. “Robert was a big, dumb kid, really immature for his age, and he had a lot of rough edges. I mean, that boy didn’t even like to wipe his own ass. Barry worked to smooth them edges out, teach him to carry himself, and not just street, not just ghetto. He wanted to save him, get him to see the quality of life.” Hankerson also made connections. “You gotta understand that Barry was extremely hooked up in the black community. Extremely. He would come to Chicago and have lunch with Jesse Jackson and dinner with Louis Farrakhan. The man had juice.”
Like many people around Kelly, Hankerson could also show flashes of the menacing gangster, and perhaps even act on them. In the mid-2000s, according to lawsuits documented by Complex magazine, he bought an ex-girlfriend’s hair salon just so he could fire her. She also accused him of trying to blow up her car, charges his lawyers denied. But, one music-industry insider told me, “Barry always had class, and he carried himself more like a politician or a businessman than most of the people around Robert, who could, you know, come off as pretty street.”
Recording contract in hand, his crew in place, and Hankerson at the helm, R. Kelly and Public Announcement released Born into the 90’s on Jive Records in January 1992. Its second single, “Honey Love,” reached No. 1 on the Billboard R&B chart, as well as broaching the Top 40 pop chart, if only barely, for two weeks at No. 39. After lurching forward in fits and starts for a decade, at a pace Kelly found excruciatingly slow, the twenty-five-year-old singer and songwriter’s career finally started to take flight.
CHAPTER 2
I PROMISE YOU
“Baby, come inside / Now turn down the lights,” R. Kelly seductively croons. “’Cause there’s something that I want from you right now / Give me that honey love.” His first hit is driven by an oozing groove and a lush backing track, and in the video, he literally pours honey over a woman’s naked body. The three singers who joined him in Public Announcement—Earl Robinson, Andre Boykins, and Ricky Webster—only appear out of focus, hovering in the background. R. Kelly clearly is the star.
Lacking a truly great voice like Sam Cooke’s or Donny Hathaway’s, Kelly began to build a reputation through songwriting and crafting memorable images. He talks in every interview about how the songs never stop coming—“I walk around every day with a radio playing constantly in my head,” he told Kyle Anderson of Entertainment Weekly, “and this radio station plays a lot of hits”—but his output always has evinced as much calculation as inspiration.
“As far back as my first high school performance and my days singing in the subway, my gut told me that I needed a hook,” Kelly says in Soulacoaster. “Sex and sensuality were going to be my hook.” The clean-cut image and messages of MGM became history, and the singer remade himself as a hypersexual “Superfreak,” as Vibe described him in his first national magazine cover story, as well as the “R&B thug,” embracing elements of the street look and attitude he’d scoffed at in the Chicago Tribune story about MGM.
“He introduced that hip-hop thing to R&B, that street style, and he knew how to style his vocals that way, too, around the melodies that he wrote,” said a record-industry executive who worked with him early on. “Here was this big, strapping guy, not soft at all, with a street image in a natural way, and the direction of his music headed that way, too. Marketable.”
Public Announcement toured for much of 1992, even traveling twice to Europe, a challenge because of Kelly’s fear of flying. The buzz built, though Born into the 90’s took a year to reach platinum status of a million copies sold, and its sales topped off there. It didn’t yield another hit, but Kelly thought he found the key for the follow-up, leaning even more heavily on sex
and sensuality. On tour, he developed a skit about a dream of making love to Mary J. Blige, the queen of hip-hop soul. Onstage, he boasted that some men might give her foreplay, but he could deliver three times better; then he enumerated how, in twelve graphic steps. The skit became a song, an album title, and a template.
Leaving Public Announcement behind, the singer took a defiant and aggressive stance on the cover of 12 Play, the first album credited solely to R. Kelly, and released by Jive Records in November 1993. Open to show off his “ripped” chest, he wears a black vest adorned with random white letters atop baggy black pants. He sports dark shades and a shaven head and brandishes a cane, both a weapon and a Fred Astaire–era prop. His is special, though, and if you don’t look closely, you might easily miss the adjustable mirror on a rod at the bottom, intended to look up women’s skirts. Novelty stores call it “a dirty-old-man walking stick.”
Kelly spent months working on his second album at Chicago Recording Company, which local musicians call CRC. The state-of-the-art studio was spread over three buildings downtown, headquartered on Ohio Street, and top clients paid more than five hundred dollars an hour while the facility catered to their every whim. “They’ve got a pool table in here and everything for me,” Kelly told me with boyish enthusiasm a few years later. He recorded twelve of his raunchiest tracks yet—“Sex Me (Parts I & II),” “Bump N’ Grind,” and “I Like the Crotch on You”—as well as two sedate soul ballads he could proudly have sung for Lena McLin back at Kenwood Academy. One was an original, “For You.” The other was a cover, “Sadie,” by the Spinners. It had been one of his mother’s favorite songs, and Robert intended it as a tribute to Joann, who died not long before the album’s release.
At times, Kelly has claimed he didn’t know his mother had cancer, and she banished him from Roseland Hospital when he rushed to her deathbed. “I kept telling her I was sorry, I didn’t know,” he told Cheo Hodari Coker in Vibe. “She begged me to get out, and I did.” He said he returned to CRC and sat at the piano, and the call that Joann had died came while he sang “For You.” He repeated this version in Soulacoaster, with added detail, but when Kelly talked to Chris Heath of GQ years later, he gave a different account.
In that version, Kelly says that when he returned from his second European tour, he immediately joined his mother in the hospital. “She said, ‘Please leave, please,’” but he claimed he stayed to bare his soul. “I said, ‘First of all, I love you, and I thank you for everything you have done, everything . . . and I’m sorry for every time I’ve been bad or did something I wasn’t supposed to do. And I promise you’—and she died right there on the ‘I promise you.’ I called the doctor, they came in and they pronounced her dead. I was still holding her hand. But I finished my sentence. I said, ‘I promise you, Momma, no matter what, by any means necessary, I will be one of the best singers, songwriters, this world has ever seen.’”
Few people forget the details of their mother’s death, and the discrepancies in Kelly’s stories bothered journalist Chris Heath. “A good deal of how we come away thinking of R. Kelly must hang on what we think of R. Kelly’s relationship with the truth. . . . To not believe him would mean that he is now lying about what happened at his mother’s deathbed. And that he is doubling down on the lie to my face.” Like many others, Heath wanted to believe. Such is the power of myth.
Several sources told me that once his career began to take off, Kelly actually shunned the mother he claims he worshipped. “Robert cut her off,” his half brother Carey said, because Robert didn’t approve of Joann’s relationship with Lucious. When Kelly got his first big check as an advance from Jive, his crew shamed him for buying himself a new black Mercedes while Joann continued to drive a beater, “a raggedy old Ford” that she had to hot-wire to start. “I should have known there was something wrong,” a friend of the family told me. “He was very reluctant to share anything with her. He refused to deal with her medical bills—she checked into the hospital under a false name—although he had the money. I think he was angry with everybody for not protecting him from the abuse, to the point that he got started at the abuse himself. It sparked up something in him.”
12 Play left some in the music press cold. “In a year when the big rappers have either repeated tired outrages or outgrown them, Kelly’s crude, chartwise new jack swing is black pop’s most depressing development,” wrote the self-professed dean of American music critics, Robert Christgau. Nevertheless, the album sold more than six million copies in the United States, garnering three Top 20 pop hits with “Bump N’ Grind,” which made it to No. 1, “Your Body’s Callin’,” and “Sex Me (Parts I & II).” On the R&B chart, “Bump N’ Grind” elbowed aside Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” to claim the top slot. Not surprisingly, its auteur became a sought-after songwriter and producer for other artists, including Hi-Five, Billy Ocean, Toni Braxton, Janet Jackson—and a promising high school student from Detroit named Aaliyah.
Aaliyah Dana Haughton was born in Brooklyn on January 16, 1979, according to her birth certificate. Diane and Michael Haughton chose their second child’s name from Jewish and Arabic roots meaning “rising up” or “ascending.” She attended Gesu Catholic School in Detroit, where the family resettled so Michael could work in a warehouse owned by Diane’s brother, Barry Hankerson. After Aaliyah started singing in church, her proud stage parents paid for years of vocal lessons. She went on to maintain a 4.0 grade-point average at the Detroit High School for the Fine and Performing Arts, focusing on drama, not music. Barely five-foot-one, light-skinned with thick, flowing black hair and hypnotic brown eyes, she always made as much of an impact onstage with her charismatic presence as her vocal abilities.
Host Ed McMahon introduced Aaliyah as a girl with “a big voice and an even bigger dream” when she appeared on the television show Star Search at age ten. Looking like a young Whitney Houston in a ruffled pink skirt and jacket with enormous shoulder pads, she confidently sang “My Funny Valentine,” building to some vocal flourishes a la Houston or Céline Dion. The next year, at age eleven, she joined her ex-aunt, Gladys Knight, onstage during a five-night stint at Bally’s Las Vegas Hotel. Talking to People magazine years later, Knight remembered Aaliyah as “brought up in the old school, a sweet, sweet girl. She would walk into a room, and you would feel her light. She’d hug everyone, and she meant it.”
At age fourteen, Aaliyah became the first artist signed to Blackground Records, the boutique label her uncle Barry Hankerson started with Jive in 1993. Hankerson introduced the niece he called “the light of my life” to his star client, and she began recording the debut album R. Kelly wrote, produced, and titled for her. Shy and timid by some accounts, Aaliyah was considered “wise beyond her years” and “old for her age” by many people. Released in May 1994, five months after her fifteenth birthday, the cover of Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number depicts a different girl from the one seen on Star Search. Doing her best to look street, Aaliyah poses in a hoodie, leaning against a wall and wearing dark sunglasses under a black skull cap. In the background, the twenty-seven-year-old she thanks in the liner notes as her “mentor, best friend, and producer” peers at her from behind his own dark shades, shirtless and wearing a vest like the one on the cover of 12 Play.
Kelly and Aaliyah appeared on BET’s Video Soul Gold in the summer of 1994, dressed in identical hip-hop streetwear. Co-host Sherry Carter started by saying, “Everbody seems to think that y’all are either girlfriend or boyfriend or cousins.” Kelly laughed. “I better go get me a white Jeep, uh-oh,” he said, presumably referring to the white Bronco O. J. Simpson had recently driven while fleeing police. “Well, no,” Aaliyah said. “We’re not related at all. No, we’re not. We’re just very close. He’s my best friend.” With that, she playfully tapped his arm. “In the whole wide world,” Kelly said, completing her thought. Through a wide grin, Aaliyah echoed him in childlike singsong. “In the whole wide world.”
The other host, Brett Walker, later asked
about the origin of Aaliyah’s album title. “She’s running around the studio one day with her friends, talking a lot of smack,” Kelly said. Aaliyah hung with a posse of three girlfriends everyone called Second Chapter. “‘Tell her age ain’t nothing but a number, girl,’” Kelly recalled her telling one of her friends. “I was like, ‘So what you trying to say?’ So immediately I heard the song, you know, and I called her back fifteen minutes later, told her check this out, and we cut the track right then and there.”
Many on the music scene believed Aaliyah was older than the fifteen stated in her record-company bio, so Carter asked, “And for the record you are how old?” Aaliyah smiled, held her finger to her lips, and playfully whispered, “That’s a secret. Shhh!”
Kelly’s growing Midas touch held as Aaliyah’s debut sold two million copies, spawning two Top 10 singles with “Back & Forth” and “At Your Best (You Are Love).” Six months later, in December 1994, Danyel Smith’s cover story on Kelly the “Superfreak” hit the newsstands in Vibe, noting for the first time in the national press a rumor about him and Aaliyah. Visiting a black beauty salon at Philadelphia’s fading Gallery Mall, Smith described a group of women “discussing R. Kelly because he’s headlining at the Spectrum tonight and because, word is, he just married his teenage protégée, Aaliyah. Like the jocks on the radio in New York, Philly, Oakland, and L.A., folks are yammering about Kelly’s marriage, making comparisons to Marvin Gaye and Jerry Lee Lewis, joking about jailbait and robbing the cradle.”
The illustrations in the four-page magazine spread included a Cook County marriage certificate for Robert S. Kelly and Aaliyah D. Haughton, citing a “religious ceremony” in suburban Rosemont near Chicago’s O’Hare Airport on August 31, 1994. It accurately noted Kelly’s age, twenty-seven, but listed Aaliyah’s as eighteen. Kelly, Aaliyah, and their label reps all declined to comment.
Soulless Page 4
