Soulless
Page 6
I discovered music via the small collection of LPs my dad left behind in a wire rack beside the old console stereo, cast recordings from the Broadway musicals Camelot and Oliver!, Whipped Cream & Other Delights by Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass, and Hell Bent for Leather! by Frankie Laine. The first record I bought with money I saved from serving as an altar boy (funerals paid five dollars, but you could earn as much as twenty at a wedding) was The Beatles/1967–1970, the greatest-hits collection known to fans as “the Blue Album.” My tastes progressed from there thanks to New York radio and records passed down by my older cousins. By high school, I held progressive rockers like Yes, Genesis, and Pink Floyd and punk bands such as the Ramones, the Clash, and the Sex Pistols in equal esteem. Some might say those genres are diametrically opposed, but attempts at transcendence and cathartic venting both seemed like valid responses to life in Jersey City.
In college, New York’s nascent hip-hop sounds led me back to R&B, soul, and funk. The first time I heard Maggot Brain by Funkadelic blew my young, white, nerdy mind, and though I suspected I wouldn’t quite fit in, I wanted to go to that party. I had similar reactions to White Light/White Heat by the Velvet Underground and Pink Flag by Wire. Public Enemy; X-Ray Spex; the Feelies; Hüsker Dü; the Replacements; De La Soul; Patti Smith. The common theme of all the music I devoured, internalized, and loved was, as Robert Christgau wrote of Parliament-Funkadelic, “the forces of life—autonomous intelligence, a childlike openness, sexual energy, and humor—defeat those of death.” Hey-ho, let’s go!
As essential to me as the music for revealing a bigger, more exciting, and more open-minded world beyond the Heights was the writing that mapped it and put it in context. By seventh grade, the Village Voice had become my Bible, thanks to the cutting insights of its music editor, Christgau, and the unbridled passion of his most acclaimed writer, Lester Bangs. But I never just read the alternative weekly’s music pages. Media critic Geoffrey Stokes, feminist sex columnist Cynthia Heimel, and investigative reporters William Bastone, Wayne Barrett, and Debbie Nathan inspired me, too, and so did the writers Tom Wolfe compiled in his 1973 anthology, The New Journalism. I bought a used copy at the Strand bookstore to read Christgau’s piece, and in the bargain discovered Joan Didion, Michael Herr, George Plimpton, Gay Talese, and Wolfe’s manifesto that journalism can be literature, but even more powerful, because it is, he said, “true-life.”
My Spider-Man moment came on April 14, 1982, toward the end of my senior year at Hudson Catholic Regional School for Boys. The honors students read masterpieces of Western literature, while the wrestlers and football players wound up in journalism. Short sentences, simple words. I took both. I grated on my high school journalism teacher’s nerves with never-ending questions about the New Journalism, the difference between criticism and journalism, and investigative reporting in the wake of Woodward and Bernstein and Rolling Stone’s exposé about the suspicious death of anti-nuke activist Karen Silkwood. “Look, you’ve already got your A,” he finally said. “You don’t have to come to class anymore. Just go interview a hero in your chosen field and write it up.”
I picked Lester.
I spent a long afternoon with Bangs in his fifth-floor apartment above Gum Joy Chinese Restaurant, just off Fourteenth Street at the edge of the Village near the Sixth Avenue PATH station. He kept swatting aside the questions I’d scrawled earlier on a yellow legal pad in favor of having a real discussion, asking what I thought, who I was reading, and what I was listening to. I was a fat, nerdy seventeen-year-old with acne from Jersey, and he was America’s greatest rock critic. When I left Lester that day in 1982, he signed my copy of his book about Blondie, one of the two quickie fan bios he published in his lifetime. “Now it’s your turn.” He died two weeks later.
I got to attend New York University on a scholarship, and I majored in journalism and minored in sociology because they seemed like the same thing—the study of people. In my junior year in college, I began writing a music column for the Hoboken Reporter. After a few months, the publisher, who’d started a chain of free weeklies in Hudson County to forward his agenda as a real-estate developer, deemed the ungodly sum of $150 a month for music coverage unwarranted. He assigned me to start reporting on city council and planning board meetings, too.
By the start of my last year at NYU, I’d been hired full-time by the 65,000-circulation Jersey Journal, covering news stories two nights a week after classes, and writing wedding and church-social announcements the other three days for what were, in 1986, unapologetically still called “the Women’s Pages.”
The stories never stopped coming during my five years at the paper, first as a reporter covering the Hoboken beat, then digging into county-wide waterfront development. I did a miserable stint as assistant city editor—I hated being stuck in the newsroom, and I missed writing—and finally wound up as a columnist aspiring to some measure of what Jimmy Breslin, Murray Kempton, and Anna Quindlen did across the river. Through it all, I also wrote about music for free for fanzines, photocopied do-it-yourself magazines distributed at rock clubs and record stores such as Maxwell’s and Pier Platters in Hoboken. I published my own zine, too, calling it Reasons for Living, because that’s what music provided. I was nothing if not an earnest young thing.
Like Lester, I saw collecting records, spinning them on college radio, spouting my opinions about them, and making an awful racket myself all as part of the same fanatic impulse. I’ve always joked that I’m not a musician, but I am a drummer (ba-dum-bah!). When I was in my early teens, my mom remarried, wedding my former eighth-grade science teacher at Saint Nick’s, and my stepfather, Harry Reynolds, gave me the old set of Slingerland drums he’d used to gig in go-go bars up and down the Jersey Shore. I learned to play by bashing along to Ramones records in the basement, and I kept drumming in a series of bands not because I thought any of them would “make it,” but because I couldn’t imagine not doing it. In 1987, my Wire cover band, the Ex-Lion Tamers, opened for Wire itself on a month-long tour of the United States and Canada. During my eighties indie-rock version of On the Road, I realized that college friends in cities like Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, and Montreal all lived better than me. They worked fifteen hours a week running copy machines or making lattes to pay their share of the rent in a big old band house, then devoted the rest of their time to drawing comics, making films, painting or sculpting, and rehearsing in the basement.
Burned out at the Jersey Journal after one too many trips to the projects to interview a mother whose son had been shot in the street, I quit, packed what fit in a rented U-Haul trailer—the vinyl albums and drums took priority—and moved to Minneapolis to manage a friend’s band and try to make a go of it writing about music.
As luck would have it, I landed a job as assistant editor at a magazine called Request, with a free circulation of a million copies monthly at every Musicland and Sam Goody record store in the country. After nearly a decade, I finally got a paycheck for covering my dream beat, and Request became my graduate school. That led to my first stint at the Sun-Times, from 1992 to 1995, when Chicago enjoyed a brief moment as “the next Seattle” during the alternative-rock explosion, and then to Rolling Stone, the big leagues at last—or so I thought. I got canned after eight and a half months for shooting my mouth off when publisher Jann Wenner spiked my negative review of Fairweather Johnson, the second album by Hootie & the Blowfish. I wound up back in Minneapolis, freelancing for two years and starting work on a biography of Bangs, until the Sun-Times asked in the fall of 1997 if I’d like to return as its pop music critic.
I had never loved any city as much as Chicago. I enjoyed living in Minneapolis, twice, but it truly is a small town, and one where some restaurants at the time thought egg noodles and ketchup were “pasta.” By age twenty-two, I’d visited twenty other North American cities on tour with the Ex-Lion Tamers, and eight European burgs when I served as the road manager for a friend’s band, but Chicago was special.
Yeah, the racism a
nd segregation in Chicago suck; those suck in New York and Jersey City, Berlin and Paris, too. But Chicago has all the art, energy, and excitement of New York, at a fraction of the cost and aggravation. The cliché about “the city that works” is true, especially in the arts. You can open a gallery or a storefront theater in Chicago, start a restaurant, join an improv troupe, and most of all make music—it’s hard to be a garage band in Manhattan, where garages are scarce and absurdly expensive—and you can learn your craft and find a following, or fail with relatively few consequences, then pick yourself up and start again. Residents in the city of Studs Terkel and Nelson Algren, Ethel Payne and Sandra Cisneros, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert are real people who sneer at pretensions and “people who think who they are.” Yet Chicagoans can still talk for hours until last call about politics, philosophy, art, religion, social justice, and the forlorn Cubs. The only thing I find lacking is the pizza. There and only there, I’m still New York all the way.
The Sun-Times editor I’d clashed with over covering Michael Jackson without mentioning that unpleasantness about sex with boys had left, and a crew of Canadians had taken over, appointed by a new British owner, Lord Conrad Black of Crossharbour. I told the editors who interviewed me that all I wanted in order to return was the deal Ebert had. They rolled their eyes, until I explained I didn’t mean money; I’d just like to work at home. And mostly I did for the next thirteen years, except for the weekly visits to pick up the mail and meet with the bosses.
Through the mid-nineties, I continued to follow R. Kelly’s burgeoning career with the pride of a hometown journalist and critic who’d been there almost at the start, as well as, I’ll admit it, a fan, albeit one with reservations.
Jive Records released the singer’s third album, R. Kelly, in November 1995, and it sold five million copies. I reviewed it for Rolling Stone, giving it three stars on the magazine’s five-star scale and summing up his output to date. The knock on his first two solo albums had been that Kelly was a soul man with no real soul, I wrote, just another hot ’n’ horny would-be Lothario using his silky-smooth grooves to lure the honeys to his water bed. Coming on the heels of “You Are Not Alone,” I found the new album’s tonal shifts jarring, but I thought of them as a meta-commentary about the differences between R. the persona and Robert the person. He shamelessly boasted about his success—“Even the Statue of Liberty wants to bump and grind”—but also humbly thanked the Lord. He alternated between the profane and the sacred. “You remind me of my Jeep, I wanna ride it,” he sang. “Girl, you look just like my car, I want to wax it.” But he could have delivered the spiritual ballads “Religious Love” and “Heaven If You Hear Me” at any church service.
I didn’t quite know what to make of “Down Low (Nobody Has to Know),” and I still don’t. Despite the title—which became better known as slang for sex between an ostensibly straight man and another man—Kelly’s song is an account of sleeping with another man’s wife and urging her to keep it a secret. It’s just plain weird, especially when the husband, voiced by Ronald Isley, croons in his celebrated falsetto, “How could you go so low?” But I concluded that Kelly had evolved, reaching out to “brothers in the ghetto” in “As I Look into My Life” to follow his example to “love and respect that woman and bring her happiness.”
That review would not age well.
In the months that followed the R. Kelly album, the singer talked a lot in interviews about finding God. In the spring of 1997, he joined rising gospel star Kirk Franklin onstage in Chicago to announce that he’d been saved. “It amazes me when I look back eight months ago—cars, women, money, the media, I had everyone’s attention,” Kelly said. “Some may think it’s a gimmick, but I tell you, here stands a broken man. Every day I seem to be falling in love with the Lord. . . . I used to be flying in sin. Now, I’m flying in Jesus.” Then he sang “I Believe I Can Fly.”
Lou Carlozo of the Chicago Tribune reported that Franklin, a nondenominational minister from Fort Worth, Texas, helped Kelly find his way to Jesus. Franklin had also counseled Mike Tyson and Tupac Shakur. There was talk of Kelly doing a gospel album.
In November 1998, Kelly’s fourth release for Jive significantly expanded his reach from R&B into hip-hop, as well as into mainstream pop. The ambitious double album R. sold more than eight million copies, thanks to collaborations with rappers Foxy Brown, Nas, and Jay-Z, as well as an unlikely duet with Céline Dion on “I’m Your Angel,” which reached No. 1 on the pop chart. The album also boasted one of Kelly’s biggest hits, “I Believe I Can Fly,” which first appeared on the soundtrack to Space Jam in 1996, and which promptly became a staple at graduation ceremonies and proms. Dave Hoekstra wrote about the song and the film for the Sun-Times. Kelly met Michael Jordan on the basketball court at the Athletic Club on the North Side, Hoekstra reported, and their managers worked out the deal for the singer to contribute to the soundtrack of the movie, in which Jordan costarred with Bugs Bunny and the rest of the Looney Tunes crew.
“‘I Believe I Can Fly’ is the way I think I play,” Jordan told Hoekstra. Kelly added that he screened a videotape of the movie several times in his home theater, and that inspired him to write the song. “I loved it. I studied it, and I prayed over it, because I wanted the best thing to come out of it. The film has a lot to do with encouraging kids and making them laugh and smile. That’s important to me.”
When I returned to the Sun-Times, I took over the Kelly beat from Hoekstra, who’d tired of writing about music, preferring more esoteric features and travel stories. In May 1999, I reviewed the first of the singer’s two shows supporting R. at the United Center. Even at seventy-five dollars apiece, more than double the national average for a concert ticket that year, both Chicago gigs sold out. Fronting a twelve-piece band, Kelly crooned, “I feel like feeling what I feel like feeling right now.” The giant video screens showed a woman’s hand groping several inches below his big belt buckle, which read “Champ.” Pop crossovers and gospel sermons weren’t on the set list that night, and the show ended with Kelly pulling a woman from the crowd. He convinced her to strip down to her panties and bra, lured her into a giant red bed, and removed his own clothes. They disappeared beneath the silky sheets, and the stage went dark. There was no encore.
I next wrote about Kelly a little less than a year and a half later, when I reviewed his fifth album, TP-2.com. That prompted the fax, and my return to investigative journalism.
CHAPTER 4
SCHOOL AIN’T GONNA MAKE YOU A MILLIONAIRE
“You make some calls to the people mentioned in the fax,” Sun-Times city editor Don Hayner told me, “and I’ll have Abdon Pallasch check Cook County Circuit Court to see if a lawsuit was ever filed. Let’s start there.” Before Hayner paired us to look into the allegations in the anonymous letter about R. Kelly, I’d only shared the occasional collegial head-nod with Abdon on the battered old escalators leading from the lobby to the third-floor newsroom. A perpetually boyish Irish-Polish leprechaun (he does not object to that description, I should note), Abdon stood out at the Sun-Times because he wore suits and ties to work every day, all of them purchased at Irv’s discount men’s warehouse. “I learned that if I dressed like a lawyer, I could walk past the court clerks into the judges’ chambers. It also helped me look like an adult so people would take me seriously.”
Two years younger than me, Abdon had taken a path to 401 North Wabash that was just as circuitous as mine. After he earned an undergrad degree in Ireland, he attended Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, then did a one-year residency at the larger of Chicago’s two daily newspapers, the broadsheet across Michigan Avenue that catered to professionals on the North Side and monied suburban readers. He now scoffed at what he called “Tribune arrogance.” Abdon spent time as a crime reporter at the independent City News Bureau; traveled to Nicaragua to cover elections for UPI; returned to report on the local legal world for Chicago Lawyer; and finally landed at the city-centric, working-class tabloid Sun-Times
. Whenever he wasn’t sitting in state or federal court, he could be found working the phones in the newsroom, one of its aces, at a desk piled high with stacks of legal papers that often spilled onto the floor.
Abdon grew up as a Catholic-school kid with four sisters on Chicago’s Northwest Side, and he eventually had five children of his own, including an eldest son living in Ireland. When we started working together, he could sing the first two bars of “I Believe I Can Fly”—“I must have watched that damn movie with my son five hundred times”—but he confessed utter ignorance about the rest of Kelly’s catalog, as well as most soul, hip-hop, and R&B. “Who is Curtis Mayfield?” he once asked me. His tastes began and ended with Irish folk-rock, and he knew little about pop culture, as well as some things I assumed anyone would know by age thirty-six. When I included a line in a story about Kelly lewdly singing, “Girl, I’m ready to toss your salad,” he asked, “What’s so dirty about that?” I said it was slang for anilingus, but the look of puzzlement remained. I told him to look it up.
After we huddled in the newsroom and read the fax together, Abdon jotted down names and dates in his reporter’s notebook and set off in search of the case file. Maintained, if you want to be so kind, by political patrons of Cook County Circuit Court Clerk Dorothy Brown, the filing system at Chicago’s Daley Center was notorious as the most archaic of any big city in the United States, inaccessible by computer, and with legal papers often going astray, never to be found again. Abdon nevertheless unearthed a file six inches thick for a case initiated by Tiffany Hawkins through her attorney, Susan E. Loggans, three years earlier, in late 1996. Abdon methodically photocopied the 235 pages and brought them back to the newsroom, where we scrutinized them late into the evening, highlighting passages, scrawling questions in the margins, and posting sticky notes next to potential leads.