by CeeLo Green
After the party, I got in a two-seater Benz with Sleepy Brown, from our Dungeon brothers Organized Noize. Christine just jumped in the car with me and we rolled back to the Dungeon, which had by then moved into an urban mansion with white columns. I do not think I really knew the complete meaning of the words “love” and “lust” until that moment. Okay, there were probably a lot of words that I didn’t know the meaning of back then, but you get the idea. I fell instantly for this woman—and I fell hard.
So it was love at first sight for me, and for her—well, it was pretty instant as well. See, you might be surprised, but I can be a fairly charming fellow when I really need to be. At that time, I really needed and wanted Christine. She was so strikingly beautiful and staggeringly different in terms of dress and style, she also reminded me to always be myself—a lesson I might have learned a little too well. The woman had so much style. She wore a lot of thrift store stuff—shabby chic they call it now—and she was tremendously well put together. Christine changed my life forever. She was as close to a soul mate as I may ever have here on Earth.
I love that old Neil Young song “A Man Needs a Maid.” Some people find that sentiment sexist, so let’s just all agree sometimes a man needs a mate and a family too. Christine already had two wonderful little girls, Sierra and Kalah, and so I had an instant family. I like to think of myself as a mostly self-civilized man, but Christine and the girls helped too. They taught me a lot about how to love and how to take care of other people—lessons that I learned later than most. Despite being a bit of a mutant all of my life, like most of your garden-variety human beings, I still love love, especially whenever it is reciprocated. I crave affection. I crave company. I crave family. I crave the stable home I never really had. Trust me, the things that you are denied early in your life become even more attractive to you later on.
During those first few years as the man of the house with Christine and her beautiful girls, I found a kind of strength inside of myself that I didn’t even know I had in me. A few years earlier, I was a monster that people called “Chickenhead.” Now I was a father figure to two little girls who called me “Dad.” Being in any group is a lot like being in any gang, and for most people caught up in them, gangs are usually a kind of substitute family for those seeking some measure of safety in numbers. Now I had the real family I had always been looking for.
Big Gipp: CeeLo has always had a touch with women, and part of the secret is that he’s not afraid of any woman. He doesn’t care what a woman looks like. If she’s close enough to touch, she’s close enough to speak with him. If I had to sum up his attitude with women, I’d put it like this: I might not be her type, but if she gives me a little while to talk, I might just convince her. He’s told me, some people have the look, and some people have to talk. That may be the secret to his impeccable wordplay—he needed it to get some play! I’ve seen women who thought they weren’t his type end up all in his bed. He has the kind of vocabulary that gets women to use a very important word: Yes.
And right from the moment they met, CeeLo and Christine were completely inseparable. Those two were an amazing vision together. Of course, CeeLo has always stood out in any room that he’s in, and I’m pretty sure that Christine was the only blond dreadlocked girl in all of Atlanta then. Seeing her for the first time was almost like spotting a rare, exotic, sexy animal living right in the heart of the Dirty South. Christine was way ahead of her time, and you could tell that CeeLo was instantly impressed with her style and individuality. Christine stood out as being totally unique, so she was probably the perfect woman for a man who may very well be a mutant. Once we mutants understand who we really are, the ridicule of the world doesn’t matter to us because we are very strong in who are. Christine is a very strong woman. She filled a big void in CeeLo’s life for love and for comfort and for family, especially since she had two young daughters. Christine was very adamant about raising her two girls right, and CeeLo admired this young, beautiful single mom who stood up for herself and for her girls. Think about it: Christine was really CeeLo’s first serious girlfriend and eventually she became his first—and very possibly only—wife. Overnight he went from being a kid to becoming like a father to her two kids. Respect is big for CeeLo, and he respected Christine as much as he loved her—which was a whole hell of a lot.
At the same time, with Goodie Mob beginning to take off, I found myself increasingly wanting to be my own man. Yet as I would find out, being your own man and being part of a Mob—even our crazy and slightly unruly Mob—don’t always go together. There’s another song title on the Still Standing album that in retrospect defines me pretty well and at the same time suggests why there was trouble brewing between me and Goodie Mob. The song is called “I Refuse Limitation,” and artistically that’s always been my problem and my blessing. I’ve always been highly inquisitive, and that has kept me pushing while others might settle and stay and just let it be. So I did what I do, and I kept being myself, and pushed to show my own voice in the group, which I know rubbed some people the wrong way.
Still, we pushed on. Our second album went gold—and we even did a little cameo in a movie called Mystery Men with Ben Stiller, William H. Macy, Paul Reubens, and Hank Azaria as a bunch of lesser superheroes doing a song called “Not So Goodie Mob.” The movie didn’t do all that well, so I guess we remained a group of lesser superheroes ourselves.
Since Gipp had gotten married to the singer Joi and then I got together with Christine and her daughters, the road had become a tougher and tougher place. Suddenly, you’re not just getting away, you’re going away and there are people back home who miss you. Looking back, we went so quickly from being kids to having kids, and Gipp and I weren’t quite so carefree after that. I loved the refuge from the world that Christine, the girls, and I could create together—so much so that there were many times when I just wanted to stay at home rather than be the kind of road warriors Goodie Mob had become.
My experience with Christine changed just about everything in my life. I now see that the situation became a little like Yoko Ono and John Lennon. John Lennon seemed to upset the balance of the Beatles by bringing Yoko into what that great group did, and being with Christine somehow made me suddenly and dramatically less interested in doing much of anything with the group. After a while, being with Christine and her girls became my priority, at the same exact time that I found being part of a group like Goodie Mob just wasn’t feeding me anymore.
This wasn’t Christine’s fault—or the fault of Gipp, Khujo, or T-Mo either. In retrospect, maybe it was all my fault. In any case, for my own reasons based on my own strange life story, I found myself beginning to want to be a part of a real family and beginning to lose interest in being one of the guys in any Mob and compromising any visions I might have—musical or otherwise.
Big Gipp: In Goodie Mob, we never signed a big publishing deal. We never became the biggest stars in the world. For the most part, we made our name and our money on the road—which is a dangerous place. We weren’t out to sell the most records of anybody. We were out to save the world. I remember one time on the road we went past this church bus that had caught on fire. This was in the middle of nowhere while we were driving through Arkansas on tour. Well, we pulled our bus over and we started helping the kids. Finally, there was one more kid left on the bus, and our dude Tim Elkort ran up on the burning bus and got the kid and pulled him out to safety. And as soon as we got the kid ten or twelve feet from the bus, the bus exploded. It was amazing that no one got hurt. We got an award from the church. So we didn’t get our Grammy, we got that instead.
The third Goodie Mob album, World Party, is when it all fell apart between the Mob and me. Trust me, making that album was no party. Our musical differences began playing out, and we fought about which way to go. From my perspective, having not made all that much money in the game to that point, the group desperately wanted to sell more records, and that just wasn’t what was driving me at that time. We were less into
making big statements than looking for hits. We brought other people into the process too. One track called “Rebuilding” was one of the first tracks ever produced by some kid from Chicago named Kanye West. In retrospect, it’s very cool that we worked together, even if we didn’t even meet at the time. There were a lot of meetings I skipped back then. I felt like we were regressing, turning our spaceship around and falling back to Earth. More and more, I was a man looking for the exit.
By then my old friend Lauryn Hill had already reached out to me and asked me to collaborate with her on “Do You Like the Way,” a song that ended up being featured on one of the biggest albums of all time—Supernatural by Santana. I felt empowered by the project—artistically and monetarily. It was the first time I could really sing out on a vocal, and it affected me, gave me ideas of how things could be. Santana wasn’t there the day we recorded, but I met him later, when we were performing the song for a TV show. He told me I had the voice of a thousand generations. I didn’t know what he meant, but it sounded wonderful, especially coming from him. Supernatural won Album of the Year at the Grammys in 1999, and it sold 30 million copies. I figured it would put some serious change in my pocket.
Meanwhile, when the going gets tough, sometimes the tough get going in the other direction. I wanted a family. I wanted to be home. I wanted a life. And more than anything, musically speaking, I wanted to make my own statement without having to run it by or get approved by any committee—even one made up of my longtime Goodie buddies. So not for the last time in my career and in my life, I withdrew further and further into my own deal—both literally and figuratively. And once I discovered our management was ripping me off—and taking food out of the mouth of my new family—Goodie Mob felt like a much less welcoming, and even dangerous place for me to be. Gipp was there when I found out that I wasn’t seeing all the money I thought I should be getting from the Santana album and I pulled a gun on one of our managers. I’ll let him tell that story.
Big Gipp: My take on why CeeLo left Goodie Mob is a little different. For me, it was a low point that came from a high point for CeeLo. Lauryn Hill had reached out and worked with CeeLo on that track “Do You Like the Way” for Santana’s Supernatural album, and it became part of one of the biggest albums of all time. After that, CeeLo had a dispute over a publishing check with one of our managers just as we were going out on tour for World Party. I remember Lo calling me and saying “Dude has some money from me, and I’m getting it back!”
The big showdown was between the manager and CeeLo, and we couldn’t do anything about the money or the feelings behind the money because there were only two people in that fight. When our manager got on the bus that morning, CeeLo pulled some kind of Uzi on him. It looked like CeeLo was about to kill the man. And I stood in front of CeeLo and said, “You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to kill him for the money.” And Lo said, “If I die, at least I’ll have my respect.” That’s when I knew CeeLo was capable of pulling a murder when it comes to him fighting for his respect—or him feeling like he had been disrespected. CeeLo is a truly great guy—right until he feels like he’s been treated with no respect, then trust me, he can be one bad enemy.
When the shit hits the fan with you and your best friends, it is the shittiest feeling of all. The day after CeeLo pulled a gun on our manager on the bus, Goodie Mob was supposed to start a House of Blues tour with the Black Eyed Peas. So I left with the group to go set up for the tour. Our first night was in Hilton Head, and I tried to speak with CeeLo all day that day trying to see if he was going to get on the bus or would he not get on the bus. That was the question. And soon the answer was clear—he wasn’t going anywhere. That was when I finally realized there was going to be big division in the group, that CeeLo was going to leave Goodie Mob, and a very dark period in my life was about to begin. And it was worse because there was nothing any of us could do to prevent the situation.
The gun incident was probably a final nail in a coffin that was already being built. I withdrew from the tour and went on hiatus. I just took a year off and I didn’t do much of anything. I don’t think I left the house.
Meanwhile, OutKast was exploding, and where we had always been all over each other’s albums and videos, now there were all these OutKast videos that I wasn’t in, like “B.O.B. (Bombs Over Bagdad)” and later “Roses.” I only sang on one song apiece on Stankonia and Speaker-boxxx/The Love Below. I just pulled away from being a part of so many things then. After a while, I didn’t feel like I belonged. I would much rather bow out gracefully than be argumentatively indifferent. Or maybe I wanted my conspicuous absence to be noticed and to be welcomed back warmly. Part of me wanted to hear the Goodie Mob guys say, “Come back, CeeLo, we love you, we miss you.” But that was not the reaction I got. What I got was that people respected my space. So I took it, and more and more distance developed between us. That old Mob of ours was breaking apart.
Why does anything in this life fall apart? Generally, it’s not for one reason but for many reasons. I had grown up in Goodie Mob, and I felt like I just grew out of it eventually. It’s the most natural thing in a way. It wasn’t personal. I was following my voice and seeing where that voice might take me. And that was the right thing to do because I can see now that a song like “Crazy” or “Fuck You” would never have happened under the banner of Goodie Mob. Those songs wouldn’t have fit. And at least for me, art is not about being restricted. It’s about being free to express. I am a restless artist and a restless man. I have a lot of songs in me to sing. All kinds of songs too. If I had not aspired to become an individual artist and not decided to take a chance and be the whole thing instead of just part of something, I would never have known what exactly was spinning inside of me. That would have been an injustice to all of us, and most especially to me. And time after time in my life, I have found that I am a man who truly hates injustice—especially when that injustice is happening to me. So not for the last time, I did what men do sometimes.
I left.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Perfect Imperfections
A Soul Machine Goes So Lo
Listen now, I got a story to tell
About a bird who wanted to fly away
You see he knew that he could and he probably would
But his family said they needed him to stay
But his spirit is strong and he’s been waiting so long
And he don’t really want nobody to tell him daddy wrong
So excuse me I wanna go and kiss the sky
Cause these wings that I was given were intended to fly
—CeeLo Green, “El Dorado Sunrise (Super Chicken)”
HARD TIMES
Doing what it took to make ends meet.
CeeLo was chosen.”
That’s what Rico Wade from Organized Noize once said about me, and who am I to argue?
Call it a strange sixth sense or arrogant delusions of grandeur about myself, but in my own funky heart of hearts, I have always felt that my story has been fated. Perhaps I feel this way because my life has been, in so many ways, stranger than fiction. Some of this stuff you couldn’t make up—at least I couldn’t. Maybe everybody out there shares this same deep feeling of the role of destiny in their lives, but since I have only ever had the pleasure of being my own mutant self, I will speak strictly for myself here. Yet even though I feel my path has been preordained, I still do not believe in just passively accepting your fate. Instead, I believe strongly in fighting for it. As the noted gangster rapper Donald Trump once declared, “What separates the winners from the losers is how a person reacts to each new twist of fate.”
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. S
troke 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.
