Every Little Step: My Story (6 page)

When my family started making noise, the families of the other members got upset at us, telling us we were going to mess it up for everybody. They were saying we should just leave it alone. But my mother’s response was, “Are you crazy? They’re robbing these kids!”

Bobby didn’t have the mentality to take this kind of mistreatment. He comes from a family that’s not going to tolerate that. I remember the management company coming in from New York to have a big meeting with the five families that took place in our apartment. They were supposed to be coming with an accountant to give us a rundown of what was happening with the money, but instead they gave us some wishy-washy bull. So my mother got totally fed up and kicked them out of the apartment.

“Get moving—get out of my house!” she said to them. “I don’t want to hear any more. See you all later!”

After that it got really rough with the other families. They were pretty upset with us. But we soon saw what the management company was up to when they came to us and started talking about Bobby going solo. While they were talking to us about a solo career, the management guys were going to the other members and telling them that Bobby was causing trouble for them and they should think about getting rid of him.

At one point they even had my mom at a meeting in a Boston restaurant talking about Bobby leaving the group and going solo, while at the same time somebody else on the management team was meeting with the other New Edition mothers at a different restaurant on the same street. My mother actually went to the other mothers and told them that the management was trying to play both sides, but they wouldn’t hear it. Management’s strategy was divide and conquer, making sure they didn’t have to split up that pie. So they just built another pie that they could dig into. They went to the other members and encouraged them to take a vote to kick Bobby out, but at the same time they had big plans for Bobby as a solo artist. It was a very confusing and frustrating time.

If you want to understand the demise of New Edition and Bobby’s separation from the group, listen to the last song he recorded with the group, called “Who Do You Trust.” Study the lyrics, because Bobby spelled it all out in that song, on which he was the lead singer. The writing credits went to David Hurst
Batteau and Danny Sembello, who clearly had some sense of what Bobby and the group were going through.

In my opinion, this moment is where the whole “bad boy” reputation started, when he left the group. Despite what was going on behind the scenes with the shady financing and deceitful managers, Bobby got labeled as arrogant and uncooperative. A troublemaker. A bad boy. That’s where it all began. After all, who would walk away from a multimillion-dollar group? And to top it off, word got out that the group had voted to kick him out because he was irresponsible and missing rehearsals and shows, trying to destroy an extremely popular group. That was the official story fed to the press.

That’s where the stigma started.

My life changed pretty quickly when I left New Edition. It went from one extreme to the other. My first problem was I didn’t have any money. I was seventeen years old, back in Boston, and I had to figure out what I could do to survive until I made my solo record. So I started selling weed. But that didn’t last long—my brother found out. He was not happy and shut that down right away.

I then started writing and going into the studio and recording as much as possible. I would send songs to people I knew at MCA, and they liked what they heard. MCA had already asked me if I wanted to do a solo album, but I needed some time off from the grueling travel with New Edition. So I went to work on my first solo album, which would fulfill my part of New Edition’s two-album obligation to Jump and Shoot. We called my solo album
King of Stage
. I’ve always felt that was the most accurate description of my performing tal
ents. I may not be the most gifted singer in the world, but once I got out on that stage I didn’t think anybody could match me. Years later my first wife would try to call me the “King of R & B,” but that was never a title I claimed.

I had a big hit on that first solo album, a song called “Girlfriend” that climbed to number one on the
Billboard
R & B chart in 1986. I made enough money with that song to move my entire family out of Boston to Los Angeles—my mom, dad, sisters and brother. Everybody moved out west with me. I was fulfilling that vow I made to myself after Jimmy died to get out of the projects—though I had no idea it would all happen so fast.

While it was cool to have a hit song on my first album, I wasn’t even close to satisfied. I wanted to do big things. I had a lot I wanted to say. But nothing could have prepared me for
Don’t Be Cruel
.

Blowing Up

At one point when New Edition was out on the road, we were touring with the incredible Rick James. I spent a lot of time with him; I was drawn to him like a magnet. How could you not be drawn to Rick James—he was larger than life. I’d always loved his music, ever since those days dancing to my grandmother’s records in her living room. But now he became a very dear friend to me. I learned so much from him, about life, about music, about women.

I would often go into his dressing room before the shows, just to absorb all the knowledge and wisdom I could. He was trying to teach me how to play the bass, that instrument I had always loved, so while we were having our lesson, he’d start talking. When he found out that we were smoking weed on the tour, he got pissed off. He was adamant—he’d say to us, “Don’t ever do drugs, it’ll kill you.” And he’d be smoking a joint while he said it!

We said, “But you smoke it!”

“That doesn’t mean you should smoke it,” he said. “You’re kids. When you get to be twenty-one, then you can talk to me about smoking weed.”

My response was, “Man, whatever.” I didn’t stop smoking weed.

But beyond the weed discussion, Rick was a huge influence on me and the music I created for my second solo album. I wanted to take a little bit of Michael, a little bit of Prince, and a little bit of Rick, and mash it all up in a ball. That’s the artist I wanted to be. From Prince, it was all about his originality. That was everything to me. And every move he made was cool, mysterious. I wanted to take Rick’s wildness. When I got up on that stage, I wanted it to be like I had been let out of a cage. Growling, stalking, like a wild animal. And with Michael, it was about his precision. His mastery of the craft we all used, which is entertainment. I wanted to put all of those elements together and become this super-entertainer, jumping off risers and things like that.

To make my new record, I crisscrossed the country, working with great producers like LA Reid and Babyface, and Teddy Riley. When we were finishing our sessions on the West Coast with LA and Babyface, I just felt like we weren’t quite done. I wanted to add more aggression to the album, something that had a harder edge to it. That’s what brought me to the East Coast and New York City, where I was walking down the street when I literally bumped into Teddy Riley carrying his Casio keyboard under one arm. Though he was only two years older than me, Teddy had been a hot producer for years. He had started working on some stuff with his new group, Guy, but they were still a couple of years away from releasing their groundbreaking album,
The Future
.

“What’s up, Teddy?” I said, genuinely pleased to see him.

“What’s up, Bobby?” he said.

“Dude, we need to get together, do some songs,” I said.

“Man, that would be great. I would love that,” he responded.

So that’s how I wound up messing around in his little studio in his apartment in Harlem, where he grew up. I took out my cassettes and played him a few grooves I had been working on. We were just brainstorming, throwing stuff out there and vibing off each other. He put down a pounding drumbeat and I immediately thought of this groove that had been bouncing around in my head for months. It haunted me; I would play with it every time I got on a keyboard. So when I heard Teddy’s drumbeat, I got on his keyboard and
I played it for him.
Da dadadadum
. Teddy loved it. That became the unmistakable, addictive hook for “My Prerogative,” which many consider my signature song—and the song that announced the arrival of a pounding, rhythmic, hip-hop-inspired approach to R & B that came to be called new jack swing. With “My Prerogative,” I was definitely trying to make a statement about leaving New Edition and being on my own. I could do what I wanted, play what I wanted, spend my money where I wanted. Because of a contract dispute he was embroiled in at the time, Riley isn’t listed as a writer and producer on the credits of “My Prerogative.” He just got credited with mixing, but his influence is all over that record.

When
Don’t Be Cruel
came out, it was like a bomb exploded on the American music scene—and in my life. I don’t think I was fully ready for it. I was in awe of the success of that album. We stayed out on the road almost three years touring on that record, traveling across the globe. The first single was “Don’t Be Cruel,” and I rapped at one point in the song, so the radio wouldn’t play it. This was 1988 and there were still many pop radio stations that considered rap some kind of scary black thing. So we took out the rap interlude so that we could get pop radio play. But then a funny thing happened—MTV started playing the video, featuring my rap. After that, the pop stations started playing the original version of the song, with my rap included. MTV set the standard.

We recorded forty songs and picked the best twelve. Nine of the cuts wound up going out as singles, nearly the whole
album. I became the first teenager since Stevie Wonder to hit number one on the
Billboard
chart, topping both the pop and R & B charts.
Don’t Be Cruel
wound up as the top-selling album of 1989, selling over five million copies in that year alone (and more than eight million total over the years). I won a Grammy in 1990 for Best Male R & B Vocal Performance.

Along with my swagger and my music, I also introduced the world to my haircut, which came to be known as the Gumby. The haircut actually came about as an accident. I had a flattop at the time, and I was sitting in the chair of a famous barber in New York named Dinny Mo. Something happened and the razor slipped out of his hand. I think he actually said, “Oops.” But I saw it in the mirror and thought we might be onto something. I liked the way my hair swerved asymmetrically. I told him to give me some parts coming down here and over there. Then I wet my hair and put some gel on it. My hair is naturally curly, so that completed the look.

“Yeah, this is gonna work,” I said when I looked in the mirror. I was feeling it.

After I wore the style in the “Every Little Step” video, I started seeing it everywhere. To this day there’s a whole little society in Japan called the Bobby O’s, thousands of kids who follow everything related to Bobby Brown. They cut their hair like me and even dye their skin. It’s been more than twenty years and the Bobby O’s are still going strong.

A FEW WORDS FROM KENNETH “BABYFACE” EDMONDS

The creation of Bobby’s
Don’t Be Cruel
album was like the forming of a perfect storm. In the late eighties, LA Reid and I were out in Los Angeles, trying to sell records as the Deele and also trying to establish ourselves as writers for other artists. During a meeting we had at Universal, they mentioned that we might want to meet with an artist named Pebbles [who eventually became LA’s wife], and they also mentioned Bobby Brown. At the time Bobby had that song out, “Girlfriend,” and of course we remembered him from New Edition, but we didn’t exactly jump on it.

We left the meeting and got in our car to drive back to our apartment on Highland. As we were driving, Bobby Brown came on the radio. He happened to be on a radio show where he would do a live performance. He was singing his song “Girlfriend” and at some point he went for a note he couldn’t reach. Bobby got mad and he said, “I don’t want to sing this song anyway.” We were shocked. We said, “Can you believe he did that?” That changed everything for us. That told us this guy was crazy. We loved his crazy energy; he just didn’t care. We loved who he was. Right then we knew,
This guy is a star
. That made the decision easy for us. We wanted to work with him.

When we finally got with Bobby, I don’t know that he was that crazy about working with us, to be honest. He fought us on a couple of things. He fought us on “Don’t Be Cruel.” He
didn’t necessarily think it was a good song. He fought us on the vocals. He was trying to
sing
and we were trying to keep him simple. When we put all the songs together, we did the best we could. But nobody knew Bobby was going to blow up.

We thought we did a good job. We knew it was unlike anything that had been out before. There were no songs like “Don’t Be Cruel.” It was unique; nothing that followed “Don’t Be Cruel” has sounded like it. The whole structure of it was kind of different, the whole choral thing in the beginning. When Elvis did “Don’t Be Cruel,” we liked the words, and we wanted Bobby to have that kind of energy.

When the record came out, there was a moment that we knew it was really happening. Bobby was on tour with Al B. Sure and New Edition. We went to see the show, somewhere in North or South Carolina. Bobby started that tour opening up the show. He had already performed when we got there; a lot of people didn’t see him. Al B. Sure was on the stage at the time. We visited Bobby backstage. We had seen that “Don’t Be Cruel” was going into the top ten and would maybe even be a number one record. That was great. But what happened at that concert was more significant. We walked to the side of the stage with Bobby. The people who saw Bobby on the side of the stage just lost it.
While Al B. Sure was onstage.
Al was hotter than you could get at that point, but Bobby standing on the side of the stage caused such pandemonium that we were like, “Oh shit, this is crazy. He’s getting ready to blow.”
It was based on the song that was playing on the radio. It had already started.

We saw his energy in the video, we knew he brought something to the table as a performer. There was no question. But when he stood on the side of that stage without doing anything and they loved him, that told us something. It was maybe two months later that they changed the tour. Suddenly Bobby was closing the show. It happened that fast. I don’t know of any situation I can think of where someone started out a tour as the opening act and in that short period was headlining.

It’s not that Bobby has ever been a great singer. Bobby has been a great entertainer. Some people were just born to entertain. In my opinion, to this day there has not been another Bobby Brown. There are people who can dance, people who can sing, but when you look at Bobby Brown in his prime, the way he worked the stage, his entire persona, it’s hard to touch that. The only thing close that I’ve seen, people who have a persona like that, you have to go back to James Brown and how he commanded the stage. You have to go to Prince, how he commanded a stage. Or Michael. Bobby Brown commanded a stage in that way. That was the magic of Bobby. And add to it his being a bad boy. Singing those love songs, the way he brought an edge to it. That just worked. He was the original bad boy of R & B.