Everybody's Brother (14 page)

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.

HARD TIMES

Doing what it took to make ends meet.

C
eeLo 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.”