Everybody's Brother (17 page)

While all this was happening, things were getting rocky on the home front too.

Like a lot of marriages, ours had its ups and downs. And as far as I’m concerned, I don’t owe anyone an answer to shit that’s happened in my personal life. That is why it’s called a personal life. But I will take this opportunity to set the record straight on one incident that keeps popping up in the media. Because our lives are so publicized these days, you sometimes have to speak on behalf of your life and even defend it. This isn’t my defense case but my honest attempt to clarify the misunderstanding that some inquiring minds like to spread.

This particular incident dates all the way back to July 2001. Christine and I and were not getting along at the time and had separated briefly, but we were still trying to keep things together. We had driven down to Disney World in Orlando, Florida, on a family vacation, and had enjoyed an entire weekend together. Then, on the way home, I was dropping off Christine and the kids, including Kingston in his baby seat, because I was staying somewhere else during our separation. As lovers do, we had gotten into some dumb dispute, and after we unpacked the car and the kids had gone inside, I felt as if Christine was being really dismissive of me. I hate feeling dismissed, especially when I felt like I was trying my best to do a good thing by attempting to keep us together as a family under difficult circumstances.

There I was standing in the garage with the door slammed on my face. I thought “Oh shit,” and I felt years of anger and frustration and pain coming back to me. I felt hurt, and so I wanted to hurt something. I felt terribly
slighted, and as I stood in the garage, some of my old street rage returned to me. At least in my crazy mind, there wasn’t much I could really do—other than take out all of my frustrations on the first thing that I saw. So I grabbed the thing nearest to me—a little wooden statue that I found in the garage—and I busted the windows out of the Jaguar.

Yes, I know this was horrible behavior—something I have had some experience with over the years. But for the record, what happened that day really was vandalism and not domestic abuse like some people think. No one was harmed in this incident—other than that statue and that car. Christine didn’t even know it happened at first—that garage was soundproofed, and she must have come down later that night, because she called me up and said, “Why did you do that?”

“Because I was frustrated,” I said.

“CeeLo, that’s the only means of transportation we’ve got,” she said. “You know you have to pay for it.” I said I was sorry and apologized because it was crazy. And it was.

In the end, I sure did pay for it. What happened was when Christine filled out the insurance form she, disclosed the nature of the incident. Two days later the police got involved and threw my ass in jail. I was arrested and released on $2,800 bail. For the record, I was not charged with domestic violence. The experience was humiliating, even though the mug shot wasn’t too bad. A couple months later, I was taken back into custody after I failed to show up at a court arraignment. I’ve never been too
great about showing up on time. In the end, I pleaded guilty to a single charge of “disorderly conduct”—which I have been guilty of most of my life—and spent two days in jail and a year on probation.

I fucked up. That’s pretty clear. But just for the record, worse things have happened when two people argue. Sadly, worse things happen all the time—and people end up dead on both sides of domestic disputes. That is not what happened here. Thankfully, this was something stupid, not something tragic. It did not end the relationship between Christine and me. It didn’t even end our marriage.

But as you might expect, my personal life had become suddenly a little bit messier following that Jaguar incident. I did spend more time rebuilding my relationship with Christine and the kids, and trying to keep the peace between us and earn their trust again. The time had come for me to behave myself and get right back to work. So in the wake of that passing storm, I figured I would try my best to stay out of trouble and focus on trying to get my music right.

We tried to make it work. But eventually in 2004, Christine filed for divorce. The truth is that even our divorce didn’t end our relationship—it just changed it. Even though we’re not together, my ex-wife and I, we’re still a family, and a pretty functional one. And we still love each other like a day hasn’t gone by. As much as anything else in this life, love is crazy—and I’m not the first one to see that or the last. I may be crazy, but I won’t let anyone tell me I don’t love my only wife or that she doesn’t love me. And nothing or nobody will ever tell me that this
union that led to our beautiful Kingston was any kind of mistake or failure.

A guy who I used to work with once called me an “idiot savant.” At the time, I thought he was calling me an idiot, so I didn’t act too thrilled. Now I think I know what he was trying to say. When it came to music, I didn’t apply any math to the process whatsoever. My approach to music was and is entirely chemical. I did what came naturally to me and to my own idiosyncratic chemistry. I am like a human lava lamp. So in retrospect, maybe he had a point. When I’m making music I try to be totally innocent—not totally naïve, but innocent; not ignorant, just innocent. I think that attitude separates me from a lot of other artists today because so many people sit down at this particular table and the first thing they ever say is “Whose throat do I have to cut? What do I have to do to make it at any cost to anyone else?” I didn’t want anything from anybody. I just wanted to make music. I didn’t make
Perfect Imperfections
to hog up a budget. I made it because I was by myself following my muse—and that’s just what came out then.

For the follow-up to
Perfect Imperfections
, I tried my best to play a little more ball and bring in some other producers, but still the fact remains that the late great Sammy Davis Jr. was right—I’ve gotta be me. I mean, in the end, who the hell else can I be?

Still, I tried to be open to more input and collaboration. On my next album for Arista,
Cee-Lo Green… Is the
Soul Machine
, I worked with some of the hottest names in music, like Timbaland and the Neptunes, as well as Jazze Pha, DJ Premiere, and my old pals Organized Noize. I still didn’t—and couldn’t—keep my freaky side in the closet, but I think we made a slightly less eccentric, somewhat more commercial album, especially tracks like “The Art of Noise,” “I’ll Be Around,” and “My Kind of People.”

But my timing was bad because shortly before my album came out, L.A. Reid moved on from Arista to run his next empire, the Island Def Jam Music Group, and suddenly there was a whole lot less interest at Arista in being in the CeeLo business. There were small glimmers of success—like getting to perform “I’ll Be Around” with Timbaland on the second season of
Chappelle’s Show
, but whatever we did, it wasn’t enough to get a hit.

Big Gipp:
CeeLo was so much more than hip-hop. CeeLo was—and is—way too big a talent to be contained by any group or any genre for too long. He always wanted to do it all—and so when he became a solo artist, that’s exactly what he did. The great thing about CeeLo is that he is a true force of nature. Of course, the bad thing about CeeLo also is that he’s a force of nature. No man or woman or group or record company is ever going to control this man for too long. As I’ve learned time and time again, the best way to get CeeLo to do anything is to try and tell him he can’t do it.

CeeLo once told me that when he did his first solo show for Arista, he walked up onstage with a boa and a wig. He knew that he was scaring people, but that’s one thing real artists do. They are scarily talented and they take chances. It’s about freedom. CeeLo loves his freedom, personally and creatively. I know that for his second album, CeeLo tried to work with the right people—including big name producers like Timbaland and the Neptunes. CeeLo tried to do what other people do. But what works for everyone else just doesn’t work for CeeLo. The man plays by his own rules, and he breaks those too. He didn’t want to only write songs about the club, because CeeLo’s world is bigger than that. And so is his talent.

Maybe CeeLo’s first two solo albums didn’t work because he dove into singing with two feet. Remember, he had been known first and foremost as a rapper before that. Everything CeeLo ever wanted to do and try, he did it all at once on those two solo albums. He tried to do every genre of music, and what he found out is that the music industry’s attention span is just not that wide. People like an album of R&B songs, of love songs, but not an album that’s like Noah’s Ark with some of everything. CeeLo did it because it was something he wanted to do. He felt like those two albums were his boot camp for becoming a solo artist after pouring himself into being part of a group. Once he got out there on his own, he realized it was going to be a lot of work to establish the brand of CeeLo Green, Solo Artist. That took him a long time, and he’s still in the process. The masters like Stevie Wonder or Michael Jackson figure out who they are musically then take everyone along for the ride. CeeLo is still defining himself as an artist—which is cool because there are still many mountains for him to climb.

In the end, Arista didn’t drop me exactly—they just sort of released me because my contract was basically up. The company thought
Soul Machine
was a lost cause and didn’t
want to put any more money behind it. They gave me the choice whether I wanted to start something new or be free and just move on. As I always tend to do, I choose freedom because I thought they were all wrong about
Soul Machine
. True to form, I believed that I was right and they needed to see the light.

But first there was darkness. When I left Arista with no particular place to go, I found myself entering a kind of musical wilderness. Suddenly I was looking for my next meal or record deal. Between the
Soul Machine
album failing in 2004 and Gnarls Barkley coming out of nowhere in 2006, money got tight, but not too tight to mention here. I did not know where my next twenty grand was coming from. At the same time, I remember feeling a certain welcome sense of freedom and liberty. That’s one nice thing about finding yourself in the wilderness—other than debt collectors, people don’t bother you too much. And coming from where I had come from, being counted out and underestimated just made me feel very much at home.

THE CRAZY FORCE WAS WITH US

Danger Mouse and I gave an out-of-this-world Gnarls Barkley performance of “Crazy” at the 2006 MTV Movie Awards.

No, I am not Danger Mouse’s father, and he turned me to the Dark Side.

Photo by John Shearer/WireImage

T
hey say it is always darkest before the dawn—unless, of course, dawn never actually comes.