Everybody's Brother (9 page)

Among a certain select group of individuals in the greater Atlanta area, I was starting to get a reputation as a rapper who could sing. Using my voice to sing also allowed me to impress my family—maybe for the first time. It happened at my cousin Erica’s wedding reception when I was about sixteen or seventeen. My mother was there in her wheelchair, along with my grandmother and everybody else in the family. I always loved gospel music, and as a kid I memorized every song that BeBe Winans ever recorded. So it seemed appropriate to ask to sing a sexy yet spiritual Winans song called “I Wanna Be the Only One” with Aunt Audrey and her band. We did it as a duet, and Shedonna assures me that I was electrifying.
For once I became a kind of star—at least to my relatives.

Even though I was powerless to help my mother walk again or use her hands, I realized that what I could do was to share my voice on her behalf. I felt like I was meant to carry on for my mother, and I did not want to take such a privilege and such a duty in vain. I felt strong enough, and I was both willing and able. Having spent time in church, I wanted to be pleasing in the sight of my Maker and serving one master. It’s easy to explain in retrospect because I’m older and I can only hope wiser. I did what I did because that’s what came natural.

It’s not easy for strong characters like my mother or me to feel helpless. And the way my mind works, I would never write a song about pure helplessness. I do not write songs to share that kind of pain. I write songs to empower myself and to empower other people who will ultimately have to face the inevitable and the unavoidable. Early on as a little boy, I learned that music is about rising above pain. It’s about expressing your soul and touching the souls of other people too. That explains why, when the time came, I did not write a song called “Trapped” about my mother’s suffering. Instead, I wrote a song called “Free.”

Lord it’s so hard livin this life;

A constant struggle each and every day.

Some wonder why

I’d rather die

Than to continue livin this way.

Many are blind

and cannot find the truth cuz no one seems to really know.

But I won’t accept that this is how it’s gonna be.

Devil you got to let me and my people go.

Cuz I wanna be free—

Completely free.

Lord won’t you please come and save me.

Cuz I wanna be free—

Totally free.

I’m not gonna let this world worry me

We are all superheroes in our own stories—haunted by our pasts, yet focused on our futures. I was no exception. If my mother couldn’t go anywhere now, well, then in my mind, that just meant that I was going to have to go everywhere. Even if my first stop was underground.

GOODIE TIMES

Life with Goodie Mob was my education in music and life.

L
ike the old saying goes, home is where the Dungeon is.

For those of you who unwisely skipped your Introduction to Torture 101 course, a dungeon is a dark, forbidding, and often underground cell where prisoners are confined. Throughout history—fantasized and otherwise—dashing superheroes and nefarious villains like me have found themselves rightly or wrongly charged with unspeakable acts then thrown into a dungeon. As a rule, these captives cannot wait to make their big escape. But that’s not how it works in my fable. In my very strange case, a dungeon turned out to be the perfect escape that I had been looking for all of my life. In fact, finding my rightful place in the Dungeon is what finally set me free.

While I was dabbling in psychedelics in military school, a group of very young hip-hop artists had been creating the sound of the Dirty South out of Lamonte’s Beauty Supply shop in East Point, a gritty little city just south of the Atlanta line. Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins worked there before she became a big star in TLC, and so did Rico Wade, the teenage store manager and junior gangster who’d bought his own gold and black Honda Accord before he was old
enough to drive. A lot of the young rappers in southwest Atlanta started hanging out in that shop, and eventually Rico and two of his homeboys, Ray Murray and Sleepy Brown, organized themselves into a groundbreaking production team called Organized Noize.

In the early nineties Organized Noize moved its headquarters to a small brick ranch house Rico rented for his mother over in Lakewood. There was a scene going on there day and night. Sometimes twelve, fifteen kids would be hanging in the living room and kitchen, drinking 40s and writing rhymes on notepads, having rap battles out in the driveway, or cramming into the studio in the basement, which wasn’t even a real basement—it was more like a dug-out crawl space with red dirt walls. There wasn’t room for much equipment, just an MPC drum machine, a keyboard, some recording gear, a table and chairs, and records all over the place. But what was going on down there was so good and so intoxicating that nobody ever wanted to leave. They were captives. So they started calling the place the Dungeon. And this cramped, thrown-together corner of the universe became the epicenter of a whole new rap scene.

Two guys from my neighborhood who hung out there—Jay Douglas and Killer B—brought me over to the Dungeon for the first time. It was definitely the craziest and coolest place I’d ever seen. That first night I rapped with Sleepy Brown and did some singing. He told me he liked my singing more than my rapping. Then Rico Wade walked in with André Benjamin and Antwan “Big Boi”
Patton, who were just starting to call themselves OutKast. Since Dré and I had known each other since third grade, he was excited to see me. “This is my homeboy we been telling you about,” he told Rico. “Man do all the story raps. And he can sing!”

From then on, I was a member of the Dungeon Family. In the beginning, I would mostly just sit at the top of the stairs and try to size up the situation and figure out all of the players. The roots ran very deep there. Along with Dré and Big Boi, I already knew Big Gipp and “T-Mo” Barnett, who grew up in my neighborhood. They were slightly older than me, Original Gangsters—O.G. in the popular abbreviation—to be respected and possibly feared. Gipp was kind of quiet, but in an extremely striking way that let you know that he was someone special. Gipp was, is, and always shall be simply and utterly unique. Maybe that’s why Gipp has always called himself—and in his heart of hearts considered himself to be—an earthbound mutant. I think maybe it’s his ears. To me, Gipp is kind of like the black Spock—and just as lovable a character too.

Then there was T-Mo, who I’ve known the longest. T-Mo is four years older than me, but he is forever young. The man doesn’t look any different to me than the day that I first met him—and that was back when I was in nursery school. Gipp was more or less a free agent, but T-Mo was in a group with Willie “Khujo” Knighton, another O.G. who was especially legendary on the streets of Atlanta. They were calling themselves Khujo and the P-Funk Goodie Mob. And that fit right into the spirit of
the place, because the Dungeon Family was growing into a collective, a Dirty South version of George Clinton’s psychedelic dynasty, a Parliament-Funkadelic of hip-hop. In the Dungeon, I finally found my crew and I found my way in life too. In the Dungeon, I was set free in a manner that would open up the whole world to me.

Big Gipp:
Whatever it looked like to anyone else, the Dungeon was the center of the universe and heaven on Earth to us. We never really recorded in the Dungeon. Organized Noize would make beats and keep the beat on for two or three days at a time. You would go home, take a shower, go to school, go to work, come back, and that beat still be playing. And that’s how we created songs. When we started to be able to record, we thought that we were on to something, we was big time. Outside of that, we’d just rap to each other and rap to the sky.

That was the first time I had a good chance to really watch CeeLo and figure him out. He was a fascinating guy even then. CeeLo was never the one rushing into a rap battle. Instead, he was always the one studying the music, sitting up against the drum machine and figuring out exactly how everything worked. Lo may not have paid much attention at school, but I’m telling you that no one ever paid more attention at the Dungeon. I guess in the end, that was the school he really needed. When he didn’t know something, he asked questions constantly: How you do this? How you do that? He was never halfhearted. He was always focused on the music, while the rest of us were taking time off or playing the game. He never got into that stuff. He was always off listening
to the music, and he was like a walking encyclopedia of music. He wasn’t just listening to a song, he was studying who wrote it, who produced it. The rest of us were mostly just noticing what people were wearing on the cover. He always took a deeper approach. He knew who played bass. I know what sounds good to me. But he knew
why
it sounded good. It dawned on me later that back right in his first days at the Dungeon, CeeLo was already developing the talents that I didn’t start seeing until later. That’s also right about the time that “Chickenhead” became “CeeLo Green.”

With all due respect to Kermit the Frog, I must say that for me it’s actually been pretty easy being Green—and definitely much easier than being known as Chickenhead. At the time, I was always wearing the color green, and that went into my thought process. But also back then Sleepy Brown told me that I had a voice like Al Green—which is high praise indeed because the Reverend Al is clearly one of the all-time greats. In my mind, changing from Thomas DeCarlo Burton into CeeLo Green came to mean that I was a natural—it suggested that I was born to do this. I knew I would certainly be the one and only CeeLo Green. Like Ol’ Dirty Bastard would say, “There’s no father to my style.” And in my life, there had been no father at all, just a void I kept trying to fill. So in choosing my own last name, in redefining myself as CeeLo Green, I think that
was a way for me to say once and for all that I was my own man. And the Dungeon was the perfect place to invent myself as my own masterpiece.