By Todd Lavoie
“A lot of cats knew how to funk – that part was easy. But very few knew how to put that special vibe on their music. That’s what I knew best.”
Oh, I think I smell a Pulitzer! Rick James gives it to us straight – and beamed down from that great big coke-and-bondage romp in the sky, apparently, considering that ole Kinks himself passed away three years ago – in his recently released tell-all The Confessions of Rick James: Memoirs of a Super Freak (Colossus), and I’ll be damned if it’s not the juiciest pile of pages I’ve seen in a while.
But let’s be frank, people: a literary triumph it ain’t. So, when I say that he’s “giving it to us straight,” what I really mean is: “scribbling down the memories as soon as they wobble out of the freebase fog, without a moment’s thought to word choice or sentence structure.” Trust me, there’s not a thesaurus or an editor in sight. We’re talking direct brain-to-page transmission here, which sometimes makes for wincingly fascinating results. But hey, I guess we can’t always put a “special vibe” on everything we do?