Requiem for a Super Freak

Three days before he died, Rick James was running errands like anyone else. He woke up a bit before noon in his apartment in Los Angeles, and took his 12-year-old son Tazman to the Verizon store in Topanga to buy him a cellphone. His personal assistant and two teenage relatives piled into James’s Infiniti for the ride.

James was in a good mood, and on the drive over he cranked up one of his old CDs and they all sang along. It was sweltering out, but he was wearing Timberlands, green cords and a green silk long-sleeved shirt. As always, James dressed to make an impression.

And as always, he did. In the store, James greeted an old friend and they started loudly joking around. The other customers — two young girls and their father — turned to look. He ignored them. Tazman and the teenagers scoped out the phones, and James sat down in a chair near the counter and started talking on his cell, joking just as loudly. The other people kept staring.

Even people who didn’t recognize James knew he was someone. That day, though, James left no doubt who he was. Right before the conversation with his friend ended, he barked one last thing into his phone: “I’m Rick James, bitch!”


If there was one thing the man born James Johnson loved more than anything else, it was being Rick James. And in 2004, after more than a decade in the wilderness, being Rick James finally meant something again.For years, his reputation as one of rock & roll’s most electrifying performers was obscured by trials, allegations of torture, years lost to cocaine. But a February 2004 episode of Comedy Central’s Chappelle’s Show made him famous all over again.

Dave Chappelle’s cartoonish impersonation of James traded on the extremes of the musician’s ’80s identity. As portrayed on the show, James was an embodiment of disco-era anything-goes abandon, a man with a heroic disregard for the norms of civilized behavior. Now people loved him for it. Most of his albums may have been long out of print, but by the middle of the year, his face was on hipster T-shirts across the country. And everyone knew that catchphrase.

James enjoyed Chappelle’s skits. “He said it turned the lights back on, the limelight,” says Charlie Murphy, a Chappelle’s Show regular whose recollections of meeting James at his decadent peak led to the infamous episode.

“He consciously turned himself into that Rick James persona,” says Bobby Brooks, an engineer-producer who knew him since the early ’80s. Even at 56, after suffering a stroke and receiving a pacemaker, James Johnson was still determined to live like a super freak. He indulged in outsized amounts of everything. When he’d go for dinner at Le Dôme, he’d ask for a good table and order every entrée on the menu. If he went to a club, he’d drive onto the sidewalk so he could make a big entrance — the valet would sort everything out.

“He had to be the center of attention,” says his daughter Ty James, 27. Before the Chappelle’s Show episode aired, Rick called Tazman’s mother, his ex-wife Tanya Hijazi, to make sure they didn’t miss it.

And all the attention created a new wave of interest in James’s work. By the end of July, he had recorded enough material for a double album; he was trying to find a publisher for his autobiography, Memoirs of a Super Freak; he had just played a string of concerts with his old Motown protégée Teena Marie; and was thinking about a solo tour. He was even talking to Jamie Foxx about producing a reality show based on his family, an Osbournes for the BET set. Hijazi was moving back to L.A. with their son after years in Atlanta, and his personal life was looking up. “He had a second chance,” Ty James says. “He enjoyed every second of it.”

But on August 6, Rick James was found dead in his apartment by his live-in personal assistant. He died in his sleep, apparently of heart failure. A toxicology report revealed that when he died, he had in his system cocaine, methamphetamine, Valium, Vicodin and Xanax. No drug was at a level that would kill a healthy person. But James was anything but: He had a history of heart disease, diabetes and sleep apnea, and had been overweight for years.

Danny LeMelle, a longtime friend and collaborator, had seen this flip side of James’s hedonism: That of a man on antidepressants, tormented by his failure to overcome addiction, and trapped by his supersized alter ego. “He saw the relationship I had with my son,” LeMelle says. “Once he told me, ‘I want to play ball with my son, I want to take him to school, but I can’t.’ He said, ‘Rick won’t let me.’”


James Johnson was born on February 1, 1948, in a Buffalo, New York, housing project. Dad walked out on the family and mom provided for eight kids by running numbers for the Mob. Rick, remembers Levi Ruffin Jr., a classmate and later the keyboard player in the Stone City Band, “got kicked out of school a lot.” But he didn’t stand out much in a neighborhood where most kids got into a little trouble. At 15, he joined the U.S. Naval Reserves.

The next time Ruffin saw him, it was almost a decade later. “Someone honked outside my apartment in a white Mercedes,” he says. It was his old friend, flashing fancy, expensive-looking clothes. “He didn’t have the money but he had the attitude,” Ruffin says. James had spent two years in Toronto, where he had gone AWOL from the Reserves, discovered the hippie scene, and formed a band called the Mynah Birds with Neil Young and Nick St. Nicholas, later of Steppenwolf. He did some time in the brig when the Navy caught up with him. He then spent years traveling the world, playing gigs as a sideman and writing songs at Motown.

With Ruffin on board, James formed an early version of the Stone City Band and used his own money to record 1978’s Come Get It! His first single, “You and I,” was a number 1 hit. But he also attracted attention for playing marathon shows that featured the kind of arena-rock theatrics (and, eventually, pyrotechnics) employed by groups like Kiss. “He had this vision of how he wanted things to look,” LeMelle recalls. James purposefully hired band members who were over 6 feet tall, then had them grow braids and shake glitter into their hair before they performed. “Rick said we need to be living like rock stars,” LeMelle says.

James had the same kind of singular vision in the studio, where he was known to be a demanding boss. “People could sit around and drink or get high and that’s when he’d turn around and say, ‘You’re on!’” says Lisa Sarna, one of James’s original backup singers. “The focus wasn’t on drugs, it was on making music.” At first, says Brooks, the drugs helped James work. During recording sessions for Street Songs, Brooks remembers James showing him a jade jar full of cocaine and telling him the two of them could split it because the band had their own.

Gradually, though, the studio started to seem like a nightclub. Robin Williams would stop by, and he and James would try to outdo each with weird jokes. Another time, when James and the Stone City Band were recording at the Record Plant in Sausalito, California, Grace Slick stopped in to say hello and ended up expressing her concern. “She sat us down and said, ‘Look, drugs can take you into a world but then you have to come out of it,’” LeMelle recounts. “I listened and a couple of the other guys listened. Rick listened for a while, but that wasn’t what he was going to do.”

Released in 1981, Street Songs made James one of the biggest stars of the nascent decade. “His music was the funkiest thing out there,” Parliament and Funkadelic pioneer George Clinton says. “Rick was the only one at the time staying nasty and keeping the groove going.” Inspired by a few months he spent in his old Buffalo neighborhood, the album was more varied than anything he had done before. “Fire and Desire,” an erotically charged duet with Teena Marie, became his best-loved ballad. “Mr. Policeman” added politics to his usual subject matter of sex and drugs. And the funk-rock classic “Super Freak” became a Top 10 hit twice: once at the time and again in 1990, as the basis of MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This.”

The subsequent tour broke attendance records set by rock bands and solidified James’s status as a superstar. He began dating Exorcist child star Linda Blair, and hanging out in flashy nightclubs like Studio 54 and Xenon — with a celebrity crowd that included Eddie Murphy and Rick and Kathy Hilton, parents of Paris and Nicky. He bought weed by the trash bag, treated his musicians and road crew to a Hawaiian vacation, and gradually started using more cocaine. “We used to say we would never let women or drugs destroy the band,” Ruffin recalls. But the signs were there. James, who said he would never freebase after seeing what it did to Sly Stone, had started smoking cocaine himself.

As his habit got worse, he started to hide it from friends, sometimes staying in a separate hotel when traveling. Before a Saturday Night Live appearance, Ruffin confronted him about his drug use. “He said, ‘Fuck you all, my name is Rick James,’” Ruffin says. “I said, ‘Your name is James Johnson.’” Then Ruffin had to write out the words to “Super Freak” because James couldn’t recall them. In August 1982, he collapsed onstage and cancelled the next six weeks’ shows.

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