Lionel Richie
👤 PersonPodcast Appearances
At 24, I lost my narrative, or rather it was stolen from me. And the Monica Lewinsky that my friends and family knew was usurped by false narratives, callous jokes, and politics. I would define reclaiming as to take back what was yours. Something you possess is lost or stolen, and ultimately you triumph in finding it again.
At 24, I lost my narrative, or rather it was stolen from me. And the Monica Lewinsky that my friends and family knew was usurped by false narratives, callous jokes, and politics. I would define reclaiming as to take back what was yours. Something you possess is lost or stolen, and ultimately you triumph in finding it again.
At 24, I lost my narrative, or rather it was stolen from me. And the Monica Lewinsky that my friends and family knew was usurped by false narratives, callous jokes, and politics. I would define reclaiming as to take back what was yours. Something you possess is lost or stolen, and ultimately you triumph in finding it again.
So I think listeners can expect me to be chatting with folks, both recognizable and unrecognizable names about the way that people have navigated roads to triumph. My hope is that people will finish an episode of Reclaiming and feel like they filled their tank up. They connected with the people that I'm talking to and leave with maybe some nuggets that help them feel a little more hopeful.
So I think listeners can expect me to be chatting with folks, both recognizable and unrecognizable names about the way that people have navigated roads to triumph. My hope is that people will finish an episode of Reclaiming and feel like they filled their tank up. They connected with the people that I'm talking to and leave with maybe some nuggets that help them feel a little more hopeful.
So I think listeners can expect me to be chatting with folks, both recognizable and unrecognizable names about the way that people have navigated roads to triumph. My hope is that people will finish an episode of Reclaiming and feel like they filled their tank up. They connected with the people that I'm talking to and leave with maybe some nuggets that help them feel a little more hopeful.
Follow Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Reclaiming early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.
Follow Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Reclaiming early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.
Follow Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Reclaiming early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.
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Yeah, to the point where somebody says...
I remember a couple of my friends... Why am I drawing a blank?
Rick James had a great line for me.
Every time he saw me, I'd say, Rick, how you doing?
And that means I love you, but I hate you.
And, of course, I get it, you know, because things along the way become almost...
What's behind me doesn't count.
You know, it's like, OK, did I go out and call Dick Clark and say I wanted to host the American Music Awards?
He called us and said, Lionel, forget that guy in New York.
Forget that guy in New York.
I mean, forget that guy.
Now, whoever that guy was, the gift was handed to me.
And now I spent the next two or three weeks trying to convince Mr. Clark that I don't have any training in how to be a host.
And that's when he would come to me and say, ah, you schoolboys are all the same.
You think you need a diploma before you think you know something.
You know, these lines that come out of this whole story, you know, that's not orchestrated.
It came from the other side back this way.
So what this book made me do was actually turn around and look behind me.
The word I'll use is blessed.
It's one of those things where my grandmother said something to me a while back.
I just finished Endless Love, and I went back to Tuskegee.
And I'm walking around in the house pacing back and forth.
She says, what on earth are you doing?
And I said, I'm trying to figure out my next move.
And she said, did you come to school to join the Commodores?
She said, no, no, I met them on the campus.
She said, did you plan on being a writer?
No, no, no, no, I found out I was a writer.
She said, did you plan on being a lead singer?
I said, no, no, no, no, I found out when I joined the group.
She said, why don't you just get a good night's sleep and wait for God to give you the next move?
And that's how I started my career.
And I tell you what I discovered.
That's an incredible woman.
That's incredible perspective.
Quit trying to figure this out.
Did you figure it out before?
Can you read and write music?
I discovered Lionel Richie.
Because up to this point, I had never really gone into the depths of how I got here.
I try to tell the kids on American Idol, you know, sometimes you have to look at failure as a great sign.
If they had told the Commodores on the first time we auditioned, you got it, ready to go.
I just remember, because you want to forget.
The answer is we weren't ready to go.
It took no and no and no.
And signing at Atlantic, no.
Signing at Philly International, no.
but we're the greatest band ever.
What did they say to us?
You sound just like The Temptations.
You sound just like Sly and the Family Stone.
What do you sound like?
What do we sound like?
So the only way we have to find out is we have to start not imitating somebody else.
Now comes the thing of, well, what do we sound like?
I didn't know how to write.
And then you get to Motown.
I don't know how to read or write music.
What the hell am I doing here with this band?
I'm not the lead singer.
I sing some cover songs.
And then you walk down the hall and there's Marvin.
So I decided I'm going to interview Marvin.
What music conservatory did you graduate from?
And he said, what the hell is that?
I said, well, I mean, how do you write your music?
He said, no, no, little brother.
He says, all that you can't play with three fingers, hum it into a tape recorder.
And then you go down the hall again, and it's smoky.
And there's Barry Gordy, who built Motown.
Excuse me, Mr. Gordy, what university did you graduate from?
He said, I was at a car plant.
And you try to kind of, you know, it's like playing football.
What are you talking about?
Everything that I grew up with on the campus of Tuskegee as a kid, I grew up on the university campus.
Did not apply in the world of hustles.
So I'm now meeting the guys and ladies who found their hustle.
And I am telling you, Joe, from that moment on, I was let out of the box.
You got hit really badly on that last play.
Somebody let me out of the cage.
Because in academia, there's a logical reason why you know what you know because you studied it.
But I was that kid that was sitting in the class going...
Mr. Richie, Mr. Richie, would you like to join the rest of the class?
I found at Motown, the whole damn company was tapping on the table.
But you go back to the huddle.
I found out in New York City,
The whole town is tapping on the table and dancing, right?
And so from that point on, I joined this creative source, force, fraternity, sorority of crazy, out-of-control people that gave me permission to dare to listen to myself.
You know what I'm saying?
You won't know until tonight after you get off the field, and they'll tell you you broke your arm.
I mean, I get chills sitting and talking to you.
Watching Marvin record.
And you keep thinking he walked in with a paper and he had written these lyrics.
He is scatting at the microphone.
I'm thinking to myself, what am I watching?
And then he said, bring the microphone over to the couch.
He's on the couch, singing in the couch in the control room.
In other words, it was just so organic and so, you know, because you think about the orchestra and they're there.
You know what I'm saying?
inside of a wonderful dream of watching creativity just explode with no doors, no windows, no walls.
But it's really don't stop moving forward.
And he was making this up in real time.
You're talking about freestyle.
My man was freestyling, coming up with some of the greatest lyrics ever on life's planet.
And I kept thinking, okay, so let me go back and put that in my little hamper.
I think he had a feeling about the idea.
But did he know the exact words?
You know, it's like when you close your eyes and you're in it.
But see, I didn't understand how to be in it.
You know, I kept thinking, well, let me put it this way.
I was trying to think.
So you because of the academic background, you're trying to logically.
And that's really what this whole thing was.
There's a logical reason why you're about to say what you're going to say.
Instead of just saying, OK, just turn on the mic.
You know what I'm saying?
Just turn on the mic, man.
You know, to this day, I have a thing that I do that still wears out my management.
This exercise in this book was really for me to actually go, hmm, I can't believe I did that.
And I have to do a speech or something.
And they say, OK, can you give me the speech so we can put it on the teleprompter?
And I said, I don't have a speech to give you.
Lionel, we need the speech to put on the teleprompter so you'll know what to say.
I don't know what I'm going to say.
What do you mean you don't know what to say?
I said, no, I won't know what I'm going to say until I get there.
And I walk out on stage.
I said, now, how long do you want the speech?
They said, we have five minutes.
I'll give you five minutes worth of speech.
I was actually trained, you know, this is Grandma Foster, A.M.
She quoted my grandfather in Booker T. Washington's house.
That's where she came from, Tuskegee.
My grandfather, they knew Booker T. She knew George Washington Carver.
In my home in Tuskegee, Alabama, there's a crocheted piece from Mr. Carver, Dr. Carver.
My dear Mrs. Foster, congratulations on your wedding.
That's a crocheted piece.
The deed to my house has the Washington family's name on the deed to my house.
It was given to me and to my grandmother and grandfather.
by the Washington family Booker T so now when you have all that background it's kind of one of those things where where do you go with this thing you know right and so you know my my upbringing was pretty pretty amazing where it had structure had structure and now here I am over in this other side where wait a minute you mean I don't have to remember anything I can make up something
And allow the universe to just give you.
I can just make up something.
But what do you want to make up?
So then it's a word that we learn called receiving.
If you had said to me when I first started my life, you know, my dad used to always have this line over and over again, you know,
So now where does receiving come from?
Receiving comes from the silence.
So here I am between 1 and 6 in the morning, and everyone thinks, what's Lionel doing?
He's just kind of sitting there.
But let me let you in on a little sound that's terrifying to most people.
Now if you can hear...
Out of the silence comes the receiving that from the other side.
It is a receiving, isn't it?
Sometimes you just have to just blank it out.
Some people call it meditation.
Some people have all kind of names for it.
I just love to listen to silence.
By the way, there's only 12 notes, Joe.
So everything that has ever happened that you've ever heard on any radio, it's only 12 notes.
So how do you turn 12 notes into something that sounds new, different?
And so in the silence, and all you have to do is learn how to figure out what are the four chords?
Because if you've got four or five chords, you can write a whole album.
But it's the melody that goes on top that you have to be able to hear.
And so once I learned that Marvin and Smokey and, you know, Michael Quincy and, you know, these are Hendrix.
A great fighter is not determined by how many punches he can throw.
I saw the poster coming in, you know.
They all made careers.
Not only careers, they had their unique sound out of 12 notes.
Now if you think it's hard enough to get a hit record, how do you become unique unto yourself with those 12 notes?
It's how many punches he can take.
The blessing was not in having a hit record.
The blessing was in having unique sound.
Stevie sounds like Stevie.
Smokey sounds like Smokey.
You know what I'm saying?
And so when you start thinking about, okay, now, by the way, you can't rehearse that.
That's either your gift or you can't say, well, I'm going to work on my sound.
And I realized that I could take punches.
No, it's a real thing.
That's why when we do American Idol, I tell them over and over again, I'm not looking for singers.
I'm looking for stylists.
What's gonna make me close my eyes and remember you?
I don't wanna see you.
Can I identify you by your voice?
And I can see their frustration, you know.
I'm the most unlikely person to take a punch because I'm not that guy.
Lionel, I can't believe, it's amazing how you went to that augmented 7th with a diminished 9th with a raised 18th with a 45th.
And I'm sitting there going, I can't read music.
And he goes, and the way you did that modulation from... And I said, I can't read music.
And he kept saying, and the way you turned that vocal around, it came back down to that...
augmented seventh over and raised ninth.
And I kept saying, I can't read music.
So I try to tell them, listen, forget the notes.
Can the crowd sing your song?
If they can't sing your song, dazzling them with notes is not going to get it.
That's the first thing.
That's for the guys who can read and write and do the full Juilliard and Berklee and killer.
If I can talk my way out of it, I will.
For the kids who are just brilliant, by the way, and they know their music, but they don't know how to receive.
My answer now is now that you know the technical, forget it.
Now, tell me what you're feeling.
But if you understand life itself, number one, that's difficult.
And instead of playing 15 chords, play one and hum as much as you can holding that one chord.
And then when you get tired of putting everything in that one chord, that's the second chord coming up.
Because what happens is musicians, they want to go, we are the... No, no, no.
Bang, we are the world.
Bang, we are... Just keep holding that.
Bang, we are the ones that make a brighter day.
Bang, there's a... Bang.
And then if you start thinking about the music business, the entertainment business, it's an impossibility.
Because if you confuse me and you dazzle the world with all of your musicianship, you just miss the melody that the whole world can sing.
You're going to get punched every day of your life.
Remember now, when Marvin said to me, he was giving me the words of wisdom.
When Norman Whitfield, who wrote Cloud Nine and all these just amazing temptation songs.
He's playing one note.
They hadn't changed yet.
He wrote the whole first verse.
Now, can you get up off the floor and come back?
He's still on one note.
it takes time to understand what that master just told you.
And then once you understand the simplicity is the secret.
Give me fried chicken.
Can you get a bad review and come back?
Give me baked chicken.
Give me smothered chicken.
Don't, don't, don't get too.
You don't have to get crazy.
And at the end, just give me an apple pie.
Just give me key lime pie.
You know what I'm saying?
Give me lemon meringue.
You don't have to get crazy.
We have a deconstructed.
And I go, just put it together.
Put the whole thing together and give it to me.
Can they not like you and you come back?
Can you find that that's a humorous thing instead of a tragic thing?
Yeah, Mr. Gordy, I've known him enough now where I can say Barry, but he's clearly Mr. Gordy, you know.
He taught me the greatest line ever.
I went to him, and I met him in the hallway, and he would never, ever say,
Say, oh, congratulations, you got a hit record.
That's not what he would say.
He'd always say, oh, Marvin's got a hit.
Marvin's got a smash coming out.
I go, Mr. Gord, I just want to let you know I have a number one record.
Marvin's got one coming out.
It's going to be a smash.
And then what do you have next?
Can you lose friends along the way?
What do they have next?
And then I said, okay, well, I got a hit record.
He says, I said, let me go out to the car and get a tape.
I want you to hear it.
If you need to play music, you got a nice tune.
So you don't really realize...
Now that means the crowd is going to sing along every note with you.
You don't have to wait to the hook.
They'll sing the verse with you.
What is that pressure like?
I would love to tell you it was a pressure.
I would tell you that there's an old expression that a jazz musician said to me years ago.
You either understand or you don't.
You can either hear it or you don't.
This is a business, if you look at it, think about how many people we've lost.
In other words, and my line is, if you can hear me tapping on the table and all you hear is me tapping on the table,
You're not a songwriter.
But if you hear me tap on the table and you hear a song, you're a songwriter.
We don't have to waste any more time.
brand new person every day.
I meet crowds of people.
You meet one-on-one people every day.
And to know something about them and wanting to find out more.
When I started writing this book, I started thinking to myself, where's Luther?
And how does your personality work with that other person?
But that's not even a skill.
That's not something you practice.
That's something you had in you from way down deep.
It's just the more you do it, you got better and better at being...
That's exactly correct.
So if I said to you right now, how did you study that, Joe?
You'd go, eh, just turn on the mic.
I put down, fuck yeah, Lionel Richie.
Again, it's one of those things, out of your natural curiosity,
Well, out of my natural ADD, ADHD, hypersensitive, whatever they used when I was growing up.
I found it all serves me well because it all came out in songwriting.
I want to tell you more stories about Prince.
There's two types of kids, and I keep trying to tell them.
But it's not fair because in certain cases, I want him to be here to laugh with the joke too.
You want them to remember.
And then there's the creatives.
The last thing you want to do is put a creative kid in a room full of academics.
The grades are not going to be great.
And you're going to worry them to death.
Put them in a creative school where they...
They're nurtured into their, yes, they're going to work on math, and yes, they'll work on their science, but don't make that the priority.
No one to this day has ever asked to see my college degree.
No one to this day has ever asked me to see my high school diploma.
So was I an A student, B student, C student?
I mean, I was right there on the borderline of disaster, right?
But I was just happy to be there.
But the point was, it's not important.
What did you end up being?
Who did you end up discovering?
And so then you start realizing, damn, this is lucky.
How comfortable are you with yourself?
By the time you get out of elementary school, going into high school, you're so inundated.
And let me tell you what's wrong with Lionel.
Lionel has a problem with, and if you listen to that crap, by the time you go into college, it's not happening.
They told my family, my mom and dad, truthfully, Lionel is not college material.
I mean, in other words, he should be created.
You know who they forgot to tell?
The best thing they ever did.
They didn't tell me about that conversation, which means it was okay.
This is really blessed time now because I'm in rare survival air, if you will.
I didn't use that as my crutch.
Don't tell somebody they have a handicap.
Just leave them alone.
Just let them figure out what they actually like to do.
Because it's not a handicap.
In other words, I learned years ago, a race car driver, he sees 200 miles an hour as, can I get this to go any faster?
Magic Johnson, the basketball goal looks like the size of the inside of a building.
That's how big it is in his head.
To me and you, it's a little tiny thing at the other end of the court.
Okay, so my point is everybody has a unique brain in how they see things.
Quit trying to put everybody in this one little box.
if we can set up education where, let those that see it in freestyle, has a freestyle moment.
We'll get more out of kids, we'll get more out of people if you just quit trying to condemn them and let them flourish in their lane, if you will.
I'm still here at 200 years old talking about my career, but I'm telling the story.
And that's the special part.
Yes, okay, reading and writing, you got it.
And now with AI coming and all this stuff, you don't have to do that anymore.
But I'm just saying, there's some basics you have to have.
But then after that, I think we're crippling our kids because we're giving them too many gottas in a world that's constantly changing.
Get the law degree and then try to be a singer.
I mean, in other words, in my case, I didn't have a backup plan.
I mean, luckily, my freshman year, I found that thing.
And I mean, how did it work?
That's why I said to you, is it divine guidance?
I didn't have a plan B. But I'm sure there would have been one if it was time for that to come into play.
If I told you how many lawyers now, excuse me, how many...
lawyers started out as singers.
They wanted to be in a band.
If I told you how many people that are now on Wall Street, what do they do on the weekends?
And so as time goes on, okay, so you're not the lead singer, but you're the lawyer in the record company or you're the manager.
You follow what I'm saying?
There are 99 million jobs under the word entertainment.
It's just that maybe you weren't going to be the star of the show, but you're in the show.
That's easy for Lionel Richie to say, though.
If you're that lawyer that wishes he was a star, it's a real problem.
And trust me, I run into those guys who hate me.
And by the way, I mean, what I like about the book is everyone, just to let you know, it sounds like...
You know, I won, I won.
No, it was a struggle.
I'm the shyest guy in the world.
Joe, walking out on that stage, I said it was a freshman talent show.
I went off with the curtains.
The only reason that I was on that stage, I didn't grow up with the guys in the Mystics.
They didn't know that Lionel Richie from Tuskegee, Alabama was the shyest kid in town.
They didn't know that.
These are guys that I didn't grow up with.
So they said, hey, man, you brought your horn?
You want to be in a band?
Now you're talking to a kid who goes, okay, we're going to do a baseball team.
Okay, we'll take Lionel.
Okay, let's do a basketball game.
Okay, all right, we'll take Lionel.
These guys came along and said, hey, you got your horn?
You want to be in our band?
You mean you don't know about me?
So they said, okay, here's the part.
Can you play the saxophone?
Yeah, man, I play the saxophone.
I didn't tell them I brought the horn to school to learn how to play it.
But I could play by ear.
So unless we're reading music...
I sound like I know what I'm talking about.
So it became one of those things.
And by the time I got in the Commodores, I didn't tell anybody.
I'm the greatest horn holder that ever lived.
So just keep that secret and keep on going.
But what I'm saying to you, just think about this for a moment.
I mean, it didn't start out with confidence.
It came out with sooner or later, they're going to know I'm an imposter.
And slowly but surely, who worked the hardest?
Because sooner or later, they're going to find out.
That I got to catch up.
So every time we had some time off, I'm interviewing Marvin.
I'm interviewing you name it.
Tell me what you did to get to where you're going.
Then I found out nobody went to school to know what they know.
Now we're on to something really serious.
Because then I had some aha moments.
And so if I can't play it, I can hum it.
But most of the time I could just play it.
Okay, I can play this.
And as you learn, you grow quickly.
If you talk to the person themselves, that was a learning experience.
You have to learn quickly now because we just signed the contract that said we're now on Motown Records.
I got to do a fast track here.
It happened in real time.
At any moment, they could have called up and said, we're going to cut the group down to the most significant people in the group.
So I had to make sure.
Let me make sure I get this.
I'm working harder than anybody I've ever seen before in your life.
And so that's how it's a whole life of insecurity.
And then you get your first song and you go, okay, okay.
So you keep thinking, oh, my God, what did you do when that happened?
Then the guy said, hey, kid, you got any more of those songs?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got another one.
You go home and look at the guy in the mirror and go, you got any more songs?
Because I'm talking to myself.
And that's when you realize, okay, out of fear, I got to come up with another song.
And you go, no, no, no, no, no, I needed that.
So everyone keeps thinking there's this confident guy walking in, I got another song for you.
I got to tell you how many times I walked on stage, Joe.
and had a panic attack.
Right in the middle of the show, I'm having a massive panic attack.
Because I'm supposed to look like I got this.
When actually, I don't.
But eventually you did.
Well, that's what happened to Barbra Streisand, and that's what happened to... I mean, once you realize, as you start interviewing people...
Because I wouldn't have been to the next person if I had not experienced that.
the people who are scared to death on stage, and then they realize as time went on, they got used to it.
But I realized the thing that scares you to death is the thing you have to keep going forward on.
That's my dad's line again.
What's the similarity between a hero and a coward?
One step forward and one step back.
No matter how much it scares me,
And so each time, I was not going to say I'm not going on stage.
Because it's like trying to go to scrimmage before a big game.
I go on stage and I'm going to sweat for two hours and try to fake my ass off.
And now it's like second nature now.
But at the time, give me a break.
Met the president before in life?
Have you ever been on stage in front of 100,000 people?
Have you ever been in a club with four people in the room looking at you going, what you got to do?
I mean, listen, that's why when I see these kids on American Idol, I don't know how they do that.
I came in with five other guys going, yeah, yeah, yeah.
They're singing a cappella.
to me and Kerry and Luke, are you kidding?
And 20 million people watching and a billion, 200 million live impressions.
Get the frick out of here.
So I'm just saying for me to be this authority, if you will, I can relate to every one of their heartbeats on that stage.
I know what they're fearing.
That's why when I get around artists,
You don't try to blow them away with your importance.
Well, they hit harder from the other team.
First of all, do you need a hug first?
Let me talk to you for a minute.
Let me talk you down because you're expecting too much out of us.
Because we're all students of scared to death.
If you're not, you're in the wrong business.
And by the way, the book is not about how I won.
It's how I got not to the peaks, how I survived the valleys.
So you've got to practice hard.
The valleys of insecurity is it, man.
How do you get up and go, you're going to host the American Music Awards.
Dick wants you to do that.
Well, the only way to get into the music business, you've got to be on the feel.
I know you're not expecting this interview, but I'm pleased.
You have to understand.
Lionel, we're going to do an instrumental for a movie.
It's called In This Love.
I'm only doing Kenny's album.
I'm only doing the Commodore's album.
But because it's Franco Zeffirelli and John Peters and everybody, I'm thinking, okay, I can do an instrumental.
Then halfway through the thing, they say, well, we're going to shoot a scene where we just need the lady to sing a first verse to the person in the scene.
practice is not in the equation.
Can you write a first verse?
My love, there's only you in my life.
The only thing that's right.
My first love, you're every breath that I take.
You're every step I make.
Lionel, we've decided now to make this a duet.
And we're going to get Diana Ross to sing the ladies' part.
Who do you recommend to sing the guys' part?
Are you out of your mind?
What are you talking about?
I'm not going to recommend somebody else.
Were they beating around the bush?
You got to get out on the field and it's nasty and it's not designed for you to survive.
I think they were backing me in because I told them I don't have time.
So they baited me by saying, you know, it's going to be an instrumental.
But by the time I got there, I'm thinking, okay, now here's the problem.
I'm doing two albums, Commodores and Kenny Rogers.
I'm not going to New York and she can't come to L.A.
Where are we going to meet?
We go to Tahoe, but it wasn't even Tahoe.
So at the end of my Commodore night, 10 to 6, Kenny Rogers.
6 to 10, Lionel Richie.
And then 10 to 4 in the morning, I got to get on a plane, fly to Tahoe, and put Diana Ross on Endless Love.
Now, what you don't know when you're that...
part of your life, that you could die from having creativity.
It was, I mean, it was so exciting, but at the same time, I'd never written a duet.
And I try to say this to the kids on American Idol.
So my first duet in life was with Diana Ross.
Do you think I was nervous?
Do you think I was nervous?
Do you think I was nervous?
I mean, I just kept praying, God, for God's sake, don't let me pass out in front of Miss Ross.
I said, listen, I love you.
So what I'm just saying to you, the title of the book could be Scared.
I got titles, man, you know, because it's not, it's the first time of everything.
I've never done this before.
And so just imagine being put into a situation throughout my entire career.
You got a great personality, but you better hope like hell you have a sense of humor.
Where, you know, step forward, Lionel.
Can you all hear my heart beating?
That's what it's been.
I tell people every day what this book did for me
I discovered Lionel Richie.
I'm the Italian race car driver.
I never looked behind me.
I never paid attention.
And then all of a sudden this book made me turn around and look behind me.
I mean, what was that?
I mean, you think about it.
I mean, you think, yes, I got the hit record at the same time my mother was dying.
Now, those two don't go together.
I'm in the world tour of my life.
It's the dancing on the ceiling tour.
I'm going to establish me around the world.
It's the all night long dancing on the ceiling tour.
You follow what I'm saying?
Okay, so now, how's dad doing?
Well, he's doing okay.
She's okay, but I can cancel the tour and come home.
Okay, but how's she doing?
but you don't realize she's in the decline, but you keep trying to balance this, what do I do?
And so it's all happening while it's happening.
And so it's, how do you kind of compartmentalize the show, the writing, and real life family
We're having the reunion.
It's the class reunion.
It's the family reunion.
Have you ever been to the family reunion?
Didn't make the family reunion.
Because when you're in the Commodores, when you really have your shows, it's Christmas, New Year's, all the holidays, all summer.
So if you happen to have...
Any kind of reunion during those times, you're not going to make it.
So it's the sacrifices.
How many barn fires did I make during college?
Basketball tournaments?
But I'm the Commodores.
If you understand something, I was – and I tell this joke all the time.
So I always tell people what comes with success are the sacrifices.
make the sacrifices, it's not guaranteed that you're gonna win.
You're trying to pretend like you're not seeing it.
You know, there's a moment when you go home and your parents age right in front of you.
You never noticed it before.
He wasn't dying yet, but you could see the decline.
Too small to play football, too short to play basketball.
Until dancing on the ceiling, you'll see a little bit more of the decline.
You follow what I'm saying?
And then finally you realize, holy shit, this is not going to be good at all.
But you keep pretending like it's not happening, if you know what I mean.
You kind of put that in that little compartment.
He's getting older, but he's okay.
The answer is, well, he's not.
And then from that, you think that everything else in your life is okay.
Because all priorities are going towards this new thing you've never experienced before called freaking hit record.
I'm leaving the Commodores.
I'm leaving the Commodores.
Baseball was a projectile coming at me at 300 miles an hour.
These are the only five guys I've ever trusted in my life.
So everyone keeps thinking, yeah, you went solo.
What was that word that comes with that?
So everyone keeps thinking, and then I decided to go solo.
I'm not standing in front of that thing.
No, no, that's not the way it was.
And the only thing I could play was tennis.
I'm not leaving you guys.
What are you talking about?
Leaving the Commodores is crazy.
I mean, you almost can't.
You can't do it, but...
What was happening behind the scenes?
What was happening behind the scenes was, and I understood, I understood, but still I didn't want to accept it.
So you understand, walking around on a tennis court in the middle of the civil rights movement, you have to develop a sense of humor, otherwise you're going to die.
The article read, and then Lionel Richie sat down to the piano and started playing his classic hits.
What's a guy like Lionel Richie doing in a funk band like the Commodores?
Joe, try to go back to rehearsal after that review.
Or now we've done Endless Love.
Now we've done Lady with Kenny Rogers.
Tell us, Lionel, how you started the group.
I didn't start the group.
And now you walk into a group interview, and they knock Clyde over, and they whack over Tommy.
Lionel, tell us about the band.
So what I tried to do was come later.
But by coming later, oh, you think you're big enough now where you don't have to be in the group.
Well, if I don't, if I'm on time, they'll disrespect you.
Of course, of course, of course.
see him yeah check it out and then all of a sudden boom and now they get the love and the recognition but back then everybody was on their own it was a dog eat dog world and it was controlled by gangsters I rest my case the answer was I realized one very important thing throw the word degree out of your vocabulary the music business a degree
So I found also, again, it's funny what your father will say to you.
A degree in music, a degree in business, a degree in what?
This was street degree.
What did the guy tell me?
He said, I'll tell you the best course I ever took in life.
And this is a true story.
He said, you know, you schoolboys are funny, man.
you all learn how to account for the money.
He says, we count the money.
And I said, okay, so what does that mean?
He says, somebody's got to teach you how to steal.
Best lesson I ever took in my whole life.
Because once you learn how to steal the money, you know how to stop people from stealing.
And you wonder, how did he get through all of his life?
I mean, the answer is.
There is a one moment when I looked into my mom and dad's face and I said, hey, they just stole $363,000 from me.
Because they went through the struggle of life.
And my mother said, you leave those people alone and come home.
And I go, no, no, no, no, mom, mommy, mom.
It only cost me $362,000 to learn that lesson.
It's never gonna happen again.
And I was so excited about it.
And he said, if you lose your sense of humor, they got you.
She looked at me and said, my son's crazy.
You can lose millions.
You can lose billions.
So if it only took me $362,000, I got off light, man.
And not only that, can you keep your life?
I mean, just think about it.
When you go to the box office, everybody had a gun.
Now, here's the beautiful part about it, because I knew that later.
Nobody's going to shoot anybody.
It's just if you, how naive were you?
If you were naive and a little schoolboy, you could get shot and killed.
But as you started learning who the gangsters are, that was just an intimidating factor.
But you had to be, once you knew them, then they go, come on, Lionel, just cover us a little bit.
And I always remembered the fact that if you can find something funny out of this experience, take that ha-ha to the next day.
When you're around normalized gangsters.
And then you start and then your mother starts meeting them on their way to Miami.
They would drive and they stopped by Tuskegee to see the schoolboys.
And here's a guy dead of homecoming season in a full head to toe mink hat, mink coat, pink Eldorado.
driving across the campus and you go to your instructors.
Yeah, this is my friend, you know, tall Paul.
I got all kinds of names for him.
Oh my God, we had names.
You can't make this up.
You know, and how do you introduce them to the president of the university?
The answer is you don't.
It was, Joe, one of the most exciting things ever.
I never experienced anything like this before.
Listen, you mean, wait, see, we played gangster.
They weren't playing gangster.
So we are with gangsters.
And it just became so another world where, what the guys say, in our world, it's not how long you live, it's how well you live while you're living.
And so I kind of use that as my mantra, basically, that, okay, where am I?
Now, that's a profound statement from him.
I don't want to know anything big about that, but you have to listen, right?
They don't plan on living a long life.
but they plan on living well while they're here.
So it's nothing to say when you go back to New York for the next summer, whatever happened to so-and-so?
Oh yeah, he got shot in December.
That's normal, he's leaving town, or they're leaving town.
And so as time went on, it became a short-term view of a very long-term problem
That has always been normalized because a part of legal is illegal or desirables and undesirables.
That's just a part of the city.
And here's what you find out the most important thing.
The desirables know the undesirables.
You go backstage and you go, wait, you two know each other?
You know, but that's what happens in this world of cities, in this world of culture.
You know, everybody has that.
What's that line I used to use all the time?
And until it is revealed later in the music business, we see it all.
What am I complaining about?
So you just have to understand it's probably one of the greatest educations in the world because everybody backstage is who they are, not who they say they are.
I'm complaining about I don't like my seat.
And by the way, it's okay.
What did they just say?
Was a Harvard grad the founder of Vegas?
So what I'm saying to you, the problem that happened with all of these businesses we now have,
They messed the whole thing up.
Did the movie business start out with wonderful PhD guys?
It started from the street.
And so what we are trying to do now is we've tried to legitimize all of this.
We want to do the whole thing.
The answer is no, no, man.
We messed the whole thing up.
You know what I'm saying?
Because what it was is the fascination of...
Hey, Lionel, can I put my name on your album?
I've got to move some stuff around.
Or you're just at the Grammys.
But the answer is I couldn't do it because I don't want to get in trouble.
You're kind of trying to dodge these guys.
But the point is, it's real.
So I won't put a business like that together.
What I'll do is start the business.
Hey, what a great way to do that.
But the only thing wrong with that is...
You know how many people don't get to come to the Grammys?
As time goes on, someone asks a very difficult question.
I like to see the books.
Go deal with that one.
So you follow where we're coming from.
So for us, for me, as they used to call us in Harlem, the schoolboys,
You know, for the schoolboys, this was fantasy land.
I mean, we didn't think we were going to die.
This was like the best course we ever took in the world from the originals.
Just on the invitation.
This is not some hearsay.
And they adopted us as the schoolboys.
You have, Joe, you have no idea.
And then, you know, I mean, the days of Smalls Paradise.
And so you have to go back and look at this as far as is it really that serious or, you know, you have to kind of put things in perspective.
I mean, this is the club of clubs in Harlem.
The days of Studio 54.
Michael Jackson's 21st birthday.
Back then, what I loved about private clubs was... The reason it was private is because...
If you can't keep a secret, if you weren't in the building, you can't find out what's happening in the building.
Now everybody's got a phone.
And everybody can't wait to take a picture or rat on somebody.
So you can't have a private club anymore because everybody's going to tell what they saw inside.
Once they let you in those doors, first of all, it was a privilege that they thought that much about you to let you in.
And then once you got in, you were in the club, man.
And so, you know, the first half of my career was just a matter of how do I get there?
So, Joe, let me tell you something.
That's at Studio 54 on Michael's 21st birthday.
And the mustache was thicker than ever, man.
It dripped down a little.
Oh, no, I had the little hook over on the side.
Was that when they first hit?
It was either Ed Sullivan or Dick Clark.
I think it was Ed Sullivan when they blew up, blew up.
The second half of my career is can I please try to enjoy a little bit of it?
You can't play any of it?
But watch him jump out front if he does.
When you see the scene where he comes out front.
Oh, this guy didn't know the clip.
But if he ever spins around one time.
And you'll see something that looks so simple to do.
He got that from Jackie Wilson.
I said, where did you get that from?
He said, Lionel, that's Jackie Wilson.
But if you see him spin and come back to dead center.
Now, this is when he was just getting his wings to flap.
He's got to be 12, 11, 12.
And that's where I am right now because, you know, the song stuck around.
And, of course, at this time, it was just ridiculous because he knew what he was doing.
I mean, this is the oldest soul you've ever met in your life.
And then they walk off stage and turn into 12-year-olds.
This kid turned into itching powder in your Afro.
See how you stand out in front and see how he points to you?
Now, shake it, shake it, baby.
I know what he's singing right now.
crazy he was crazy and if you see him with that I mean I'll be honest with you I mean we forgot sometimes that that this is going to happen because when you're backstage or in the hotel room that's a kid right that's a kid then as time went on things happen where you could see it getting weird for example
More importantly, I'm still here.
I'd go down the hall and I'd say, where's Mike?
And they said, he's in the room.
And meanwhile, what became normal was, watch out, be careful.
You're still here and you look great.
Watch out, be careful.
Now, if you understand the Commodores, Jermaine was a bass player.
He hooked up with the bass player of the Commodores, Ronald.
I'll take that as a compliment.
So Michael and I bonded at 12, 13 because of the lead singer.
So I went down to check him out.
And I say, where's Michael?
Hey, Mike, where are you?
He's hiding in the bathroom.
The girls are out there.
What do you mean there's no girls out there?
They sealed off the floor.
Now, they got mad at me because I'd walk out in the hall and go, come go with me.
I said, you seen the girls out there?
Oh, I thought they were in the hall, Lionel.
Well, considering... A lot of energy.
Okay, so in other words, watch out, be careful.
But they're protecting the golden goose, ladies and gentlemen.
But the golden goose needs play period time.
Looking at you across the table from me, I think I left my muscles back in the hotel room.
You're freaking him out.
Jermaine, Tito, listen, they go on dates, guys.
Michael can't hang downstairs.
And so as time went on, you could see the slow shutdown of trying to protect an incredibly talented person.
But at the same time, he got special treatment.
And so what I tried to do every chance I could was, hey, man, come and get you in the car.
It really accounts for, I'll tell you the joke of the book first.
Let's get it together.
You know, hang, hang, hang.
You know, and so, you know, we went through that period of time where.
We don't stay together long, because once the Commodores took off, we didn't have that everyday time anymore.
But every once in a while, we get together.
And there's a little rumor that's out right now that I want to clean up right quick.
They said in Lionel's book, Lionel called Michael smelly.
Didn't like the way he smelled.
I said, no, that's not what it is.
So let me clean this up.
So imagine sending your clothes out anywhere.
But, you know, it's all about...
And you get half of your clothes back.
The other half of your clothes are souvenirs.
So what he would do is if he had a pair of jeans, right, he'd wear the jeans until they tried to run away from him.
They were stealing his clothes, right?
Or he'd walk in the house some days, and I'm looking down at his feet, and I go, Michael.
your shoes are flopping on your feet.
Two and a half hour show a night for the last 50 years.
They're two sizes too large for you.
I know Lionel, the guy we were in someplace, he gave me a pair of shoes and I told him, thank you very much.
I said, but Michael, you could have gotten the shoes in the right size.
I know, but I didn't want to embarrass him.
So he's walking around with two sizes too large.
So he'll come by the house.
We wore the same size, right?
By the time he became that teenager.
So I said, go in the closet.
So literally he changed clothes.
And by the way, he left the clothes on the floor in the room and walked away from him.
In other words, he'd wear them until he got another pair.
And so we call him Quincy called him.
And so his nickname was for the insiders was smelly.
So when I said it in the book, everybody goes, oh, my God, Lionel called Michael Jackson smelly.
And I go, no, that's not it.
That's that's his name.
That was I revealed that.
I mean, the poor guy, the kid, when he was 12, 13, 14, sent underwear out.
T-shirt out, no T-shirt back.
Socks out, no socks back.
So what he basically had was a new pair of underwear.
Every time he put a pair of underwear on, it was new.
Yeah, because it's just not going to happen.
Because you've got to be ready for two and a half hours.
I stole it in the 70s.
But by the way, very valuable.
I would love to put that out there and say no prosecution needed.
It was not going to happen because you've revealed yourself.
Because that's got to be.
I would have that frame right away.
It's just so bananas that that was just ubiquitous.
And I don't care what you think.
You're the greatest guy in the world.
I'll put you on that stage and give you 50,000 people.
They're judging everything you do.
And then that thing came along and called the phone.
At least if they did see you, they caught you in that place.
But now, they're looking at you everywhere.
So the press is everybody.
Okay, so, I mean, in my case,
I think something happened.
And you, after running with it night or all night long, sing a slow song.
I live with that sound all the time.
No, but what happens with me was we went from you could actually be.
You could actually sneak.
Sneak means you could look out.
Do you see anybody you know?
If you don't see anybody you know, you can sneak.
And then something happens one day.
You came in through the back door.
You sit at a table in the back door.
The band starts playing Three Times a Lady.
And then everybody turns around and says, hi, Lionel.
And you thought you were just sneaking your ass off.
You ain't sneaking nothing.
You're trying to sneak around and get some dinner.
It ain't not happening.
And then the next thing that happens, which is you want to have a nice anniversary dinner.
Anniversary dinner is the best dinner ever.
And three ladies walk over to you and say, hi, Lionel.
We want to tell you we love you and we want to tell you.
And then your wife says, who are those ladies?
I've never met them before.
I know, but they seem so familiar.
oh okay wait this is not good because now the romantic session just turned into but now i've never experienced this before remember now this is new this is not i know now not to go to the romantic place you go someplace where you can have a great time but the point was back then this is first time happening right and you're trying to be like all your other friends you take your wife out or you take your girlfriend out or you go to dinner and you have a no no no man
It becomes now everybody's watching you and they can't wait to come over and say, can I have an autograph?
And now they come up and say, can we have a picture?
And so it becomes... Very weird.
You have to plan where you go.
And more importantly, be fully dressed before you leave.
Don't do something stupid, right?
I'm probably the only guy in the world that had a book with probably a thousand pages in it.
We started in 68 on the university campus.
You're just detailing a unique aspect of your life.
I tell people all the time, and this is the truth, I hope you like people.
I hope you like people.
Because if you don't, you're not going to like fame.
They keep thinking they're going to be famous and rich.
Because they're going to be in your face and in your business with an opinion.
all the time yeah now you want to go to recital with your kid and it's your kid's piano recital i hope you like being famous because while your kid is playing the recital the parents are going to be asking you for your autograph not the kids the parents yeah i made the mistake and decided i'll go to sea world with my kid and i'll go by myself on the parents bus
You know who protected me on the whole trip?
It started out as a group called the Mystics.
Miles said, okay, we got to protect my dad because the parents are coming.
And everybody at SeaWorld showed up, and there's Lionel Richie at SeaWorld with his kid.
So I had four little kids surround me.
I said, guys, I'm with them.
We're with the school.
But, I mean, it becomes, holy crap, what the hell's going on?
And it's annoying for them, too.
But you can't have that moment with your kids.
And it's a big deal because at that time,
And we were the talent show group.
ABC, NBC, CBS, and a new station just came out called CNN.
Other than that, to see you, to have a sighting was like, come on, man.
We didn't realize that we were the joke of the seniors, of the juniors.
Billion people watching live, live.
So I went from Lionel Richie to Lionel Richie all night long.
The end of my name became all night long.
Lionel Richie all night long.
Hey, that's Lionel Richie all night long.
Every country in the world, I became Lionel Richie all night long.
But they have a freshman talent show every year, and we wanted to be the band to be the freshman talent show.
Joe, it felt like a regular performance, but I had never in my life had the world watching.
We did it not realizing
It was the world, literally the world, watching.
And go back and look at that little podium.
What was supposed to happen at the beginning of this was Ronald Reagan was supposed to come out and greet, had his speech.
I know I speak on behalf of everyone in America and the entire world how proud we are of these fine athletes.
That was his speech, right?
Because that night there were death threats, they decided it's too risky to have him on the field.
Lionel, would you give the speech on behalf of all of America and the entire world?
So before I started singing, I had to make my speech...
We came out on stage and killed it.
I know how proud we are here in America and around the world of these fine athletes.
And now we're going to sing all night long.
But I had to give this thing.
And I told him, I said, that was the proud moment after I came off stage.
Before I went on stage was, well, Mr. Reagan's worried about his life.
And it was a guy, another group there called the Jays, which was the seniors.
What's going to happen here?
It was so overwhelmingly, you're talking about energy and adrenaline, and you can't beat 2.6 billion people live.
And you think Super Bowl was something special?
I'll tell you what this was.
There was not another channel covering anything.
The whole world was watching this.
And by the way, that's what happened.
But what you don't see there, that was the opening.
They had been there for the last four years, and they were the biggest group on campus.
That's very good, man.
I hadn't seen this clip.
What was happening with that was just before it started, they sealed off the airspace completely.
And I remember looking out.
There were four helicopters facing out.
And the problem was you couldn't hear them, Joe.
And I kept thinking, I'm looking at helicopters, and I said, what's that right there?
And they said, they sealed off the airspace.
Nothing's coming in to this place.
One, two, three, four.
They were about to break up.
Military Area 51 ship.
You understand what I'm saying?
And the answer to me was, okay.
I mean, you understand me at this point?
And a guy named Michael Gilbert gave us a phone call and said...
And Howard K. Smith, remember the sports announcer, I think, was it Howard K. Smith?
No, he was with Wide World of Sports.
And he kept saying, this is going to be an amazing night for you.
And I said, yeah, okay, not knowing what this was going to be.
And there was a kid that was backstage, and he said, oh, my God, this is going to be the biggest night ever.
You know who that kid was?
He was one of the dancers.
And from that moment on, I kept thinking, what's going to happen?
I said, here's what I want you to do.
They're not looking at me.
Your parents are looking for you.
So get a signal, give them something where you wave your hand so they'll know that that's you.
I want to put a group together, and I was looking at you four guys.
But the truth of that was that was one of those interesting moments in time where the world was watching and it was no other way to happen.
I woke up the next morning, drove down the street.
I could be five cars back from the traffic light.
And somebody passed me and go, hey, Lionel Richie, all night long.
Lionel Richie, all night long.
Hey, it's Lionel Richie, all night long.
Oh, God, what just happened?
Did you get your windows tinted?
I got everything tinted, babes.
What you talking about?
Would you like to come and join this band over here?
Without dying, of course.
I mean, it's... I don't know what that was, but it freaked me out.
Because I went from slightly invisible...
My friend got married.
I kept saying to him, you don't want me at your wedding.
He said, no, no, you have to come to the wedding.
I said, you don't want me at your wedding.
There he is walking down the aisle.
There he is saying I do.
And there he is walking out with his lovely bride.
The answer is, that was the beginning of the Commodores.
Every other picture after that is his mother-in-law with me
His family with me is no longer in the wedding.
Every picture was me in his wedding book.
And I said, you don't want me at your funeral.
nobody's gonna ever know you left.
For the first couple of 10 years, you gotta get used to this.
And also you have to understand, it becomes an annoyance to your friends.
Hey, Lionel, let's go down to the bar and get a drink.
You've been doing that for the whole life.
Now, you go down to the bar, the bar turns around.
So now your friends become security officers.
Okay, this is not cool.
And so it becomes a little bit of a hassle.
So if you want to have your friends, you either have to bring them up to your hotel thing or you bring them over to the house.
There's no hanging out.
It's not going to happen that way.
Again, you get used to it over time.
19 years old and we're going to take over the world.
And then finally one day you say, okay, you walk into the room, prepare to talk to the room.
Muhammad Ali said it correctly.
We had lunch one afternoon in New York and, um,
I turned a thousand pages in and they said, what the hell is this?
It's time for it to be over.
And as we were having lunch, there are people coming up to the glass looking in.
Joe, you know what I mean?
It's time for us to go.
And my security had me and I'm ready to go.
I said, where's your security?
Muhammad, he said, I don't need any security.
In other words, you know, there's James Brown, there's Marvin, and there's the Commodores.
I said, what do you mean you don't need security?
I said, there's tons of people out there.
He said, no, no, no, no, no, they'll take care of me.
And he walks out the door and everybody's going, get back, get back, get back.
In other words, you neutralize the room.
You can either make it a frenzy or you can, that's what Michael, God bless him, he couldn't get that in his head, but he couldn't, even if he tried to do that.
His whole persona was the frenzy.
He has to have the frenzy, otherwise that's not Michael.
So I just kind of got to the point where you go into that zen mode and how do I get across the airport?
You got to walk across the airport.
I knew how to navigate it.
They would just swarm him.
You know how that works, you know?
And a beautiful person.
I mean, what I... And again...
I mean, when you see him out in public, he was Mr. Showbiz.
And what I love about that period of time, we could be, you know, all right, all wrong, but we were all together.
But he was carrying a lot.
He was carrying his belief.
He was carrying his growth.
Losing the family, gaining another family, still being the icon.
With me, I just got to sing all night long again.
With him, he's got to win again.
When you can walk out and go, I'm going to speak my truth and I don't care.
Now, this is back in the days when Hoover was Hoover and the investigations were the investigations.
I mean, this is life and death situations.
And for him to accept his role.
as the educator and also the beacon of hope.
When I got that in my book, when that man came up to me and said, you must survive because you're our beacon of hope.
There's a moment in time when you realize there is a responsibility here.
It didn't make any difference.
And whether you wanted to be the teacher or not, there are folks looking at you besides the folks in Tuskegee.
So we experienced every possible imaginable part of growing up together.
But it doesn't come, I keep trying to tell people every day, it doesn't come with the word flawless.
How did you learn that?
You put your foot in the shit.
I mean, you understand?
And the only way to know it, the only way to understand it, you know, what you don't want to do is have someone describe to you life because they read it.
I want to know about life that you lived it.
Now, that's the person I'm taking my advice from.
Unless they're Rick Rubin.
And by the way, by the way, you said...
That's a strange brother, boy.
I mean, I got chills when you called his name.
I didn't grow up with brothers.
That's a real eccentric.
That's a real eccentric.
I went to Rick's house one day, and I said, oh, man, this is going to be great.
He's out by the beach.
He walked in, and he said, sit right over there.
Rick is only one beanbag chair on the floor.
That's the whole living room.
Where's the living room?
Or there's the terrace of his bedroom.
So these became, forget the band.
The doors open off onto his terrace.
They forgot to put the terrace out there.
These were five brothers.
And we were in every disaster you could probably think about.
In life, if you have a chance to be around someone that's authentic unto themselves, at the same time, they're receiving.
It's not just songwriting.
There are people who are receiving messages and you go, do me a favor.
Just sit down and tell me the story.
Well, authors all talk about that.
I mean, for example, every time I go to Atlanta, Georgia, who's backstage?
Greatest fan, greatest mentor ever.
And we laughed our way in and out of every—today, we'd all be in jail.
And he sits back there.
I've sometimes been 15, 20 minutes late to go on stage.
And he's just spewing.
the message, and again, the answer becomes, hmm, how do you feel about where we are now?
You know what I'm saying?
And so I just sit as a student, and that's what happens in life.
If you have a chance, who comes backstage to my shows?
And they sit there, and I have a chance to find out, hmm,
Now, they say you're this person.
And the answer is, no, they're not.
Everybody has a front and a back.
Especially a public narrative.
If you don't know them personally.
If you don't know them personally.
And so with me, I have found the greatest parts in the world of this whole story is that they come as fans, everybody.
And that's the part that really makes me feel really great about traveling around the world.
Because it gives – remember now, I know the world of the world.
I can make that statement.
A lot of people know Detroit or they know America, but they don't know Europe or they don't know Asia or they – Joe, I'm 200 years old.
I mean, but back then, it was the best.
I scratched on everything.
But the point is, when I come home to write a song, I don't write a song based on is it going to be a song that can identify to America only.
I write a song that the world will understand.
Because you've been to the world.
I've been to the world.
So when I came home to write All Night Long, everybody looked at me like, you're out of your freaking mind.
It's freaking Calypso.
There ain't no Calypso music on the radio.
I said, there's a thing called world beat.
That's why every gangster, every politician, every school teacher, everybody, when you go on vacation, what do you hear?
It's called the world beat.
So when I play the world beat on anything...
you automatically feel familiar.
But now try to play that in the middle of funk.
Try to play that, yo, what is Lyle doing?
But the point is, when you travel the world and you come back home and you put a song out, it's going to resonate to the world.
And as time goes on, it will resonate to America.
But I do from the world back in certain cases.
Lionel Richie crossed over and can't get black.
So in other words, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.
Three times a lady, yo.
That's a waltz, little brother.
And the answer's, no, no, no, I'm not copping out.
But my answer was very clear.
If Mozart were black, would he be Mozart?
No, because he wouldn't be funky enough.
Yeah, it's basically the same thing.
Everyone keeps thinking, oh, man, it's going to take over.
And hopefully if you're smart enough and get out of the way of this regurgitating over and over again the same goddamn song and go over here, it's got to be somebody that goes, I want to say this.
It was, well, first of all, we didn't really get into recording until 71, 72.
And no AI can tell you that.
It's going to, what's that word?
You gotta have something that touches someone.
It can rhyme all day long.
But does it touch you?
That's coming from something else that's gonna be the new thing.
And we've gotta allow a place where the new thing can come through.
Because otherwise it gets to be a hum.
And that's when you hear, we only play 98 beats a minute.
Well, you know what happens on the fifth song?
Because you want to hear something that goes...
We were just the biggest, largest, most dynamic band in our heads across the South.
But someone said, let's just keep it all the same.
So now I have to ask the question.
These are the people who don't write songs.
I mean, that's like going to a concert.
And the first song is, and the second song is, and the third song you go, where are we going to eat?
Something's got to switch up.
The lights have to change.
Something has to happen.
Otherwise it becomes monotonous.
I'm telling you, it used to be wonderful because the creative people were the guys who owned the labels.
When they started consolidating all the things.
In other words, they started buying up Motown, and then they bought up A&M, and then they bought up Mercury, and then they bought up Polygram.
Now you've got this big, giant... Okay, so it's Warner Brothers, Sony, Universal...
And then the independents and then the da-da-da.
And then it became one big... Just a machine.
A bunch of people who just want to make money and they don't make music.
And then the guy says, I know how to sell records.
And I said, and I've got some more stories.
I sold 18 billion hamburgers before I came here.
What the frick are you talking about?
Now, can you give me your album in the third quarter?
I normally give my album when I finish it.
And until we were the opening act for the Jackson 5, their first tour they went out on, we were the opening act for them.
Now, what are you talking about?
Third quarter means what?
Can we have it in the first quarter?
If we can have it in the first quarter, it'll be fine.
The most irritating part of it was you start an album...
And by the time you finish the album, they sold the company.
And the people who started the album with you are no longer there.
So that's a new group of people that's receiving the album that has no idea that you've been working on the album in the first place.
And then what label did they put that on?
Okay, they put Motown over on Mercury.
And then they put Motown Mercury over on Polydor.
Now you're sitting there going, okay, guys.
It went so sideways that, you know, and then as we slowly get further and further down the road of...
of lack of communication.
Half the time you go to another company, they didn't know what the hell you've done.
You know, they go, okay, now, you know, I've got a hip hop group that love, I got a writer that can write with you, Lionel.
That was our first look at, holy crap, this is huge.
I mean, you know what I'm saying?
I mean, you know, we got a writer that can write with you.
I don't need a writer to write with me.
What are you talking about?
I don't, I got my own, that's like having somebody say, I got a guy that can help Stevie.
Because they are A&R people from the last label.
And so you get up there and you go.
And by the way, whatever person they tell you they want you to write with, that's the single.
So you go, OK, just hold on for a minute.
Everybody take a step back.
The worst thing I ever heard in life one time was the guy said, I've got a surprise for Stevie.
He turned in his album, and I've forgotten the artist's name.
And then I'm an economics major, an accounting minor, and all of a sudden I kept thinking, I don't know what this business is, but I think I want to be in it.
I got them to remix his album.
Joe, you never heard from Stevie again for 10 years.
First of all, if you know Stevie, every...
He knows where that is.
And you remixed it before you put out the original?
But that's what I'm saying.
When you bring in non-creative people.
Who are doing cocaine.
I didn't want to say that, but the answer is a lot of it, a lot of blow.
Right, and again, you have to understand something.
They know because why do they know?
And what I've learned is there are two types of artists, creative artist and created artist.
And these people are specialized in creating artists.
But if you happen to be talking to a creative artist, shut the fuck up.
That's what I'm saying.
Madonna for the Pepsi commercial.
You know what she gave him for the Pepsi commercial?
Black man on the cross with Madonna.
That's the commercial she gave him.
And they said, this is disastrous.
What were you thinking you were going to get?
What did you think you were going to get?
Just give it a real name.
But I mean, you see what I'm saying?
But yet, was the record successful?
Bob Dylan, get out of the way.
Because you have to understand something.
But they want control.
And the answer to it is I would rather have a company full of out-of-control artists...
I've got some more stories.
When you play tennis...
Then a bunch of controlled pencil pushers and accountants, they know nothing about people and what they like or what could titillate their sensibilities.
It's got to be somebody that knows how to.
What's the number one thing you will never hear ever?
Well, are they going to be in clubs all night?
Are they going to travel around the world to festivals and everything?
No, they're not going to be there.
So wouldn't you trust us when we come back home and say, okay, I got this shit?
And by the way, they know.
And they'll come up to you and...
What they call is giving you advice.
You know what it's called to me?
You want to hear how that sounds?
Lionel, if I were you, and you know what I say back quieter to myself?
That's not going to happen.
If I came back to you, Mr., you know, and I'd say, hey, if I were you, I would do this with the company.
And you look at me and go, kids, you don't know what you're talking about.
Football, basketball, you hear them all day long.
And that's the right answer.
But if you're talking to an artist, by the way, we could run the company if you let us.
And so for the first time in the history of Harper's, probably they said, Mr. Ritchie, no more stories.
But the point is, it's too late.
Everybody knows everything now.
And so that's the point.
It's called the Peter Principle.
Everyone elevates themselves to their level of incompetence.
And now that you are who you are,
You've now null and void yourself and the industry, whatever it is we're into.
I was going to be an Episcopal priest, thinking that's my avenue.
So my point now is we've got a world now of specialists that knows nothing about the actual doing it.
I mean, in other words...
they have people who have never been in a successful marriage longer than 12 weeks giving you advice on marriage.
I'm thinking about this.
If I were you, I'd do this.
My answer is, if you ever want to find out about anything,
Don't ask anybody young.
They've been through the blitz of World War II.
They've been through the depression.
And I'm on stage one night at the Jackson show, and all of a sudden, some girl said, sing it, baby.
They've been through the crisis.
Don't ask anybody young.
Because if it comes on the phone, you don't know anything.
If you want some real good advice, when I got to Motown, who did I ask first?
Crazy as he can be, but it doesn't matter.
He was the creative killer.
Who did I ask about record business?
These guys were the most incredible people on the planet.
And so what I'm saying to you is right now we're taking advice from people who just graduated from nothing.
What are you coming from?
So that's where I I only I just find it very interesting that before I ask the question of anything, I go, how did you do it first?
And you said, well, this is my first time doing it.
I'll talk to you later.
And I said, call the minister back on the phone.
Well, let me tell you, we're so far down the road now because
What happens now is it all became legitimate when I say that.
Not that I was a nice fan of gangsters, but it's something rewarding about giving someone a chance to play.
I said, I don't think I'm going to be priest material.
Now, what's going to happen is he's either going to win or you're going to lose.
But if you win, you might get a group called the Beatles.
If you win, you might get a group out of San Francisco called Sly and the Stones.
If you win, you might get a group called the Temptations.
If you win, you might get Diana Ross.
If you win, you might get a Taylor Swift.
You know what I'm saying?
In other words, just let the artist win.
And that goes with everything.
You know, there's people who, like I said, in school, they're incredible academically.
They can recite to you everything that's ever happened and will give you every, you know, backup to that.
Now that we have chat GPT, it's not so much the same.
But the point is, and then there are those that go, I wrote a poem.
I'd like you to hear it.
Just what you don't understand.
I want you to hear about it.
I have an idea about going to Mars.
I mean, the first thing is, before you become a genius, you have to take the responsibility of being an absolute idiot to everybody around you.
You have to know at that point.
An idiot is when you came up with your first idea.
Lionel, where do you hear all your songs from?
I hear them from the other side.
On a university campus.
Now, when the world finally becomes attuned to your frequency, oh my God, you hear the word genius.
The answer is, no, I'm still the idiot that suggested it from the beginning.
You have to identify your lane.
Because I can explain to them
Because now we've opened that channel up now to where people can talk like that.
But back then, 1970, 69, 68, talking like that means Lionel is on either LSD...
I had never heard that, Joe, in my life.
He's on some kind of tab.
But he's definitely not in his right mind.
But he won't be here long.
We'll get him to rehab as soon as possible.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah, I mean, I'll be honest with you.
Richard Pryor, I use this as my perfect example.
I mean, I would just wait for his next, what's coming out of his mouth.
And then one day he sobered up and couldn't get funny.
And I kept thinking, what just happened?
Well, he went to rehab.
Well, yeah, I know, but where's your edge?
So there's a word for it.
There's a phrase for it where you learn your craft under the influence of.
And if you happen to not know how you got there off of the influence, that when you finally get off of it, you don't know how to get back to it unless you go back on it.
And from that point on, it was just a matter of riding this wave of we finished that Jackson tour.
To be in their presence is one of the most incredible things you'll ever see and hear and experience in your life.
Again, I got to the point where if I was just allowed in the room, remember now, I mean, I was allowed in the room when Marvin and Stevie's and... Did you grasp that historically at the time, like what that meant?
I mean, do you know what this was?
This was the gift of life.
I mean, that's Barry Gordy.
You know what Barry Gordy was back in the day?
He existed on the moon somewhere.
You know, Holland Dozier and Holland.
These are, you know, they're in the moon.
Aretha Franklin and Armin Erdogan and King Curtis.
This is the moon people, man.
Sammy Davis Jr., Sidney Poitier.
These are moon people.
We don't need any more stories.
And to have them sit in a room, not in a seminar, in their living room, saying, you know what, let me tell you a story about
Now there's one part of me going, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
And then there's another part of me going, holy shit, I'm sitting here listening to a freaking Barry Gordy or Sidney Poitier.
How did I get in that room?
So another title was going to be, was Fly on the Wall, but I just didn't want to be a fly.
Hollywood Bowl, Motown saw us there.
But the point is, I mean, I had the opportunity one-on-one
Not in a TED talk, but one-on-one with some of the greatest
I mean, well, I mean, Paul Mooney, Richard Pryor, and I knew Mooney real well.
Suzanne DePass was, of course, the one who put the Jacksons together and all that.
I mean, this is again, totally out of his mind, totally funny, but more importantly, totally in charge.
I mean, he knew his—I saw his frustration because they were trying to deal with him commercially.
They discovered that maybe he might be able to be on network television.
But he was so gifted in presenting the street struggle, and you laughed about it.
Miss Rudolph was Miss Rudolph, man.
I mean, when he said Miss Rudolph, everybody knew what you're talking about, you know.
In fact, can we take some of the stories out?
Or, you know, they put me in jail for shooting my car.
I mean, you know, but to know him off camera, to know him off the stage, you know, what I found a lot about my comedian friends is, you know, to make things funny, you have to take dark things seriously.
She knew us from our manager, Cape Cod, and Martha's Vineyard Island.
But they stay, most of the time, in darkness.
And Richard was in darkness a lot of time, a lot of time of his life.
The book, the book that I just finished,
Everyone keeps saying, well, did you start off in the rural South?
Forget the rural South.
I was struggling with myself, which is what everybody struggles with.
Next thing we know, we're recording.
So the answer is, it's not that I made it.
It's who was I struggling with?
And all of us are struggling with ourselves.
That's what made the book, to me, so meaningful because people will walk back to me and go, Lionel, I felt the same way.
Now, you know what that's called in my business?
When you write a song and everybody comes back to you and says, man, I was feeling the same way, you got to hit record.
Well, when you can write in a book vulnerability, where you can write in a book fear, where you can write in a book I'm not sure, I wasn't sure, I was scared, they go, how could you be scared and do all that?
And the answer is step forward.
And then you're off to the races.
We're all scared to death.
You know, we don't know what we're doing from day to day.
It's just we work it out.
But it's not where we, all this confidence and crap.
And as time goes on, you kind of develop a little, okay.
And it's called filling out your skin as time goes on.
We're off to the races.
You get a little bit more confident in the fact that I kind of know what I'm doing.
Becoming a professional.
But for the beginning stages of your life, what the hell are you doing?
And at any one point in the life, I could have turned around and said, I quit.
You know, looking at this book, it's a question, I survived, or how I survived.
The work ethic was insane.
rapping with perfect flow at 17 you're like okay I get it you just go or you get around major corporate leaders and you say to myself oh my god you built this company I was bankrupt 12 times
You know what I'm saying?
All you remember was the smash.
But you don't remember, oh, what?
What are you talking about?
In other words, how many times can you take no?
How many times can you take rejection?
How many times can you go, I quit?
And then you wake up the next morning and go, I got another idea.
Because the world is designed to make you go away.
So to answer your question, we can't fit all of my life story in a book.
Don't get psyched out.
I tell the kids on American Idol, don't get psyched out.
Just because this person can hit every note perfectly and you have this cracky voice, but I can't remember this perfect voice, but I can remember your cracky voice.
That means you've got a personality.
This is a great karaoke singer, Ovi.
Perfect notes don't work.
I want to know what your little quirk is.
You know, Cardi B is Cardi B for a reason.
Do you follow what I'm saying?
But the question to me was, I survived?
There's a lot of folks that came along.
Cardi B is Cardi... I mean, I'm just using her as one example.
But the wonderful thing about it is she came with a personality.
She came with a thing.
to me that's the quality i'm looking for not only in the music business but in life okay so you're rich okay so but who are you what right what what's your what's your thing what's your who are you do i like being around you do i like being around you are you tell me what you what is it yeah otherwise you're just rich okay yeah and you got stuff okay
Because it's not, I mean, I can tell you stories, and well, they're in the book, but I'm just saying there are moments when you just look around and go, thank God for just being naive, young, stupid, didn't have any idea of what the heck you were doing, but what a great adventure.
Well, I got to be honest with you.
There's an old expression that goes, sometimes you don't want to meet the person because they may not be what you thought they were.
You know, you're exactly who I thought.
No, I mean, because, you know, you've mastered this personality where you can sit down and talk to just about everybody.
And on the days when you struggle with trying to make a communication with somebody and it doesn't work out, I go, I understand why it didn't work out.
Because, you know, sometimes you have a block right in front of you.
You go, okay, I just have to deal with the block.
But I've enjoyed this, man.
I did not do the auto version.
I swear to you, I did not do it.
Well, you know what it was.
If you know Lionel Richie.
Okay, let me tell you something.
For the time it took me to write this book, two and a half years.
Okay, so let me just, let me be honest with you.
You don't want me to read this book because I'd go, I don't want to put that in, guys.
Can I change that one line?
And so it's just one of those things.
Did the dude who read it at least sound a little like you?
Why am I drawing a blank?
Blair Underwood, I love.
First of all, we kind of had kids in common.
Our kids were in the same school.
So when I say we had kids in common, no, we didn't have the same thing.
But we had kids at the same time.
And so we met back then.
But what I love about him is he understands the, I call it the middle class approach to education.
In other words, he understood the fact that did we grow up in the rural South, did we struggle?
No, no, it's not that kind of struggle.
We had a struggle of understanding our identity and how to take that forward as artists.
And he understood the humor.
I love his voice because it's not so identifiable that if it was a Morgan Freeman, I'm just giving that as a perfect example, and I love Morgan, but it's too identifiable.
I want somebody who can tell a joke and it sound like Lionel.
And so when I said, no, no, I want you, we hit it off.
Well, his voice, you'll hear it.
Well, thank you, Lionel.
I'm in a subway, 4 o'clock in the morning, my saxophone, and I had this little secret thing that no one knew.
I had this sheath around my neck.
Didn't know it had a secret compartment.
Of course, everybody in Harlem knew it was a secret compartment.
I had all my money in that.
I'm walking around going...
No one knows I have my money in there.
But we just had to find the ones that were actually humorous in certain cases, educational in certain cases, because it's wide.
Which is everybody knows I have my money in there.
I would walk up and down the subway.
It has to be a sense of divine guidance.
or Big Frank Lucas just told everybody, don't touch us.
One or the other, but I mean, it was just one of those moments in time where, you know, I've had some people say to me, you were in Harlem at four o'clock in the morning in the subway alone?
I'm glad I'm doing the book now because otherwise I would be, let's say, when I got to about 98, 99, because I'm planning on a full life.
There's an old man at the barbershop still telling lies about his life when he was growing up because it has to be a lie.
There was one title I was joking around with, which is, you're not going to believe this shit.
That would be the title, you know, and I was thinking that might be the way to go.
But I enjoyed the process.
And then, of course, I kept thinking, no, but from a philosophical point of view, that's not going to fly.
Okay, we'll pull that back.
But the point is, it's almost not believable.
I mean, when you start calling off names, it's almost like name dropping.
And you start thinking about who mentored you, who gave you the advice, right?
Who was there for you exactly at the right time?
Of kind of looking back.
Who left right on time?
You know what I'm saying?
There are moments that happen.
that if I tried to script this thing, if I tried to put it down as a complete play, chapter by chapter, act by act, you couldn't make this up.
Because if you understand me, I have the Italian race car driver's theory.
Too many good things happened to that guy.