Playboy Interview: Lionel Richie

At three a.m.—in the middle of his composing day—Lionel Richie is locked away in the soundproof studio of his Bel Air home, "mean and rolling," he jokes. Outfitted in a mustard-yellow track suit and munching a bagful of Famous Amos cookies, the 37-year-old singer sits surrounded by a one-man band: two synthesizers, a 24-track board, three electronic keyboards, a Yamaha grand and a "live" microphone hooked into mammoth speakers. Tape recorders are strewn everywhere, because the nation's number-one hit man doesn't read music, much less bother to write it down.

No matter. Blessed with an impeccable ear that can pull one discordant error from 24 tracks, Richie is a self-professed "humma-holic," conjuring up tunes "from a radio playing in my head" and customizing lyrics during 45-minute showers and three-hour drives on the Pacific Coast Highway.

Hidden behind his ubiquitous shades and revving to 80 miles per hour, Richie roams in his beefed-up white Porsche or silver Mercedes—both of them miniature recording studios, equipped with studio-quality tape decks and vibrating doors that serve literally as speakers. Sleeping half the day, working most of the night, he searches for the melodies and words that describe his favorite subject, love: the loss of it, the pain of it, the joy of it, the anything of it. Not for him the whimsical eccentricities of Michael Jackson, the bad-boy sexual taunts of Prince, the grit of Bruce Springsteen. Richie does, however, see himself as a rock-'n'-roller and proudly shows off his punky collection of rainbow-colored leather pants, vowing to "rock up my pop" and "take off my shirt" in future work.

Although unsympathetic critics can be scathing about what they've called Richie's saccharine tunes and boy-scout demeanor, Richie himself says matter-of-factly, "My music works. People respond, the records sell—and nobody determines my musical journey but me!"

Richie's composing muse has yielded nine years of consecutive number-one singles, an astonishing record rivaled only by Irving Berlin, who also topped the charts for nine years running. Motown executives hope that his latest album, "Dancing on the Ceiling," will eventually outsell Richie's last blockbuster, "Can't Slow Down," the biggest-selling album in Motown history: more than 15,000,000 units sold, more than $100,000,000 grossed. Richie has five Grammys (out of 33 nominations), 13 American Music Awards, a Golden Globe and a roomful of People's Choice statuettes. His bathroom is for photographs—and its walls are covered with favorites: Quincy Jones, Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, right-hand producer James Anthony Carmichael and members of Richie's Alabama family. "Making the wall," he laughs, "means true friend." Although he grounds himself with family trips to Hawaii and likes to return periodically to Tuskegee—where he keeps the same apartment he used as a college student—the touring life and the fast lane hold equal appeal.

To hear him tell it, the following happened, not so unusually, within one two-week period: He shared soul food and a private screening at home with Elizabeth Taylor and George Hamilton; Michael Jackson dropped by to demonstrate dance steps on a specially built floor in the family gym; he had a chat with Placido Domingo on the travails of performing in mammoth amphitheaters; he put in a couple of hours' sun-bathing with Springsteen; he slipped unnoticed into a Prince concert and afterward was backslapping in the theater parking lot with Muhammad Ali; he danced at his favorite L.A. night spot, Tramps; he spent an afternoon trading gossip with Tina Turner; he unpacked the polka-dot boxer shorts sent to him by admirer Calvin Klein; and he generally just hung out with family friends, Quincy Jones and Sheila.

Not bad for a painfully shy Alabamian who, as a boy, flubbed his classical-piano assignments and dreamed of becoming an accountant or a lawyer.

Born June 20, 1949, Lionel Richie was raised in academic environs, across the street from the Tuskegee Institute. The hard-work philosophy of Booker T. Washington, the school's visionary founder, served as the Richie family credo. Both the boy's father, Lionel, a systems analyst for the Army, and his mother, Alberta, an elementary school principal, believed the key to success was education. And both parents were determined to keep their son protected from a more alien environment. "I never even went the three miles into town without them—and then, only to the bank," he recalls.

Richie attended Tuskegee on a tennis scholarship, majoring in economics and accounting, and also took to roaming with his sax case—a ploy designed to impress the opposite sex. Thanks to a freshman talent show, he hooked up with five ambitious crooners who boasted that they would become the black Beatles. In 1969, armed with a 200-page game plan for success masterminded by Richie—which copied many of the touring and public-relations ploys used by the Beatles—and calling themselves the Commodores, they painstakingly carved out a regional following and hit the big time in 1971 as the warm-up group for the Jackson 5. Their 1974 hit "Machine Gun" fired them into the national spotlight, as did "Just to Be Close to You" (1976). But it wasn't until Richie led the way with "Easy" (1977), "Three Times a Lady" (1978), "Still" (1979) and "Sail On" (1979) that the group soared, racking up four gold and three platinum albums.

The down side of this success was the fact that, while Richie had captured the spotlight, his colleagues were being virtually ignored. Jealousy and resentment infested the relationship, though Commodores manager Benny Ashburn tried desperately to hold the band together. Group member William King accused Richie of pulling the group apart: "I just hope he realizes the price the band paid so he could become a star." The final break came in 1980 with "Lady," rejected by the Commodores as "corny" and rebelliously presented by Richie to Kenny Rogers. "Lady" became Rogers' biggest single to date, tallying more than 15,000,000 copies.

Later that year, when infighting among the Commodores reached its height, Richie wrote "Endless Love," a duel with Diana Ross that further enhanced his solo status. It became the biggest hit single of Ross's long career. Richie could do no wrong.

Going solo in 1982, he enlisted the support of rock-pop-business wiz Ken Kragen, who' for years had masterminded Rogers' career. Kragen's challenge was to make Richie's face as recognizable as his songs—a feat partly accomplished in 1984, when the singer signed an $8,000,000 pact with Pepsi-Cola—topping Michael Jackson's deal at the time with Pepsi by $3,000,000.

It was Kragen who, not content with being merely the manager for Rogers and Richie, helped develop the idea for USA for Africa in 1985. A year later, he created and administered Hands Across America—the overblown clone of USA that would yield disappointing financial results. But to his chagrin, Kragen discovered that Richie—worn out from his backbreaking organizational feat for USA for Africa and eager to finish his latest album—had refused to become as fully involved in Hands. Kragen impulsively fired Richie on February 5, 1986, and then cut his staff to the bone, axing ten employees. The two speedily reconciled, yet one senses a newfound wariness in Richie: "Agents and publicists come and go," he says now.

Accompanying the singer throughout these times is his wife of 11 years, Brenda, a native of Brewton, Alabama, who has been described by Richie as a "systems person—Miss Organization." Brenda is a formidable businesswoman, overseeing the marketing of Richie merchandise, directing his fan club and otherwise protecting her husband from opportunists. "She has a temper and knows how to use it," he says proudly.

Brenda, a social worker with a passion for children, has also faced, with Richie, the disappointment of not yet having been able to have children. In the meantime, they relish the visits of their ten godchildren, who roam a Spanish-style house sumptuously decorated with African objets d'art, overstuffed furniture and, in the living room, Lalique swans nesting near a mammoth Bösendorfer concert grand. "He deserves to have the best," says Brenda of her husband.

We sent writer Glenn Plaskin, whose last "Playboy Interview" was with Calvin Klein, to talk with Richie during the five-week period that included the singer's completion of "Dancing on the Ceiling" and preparations for a world tour.

"I worried that Richie, the perennial nice guy, might turn out to be as bland in conversation as sharp-tongued critics have accused him of being in his music," Plaskin says. "A sky-high career hadn't driven him to drugs or fits of star temperament; his sunny disposition and tongue-tied thank yous for dozens of awards—'This is outrageous!' he'd say over and over again—had become the butt of good-natured jokes; there were no marital scandals or nervous collapses, not even a workout video.

"I was therefore relieved to meet the real Skeet, as he calls himself: mischievously ironic, a methodical craftsman, perhaps too quick to trust and disarmingly candid—though as cagey as any political candidate when dodging an unwanted question.

"One marked contradiction is Richie's attitude toward money: Although he insists that material objects and cold cash mean little to him, he admits unabashedly that every song and lyric is gauged with concert-ticket and record sales in mind. 'Mass appeal is it,' he says.

"Business aside, Richie frequently expresses his emotions in pet phrases he emphasizes aloud. 'That's called memo off my desk,' he said of Kragen's dismissal of him, or 'That's called being slow motion,' of his early sex life. On the subject of sex, Richie discussed candidly—if shyly—the past temptations of the road and his present-day contentment with his wife. Not once did he refuse to answer a question—whether about fidelity in his marriage, his curiosity about drugs or the racism he faced from radio program directors in the Seventies.

"Our first session, a one p.m. breakfast in the Richie dining room, started with a platter of spaghetti and a head-on collision between Richie and those who criticize him."

[Q] Playboy: As a songwriter and performer, you've had more consecutive number-one singles than anyone else in history—that includes Frank Sinatra, the Beatles, Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen. Those are pretty staggering statistics. Do you feel bowled over?

[A] Richie: I'm laughing. What in the world is going on? I was going to do a quick spin in rock 'n' roll with the Commodores, make what's called fast money and then go to law school. I didn't have a clue about the magnitude of this thing. By the time I won the Oscar for Say You, Say Me, my dream had actually come true.

[Q] Playboy: That's when you made a rather gushy acceptance speech.

[A] Richie: I had practiced my acceptance speech in the privacy of my bathroom hundreds of times—I had prepared to be ever so calm and gracious. But when I won, my mouth didn't work. I found myself spilling out my guts, while inside I was saying, "Lionel, don't do this. This is not what you want to say." But I meant it.

[Q] Playboy: Your fans love you, but some critics think of you as a boy scout. Are you?

[A] Richie: I was a boy scout. I was an altar boy. I grew up on a college campus. The word is boring—because who the hell wants to hear about a kid who wasn't a gangster from a broken home? Not everybody can be on drugs. The standard question is "How did you make it in the business?" and the standard answer is "I started out in the ghetto, coked up, didn't know my mom and dad, finally struggled my way into a rock-'n'-roll band, got off drugs and here I am today." Well, that's not the way it happened.

[Q] Playboy: So when critics charge you with being a little...wimpy?

[A] Richie: [Laughs] I say, "Thank you." Watch me at the ticket booth; watch record sales. Wimpy to me means—guess what?—sales. Criticisms don't bother me. One guy called me "yucky, gooey, icky—a true maltz schmaltz" before Can't Slow Down came out. Then I received a telegram from him saying, Ok, Fella, I was Wrong.

[Q] Playboy: Whose opinion do you genuinely value?

[A] Richie: John Q. Public's. I'm selling to him. I've discovered that the average John responds best to a simple lyric—nothing flowery, flamboyant or abstract. He's not impressed by big words. So-called educated people like to sit around and impress one another with how much they can remember. I'm not selling to that crowd. In very simple terms, I want to say, "I love you, I miss you, I'm hurting, I'm lonely." Now, there's only one way to say it: "I'm lonely." It sounds boring, but it works.

[A] There's a little saying in the industry: Compose a fast song and you can write, "Baby, ah-ah, baby, ooh-ooh," and it makes no difference—people will dance to it. But in slower songs, you've got to reach in and find something that people can relate to. That's what I do.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think you're a good lyric writer?

[A] Richie: I think that I'm hitting it dead on the head. Period.

[Q] Playboy: As you did most memorably with We Are the World, a collaboration with Michael Jackson. How did that work? Did Jackson say "We are" and you say "the world"?

[A] Richie: [Laughs] We'd wanted to write a song together ever since 1971 but never had.

[Q] Playboy: Who wrote more of the melody, you or he?

[A] Richie: He did.

[Q] Playboy: And the words?

[A] Richie: We did. Michael and I were willing to test ideas out on each other without being embarrassed that we'd look like idiots. We sat down and talked about the song for three days before we wrote it and came around to the main point: The song had to be an anthem. Quincy Jones told us we could never use phrases like "Let us stand together as one" if one artist were performing the song. But when you've got 45 of the strongest performers in the business, the body of sound and spirit lives up to the words.

[Q] Playboy: The song became a monster hit. It also became a target for parody on Saturday Night Live. Did that bother you?

[A] Richie: I always trust success when 15 jokes in five languages surface in four days. I think it's a fabulous song considering its purpose. But I understood the jokes. It's called burnout on the radio. But when I turned on my television set and watched people in London, New York, L.A., Paris singing in the street—when I found out that jailed rebels in South Africa and South America were singing in their cells—how big a joke was this song?

[Q] Playboy: So why, despite your popularity, are some people so hard on you?

[A] Richie: Because who the hell wants to hear about a great dose of love? That's so ridiculous: People want to hear about beating people in the head and stabbing them in the back. And that's not what I'm about.

[A] A lot of people who write about me don't give a damn about me. Even worse, they don't know what they're talking about. They'll say, "I'm really the sports guy; the music guy is sick." Or "I was at the Springsteen concert last night; fabulous show—how does your music compare with his?"

[Q] Playboy: People on your staff have told us you would desperately like to have more of a Springsteen edge in your music. True?

[A] Richie: I hate categories. They're great marketing tools—but they limit an artist. I don't tell myself, "I'm a balladeer; I'll keep composing ballads, because that's what I am." That means I'm not testing myself. I do want to dirty up my music slightly, but I can't go to a rocker and say, "Write me one of your songs"—it wouldn't be believable. I'm not going to lose the audience I've built and say, "Ladies and gentlemen, on this album, I'm doing my thing, and anyone who wants to come along—welcome." Barbra Streisand did that a number of times and lost. I'll come out with three ballads every two years and hope the fans are happy.

[Q] Playboy: You keep a lot of fans happy, but some say that during your shows, your early stuff—the Commodores material—really swings, while the later songs can seem, in the words of one critic, "schmaltzy, TV-evangelist, calculated, trite sentimentality." Sound familiar?

[A] Richie: Yup. I am not insulted. The one thing I know about the world is that everybody wants to feel they're hip, when actually, most of us aren't. There are only three or four hip capitals of the world: Paris, New York, London and, maybe, L.A. Now, try to write a song for those cities and you're going to bomb. That's called fad. For ten years, Willie Nelson and Kenny Rogers have come out as top vocalists in listeners' polls—not Mr. Mister, Prince or Michael Jackson. Why? Because Nelson and Rogers represent the world between New York and L.A. They're not hip. They don't know anything about hip. But they understand words: Johnny Paycheck sings "Take this job and shove it." Jackie DeShannon sings "Put a little love in your heart." And the audience reacts, "Yeah, that's how I feel."

[Q] Playboy: But is audience draw equivalent to artistic success? Porky's and Friday the 13th were popular, too.

[A] Richie: I know exactly what you're saying and I'm not going to psych it out, nor tell you that I'm looking at my career with rose-colored glasses. But after an evening of Truly, Lady, Three Times a Lady, people are jumping out of their seats. When I say I'm going for some edge, I don't mean I'm taking apart the Lionel Richie everybody knows; I'm just going to test the waters.

[Q] Playboy: Where do you draw the line when testing new waters?

[A] Richie: You have to be open-minded. The punk groups only look punk—it's not real. When I was a kid, I once turned on the television to watch a press conference with a "wild sex-maniac fanatic" named Elvis Presley, who sang black music. The lower part of Elvis' body was out of control. Ten years later, Tom Jones was worse, or better, and he got a television show by doing it.

[Q] Playboy: Do you like hard-core punk?

[A] Richie: Some of the groups are a little bit ridiculous, but I won't call names. However, when a singer says fuck on the stage—I mean, give my imagination a break; let's bring in some old good taste. Let me at least fantasize a little bit.

[Q] Playboy: Do you worry about not seeming hip enough?

[A] Richie: I don't give a crap. What is hip? Success means more to me than hip. Success means selling 20,000,000 albums and filling 20,000-seat coliseums. I'm into total masses of people. I want as many people to hear my music as possible.

[Q] Playboy: You're a composer and a lyricist——

[A] Richie: Yes, but not a trained musician. My grandmother's great frustration with me was that I memorized piano music rather than read it—and I still don't read music. But I have a great ear. When I listen to an orchestrated song, I can hum all the parts.

[Q] Playboy: Wouldn't reading music or writing it down be a useful tool in the studio?

[A] Richie: When I first got to California, I ran into a wonderful guy named Norman Whitfield—he wrote Heard It Through the Grapevine and a lot of Temptations hits. I asked, "What music school did you graduate from?" He said, "I hum." That's all I needed to hear. I asked Quincy [Jones] about reading music and he said, "After you retire, Lionel, after you retire. Right now, you're doing just fine." And my producer, James Anthony Carmichael, also told me not to worry about people who urged me to learn to read music: "Lionel, for every day they can read, they wish they could write."

[Q] Playboy: How do you compose?

[A] Richie: One of two ways: Either I'll just start singing melodies and keep my tape recorder in the car or studio running until I hum something I like or I'll sit down at the piano and "Say you, say me" or "Easy like Sunday morning" will come right out of my mouth. It comes out all in one breath, without my consciously thinking of it or planning it. This is a blessing, because I'm not trying. I asked Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, "How do you throw the ball from half court?" He said, "Just throw it down there, man." I asked O. J. Simpson, "How do you run from goal post to goal post?" He said, "I just start running." I start with the hook.

[Q] Playboy: A hook? You mean like "All night long"?

[A] Richie: Yeah. When people listen to All Night Long, they can't recite the verses, but they can remember "All night long." In order to create a best seller, you've got to have a hook. It didn't take me years of theorizing to learn that.

[Q] Playboy: Are you as good a singer as you are a composer?

[A] Richie: I'm not a singer, I'm a stylist, whereas Streisand is both. But I do know how to make my songs sound believable. I know how to sell my voice. But if I got up and stood next to a singer-singer, he'd blow me off the stage. I love what Kenny [Rogers] told me the first time I walked into a recording studio with him, to record Lady: "I'm not a singer. I just know how to make what I do sell." That's really all that matters.

[Q] Playboy: Then you're a businessman-singer?

[A] Richie: No, I'm a pulling-off-what-you-can-do singer. My belief is that what makes a person great is knowing his shortcomings as well as his strengths. When I recorded All Night Long, I loved playing that character, though I'm not Jamaican. It gave me a chance to be somebody else, and that's fun to me. Lionel Richie singing his song with a calypso flavor is one thing, but singing a calypso song with a calypso accent? That could have backfired.

[Q] Playboy: Still, some think you play it safe.

[A] Richie: If you don't think bringing out a song called Three Times a Lady in the middle of the disco craze was taking a chance, think about it. Or let's talk about Kenny Rogers' and Lionel Richie's getting together on Lady—that was quite an odd couple. I like stretching, though it's not good for your stomach.

[Q] Playboy: Are your songs autobiographical or just plain fantasies?

[A] Richie: I don't live half the stories I write about, nor am I this wise owl that sits up on a hill. I'm just an observant person who walks through life.

[A] I start with my friends. Still is about a couple in Houston I happen to love very, very much. We were classmates at Tuskegee; they married and, years later, decided to divorce. When they split, I couldn't believe it. I said, "What are you talking about?" And they said, "Well, we've been fighting like cats and dogs, everything we've done is wrong and we realize we made a mistake: Marriage is not for us. But we love each other—still." End of story. Inspiration can take exactly five seconds.

[Q] Playboy: In one interview, you said, "My co-writer is God." How literally did you mean that?

[A] Richie: I get chills thinking about that quote, but, yes, I said it. I'm not a fanatically religious person. After being an altar boy for seven years, I elected to keep going to church. Every Saturday, I'd show up for one hour of acolyte practice; afterward, I'd play ping-pong with Father Vernon Jones, who turned religion into recreation. He was the best ping-pong player in town, and he taught me every bit of religion I needed across the table.

[A] When I write, I prefer to say I'm surrounded by guardian angels—people like Benny Ashburn, James Carmichael and Brenda.

[Q] Playboy: You make composing sound very easy. Are there down days?

[A] Richie: [Laughs] Not everything that Lionel Richie writes is gold. For every good song, there are 20 that are pure crap. I throw them away.

[Q] Playboy: Whom do you go to when you're stuck?

[A] Richie: To James or Quincy, my musical foundation. They've both mastered the music and speak to me in a simple form I can understand. I'm not embarrassed to say I'm having a problem, and I know that their advice works. Quincy inspires me as an all-round musician-producer. He's just a nasty musician—a killer cat on every level. When it comes down to arranging, composing and conducting, he can't be beat. But most of it's up to me: I work from one o'clock to five in the morning every day. I stay in my studio or drive around and I can be me. At home, I need a room no one will touch. If the studio needs cleaning, I'll do it; if it needs vacuuming, I'll push it. Nobody touches this room. I'm a gypsy, and I'm the only one who has a key. Brenda can come in.

[Q] Playboy: Brenda has a duplicate key?

[A] Richie: No, you didn't hear what I said. This is my house. Right here. Really off limits. She respects it, and anybody can walk in if I'm crazy enough to leave the door open. But I need to know there's one place where I can drop tapes, hide things in the drawers and not worry. I don't want interior decorators or stylists in this room. There's nothing here but what I need to pull off what I do. This is my sanctuary. It's very selfish, but I'm the recognized guy living with this strange animal called fame. It's a long way from Tuskegee.

[Q] Playboy: You hardly suffered there, did you?

[A] Richie: Deprived was definitely not the word. In the Fifties, there were three places in the South affluent blacks gathered: Nashville, close to Fisk University, Atlanta and Tuskegee—a self-sufficient, self-supporting black community, a novelty in the middle of the black belt. Integration may not have existed anywhere else in the South, but in those communities, you could find a host of black doctors, lawyers, politicians, scientists and professors—who were considered the elite of the community. They may have made only $5000 a year, but a black professor had a car and a home, and he was the socialite of the campus. Those people were my family's friends. I was taught you can be anything you want to be—no limitations. Just go for it.

[Q] Playboy: So racism didn't play a very big part in your childhood.

[A] Richie: I didn't inherit racist complexes. Mostly, what you still get in the world is "You better watch out for those black people, because they're violent." Hatred isn't inborn—it's taught. My parents never told me, "We hate Jewish people" or "All white people are bad." They never sold that crap to me.

[Q] Playboy: Were your parents strict with you?

[A] Richie: [Laughs] I could get four whippings before I got home to get one from my father, because I had a ton of love from a community of folks who cared about me. I hated school. In fourth grade, I was learning Latin and French—because Tuskegee teachers were trying to create superkids. But I was the kid who said, "I don't want to learn that crap." I wanted to go out and play.

[Q] Playboy: You use this line in one of your album ads: "I love going back to Tuskegee, because the only Mr. Richie there is my father." What did you learn from him?

[A] Richie: Dad had a wonderful habit of talking to everybody the same way. A briefcase and a three-piece suit didn't impress him. "The guy with the mop may have the answer you need," my father told me, "but if you're holding your head too high, you're going to miss what he's saying."

[A] The second thing I got from him was the ability to laugh in the face of disaster. Although he wound up a systems analyst for the Army, he came from humble beginnings and never had much money. So he didn't dwell on materialistic things. He sold me heart and didn't spoil me. Every time I said, "Dad, I need this," he answered, "Son, let me tell you about not having a suit until...." Or "Dad, I'd like to borrow the car"; "Son, let me tell you about the time I used to walk."

[A] My dad always told me, "Aptitude plus attitude equals altitude," which is absolutely true. You can have the greatest personality and no brains or be a total asshole but a genius.

[Q] Playboy: Did Tuskegee's elitist environment shield you from racism?

[A] Richie: Absolutely. I even went to a special elementary school sponsored by the college and attended by all the sons and daughters of the professors. I was totally insulated.

[Q] Playboy: So even though you spent your childhood in Alabama, you never witnessed or experienced blatant racism?

[A] Richie: Nobody threw a rock at me and called me nigger. Never. So I never felt the bitterness and the anger. But I remember driving from Detroit to Tuskegee and saying to my dad, "Let's stop off at a hotel," and he told me we'd have to make it to Nashville first. I couldn't understand why and he wouldn't tell me—just "It's the best hotel for us," and that was all. Thank God I missed the hate, the anger and frustration and moved on. I got the experience secondhand, but I never suffered. And missing it had a great deal to do with the way I approached my music. I was listening to Bach, Beethoven and Chopin every day.

[Q] Playboy: This relatively privileged existence must have irritated some of your less-than-fortunate colleagues later on.

[A] Richie: Damn right. I was once on a plane with Count Basie, returning from Japan, and I tried to identify with him. I said, "You know, Count, the business is hard. We travel so much...da, da, da." He looked at me and said, "Lionel, you don't even know what struggle is about. At least you come in the front door and get paid after you're finished playing. At least the black bandleader doesn't sleep on the bus and have his meals sent down to him there while the white boys in the band sleep in the hotel." That was a lesson, an era I missed, an era that Quincy Jones and Duke Ellington told me about—but cats like Michael Jackson and me knew nothing about it.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel alienated from the black experience?

[A] Richie: That question makes me angry. Heavy white acts, like the Beatles, said they patterned their music after Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry—black R&B artists. The Stones have said the same—and not one interviewer asked them if they were leaving their roots. The passage of time has created a new breed of black guys, though everything isn't perfect for them. It's not perfect for me.

[A] In my early years with the Commodores, what I didn't know about racism didn't kill me, because my naiveté and ignorance got me farther upstream. I didn't approach getting ahead in the music business out of militancy; I wasn't interested in making any social statement. I thought, You sit down, you write a song, the record companies say "Great" and you're a hit. And that's it.

[Q] Playboy: It didn't work that way, did it?

[A] Richie: Nope. I discovered the world of categories—a quiet, subtle form of racism. Why is it that the Temptations could sell 2,000,000 albums, the Grand Funk Railroad the same—but the Grand Funk played Shea Stadium and the Temptations a 1000-seat club?

[A] In the Seventies, the Commodores couldn't get into that white market. I'll never forget 1969. We took a song to a pop radio station in Baltimore. The program director, who happened to be a woman, told us, "Sorry. I can't play this record, because it's too black." Reality hit me in the face. What does that mean? The nerve of that bitch. How can you look at six black men, make that statement with a straight face and not even turn red doing it? I felt more embarrassed than she did.

[Q] Playboy: Only embarrassed?

[A] Richie: I was furious. I wanted to curse her out—but it's not the thing to do. I decided to kill her with a good dose of the truth; i.e., prove her wrong, which is exactly what we did. That one lady got me off my behind to work harder. I asked myself, "How can we, the Commodores, make a difference?" You know what? We didn't adjust our music one iota. We hit stations with Machine Gun, and then with Brick House—both of which went gold. I went back to Baltimore and asked the same woman, "Is this white enough?" The third time I visited, she wasn't at the station anymore.

[Q] Playboy: Did the Commodores want to be a star band?

[A] Richie: We'd listen to groups that had made it and say: "We could do that; that's no problem."

[Q] Playboy: But you weren't trained musicians.

[A] Richie: God, no. At the beginning, the thing that kept us rock-'n'-rollin' was the fact that none of us—except for our drummer, Walter Orange—was a music major. We were six guys crammed into a Chevy van—piled high with equipment and a few mattresses—who approached the music business as something we'd do for a while before going our separate ways as architects, engineers and business majors.

[A] I was considered the horn holder, and the joke of the group was that I carried my sax around campus in order to learn how to play it. It wasn't until two years into the Commodores that they found out I was doing a real good job of faking it. We made a good sound together, but we weren't killer musicians.

[Q] Playboy: What made you begin to take the Commodores seriously?

[A] Richie: Money. When we broke into the big time by opening for the Jackson 5, we watched Michael and his brothers walk out onto the stage of Madison Square Garden, and they played about an hour and were paid $70,000. We traveled with the Jackson 5 for almost three years and, in 1971, Motown heard us in Detroit and signed us to a long-standing contract.

[Q] Playboy: During those early years, what kind of a guy was Michael Jackson?

[A] Richie: We're talking about a little kid who loved to knock on the door, holler for help and throw a trash can of ice-cold water on you at seven a.m. He was also an isolated little kid, because he'd given up the sandbox too soon—nine years old and he had a hit record. So he missed everything, because all he'd ever heard were warnings: Here come the girls, watch out; here come the fans, watch out; here come the reporters, watch out. So he's been watching out for 20 years!

[Q] Playboy: And?

[A] Richie: And I watched fame slam a door on his existence. Recovering from the publicity blitz of Thriller was tough—38,500,000 records, the covers of Time, Newsweek, People, Rolling Stone: dolls of him, his glove, jackets, pants and underwear being duplicated. It can drive you nuts. I think that his closest link to reality is that he's trying to come out. Fame frightens him to death, but he's survived. The Michael Jackson I know—not the person the world knows—is a really beautiful cat. He's trying his best to stay real in an unreal situation.

[Q] Playboy: But the breathy voice, the makeup, plastic surgery, retreats to Disneyland and a menagerie of house pets—is that really the way to touch down in the real world?

[A] Richie: That's his voice. He's not putting it on. He's got to find his space. I think he's just built a world that's comfortable for him—something he can survive in, though I'll tell you that he's still the practical joker I knew. He entertains practically every evening. Screens movies at his house or goes out to the movies with a team of people: I'm not talking about security; I'm talking about friends. That you never hear about.

[A] One night, Elizabeth Taylor, M.J. and I went out to dinner, and I couldn't believe the chemistry between Elizabeth and Michael—the best I'd ever seen. Because she was also a child star, Elizabeth could relate to him, and they talked about isolation and what you do when you're lonely. It was good for Michael to hear that Elizabeth often went out of the house without security guards. The idea that you could live without them was a revelation to him.

[Q] Playboy: So you were touring with the Commodores and things were looking pretty good. Did you see yourself as a composer back then?

[A] Richie: No, no, no. I didn't know anything about being a writer. I was still the great horn holder and singing two songs a 45-minute show. The turning point for me came in 1974, when the Commodores had their first hit, Machine Gun. Milan Williams, who wrote the song, received a check for $35,000! Now, the rest of us were all sitting around making $150 to $200 a week—which was pretty good money for college guys—but that $35,000 gave me all the incentive I needed to be a composer. I said to myself, "Wait a minute; there's a market and a profit here." So in 1975, I wrote This Is Your Life, the first song I ever composed. And a few years later, Easy, my first gold. I had no idea I could write!

[Q] Playboy: What inspired you?

[A] Richie: Money. Remember, now: I was the kid who was too slow for baseball, too short for basketball, too slow for track, too light for football—and I wasn't the world's greatest lover. So here was something I could do. I suddenly felt good about myself, and my confidence level rose. Every song I wrote—Just to Be Close to You, Sail On, Easy, Three Times a Lady—tapped more and more of my insides. Writing was like therapy. Suddenly, I wasn't shy about spilling my guts to people in songs—though I wouldn't tell them what I was feeling face to face.

[Q] Playboy: Were the Commodores supportive of you as a composer?

[A] Richie: Absolutely, at least at the beginning. Every time I wrote something that was successful, they'd say, "There you go, Lionel. Do it again."

[Q] Playboy: According to the manager of the Commodores, by 1981, the group was begging you to leave. You were agreeing to concert dates and recordings and then canceling. You were "fucking them up" endlessly and they wanted you out. Is that how it was?

[A] Richie: They didn't beg me to leave—I left. That was a real love-hate wrestling match. I was looking desperately for acceptance from the group. Imagine: We started out as equal partners—$100 a man per week. I was the last one you'd expect to succeed; I was the guy who ironed the shirts and uniforms—the jokester. But as my ballads became more popular, we began to fight. The group would say, "We don't want your song." It happened with Lady. By then, the anger had built up in me; we weren't speaking, and I thought, You don't want it? Fuck you. Well, here we go, Kenny Rogers.

[Q] Playboy: But you'd been together 15 years. Wasn't there some way to talk with them, to reconcile?

[A] Richie: I didn't know what to do. I agonized for months over giving away Lady, but after 15 years of playing on the team, I didn't think I had to prove I was one of the guys.

[Q] Playboy: Next came Endless Love.

[A] Richie: A magical moment. Diana Ross had been a star when I was still in high school, and even though we had known each other in 1980, when we recorded the song, it wasn't until after the session that we really got to be friends. She loved the song. I couldn't go to New York and she couldn't come to California, so we met in Reno at one a.m., and by 4:30, we had history on tape.

[Q] Playboy: What did it do for her career?

[A] Richie: I think it was her biggest hit and an all-time record seller at Motown.

[Q] Playboy: And your career?

[A] Richie: Well, Kenny Rogers' singing Lady and telling everyone I wrote the song was the beginning for me; but there was really no face on the record. It was Kenny's all the way. But with Endless Love, I was on the screen, singing with Diana—the first time the public really got to see my face. People started to buzz, "Maybe he really will go solo."

[Q] Playboy: What did the Commodores say?

[A] Richie: They said, "We do Commodore albums—not Diana Ross/Lionel Richie duet trips." It was a real fuck-you atmosphere. I couldn't believe their pettiness. I didn't realize that composing Lady and Endless Love was the best thing that could have happened for me.

[Q] Playboy: In terms of your becoming a solo artist?

[A] Richie: Yes, but at the time, I wasn't confident about going solo. My God, the idea terrified me. I was petrified to stand out there and take the rap, all the criticism and flak. It was just so much easier to perform as a group. So I told them I wasn't going anyplace. But they kept saying, "No, you're leaving; you're leaving any day now."

[Q] Playboy: What was the final straw?

[A] Richie: I couldn't take the pressure. The press would review the group and end up just writing about me. It was like pouring gasoline on a fire. I finally said, "Screw it. Let it go." I remember standing up in a room one day with the Commodores and crying. I pleaded with them: "Guys, I'm not leaving." In fact, the rumors of my leaving weren't coming from me but from the—Commodores themselves. They wanted me to get out but just didn't want to say it. That hurt me a lot.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't any of them take your side?

[A] Richie: No. They were threatened, bottled up with their own frustrations and their fear of the unknown. What really got me was that I expected the fiber of love between us to surface—for someone to come to me and say, "I love you and I'm going to fight for you." But I never got the phone call. The key word is loss.

[Q] Playboy: What did Brenda say to you at the time?

[A] Richie: She was just trying to hold me together. She'd say, "I didn't get you into the Commodores, so I'm not going to be the one to get you out." But the split came anyway.

[Q] Playboy: Regrets?

[A] Richie: I don't blame those guys. We were all being petty, picking on one another. When you spend 15 years waking up with the same guys and going to bed with them every night, it's sad to lose them. To be honest with you, I miss them a lot. What makes groups so wonderful is that when you win, you know who's going to be at the party, and when you lose, you take heart. Camaraderie. It's a cushion. I'm a group player.

[A] And don't listen to what people say about me nowadays. Lionel Richie did not make it by himself. I'll say that now. The Commodores are a part of me, and I lost them.

[Q] Playboy: In 1981, you chose Rogers' manager, Ken Kragen, to launch your solo career. Why?

[A] Richie: Ken was brought up in Berkeley, an environment as sheltered as Tuskegee—and he didn't know anything about the black community. It took me three months to give him a brief history of the black experience so he could understand that he couldn't manage me Kenny Rogers style. I tried to explain to him that certain things are just not said or done. For example, when Richard Pryor or a black mayor would call Ken's office to speak to me, Ken would automatically say, "Lionel's not available for comment; he'll get back to you." In the black world, that means "Screw you!" Now we work together well. I don't want a hip manager, a guy to sit down and say, "OK, baby, I heard the record; it sounds great, but...." No. Ken says, "You give me something to sell and I'll sell it for you." The creative part is mine.

[Q] Playboy: But didn't Kragen face any obstacles in getting you crossed over from black to white airwaves?

[A] Richie: No. I'd love to sit here and say we had the biggest strategy of my life and that Kragen masterminded my crossover. But that's not how it happened. I walked in the door of Kragen & Company with Endless Love, 12 Grammy nominations, two American Music Awards and 15 years with the Commodores. I was not Kenny Rogers, but I had some credentials. Still, nobody knew my face.

[Q] Playboy: Kragen certainly remedied that.

[A] Richie: Pepsi helped. "Do this commercial," he said. Pepsi is a hungry company. They said, "How would you like to be presented?" How? At the end of every basketball game. At the end of every cartoon. At the end of every Saturday afternoon. What we had wasn't a commercial but a glorified video of Running with the Night. Instead of its running on MTV, we had it running on prime-time television.

[Q] Playboy: Did you ever expect USA for Africa or the song We Are the World to become such mammoth successes?

[A] Richie: Never. I remember saying to Kragen, "This year, I want to get involved in a charity that will help Africans who have nothing to eat. I'll write a song." Then I was talking with Quincy, and he said, "I was talking with Harry [Belafonte], and, you know, Michael would like to do something like that...." Next thing I knew, We Are the World.

[Q] Playboy: What about the recording session sticks in your mind?

[A] Richie: I'll never forget standing at the studio door and watching Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Billy Joel, Bob Dylan, Springsteen, Steve Perry, Hall and Oates—everybody coming together. But suddenly Ray Charles walked in and all of us were in awe. Suddenly, we were null and void. It was also wonderful when two Ethiopian ladies walked in and said, "Before you all get started, we want to thank you for saving our country." That also put us in our place.

[Q] Playboy: There were also the Commodores—personally invited by you but not in the actual recording studio. Why were they kept away from the microphones?

[A] Richie: My inviting the Commodores was sincere, but the doors were slammed after 45 artists were in the studio. Remember, now: There were two rooms; one had all the celebrities in it—people like Sidney Poitier who weren't recording—and the other had the 45. I didn't have a lot of time to go out and find out what was happening with the Commodores. I'm sure they wanted to record with us, but the problem was, I couldn't get them in.

[Q] Playboy:You—who wrote the song and organized the session—couldn't get them in?

[A] Richie: Remember, now: Our reconciliation hadn't yet started, and we weren't on the greatest of terms. So just saying, "Hey, guys, I'd like you to come down" felt a little awkward to me—because I didn't know how they felt about me. But as far as my being in the best of their graces was concerned, I wasn't. I did the best I could under the circumstances.

[Q] Playboy: Quite a few egos were intermingling that night. Who impressed you as modest?

[A] Richie: Springsteen. I dug him the most. That's because he's business. I didn't have to worry about making him the prima donna. He came in the door and said, "I came here to do this. Just tell me where to go and I've got it, buddy."

[A] After it was all over, I was vacationing in Hawaii and Bruce was there on his way to Australia for a tour. I called up and said, "Hey, I'm here," and we spent the afternoon hanging out, partying. He is so cool. We sat on the beach, just the two of us—no guards, nothing.

[Q] Playboy: Let's talk about your physical image. Has Kragen suggested any changes?

[A] Richie: No. His thing was simply "Let the people know who you are."

[Q] Playboy: Then why, in photos and videos since that time, does it seem as if your skin tones have become lighter, your hair closer cropped? Even your music seems less funky. Do you agree?

[A] Richie: Absolutely. But look at Leontyne Price: She wouldn't have a shot at being recognized by the black community; she has never uttered a funky phrase in her whole career—and I can name black classical conductors, like William L. Dawson, or ballet dancers; same thing. The point is, why, all of a sudden, when we get down to rock-'n'-roll or contemporary-music performers, do critics start talking about straight hair or white music? Is that all you expect from a black person?

[Q] Playboy: We're talking about image.

[A] Richie: Well, let me tell you: The Afro is gone because I can no longer maintain that much hair. But when I look back at pictures taken with the Commodores, I see the greatest-looking cat in the whole world. Everybody had Afros out to here—and if you had five cats in a car, that was a real crowd. Everybody walked down the street in those dancin' platform shoes. Now when I think about it, I say, "My God, how could I have looked like that?" Nowadays, I can experiment as a solo performer: I like the idea of being uptown, downtown and in between.

[Q] Playboy: Does Kragen call the shots?

[A] Richie: Show me a great army and I'll show you a great general. Although Brenda is my rock, when it comes to management, Kragen is wonderful. I mean, this guy can build you up and make you feel like you're going to take over the world. You have to be pumped up when 2.6 billion people are watching, and after a coaching session with him, it's "Thank you very much, Kragen; I'm ready to go." In fact, after three years, I went into his office and said, "I think you can slow down now." Fame is an amazing thing; it can drive you nuts. Final conclusion: He's done a great job.

[Q] Playboy: Then why, last February, at the height of your record-and-ticket-selling power, did Kragen virtually fire you?

[A] Richie: How do I say it kindly? Ken was bottled up with creative frustration and wanted something meaningful to do with his life. Hands Across America was it. He wanted to make a statement, so I said, "Fine; go ahead and do it."

[Q] Playboy: What did he do?

[A] Richie: He made one of the greatest errors of his life, called memo off my desk. He began by announcing to the L.A. Times that the two of us were going our separate ways. He told me, "Lionel, I can't handle the work load that you and Kenny bring in," and he didn't want to jeopardize my career by committing himself so fully to Hands.

[Q] Playboy: He fired a third of his creative department, didn't he?

[A] Richie: That's right. He panicked. I won't use the word maniac, but it takes sizable balls—chutzpah—to put your ass on the line. He could afford to do it thanks to me. I even appreciated his being up front: Most cats hustle you for cash—but he wasn't coming from that angle. Still, I told him, "Ken, Hands is a charity, which means it's going to happen and going to end May 25, 1986. You don't have to make this decision." But he said, "Goodbye, Lionel."

[Q] Playboy: Isn't that a bit like the servant's firing the king?

[A] Richie: If you're not used to the spotlight shining in your face, it will affect you in strange ways. Right after the announcement, he regretted it, called me up and said, "My God, what happened?"

[Q] Playboy: Didn't you consider finding another manager?

[A] Richie: I never thought for a moment that Ken wasn't coming back to me. I've seen lawyers handle major clients who are used to telling them, "Fuck you." They don't expect to lose those clients—until they do. They don't realize that their power is in who they're managing.

[Q] Playboy: How did you patch up the relationship?

[A] Richie: It was a very simple phone call. He said, "Do you think we can work something out?" I said, "Fine."

[Q] Playboy: What did you work out?

[A] Richie: Nothing. It's called business as usual. I dreaded the idea of starting over again and learning about a new manager. We had just spent three years ironing out kinks.

[Q] Playboy: After Can't Slow Down—a title that pretty much sums up your career—it took you three years to come out with Dancing on the Ceiling, and even that was eight months late. What happened?

[A] Richie: It's called fame. I told Motown, "I didn't promise you speed, I promised you quality." But Motown doesn't understand. And it isn't getting any easier. I'm becoming a world entity: A tour no longer means three months on the road from New York to L.A.—it means Japan, Australia and Europe, too.

[Q] Playboy: But when you're not being an entity, you're known to be a pretty shy guy.

[A] Richie: I used to be painfully shy, and audiences frightened me. Then, about ten years ago, a wonderful thing happened in Washington, D.C. As I went out on stage, I could practically hear my heart beating when I held the microphone close enough to my chest. Then a girl screamed, "Sing it, Lionel!" Then somebody else screamed. Then everybody started in. I realized, "They like what I'm doing. They like me."

[Q] Playboy: Aren't there nights when you just don't feel like performing?

[A] Richie: Many a night. But there's something about a coliseum packed with 20,000 people that gets you in the mood. I'm still a shy guy until the lights come on. Then I'm a total damn fool—a 37-year-old kid having recess.

[Q] Playboy: How about all those women who would like to come up onto the stage? What does that do to you?

[A] Richie: Oh, God. Man, I laugh at me.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think you're sexy?

[A] Richie: No, no, no—they do. That's why I keep laughing. I don't see myself like that at all. I don't think I'm good-looking. In fact, I can't deal with looking at publicity pictures of myself. There's something about a still lens that scares the shit out of me. I have to leave the room. I see things that other people don't see, like, "My God, the eyebrows—they shouldn't be so low."

[Q] Playboy: Why do you think women find you sexy?

[A] Richie: There are two kinds of guys: the hulk hunk, like Sylvester Stallone or Tom Selleck, and the Woody Allen type—the average guy with some personality and wit. That's me. I was the guy who couldn't tell a girl face to face I loved her. In high school, I was out of it. I would have loved to be the lover of life back then, but it was slow motion. I was awkward—just couldn't figure out a formula that worked. But about my junior or senior year, it started clicking.

[Q] Playboy: Was part of the click losing your virginity?

[A] Richie: It was called "This is what they talk about ... this is the aha...yes." I guess I was expecting The Star-Spangled Banner to break out—which it didn't—but it was close enough. I was 17.

[Q] Playboy: Nowadays, that would be considered slow, wouldn't it?

[A] Richie: That's called real slow now. But I remember walking around the next day saying, "I gotta try that one more time." My God, I didn't know what I was feeling, other than "Hallelujah, here we go!" That's why I got into the music business in the first place. Forget the money, OK? When I played the saxophone on the Tuskegee campus, guess what was in the audience. Girls. After three hours of playing the top-ten songs, all I had to say was "Hi."

[Q] Playboy: So you were a wild man in college.

[A] Richie: I was a wild and crazy man when it came to parties and hanging out, but forget the crap about "the lover." The Commodores nicknamed me "Holdin' hands, makin' all kinds of plans," because "Come on back to my hotel room" were words that wouldn't come out of my mouth. But all I had to do was sing three notes and women were suddenly dropping their skirts.

[Q] Playboy: Were you tempted to partake of all this?

[A] Richie: I burned out on it. I realized that there were real-life things called paternity suits. I was horny all day long but usually went back to my room alone.

[Q] Playboy: So, nowadays, when women in your audiences throw themselves at you——

[A] Richie: I absorb it. I don't deny it. I take it in, because it's a wonderful feeling to be loved. On the stage, it's like making love to 20,000 people.

[Q] Playboy: What if a woman wants to go backstage?

[A] Richie: Then she's in trouble, because I go out the back door. There's only one of me, and I've already gone through the period when I wanted to make love to the whole world.

[Q] Playboy: Are you a romantic?

[A] Richie: I'm a hopeless romantic. I'm a believer that man has the capacity to love more than just once. One of the reasons I'm so successful is that I've been loved by so many ladies in my life: my mom, my grandmother, my sister.

[Q] Playboy: What about your wife?

[A] Richie: I've been married 11 years, and I've found that romance comes down to some very simple qualities: You find the person who knocks your socks off and, ideally, the relationship builds. Brenda was a freshman at Tuskegee, a majorette, when we met, and I was a senior, playing the opening act at track meets with the Commodores. Brenda was Miss Prude. It's called come up with some meaningful dialog. She didn't fall for that "Oh, baby!" crap. She had the ability to be playful yet serious, too. When her mind got locked on to something, you could forget it. Stubborn. Virgo. A real systems person.

[Q] Playboy: But you eventually got married, and the relationship has not been without its problems. In My Love, you write, "Life with me, I know for sure it ain't been easy / But you stayed with me anyway...." Just how hard has it been for Brenda to stay with you?

[A] Richie: We've weathered the ups and downs. My Love was a very personal statement for me. For the first six years of our marriage, I woke up every morning with Brenda and asked her, "You sure you want to try this again?"

[Q] Playboy: What was the biggest problem?

[A] Richie: The newness of the temptations of ladies, the temptations of money, the temptations of travel. All of a sudden, I was making an outrageous amount of money and was traveling two or three weeks at a time. I was facing aggressive women. I would say, "I'm sorry, but I'm married," and they would say, "OK, excuse me; I didn't know." But soon they began asking me, "Is she here?" It wasn't easy to be that adored on stage. But that's over; Brenda and I are through wrestling with each other. She knows that wherever I am, I'll be home at six.

[Q] Playboy: Is your understanding of marriage one of total fidelity?

[A] Richie: That's asking a lot. I was brought up the old-fashioned way: There is a wife and there is a ton of respect, and it works for me not to disrupt that. My lawyer once told me, "You could not only lose your marriage, you could lose your money, too." Divorce is expensive. That's all I need to hear: I'm the original Jack Benny!

[Q] Playboy: So you're the monogamous type.

[A] Richie: If I said to you that for 11 years I'd been the saint of life, it would be a lie. But I try to keep it that way; I really try desperately to keep it on that level.

[Q] Playboy: OK, how do you keep your sex life fresh?

[A] Richie: If you asked my wife, she'd say, "Fresh?" [Laughs] It's been good with us because Brenda and I have managed to laugh in bed, and I sometimes use fantasies to inspire me. The saving grace is that there's no pressure to perform. I can't imagine getting into bed and suddenly being this stud. I go in and say, "No rules, no regulations; we're going to enjoy each other." Conversation is so important. Right in the middle of something "serious," I'll crack a joke because Brenda's feet are cold. Those spontaneous moments take the pressure off me.

[Q] Playboy: Brenda has a reputation for being a tough businesswoman—and many say she wears the pants. True?

[A] Richie: In order for me to be the creative person that I am, Brenda deals with the business. She'll sit through four-hour meetings and bring information back to me. In order for me to turn my back and say, "I am now going to devote six months to creating an album and I'm not going to worry about the house, cars, anything else," I have to know I have a partnership with Brenda. What makes this marriage work isn't only love or sex. I need somebody called partner.

[Q] Playboy: Does she protect the family purse?

[A] Richie: Absolutely. Point-blank. She gets livid when a guy says, "I'll be glad to do your gardening for $1000 a week." That's ridiculous.

[Q] Playboy: According to someone who's close to the Commodores, "Brenda can be a real bitch" to those around you. True?

[A] Richie: I say great! Brenda doesn't take any shit from anybody. In order for me to be the nice guy, she has to be the heavy. When I walk into a room, everybody smiles. They don't smile at her. Nine times out often, they don't know who she is—she blends in. People have the chance to put their foot in their mouth—to spend the entire evening talking about what they don't like about Lionel Richie—and later wonder, Who was she? When they find out, it's "Oh, my God."

[Q] Playboy: Do you ever play the star, even in your own home, and expect to be attended to hand and foot?

[A] Richie: In my house, I'm Skeet—the kid Brenda married in college. The one thing she will not tolerate from me, the one thing I won't tolerate from her, is the drama of "ta-da"—the drumbeat of "Listen, I'm Lionel Richie now and I want A-B-C-D now!" I never could pull that crap off on Brenda. It's called a grandstand.

[Q] Playboy: Then what happens when marriage and career conflict?

[A] Richie: The struggle is Brenda's battling with my mistress—"the craft." I'm really married three times—to my wife, to my keyboard and to the audience. It's not like I dread going out on tour: It's like a wonderful love affair and I want to go. But it's ever so delicate figuring out which of my loves is in control. A wife always has to feel, "Yes, if anything ever goes wrong, he's coming home to me."

[Q] Playboy: Are you?

(continued on page 152)Lionel Richie(continued from page 62)

[A] Richie: Never give an entertainer an ultimatum—"It's either me or your work"—because the woman always loses.

[Q] Playboy: So if push came to shove——

[A] Richie: I wouldn't want to even think about it, and I hope I never have to face that choice. That decision would tear me apart.

[Q] Playboy: Since so much of your married life revolves around your career, does your being the center of that universe become tedious for you both?

[A] Richie: Yes. There are days when even I get enough of me! Sometimes I just O.D. on "Lionel, your album; Lionel, your album cover; Lionel, what about your tour? Lionel, what about the ticket reservations?"—it's the L.R. crunch.

[Q] Playboy: What's the best part of success?

[A] Richie: Tasting control. This is heaven up here. I've built a little sanctuary that allows me to live with my family but also be separate from them when I want to be. I can go out into the night in my car and gather information, come back here, stay up till morning and sleep all day. That's what I mean by control. There's no such thing as standard today; I can create my life just as I create a song. I own my time—but the money is spooky. Money doesn't erase problems. I always hear people say, "If I ever got enough money, all my problems would go away." Not true. What money does is magnify what you are. If you have a little problem, get a lot of money and the little problem becomes a big one. A little bit of fame and fortune can actually drive you into the nuthouse.

[Q] Playboy: What drives you nuts?

[A] Richie: Going into a supermarket and getting clobbered with attention at the egg counter.

[Q] Playboy: And when you're compared with songwriters such as Cole Porter, Paul McCartney, John Lennon and Irving Berlin, what do you think?

[A] Richie: One night recently, I had a conversation with Tina Turner. She said, "You know, for the longest time, Lionel, I felt guilty about living like a queen"; but then, she said, she began to think about all those years of nonstop gigging—the hard-core gigs. And she said, "You know what? I deserve it." I've definitely put the time in, too, dedicated 18 years of my life to getting exactly where I am, and I'm not going to make excuses about my success. Tina and I have worked hard for what we've got.

[Q] Playboy: On the Richter scale of ambition, where do you rank—anywhere near Sylvester Stallone?

[A] Richie: Certainly the body is different. He's a little heavier. I think we're both ambitious. He obviously has a craft that he believes in, and he wants to get paid for it. So do I.

[Q] Playboy: Some would say over paid.

[A] Richie: I think about how silly the world really can be. A friend of mine from college studied for years to be a neurosurgeon, and I recorded Baby, Baby, Baby for three minutes and four seconds and made his lifetime earnings. I'm not saying I feel sorry for him; you can't compare us.

[Q] Playboy: What about someone like Kenny Rogers, who, at one point, spent $16,000,000 on a house in Hollywood?

[A] Richie: Kenny and I are very different when it comes to money, but how he spends it is his business. I'd be a nervous wreck spending $16,000,000 on a house. In fact, it was Kenny who actually helped me get over my upset stomach when I bought this house in Bel Air. Kenny said, "I hate to tell you this, Lionel, but you've got to get in. Once you buy your first house, the rest is easy." We're talking about spending $1,000,000-plus on this house.

[Q] Playboy: Have you gotten your money's worth?

[A] Richie: I like it. But I still need to go to Alabama, and that's why Brenda and I keep a home there, too. I can come back down to being the guy that I know myself to be. Remember, now: Most people think famous people get on a rocketship that takes them back to the moon right after the concert. But I've got to live right here, on earth; unfortunately, there are many artists who think they do live on the moon. But before their lifetime ends, they always wind up finding out that their home was earth. They're forced to see it.

[Q] Playboy: How easy is it to forget that fact?

[A] Richie: Very. On occasion, this fantasy-land can get overwhelming. There are days when I say, "Let me back up a little bit." I'm going to take my machete and Weed Eater out into the back yard, and then I'm going up into the woods and cut out my own path. I like to walk in the woods. I just think, reflect.

[Q] Playboy: Do you ever get depressed?

[A] Richie: My God, you can't experience the extreme high of performing for 2.6 billion people at the Olympics, of singing Say You, Say Me at the Academy Awards or performing for 20,000 people every night for six months and then come home for a three-week vacation and go to bed at nine o'clock without feeling depressed.

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever used drugs to pump yourself up or down?

[A] Richie: I experimented with grass in college, and when the Commodores and I began traveling, we came into contact with cocaine. In New York, a guy came up to me and said, "Do you want to try coke?" I said, "Great." He said, "Give me $400." That's the end of my drug story.

[Q] Playboy: You've never used drugs to get up for a performance?

[A] Richie: No. I'll tell you my great marijuana story. I was outside a club one night and an old bebopper came up to me and said, "Lionel, babes, you've got to get a hit of this grass. You'll play that horn better than you ever did." I took two puffs of it, went on stage and forgot the show. Since then, I've discovered that everybody's trying to be fashionable with drugs and only half the folks are using them.

[Q] Playboy: What's your biggest fear?

[A] Richie: Not having control of my life. I hate the idea of being trapped. I would hate having to go in to do a job I disliked because I needed the money. That's a horrible line. But the biggest fear of all is people deprivation: I can't imagine being friendless.

[Q] Playboy: How could that ever happen?

[A] Richie: I'm not talking now about fans; I'm speaking of actually being in a tight bind and saying, "God, I've got to talk to somebody" and not having anyone to call. Did you know there are actually people in this town who say, "I'm having a party" and call up a PR firm to invite the guests? They have no friends. That's terrifying.

[Q] Playboy: You don't worry about your career's coasting downhill?

[A] Richie: The terror to me is not being without dollars. I went through years of having very little money and feeling the fear of poverty. On a bad day, I can still get a three-piece group together and go play at the Holiday Inn.

[Q] Playboy: Assuming that won't be necessary, what's the next challenge in your career?

[A] Richie: Motion pictures, definitely. I wouldn't be so presumptuous as to say I'd demand a leading role, but I'd like to approach a film career in the right way—as Cher did. Cher didn't want an audience spending two hours watching just her in her first movie; she came in with established actors who could take some weight off her.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think you have real acting talent?

[A] Richie: I'm certainly a ham. I know that. And 15 years ago, if you had asked me if I had talent as a composer, I'd have said, "Are you kidding me? No, man." I'm not going to be presumptuous and say, "Turn on the cameras...I can handle it," and I know a movie isn't a music video. But until I try, I'll never know.

[Q] Playboy: As a guy from a small Southern town, do you find Hollywood phony or boring?

[A] Richie: I try to tell my wife, parents and friends that I can't write blues in the back of a limousine. I have to get back to Alabama or get to street level—to the real world—in order to be an effective writer. I live in Bel Air for convenience' sake only. It's close to everything; it's safe.

[Q] Playboy: How much do you worry about your personal safety?

[A] Richie: I can't worry about it. When I'm standing in front of 20,000 people, anybody who wants to shoot me has a good chance. Anybody who wants to grab me has got me. So I just live my life—cool. If I were dealing drugs or bound to creditors or the Mafia, then I'd need beefed-up security. But all I do is sing.

[Q] Playboy: Where do you see yourself in 20 years, when you're 57?

[A] Richie: On the moon. Or wherever. I hope the key word is happy. I still feel I'm in the achievement years, when I'm laying the foundation for my future. What I'm really doing is putting together my insurance policy to play with and in life later. I want to make sure that when I'm 50 or 60, I can, indeed, go out of my house and play with life rather than be victimized by it. I've heard so many horror stories about people who had their moment, killed it and wore themselves out. So what's happiness?

[Q] Playboy: You tell us.

[A] Richie: It is not a formula; it's not living in Tahiti. A lot of happy people can't lie down and relax anywhere! I relax in a 24-track studio, and my friends think I'm crazy. But I have the choice of being there, and I want to be. But what I'm ultimately aiming for is quality of life. It doesn't require a 24-track studio. It doesn't require an airplane. It doesn't require 20,000 people applauding me in a coliseum. It's called turn off the lights; everybody go home. Now: Am I happy?

[Q] Playboy: And the answer is?

[A] Richie: Yes, hopefully.

[Q] Playboy: Then what?

[A] Richie: Then I've pulled off the best life possible—and maybe there'll still be time to write just one more song.

"Wimpy to me means—guess what?—sales. Criticisms don't bother me. One guy called me 'yucky, gooey, icky.' "

"My dad always told me, 'Aptitude plus attitude equals altitude,' which is absolutely true."

"The Michael Jackson I know—not the person the world knows—is a really beautiful cat. He's trying his best to stay real."

"If you have a little problem, get a lot of money and the little problem becomes a big one."