MO' META Blues Part 14

I was puzzled. What did Prince mean by "cool," exactly? I wasn't sure if he was trusting me with the word or with the concept. I texted back: "Cool?" It turned out they meant the people who were already with me: Mos, Talib, Jill, Erykah, Common. I started to line people up in my mind and called them to give them the news. I thought they would do backflips: a party with Prince? To my amazement, most of them weren't up for it. Jill came backstage and told me that she was tired. Talib said that he needed to be in bed before midnight. I ran into Alan Leeds, who led me to Raphael's dressing room, where Chris Rock and Eddie Murphy were sitting and talking. I went to my same pitch: "Hey, guys, want to go roller-skating with Prince?"

"Right," Alan said. "I'll be in the grave before I'm in skates."

"Right," Chris said. "Like I'm skating with these knees."

"Right," Raphael said. "I'm too old for that s.h.i.+t."

I was confused and a little depressed. How good were these people's lives that they could pa.s.s on Prince's roller-skating party? Only one man was brave enough-visionary enough-to see what lay before us, and that was Eddie Murphy. "This is historical," he said. "For starters, I need to see if Prince can roller-skate. I'm a comedian, and honestly, what's funnier than that?"

Prince's a.s.sistant texted me directions to a rink in Glenside, way out in the middle of nowhere. It was around one in the morning by the time we drove out there, and the place was empty, a bare rink, and I started to worry that I had the wrong place, or that I had been punked. Maybe Alan and Chris were in on the joke. Maybe they were all somewhere laughing. Then I saw DJ Rasheeda and some of her friends skating. "Hey," I said.

"Hey there," she said. They were so happy to see us that I started to feel bad that I hadn't brought more people. "No," she said. "Don't worry about it. Prince likes to keep things intimate. A dozen people is a big crowd to him." That may have been true, but it was crazy for her to say, as a DJ, and just as crazy for me, as a DJ, to hear. Do you know how hard it is to entertain a crowd that small?

The rink staff was professional, if a little nonplussed. "He's paying for us to stay open," one guy told me. "Let's make the best of it. What's your shoe size?"

My girlfriend and I skated for about an hour. No Prince, no nothing, and the longer we went, the stranger it seemed. Was he coming? Was he up in the rafters, laughing? It was a strange setup, to say the least. Someone was putting down cash to keep the kid behind the snack bar there, watching the pizza bake under the heat lamp. He should have been home studying for his spelling test.

Around two in the morning we were ready to go. Still no Prince, and the anthropological benefit of watching this strange half-attended all-skate was wearing off. Suddenly, Eddie came in. "Hey," he said. "I have an idea. Maybe don't take those skates off just yet."

And there he came, Prince, followed by a Princely entourage: his wife, Manuela; Larry Graham; some kids. I didn't recognize the kids but they were a familiar type-show-biz small-fry, like I was all those years ago, when my father took me down to the green room to meet KISS.

Prince was carrying a big briefcase in his hand, and he was acting all mysterious, like it contained the glowing substance from Pulp Fiction or something. He made like he was going to open it, then stopped, then started again. Then he walked toward me.

"Where's your phone?"

"What?" I said.

"Yeah, right, what?" he said. "I know you have it, Ahmir. Where is it?"

I thought maybe he wanted to make a phone call. I admit now that's not a plausible reading of the situation, but it was all so surreal. "It's here," I said.

He took it from me and turned it over in his hand. "Your coat is in coat check?"

"Yeah."

"Put this with it."

"Why? You think I'm going to record something?"

"Check the phone."

"What about him?" I pointed at Eddie. "You're not going to take his phone? He'll tell everyone."

Eddie put up his hands. "Hey, man, I don't know what you're talking about. My phone's in the car."

I put the phone in coat check. Prince was asking me. I was being asked by Prince. It was Prince who was asking me. And fine, maybe I didn't understand any part of what was happening, but sometimes you just have to launch yourself out into the river of an evening.

When I got back, Prince had the briefcase out on the floor. He clicked the lock and opened it, and took out the strangest, most singular pair of roller skates I had ever seen. They were clear skates that lit up, and the wheels sent a multicolored spark trail into your path.

He took them out and did a big lap around the rink. Man. He could skate like he could sing. I watched him go, so transfixed that I didn't even notice Eddie Murphy appearing at my arm. "I'm going to go get your phone for you," he said.

Roller-skating at Prince's party was cool. Watching Prince roller-skate was cooler. But then it was back east, to a life and a career that suddenly felt like they were in crisis. Rich took that year in stride. His att.i.tude was that we were hardened veterans: we had recorded a number of alb.u.ms, some of which had done better than others, and we would record a number more. I wasn't so sure. Kanye's ascendancy and the relative failure of The Tipping Point-or at the very least, the sense that it happened apart from us, wasn't as intimately connected to our creative process-sent me into a bit of a tailspin. I had lost my confidence and also my community. In the wake of Voodoo, and especially the mind-bending transition to s.e.x symbol and soul savior that occurred during the second half of the tour, D'Angelo had withdrawn to his place in Virginia and was now semiretired from the music business. Every once in a while he would call me and we would put some music down, but I could hear depression in his voice. And it wasn't just my subjective read. He started to take his spiral out into the real world. In 2005, he was arrested in Richmond for drunk driving; the cops also found weed and c.o.ke on him and charged him. He and I had been talking on the telephone mostly, so I was shocked to see the mug shot: the Adonis from "Unt.i.tled (How Does It Feel)" looked like he had been on a yearlong bender. He was puffy and had put on at least thirty pounds. I called him up but he didn't really want to talk about it. When he said he was taking a break from the way things had been, he wasn't kidding. In September, he cracked up his car and broke his ribs, and the alb.u.m that he was making-that, at times, we were making-as the follow-up to Voodoo just got further and further away.

D'Angelo was the most conspicuous absence from my life at that time, but he was by no means the only one. Zach de la Rocha, the vocalist from Rage Against the Machine, who had been a good friend and a collaborator, also took a step back. And for every artist who receded, there was one who proceeded up the chart. Jill Scott became an established platinum recording star. Common finally went platinum with Kanye. Mos Def graduated to movies. And there were geographic realities, too. Tariq fell in love and moved out to Los Angeles. Common moved, too, and Dilla also: they even roomed together. I felt displaced even though I was staying in the same place. I felt lost even though I wasn't going anywhere. The world I had built, which had started to show cracks in its foundation in 2001 or so, was now definitively dismantled.

I didn't know what I would do. I didn't know if the Roots had a future. I thought that I would go on and do some movie scoring, or focus on my hobby as a DJ, which had moved up and became a nice piece of change. Even beyond that, it was time to see what was up with plan B. For the first time since South Street in Philadelphia, I thought I might not make it to the finish line if I held on to music. I looked into teaching; Princeton had offered me a part-time position. I looked into magazines; periodicals were still a going concern, so I got a few offers to guest-edit or write a regular column. I may not have looked lost, but I was.

In January of 2006, James Poyser and I were in Los Angeles. We had been asked to do some music cues for Will Smith, and it was also Grammy week, which meant more parties and more concerts. The meeting with Will went well enough that James and I decided to drop by and see Dilla. We wanted to share the news with him. Dilla and I had been talking by phone over the last year and a half, and we continued to collaborate in small ways: he helped out with music cues on Chappelle's Show and contributed some production to every Roots alb.u.m.

Since Dilla had moved to California, I had been hearing stuff on and off about health problems. Common had told me that he had been in the hospital once or twice, though he wasn't specific about why, and Dilla himself never really talked about it. When I stepped into his house in California, I was totally unprepared for what I saw. It was just Dilla and his mother, and it wasn't really Dilla at all. In his place was a frail, eighty-pound man in a wheelchair. He couldn't communicate at all. He was mumbling and gesturing weakly. I found out later, along with everyone else, that he was suffering from a rare blood disease, thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura, and possibly lupus. But all I knew at the time was what I saw, which was that he was dying. His mortality hit me square in the face. I made a mental imprint of his setup, which was nothing like his setup in Detroit, where he had the best gear and a sophisticated rig. In Los Angeles, he had a small drum machine and a small keyboard. It was simple, makes.h.i.+ft, and frail. There was a Rotary Connection alb.u.m on his turntable. I'll never forget that alb.u.m, how out of place it looked, how everything suddenly seemed like it was tending toward some inevitable end. James and I left the house in a state of shock, not entirely certain what we had just seen, or what, if anything, we could do to change it.

That year, which was 2006, Prince didn't have a skating party. Instead, he had a party at his house, and the reunited Time was providing the entertainment. I went with Dave Chappelle and Erykah Badu, and while Dave sat outside, a group of us-me, Erykah, Wendy and Susannah Melvoin, Nikka Costa and her then-husband, Doyle Bramhall II-sat in Prince's home performance s.p.a.ce to watch the show. The band started with "Girl," and then Jerome Benton did a bit where he moved around the room, pointing every celeb out to Morris Day and putting them on the spot. "Morris, look who we've got in the house tonight, yeah, yeah, who do I see? I see Gabrielle Union with her fine self! And who else? I see Lindsay Lohan."

He went right around the room like that, pointing at each of us, poking fun. He saw Christina Aguilera. He saw Verne Troyer. He saw Jamie Foxx. The closer he got to my section, the less comfortable I felt. I had always been shy about that kind of thing, and I wasn't sure what he was going to say about me. "Morris," he said. "Look here. We've got Naomi Campbell. And there, right there next to her, we've got Shelia E. And we've got Alicia Keys."

Alicia was next to me. That meant that it was my turn. I froze... and Jerome skipped right over me. "We've got Nikka Costa. We've got John Leguizamo. We've got George Benson."

I tried to play it off like I was cool, but Susannah later told me that my body language had defeat written all over it. Then Morris called Erykah to come up with them and sing "Girl," and my embarra.s.sment dissipated. (Luckily, she knew the song. At a concert a few months before, it hadn't gone so well when he had asked Alicia to sing "777-9311" and she blanked out.) I went out to the tennis courts, talked to Dave for a little while, watched Om'Mas, from the L.A. hip-hop group Sa-Ra, defiantly smoking weed. I kind of admired that: Prince was strictly antidrug, and if he had seen that, he would have probably kicked him right out.

Just before I left, I went over to give Jimmy Jam a pound. Out of the blue, Morris was there. "My goodness gracious," he said. "If this ain't the baddest, funkiest cat ever. Give me some dap." I didn't know who he thought he was talking to. He obviously didn't know who I was. Then he did: "Quest," he said, "show me some love." I was flabbergasted. We had a long conversation, and he was surprised I knew about his training as a drummer. We talked about his earliest bands, Flyte Tyme and Enterprise, and how he worked with Prince when they were in junior high school. It confirmed one of my pet theories about very famous people. If you want to get to know them, don't bother talking to them; instead, talk to the five people who know them the best. That way, you get a picture of them without having to deal with their overdeveloped defenses.

The very next day, I got a call from Common. Dilla had pa.s.sed. He was thirty-two years old. At his funeral, I told my girlfriend that I wanted to sit in the back in a pew. Tariq and Common were up in front, but I didn't want to sit with them, because I didn't want Tariq to see me crying. I have always had issues showing my feelings. I was raised by a Joe Jackson type: "You want to cry? Well, okay, I'll give you something to cry about." I have spent a lifetime hardening myself emotionally.

We went from California to Hawaii for a Roots show, and the morning after we arrived, I fled my hotel room and went for a run on the beach. I had never done anything like that in my life, but at that point I was crying uncontrollably and I didn't want anyone to see me that way.

It's been more than half a decade since Dilla pa.s.sed, and I still don't really know what to think about it. He had been there at the beginning of neo soul, though we didn't call it that then, and his music will be around long after people don't call it that anymore. An alb.u.m like Donuts-thirty-one short snippets, manipulated samples, overlaid dialogue, no real songs except that everything there is so endlessly tuneful and rhythmic-made people rethink some of their basic a.s.sumptions about music, and not just hip-hop, but all recorded music-made them go back to the beginning, to the drum, to a unit of measurement, and wonder what const.i.tutes a full work, what's a partial work, what's original, what's borrowed, whether you could take the Jackson 5's "All I Do Is Think of You," rearrange it so that the intro is located closer to the chorus, and call it a new song. There's a chef's aesthetic at work, if a chef diced, pureed, and served while he was walking on the wing of a biplane. There's a daredevil's aesthetic, if a daredevil never left his house. There's a postmodern critic in there, too, pinning pictures up on the wall but so that they're facing the wall. There's a love for the past but also an awareness that the past is destroyed every second by the present, and that the future's laying in wait to wreak more havoc. And then there's a radical rethinking of the relations.h.i.+p between artist and work: the alb.u.m's credited to Dilla, but what does that even really mean, given how he builds his house from other people's bricks while at the same time decoupling the snippets of song, the bits of music, the loops, from their original source? There's a guessing game and a veiling game and a process of slow disclosure: in traditional music, you see (or at least imagine) the source of the sound. If it's Aretha Franklin, you see her holding the microphone at the Fillmore or sitting at the piano pounding out "Spirit in the Dark," and even if you don't see her, you see her, if you know what I mean. If it's Wilson Pickett, you see him even if you don't see him. If it's Chuck D, you see him even if you don't see him. Here, there's something more profoundly acousmatic-that's music whose source you can't see. Where are these sounds coming from? Where are they going? Are they working in concert with each other, by design? Are they strangers being herded into the same elevator? And once they meet, what conversations crop up? These were central questions in hip-hop from the beginning, and they go back far before that. They go back to jazz, where traditional melodies were remade through improvisation. They go back to the beginning of recorded music, where the first break was made between performer and performed. They go back to the thing that's at the root of both Dilla and the Roots and every other inspired composition in any and every genre: it's the music in your head. That's the seed at the beginning of every artwork. How do you take what you hear and translate it to something that can be heard?

Dilla didn't answer all those questions definitively, but he asked them, and he stayed true to that quest, and I love him for it. I have the last beat he ever made, which was built on a sample from Funkadelic's "America Eats Its Young," a dark, morbid piece of music. He must have created that knowing where he was going. Everything he did had hidden messages. He made personal music even when he worked on productions for others. That's the kind of artist he was. Block Party, the movie we had made with Dave Chappelle and Michel Gondry, had been shot in 2004 but delayed due to various Dave-related wrangling. When it was finally released in the spring of 2006, it was dedicated to Dilla.

His death came at a time when the Roots were in flux. We were considering our own mortality as a band. None of us knew how to deal with a midlife crisis; we were guys in their midthirties who had started when we were nineteen. And while we knew that something had gone wrong with The Tipping Point, that we hadn't really found ourselves in the right place at the right time, we didn't exactly know what to do about it.28

For my part, the crisis cut deeper. When I searched my soul, I found that I didn't want to make music anymore. After Things Fall Apart, fans thought they had a bead on our sound. They thought they knew who we were as a band, finally; we had jumped from style to style but finally settled in something that felt comfortable to them-because, I think, it felt comfortable to us. The truth, though, is that much of that record's success was due to the fact that it was the finest record that Slum Village never got to make. Their demo was our food and fuel during that period. And the same is true of Voodoo and Mama's Gun and Like Water for Chocolate: we succeeded because we managed to beat them to their own game. We upped the ante with Phrenology, which felt like a different kind of earned success, a way for us to spread our wings, and then we found ourselves earthbound again for The Tipping Point. But after Dilla's pa.s.sing I couldn't imagine going back to the sound of Things Fall Apart. It was too fraught, too sad, too connected to the admiration I had for him. He was my idol, and I didn't want to make my mark in his shadow, or in his absence.

There were also changes on the label front. After the less-than-ideal experience with The Tipping Point, I wrote a letter to Jimmy Iovine explaining humbly that we felt like we needed to be on a label in New York so we had access to the people we were working with. He didn't disagree and, just like that, we were cut loose again.

Homeless, rudderless, without motivation or direction: that's how the band was feeling in the summer of 2005. Luckily, Rich had a plan, as always, which was to put us on a steady diet of drill-sergeant motivation and some psychological prodding. When we were in New Orleans playing a show, we went out one night and saw a group called the To Be Continued Bra.s.s Band. They had started at G. W. Carver Senior High; a bunch of teenagers from the Seventh and Ninth Wards who didn't want to die from drugs and crime decided that they would rather play music. "See this," he'd say, pointing at them. "This was you back in Philadelphia, when Tariq was freestyling and you were playing on the bucket. This is what you were and what you need to become again."

We planned to collaborate with them on an alb.u.m that used New Orleans music the way that Paul Simon had used South African or Brazilian music. That was in June. Because we had two months to spare, we decided to hop over to Europe to make some quick cash before returning to New Orleans at the beginning of August. On our last day in Portugal we played a concert that's infamous in Roots circles; Tariq lost his temper and cursed out the crowd. That same day Hurricane Katrina made landfall. The TBC Bra.s.s Band was literally washed away. One of them died, and the rest were relocated: to Portland, to Houston, to the Northeast. We did a few benefits and got HBO involved in helping to reunite the band, but our idea of working with the kids was swept away along with the rest of the city, and we were left with this empty feeling.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

From: Ben Greenman [cowriter]

To: Ben Greenberg [editor]

Re: You think there's time?

I think Ahmir's doing a great job balancing them, yes. No question. But your subject line made me laugh. Do I think there's time? What is this book except proof that there's always time, and that we're always moving through it? There's this show on HBO called "Witness," a doc.u.mentary series about photojournalists in the world's trouble spots. We just ran a short review of it in the New Yorker, and in her piece, Emily Nussbaum made a point of how deeply strange the setup really is: a TV camera crew trailing a photographer, taking footage of him, also taking moving pictures of the same things that he's taking still pictures of, the whole thing packaged for viewers to consume as a single product, experienced within the confines of their home screen. Well, Ahmir's looking back on his life as I'm looking at him looking back on his life, and everyone else is looking at that process in its finished form, fixed in time.

By the way, I'm also finding that there's a Doppler effect in personal memory. The normal Doppler effect, the one we all learn about in high school, happens when an ambulance comes toward you on the street. Because the distance the sound needs to travel is shrinking as it approaches you, the frequency of the sound waves is compressed, so it sounds higher-pitched than it actually is. I think the same thing happens with autobiography. When Ahmir talks about his childhood, the years are receding from him, and so they have a lower pitch. It's not just that he has processed them, or that he's resigned to them. He actually hears them differently. A few times, we have started talking about the future. That's time that's still coming on, and so there's more urgency, a higher pitch. It's not as comfortable. It reminds me of Ahmir's story about Aba Shanti, and how lower frequencies, even when they're very loud, aren't destructive or grating in the same way.