But he hated the army’s top-down structures and rigid discipline, so he went AWOL and headed to Toronto, where “there was a burgeoning folk, rock and roll scene.” “Here I am thinking white people are cool in Canada, and I get in this fucking fight,” James remembers. The Band came to James’ rescue during a street fight in Toronto.Īs the Vietnam War raged during the 1960s, James joined the Reserves in an attempt to avoid active duty. “If you caught something like that going down where I grew up, you beat the person down.”ģ. “In those days, you didn’t call this bureau for sexually abused children,” James says. It didn’t go very far because my mother came home early.” James watched as his mother and the other woman started to brawl. “I remember laying on a bed, this older woman started touching me and doing these things, and it felt good to me. “When I was 13, there was this older woman, a friend of my mother’s babysat me,” the singer recalls. In addition, James himself claims that he was sexually abused when he was 13. James had a fraught childhood: The singer saw his father beat his mother, and later helped his mother run numbers around Buffalo, according to Bitchin. “He talked about hearing Miles and Monk at a very early age in person and getting it.”Ģ. “Rick was definitely a musical prodigy,” he says. “But the other thing he discovered in Buffalo - because there was a club there called the Royal Arms that he went to - was jazz,” Ritz continues, an influence which fans of “Super Freak” and “Give It To Me” may not immediately detect in James’ work.
“One was the music of Ray Charles and Bo Diddley and Little Richard,” all black musical pioneers whose hard-driving style and cross-genre interests were obvious precursors to James’ own hits. In Buffalo where James grew up, Ritz explains, he “absorbed” two different styles. As a child, James was musically omnivorous.ĭavid Ritz, music’s go-to biographer, appears frequently throughout Bitchin.
“But he didn’t know how to turn it off.” Here are 10 takeaways from the film.ġ.
“He wanted the fame, he knew how to get it,” she says.
Maybe the most telling analysis comes from one of James’ former video directors. T he film also includes strange animated sections to replace scenes for which there are no photographs or footage - the inclusion of a PG animated orgy scene is a head-scratcher. This might lead to a fruitful discussion of distinctions within R&B, but he refuses to elaborate any further, leaving listeners wondering about potential differences, especially since acts like the Gap Band made ferocious funk records (“Early in the Morning,” “Burn Rubber On Me (Why You Wanna Hurt Me)”) as hard-bitten as anything James did. The analysis can be frustrating do we need the quote “Rick James’ grooves were groovier than most?” The rapper Big Daddy Kane shows up to claim that “James’ style of funk wasn’t like” other great groups that got their start in the 1970s, including the Gap Band, Con Funk Shun, and the Ohio Players. How True Is 'Respect'? Fact-Checking the Aretha Franklin Biopicīitchin is surprisingly heavy on explanation and talking heads - long on tell, short on show - and sometimes pedantic in a way that seems at odds with James’ party-starting music. (James went to prison in the Nineties after he was found guilty of assaulting a woman.)
The film has a tough task: celebrating James’ work even as it reminds viewers that the singer was both a victim of abuse and an abuser himself. It incorporates interview and performance footage along with quotes and analysis from James’ family members, bandmates, ex-wives, a slew of other artists (from Ice Cube to Conway the Machine, Bootsy Collins to Nile Rodgers), and a host of critics. The man behind “Mary Jane” and other urgent funk hits like “Give It To Me” is the subject of Bitchin: The Sound and Fury of Rick James, a new documentary that just premiered on Showtime. After years of trying to funk his way to stardom, Rick James finally broke through in 1978 on the back of a pair of dynamite singles: “You and I,” an eight-minute dance-floor workout that includes a lovely, soaring falsetto kiss-off (“they all can go to hell”), and “Mary Jane,” the most hummable ode to weed this side of D’Angelo’s “Brown Sugar.”