RAY PARKER, JR.
Let's start with the shirt you're wearing. How is Detroit the musical foundation for your career?
Detroit — that's like the beginning and the end of everything. [laughs] It really is. I started off in Detroit. That's where I learned everything. It was a crazy city to grow up in, but it was musically wonderful.
I started at six years old on the clarinet and the saxophone, which I didn't like that much, but I was really good at it. That's why I learned to read music. I learned the technical things in music. Then, at about ten years old, my brother had a cheap little $35 guitar. I just liked the guitar. You could play more than one note at a time, and play some chords, which I had never even considered when I was playing the saxophone and clarinet.
Yeah, Detroit's very important. When a basketball game comes on, I'm rooting for the Pistons, or the Detroit Tigers in baseball. I'm just a Detroit-er at heart. That's why you see me wearing a Detroit T-shirt, to represent.
Why do you think so much incredible music came out of Detroit? What is it about Detroit that lent itself to all of that creativity?
That's a really good question. Most people would play baseball, basketball, or football. In the neighborhood that I lived in, nobody did that. We all played music, so there were musicians upstairs, down the street, to the left, to the right. It could have something to do with Motown only being twelve or fifteen blocks away, but everybody was really really interested in playing music when I grew up.
The New York Times recently published an article celebrating the 50th anniversary of Stevie Wonder's Talking Book (1972). In your documentary, Stevie talked about your guitar playing on "Maybe Your Baby". He said, "It was almost as if he was hearing my thoughts." You were only 18 years old at the time. What do you attribute to your innate ability to blend so well with Stevie?
Lots of practice! [laughs] First of all, Stevie's from the Michigan area and I think we were just vibing in the same groove. When he hired me, he wanted someone from that neighborhood who had that same feel that he did. Even after me, I got him several other people. He wanted them from the same neighborhood, where they had the same feel that he would like. I got him the drummer, Ollie [Brown]. I got him two bass players. Nathan Watts is still playing with him. I think it's pretty amazing, actually.
How would you describe what that feel is, musically?
That's going to be hard to put into words but it's more the rhythm and where things sit. It's not in front of the drum. It's not too far behind the drum. It sits in a spot.
What exactly did you learn from Stevie about songwriting that you've taken with you throughout your career?
He's so complex. [laughs] All of my songs, including "Ghostbusters" and "Jack and Jill", are simple songs. Three chords, four chords. Verse, chorus, clever lyric, and that's it. Stevie's stuff is always so complex that even when you think you played it right, you played it wrong ... and that's for the best of us.
He would take my little songs from a cassette — I call them songs, but they were basically me playing too many guitar parts — and he would change them into a song. He would take them into the studio — pay for them, by the way — and put his band with them. I tell people I'm a college dropout but I graduated from Wonder University.
I'll never forget the one time we were waiting to cut some of my songs, he wrote "Living for the City". I was there when he wrote it and I was there when he recorded the entire song. What an education that was, just to watch that process. I wanted to go to bed and go to sleep several times. He wouldn't let me go to the hotel and go to sleep. I had to sit there with him through the whole process, but what a lesson that was!
I know Stevie's Music of My Mind (1972) is one of your favorite albums of all time.
That was like nothing anybody ever heard before. What you got to remember is that's one of the first albums that had the synthesized bass on it. Nobody even knew what those sounds were. You couldn't even buy a synthesizer to produce those sounds. They had that big giant TONTO machine that they would plug all the cables into. Then the ARP 2600 came out, which was a smaller version of the TONTO, and to plug in all those cables ... and that's just to get one sound and one note. It was really groundbreaking territory.
You toured with Stevie when he opened for the Rolling Stones on their 1972 tour. What did you observe between those two dynamic musical forces?
Well, coming from Detroit and being part of Motown, I thought Stevie Wonder was the headliner! I thought, They're gonna let those nice Rolling Stones guys from England open up for Stevie Wonder. That'd be kind of cool. It was really the other way around. I mean I didn't get that at all. It was a culture shock and learning lesson, not offensive in any way, because they were wonderful guys to hang out with, but I just didn't know what was going on in the world past Detroit! I hadn't been out of Detroit. I thought Stevie Wonder was already a star. Then he got so much bigger after the Rolling Stones tour and after the Talking Book album. He shifted gears and went into hyper space.
When I interviewed Lisa Fischer recently, she mentioned how Rufus & Chaka Khan's Rags to Rufus (1974) was the first album she ever bought with her own money. That album has Stevie's "Tell Me Something Good", but it opens with your song, "You Got the Love". How did that song get to Rufus & Chaka Khan?
I wrote that song and I'd wanted Stevie to cut it, I wanted Barry White to cut it. I wanted somebody big to cut it. Chaka Khan and Rufus lived next door. André [Fischer] said, "Well if ain't nobody will cut it, we'll cut it." I thought, Some unknown band is gonna cut my song? It was better than nothing, I guess! Then I heard Chaka put down the lead vocal and I just went, "Who's that? What is this?"
Just like listening to Aretha Franklin, when you listen to Chaka Khan, you can tell something special is going on there ... and I wasn't aware of that at all. They were just my next door neighbors, so they were cutting the song. I was out of town doing something. Chaka took some of my lyrics and wrote the rest of the lyrics and then sang it. When I heard her vocal on it, I was like, "Wow, man. You can really sing!"
What I love about "You Got the Love" is the way it builds. It starts with your riff and then it goes to places that, as a listener, I didn't really expect it to go. How is that an extension of who you are and how you approach music?
The only thing unusual about that song is I went to those diminished chords and that was pretty different. It slides up. That was just me playing the rhythm on the guitar like I would play on anybody's record in the studio. It really caught on. I'll never forget when André heard it, he was like, "Man you're grooving on that guitar part. Let's turn that up!" I was only 19 years old, so what the heck did I know. I was just trying to find my way and get something going.
Who You Gonna Call is a clever name for your documentary because it has a double meaning. It references "Ghostbusters" but it also relates to your work as a session player. Everybody called you to play on sessions. In the '70s, you did a lot of studio work with Bill Withers. How did you first connect with Bill?
People had heard about me playing rhythm guitar and he wanted some on his album. We became best of friends, all the way up till the end. Bill would come over to my house and take care of my kids, give them lectures. They'd listen to him. They wouldn't listen to me, that's for sure! Bill gives you the unadulterated version of it. He just tells it flat out like it is and I think they liked his delivery.
I really miss Bill Withers. It's only been a couple of years, but it seems like forever.
Upon Bill's passing, Billboard, The Guardian, and Rolling Stone selected "Lovely Day" as one of his most essential songs. The Guardian called it "one of the most joyful songs ever recorded. It is impossible to hear this song without feeling better." Rolling Stone said it's "relentlessly optimistic". You're part of that recordings's DNA. What do you recall about cutting "Lovely Day" in the studio?
When we were in the studio recording it, I thought we were going to hit something more like "Use Me" or "Ain't No Sunshine", and then he comes up with "Lovely Day", which had a great melody. I remember him holding that long note! I thought, Why is he doing that? The song sounds good, don't hold the note so goddang long but that's part of the catchiness of the song, I think. You could hear it, that it was going somewhere. It just was different from what I thought we were going to do. I thought we were going to do a lowdown thing. I like those naughty stories he tells!
Bill spoke at your induction ceremony when you received your star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2014. He said, "The thing that I remember most about Ray is Ray never fell into any of the traps. He was always clean. He was always clean cut." Thinking back to the '70s, what kind of traps could you have fallen into? How did you avoid them?
All the obvious ones. Too many girls — that had to be a trap! Drugs was the big one back then. They say, how did you not get into drinking? How did you not do the drugs, all of the stuff that's around you, the cocaine? To me, it just wasn't that interesting. First of all, everybody I saw that did it, looked stupid and they were spending way too much money on it and it killed everything that they were trying to do. It brought down my heroes. Stevie Wonder didn't do any drugs and he was prolific and a genius. He didn't need that stimulation. I thought, If he doesn't need it, then I don't need it. My heroes that didn't do it were on top and my heroes that did do it ended up falling, so it just didn't seem that appealing to me.
"Jack and Jill" was the first single off your first album, Raydio (1978). It debuted on the chart in January 1978 and then hit the Top Ten three months later. What kind of expectations did you have for the release of your first single?
To put me in business. At that point, it was like, if I didn't get a hit, just go back to the studio and play your guitar. I had been trying to cut records. I'd put all of my money into recording equipment. I put all the chips on one number. I needed it to happen. I tried to put a piece of everything that I loved in one song. My mind was like, I need that Stevie Wonder kind of intro, that Sly Stone kind of groove, the Holland-Dozier-Holland nursery rhyme kind of lyrics.
When it was finally done, I put everything but the kitchen sink in there and I kept it simple, so that the average person could understand it. Thank God everybody else felt the same way I did because I really worked hard on that one. I even put the high voices in there because I figured when it comes across radio, the voices would leap out — "Jack!" — so you had to pay attention to it. That worked really good as well.
Were you watching the charts as it climbed?
Are you kidding me? I was living in the charts. It was a slower-moving song. It was around for twenty weeks or something like that. Sometimes it would lose its bullet. Clive [Davis] would be like, "Don't worry about it. We're selling." We ended up selling almost two million singles, so it was a big single. It was a wonderful song and a wonderful record. It really worked great for me.
I'll never forget, George Clinton, who's from Detroit, said, "I like how you put those California vocals over the funk." I thought, Is that a compliment? What's he saying? He was actually complimenting me because I got on the pop charts with the first record. I don't know what happened. I thought I was cutting something more funky. What happens is, your voice is a footprint. You can't really change it. The way I heard voices and everything just came out real poppy.
How did you find your identity as a lead singer?
That was difficult. What most people don't know is that I didn't sing a song all the way through until "A Woman Needs Love", till the fourth [Raydio] album. I was smart enough in the beginning to know I couldn't ad lib or sing like Philippé Wynne [The Spinners] and sing all the lines, so I had Arnell Carmichael and Jerry Knight there to sing with me. I was smart enough not to ruin the whole song.
I hadn't spent any practice as a young kid singing on stage or trying to do it. I'd always be in the back playing my guitar. All of a sudden, I'm being thrown into the forefront. I thought, You got records coming out. You might want to try singing on a couple of those, or somewhere in the song. [laughs] The girls thought I was sort of a handsome guy, so here's this big tall guy holding a guitar ... you are gonna sing some more, right? You sort of feel the pressure to get it together. It's like doing push-ups, or anything else, the muscle for your voice. If you just do it all day, every day, it will get there.
Of all the songs you recorded up until that time, why was "A Woman Needs Love (Just Like You Do)" the first song you decided to sing all the way through?
It took me two months trying to do it. I got so in the groove that when I got Arnell to sing on it, it wasn't in his key. It was like, you need to start over and cut the track over. Cut the track over? It's a masterpiece! I had it feeling good. The only person who could sing it in that key was me. I remember at one time I was so frustrated. I was gonna erase the whole thing. I put all 24 tracks in record. I walked out the door and Arnell actually stopped me. He saved the day. He said, "You've been working on this forever. At least play it for Clive. You've got the vocal on there now. Why would you erase everything?" That's the "A Woman Needs Love" that we know today.
What's the genesis of that song?
There was always a couch in front of the console. I'm sitting at the console. When I was writing the song, there were six girls on the couch. They're not looking at me. They just started to do their gossip thing. At that time, girls were like, Well if a man can [fool around], we can do it too. Times have changed. One girl said, "Come home early, get your feelings hurt." I thought, That's a hell of a line.
The big crisis was that I had written "She will fool around just like you do". They didn't like that. Then I changed it to "She can fool around" if you don't take care of business. They all liked that. As soon as I said "They can fool around" or it's possible that it's going to happen, the girls were good with that, but they didn't like me saying they will fool around. It's almost like I was giving the girls permission to go out and do it if he's messing up. Guys didn't like the song but the girls loved it. The program directors were like, "We ain't gonna play this song" and the girls made them play the song.
"A Woman Needs Love" is the only song that I ever wrote that I thought was the hit. "I got this one! This time, I'm going out to order my new car!" [laughs]
It's interesting how, thematically, "The Other Woman" seemed like the flip side of "A Woman Needs Love" and that came out less than a year later.
"A Woman Needs Love" made me so good. I got all the girls on "A Woman Needs Love", across the board. "Why can't you be like Ray?" Guys would be like, "I don't want to hear about him. Let's get this over with. Go on and kiss my wife. Dance with her, please." I thought, I don't know if I want to be that goody too shoes.
I remember hearing "Jessie's Girl" by Rick Springfield on the radio. It had the guitar in it. I thought, Maybe I need a record with the guitar and other stuff, but I'm not that kind of guy who looks at something else. I'm like, let's just go take the chick if we're gonna do this. I'm not wishing I had somebody else's woman. I would just go take her, so then I came up with the idea for "The Other Woman".
I'll never forget, some of the guys at the record company thought it was too rock and roll. "Black radio ain't playing that. How are you gonna get on WBLS with rock and roll guitars and that stuff? This is a bad idea, Ray. Don't do this. Turn those guitars down." I thought, There ain't nothing on here but the guitar! Turn them up! That was in the air at that time. It's not in the air now.
The story was sort of a true story for me, mixed in with some other stories I heard, but it was a heck of a story: "I'm just an average guy, fooled around a little on the side."
In your documentary, there's a great section about Ray Parker, Jr. as a sex symbol. It's fun to see your family respond to that ...
... They're laughing about it. My youngest son says, "He's so corny. What are you talking about?"
As your career took off, were you aware of how your image was being crafted?
Yeah, the publicity department is gonna sell whatever they can sell. The girls were falling over the lyrics of the song or they liked your haircut. There's even a picture of me and Billy Dee Williams at the same age and they put the two of us together. Even I almost had trouble knowing which one was which. That part just came. For me, the music was always the most important thing.
My image with the girls always was the same thing. It's like, "That Ray Parker ... He's such a nice guy but there's a little something ... I don't know. I don't trust him all the way. He might be a little more naughty than y'all think." [laughs]
I'll never forget I was in People Magazine's Top 40 Millionaire Bachelors. First of all, the millionaire thing, that was nice because I was broke growing up in Detroit. Even my mother was like, "Son, do you have a million dollars?" Then they went to the sex symbol thing and I looked in the mirror. There wasn't anybody knocking down the door the week before, so when they're knocking the door down it's got to be because of this music and the money and some other stuff. It's the same guy in the mirror. Ain't nothing changed.
The nice thing about being famous is you get all the attention, you get all the girls, you get all that, and the other nice thing about being famous is when you stop making records, it all goes away really quick, so you can go back to society, which I think is wonderful, by the way. I don't want to be that guy who, for the rest of your life, can't go to a deli and have a sandwich. It's like going on a vacation — be the star, get all the girls, get all the stuff, and then you can go right back and disappear again.
By 1983, you'd written and produced for artists like Cheryl Lynn and Deniece Williams. How did you get the gig to write and produce for Diana Ross?
According to [designer Ria Lewerke-Shapiro] that did her cover, Diana saw my cover on A Woman Needs Love and really liked it. She said, "I think she's gonna call you." She calls me. We went on a couple of dates. I picked her up in my car. We went out and hung out. I took her to the studio and then we started recording here in New York. She was wonderful, by the way. Very nice person.
She had bought her mother a mink coat. She'd invited me to her house in Connecticut. I said, "I got to go to Detroit." She said, "Oh, you're from Detroit?" I went, "Yeah. I'll drop your mother's coat off at her house." She was so surprised. She said, "How do you know so much about me?" She had totally forgotten that I was her guitar player when I was nineteen! Now I'm an older guy, I'm more mature and she's looking at me totally different from the way she looked at me when I was a young kid playing the guitar for her. "What do you mean you don't remember me? We flew to New York together on the airplane, you and me! We rode to Electric Lady and cut some sessions." She said, "That's you?" "Yeah, that's me. That's why I don't know what you're talking about!"
It was fun working with her. That was exciting. It was like the old days in Detroit and early California days when we used to work with Motown. I just played the songs for her at my house, sat at the piano, sang them a little bit for her. It was a lot of fun.
We did the vocal in New York. I was hoping I was going to have more time with her, of her singing, but she's like, "Two hours, hour and a half, you got it. That's it. I'm going to Atlantic City after that." Oh shoot, I gotta get this right now, as opposed to some people who just sit there and sing their heart out forever. It's just different, different ways of different people working.
Of the songs you wrote and produced for her, RCA released "Up Front" as the single, but I always thought "Love or Loneliness" would have been a strong contender as well. What's the story of that song?
You have to stop and ask yourself, is it really worth it? Is this love or is this just loneliness? Is this a mistake? It's funny when you cut records on somebody, no matter what you think in your mind, the record takes on a life of its own. That one would be my preference over "Up Front" because I like the realism that she delivered in that. I still listen to that now sometimes.
"Ghostbusters" dropped a year later. As a songwriter, how was your experience writing "Ghostbusters" different from any other song you'd written before?
First of all, writing "Ghostbusters", everybody was in my way. If I was starting to write a song, I'd just do what I want to do. It depends on what I'm writing as the story.
"Ghostbusters" is probably one of the first times that I had to sit in the room with somebody else. They showed me a film. I've got to put something under that scene that sounds like that scene, but I don't hear any music so I've got to hear it in my brain. Then I've got to talk to the director who has his own ideas of what that is. He tells you he wants this tempo, this beat, this kind of feel, so now you've got to adapt to what someone else is thinking. I'm really writing the song based on someone else's input, what someone else is telling me to do, all the way down to "I want the word 'ghostbusters' in the song". I would have never done that. That's the last thing you want to sing, that word! That word don't sing too good! I had to come up with all of that stuff based on the director's input and what the film was telling me.
It worked!
Well, it worked because there's one scene in the film where the ghostbusters had their backpacks on and they got the phone number underneath it. That, to me, was the entire thing — you call the ghostbusters. Then the music, for me, had to be stiff, it had to be military because I thought of ghostbusters as military characters. I see them marching. I saw them like Gomer Pyle, which is why I put the little Gomer Pyle line in the song — "I can't hear you!" I took the military approach to it ... and now all of that works. It was as far away from what I would have done on my album as possible.
Describe the impact of "Ghostbusters" when it was released.
That song was a hit the same day it came out! It was an immediate success. In one week, the promotion guy had all of the radio stations and it usually takes months to get that. He had them all the first week. Little kids are pointing to me in shopping malls. They didn't know what they were singing but they recognized the face. Even now, five or seven year old kids, they don't want to be sitting on grandpa's lap but they want to take a picture with me and give me a hug. They just love that song. It's a timeless song. It's almost 40 years old, but it feels like it was yesterday.
You've said it's like a having a new hit every year.
Yes, it's like having a new hit every year. When Halloween comes, I'll go out with my kids or my wife to some party, and there will be kids there who go completely nuts ... and I'll have to sing a few bars of it or something. That's always the case, but what a nice problem to have! [laughs] People say, "Are you tired of it?" It's like the winning lotto ticket. Do you want to give that ticket back? No, of course not!
How did you find out that "Ghostbusters" was nominated for an Academy Award for "Best Original Song"?
I really didn't know what to expect with the Oscars because I didn't really watch the Oscars. I wasn't a TV guy. I didn't understand the significance of it at the time. I was in my twenties. I didn't care. They were inviting me and I was like, I don't think I'll go. I got a call from Columbia Pictures. "Excuse me, it's the Academy Awards. You're going." It was strongly suggested by somebody there that I go. Then they wanted me to open up the 57th Academy Awards, to sing and perform. I understand the performing part. Now I've got something to do, so that was pretty interesting.
The set piece for that performance has all these levels. You're backing up a forklift on stage, which then rises up in the air. There's dancers, explosions ...
... Dom DeLuise and the orchestra. I didn't know it was going to be that big of a production. In fact, Diana Ross was there that night. She looked at me and said, "There's billions of people watching this show and you're opening it up. Are you a little bit nervous?" I said, "No, it's what I've been waiting on all my life. I'm not nervous. I'm ready to do this!" It was fun.
In the documentary, you're shown talking to a classroom of young students. One of the things you say to them is "The only thing I was afraid of as a kid was turning 40 or 50 and having not tried it." What kind of wisdom would you share with aspiring musicians?
You live one time. No matter where you are, everybody is taught to do it the safe way. You might have some idea and they're all saying, "Man, what makes you think you can fly to the moon? Nobody else has done it but you're the one, right? You want us to believe that you're the one in a million." Sometimes you are the one in a million. What's worse than that is if you don't try it — anything that you want to do that you love — later on, you'll be looking at the rest of the guys doing it, saying I could have done that. You're just looking at all that time that went by and you just never gave it a shot.
What songs of yours would you want to put in a time capsule?
"A Woman Needs Love", for sure. "The Other Woman", and "Ghostbusters". Those three pretty much ... Well, I've got to put "Jack and Jill" in there and I got to put "You Can't Change That" in there, too. Those five pretty much sum me up.
I know one of your favorite songs that you wrote is "That Old Song". Why is that special for you?
I believe everything that I wrote on that. There's just something about the melody and the arrangement and the story. Gene Page did those strings. I thought that was going to be a much bigger hit. It did well, but I was waiting for the public to go crazy and they were like "That's nice". Then you look at "Ghostbusters" that was really a throwaway song. It wasn't even going to be a record. It was only going to be 20 seconds ... and then everybody goes crazy. I poured my heart out in "That Old Song" and then you listen to "Ghostbusters", that wasn't that big of a deal, and it was a bigger smash. "You're the man!" I am? [laughs] Music is surprising like that.
For the time capsule, what song would you add that you wrote for another artist?
I'm going to go with "Mr. Telephone Man" [New Edition]. I should have sung that myself! It sounded just like my band Raydio, the whole track and everything. I didn't like the lyric so I changed the lyric to "A Woman Needs Love". It's really almost the same song, musically.
New Edition did such a wonderful job. They were all scared to death. They'd never sung the harmonies before. They said, "Who's singing in the background?" I said, "You guys are." "We've never done that!" "Well, you're going to do it this time." The nice thing about that is they were open to trying everything.
Bobby Brown had never sung anything in his life. He was the only one with that high voice. He could barely get there but he did get there. They were struggling so hard to get the record that they sounded so youthful and energetic. The story was right for them. They just made it a smash. That was a real surprise, a real shocker.
Ray, how do you define success for yourself?
Success is when you can do what you want to do every day, and you enjoy what you're doing. It's not really the money. It's not even really what everybody thinks. It's what makes you happy. For me, I find success in my music because I love music so much.
I always wanted to be a part of the club, the higher echelon of musicians or higher echelon of people who are thought of creatively. I'm as big of a groupie as I am an artist who does it. I get kicks when I'm sitting next to this star or that star, people whose records I buy, people I enjoy being around. To me, that's the biggest success.
People say, what would really make your life change? If you said, "Ray, you can't have three Porsches anymore, you can only have one", it's an inconvenience, but that wouldn't be a big deal. The big deal is you can't play the guitar anymore.
What's one of the greatest challenges you've overcome in your career?
Well, the challenges that I've overcome are just fear. Is the first record gonna sell or am I gonna look like an idiot? You're always thinking that when you write a new song. You're always thinking that when you go out onstage. I don't know why, because the people in the audience already bought the record. We got to come out strong and get those guys in the first ten rows who affect the other guys. If it ain't right, you get hit with a tomato. It does happen. You just worry about the typical things that anybody would worry about, but it's all fear-based.
Over the last five decades, you've carved a unique niche for yourself from all of the different roles you've had in music. What would you say to your younger self, knowing what you know now?
Knowing what I know now, if I had to do it all over again, with this knowledge, I don't know if I'd do it all. [laughs] It's extremely difficult and it takes timing, preparation, luck ... everything all at the same time. Of course, I would probably be doing the same thing I'm doing because it's the only thing I love doing.
"Not knowing" is what's called being young. That's what makes the record business so youthful. You don't have enough sense to know that you shouldn't be doing this ... or you spend too much money on the equipment. When you're young, you just have that positive outlook — "I'm gonna go do it!" That's what makes it work.
