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  Staring at Sound: The True Story of Oklahoma’s Fabulous Flaming Lips

  Copyright © 2019 Jim DeRogatis

  Cover © 2019 Abrams

  Translation from Der Rattenfänger courtesy of Laura Johanna Waltje

  Published in 2019 by Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019930879

  ISBN: 978-1-4197-4007-7

  eISBN: 978-1-68335-762-9

  Abrams books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact [email protected] or the address below.

  Abrams Press® is a registered trademark of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

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  FOR THE GIRLS

  Sometimes this versatile musician

  Snatches up a pretty gal.

  No town has offered him admission

  Where he found no girls to beguile.

  And even if the girls are dim

  And all the women are too prim

  They all together lovesick long

  Enchanted by his strings and song.

  —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,

  from Der Rattenfänger (“The Pied Piper”)

  CONTENTS

  Prologue: Robert’s Problem Is Young Girls

  PART I

  Chapter 1: He Gonna Grow Up Being a Shooter

  Chapter 2: I Promise You

  Chapter 3: There Are Lots of People Who Know About This

  Chapter 4: School Ain’t Gonna Make You a Millionaire

  Chapter 5: Numerous

  Chapter 6: Trophies

  PART II

  Chapter 7: Go to Your Mailbox

  Chapter 8: Victory by Delay

  Chapter 9: Recent Unpleasantness

  Chapter 10: The State of Illinois v. Robert Sylvester Kelly

  Chapter 11: The Defense and the Verdict

  PART III

  Chapter 12: “How Old Are We Talking?”

  Chapter 13: “It’s Just Music”

  Chapter 14: The Cult

  Chapter 15: Reckoning

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  PROLOGUE

  ROBERT’S PROBLEM IS YOUNG GIRLS

  I intended to make it a quick trip. Since it was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, 2000, I knew most people would have stayed home when I made my dreaded weekly visit to the office to show my face to editors, file my expenses, and sort through the postal bins full of promo CDs piled up since my last appearance. The traffic had been dead, so I zoomed down Lake Shore Drive. As I hustled across Wabash Avenue from the parking ramp into the gray, barge-like Chicago Sun-Times building overlooking the river, the wind bit ferociously. The temperature hovered in the low twenties, but as Chicagoans say, it’s always cooler by the lake. I had only started to thaw out when an editorial assistant grudgingly handed me a fax sent to the main number in the newsroom instead of to the constantly humming machine a few feet from my desk in the features department. A lot of that curly, heat-sensitive fax paper got wasted in the days before everyone used email.

  “Dear Mr. DeRogatis,” the fax, a one-page, single-spaced letter, began. “I’m sending this to you because I don’t know where else to go.”

  My review of the latest album by singer, songwriter, and producer R. Kelly had run as the lead story in the entertainment section on November 7, the day TP-2.com arrived in stores. Like celebrated film critic Roger Ebert, whom I proudly called a colleague, I disliked reductive ratings, stars or thumbs, but our editors demanded them. I thought a line in my critique nailed the dilemma better than the equivocal two out of four stars I’d given the disc. Prince, Marvin Gaye, and Al Green all showed that, under the right circumstances, sex and prayer can be the same thing, I wrote, but Kelly’s lyrical shifts from church to boudoir were so jarring, they could give you whiplash.

  “You wrote about R. Kelly a couple of weeks ago and compared him to Marvin Gaye,” the letter writer continued. “Well, I guess Marvin Gaye had problems, too, but I don’t think they were like Robert’s. Robert’s problem—and it’s a thing that goes back many years—is young girls.”

  My stint as the paper’s pop-music critic began in 1992, not long after Kelly rose from busking for change on the city’s “L” platforms. I left in 1995, making a brief foray to Rolling Stone in New York. When I returned to the Sun-Times in 1997, Kelly was firmly ensconced as the dominant voice in R&B for a generation, well on his way to selling more than a hundred million records, his own as well as those he crafted for other artists. Both his music and his story inspired many in his hometown, which embraces local heroes with a singular devotion.

  Boosterism reigns in Chicago. Residents brag that their skyscrapers, their sports franchises, their entertainers, their crooked politicians, even their pizzas are bigger and better than those in New York, Los Angeles, or any other global metropolis you’d care to name. At the same time, Chicago is perpetually the Second City. Its denizens suffer from a deep-seated inferiority complex common to the Midwest, but running especially deep in the City by the Lake, where so many future stars begin their careers, then decamp to the coasts to become “real” celebrities. This mix of pride and insecurity is amplified on the South and West Sides, where the black community fights segregation and pervasive racism. These make black Chicagoans particularly reluctant to turn on heroes from their streets, especially if they stay once they’ve made it. Kelly had made it, and he’d stayed.

  I got a lot of angry letters via fax and snail mail in response to my record and concert reviews. They were especially numerous when I harshly critiqued aging baby boom favorites like the Rolling Stones, Billy Joel, or Eric Clapton—I called them “geezers”—and whenever I praised hip-hop. “That’s not music, it’s noise!” readers commonly complained. Although the faxed letter was signed “A Friend,” I initially dismissed whoever wrote it as just one more reactionary jerk trying to disparage a black superstar.

  “R. Kelly likes them young” had long been a rumor on the music scene, almost always whispered in those exact words, by publicists and recording engineers, radio programmers and concert promoters, fellow critics and fans. Gossips said he’d married his fifteen-year-old protégé Aaliyah in 1994. That story seemed strange and unlikely, and both of them had denied it. There had been little public discussion about what those words actually meant, and I’ll confess, I didn’t think about them much at first, either.

  Although this book and two decades of reporting on the pain R. Kelly has caused dozens of young girls began with that fax, I initially tossed it on the pile of press releases, artists’ biographies, and angry letters from aggrieved readers stacked in a wire bin filled to overflowing on the corner of my desk, eventually destined for the trash.

  PART I

  CHAPTER 1

  HE GONNA GROW UP BEING A SHOOTER

  In the video for “I Wish,” R. Kelly stands atop a Chicago high-rise overlooking the dramatic skyline of the city he calls “the center of my universe.” He gazes up at the crisp blue sky. “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?” asks a d
isembodied woman’s voice. “I want out,” the singer replies, removing his shades. “But it’s hard. I need answers, Momma.” He turns his back. “I need answers.”

  Almost all of Kelly’s albums mix lascivious bedroom jams with soulful prayers or pleas, and “I Wish” is one of the latter, a nostalgic tribute to his late mother and the South Side neighborhoods where he grew up, as well as a bittersweet contemplation of the burdens of fame: “Now you hear my songs the radio is bangin’ / Oh, I can’t believe my ears / And what everybody’s sayin’ / Boy, I’ll tell you, folks don’t know the half.”

  The 2000 video also portrays Kelly surrounded by friends and family on the wooden porch of a small stucco house near West 107th Street and South Parnell Avenue, one of two homes that loom largest in his childhood memories. A twenty-year-old female extra lovingly braids his hair. Eight years later, she would testify that during a break in filming, she had a threesome with Kelly and an underage girl in his luxurious trailer. Folks don’t know the half.

  “Rock ’n’ roll comes down to myth,” my other great critic role model, Lester Bangs, wrote. “There are no ‘facts.’” From the beginning, Kelly excelled at building the myth. I have talked to only one of his three half siblings, and aside from scattered quotes another has given to journalists, the primary source about his formative years is Soulacoaster: The Diary of Me, Kelly’s idiosyncratic 2012 autobiography written with David Ritz, the author of more than three dozen as-told-to celebrity tomes, the best of them about Marvin Gaye. Woefully short on real or full names and specific dates and addresses, the book gets some of those it does mention wrong, citing the corners of streets that don’t intersect, referring to buildings that never existed, even misspelling the name of Kelly’s younger half brother throughout. Ritz views his role as conveying what his subjects want readers to know.

  “I remove all issues of control of the book by giving complete control to them,” Ritz said when we appeared on a panel together in 2003, but even Kelly disowns some of his chosen collaborator’s work. “He didn’t get everything on point,” Kelly told Chris Heath of GQ, “just like no one ever does. When you say things, you know they’ll get them misconstrued. I’ve read a couple of things in the book that wasn’t exactly how I said it.”

  In addition to Soulacoaster, which is not always reliable, and public records, where information often is scarce, my portrait of Kelly’s early years draws on sources close to his family, and some of what they told me comes from long conversations with Kelly’s mother on her deathbed in 1993. Hundreds of sources talked to me during my time reporting on Kelly, whether on the record, not for attribution, or on background, some for five minutes and some repeatedly over the course of many weeks, months, then years. Every off-the-record agreement I made remains intact in this book, unless the source later gave me permission to name them or went public with the same information.

  According to his birth certificate, Robert Sylvester Kelly was born on January 8, 1967. Joann, age nineteen, gave birth at Chicago Lying-In Hospital, part of the University of Chicago healthcare system, in the Hyde Park neighborhood. No father’s name is listed. Joann herself is a ghost in public-records searches, but Robert’s birth certificate lists Joann’s place of birth as West Memphis, Arkansas. Friends of the family told me Joann and her mother moved to Chicago as part of the Great Migration, when millions of African Americans fled the racism and poverty of the South in search of better opportunities in the cities of the Northeast and Midwest.

  Chicago, which was 2 percent black in the early 1900s, had become 33 percent black by 1970. Many African Americans relocated to the South and West Sides to neighborhoods like Bronzeville, Pullman, and Austin. There they formed a black belt marred by poorer housing stock and fewer retail businesses, but rich with music venues and churches that served as centers of community, hubs for activism during the Civil Rights movement, and political power bases thereafter.

  All four of Joann’s children had different fathers. Robert has an older half sister and half brother, Theresa and Bruce, and a younger half brother, Carey. The family called Carey “Killer,” after the unseen boyfriend of the flamboyant character Geraldine Jones, portrayed by comedian Flip Wilson in drag on his early seventies TV show. This was a big, complicated family. At times, Robert and his half-siblings lived near or with his maternal grandmother, four uncles, female cousins and aunties, and a man named Lucious, who married Joann and became the stepfather to her four children, around the time Robert turned five. A self-professed mama’s boy, Robert resented anyone else vying for Joann’s attention, and he disapproved of the marriage, but he grants in his book that Lucious was “a nice man, nice to me, and most times nice to my mother.”

  Most times. Kelly also recounts several physical fights when his mother and stepfather drank. “That was a very abusive, kind of crazy relationship . . . a lot of fussing and fighting,” a friend of the family told me. Carey told Tasha K, YouTube’s “Queen of Real Talk,” that Lucious worked for one of the airlines. He admitted that Lucious had his flaws, but said he worked hard to provide for the family. For better or worse, Joann remained devoted to him, and the couple stayed together.

  Whenever he asked about his own father, Kelly says in Soulacoaster, “My mother would just roll her eyes, look away from me, and say, ‘Don’t say nothing to me about that no-good son of a bitch, because the minute he found out I was pregnant with you, his coward ass left. Disappeared in the wind.’” Describing his mom as a beautiful, heavyset woman, with “flawless brown skin, brown eyes, thick eyebrows,” he notes that she “was strong in her faith . . . a praying woman who looked to God for a better way.” He also admits she “had her bad habits. She loved her Winston cigarettes and her Miller beer. Sometimes she’d drink too much and get sick.”

  Talking to ABC’s Primetime Live, Kelly said he and his mother went to McDonald’s together almost every morning: “She’d fix a cup of coffee, she’d wear this cheap lipstick, she’d leave this red lipstick ring around the cup, and I’d turn it around and drink from that part, taste lipstick and coffee at the same time. If I could, I would have married my mom.”

  Robert and Carey both have said Joann worked at Roseland Community Hospital in the South Side neighborhood of the same name, not far from the house at 107th and Parnell; according to her two sons, she was an EKG technician and a phlebotomist. The hospital, which has long struggled financially, and which has recently been threatened with closing, could not confirm employment records when I inquired.

  The family moved a lot during Robert’s childhood. In his earliest years, they lived in the Parkway Garden housing project at East 63rd Street and South Martin Luther King Drive. South Siders now call the 6400 block of King Drive “O Block,” after a slain gang member. A 2014 series in the Sun-Times named it “the most dangerous block in Chicago,” with nineteen unsolved shootings in three years, but in the late sixties and early seventies, during the twenty-one-year reign of Chicago’s infamous “Boss,” Mayor Richard J. Daley, the project ranked among the city’s better-maintained and safer low-income housing complexes. Michelle Robinson’s family also lived there, when she was a toddler, long before she met and married Barack Obama.

  “Back then the projects didn’t seem as bad as people make them out to be today,” Kelly says in his book. As a kid, he loved watching the sitcom Good Times, set in Cabrini-Green, a housing project on the Near North Side. From 1974 to 1980, the show depicted a richer life in public housing, beyond the prejudiced clichés, though some attacked as an insulting caricature the character of the oldest son, J.J., portrayed by breakout star Jimmie Walker. “He can’t read or write,” Esther Rolle, who played the show’s matriarch, complained to Chicago-based Ebony magazine. “He doesn’t think. Negative images have been slipped in on us.”

  Around Robert’s eighth birthday, Joann moved the family to a home at East 40th Street and South Martin Luther King Drive in Grand Boulevard, a neighborhood that took its name from what had been one of the most bustling commerc
ial strips on the South Side. In the wake of King’s assassination in 1968, Chicago, like many other cities across America, rechristened the thoroughfare in his honor. During Kelly’s youth, barbershops, nail salons, boutiques, record stores, fried-chicken-and-shrimp joints, storefront churches, and the corner groceries locals call “Food & Liquors” thrived. The neighborhood also retained touches of fading splendor from years past.

  Robert and his half brothers frequented the Metropolitan Theatre at 46th and King, a historic vaudeville palace turned movie theater, to watch Bruce Lee films such as Fist of Fury and Enter the Dragon. Closed in 1979, the theater was demolished by the city in 1997. Joann fondly reminisced about shows at the Regal Theater, an even grander venue built at 47th and Grand Boulevard in 1928, where Aretha Franklin, Al Green, James Brown, the Isley Brothers, and many other greats performed. It closed in 1968 and faced the wrecking ball in 1973. A block off King Drive at 38th Street, Madden Park drew kids from miles around to its Olympic-size swimming pool in the summer, and its basketball courts fostered countless hoop dreams. Both are gone now, too.

  Chicago historian Dominic Pacyga, the author of several books about the South Side, says Grand Boulevard during Kelly’s formative years was 99.5 percent black, with the lowest average family income in the city, less than $7,000 per year, when the median nationwide topped $10,000. Single mothers headed 70 percent of all households with children under eighteen, and the unemployment rate approached 32 percent, far overshadowing the national rate of 6 percent. Two of Chicago’s toughest housing projects, the Robert Taylor Homes and the Ida B. Wells Homes, skewed those numbers, especially by 1970, when gangs such as the Egyptian Cobras, Black P Stones, and Black Disciples began to take hold. Most residents rented in two- or three-flat apartment buildings, but the area also boasted stately old greystones and distinctive brick bungalows like those documented by Lee Bey in Southern Exposure: The Overlooked Architecture of Chicago’s South Side.