Lionel Richie walks into the hotel meeting room at 6.20pm and stretches his arms out wide. “Good morning, everybody,” he says in a southern drawl as smooth as whipped cream. He’s not joking. Richie, 76, is touring here in Budapest, and he’s on rock’n’roll (well, legendary soul balladeer) time. The singer-songwriter, who has sold more than 100m records over his six decades in the business, has just got up. “That bed was saying to me, ‘Stay here, Lionel, you’re looking goooood.’”
He introduces me to his girlfriend, Lisa Parigi, a Swiss entrepreneur. Parigi is in her mid-30s, gorgeous, friendly, and young enough to be his daughter – or granddaughter at a push. To be fair, though, Richie looks fabulous. As a young man, he was all chin and tache. Now he’s just regular handsome, surprisingly tall, with a bearing that verges on the military. Parigi leaves us to chat.
Richie is famous for his bonhomie. He doesn’t simply invite you to the party, he leaves you feeling that he’s hosted it for you, and you alone. Within seconds of learning I’m from Manchester, he’s telling me stories of his times there. “Everyone prepared three days earlier to come to the concert in Manchester. They went to the pub on the first day, then on the second day they went to the pub, and on the third day they said, ‘Now we’re going to the concert.’ At one point I thought, they don’t know it’s me on stage. I mean they’re having their party. They take over the show, then do the soccer chants, then in between the soccer chants they go back and sing Three Times a Lady again. And, wait a minute, I’m not singing Three Times a Lady now. Oh my God, I have great stories.”
I know he has. I’ve just read his memoir and it’s rammed with them. He has worked with everyone – there’s Marvin and Stevie, and Quincy and Michael. One moment, he’s getting advice from Sammy Davis Jr that transformed his career, the next he’s taking Nelson Mandela clothes shopping in LA.
But even more important is the role of his family, growing up on a black American university campus in the deep south. He knows it’s an atypical story for a person of colour born in the 1940s, and it’s one he says the media has often resisted because it didn’t conform to their idea of what his narrative should be. It really is a fascinating tale. Richie has a Zelig-like quality; there for all the big moments in music and civil rights history, whether as an active participant, a passive bystander or hanging on the coat-tails of girlfriends. He is a man we associate with relentless positivity, but there have also been terrible lows.
The story starts in Tuskegee, a tiny campus city just 38 miles from Montgomery, Alabama, and what many regard as the birthplace of the civil rights movement. Tuskegee was a black middle-class enclave. Everybody there was so proud of their education and the city’s political history, Richie says. From a young age he was taught about Booker T Washington (founder of the Tuskegee Institute and advocate for African American economic self‑sufficiency through vocational education), and scientist George Washington Carver (who revolutionised southern agriculture and championed sustainable farming). Richie’s mother, Alberta, was a school principal and his father, Lyonel Sr, was a systems analyst for the US army. Meanwhile, his maternal grandmother Adelaide Mary Foster, a classically trained pianist, was the grandchild of an enslaved woman called Mariah and the plantation owner Dr Morgan Brown. In his will, Brown stipulated that Mariah and her son John Lewis Brown be given their freedom, and John went on to become the head of a black fraternal order promoting education. Richie and the family grew up in his grandparents’ beautiful home, which had been the institute’s faculty house, and was given to them by its original owner and close friend Booker T. History was rich and ever present in the family.
“The level of education was so heavy that you couldn’t help but just let it rub off on you. What I loved about Tuskegee is that failure was not an option. With the airmen there, the academics there, my grandmother, her generation, I grew up with these extremely bourgeois, aristocratic black folk.”
Richie tells me his young self could not have been less cool – hopeless at sport, invisible to girls. “A lot of time people see artists and go, ‘Well, he must have been a jock or he must have been the ladies’ man.’ I was nothing. I was the shyest, almost broken kid.’” He was a frightened little boy in awe of his tough, high-achieving father who passed on so much wisdom to him. Lyonel Sr taught him that it was normal to be frightened. “My dad had a great line,” he says. “‘What’s the similarity between a hero and a coward?”
I say I know the answer from the book.
“Can you tell me?”
“Both are equally scared. But the coward takes a step back, while the hero takes a step forward,” I respond on cue.
“That’s it!” he says, delighted. He looks at his manager Bruce Eskowitz, who’s sitting in with us. “Bruce, give him an A for this course. Give him two stars.”
A hotel waiter comes to take our order.
Richie orders a cappuccino. I go for a flat white and double espresso. I’ve just flown in to Hungary, and am feeling it.
“Ooooh! In that case, I’ll double him by having one more of these. Hahaha! If he’s going to up the stakes, I gotta stay with my man. He read the book! So I’ve got to be at my sharpest.”
Richie says he realised when he was writing it he had endless anecdotes to tell. The publishers loved them, but asked where the meat was. He told them he was the meat – his journey of self-discovery, how he got to where he is today. The story he tells is a profound one; of his own inner dialogue with his blackness. How black does he have to be? Who defines that? What are the constraints of being black? And, again, who makes that decision?
At the age of eight, he had a life-changing experience on a shopping trip with his father to Montgomery. Richie was unknowingly drinking from a whites-only fountain. Lyonel Sr was approached by a group of angry white men who were repeatedly using the N-word and demanding, “Can’t you read?” Richie waited for his father to “kick some ass”, but Lyonel Sr quietly told him to get in the car, and they drove off. Richie was ashamed of his father’s reaction and couldn’t bring himself to ask about it. Five years later, he brought it up at the dinner table. Lyonel Sr replied, “I had a choice that day – whether to be your father or be a man. I chose to be your father, because I wanted to be here to see you grow up.”
Major civil rights landmarks run through Richie’s life, almost by happenstance. He remembers leaders such as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X passing through town. He was a member of Jack and Jill, the organisation that fostered leadership potential in black college-bound kids. At the age of 10, he fell in love with a girl called Cynthia whom he met through Jack and Jill. Cynthia was clever, with “a grace and a smile that were breathtaking”. Every time he saw her he froze in her presence. Then she disappeared. Many years later, in 1977, he saw her picture on a TV screen, looking just as he remembered her. The news was reporting on a Ku Klux Klan member who had been convicted for the 16th Street Baptist church bombing in 1963 that claimed the lives of four young African American girls. Cynthia Wesley, 14, was one of them. Richie knew all about the church bombing and says it marked the end of innocence for him, but until then he had no idea that Cynthia was one of its victims.
In 1966, aged 17, he learned of the murder of 21-year-old Tuskegee voting rights activist Sammy Younge. After helping register 40 black voters in one day, Younge had stopped at a gas station to use the restroom. When the white attendant told him to use the hole “where Negroes go”, Younge replied that the segregation of bathrooms was illegal. The attendant drew a gun, fired and missed, and Younge drove off looking for police protection, to no avail. He returned to the gas station to argue his rights. Later that night, Younge was found dead behind the gas station from a single bullet to the head. The attendant claimed self-defence at trial and was acquitted. Yet another wake-up call for Richie.
After Luther King’s assassination in 1968, he writes, “a heaviness hung over everything”. He started to follow the Black Panthers, “who I thought were the greatest. If Stokely Carmichael had something to say, I wanted to hear it.” Richie was living in Harlem, and was by then a member of the Commodores and dating a teacher called Sharon Williams – “sweet, pretty and a deep thinker”. She joined the Black Panthers, explained the struggle to Richie, and headed off to California for the revolution. Years later, Richie heard that Williams had been involved in a shootout with the police. “I think she died in the shootout. Again, I was on the outskirts.”
Had he realised before writing the book how personal his connections to the civil rights movement were? “What I didn’t realise was that it made up the core of who I was. At the time I didn’t realise because our parents made a point of keeping a lot of that edge away from us [his sister Deborah, a librarian, is two years younger than him]. We were in the bubble.” In 1965, when MLK had marched to Montgomery, his parents told 15-year-old Lionel that he was too young to get involved.
Had he wanted to be part of it? “I was longing to be part of it. And my parents kept telling me it was dangerous.” How did he feel about that? “I was angry, because I thought they had left me out of some of the most significant history. My anger came when I realised what my grandmother and grandfather had gone through, what my mom and dad had gone through. I said to my folks, ‘Why did you not tell me? Why did you not involve us in this?’, and their answer was, ‘We didn’t want anything to limit you in your thinking of what the possibilities for your future could be. And if we had attached you to our anger then you would be stuck in our anger.’” He’s talking quietly, with immense passion. Was he aware of that anger? “You couldn’t miss it. Every day I was aware of the anger, because there was a Tuskegee anger.” That was the anger of some of the smartest people in America stymied and siloed by racism. Civil rights didn’t start in 1965, Richie says. He talks about the activists of 1936 who campaigned against school segregation, the challenge to interstate bus segregation in 1947. If he’d not opted for a career in music, you could see Richie as a professor of black history. As a child, he imagined being ordained as an episcopalian priest.
In 1974, Richie graduated from the Tuskegee Institute with a degree in economics and business. But he’d known for a long time that he wasn’t destined to specialise in either. At college, Richie was invited to join a band called the Mystics by guitarist Thomas McClary. The Mystics, then got together with members from a more successful college band, the Jays, and they became the Commodores. The name was chosen by randomly opening a dictionary and going for the first word their eyes fell on. The word before Commodore was commode. Richie says he doubts the Commodes would have been as successful. By 1974, the Commodores had been playing for six years and were just about to release their first album, Machine Gun, on Motown. The title song, an instrumental, became a huge hit. Richie was a saxophonist who played by ear and sang three songs in their set.
Did the rest of the band come from a similar background? “No, I had to overcome one phrase from within the group for the longest time, ‘Lionel, you don’t know what it is like to be poor.’ And I said, ‘Guys, I don’t want to know what it’s like to be poor!’” But the comment touched a nerve. “I’d say, ‘Will you stop saying that? You’re pissing me off.’ But then I got the best lesson from them, because they taught me how to survive.”
In the early days on the road he did find out what it was like to be poor. “I’d be like, ‘I’m hungry, it’s time to eat,’ because I was used to three meals a day. ‘Well, we don’t have enough money to eat, Lionel – get a jar of orange juice and sip on it slowly, OK.’ Next thing is, ‘You’re going to eat this.’ Well, what the hell is it? ‘It’s chitlins and pickled pig feet.’ Pig feet? My grandmother never had pickled pig feet in the house. It was the best education, because it gave me the opportunity to go down to ground floor.”
The newly radicalised Richie was determined to play the tough guy. He admits he was naive. “I remember the day this guy called me the N-word.” The Commodores were booked to play a prom at a white high school, and they arrived 45 minutes late. Three men greeted them and told them to get back in the van and get straight out of town. All three were using the N-word. “Instead of running I said, ‘Oh my God!’, and the guys were going, ‘Lionel get back in the van!’’, and I was like, ‘Nononono, I’m in the civil rights movement now.’ And they’re like, ‘Lionel. Get. In. That. Van.’” When one of the men pulled out his Bowie knife, he gingerly stepped back into the van.
After Machine Gun, Richie found himself playing less sax, taking over the vocals and writing the biggest hits. Their variety confounded critics, but Richie says it just reflected the range of music he grew up with. “When I got into the music business, I realised they had little holes for everything – ‘OK, now this is the R&B guy, you’re the black singer’, and I was like, ‘What’s going on here?’ I didn’t know these categories. I was educated across the board from country music, classical music, classical pipe organ music, R&B, the blues, gospel.”
Where did it all come from? “That one little town.” Tuskegee, he reckons, had a population of about 2,000 when he was growing up. “When I started writing, someone would say, ‘Where does Sail On come from, that’s a country song? Three Times a Lady, that’s a waltz? Where’s the funk coming from?’ Well, that’s all here at the house with the guys on the campus. It was so rich in culture.”
One of the best bits of advice he received came early on, from Sammy Davis Jr. He told Richie that his career was about to go through the roof and that he would be approached by the biggest players in the industry who would offer him everything he’d dreamed of and more. Richie responded enthusiastically. Davis Jr told him it wasn’t anything to be enthusiastic about. He instructed Richie, “Your answer to everything they offer you is no.” When Richie asked why, Davis Jr said, “Because I said yes. And I don’t want you to make the same mistakes I made.” He was warning you off being owned? “That’s right. That alone saved me a hundred years of misery.”
By the beginning of the 1980s, he was branching out. He wrote chart-topping songs for other artists – Lady for the country star Kenny Rogers and Endless Love for Diana Ross (her biggest hit, on which he duetted). In 1982, he went solo and for the next five years he was a constant in the US Top 10, with four No 1s. There were clubbing classics such as Dancing on the Ceiling and All Night Long, and there was schmaltz galore such as Say You, Say Me and Hello (with its cheesy-creepy video of a drama teacher falling in love with his blind pupil).
Music promoters and executives asked what Richie was playing at when he wrote for Rogers. They suggested he had become divorced from his roots. It infuriated him. “I bent myself into a pretzel to be black enough for R&B and accessible enough with pop promoters,” he writes. “Or as detractors in my own community later put it, ‘Lionel Richie crossed over and can’t get black’.”
When Richie joined Motown, Berry Gordy’s soul label was thriving. He got to know all the greats. The Commodores’ first tour was supporting the Jackson 5 in 1971. Richie, then 22, was like an older brother to 12-year-old Michael. In 1985, he and Jackson wrote the song We Are the World, which was produced by Quincy Jones and sold more than 20m copies to raise money for famine victims in Ethiopia.
He describes Jackson as “eccentric and extremely chaotic”. He says he would wear the same clothes till they disintegrated. “Quincy and I called Michael smelly.” He says Jackson would laugh because he knew he was being teased out of love. At one point, he was at Richie’s house and the stench was so strong that Richie presented him with a pair of his own jeans and a new pair of underpants, and told him to change into them. Later that day, Richie saw the discarded underwear and jeans in Jackson’s bedroom “lying there like roadkill”.
Jackson was cleared of child molestation in 2005, though the allegations were revived more than a decade later in the documentary Leaving Neverland. Richie’s daughter Nicole, who became famous in her own right as a reality TV star alongside Paris Hilton, was Jackson’s goddaughter. Nicole often slept in Jackson’s bedroom along with other children and has said she never witnessed anything inappropriate. “My parents would never put me in hands that they thought were dangerous. I never had any complaints, and, you know, I love him,” she said in 2003.
Richie talks movingly about Jackson’s genius and his battles. “I watched him struggle. Before I got into the fame business, at least I had my friends from school and college. I had some experiences. I had the opportunity to hang out at a football game. I knew what a date was. I’d been jilted. He missed it all. He. Missed. It. All. I was there with him when he was going to that studio every day after school and he’d pull in like a machine at 3pm and stay there till six. Just imagine a kid like that and all you hear is, ‘Watch out the girls are coming! You can’t trust her, you can’t trust them!’ I saw it.”
He claims many people were stealing from Jackson in one way or another. Was Richie in a position to advise him? He shakes his head. “No. When you’re in the war and you’re both ducking bullets it’s hard to give advice to the other soldier. The same crooks that were trying to take advantage of him were coming to take advantage of me.”
At the same time, he made so many incredible friends. He could tell stories about them all day long. There’s the time Stevie Wonder told him to get in the passenger seat of his car, and reversed down the driveway at speed, terrifying the life out of him (“I lost it completely and screamed, ‘Stevie, what the fuck are you doing!?!’”). Then there’s the occasion he took Nelson and Winnie Mandela clothes shopping at Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue in preparation for a reception in honour of the South African leader. (“Young man, I want to thank you for your lyrics and your music,” Mandela told him. “Your songs got me through many years while I was in prison.”)
I ask who influenced him most as a songwriter. “Smokey Robinson, Norman Whitfield and Marvin Gaye. Each one in their own way would stop by and give me just a little thing. Marvin said to me, ‘What’s the most important note you’ll ever get, kid?’ I said I don’t know. And he said, ‘Hhhhhh-haaah.’ He inhales and exhales, Marvin-like. “Make sure they hear your breathing on the record. It’s not how hard you hit the note, it’s the storytelling.” What about Smokey? “Smokey is the lyricist of lyricists. But also what I love about him is he could have grown up in Tuskegee. He has that smooth way of teaching. It was always, ‘Little brother, let me teach you this, let me show you this, let me bring you in.’ When Smokey was with you in the room, you got nothing but knowledge.”
Of all his mentors, it’s his father he most often returns to. He tells me of the day Lyonel Sr explained that life had not tested his son yet, and when it did there would be people glad to see him fall. His father told him that the test comes to any person in the form of “the five Ds” – divorce, disease, disaster, disgrace and death. “His line to me was, ‘A great fighter is not determined by how many punches he can throw, it’s how many punches he can take. And you haven’t been hit yet.’”
Soon after, in June 1988, Richie was hit good and proper. He and his wife, former childhood sweetheart Brenda Harvey-Richie, had discreetly split up. Richie was dating Diane Alexander, who went on to become his second wife and the mother of his two younger children Sofia and Miles. When he was at Alexander’s house, there was a knock on the door. It was Brenda. She confronted Richie about the relationship and then physically attacked both Richie and Alexander. The police were called, Brenda was charged with corporal injury to a spouse, battery and resisting arrest, and the story became front-page news.
How did he cope? Badly, he says. “Disaster and disgrace, that’s two of them, back to back. And you think, how do I maintain this dignified approach when the curtain has been pulled away and you have to survive that? All of Dad’s teachings came together at that central point of my life. He didn’t tell me what was going to happen, he just told me it’s going to happen, but when it does, don’t be shocked about it, just remember to do one thing. Get. Up. Off. The. Floor.”
But that was easier said than done. Richie still wasn’t done with the Ds. In 1990, Lyonel Sr died, then one of his vocal cords haemorrhaged because of overuse and he was told he might never be able to sing again. (It took four operations to fix.) At his nadir, he retreated to Jamaica and spent five days drinking till he “damn near passed out”. He sat alone, on a deckchair at the ocean’s edge, polishing off bottles of Cristal champagne, oblivious to the fact that he was up to his waist in water. Later, when he was recovering, he spoke to Motown executive Skip Miller about it. “I said, ‘You know what, Skip, man, if I hadn’t quit the business I would have had a nervous breakdown.’ And he said, ‘Oh, you had a nervous breakdown all right, that’s why you did quit the business.’”
How long did he stop working for? Five years. Five years.” He sounds as if he can’t quite believe it. Richie says it’s a tough industry, and he starts totting up its victims. “Who did we lose? Everybody. Marvin’s gone. You name it, they’re gone. Michael, Prince, Hendrix …”
I ask what he thinks his parents would have made of today’s United States and Trump as president. He responds with a surge of raw emotion. “You know what, I’m glad my dad and that group is not here. It would be tough. I can’t even imagine.” He talks about the progress they witnessed through the civil rights movement, and how it is now being reversed. “And now we’re going back to eliminate it.” He looks at his manager. “Bruce can tell you, I’m having my worst moments because you can’t erase all of this progress. I made a statement in 1983 when we were talking about civil rights, and I said, ‘We still talk about that?’, as if to say that’s behind us, we’re interested in the future. Now, here we are 42 years later and we’re still talking about the same thing. But it’s even worse. What I’m watching now is not only going backwards, but it is the erasing of history.”
Is he scared for the US? “Always,” he says with a hint of desperation in his voice. Would he ever go into politics to challenge Trump? He laughs nervously, then answers definitively. “Never.” Then he remembers he’s Lionel Richie, the eternal optimist, the lover man, the great unifier, who brings the world together through music. He points out he’s not only African American, he’s also part Cherokee Native American on his grandmother’s side, with a splash of French-Canadian, English and Scottish thrown in for good measure. Of course, he was always going to bring people together. “If you’re waiting for Martin Luther Richie, he ain’t coming. But if you’re waiting for Lionel Richie, the bearer of love, you got me. Back in the day I was thinking politics is a great place. But I saw Malcolm, I saw Martin, I saw all the civil rights guys, and, guess what, they didn’t survive it. It’s not survivable. Politics is ugly, it’s nasty, and it’s got even worse now because they character assassinate you before you even get in. And I found an avenue that works well for me.”
He tells me of a Unesco meeting where he was invited to perform and talk about the power of music in bridging differences to a group of Middle East delegates from countries including Israel, Jordan and Egypt. When he asked why he’d been invited, they told him he was the only person everyone could agree on. “I can walk into a room. The room does not like each other. It’s suspicious of each other. I walk in and everybody starts smiling. That’s powerful.” Then he takes me to a typical gig back in the 60s. “ Right in the middle of all this craziness, on the third row there’s the guy from the Klan. Big fan. I can have a conversation with anybody and get the message out better than I can by standing on a podium, pounding my fist down and saying, ‘Follow me!’”
In the end, he says, that message has to be love, and he’s thankful he’s surrounded by it in his own life – three children, three grandkids and his partner, Lisa. Is there any truth in the rumour that they’re thinking of tying the knot? He makes a shushing noise. “I don’t want to jinx it. I love the rumour,” he says, giggling like a schoolboy. “Keep it like that.”
As I prepare to leave, Bruce asks us not to mention Trump in the piece. Richie, though, says he’s fine with what he has said. But, yes, he’s sticking with love rather than politics. “I’m the pied piper of that whole thing, buddy. ‘I love you’: three corny words that the world needs to hear every day. Wants to hear every day. Now I’d rather say that than, ‘Let’s go fight the revolution.’”
• Truly by Lionel Richie is published by William Collins, £25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
