Neil helped reshape the Mynah Birds into the band I’d been hearing inside my head.” He got all over those strings and showed me some shit I’d never seen before. “His singing was a little strange, but his facility on the guitar was crazy. “Like most of the other white musicians in Toronto, he was into Black music,” James says of Young in Glow. That added to my status.”īut James wanted to change the group’s sound. As James tells it, his friend Joni Mitchell and his Mynah Birds bandmate, Bruce Palmer, both recommended adding then-unknown Toronto native Neil Young to the Mynah Birds, because he could help the group attain a “blues-based folk rock” sound. This led to the creation of the band The Mynah Birds, featuring “Little Ricky” on lead vocals. Inspired by The Beatles, Kerr promoted the group heavily, and they gained local buzz.Īt first, they were basically an R&B band, and James says in Glow that he stood out “as an authentic R&B singer living in a city where white musicians were striving to play authentic R&B.
He soon met a budding manager named Colin Kerr, who was impressed with his musical talents and invited him to his cafe, The Mynah Bird. They brought James into the Toronto music scene, where he went by the name Little Ricky, in part to evade arrest for escaping Vietnam. The Rick James memoir Glow, written with David Ritz, who is featured in the new Rick James doc Bitchin’ on Showtime.
(Martin Scorsese chronicled what was billed as their last performance in his 1978 documentary The Last Waltz.) They would later become famous as members of The Band. He loved the coffeehouses, clubs and strips bars, but was soon confronted by three drunk Americans who accused him of being a draft dodger and called him a racial slur.įortunately, a group of Canadian musicians came immediately to his aid. He set out for Yorkville, which he had been told was “the Greenwich Village of Toronto,” according to Glow. After reporting to Rochester to be shipped over to Vietnam, he decided to instead buy a one-way ticket to Toronto - and went AWOL.Īlso Read: Yes, Rick James Avoided the Manson Murders Because of a Hangover As he explains in Glow, he lied about his age to enlist in the Navy at the age of 16, but soon decided it was a mistake.
James was born James Ambrose Johnson, Jr., and grew up in Buffalo, New York, just 100 miles from Toronto, across the U.S.-Canadian border. James recounted his Toronto years in his magnificent 2014 memoir, Glow, which was completed after the singer’s 2004 death by author David Ritz, who appears throughout Bitchin’, which was directed by Sacha Jenkins and debuts Friday on Showtime.
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“For the whole 10 years, it was a constant battle in me trying to acquaint them with what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it.The Rick James documentary Bitchin’: The Sound and Fury of Rick James, briefly touches on James’ stint in a band with Neil Young called The Mynah Birds - one of those rock collaborations that sounds too weird to be true.Īnyone with a basic knowledge of popular music probably thinks of James as the funk-driven, volatile mastermind of tracks like “Super Freak” and “Mary Jane,” and Neil Young as the earnest architect of ballads like “Heart of Gold” and protest anthems like “Rockin’ in the Free World.”īut their musical tastes melded beautifully in 1966 Toronto, where James went to avoid being drafted into the Vietnam War, and immediately fell into a thriving Canadian music scene that spawned Young, Joni Mitchell, and Gordon Lightfoot, among others. “They never totally understood what I was trying to do, where I was trying to come from with my music,” he said in a 1988 interview with The Associated Press. His hits in 1980 included the album “Garden of Love” and the singles “Fool on the Street,” “Love Gun,” “Come into My Life,” and “Big Time.” The following year came the well-received album “Street Songs” and the hits “Give it to Me Baby” and “Super Freak.”Īfter a decade at Motown, James left the label as the sexually graphic themes of his music conflicted with the company’s conservative approach to pop music.
James went to work for Motown in the 1970s and got the chance to record an album, “Come and Get It,” which was released in 1978 and produced the hit “You and I.” He followed with “Bustin’ out of L Seven,” which had hits with the single “Bustin’ Out” and “Mary Jane,” and another popular LP, “Fire it Up.”