Now, here's a fella who's been here a lot.
I like him a lot. [WOMEN CHEERING]
He is...
He's not only-- Yes, he's sexy, you don't have to...
Not only good-looking, he has about that much talent
and he spreads it a lot.
I mean, for a man with minimal talents,
he's gone a long way.
[ALL LAUGH]
No, you know, seriously, he writes, he produces,
he engineers, plays all the instruments.
He sings, he does it all, he is a one-man band.
He is Ray Parker Jr.
♪ If there's something strange In your neighborhood ♪
♪ Who you gonna call? ♪ ♪ Ghostbusters ♪
♪ If there's something weird And it don't look good ♪
♪ Who you gonna call? ♪ ♪ Ghostbusters ♪
♪ I ain't 'fraid of no ghost ♪
PARKER JR.: People think I woke up in the morning,
wrote "Ghostbusters," and went back to bed.
Let me tell you, a lot more happened before that moment.
Let's just start at the beginning.
[JANICE DEMPSEY & STEVE SECHI'S "STONED SOUL" PLAYING]
I grew up in Detroit, Michigan, which I'm very proud of,
because Detroit in the '60s and '70s
was the land of opportunity.
Motown cast a shadow over our neighborhood
that just couldn't be erased.
♪ Spread the word ♪
All of the parents in the neighborhood--
Our neighborhood was like one.
You could get a spanking from any mother
or any father in the neighborhood
if you were wrong.
Seemed like all the parents were good.
All the people were good people.
I happened to have the greatest parents.
My father was a blue-collar worker, does the manual labor.
Working on the factory floor.
He really wanted me to graduate college
and be the first white-collar worker in the family.
That was his dream for me.
That wasn't my dream.
Around about 10 years old,
I saw the Lovin' Spoonful on The Ed Sullivan Show.
♪ Do you believe in magic ♪
♪ In a young girl's heart ♪
Something about the electric guitar.
I thought it was the most amazing thing.
It fascinated me, I liked the sound of it.
It was electric,
and it was just moving into the new century for me.
Man, did that turn me on. I said, "Man, I can get loud."
Ever since then, I've been playing the guitar.
The mentor who would change my life.
My teacher Alfred T. Kirby.
Alfred T. Kirby was a tall white guy in the ghetto.
I don't know how he got there.
But he was in the inner city at the school.
Mr. Kirby named the band "The Stingrays" after me.
In this band, there was already my best friends,
Nathan Watts and Ollie Brown.
Ollie played the drums, Nathan played the trumpet.
Ollie and Nathan had no idea they'd been screwed.
[CHUCKLING] You know what I mean, so I was the leader. My band.
Called The Stingrays.
[LAUGHS]
The Stingrays.
I didn't realize that he had snuck his name in there.
But that's my brother.
PARKER JR.: Well, we played PTA meetings,
orphanages,
and we'd do local shows, and we were the hot band.
People thought we were so cute.
Shortly thereafter, I was riding a bike
and going kind of fast.
I think it was in one of those five banana seats.
Five-speed shifting Huffys.
I'm riding this thing, and I look cool,
and I put my foot out and it hit the curb,
twisted it all the way around, broke it,
and I had to have a cast up from my waist
all the way down to my toes.
So I practiced my guitar at least 12 hours a day
every single day for the next year and a half,
and that's where I got my 10,000 hours
at playing the guitar.
RIVERS: When I met Ray, I already had a band together
called the Dynasonics, and Ollie Brown was our new drummer.
He says, "I got this friend, he's great. You gotta get him."
I said, "Sure, I'll go over and listen."
He says, "Listen on the phone."
"I'm Losing You" was out by The Temptations,
and Ray played it on the phone and played all the guitar parts.
[THE TEMPTATIONS' "I'M LOSING YOU" PLAYING]
♪ Your love is fading I can feel your love fading ♪
It's so good, I said, "Tell him he's hired."
And Sylvester's band was more sophisticated.
His band had chords,
an electric Wurlitzer piano like Ray Charles would play.
It was just devastating, we'd never heard a sound like that,
and I was like, "They sound like a record."
Now, let me tell you the thing about the band I did not like.
Sylvester, he'd make us wear
these silver suits with white shirts,
and we're like 14 years old,
what are we doing in silver suits?
That was his look that he thought was great.
When you see him today, he's still like that.
By the way, he was Michael Jackson's band leader,
until Michael saw him in a suit and tie,
fired him on the spot.
The music was perfect,
he just didn't like him in a suit and tie.
And that's how Ray and I got started.
Even all of these years later,
having worked with some outstanding guitar players
for many, many decades...
Uh...
Ray is still my first call.
[STEVE SECHI'S "LOVE JONES" PLAYING]
PARKER JR.: When I was 13 years old,
Billy Henderson called me to audition for The Spinners.
♪ It's a shame, the way You mess around with your man ♪
PARKER JR.: Motown, there you go.
[STEVE SECHI'S "GOT TO KEEP ON MOVING" PLAYING]
The opportunities, we had Motown, we had Stax,
we had Holland-Dozier-Holland.
We had the clubs that you could go to at any night.
If you're 14, 15 years old,
you could have your parents drive you around.
You could see six or seven bands a night.
♪ One thing I can tell ya Is I've been around ♪
I was playing a gig at Latin Quarter, and Hamilton Bohannon
came in and heard me play.
I met Ray Parker. Um...
He was 14 years old.
One night I went to this club.
I saw this kid playing guitar.
I introduced myself, "I'm Bohannon, I'm the band leader
of Motown Records, and I like the way you play."
Now, Hamilton Bohannon was the drummer for Motown,
but he also was the band leader
who would orchestrate all of the Motown stuff.
I heard him play and caught my ear.
Not one ear, he caught two ears.
Pulled me, and he speaks like this.
"Come play with us. Playing the big band,
I'm Motown band leader."
That thing, and I'm like, "Who is this guy?
What's he talking about?"
He says, "I like the way you play.
Can you play with the big boys?"
Came over my mother's house, assured my parents
there'll be no drugs, no alcohol.
He personally picked me up and dropped me off every day,
if my parents couldn't.
I wanted his parents to trust me with Ray.
I became like instant family with him.
That's how I got in the band at the 20 Grand.
Gladys Knight was the first group we played with,
along with Parliament, which was George Clinton singing...
♪ I just wanna testify What your love... ♪
That's the Parliament before it became Funkadelic.
I work with The Funk Brothers,
James Jamerson, The Temptations,
Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye.
[JANICE DEMPSEY & STEVE SECHI'S "SWEET BABY" PLAYING]
The neighborhood I grew up in, white people were only on TV.
[CHUCKLES] I thought that white people were in the TV, literally.
We just lived in a very segregated neighborhood
where you didn't see white people.
If you walked around the block
and you looked at the neighbors,
they were all Black.
A club, everybody was Black.
If you turned on the TV, everybody was white.
It's all we knew.
HUDSON: It was very segregated.
Certain lines you couldn't cross.
The city right next to Benton Harbor is called Fair Plain.
Blacks weren't allowed in Fair Plain after dark.
If you were caught there,
the police would stop you or worse.
I went to a high school that was integrated,
but only in the sense
that Blacks were allowed to go there.
We were separated.
We were on a different system than the white kids.
We grew up in a time
that America was talking a lot about freedom,
but it wasn't demonstrating that.
So 19--
Gosh, '67, I think I was 13 years old.
We're going on a trip 'cause my dad had a little speedboat.
Gonna take it to Lake Erie and catch some perch
because I like these fresh perch.
And that was the first time I ever heard the words "Riot."
I didn't know what he was talking about.
But we had got to like Dexter and the Boulevard, and he said:
"We gotta turn around. There's a riot."
I was like, "What's a riot?"
REPORTER 1: Four days of rioting, looting, and arson rock Detroit
in the worst outbreak of urban racial violence this year.
Entire blocks of homes become infernos.
At least 36 are killed, more than 2000 injured,
and damage topped the half billion mark.
REPORTER 2: Governor Romney declares a state of emergency.
[REPORTS OVERLAPPING]
[♪♪♪♪♪]
[GUNSHOTS]
Saw fires everything, everywhere.
Tanks running down the street.
Our high school we went to
was the base for the National Guard.
That's like ten blocks away at the most.
So it was kind of hard for a kid that's only 14 and 15 years old.
You know, it was amazing.
But thank God that's over with.
I mean, you could literally--
I was right in it where I could see the flames.
I saw the National Guard down the street.
That's the neighborhoods we were in.
And I tell you, I got home, then I saw cars,
convertible cars going with couches
and the word looting came up,
which I never knew what looting was.
And then we watched TV,
people were throwing bottles in the building windows
and burning the buildings down.
And my house, you could look straight up like this
and see the fire straight overhead.
But the gas station would be,
I don't know, two, three blocks away.
So it was just unbelievable what was going on at the time,
I was scared to death, I thought the world was coming to an end
'cause I'd never seen anything like that since I was born.
And it really tore the city apart at that time.
I mean, everything was just torn up.
Walking to school weeks later,
all of the stores we shopped at,
all the stores were burnt down, burnt to the ground.
All the windows were broke
and everything taken out of the stores.
It was just a really, really, really scary time in my life.
And the only thing I could depend on was playing my guitar.
I was on my way to Cass Tech, and I was at the bus stop.
I got my books, I'm going to Cass Tech.
Getting on the same bus every morning.
Four, five policemen came out,
drew their guns, and they were saying stop.
And I'm thinking, "Oh, my gosh, oh, my gosh,
somebody's in trouble."
You're looking around. I'm about to get on the bus.
Looking around to see what's happening,
and they were actually pointing the guns at me.
Grabbed me, took me in the alley,
nobody said anything, and I'll never forget.
If they did it to me now, you'd break my arms.
But at that particular time, they had me like this,
up on top of the car, lifting me off the ground.
And the other three or four guys
were just pounding on me with their fists.
And this is probably the point in my life
where I really thought: "It's over now.
You're not gonna come out this one alive."
My best friend, Nathan Watts,
who's the band leader for Stevie Wonder.
His mother came on her back porch
and she was cleaning a rug of all things.
Just mercy from God at that moment.
She just happened to be cleaning a rug
and she looked over, looked straight down
and saw me getting beat up.
And she said, "Hey, he's a good kid. What are you doing?"
They just look at her and they didn't say anything.
Stopped beating on me and they just let me drop.
I just laid on the ground for a while.
Nobody ever told me why they did this.
I wasn't arrested.
They never even told me what I did.
They just took me in the alley and started beating on me.
And, uh...
You know... Ahem.
Man, it just kind of killed--
Killed my groove for sports and a few other things.
But, you know, I guess like anything else,
the positive that came out of it
is it made me want to stay home and just practice my guitar.
And someday, if I could get good enough on the guitar,
that would be my way out.
You know, my way out of this craziness.
♪ I bet you're wondering How I knew... ♪
Bohannon introduces me to Marvin Gaye
and we started sessions with Marvin Gaye when I was 15.
Those sessions were in the daytime.
[CHUCKLES] There goes some of the work in school.
I played on a lot of Marvin Gaye.
But the one I remember the most
is the live album at Oakland Coliseum.
Thank you.
[CROWD CHEERING]
[MARVIN GAYE'S "DISTANT LOVER" PLAYING]
And what I remember is we started up
on "Distant Lover," right?
And all of a sudden, I almost dropped my guitar,
the screaming was so impeccably loud.
It wasn't mic'd in the audience.
But on the record you can hear the screaming
coming through the guitar mics
and drum mics and the bass mics.
When he said "Distant Lover,"
and there's space before he starts singing the verse,
was just the loudest thing.
The Rolling Stones concert was never that loud.
I never heard anything this loud before or after.
♪ Distant lover ♪
[AUDIENCE CHEERING, SCREAMING]
RIVERS: I started working as house pianist
with Holland-Dozier-Holland's Invictus label.
Once I was there, I wanted to get Ray on board.
PARKER JR.: For those who don't know Holland-Dozier-Holland,
they wrote "Stop in the Name of Love,"
"Sugar Pie Honey Bunch,"
a whole bunch of other stuff,
so this was a really big thing.
And every day I'd stay home,
hoping that somebody would get sick,
and then Sylvester could put my name in the pot
and say call Ray.
The first time we was aware of Ray
was through McKinley Jackson.
McKinley Jackson was the arranger.
My first question was, where has he been?
Where did he come from? And how can we keep him?
Holland-Dozier-Holland had just left Motown
and started a company called Invictus Records
and Hot Wax Records.
I was trying to bring in new blood
and Ray was the first of those to come in.
I'm 15, I'm coming into Holland-Dozier-Holland,
where Robert White and Eddie Willis just left.
And here's this young kid,
I got a little bit of peach fuzz here, an afro,
and I don't look like anything that I know what I'm doing.
And they said, "Who is this guy you're bringing in here?"
When I saw this little kid come in.
[BOTH LAUGH]
They said, "He better play, McKinley,
or it's gonna be on you."
And he came in with a small amp, came in and started playing.
It was like...
That was it.
He started playing and he was good.
Really, I was shocked, you know.
I'll never forget the name of that song was:
"Everything Good is Bad, Everything Bad is Good."
♪ Everything good is bad ♪
♪ Everything bad is good ♪
And McKinley put me on a wah-wah guitar,
a couple other guitars, and by the time we were done,
we had three or four guitars on this same record.
And I thought to myself, I got them now.
[CHUCKLES] He's overdubbed four guitars, if he didn't like me,
I'd been out of there a long time ago.
From there, the rest is history.
He executed and executed well.
So we were good and I did all of their records.
♪ Everything good is bad ♪
They had groups like the Honey Cone, "Put it in the Want Ads,"
Laura Lee, "If You Can Beat Me Rockin',
You Can Have My Chair,"
Freda Payne, "Bring the Boys Back Home,"
Chairmen of the Board, "Patches."
All of those songs I played on
and just loved all of the acts that were there,
just wonderful.
♪ Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah ♪
♪ Everything bad is good ♪
So I got a permanent gig at 15 years old making $350 a week.
Jewish bar mitzvahs and weddings were about 35 bucks a pop.
And then two sessions a week at different studios
making 90 bucks every three hours.
So I was pulling in a good $600, $700 a week.
It got so that everybody that heard him
wanted him on their sessions.
That's how good he was.
That's how good he is, don't say he was, he's still good.
[CHUCKLES]
All of the things that happened to me in Detroit.
There were bad things, but Detroit is still my favorite
because it was the land of opportunity.
I called Stevie Wonder one night and I said:
"You gotta hear his guitars. Name's Ray Parker."
And I gave Stevie Wonder Ray Parker's phone number.
Is this Ray Parker Jr.? This is Stevie Wonder.
Okay, Music of My Mind is my favorite record.
Used to put it in my car, drive around listening to that.
When somebody calls you that's really famous,
or someone that you happen to be a big fan of,
the first thing you think is my friends are playing a prank.
Now let's back up just a bit.
When Stevie Wonder called, you can't just go right past it.
I didn't really believe that Stevie Wonder--
Come on. Stevie Wonder? Calling me?
What are we talking about here?
I'm sitting home in Detroit and the phone rings,
Stevie Wonder's on the phone.
I took the phone and hung it up. I really did.
I was like, it's one of my friends.
Click, click, and he called back.
He's very persistent, called back.
I hung up again, I think maybe the third time
I put some words that I shouldn't have,
maybe some four letter words and hung up.
I thought he was kidding, it's okay.
He thought I was kidding and so I called him back
because I was determined to have him to play
and I was excited about his talent.
So I call him again and he believed it.
And I said, "Hey, this is Stevie, I'm not playing.
You hang up on me again, you get punched out.
You know, I know people in Detroit too."
And what I remember distinctly, he said:
"Look, we're not communicating here."
He says, "Hold on. I want to play you something."
He played the rhythm track to "Superstition."
If you remember what "Superstition" sounds like,
the drums go...
[IMITATES DRUMS]
And then I heard the Moog Bass and the Clavinet come in.
And I went, oh, my gosh,
I've been hanging up on Stevie Wonder,
what am I doing here? Come on.
♪ Superstition ain't the way ♪
He says, "You don't have to audition.
We're going to go to L.A.,
we're gonna cut the Talking Book album,
then we're gonna go on tour with The Rolling Stones."
Everything changed from that moment on.
So it's me playing on Sesame Street
with Stevie Wonder when I was 18.
We're playing "Superstition."
It's just a classic thing and we're on Sesame Street,
which I used to watch as a kid with Big Bird
and the famous characters are there.
Right after that, go on tour with The Rolling Stones.
I'd never seen anything like this.
People are screaming. I'm like what's happening here?
I'm just a kid from Detroit, where we at with this stuff?
♪ Then you suffer ♪
♪ Superstition ain't the way ♪
♪ No, no, no ♪
[FUNKY RIFF PLAYING]
There was riff that Ray would always do
and I'd hear him on the sessions.
And I wanted him to come and play on that particular song.
"Maybe Your Baby."
PARKER JR.: He breaks out "Maybe Your Baby."
Just the funkiest thing I've ever heard.
I mean it's got...
I mean, sounds that aren't on any record that I worked on
or even heard from other people ever in life.
So this is a whole new experience. What do we do?
He really was incredible rhythmically.
I mean, he sort of set it off
with whatever musicians were playing
and as well any guitar player that would be playing too.
He just created, you know,
that kind of glue that put it together
with his rhythmic ability.
And followed the syncopations and the things that I want.
It was almost as if he was hearing my thoughts.
♪ ...made some other plans ♪
♪ Kind of makin' me worried ♪
♪ And I ♪
♪ Maybe your baby Done made some other plans ♪
♪ Oh, yeah ♪
EDWARDS: Stevie looked at his band members as his family.
He took us and put us on his stage,
which was a great achievement,
so he didn't like anyone really quitting
'cause that's like a family member
saying, "I'm pulling out of the clan."
I've been with Stevie Wonder for 45 years.
Forty-five years, Mr. Wonder.
When you come out of the School of Wonder,
you know things about music and how to make a song.
Ray could tell you he didn't learn how to make a song
until he worked with Stevie.
Stevie taught him everything.
Stevie taught me how to write songs.
Took me in the studio, paid for it,
recorded my songs, sang duets with me,
and arranged my music to show me how it would go.
So I'm thinking, why did I leave the band?
Well, I think he's still pissed at me
a little bit for leaving the band.
We were living in New York at the time,
and I really wanted to go to California
where the sun was shining.
Thought the music business was in California,
I wanted to be in California.
I broke the news to him that I was gonna leave.
I remember we had
like a military- drill-sergeant road manager,
he says, "You're not leaving the band.
Everybody's happy, shut up."
You know, it seemed like at one point
I was almost being held captive,
you know, in the band.
And I remember in Corpus Christi, Texas,
I slept on the couch at the airport.
I said, "I'm making my escape."
He wanted to be the star and he did it.
I'm proud of him for that.
INTERVIEWER: And Stevie's pissed?
[BABBLING]
I wanted him to do a record with me,
but that was not what was meant to be.
You know, so he did his thing and it was great.
And I'm just happy.
Happy for his success.
[STEVE SECHI'S "GOODBYE BABY" PLAYING]
PARKER JR.: I had the belief that if I could get to California
that I could make it.
I know everybody says that.
You know, I'm gonna go to Hollywood
and become a star.
But it's gotta happen for somebody,
so I thought my number was there.
I would go to studio like The Record Plant,
or something similar, that was a very, very popular studio.
I'd take a guitar in one hand, amp in the other,
and every morning I'd go sit out in front of those studios
with my guitar and block the door.
If you want to get in here,
you talk to me or listen to me play.
PASSMAN: When I met Ray, he was really young.
He was 19 years old.
It was evident that this was a guy
who understood what it was about.
There's two elements to being successful in the music business
as a creative person. One is talent.
And two is drive.
Ray was that great combination of having talent and drive.
I was very, very boisterous,
and I would tell people:
"You can let me play the guitar
or hear me talk for the next 20 minutes,
and get in your way,
or you could let me play for a few minutes, listen to this,
and I'm out your hair."
And most would look at that and go:
"Wow, in ten seconds, I ain't gotta talk to him."
The main person in L.A. who really affected my--
Bigger than anybody was Gene Page.
He put me into the session scene
and really got me started with it.
Gene Page was the number one arranger.
He did everything from "You Lost That Lovin' Feeling"
by the Righteous Brothers,
to all the Barry White stuff,
all the Lionel Richie stuff
that you hear orchestrated,
Elton John records that you hear orchestrated.
He wrote the strings and horns
on the biggest instrumental in history, "Love's Theme."
[THE LOVE UNLIMITED ORCHESTRA'S "LOVE'S THEME" PLAYING]
Glen Campbell was a guitar player
in the studio with Gene Page.
Glen Campbell got his own TV show.
Who would think that would benefit me,
but that left a slot for me to come in.
Gene Page invited me to a Barry White session.
And I remember Barry was playing a song back really loud,
it had a train whistle in the front.
Me being from Detroit,
I went over to the tape machine.
I mean, the speakers were loud, everybody's grooving.
[THE LOVE UNLIMITED ORCHESTRA'S "WHAT A GROOVE" PLAYING]
And I had an idea in my head for the song,
so I went over to the tape machine
and I hit the stop button, and the music stopped.
And Barry said, "What the ----?"
I said, "Excuse me, Mr. White, that's a wonderful song,
but I got an idea."
And I don't know what he saw, but he looked over and says:
"Well, then get the F in there and play it."
I started playing the lick, he liked it.
I stopped because I was like:
"Roll the tape back, I'll play it all the way."
He said, "Keep playing it."
So there's a hole in the record,
about a bar-and-a-half, where there's no guitar playing.
That's him pushing the button, telling me, "Keep playing."
I picked back up, it goes on the record.
We come best of friends.
Barry White's manager lived upstairs over me.
He pulls over in his white Mark VII,
parks in front of the gate where the door was
because he's Barry White.
He's not gonna park on the street,
he's gonna park where it's comfortable.
He gets out the car, I see him.
So I run, get in my car, drive it around,
because I want to play him a song. But unfortunately,
his car was parked too close, so when I triggered the thing,
the gate lifted his car up,
then the gate fell on top of his car,
the gate ripped off the building and fell down,
and he was like, "Thanks, Ray, I needed that."
And I was like, "I'm sorry, but you gotta hear my song."
Would you believe I still sat him in the car after that?
He could have punched me out, right?
I sat him in the car, played him a song.
He took the song home, wrote the words to it,
and that song is "You See the Trouble with Me."
It has been number one twice all over the world.
We sold 6, 7 million records.
♪ I can't do nothin' Without my baby ♪
Barry White did not need one of my songs on his album.
Nothing. He just didn't need them.
He's the biggest selling artist at that time period.
RIVERS: Barry was into no outside songs,
but he made an exception for Ray and had a big hit.
Who impressed you the most? Who--?
There's a guy in California, Barry White.
Really, when you came out here?
What did you find by watching him work?
You were a studio musician.
I like the speed that he did it with,
three hits in one day.
I've been trying to do that. I can't figure that out yet.
Barry White had a certain strange way of doing things.
He said, "I'm gonna pay you guys triple scale...
but I want eight songs done.
Now you can do it in 12 hours, or three hours and go home.
I don't care. You get the same amount.
Here's the money I'm allocating."
And so one day, we cut "You're My First, Last And Everything,"
"Can't Get Enough of Your Love,"
and "Love's Theme," all in the same day.
[CHUCKLES] Just all in the same day.
Bam, bam, bam.
I can't remember the first time I met Ray,
but he blew into town
and into the scene like a firestorm.
I had the fortune of being a first-call studio guitarist.
And one day, I walked into a record session
and there was this cat sitting next to me.
I thought, "Let's hope this guy's good."
After one pass, I was convinced
this guy really is
the best rhythm guitarist I'd ever heard.
Ray is the greatest living rhythm-guitar player.
He's just-- He's just badass.
He has this incredible funky-rhythm thing
that nobody in town had.
When Ray was young, he wasn't humble.
[LAUGHS]
If you wanted to know how good Ray was, ask him.
We were considered, you know, "the young, hot guitar players."
When I first met Ray Parker Jr.,
Ray shakes my hand and says:
"I'm the greatest guitar player in the world."
And I smiled and I said, "We'll see about that."
[LAUGHS]
I think he's great and I think he was great then.
But if he had said that,
I would've smacked him on his mouth.
What do you say to that? It's Ray Parker.
I cracked up and said I'd heard.
Ray's a confident man.
He's very confident. By the way,
he's not the greatest guitar player.
But he is very, very good.
This man came in with a style
that none of us heard before
and none of us have ever heard since.
To me, these guys are my family, right, and we all feel so close.
And it's the kind of love and it's the kind of respect
that I can't explain it to my wife.
I can't explain it to my friends.
You have to be one of the guys
to understand exactly what it really is
and how important it is.
All of us, we all have such love for each other
and know that's our best time of our lives.
That was the best era of our lives.
Ray and I have this special bond,
which is: one brain, four arms, and two guitars.
Literally. It's like we're mind-reading each other.
The brains are locked in.
We just love so much what the other's playing,
and we just work off each other so well,
and our groove and our pocket is so similar, it just--
It's magical.
When we walk into a room
and more than one of us is in it,
it's like we revert back to 1976, '77.
Like we're just little kids in old-man suits.
Some of the greatest times of my life.
Best days of my life is playing in the studio with all the guys.
The best days, bar none,
the best times I had in my life. It was a fertile time for music.
The music business had a lot of money in it still.
Everybody was still excited.
Records were getting bought, people were playing.
Lot of work.
And to be at that time with all these artists
that wanted musicians like us to play. Yeah.
[BILL WITHERS' "LOVELY DAY" PLAYING]
First, when I got the call to play on Bill Withers' record,
I guess he heard about me from some other people,
but, you know, I loved Bill Withers' records.
So I thought this was just too cool.
I'm going to play with Bill Withers.
♪ When I wake up In the morning, love ♪
♪ And the sunlight Hurts my eyes ♪
♪ And something Without warning, love ♪
If you look at the back of the album,
you see me in swimming trunks eating barbeque,
laying on the grass. It's that fun.
So we go to Bill's house and he loves to talk, right,
so he's starting his song off and I'm thinking:
"Wow, this could be one of those hits,"
like the other hits he's got.
So I came up with a little pluck chorus line on the guitar.
[PLAYING CHORUS LINE FROM "LOVELY DAY"]
Lot of people play different guitar parts,
but that's the guitar part on the song.
♪ Lovely day Lovely day, lovely day ♪
[BOZ SCAGGS' "JOJO" PLAYING]
The song "Jojo"...
was Ray and Steve Lukather.
[IMITATING GUITAR FROM "JOJO"]
It's this little relentless thing
that's more in the style of what Ray does to a song.
It's just what Ray does.
He always comes through with the good stuff,
and I just love him, so I get to see him and hang out.
[CHERYL LYNN'S "GOT TO BE REAL" PLAYING]
♪ What you think ♪
♪ What you feel now ♪
♪ What you know ♪
♪ To be real ♪
I'm in the presence of Cheryl Lynn.
Goodness, it doesn't get any better.
Luther Vandross sang duets with Cheryl Lynn.
My God, listen to you.
Nobody ever asked me to sing a duet with her.
I love singing with you. You will?
All the time, any time. Commitment time, I got it.
Y'all got a commitment. Any time. This is my guy.
♪ ...know ♪
[SCATTING]
♪ To be real ♪
♪ I said... ♪
♪ What you feel now ♪
♪ I said... ♪
When we cut "Got To Be Real,"
it was like knocking a baseball out the park
the first time you picked up the bat.
It's like, "How do you swing this?" Bam.
Nobody ever saw the baseball again, it's just gone.
I mean, immediately, when we got done playing
and we were with all the best musicians,
we all said to ourselves, "Boy, that sounds good."
That's it, you know.
And you can take it all you want some more,
but what else was supposed to happen? Everybody got down.
Sounds were great, the mix was great.
Everything was just wonderful.
♪ To be real ♪
♪ It's got to be real ♪
♪ To be real ♪
♪ It's got to be real ♪
♪ To be real ♪
♪ No, no, no, no ♪
[VOCALIZING]
♪ I've got to have it, baby ♪
It was the instrumental I cut
that they played on The WAVE all the time,
which is like a jazz record. It's called "After Midnite."
[PLAYING "AFTER MIDNITE"]
You say, "Why did you pick up this guitar
as opposed to one of those jazz guitars
or one of the others?" Well, in those days,
the truth is, I was just lazy,
so I grabbed the first guitar that was close.
[HERBIE HANCOCK'S "STARS IN YOUR EYES" PLAYING]
Herbie Hancock is like music royalty.
First time I met Herbie
was in San Francisco at The Automatt.
I got called, I'm thinking, "We get to play some jazz now."
All my life I've been studying some...
[PLAYS JAZZ RIFF]
I only play... A bunch of notes.
And Herbie, I'll never forget, he stopped me
in the first session and said, "What are you doing?
It's really true that...
you know, my foundation is in jazz.
That's not really Ray's foundation.
I'm thinking, "I'm with Herbie Hancock,
we're gonna play some jazz."
He says, "No, I didn't call you for that.
Everybody told me you had that great feel on the rhythm guitar.
I'm waiting to hear that."
Ray was important to me
because he was able to add that groove
in a way that nobody can.
He says, "I got other people who can play that.
I called you, give me that groove,
and give me the rhythm and stuff."
And was I just shocked.
He may as well had punched me in the face.
Wait a minute, this is not what I thought.
So in less than 60 seconds,
I had to readjust my entire thought pattern.
♪ It's the same old story ♪
♪ About somebody with a dream ♪
We had some unbelievably wonderful times.
I was over his house in his studio working on a song.
So he's got these chords going fast, and I said, "Whoa."
He said, "Okay, that's it. That's all we need."
I said, "What are you talking about?"
He said, "Those chords you've just played.
We only need about the first four."
[SCOFFS]
"I can write a whole song
off of what you just played in two seconds
if you just slow the chords down."
And it was coming out so good,
that in the middle of his recording session
that he's paying for,
I took all his equipment, put it into my car,
put him in my car, drove him to my house to my studio,
and said, "Okay, now play that here."
After that, he liked my song so much
that I derived from his, we split it 50/50,
that he actually recorded that song on one of his albums later
with a female singer.
"Tonight's the Night" by Ray Parker Jr. and Herbie Hancock.
I met Chaka Khan in Chicago,
and she came up to me and said,
"I want you to listen to this tape."
And I was looking at her
and I had some other plans for her.
I told her, "Mail the tape to this address in San Francisco,"
since she wasn't cooperating with what I had going on.
But wouldn't you know, right, a year later,
I wrote this song with The Groove
and had this great guitar riff on it...
[PLAYING RIFF FROM "YOU'VE GOT THE LOVE"]
I remember hearing that in high school.
"Who played that?" Is it Ray Parker? Who is this cat?
Eighteen? Was he that young?
[LAUGHS]
But I remember that lick.
I want Stevie to cut this, he doesn't want to cut it.
I want Barry to cut this, he doesn't want to.
And Andre Fischer says:
"We'll cut it on our band Rufus."
I'm like, "What's a Rufus?"
I never even heard of this band before.
But no one else is gonna cut it.
Okay, Chaka comes in,
I wasn't there when she sang it, but she comes in,
finishes the lyric, sings a song, and I'll never forget.
I listened to that track after it was cut
and I said, "She could sing.
She could really-- Who's this?"
How about it for Rufus.
♪ Love me right ♪
♪ What's the matter with you? ♪
♪ Hold me tight ♪
♪ Why must I tell you What to do? ♪
♪ Smilin', smilin' ♪
♪ Comes as no surprise ♪
"You Got the Love" is about as funky as it gets.
[LAUGHS]
They killed that one.
♪ What I see in your eyes ♪
♪ The story goes ♪
♪ Oh, much deeper ♪
♪ Than the eye can see ♪
♪ Yes, it do ♪
♪ You got the love ♪
♪ Gimme the strength ♪
It's driving, it's just--
You can't stop it,
and that's Ray moving down the road.
♪ Whatever it is ♪
♪ I can't do without ♪
We sat down with Chaka and she says,
"You don't even remember me, huh?"
[LAUGHS] I'm like, "What do you mean? I never met you before."
She says, "Oh, yeah, we met before."
So she reminded me of the wrong I had done.
If I had listened to her tape
instead of thinking something else,
I probably would've owned the band myself.
I could've signed her. She was asking me to sign her.
And so how ironic is it
that I have a hit on the same voice a year later?
♪ I need you ♪
She's so sweet, she forgave me for that,
and we've been buddies ever since.
What it did for me was, A, it made me a songwriter.
People started to take notice of me.
And it gave me the confidence to go further,
do some more songs. "Boy, I'm on the radio."
By the way, hearing your song on the radio
was unbelievably wonderful, just to hear it play.
I used to just wait on the radio station,
listen all day just to hear my song on the radio,
so you can bop your head up and down. That was just wonderful.
I did a session one time for Jeff Barry, the producer.
Jeff took the guitar part, which was...
[IMITATES GUITAR]
And they lifted my guitar part
and made it something else.
Ray went way beyond the call of duty
with the Don Kirshner theme.
I mean, he literally, literally wrote that thing.
[DON KIRSHNER'S THEME PLAYING]
[IMITATING GUITAR]
I also didn't get paid for it, no credit.
I mean, that's just unforgivable, you know.
That's his mojo.
That's his jam. That's his thing.
And he didn't get the credit for it.
But that guitar part, what's interesting about it,
everybody recognized my style of playing
and everybody recognizes it when they hear it.
"That sounds like Ray."
"Did you get something for that?" No.
As a session musician, you get hired to come in.
You play three songs in like three hours usually.
And this particular day, we had a break
in between the two three-hour sessions, a lunch break.
So I'd written a song at home and came up with this groove,
but I wanted to hear what it's like
with the drums, bass, keyboard,
so I could hear what my groove was like.
When the producer came in at the end of lunch period
and said, "I like that groove. Can we cut that on Leo Sayer?"
I immediately told him, "Hey, this is my song, wait a minute.
It's my song I wrote at home, what we talking about?"
He said, "I'll give you your percentage,
but what do you wanna do, call your lawyer?
The groove is hot, let's record it."
So I put the track down,
showed the band what to play, put everything down,
and never got my credit for it.
And that turned out to be Leo Sayer's biggest song:
"You Make Me Feel Like Dancing."
♪ You make me Feel like dancing ♪
♪ I wanna dance The night away ♪
♪ You make me Feel like dancing ♪
And the song turned out to be number one R&B Song of the Year,
it won the Grammy.
It was devastating,
I'm sitting at home, looking at the TV,
and there's a guy I never met before collecting my Grammy.
I don't know Leo.
I know Richard Perry,
and I have no comment about him,
because we bumped heads, let's just say that.
And he's got a lot of credit on a lot of great works.
I'll leave it at that, but...
Come to think of it, I just thought of it,
he didn't give me credits on the Pointer Sisters record.
Many of us were all in the sessions
and you see something happen,
and when the credits are given out,
you know, something's missing, and...
it's the name of the business and it's a drag.
Like I said, you sit in that chair,
expected to give your all.
Sometimes you give too much and don't get enough for it.
But it's just the nature of the beast, you know,
but Ray didn't get mad, he got even.
Yeah, the idea was, you know,
you get 15 years or so as a session guy
and then you'd better move on to be either an arranger,
producer, artist.
He figured it out really early that:
"I'm not gonna give away all this stuff that I know
for a couple hundred bucks a day."
As a studio player, you were part of the puzzle.
You were one piece.
I wanted to be the whole puzzle and so did Ray.
Ray had too much fire, and he loved to write songs.
He had big dreams
and I think he even exceeded his own dreams.
He set the goalpost, then actually went further.
PARKER JR.: What motivated me to do more,
I went home to Detroit one Christmas,
and I had written two songs.
I had "You've Got the Love" by Rufus and Chaka Khan,
and I had the "Always Thinking of You"
on The Love Unlimited Orchestra, Barry White.
So I'm going home, thinking, "Wow, I'm a guitar player,
but I wrote two songs. I'm happening, I got this going.
This is my first year in L.A., I'm really booming."
So I get home to my mother.
She looked at the record, says, "I don't see you."
I said, "Mom, you're not gonna see me.
I'm not on the record, I wrote the song."
"What does that mean?"
"Means that I took a pencil down,
wrote the chords, the lyrics."
"Where is your name?" "My name is on the label."
And she picks up the label, she says:
"Bring me my magnifying glass."
So she gets the magnifying glass.
She does like this with it,
trying to see my name, and it says:
"R. Parker."
And even my mother knew a little bit about typing.
She says: "One more character
and they could've gave you 'Ray'
instead of the period. They could've gave you Ray.
They couldn't even put your whole name?"
Needless to say, when I arrived for Christmas,
my ego was this big, and before I left,
it had gotten all the way down.
And that's what motivated me to get everything going.
Ray had been on hit records,
million-sellers all over, but it wasn't his record.
He had a desire to be a star.
He was dreaming of stardom
because he's always dreamed of stardom,
and his dreams came true.
I vowed to myself, I said, "You know what?
I gotta make a record with my picture on the front
and my name on it,
so my mother will know what it is that I do."
[RAYDIO'S "JACK AND JILL" PLAYING]
I was on a Gene Page session with Ray,
and this is right after he did the "Jack and Jill" demo.
I'd heard it and I go, "That does sound like a hit.
I think you're gonna pop a hit."
We're on the stage for Gene Page. It was for the Osmonds.
And Gene's counting the tune off:
"One, two."
Right then, I hear "Jack and Jill" blasting in my earphones.
♪ Jill ♪ ♪ Jill ♪
♪ Always away from home ♪
Ray had taken his cassette machine
and shoved it up to the guitar mic on his amp,
and it was just--
I mean, talk about balls.
"Well, I want everybody to hear my tune."
I go, "Yeah, man, how about on a break?"
♪ Why do you think ♪
♪ Jack snuck down the hill ♪ ♪ He snuck down the hill ♪
♪ Because he needed love ♪
♪ Love he couldn't get From Jill ♪
♪ Oh, yes, he did ♪
♪ Why do you think ♪
♪ Jack snuck down the hill ♪ ♪ He snuck down ♪
He started talking about some song that he had written.
I said, oh, God, this guy's writing a song.
And then, he starts playing this "Jack and Jill" song.
"Jack, Jack came down," and this was good.
I was really copying a Holland-Dozier-Holland song.
I liked those songs where he went, "Fee-fi-fo-fum,
I can smell the presence of someone."
You know, "Somebody's been sleeping in my bed.
Somebody's been in my best booze."
They had one song.
"If you dance to the music,
you gotta pay to the piper. Ask your mama."
♪ If you dance to the music ♪
♪ Don't you know you got To pay it to the piper ♪
♪ Ask your mama ♪
I thought that was a wonderful song.
So they had all kinds of songs and lyrics like that,
so the music was great, and the lyrics had to be great.
I figured I could get the music good
because I played the guitar,
but I had to really work on getting the stories
up to where they were.
Lyrically, he had laid it out so well,
like it was a nursery rhyme type of song,
but he made it sexy, and he would just smile.
He was just playing that song.
And I remember thinking, damn, this is a hit.
No one makes it without the help of someone else.
One of my best friends, Carole Childs,
she took "Jack and Jill" away from her employer
and took it to Clive Davis.
He listened to it, and I'll never forget,
he had his eyes closed.
Right, he was just doing like this,
and I was like, is that good or bad?
Because I never had a meeting with him before. I don't know.
And at the end of it, when he opened his eyes,
he said, "Just play it again."
It was the songs. It was his writing.
It was him as really a superlative writer.
"Jack and Jill," incredible lyrics
that made it a big hit record.
PARKER JR.: More so than just a record executive,
Clive Davis was a person who sat,
listened to what I said, and if that wasn't enough,
after all the things I told him I wanted,
I told him, I can't sign this deal
unless you hire my friend Carol.
She threw herself under the bus
and got fired to help me get here.
So he not only took me.
He also hired Carol as well,
which made him unbelievably special to me.
♪ Jill ♪
My mama needed to hear my song in Detroit.
Al Perkins at WJLB said,
"Where's your mama at? Call her up."
He says, "The only song I'm gonna play
between now and the next 15 minutes is gonna be your song."
He played it four times in a row,
so my mama could hear my song on the radio.
We was good then.
Ray Parker Jr., nice to see you.
[AUDIENCE CLAPS, CHEERS]
FM, AM. It's got a highly geared-- Look at what you got--
I didn't notice that. It has the radio dial here.
DAVIS: Raydio was his creation.
It was the writing of Ray Parker Jr.
"Two Places at the Same Time," "The Other Woman,"
I mean, "You Can't Change That."
[PLAYING "YOU CAN'T CHANGE THAT"]
♪ Honey, I'll always love you I promise to always love you ♪
♪ 'Cause I think The whole world of you ♪
♪ And you can't change that No, no ♪
♪ There's nothing You can do or say ♪
♪ I thought about this For many a day ♪
♪ And my mind's made up To feel this way ♪
♪ And you can't change that ♪
♪ 'Cause you're the only one I love ♪
♪ And you can't change that ♪
♪ You're the only one I need ♪
♪ And you can't change that ♪
♪ You're the one I love ♪ ♪ You're the only one I love ♪
♪ And you can't change that ♪
♪ You're the only one I need And you can't change that ♪
From his thinking of the group mentality
to the emergence as an artist in his own right,
there I felt very strongly that it was really Ray.
We had to do it in stages because he was somewhat shy.
He was really a session,
wonderfully virtuoso guitar player.
And it took some doing to get him
to be in front of the microphone,
to feel comfortable.
So it was Raydio. Then, it was Raydio featuring Ray Parker Jr.
And finally we got it to Ray Parker Jr.
I never met any of his band.
I never met any other member. I mean...
So I never had to deal with any individual.
I mean, in effect,
he was really a solo artist from the beginning
that adopted a group name
because he was too shy and reticent
to put his own name out there.
But to me, I only met with him, only dealt with him,
never met anybody else within the group.
So it was always Ray Parker Jr. to me.
[RAY PARKER JR.'S "A WOMAN NEEDS LOVE" PLAYING]
♪ A woman needs a love Just like you do ♪
♪ Don't kid yourself Into thinking that she don't ♪
♪ She can fool around Just like you do ♪
PARKER JR.: Several things about "A Woman Needs Love"
are unique to anything that I've ever done.
One, that's the first song
I sang by myself all the way through.
I wrote it for Arnell to sing, but I put it in the wrong key,
and I had perfected the instruments,
and I was grooving, it sounded good.
I forgot to check it and see if he could sing it.
And then, I'm gonna give Arnell credit,
because he was the one who said,
"Man, you've been working on this thing forever.
Your voice sounds good. It sounds good.
Play it for Clive and see what he thinks."
♪ Because a woman needs love Just like you do ♪
♪ Hey, don't kid yourself Into thinking that she don't ♪
♪ She can fool around Just like you do ♪
When Clive heard "A Woman Needs Love,"
he said, "Instant smash. That's it."
The message was strong.
The girls loved the message at the time.
Women's situation was very interesting,
especially at radio stations,
because in those days,
you always had to pay a promotion man
to go bang the doors down, get on the radio station.
But this record didn't require a lot of promotion.
In fact, girls were buying me gifts. I got a TV from a girl.
And the program director, who's usually a guy,
would go, "I don't know if I'm playing that."
The girl that answers at the desk
will say, "How come you're not playing 'A Woman Needs Love'?"
So they'd make them play it,
so it was a really interesting record.
I'll never forget the promotion man telling me:
"This is the easiest record I ever wrote.
They have to play it.
Otherwise they're against women."
♪ And if you're smart ♪ ♪ Just like you ♪
♪ You better stop fooling around Hey, hey ♪
♪ 'Cause she will too ♪
♪ Just like you do ♪
You know, my mother and father used to dance to that
inside the house, you know, during, like, Christmastime.
Yeah, right.
You know, they'd pull that out,
or Friday night when they're playing cards,
and they turn on the music.
Why did you decide all of a sudden
instead of, you know, blending in with everybody else
to do your own thing?
I've been making hits for a long time,
but I decided I'd make my own record.
To me, you could've been
Ray Parker Jr. from the beginning. Exactly.
But it took, really, a passage of time
before you even agreed to say, "featuring Ray Parker Jr.,"
and then, to the solo aspect.
It was always just Ray and myself.
In this room was something comparable at this very hotel.
Unbelievable experience, so-- Thank you, thank you, thank you.
I thought his voice was--
This is gonna be weird, but his voice was sexy.
He has a soft singing voice. He's not Marvin Gaye.
He's not James Ingram. He's not, you know, Bruno Mars.
But it worked, you know?
And he managed to manufacture and tailor those songs perfectly
for his voice and his voice alone,
and that in itself is a lot of magic.
You know, he just knew who he was writing for.
He was writing for Ray Parker Jr., and he got it right.
[RAY PARKER JR. & RAYDIO'S "TONIGHT'S THE NIGHT" PLAYING]
Sex symbol status. Well, was that good or bad?
[CHUCKLES] You know, it's funny.
I think I was a tall guy holding a guitar.
And after about the second or third album,
you know, girls really got into me.
Well, now, wait a minute.
I wasn't that handsome three years ago.
And I looked in the mirror.
It's the same guy in the mirror, right?
But I'm gonna go with it, what you guys say.
See, don't forget, there's a couple of things
that you have to add to this, okay?
You have to add star power.
No matter how minor or how early you are in the game,
any kind of a celebrity is a plus,
obviously, where ladies are concerned, okay?
It would work for you if you were short and fat
with one eye in your head.
INTERVIEWER: Ray being the sex symbol...
You want me to say that?
[LAUGHS]
Ray thinking he was a sex symbol that he is--
that he was--no, is.
I'm sorry. This is hard.
My dad being a sex symbol. Well, I do not see that.
[CHUCKLES] I can't see that.
Yeah, it cracked me up, all the little magazines.
I used to look when I searched his name,
I was like, wow, this is funny.
But I mean, like, thinking about his personality today,
it's like you cannot imagine that like--
He's too, like, goofy and, like, just funny of a guy.
It's hard to imagine, hard to picture.
I mean, I've seen some of the photos.
And... It's best I show you.
I just so happen to have some stuff right here on me.
One thing I liked about this photo is that pinky ring,
which I wish I could inherit.
Little pimp ring, I guess this tells you what--
Look at the gold watch as well.
Some of these photos crack me up, but, yeah,
this is your sex symbol.
And then, you can't forget this one. This one I get though.
You wanna talk about sex symbol,
you gotta have this one.
Have you guys ever seen,
wait for it, the Black Willy Wonka?
[LAUGHS]
I'm my dad's son, you know, so if he's a sex symbol,
I might have one or two genes pulled from that gene pool.
Okay, I still see him in my back mind
as the sex symbol that I fell in love with.
To me, I had lived a perfect life.
Everything had gone great.
My music was going great. My health was great.
Everything was wonderful, except when my parents got sick.
[♪♪♪♪♪]
My parents, to me,
were the most important things in my life.
Somebody said to me-- I think it was a manager.
"Why don't you go spend a weekend with your parents?
And come back and let's finish this record."
It's like, no, that's not what I'm talking about.
It was the first time in my entire life
that I was at a standstill
with no answer of what to do.
I had signed a new deal with Geffen Records,
and I was paying a penalty for every day I was late.
I think I was 400 days late,
paying, like, several hundred dollars a day,
and I had to get my lawyer
to actually go back and make a new deal,
because I was that penetrated and upset
with what was going on with my parents.
And I really couldn't think of any new songs,
and I couldn't think of anything.
I definitely couldn't go on tour
because I had really moved back to Detroit,
and I wanted to take care of my mom and dad.
I didn't play any music.
I didn't do anything for several years.
And I heard about it first with my father.
He caught cancer, like a bladder cancer or something.
It was like we were newly dating in the first year or two,
when his father was going through cancer.
I didn't even notice that my mom was developing Alzheimer's
because I was paying so much attention to my dad.
And they both was happening simultaneously,
and it was just really, really devastating to me.
It really breaks my heart that they let Detroit go like this.
I mean, this is my start,
Holland-Dozier-Holland, Motown, car industries,
I mean, just everything.
Smokey Robinson, you know, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder.
And this is just a positive, motivating force.
Somebody should really do something.
I just dream that everybody should come visit Detroit,
and that this place gets back on track
and becomes the wonderful place that it is.
I got unbelievably great memories
of this place right here standing in back of me.
It actually breaks my heart that they let the house run down.
I wish there was some way I could buy it and fix it
and make it like a summer home.
I mean, this neighborhood, all the parents,
everybody looked out for the kids.
It was just a positive thing.
Musicians everywhere in the neighborhood.
At least four or five. Nathan lived down the street.
Ollie lived upstairs over me. Lynwood lived around the block.
And it was just a great place to grow up.
The opportunities were wonderful here in Detroit.
The musicians in Detroit
are probably just some of the best in the world.
Motown broke barriers because they were the first
to get on Top 40, on the pop charts, CKLW.
Rosalie Trombley was greatly responsible for that, I hear.
And Motown changed the face of America as we knew it.
It went from race records,
or what they were called, Black music, to all music.
Motown united the world.
I'm proud to be a Detroiter.
I'm proud to be part of the dream.
I was brought up not to hate any culture.
I wasn't brainwashed by my parents.
But the inside of the United States,
people are brought up to be racists.
It's not cool.
And it's obviously still happening in spots,
and it just makes me sick.
First you bring us over here.
You make us build this country.
Then, you wanna beat us to death
because we just wanna be citizens.
We wanna be a part of what this country is.
If it's for freedom and justice and equality,
then, give us that also.
It's probably harder now.
We have to bite our tongues a lot more because,
you know, they will kill you.
They will literally kill you.
[GUNSHOTS]
[CLAMORING]
I'm not gonna say there's more racial tension
in the world today, but we're on the crest of a riot.
[PROTESTORS CHANTING]
I'm really disappointed in the politics,
what's going on in America,
and the country is divided in a way that it hasn't been
since the '60s really.
And I don't know how they're gonna fix it.
I can definitely say that Ray had a hard upbringing.
As to what happened to him,
him being beaten by some obviously ignorant police
who were using race and their fear
and their dislike against someone
that God had a greater plan for is sad.
And I'm sure that life has beaten them up.
I just think there's been a lot of racism
that's been hidden under the rug,
but certain situations of today are exposing them.
Well, you can turn negative situations
into positive situations.
How can I create value out of that?
The best thing about music,
it is the international language.
It is, in my opinion, what saves the world,
and this is what's gonna change the world
because people of all cultures
listen to a certain groove or certain music,
and they love it,
and that's what I think brings people together.
There's no words to hurt anybody. There's no arguing.
They just listen to the music and have a wonderful time.
As to what he was able to do in his life through that,
he was able to achieve a blessing
of working on his music and discovering his gift.
So in the end, he wins.
Those who were haters lost.
PARKER JR.: I thought my career was at a halt.
I thought things had come to a stop.
A year later, I got a phone call from Jheryl Busby at MCA
to come see this group called New Edition.
♪ Cool it now ♪ ♪ You got to cool it now ♪
♪ Oh, watch out ♪
He says, "Yeah, man, you gotta do this song."
I'm like, "Oh, I really don't feel like writing a new song."
I'm so depressed because my mom and dad was sick.
BROWN: Yeah. PARKER JR.: He says, "You don't
have to write no song.
They wanna cut one of your older songs."
♪ Mr. Telephone Man ♪
♪ There's something wrong With my line ♪
♪ When I dial my baby's number I get a click every time ♪
PARKER JR.: That was "Mr. Telephone Man,"
which I wrote at the same time I wrote "Jack and Jill,"
which led, by the way, to me going to L.A.
for the first time in a long time.
I was in Los Angeles doing the New Edition.
I'm having lunch at Spago's, and I look up to my left,
and there's a poster, a black poster.
And I every time I go to Spago's for lunch
they're painting something else on.
I'm like, what the heck is this black poster?
There's nothing on it except black.
Next thing I know, they put a red circle,
and I couldn't figure out what's going on.
My telephone rings, and it's Gary LeMel,
and he said, "I got this one film
that we really need a song for. We're out of time,
it's gotta happen like really, really fast.
It's called Ghostbusters."
♪ Ghostbusters ♪
♪ If there's something strange In your neighborhood ♪
♪ Who you gonna call? ♪ ♪ Ghostbusters ♪
The movie was coming out June 8th or 9th,
and so this is like April, maybe May.
I kept getting original songs, and none of them seemed to work,
and I think I must have listened to at least 100 pop songs,
just trying to get some kind of template to cut to.
PARKER JR.: I go to the film lot, look at the movie.
I sit with the director, Ivan Reitman,
and he doesn't really know who I am or anything,
and he's describing to me what he wants,
and I'm thinking, oh, I can do this.
I remember showing Ray the movie,
or at least that sequence,
and he was very confident, that's what I remember.
He said, "I think I got it, and it's gonna be no problem."
I just had some good ideas with the intro and the:
I mean, I just came up with that really, really fast.
And then, we get to the hard part.
He says, "But I want the word 'Ghostbusters' in the song."
And I went...
♪ Ghostbusters Ghostbusters ♪
And I just thought, That's impossible to sing.
It's not hard.
That's a stupid word to-- You can't sing it.
I had zero, absolutely zero idea
how the melody and the lyrics
and everything was gonna come together.
And late at night, before it was done,
I saw like some Roto-Rooter
or bug commercials or something on TV
where they have those guns
that they bring out and spray everything with.
And the phone number was underneath it.
I remembered in the film,
the four Ghostbusters with the phone number...
...to call if you needed help.
And I went, wow.
The thing is to call the Ghostbusters,
right, not sing their song.
And I said, this is the secret.
I can never say the word "Ghostbusters" in the music.
So it's a call-and-answer response song.
I still don't have any words on, right, but I got the concept.
Who you gonna call? Ghostbusters. Got that.
But now the messenger's coming at 9:00 and it's 8:30.
Well, this is the exact spot and location I was sitting at
when I wrote "Ghostbusters."
I had the mailman,
the messenger guy sitting outside,
ready to come in. I would not let him come in.
I locked the door, because if I didn't have any words,
they weren't gonna pay me my money.
So I actually wrote the song
sitting here with no headphones on
and sang the master vocal that we kept
that's on the record now through those speakers.
♪ If there's something strange In your neighborhood ♪
♪ Who you gonna call? ♪
And I just sang it just like this
sitting on the floor.
Put it on a cassette,
hand it to the messenger,
then, I go home and go to sleep
because I hadn't slept in two and half days.
And I get a phone call from the director, Ivan Reitman,
in the middle of the night.
And he says, "Man, I really like this song."
REITMAN: He sent me the song-- I don't remember.
--about 3:00 in the morning.
It was quick, that's what I remember,
and I remember putting it on, and I just started smiling.
He killed it, for sure.
It's interesting, he's from Montreal,
maybe a more proper environment.
He kept saying, "What are you saying?"
He says, "I'm not afraid of any ghosts."
I said, no, I'm saying, "I ain't 'fraid no ghosts."
He says, "You ain't afraid of no ghosts?" No, no, not "of no."
"I ain't 'fraid no ghosts."
There is no one on the planet
more afraid of ghosts and spooks than me.
Ray, like ever since I've known him,
he will not sleep in the dark.
We have to have the curtains open, wide open.
There has to be some kind of nightlight.
When I was born, my mother says she kept a nightlight on,
and so I have to have a light on no matter where I go.
I'm never in a dark room.
I'll swallow my own tongue. I'll have convulsions.
I seriously think I would jump out of a 50-story building
just to get out the dark.
That's how much it scares me.
If I'm not here and I come home
after being gone a night or something,
I come home, every single light in the whole house
is on, on, on.
Then he goes, "I can't believe our electricity bill."
First time I discovered my dad
was actually scared of the dark--
I never really knew this. I thought my dad was fearless.
I'll never forget, we were on a cruise ship.
I was 12 years old and I cut off the lights
'cause I was opening the door.
Before my hand could reach the knob, I heard...
I heard smacking on the walls,
I flicked the light on so quickly.
I looked back, he was holding on to--
"Never turn the lights off."
I just see things moving in the house.
I know that the doctors and everybody tell you:
"Ray, you gotta understand,
the curtains, they just didn't move."
And my opinion of that is, "Well, you should tell that
to the curtains," 'cause they're moving.
I mean, everyone talks about Clive Davis's genius,
but the thing that I remember is, he did not like the song.
Clive's reaction when he heard Ghostbusters,
he thought, "Are you crazy, you'll sing to a ghost?
We built you up
and made you the macho man. You sing to girls."
REITMAN: He said, "I don't think this is gonna work,"
and I said, "You don't have an album deal
unless you put this on at the beginning,
and I really think this has to be the first song."
So I had to get the film sent over to him privately,
so he gets his own private showing,
and then I told him, "You can put all your acts on the album.
We'll fill up an album. We'll make a soundtrack album."
Then he thought it was a great idea.
I had not seen the movie when I first heard the song,
but this was a win-win.
I remember we wanted to get the song out really quickly.
What I recall is that the song came out
a week before the movie opened.
It ended up being the number one song of 1984.
PARKER JR.: So now Clive, when he called me up,
it was about three, four weeks later,
and I'm thinking he's gonna tell me
how we're moving up the chart
and we're doing some heavy thing.
He says, "We've exported 4 million records."
Exported, not what we sold in America, exported.
This record went to number one
in 52 countries around the world.
Number one or number two in 52 countries.
The record came out in August.
By February, they presented me
with a 10-million-selling album plaque.
Ten million albums of a soundtrack just by February,
and that was only five or six months after the fact.
I don't know if the movie drove the song...
but I think they sort of worked hand in hand.
I think there's an enormous amount
of nostalgia about the film,
and it carried a lot of things with it.
I think the song, it would've stayed popular
even if the film hadn't been
quite the phenomena that it became,
'cause it's an effective song.
But I think that both worked together synergistically.
If you go up to anybody...
no matter what age, no matter what generation,
and you go, "Who you gonna call?"
"Ghostbusters!"
I mean, everybody knows this song.
And to me, that song defines him the least.
Oh, there's no question that the body of work--
I would never just pick out "Ghostbusters."
It probably was his biggest hit,
but so many other songs, so many other hits that he had.
When I go places now, they don't know my other music.
It's old music to them.
It's been my dream ever since I was 18 years old
to have a star on Hollywood Boulevard.
I came out here with my parents at 17,
and the idea that I got a star,
I feel so blessed and I'm so excited.
I look at it and it's just like a dream come true.
It's like I can't believe that things have gone that far.
It's just wonderful.
And I love all my fans so much that, yes,
I do come down here at least two of three times a month
just to show appreciation and just to realize
how very, very fortunate I am, I love it.
Come on, now you're talking, there we go.
[WOMEN WHOOPING]
What's your name?
[SPEAKING INDISTINCTLY]
♪ Call it intuition ♪
♪ I gotta feelin' ♪
♪ Something good's Gonna happen tonight ♪
Who you gonna call? Ghostbusters!
♪ But I predict Somebody's wishes ♪
♪ Could happen tonight ♪
My dad's probably the best celebrity. He loves it so much.
You'll never hear a story with my dad
where you hear some of these stories of:
"Oh, so-and-so asked for an autograph and he told me no."
Not my dad, my dad will cross the ocean for you.
He always plays into, "Are you so-and-so?"
"Yeah, it's me."
It's like, "Oh, gosh!"
[CHEERING]
When he says I love being a celebrity,
sometimes it's annoying, but in my mind,
I feel like the people who bought my product,
it's the same as if they buy a Ford car, okay?
I'm sure if you buy a Ford car, Mr. Ford will like you, okay?
Well, I'm the same person.
If you're buying my product, you support me.
I only have my lifestyle because you guys
enjoy my product and you supported it.
So I feel some indebtedness to everybody who's,
you know, complementary to my cause.
So I'm really, really super excited to bring in today
Mr. Ray Parker Jr.
Let's give it up for Ray.
[CLAPPING, CHEERING]
My gosh, look at the kids.
I don't know how you gonna get here.
I don't even know how to get over here.
But the first thing I'm doing is taking a couple selfies.
Yeah, guys, come on in!
Wave.
I got-- Look at these--
Look at all the guitars. Good gracious!
In my school, we only had clarinets and flutes and stuff.
I'm like, "You got guitars and drums,
and y'all get to rock out!"
This is only like my dream come true
when I was a kid was to have guitars in the classroom.
So I thought about it on the way over here, I said:
"Okay, what can I say to the kids that won't take very long?"
Don't be afraid to live your life.
I worked so hard because my dad worked so hard,
and he put everything into me from day one.
This is when he told me, "You know, son,
I've been saving for you to go to college
since before you were born,"
for me to be the first one in the family to finish college.
I delivered the bad news to my father:
"Dad, I don't even wanna go to college.
I'm in it already, but I wanna drop out
to go on tour with a rock band."
"I wanna go on tour
with the Rolling Stones or Stevie Wonder,"
which I thought was a better idea
and I still think it was a better idea.
But the point being is, I broke his heart that day
when I'd taken away his dream.
It was older than I was.
But don't be afraid to live.
Like, don't go to school and say:
"My backup plan is I'm gonna be a secretary,"
'cause you will end up being a secretary.
If you wanna be a rock 'n' roll star, put your all into it.
And the only thing that I was ever afraid of as a kid
is turning 40 or 50 and having not tried it.
My father wanted me to be what you call a white-collar worker.
To him, that was his dream for me,
and my dream-- That wasn't my dream.
I didn't wanna work in an office.
I didn't wanna design car parts and I didn't wanna build cars.
I just wanna drive them.
One day, if you become older
and you never tried your dreams,
that is actually the worst thing that can happen.
Like, if you tried your dreams and it didn't happen,
well, then at least you tried it,
so you can go to sleep and get a good night's sleep,
but to not try at all is a really terrible thing.
And looks like I see a bunch of talented people here,
so I'm gonna be watching the Grammys,
like, in a couple years.
And, you know, was there something special that--
Yeah, we brought a little present.
Well, maybe you wanna go over there
and show them what you got?
A little present. Here, take this one.
Are you ready? Yeah!
Are you ready?
[STUDENTS CLAPPING, CHEERING]
My pleasure.
TEACHER: Guys, you got no excuses now.
No excuses, right?
PARKER JR.: Little kids rock. It's early in the morning.
I'm way pumped up and too excited.
I just saw about 25 or 30 kids going absolutely crazy
and playing some great music over here.
And, boy, they looked at those guitars
and looked at the colors,
and it reminds me of what I felt like
when I was getting my first little Kingston guitar.
And you know, you can see each person
eyeing on which one they like.
Like one's looking at the orange guitar like:
"This is me right here, I'm doing orange."
Then you see somebody else with the butterscotch.
"This is me over here, this is my kind of thing."
And so I hope it really turns them on,
it really inspires them.
And like my father used to tell me,
he always loved me playing the guitar
because he says I'm doing something positive.
If I'm spending this much time doing something positive,
I'm not spending any time doing something negative.
This is a very easy song.
When I go, "Who you gonna call?"
You go...
Ghostbusters.
But you do with it a lot more enthusiasm,
a lot more energy, like you're having a good time.
Otherwise, the record will not be a hit.
Okay, okay, here we go.
[PLAYING "GHOSTBUSTERS"]
Sing it, here we go.
♪ If there's something strange In your neighborhood ♪
♪ Who you gonna call? ♪
♪ Ghostbusters ♪
That's what I'm liking.
♪ If there's something weird And it don't look good ♪
♪ Tell me, who you gonna call? ♪
♪ Ghostbusters ♪
So do I get tired of "Ghostbusters"?
Do I get tired of, "Who you gonna call?"
Do I get tired of, "I ain't 'fraid of no ghost"?
Do I get tired of, "Bustin' makes me feel good"?
Do I get tired of, "I can't hear you"?
Do I get tired of...?
No! Are you kidding me?
That's like eight numbers to the lotto
and all the lotto numbers came out.
Would you give back the winning lotto ticket?
That's what I ask people.
I think it's the biggest blessing
in the world, "Ghostbusters."
I just think it's the most wonderful thing
that could ever happen.
Everybody knows "Ghostbusters"
and it puts a smile on everyone's face.
So when they say Ray Parker Jr.,
everybody does the same thing.
"Who you gonna call?
I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that."
And they always do that and it's like, "Hey,
I'm good with it, I'm the guy."
Who you gonna call?
♪ Ghostbusters ♪
♪ Who you gonna call? ♪ ♪ Ghostbusters ♪
♪ I can't hear you ♪
♪ Who you gonna call? ♪ ♪ Ghostbusters ♪
♪ Louder ♪ ♪ Ghostbusters ♪
♪ Who can you call? ♪ ♪ Ghostbusters ♪
♪ Who you gonna call? ♪ ♪ Ghostbusters ♪
PARKER JR.: One, two, three, four.
[PLAYING "THE OTHER WOMAN"]
♪ Oh, yeah ♪
Let's go.
♪ I'm in love ♪
♪ With the other woman ♪
♪ My life was fine ♪
♪ Life was fine ♪
♪ Till she blew my mind ♪
♪ I'm just the average guy ♪
♪ I fool around A little on the side ♪
♪ Never thought it would Amount to much ♪
♪ Never met a girl Whose love was so tough ♪
♪ Who'd have thought A one-night stand ♪
♪ Could turn into Such a hot romance ♪
[♪♪♪♪♪]
♪ I bought her high heel Blue shoes ♪
♪ She threw them in the trash Still new ♪
♪ She wrecked her Corvette And it was blue ♪
♪ So why was I surprised When she made me blue too? ♪
♪ She took everything I had to give ♪
♪ And left me just enough To wanna live ♪
♪ She took my heart She took my soul ♪
♪ But she forgot to take My rock 'n' roll ♪
♪ She took everything She controlled ♪
♪ But she forgot to take My rock 'n' roll ♪
♪ Goin' to therapy Was wack ♪
♪ The whole reconcilin' thing Was all an act ♪
♪ I kissed some this I licked some that ♪
♪ I did everything I could To get her back ♪
♪ She loved me just enough To lead me on ♪
♪ She loved me just enough To do me wrong ♪
♪ She took my heart She took my soul ♪
♪ But she forgot to take My rock 'n' roll ♪
♪ She took everything So cold ♪
♪ But she forgot to take My rock 'n' roll ♪
♪ Now, in the long run I'm gon' be cool ♪
♪ Even though everybody thinks I played the fool ♪
♪ She took the car She took the house ♪
♪ But music publishin' Is what it's all about ♪
♪ You should've heard her When she figured it out ♪
♪ I had to turn my guitar Up to 10 to drown her out ♪
♪ She took my heart She took my soul ♪
♪ But she forgot to take My rock 'n' roll ♪
♪ I know she loved me Enough to be cold ♪
♪ I know she loved me Enough to let it go ♪
♪ She took my heart She took my soul ♪
♪ But she forgot to take My rock 'n' roll ♪
♪ She took everything That could be sold ♪
♪ But she forgot to take My rock 'n' roll ♪
♪ Ow! ♪
♪ My rock 'n' roll ♪
♪ My soul's in My rock 'n' roll ♪
♪ Leave me my music, babe My rock 'n' roll ♪
♪ I can play my guitar My rock 'n' roll ♪