The first time I met Chaka Khan was just before Christmas, 1978. She was 25 and I was 5 years older. She was just starting a new solo career after 6 years of success as lead singer of Rufus. I was struggling to make a living as a music journalist, mostly writing about punk, not funk. I don’t remember how I came to be in L.A. interviewing Chaka, just as “I’m Every Woman,” her first solo single destined for #1, was released to serious radio play. It looked like the risk of going solo was paying off. The Risk Pays Off was the title of my interview with her, published by BAM. I could have had no idea that 2 decades later I would be a record company president excitedly bringing Chaka over to the label.
That first time I met her, though, I was waiting in her manager’s office. The 25year old super-star destined Chaka walked in, diminutive, but bursting with energy, and all smiles. She looked like any other pert young Malibu Canyon housewife, though perhaps a little more dishevelled after her hour-plus drive through heavy L.A. traffic. In my fantasy I must have expected her to make her entrance in a slinky, sequined gown: glamour incarnate. Instead, she was munching a swiss cheese sandwich.
"I've had three interviews here this weekend and all three people said they expected me to be dressed up. It isn't a gig, after all," she says affably. "Do you expect everybody you interview to be dressed for a show?"
No, but somehow Chaka's public image— formed through her six years with Rufus— conjures up a flash of elegance. Chaka Khan never had to breathe heavily into a microphone to insinuate a luxuriant, senuous touch to her music. But, of course, that doesn't really have much to do with the real Chaka Khan, the person inside the image who's struggled—like most successful artists— and come up through the ranks. Chaka (not her birth name, by the way; it indicates fire, red, Mars, and war in the African Uruba language) started singing on street corners around her Chicago junior high school. Eventually she broke into school talent shows.
"My sister and I and two other girls had a little group called The Crystalettes," she recalled, "and we even went one step beyond; we knew this lady named Miss Furbish who owned funeral homes in Chicago and also booked acts in the clubs— a real nice old lady, grandmother type, but like a jazzy, saucy grandmother. She sort of took us under her wing. She booked us in clubs on the South Side and was a chaperone and made costumes to dress us up like little women. I was 12 or 13 at the time. We were doing Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight, hits of that era."
Rufus, originally the American Breed, was a local favorite at the time. Chaka knew everyone in the band and a girlfriend of hers was singing with the group. When her friend quit, Chaka stepped in. Today, after three complete personnel overhauls, only Chaka and Kevin Murphy remain from the old days. In 1973, with the help of an ex-American Breed manager-turned-ABC Records producer Bob Monaco, Rufus moved to Los Angeles hoping to forge a recording career. Monaco got them a deal with ABC, and although Chaka complains that the band was cursed with poor management from the word go, the group put out hit records from their very first effort. Rufus, Rags to Rufus, Rufusized, Rufus Featuring Chaka Khan, Ask Rufus, and Street Player were all big-selling albums, each one either gold or platinum. “Tell Me Something Good,” the first single from the first album, was a smash hit right off the bat. And two years ago, the group won a Grammy for the single from Rufus Featuring, Sweet Thing.
By the time they started putting out hits, they were in debt; most groups are. It took years of building a steady following and a track record— in the studio and onstage— before they were able to pay back ABC and actually start making money for themselves. That finally happened just as she had decided to go solo.
"I've always considered any move I've made as a stepping stone for something bigger, and of me being in complete control of my destiny as an artist," explained Chaka. "The outcome of an album with Rufus was determined by six different people and several factors— the material, the production, where you're coming from, and what you're saying. We were a really mild-tempered band for the most part; we all love each other very much and we really get along like family, but as we got older and more popular there was a greater need to express myself on an individual level. I think they were ready for that and so am I."
That was not to say, by the way, that Rufus was over, or even lacking Chaka's definitive vocalizing. She was signed to Warner Bros as a solo artist but still owed ABC Records two more Rufus albums. She told me she’d do the albums but didn’t intend to tour to promo them. Her feelings about the group were nothing but supportive, she said, but her solo career was her top priority.
Chaka views herself primarily as an entertainer, a performer— although she did co-write two songs on Chaka and said she looks as forward to working in the recording studio as she does to getting onstage. "Art," she said, "is a form of self-expression. You can't get away from it; they go hand in hand. Every band that records an album is producing as well. Every band is a co-producer. I've even been thinking about producing other people. Tata Vega and I have talked about it, and I talked to a girl named Lalomi Washburn, who has written a lot of the songs I do."
But for her own solo debut, Chaka, she picked the best in the business, Arif Mardin, to work the dials. "He's the first producer I've ever been into," she says warmly of the man who's produced and arranged masterpieces for Aretha Franklin, Eric Clapton, the Average White Band, and Carly Simon, to name a few. "He's a great human being first off. And his track record speaks for itself."
Actually, his track record has been considerably enhanced by Chaka's latest work. The single, which was almost impossible to avoid in discos that month days, was added nationally to radio station playlists out of the box, which is to say, with virtually no promotion. And understandably so. The song is catchy and melodic with strong lyrics and a nice mid-tempo beat that's hard to resist. One might even be moved to make the faux pas of asking the fiery Ms. Khan about making a disco hit.
Her countenence turned almost icey. "If you want to put it that way..." She obviously doesn't. "I wouldn't say it's disco. It's much more sophisticated than any disco I've every heard. If they play it in discos that's fine with me. Disco, to me, is an unintelligent song lyric with a droning beat— that's it. I have no great love for it. I have no great hate for it either," she adds as an afterthought, perhaps thinking of the thousands and thousands of records she's selling to people who hear 'I'm Every Woman' blaring out of speakers night after night in discos from Boston to San Diego.
Nevertheless, Chaka wasn't going out disco-dancing herself, and, as you might guess from the list of musicians she and Mardin chose to back her— George Benson, Richard Tee, the Brecker Brothers, Dave Sanborn, Airto Moreira, Phil Upchurch— her great love in music is jazz. Predictably, her favorites include Ella Fitzgerald, Carmen MacRae, and Billie Holliday, as well as old buddy Lenny White, Oscar Brown Jr., Charlie Byrd, and Miles Davis. Not so predictably, Chaka also says she's a big booster of the new wave. "I love punk," she volunteered, almost out of nowhere. "I just love it. I think it's decadent. I love the Dead Kennedys; I like The Ramones and Mary Monday. I have a big collection at home."
Family, she told me, means everything to her. Even in her explanation of why she moved from ABC to Warner Brothers, the idea that Warners is more "family-like" than most companies, was a decisive factor. I remembered that may years later when Warners offered me a job after a horrible corporate experience at CBS, the ultimate dysfunctional, non-family company.
And there I was, two decades later, loving that Chaka would be on Reprise— and talking her into letting me put Love Me Still on a compilation album I putting together for the hit TV show, Party Of Five, along with the Bodeans, Joe Jackson, Rickie Lee Jones, Rusted Root, BT, Syd Straw, Stevie Nicks…
One of the last things I was working on before I left Reprise was a Joni Mitchell tribute album. Joni and Chaka were crazy about each other and Chaka, if I remember correctly, recorded Help Me, which came out many years later on a birthday celebration album when Joni turned 75.