I Am Charlie Wilson

Charlie Wilson

• Publisher: 37 Ink
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781476790091
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

The long-awaited New York Times bestselling memoir of seven-time Grammy-nominated artist Charlie Wilson, the iconic R&B and Funk singer-songwriter-producer and former lead singer of The Gap Band—interwoven with his recollections of collaborating with fellow artists such as Stevie Wonder, Kanye West, and Snoop Dogg. Recognized the world over for his distinct voice and timeless hits spanning a career of nearly half a century, Charlie Wilson is one of the most celebrated musicians of his generation. So it took friends and family by surprise when he checked into rehab and revealed that he had been not only homeless, but also helpless.Here is the riveting story of how love and faith carried him through not only his addiction, but also prostate cancer. Here, too, is the story of his work in the music business, including a career resurgence that saw collaborations with some of the most sought-after artists of today, including Pharrell and Justin Timberlake.Now over twenty years sober, Wilson recounts a life filled with vertiginous highs and heartbreaking lows. His is a story of triumph over adversity, courage in the face of extreme hardship, and love when all else is lost. It is a tale of the last sixty years in social and pop culture history, and one that will stay with you for years to come.

Chapter 1

Becoming Charlie Wilson

My daddy was a preacher with that Bible-thumping, Southern Baptist fire deep in his bones. That early-Sunday-morning vigor gave him wings; he’d fly all over that pulpit and all through the church, crowing through the pews and hopping over laps, the Word dripping from his tongue. That man could jump three or four feet in the air, and by the time he made it back down, people were falling out and shouting. I’m not going to lie: my daddy’s hollering and screaming scared me. The way the congregants of the Church of God in Christ in Tulsa, Oklahoma, would jump in the rhythm and work themselves into a frenzy was confusing. Alarming. Addictive.

I was about four years old when I said, “I want to do that.” My father happily obliged me, seeing as my oldest brother, Ronnie, and later my sister, Loretta, both gave up their position as the good pastor’s warm-up act when they turned twelve and got a little too much preteen angst to be bothered. I had no problems handling the gig.

I took my cues from my father.

Oscar Wilson was a boy preacher. A prodigy. At just thirteen years old, he took off from his home in Lehigh, Oklahoma, in the dead of night with nothing but a small suitcase and a Bible, chasing behind God’s voice and a light that lit his footpath through the pitch dark. The Lord had spoken to him—told him to get on the first train coming and ride it through the countryside until He told him where to get off. The average teenager may have thought he was going slowly, surely mad, following behind a voice that insisted he leave all he knew and deposit himself on a locomotive, destination unknown. But when my father heard the calling, he listened. He ended up a few stops down that stretch of railroad track, in a small town with a huge, empty field God directed him to. When he arrived there sans a chaperone, the people there said, “What’s your name?”

“Oscar Wilson,” I’m told he replied.

“Wilson, huh,” one man stated. “What’s your daddy’s name?”

“Dave Wilson,” my father answered.

“Boy, you Dave Wilson’s son?” another man asked.

“Yessir,” my father answered quickly, understanding the cachet this carried in this town among its people, both of which were foreign to him. My grandfather, Dave, was somewhat of a pistol. Literally. I’m told that he was a full-blooded Indian with a hot temper and an itchy trigger finger. Word has it that he once shot the town sheriff and got away with it, and that he was known for lying in the road with his Winchester rifle, waiting for someone to say something sideways to him. After that incident with the sheriff, no one ever did. His reputation preceded him. “Dave’s lying across the road with that Winchester,” they’d warn anyone who approached. “Be careful.”

So when my father showed up talking about preaching, the townspeople, either impressed or out of fear, happily obliged him, strange as his intentions were. “Where you going to preach?” they asked him.

“Right in that field over there,” he stated matter-of-factly. “That’s where God told me to preach.”

They made my father a little platform and strung up some lights for him so that the people could see him. He preached to a few people on the first night and to double that number the second night, and bit by bit, hundreds and hundreds of people showed up to hear the boy preacher. He was answering God’s calling, and the people were getting saved. An evangelist, my father preached all around the country for most of his years on this here earth.

I honed my stage presence and singing performances in the back room of my childhood home, in front of the mirror, where I would mimic my daddy and my mama’s church preaching and praise. When people see me whirling across the stage with all that infectious energy and ask me where I learned to perform, without hesitation, I give that credit to my father. When he was in the pulpit, Daddy would sing and shout all kinds of things, like, “Throw your hands in the air!” and “Say yeah!” while my mother was over there getting down on that piano, whipping him and the entire congregation into a frenzy. Those are move-the-crowd standards that I tend to shout out during my concerts, even today, but I’ve been working on and perfecting my high-energy stage exploits for a lifetime. It wasn’t a thing for my family to open the door and see four-year-old me wrapped in one of my mother’s robes, my father’s shoes flopping off of my tiny feet, flying through the air, landing in front of a mirror: “He’s a mind regulator and a mind fixer and a burden bearer!” I’d be shouting, jumping, twisting, squalling, rearing back, and playing the air piano, all at the same time. My parents would take a gander at the dramatics in that back room and just shake their heads. “Boy, we got our hands full with this one,” they’d say, laughing. Of course, because our house was deeply religious, it wasn’t strange to anyone that a four-year-old was preaching and jumping and shouting at his own reflection. It was expected.

There were more dramatics on Sunday when I put my routine into action at the church. Dress code: blue gabardine suit jacket with matching shorts and bow tie. The song: “When They Ring the Golden Bells.” Nerves: nonexistent. There was no reason to be scared; we grew up in the church, quite literally, spending at least three days out of the week, sometimes more, learning both the Bible and how to be. At any point in time, you could be standing up in front of the entire Sunday school to recite Bible verses you learned in class, or playing a baby lamb in the Nativity play at Christmas, or spending the entire Saturday with your church friends and their parents, doing good works out in the community or dancing and playing at the congregation’s picnic. Being in front of one another, fellowshipping and growing, is what we kids did in the church, and everybody embraced you, no matter what you did or how you did it. Even if you couldn’t sing or you got a few of the words in that verse jumbled, everybody would get up on their feet and clap for you so that you knew you were loved, and when there is love, there is no guard—no wall. You show up, open your mouth, and sing. Of course, it helped, too, that my mother insisted we Wilson kids were the best singers. But really, everybody—the crooners and the croakers—could stand up in front of a microphone and be made to feel as if they’d turned the place out. There was nothing to get nervous about at all. Plus, when it came time for my solo, Mama had already practiced the song with me, and on top of that, I was on a mission: my father delivered a powerful sermon every Sunday and it was my job to make sure the spirit was high and everybody within range of the sound of my voice was in full-on shout mode. My voice may have been sweet and pure and the scab on my knee may have betrayed just how little and new I was, but that old soul deep in my bones had crept up through my center mass and into my throat and was waiting there like a revving race car at the starting line. My mom was sitting at the big upright piano, with my siblings and me standing off to the side of her. “It’s time to sing, baby,” she said, nodding at me.

Let me tell you, when she put that microphone in my hand? I took off—headed straight for the pulpit, where the preachers and deacons were. And when I rounded that corner and saw my daddy, he stood up and then everybody else did, too, and I knew that was my cue. I went in. I started shouting and moved down the aisle as far as I could get with that microphone, jumping and throwing my leg up and my head all the way back. People were going crazy and shouting with joy, and by the time I finished, my dad got up humming, happy I’d warmed up the congregation, yes, but also proud that his son was hopping in his footsteps.

My addiction to that energy, that power over an audience, extended beyond the church pews, right into the halls of Dunbar Elementary School. My brother and sister had already been through the school, so I walked in there with a serious rep. I was “Little Wilson,” the teacher’s pet. They had me singing on demand: the instructors would say, “Come here, Little Wilson. Let me see if you can sing this song.” I’d get the song’s key and dive in. The response they’d give was inevitably along the lines of, “Oh my gosh, what a beautiful voice,” whenever I sang.

That much I could handle, but I wasn’t ready for what would happen once I shared my abilities with a bigger school audience. Indeed, I got the full brunt of people’s response to my singing at a talent show, when I was in the fourth grade. Someone taught me Tony Bennett’s signature song, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” and I sang it in front of an auditorium packed with my elementary school peers. As I sang, they began to scream and swoon as if I were Frankie Valli. And when those last words crossed my lips—“Your golden sun will shine for me”—those girls came running toward me full-speed, screaming and waving their hands in the air. A good eighty to one hundred of them. I still had my arm in the air and my eyes closed, dragging out that last note, when I heard the stampede. It scared me so much I took off running! With the entire elementary school of girls chasing me, I scrambled off the stage and down the hallways, searching desperately for an escape; I pushed through the first door I could find, not sure what to do or how to survive a gaggle of screaming fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade little girls. Big mistake. I didn’t realize what the room was until I saw the stalls: the girls’ bathroom. I was trapped. Shaking, I almost peed my pants when a teacher pulled me out of there and rushed me into another room.

“You all right, Charles?” the teacher asked, brushing off my clothes and putting her hands on my shoulders to steady me. Breathing hard, I held back the tears, completely traumatized.

• • •

That teacher pulled me into the teachers’ lounge, away from the grabby hands and shrieks of my peers, tucked away safe until, finally, my mother got there. When she walked into the room, I could tell she was trying her hardest to suppress her laughter. “Your little heart is beating so fast,” she said between stifled giggles.

My mother couldn’t wait to tell my daddy the story when we got home. “Babe, they ran him into the bathroom. One of the teachers had him over there in a separate room and the halls were full of kids trying to get to him,” she said, her laughter met with my father’s easy grin. My mom hugged me and said in that soothing voice: “It’s okay, baby. You did good. You did real good.”

That had never happened to me before. Once I recovered, I realized I liked it. A lot. From then on, anytime anything needed to be sung at the school, I was the chosen one. And I was always ready for the reaction. I was pretty all right with the girls chasing me after that; the sixth graders wanted to kiss me all the time. I craved that excitement and would look for it anywhere I could—on the stage, and later, in everything from my relationships, to my career, to even my addictions. I understood instinctively, even at age six, that the sound of the crowd is life.

My air.

Chapter 2

Music, Family, Heartbreak

My musical talent must have a genetic component. My mom’s brother played piano; my father played a little guitar; my brother Ronnie played drums, piano, and coronet; and we all played a little violin because that’s what you started playing in school as a young student, when learning an instrument was mandatory. It sounded like we were strangling cats, but my mother thought it was beautiful. All of us—my older siblings, Ronnie and Loretta, and my younger brother, Robert, and I—could sing. God gifted us with it. But it was my mother who was the most talented of all. Killer on the piano, she could play really fast with both hands—one hand playing one chord structure, the other doing something totally different. She had a particular talent for songs that dancers would perform the Lindy Hop to, the dance where a man slings his partner up his side and into the air. Those fingers could fly! I grew up hearing tales that Ray Charles and some of the other popular singers of the time heard my mom play and tried their hardest to get her to join their bands, but my grandmother would have none of that. Maybe she knew what everyone else did: that singing that doo-wop secular music was sending all too many of our most popular musicians, Ray Charles included, down a spiraling hole of drug dependency, prison, and ruined lives. So whenever anyone asked my mother to play secular music, she would tell him, “I’m saved and sanctified and filled with the Holy Ghost. I can’t do that.”

She did play for the church, though. Everybody loved Sister Wilson. My mom was the state minister of music Oklahoma North West, meaning she organized all the state choirs, featuring singers from all different churches around that region of Oklahoma. Whenever there was a convocation or a big revival somewhere, or some bishop was being celebrated, they would put all the church singing groups in one mass choir and my mother would lead it—picking out the music, the musicians, the lead singers, the wardrobe, right on down to choreography. Everything that went on musically in our state had to go through her.

Of course, she also played for my dad, who was by then a preacher at the Church of God in Christ in Sand Springs, Oklahoma, near where I grew up. Though I have only scant details on how they met, I have no doubt that church was involved, with my father in the pulpit and my mother conjuring up the ghost on that piano.

It was my mother who taught me how to play the trumpet and the piano. I wanted to play those instruments because my older brother, Ronnie, was playing them. When I expressed my desire to play to my mother, she said, “Okay, baby, go get the horn.” When I brought it to her, she put it right up to her lips and said, “Hold your mouth like this.” I’d never seen a woman, let alone my mother, play a trumpet before.

“Mama, you play trumpet, too?” I asked, shocked but excited.

Turns out that in high school back in her hometown of Ada, Oklahoma, she was a first-chair trumpet player! She taught us all how to play brass instruments, and the piano, which she taught to other kids in the neighborhood, too. When I realized that she was teaching others, I was surprised because I didn’t even know she knew how to read music. In church, she wouldn’t use sheet music because she had memorized the songs. But one afternoon, I came home from school and there were students tumbling out of the door. When I went into the piano room, she was in there reading music, transforming the chord structure of a hymn to make it sound more like a gospel song. Right then, I asked if she could teach me how to do that. She sat me down and showed me how to read the notes and gave me something to play. I proceeded to do so without looking at the sheet music; I could just hear and feel what was supposed to come next and I played it.

“You’re not reading the music, Charles,” she said. “You’re mimicking what I’m playing.”

Always, I could play by ear. The ability to feel the music, to move it beyond what is on the paper, is the ultimate gift, one that, to this day, serves me well when I’m in the studio with colleagues—producers, musicians, and artists, alike—who usually have no idea that when it comes to the music, I can do much more than simply sing.

• • •

My mother’s instruction was inspiring but I found her repertoire limiting. She forbade me from singing secular music but that didn’t stop me from wanting to, especially when I got a gander at my father’s nephew. Lowell Fulson was a blues singer. He had written a song called “Tramp” and he was famous around the fifties and sixties. Light-skinned, like my father, with a dimple to boot, he used to come to our house with his hair all shiny, driving a great big old car that was even shinier—a Cadillac, as I recall—and with gold teeth that added a sparkle to it all. I saw him and said, “Man, that’s what I want to be.”

I thank God my parents nurtured this gift my siblings and I shared. It would have been just as easy for them to tamp down their kids’ desire to lead lives filled with music, particularly in a household led by a Holy Roller who thought the kinds of noise we wanted to make with our voices and instruments were the source of the devil’s temptations. But that wasn’t the way of Oscar and Irma Wilson. There we were, right there in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the middle of segregation, Jim Crow, and the burgeoning civil rights movement, and my parents were right by our side, focusing not on the system of racist laws that dictated what we couldn’t have but all the things they could give us within a rigid, constricted system that relegated black people to second-tier schools, housing, and social opportunities: a sound education; time for any extracurricular activity we had an interest in, including marching band, football, and basketball; and a solid religious foundation that fed us spiritually, emotionally, and socially. Of course, because we were African-Americans in a country that purposefully tried to restrict us based on the color of our skin, we weren’t immune to the foolishness of the times; we had our moments when race tainted our everyday interactions: there were “colored” and “whites only” water fountains and a segregated and unequal school system; there were times when I, a child, was referred to as “nigger boy,” a name I simply could not comprehend; and in our community, there were always memories of the 1921 Tulsa race riots, which killed countless innocent black Oklahomans and destroyed the prominent Greenwood Avenue community known as “Black Wall Street.” This history was never far from any of our minds.

I remember vividly one time, when I was about five or so, going to Woolworth’s with my parents and running through the front doors of the store, headed straight for the stand where they served up strawberry malts. I didn’t know what “whites only” meant or that there was a door in the back reserved for people with my skin color; I just knew that if I deposited myself on the little bar stool at the counter, I’d be in prime position to get me one of those malts. So, without hesitation, when my father pulled his car up in front of the store, I jumped out and went running through the doors and hopped right on up onto that stool and started spinning around and around. And oh my gosh, I heard my mother hollering out to me, frantic, but I didn’t pay her any mind because I was getting myself ready for that malt. To be honest, I didn’t even really understand why the man in the white outfit and the little white hat was yelling or what he meant when he said, “Come get this little nigger bastard,” or why he was making his way from behind the counter, but my mom sure did make it plain when she came rushing through the doors and yelled, “Don’t you do it! If you hit him, you’re going to draw back a nub!” My mama was reaching into her purse as that man got closer to me. I didn’t know what his intentions were, but my parents did. That man was aiming to hit me.

My mother and he were going at it, yelling and screaming a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Prologue
• 1. Becoming Charlie Wilson
• 2. Music, Family, Heartbreak
• 3. Greenwood, Archer, and Pine
• 4. Get Up and Dance (Oops!)
• 5. Party Train
• 6. My Years of Living Dangerously
• 7. She Saved Me
• 8. The Voice
• 9. Getting Back to the Music
• 10. Snoop
• 11. Going Solo
• 12. Charlie, Last Name Wilson
• 13. The Art of Song
• 14. What Doesn’t Kill You
• 15. A Place in the Sun
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• About Charlie Wilson
• Index
• Copyright