Bliss (39 page)

Addendum

Celebrating her tenth year in the recording business, the legendary Sunny Addison chats with DANYEL SMITH about love and life, and finally breaks her silence about her brother, the mysteries of “The Rain Song,” and her secret weapon
.

SHE’S LIKE A SUN
—a source of light and heat at which the world is awed at every dawn. She moves like our sun, too—slowly around her world, shining through even when the air is cold. Sunny Addison remains a mystery, a star on high sending down miraculous rays we dance in, make love in, and—when she sings about pain—we burn in. At her best, she’s a place in which to find comfort from a bitter world.

F
ittingly, it’s a warm day in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, a shoreline community in Encinitas, California, about ninety miles south of Los Angeles, and a hop-skip-jump from Deirdre “Sunny” Addison’s hometown of San Diego. The breeze is light around her oval pool, and even in
April, the view from Sunny’s three-story palace overlooking the surf is like something out of a dream.

“Hell, yeah! It is a dream come true. I’m from the SD, got my true,
professional
start in Monterey, and Carmel-by-the-Sea—but it gets too cold up there for me. Cardiff is warm almost year-round. Perfect for my hot blood.”

Sunny—long estranged from her father, and “in long-distance therapy,” she says, with her mother, Lt. Thelma Lynn Addison (USN, Ret.)—is stretched out on a chaise (“My favorite position,” she says, laughing) gulping a shot of pulverized wheatgrass. There’s music on the stereo—old A Tribe Called Quest and older Full Force, Randy Crawford, some Tupac Shakur, Tamia, Carole King, Usher, Mary J. Blige, some Digital Underground. The superstar is in a bopping, sunny mood as she reflects on her tenth anniversary as a singer-songwriter. “Really, I’ve been writing songs since I was kid, so this whole tenth anniversary thing is hilarious to me.” Her sixth album is already platinum after a month in the stores, and critics, with few exceptions, have given
On Recollection
thumbs up across the board.
Entertainment Weekly
said, “Sunny Addison remains aglow … is still a force to be reckoned with.”
Vibe
, “Sunny is at the height of her powers … the only singer out there who’s skill as a songwriter matches the power and soulfulness of her voice.” And
Hip Hop Soul
calls
Recollection
“as mature and kick-ass as that bottle of Cristal you lifted from Puffy’s ‘97 white linen birthday set—so tilt it back, turn it up and feel the cool sunlight.”

Sun is also relaxing in the glow of being honored as Songwriter of the Year by the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP). “Now the award
is
a big deal,” she says, getting stern. “I love to sing.
Love
to sing. But to be acknowledged for my song-writing, especially after all the different kinds of albums I’ve done, well, it just feels important. Like folks really listen when I tell my stories.”

The main hallway of Sunny’s home is lined with platinum album plaques, and she has a small room off her cluttered office with cases of trophies and keys to various cities in the United States and around the world. She has guitars on stands in about every room, though she
says “her” guitar is locked away “someplace safe, soaking up the world’s best energy, and waiting on me to pick it up and do some writing.” She has the requisite living room-size closet full of rare shoes and a breathtaking quantity of clothes. She has a boyfriend (rumored to be, over the last year, music mogul Hakeem Watkins) whose name she won’t mention. “If you want to call him ‘boyfriend,’ “she says with a wry grin. “He’s too old for that, really, and he’s on the other coast so much we can’t even get it together to get pregnant.” She’s happy, she says, that she’s got money in the bank, that she’s stretching herself by delving into acting, and that she has people around her that she can trust. “It’s the key in this business,” she says, motioning toward the kitchen for some refreshment, “knowing which bridges to burn, and which bridges to cross.”

And you know the difference?

“With a little help from my friends, I do. But then, you gotta know who your friends are.”

So you do know who your friends are.

“I know who my friend
is
,” she says. “I’m exaggerating, but I basically have the same people around me that I always have. We have our ups and downs, but we rarely have our outs.”

Addison’s career has been filled with mostly ups, but has surely has its share of downs. Seven years ago, her career was in the outer stratosphere. After only two albums (her strong 1996 debut,
Poems on Various Subjects
, and the wondrous 1997
Bliss Unknown)
she had Grammys, MTV and BET awards, and even an Oscar. “It was unreal when
Bliss
came out,” she says. “Everybody was worried about the sophomore jinx, but I was confident. The spirit of Phillis Wheatley was on my side.”

And it didn’t hurt to have legendary hit maker Hawk Watkins on her team. “She’s one of the most extraordinary people in this world,” Watkins says cheerfully from his New York offices. “Sunny is that rare species—a hardworking, natural talent.” It was the huge mainstream success of
Bliss
that began the murmurs. On urban radio stations around the country, jocks and programmers started complaining, on and off air, that Sunny wasn’t really “black,” or not black “enough.”

“She was a trip for a minute,” says Jimi “Go-Go” Gonzales, now program director of Los Angeles’ soulful KLUV 93.1. “Right before that first cover album,
Hymn to Humanity
, came out. I was on air then, and we were playing Sun’s stuff like crazy. She’d come to town, go straight to the pop stations, the big white stations, do drops for them, hang out all through their wack-ass morning shows, and not even come by here for a wazzup.”

Sunny sees it differently. “I was young. I didn’t want to visit
any
radio stations, or be interviewed at all for that matter. All I wanted to do was just
be
. Record. Perform. Write. Sing. Jesus!” She sighs loudly and shakes her head. “But this is a business, and that’s something I learned from Eva Glenn.”

Eva Glenn, erstwhile glamorous record label executress, and now manager to the some of the most successful recording artists in the country, signed Sunny to the now defunct Roadshow Records after a fiery, early nineties bidding war. Glenn, loved and hated, is the stuff of legend herself. Often labeled as too much of a “fun” girl by her (some say jealous) colleagues and competitors, Glenn remains the marketing and managerial mini-mogul behind Sunny’s astronomical sales and edgy (yet somehow still pristine) reputation.

“It’s always been Eva,” says Sunny, laughing. “Even when we fought like fools. And besides, she don’t party like she used to. She’s Mama Eva now.”

Piper Gibbs, senior director of promotion and advertising for BET, was, many moons ago, personal assistant to Glenn, and sometime assistant to Sunny. “Eva was a bitch, no question. And she’d be glad to hear me say it. But she was one of the hardest-working people at Roadshow. And she tried to be honest. In this business it’s hard to do that. And she wasn’t scared of Sunny or any of the artists, really—like Seb [former Roadshow CEO Sebastian Turcos] was. Eva wasn’t scared of younger people, either—like me. She didn’t hate on us. She tried to bring us up.”

And Sunny?

“Sunny and Eva were on some love-hate back then, though now I guess it’s love-love. I always thought that they were more alike
than not. If Sunny couldn’t sing, she probably would’ve been an Eva. And if Eva could sing—oh my God!—she’d be bigger than Sun is right now.”

Poems
and
Bliss Unknown
behind her, it was Addison’s third album,
Hymn to Humanity
, that pushed her into territory previously occupied by the likes of Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, and (in terms of international success) Michael Jackson. Within two years, ten million copies of
Hymn
sold, and as of January 2005, it’s up to almost eighteen million. Among the songs on the cover album: a tear-down-the-walls version of Barry Manilow’s “Looks Like We Made It,” a slow, acoustic twist on Bill Wither’s “Lovely Day,” a melodic tribute to Tupac Shakur’s “Dear Mama” (sparked by the loop of a never-before-heard snippet from a voice-mail message from the late great MC himself), Billy Preston’s “Will It Go Round in Circles,” and a wild rendering of “Midnight Train to Georgia” that had Gladys Knight jumping to a standing ovation during Sunny’s second prime-time network special, 2000’s ratings blockbuster,
Sunshine on My Shoulders: A Prime-Time Party with Sunny Addison
.

Hymn to Humanity’s
last-minute lead single was a duet with Sunny’s younger brother, D’Artagnan Addison.

Yes—
that
D’Artagnan, the platinum recording artist known by his evocative first name.

“And it’s his
real
name,” Sunny says, munching on shrimp toasts placed on the table by a discreet attendant. Then she pours herself a glass of water from a pitcher lined with slices of lime. “D’Artagnan Marlon Addison. At home, though, he’s just Dart.” The astonishing single, a masterful retooling of the Temptations 1968 “I Wish It Would Rain,” not only anchored
Hymn
and kicked off the career of Sunny’s notoriously private sibling (D’Artagnan declined to be interviewed for this story), but the song has become a fairy tale swathed in mystery wrapped in a quilt of secrets.

Tall tales and urban legends are pervasive in the word of recorded music. And they are seductive. In some cases, the tales lend earthy
tangibility to the magic of music. In others, the legend just adds to the mystery and the immortality of a piece of art so perfect, it’s impact goes far beyond sales and chart positions, and remains super-naturally immeasurable.

There’s the myth, for example, about Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight.” No, he didn’t write the song after witnessing, while unable to help, a friend of his drown. The song is Collins being aggravated about his marriage to his then wife, Andrea.

Another legend keeps up the notion that Michael Jackson’s home phone number was in the UPC (bar) code of
Thriller
(No!). And the model on the cover of the Ohio Players’
Honey
is the subject of an old, macabre rumor. Supposedly, the model’s skin was horribly burned by the heated (so it would drip more easily) honey at the photo shoot, and days later she came to the recording studio where the Players were working on their “Love Rollercoaster.” Supposedly angry—and literally scarred—the model threatened to sue OP for every dollar they had, and so the band’s manager supposedly stabbed her to death right there in the studio, her dying screams supposedly, inadvertently recorded and then included in the song. There
are
screams buried low in the mix of “Love Rollercoaster,” but they aren’t even a woman’s. Keyboardist Billy Beck screeched for the song.

But the stories still awhirl around Sunny and Dart’s version of “I Wish It Would Rain” are complicated and convoluted and have all the makings of a (Lifetime? VH-1 “Movies That Rock”?) fun film. Depression, sex, betrayal, even … the unexplained.

And, of course, what seems a happy ending.

Here are the particulars.

Sunny Addison “employed” her only sibling, D’Artagnan, as her manager because he was suicidal (so she kept him near). He took no (or very little) money for his work. Some say Dart never really did anything for Sunny. Some say he was devoted to her in a way that was almost unhealthy for brother and sister. Some say Sun manipulated him and he resented her. Some say he was always jealous of her success. Some say they have an extremely healthy, loving relationship that was solidified by an absent father, a strict mother, and the fact that
they ran away from home together when Sunny was nineteen and Dart eighteen. They lived in their car until they had money for shifty hotels. By the time they had money enough for a raggedy apartment (one in Fresno, then one in Rosemead), they began traveling Arizona, Washington, and California’s cities and back roads, Sun singing wherever she could for dollars tossed in a green glass dish that she supposedly still has in her home—now filled with floating lilies.

Eva Glenn signed Sunny when Sunny was supposedly at the end of her rope. By most accounts, Sunny’d told Dart that if she hadn’t been signed to a deal by the end of that summer in central California, she was going to get a job, probably get her GED, maybe go to college, or join the service. “Dart was in the dregs back then,” says Hawk Watkins, who was a part of the eventual bidding battle for Sunny. “He was very overweight, and depressed at the idea of Sunny giving up on her dream.”

But then Eva signed Sunny to Roadshow.

Fast-forward.

In 1998, when Sunny and Dart were at a music industry convention in the Bahamas, Dart was supposedly upset at Sunny’s success, and disappeared. “He was NOT ‘upset’ or depressed with my quote-unquote success,” Sunny says with an eye roll. “If you knew him—and you never will—you would know that was impossible.”