Every Little Step: My Story (4 page)

When we hit Germany, it was more of the same—severe homesickness and a desperate search for a hamburger. When the two weeks were over, we were so happy to return to Boston.

New Edition never really found out how many units of our first album we actually sold. So we went out and found these white guys to manage us because we couldn’t get answers from Maurice Starr. We agreed to be managed by a production company called Jump and Shoot. At one point one of our managers even told us, “You gotta get ripped off once or twice in your career,” like this was some meaningful rite of passage in the music business. We said, “What are you talking about? No, we don’t
have
to get ripped off!”

Once we got signed by MCA and started working on a follow-up album, things had gotten ugly with Maurice. We
felt like he had made a ton of money off our efforts and we never saw any of it. But in retrospect it was Jump and Shoot that was collecting most of the cash. We found out that we had been the victims of classic music industry shenanigans: Our contract was actually with Jump and Shoot, our management company, not MCA. Meanwhile, Jump and Shoot signed the deal with MCA. So in effect we, the actual members of New Edition, had no real connection to MCA. Jump and Shoot could pay us whatever they felt like and tell us whatever they wanted.

Let me draw a picture for you of how crazy our lives were in those early days. We would go down to New York City and do shows the whole weekend, starting at midnight on Friday, then shows at one
A.M
., two
A.M
., all the way to four
A.M
. Then on Saturday and Sunday night we’d do the same thing and then head back to Boston once we were done. Once we got back home, the bus or station wagon we were traveling in would drop us off in front of our schools. Ricky, Ralph and I went to the same school, so we’d stumble out of the bus and go straight to class. Yes, it looked crazy as hell. But everybody in the school knew who we were so we got away with it.

Believe it or not, I was a bit shy when I was younger, but I was trying to get past it. Part of the problem was I thought I was ugly. I’ve always had these heavy bags under my eyes, even when I was a little boy. When I looked in the mirror, in my mind I saw an ugly kid staring back at me. And then there was my skin color. As a community we’re slowly start
ing to get away from our color prejudices, but it was still definitely in effect in the seventies and eighties. Black people can say some mean, dirty stuff to each other. They would call me “darkie” or “black,” or “five-head” because I’ve always had a big forehead. Even New Edition used to say this stuff to me back when we first formed the group. They called me all kinds of names, up until the first time we made it to
Soul Train
. I can remember this one particular day when we were practicing with Brooke. While we took a break he’d let us watch
Soul Train
.

“Man, I’m telling you, I can’t wait until we go on there,” I said as I looked at the screen. “We’re gonna turn that place out!”

The other guys went in on me. “We ain’t never going on no
Soul Train,
Charcoal!” one of them said.

“Black-ass dummy!” another one said.

I usually brushed it off, but that time it hurt my feelings because I really believed that what I had said was going to happen. I had dreamed about it. And I turned out to be right: About two years later we did go on
Soul Train
for the first time—and we did turn the place out.

All of them called me names, but Ricky was the worst. Ricky couldn’t fight, so he talked a gang of shit. I never understood why he focused so much on my skin color because we were about the same complexion.

“Dude, you’re no lighter than me!” I’d say to him.

“Yes I am lighter than you,” he’d say back.

“Not even a shade,” I’d say.

Then we’d hold our arms next to each other to see.

But then something happened that shut down all that skin-color talk: Ronnie DeVoe, Brooke’s nephew, joined the group. When they added Ronnie, everybody else instantly became dark because he was the light one.

Some people might find it ironic that while all these girls around the world were starting to swoon when they saw us onstage or in magazines, I was still dealing with insecurities about my looks. Maybe that’s why I dove into the ladies so hard: to prove a point, to show I was desirable.

However, let me emphasize that despite the name-calling, the guys and I had a great time together. We were constantly laughing and goofing around. In those early years, life with New Edition was one big party.

Girls, Girls, Girls

The party got even better when we hit the road and started spending time with the girls who would come to our shows. I was the first one in the group to have sex with one of the fans. It was our first time on the road in an actual tour bus. We were in North Carolina and I met this girl who had been at the show. She was a lot older than me. Man, she showed me something that night. After the show she came backstage, and then I took her on the bus. The rest of the guys were still out in the parking lot talking to girls, so the bus
was empty. I think the other guys were still a little scared of sex, but not me.

I was still so clueless, I didn’t even use protection. I don’t think it crossed my mind at the time. But that changed real quick when the people around us realized what was starting to go down. I mean, we were becoming teenage sex symbols, with girls screaming at us everywhere we went. It was inevitable that we’d start taking advantage of the situation. They talked to us—and quickly—about the need for us to be safe and protect ourselves. Once we started, they couldn’t keep enough condoms on that damn bus.

These girls would have their mothers drop them off at the shows, not knowing what the girls were going to be up to after the show. And I have to admit, even some of the mothers who would stay for the shows and watch us up there onstage pumping and grinding would be getting excited themselves. I could look at them and see the way they were eyeing us. I was always attracted to older women, so it was all good for me.

Our life changed so fast once New Edition blew up. It seemed like overnight we went from one extreme to the next. One minute we were poor young boys from the projects; next thing I knew we were big stars with groupies. By the time I left New Edition, I didn’t know where the years had gone.

One of the things that got drilled into us early on with New Edition was the value of practice and performing. To choreographers like David Vaughn and Brooke Payne, practice was the key to putting on a great show. The dance steps
needed to become so familiar to us that we could do them without thinking about them. And if we didn’t have to think about them, then we could focus our energy on the crowd and the show. It was a work ethic that became second nature to us. I think that work ethic has been largely lost with the current generation of performers. In R & B, there are only a handful of performers who I can say without a doubt share that devotion to the work. Usher has it; you can see it in how he puts his shows together. Mary J. Blige has it, as do Beyoncé and Janet Jackson; they all really focus on creating an amazing show. The rappers? Not so much. Thirteen mics onstage, dudes wandering around everywhere—there’s mostly performance but not much show. Sometimes you can’t even tell who’s rapping the verse because everybody is singing or chanting along. I’m thinking,
Shut up and let him do it!

While New Edition has always been just a singing group, we all had to dig into the music to do our job properly. We could all play instruments by ear and we would pay attention to the chords and the changes to be able to sing harmony. If you’re going to harmonize, you have to know where you fit in, which can only come from studying the chords. And as a dancer, I learned movement by listening to the music, moving my body to every sound in the song. That’s what popping is, reacting to every beat, every rhythm.

Once New Edition started to gain notoriety, an amazing thing happened to us. We got to hang out with our hero
Michael Jackson. We had just signed with MCA and on one of our early trips to Los Angeles, Michael invited us back to his house. This was in 1984, when Michael still lived on Hayvenhurst in Encino. He wouldn’t move to Neverland until 1988. While we were there, we met La Toya and Janet. I already had a crush on Janet from afar, so being in the same room with her was exciting as hell for me. Her second album,
Dream Street,
had come out that year, failing to make a big splash. This was two years before
Control,
so she wasn’t yet the enormous pop icon she would soon become. She was really sweet—and I was in love. Clearly she was a New Edition fan; maybe she was feeling me a bit too.

Michael was incredibly cool, playful and funny. This was two years after the release of
Thriller,
the bestselling album of all time, so Michael was the biggest star in the universe. We were in awe. He loved playing jokes on people, so he kept running through the house and smacking his sisters on the ass. We ran through the house with him and we all desperately wanted to smack La Toya and Janet on the ass too, but we refrained. I don’t even know why he thought it was so funny to slap his sisters on the ass, but I was certainly enjoying the spectacle. He gave us a tour of his house, showing us all the animals he had in the back. There were monkeys and snakes; there might have even been an alligator. The whole experience was mind-blowing. He invited us to spend the night and we were ecstatic—until our manager told us we had to leave because we had a flight in the morning. We were
so hot at him we could barely speak. How often do you get a chance to spend the night at the house of the King of Pop? Some people might want to insert a joke here, considering the legal battles Michael faced later on, but I was and always will be one of his biggest fans.

Michael and I remained fairly close over the years. Though we didn’t spend much time in each other’s company, we did talk on the phone quite often. He always called me “tough guy” because he said I wasn’t scared of anything. He was mainly talking about how I didn’t fear the public like he did. He told me that he just had a hard time trusting people. He didn’t like people staring at him; being in public made him nervous. He felt that everyone was always judging him, which is definitely a sentiment I can identify with now.

But Michael didn’t have that nervous, fragile demeanor when you hung out with him in private. When he was relaxed, he was very goofy and always joking around. I know some people may have a hard time believing this, but he spent a lot of time talking about girls. He’d point out a female walking by and say, “Look at that girl over there, Bobby. She’s fine!”

And this wasn’t done in a way where you might think he was just showing off for me. Michael was serious about it. He was always flirting with girls, making moves on them. Now, I can’t testify as to whether he’d bring them back to his place, but he was definitely interested in them in the most
heterosexual of ways. And he seriously wanted my future wife. When I married Whitney, he told me, “You beat me to it, man, you beat me to it. I thought I was going to marry that girl.”

“Yeah, whatever. I thought I was going to marry your sister,” I said right back to him.

After New Edition had started receiving some local notoriety, but before our record hit the radio, I met one of the loves of my life. We were performing in a show at the Cathedral, the projects where Ronald DeVoe lived in the South End, right next to Roxbury. A female dance troupe called Phase Force was also performing that night, and my sister Carol was a member. Another member of the group was a girl named Kim Ward. She drew our attention right away because she was the cutest girl in the group—and the one with the biggest butt. She was fine as hell, with long hair and almond-shaped eyes. And did I say she also had a big ol’ butt? All the guys in New Edition were checking her out. But after we performed and were in the area that was serving as our dressing room, the girls in Phase Force walked by and punched through the paper that was supposed to be providing us with some privacy.

“I want him,” Kim said, notifying the girls in her group. Her finger was pointing at me. “That’s the one I want.”

All the guys started laughing.

Bivins said to me, “But that’s the one I want to talk to, Bob.”

“But she want me though, nigga! Sorry, can’t help you,” I said back to him.

We started seeing a lot of each other, going to the movies, hanging out in OP or in her neighborhood in Dorchester, Talbot Avenue, which was like a mini suburb. She was fourteen, a year older than me. For some reason, in my early days I always wound up with girls who were older than me. We did a lot of kissing, a lot of grinding. It was real hot and heavy. I was in love, and I’m pretty sure she felt the same way.

But there was one problem: Kim had been messing around with this dude named Timmy who was about seventeen or eighteen—way older than both me and Kim. Kim had broken up with him, but Timmy still hadn’t reconciled himself to that fact. By the time we got to the summer of 1983, New Edition was well on its way to becoming a national phenomenon. “Candy Girl” was all over the radio and we had become local celebrities. All of these things made Timmy very unhappy when combined with the fact that I was messing around with his (ex-)girl.

One day when Kim and I were dancing together at a neighborhood block party, I found out exactly how unhappy Timmy was. We were getting into each other, dancing real close and enjoying each other’s company. All of a sudden, I heard several people say, “Here come Timmy! Here come Timmy!”

Kim leaned into me. “I think you should leave, Bobby,” she said.

But I was Bobby Brown and I wasn’t scared of nobody. I wasn’t running away just because her former boyfriend was coming. It was time for him to find out what was up anyway, that his girl was now my girl. I was eager to confront this dude I had heard a lot about. The fact that he had been locked away in juvie didn’t scare me. I had put hands on dudes way scarier than Timmy.

These were the thoughts that went through my mind as I defiantly stayed out there dancing with my girl. The distress on Kim’s face should have served as a warning to me. But it didn’t.