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Petals - The Collection
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Minnie Riperton
Petals - The Minnie Riperton Collection
Capitol Records
72435-29343-2-4
DISC ONE:
1. THE EDGE OF A DREAM (4:20)
(M. Riperton – R. Rudolph)
(P) 1974 Capitol Records, Inc.
2. YOU GAVE ME SOUL - Andrea Davis (2:40)
(B. Davis)
Courtesy of MCA Records
3. LONELY GIRL - Andrea Davis (3:02)
(Sugar Pie DeSanto, B. Davis)
Courtesy of MCA Records
4. RESPECT - Rotary Connection (3:05)
(O. Redding)
Courtesy of MCA Records
5. WE'RE GOING WRONG – Rotary Connection (3:20)
(J. Bruce)
Courtesy of MCA Records
6. I TOOK A RIDE (CARAVAN) (6:05)
(H. Ando)
Courtesy of MCA Records
7. COME TO MY GARDEN (3:13)
(R. Rudolph)
Courtesy of Janus Records, Inc., by arrangement with Celebrity Licensing Inc.
8. COMPLETENESS (3:24)
(C. Stepney, R. Johnson)
Courtesy of Janus Records, Inc., by arrangement with Celebrity Licensing Inc.
9. EXPECTING (3:55)
(C. Stepney, J. Stocklin)
Courtesy of Janus Records, Inc., by arrangement with Celebrity Licensing Inc.
10. LES FLEUR (3:16)
(C. Stepney, R. Rudolph)
Courtesy of Janus Records, Inc., by arrangement with Celebrity Licensing Inc.
11. STUDIO DIALOG (:34)
12. SEEING YOU THIS WAY (DEMO) (2:39)
(M. Riperton, R. Rudolph)
(P) 2001 Rudolph Productions
Licensed courtesy of Rudolph Productions
13. REASONS (3:25)
(M. Riperton, R. Rudolph)
(P) 1974 Capitol Records, Inc.
14. TAKE A LITTLE TRIP (4:11)
(S. Wonder, Y.L. Wright)
(P) 1974 Capitol Records, Inc.
15. LOVIN’ YOU (3:53)
(M. Riperton, R. Rudolph)
(P) 1974 Capitol Records, Inc.
16. EVERY TIME HE COMES AROUND (3:51)
(M. Riperton, R. Rudolph)
(P) 1974 Capitol Records, Inc.
17. LOVE AND ITS GLORY (5:10)
(E.T. Brown, M. Riperton, R. Rudolph)
(P) 1975 Capitol Records, Inc.
18. SIMPLE THINGS (3:44)
(M. Riperton, R. Rudolph)
(P) 1975 Capitol Records, Inc.
19. LOVIN’ YOU (LIVE REPRISE) – with George Benson Band (4:26)
(M. Riperton, R. Rudolph)
(P) 2001 George Benson. Licensed courtesy of George Benson
DISC TWO:
1. PERFECT ANGEL (3:22)
(S. Wonder)
(P) 1974 Capitol Records, Inc.
2. ADVENTURES IN PARADISE (3:15)
(M. Riperton, J. Sample, R. Rudolph)
(P) 1975 Capitol Records, Inc.
3. YOUNG, WILLING AND ABLE (3:44)
(M. Riperton, R. Rudolph, M. Henderson)
(P) 1975 Capitol Records, Inc.
4. GETTIN’ READY FOR YOUR LOVE (3:38)
(M. Riperton, R. Rudolph)
(P) 1975 Capitol Records, Inc.
5. BABY, THIS LOVE I HAVE (4:12)
(M. Riperton, L. Ware, R. Rudolph)
(P) 1975 Capitol Records, Inc.
6. CAN YOU FEEL WHAT I’M SAYING (4:17)
(M. Riperton, L. Ware, R. Rudolph)
(P) 1975 Capitol Records, Inc.
7. INSIDE MY LOVE (4:45)
(M. Riperton, L. Ware, R. Rudolph)
(P) 1975 Capitol Records, Inc.
8. LIGHT MY FIRE feat. Jose Feliciano (5:09)
(J. Densmore, R. Manzarek, R. Krieger, J. Morrison)
(P) 1979 Capitol Records, Inc.
9. COULD IT BE I’M IN LOVE (4:17)
(M. Riperton, R. Rudolph)
(P) 1977 Capitol Records, Inc.
10. STAY IN LOVE (3:16)
(M. Riperton, R. Rudolph, M. Henderson)
(P) 1977 Capitol Records, Inc.
11. HERE WE GO feat. Peabo Bryson (4:03)
(R. Rudolph, A. Phillips)
(P) 1980 Capitol Records, Inc.
12. MEMORY LANE (4:23)
(M. Riperton, R. Rudolph, St. Lewis, Dozier)
(P) 1979 Capitol Records, Inc.
13. WOMAN OF HEART AND MIND (3:42)
(J. Mitchell)
(P) 1981 Capitol Records, Inc.
14. RETURN TO FOREVER (4:07)
(R. Rudolph, R. Waldman)
(P) 1979 Capitol Records, Inc.
15. LOVER AND FRIEND (4:13)
(M. Riperton, R. Rudolph, St. Lewis, Dozier)
(P) 1979 Capitol Records, Inc.
16. GIVE ME TIME (4:25)
(L. Caston, L. Hurtado)
(P) 1980 Capitol Records, Inc.
____________________________________________________________________
I hear her voice in everything that is joyous, at peace and pure - in church bells at Christmastime, in the 'til-their-cheeks-turn-cherry laughter of children, in a breeze telling secrets to the leaves, in the caw of an eagle feelin' its freedom, or the cry my lady makes when love and oneness reach their peak. In her songs, always, there light. She rocks you in an oven embrace, seats you before the fireplace of her heart and pours until you say when. You never want these visits to end ... When it is time to go, you don't walk, you wing high on hope, passion and 1 he profound possibilities of simple earthly grace, You've beheld vistas of Eden, of jungle paradise by moonlight, and galaxies aligned by the harmony of ages.
"Your majesty," you genuflect. "Just Minnie," she replies.
With her astounding soprano coloratura, five-and-a-half octave range, and the intimate expressiveness with which she wielded it, Minnie Riperton sang the unabridged omnibus of life. Hers was a talent that could not be contained - She was the star of any musical situation into which she was placed, whether singing background, foreground or some slippery slope in between. Her gift always gleamed through, buoyant and crystalline.
It's impossible to overstate that there is so much more to Minnie than "Lovin' You," the charming acoustic love song with which she topped the charts in 1974. In this anthology, a sincere attempt has been made to offer a generous and varied sampling of Minnie's work - from her brief stint as "Andrea Davis" to her key role as the eyerywoman of the criminally underrated rock group Rotary Connection, to the rare masterpiece of her debut solo album, Come To My Garden, to the final albums she completed before breast canter claimed her life in l979. It is a canon this writer has come to affectionately refer to as Minnies from Heaven.
Minnie Julia Riperton was born on November 8, 1947, on the South Side of Chicago, the baby of eight. Her father, Daniel, worked for the railroad and her mother, Thelma, was a housewife. There was a great appreciation for music in her home. One brother, Ricardo, was a jazz pianist. Minnie embraced the arts at an early age, first focusing on ballet and modern dance before shifting to music and voice. She was also a member of the choir at the Sixth Grace Presbyterian Church, half a block down the Woodlawn Avenue on which she lived.
Minnie received operatic vocal training from Marion Jeffery at the Lincoln Center, a black community arts space smack in the middle of Chicago's roughest, most economically challenged area. Jeffery provided Riperton with a strong vocal foundation, emphasizing breath control and exercises that made her able to hold vowel sounds for extended periods of time. While studying, Minnie was mostly singing operettas and the occasional show tune. After several years of molding Minnie, Jeffrey was eager for her to study the classics further in the city's Junior Lyric Opera. However; a now-teenaged Minnie was showing more interest in modern music, particularly soul and psychedelic rock. After graduating from Hyde Park High School and a mere three weeks at Loop College, she dropped out to pursue pop music in earnest.
Minnie's career in pop music had actually already begun. Musician Raynard Miner heard her Singing in Hyde Park's' A Cappella Choir when she was 15. Impressed, he persuaded her to replace Vandine Harris in a girl group formed at rival Marshall High School (on the West Side) called The Gems. Miner, the group's blind piano accompanist, along With Gems manager, Rose Miller, brought Minnie to Chicago's legendary Chess Records where she signed her first contract as a member of the quintet (soon to be a quartet and, in its final days, a studio trio known as Girls Three). The Gems recorded a handful of cutesy singles for Chess, of which, Minnie was primarily featured on their last, three: "Love For Christmas” in '64 (b/w “All Of It:) and “Happy New Love” in ’65.
Chess Records, owned by Phil and Leonard Chess, was the honored home of roots black music by the likes of bluesmen Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, father of Rock ‘n Roll Chuck Berry, and R&B singers Mitty Collier and Billy Stewart. Throughout her stint in the Gems, Minnie – sometimes with the group and other times without – contributed backing vocals to hits on Chess such as the Dells’ “There Is” and Fontellas Bass’ “Rescue Me.” She can even be heard on the classic Pigmeat Markham comedy side, “Here Comes The Judge.” For these sessions, Minnie was paid $10 a recording. When Etta James and Sugar Pie DeSanto scored a breakout hit with the song “In The Basement,” Minnie got her first taste of the chitlin circuit, filling in for a sidelined James. The Chess sessions blossomed into work in Chicago’s lucrative radio/tv jingles market, as well as background work for non-Chess stars, including Ray Charles. Minnie’s voice also grace the phone for the Chess offices during her after-school job as their receptionist.
Chess’ folk-jazz singer/songwriter Terry Callier remembers, “When I was recording my album, Occasional Rain, I really found out how talented Minnie was. She sang backgrounds on my song “Do You Finally Need A Friend.” I put it down with just piano, bass and drums. When Charles Stepney (the producer/arranger for the album) called me back to the studio to play the finished version with Minnie’s backgrounds, I couldn’t move when it was over. I still go back and listen to it.”
The Gems eventually faded, but Minnie’s incredible talent, sunny personality and bewitching good looks were making her quite the popular girl. She was taken under the wing of producer/manager Billy Davis, a giant in the industry then who was the manager for most of Chess’ R&B roster. A younger man who took notice of Minnie was George Daniels, who is, today – thirty-five years later – among the most high-profile music retailers in the United States. Back in ’65, George was one of Minnie’s first boyfriends.
George escorted Minnie to her senior prom at the original McCormick Place (which later burned down). “The Red Sanders Band was playing,” he remembers. “They were very popular at the time – played all of the cotillions and club dates around Chicago. That was the first night I really got to experience hearing Minnie’s talent. Minnie was very popular in school, so Red called her up to the bandstand to sing Barbra Streisand’s “People.” Minnie killed it! When she started hitting those notes over the rhythm section and horns, it was over.”
Through Billy Davis, young George got a gig at Chess, too, first as a janitor then as a driver on the road for Billy Stewart. Through their association with Davis and Chess, Minnie and George got to hang out at funky nightspots like the High Chaparral and the Celebrity Club, soaking up all that good, grown-folks music.
By ’66, Minnie finally had a regional hit of her own the “Lonely Girl,” an escalatingly dramatic ballad of teen forlornment (personally produced by Davis, who co-penned it with Sugar Pie DeSanto) that dynamically showcased her range. It was banded with the more upbeat “You Gave Me Soul,” which was very similar to the ditties Minnie sang with The Gems. Minnie recorded both of these numbers under the “Showbiz” name, Andrea Davis. Chicago radio station WVON, owned by the Chess brothers, kept the single in good rotation, so Minnie enjoyed some local success.
Daniels witnessed soul singer Tyrone Davis call Minnie up to sing during one of his sets. “Minnie had the audience just cheering! I walked up and gave her a dollar, then everybody in the house started giving her dollars. At the bus stop on the way home, we counted our loot. That was our little hustle!” Daniels’ first days in the music biz came to an end when he had to face the draft board for service in Vietnam. Of those golden days prior, he concludes, “Minnie was a lot of fun, yet she was also the personification of someone who ate, slept and drank singing. That’s how she had complete control of her instrument.”
About a year after her Andrea Davis single, Minnie was slotted into a rock group dubbed the Rotary Connection. The band was the quirky, counterculture creation of Marshall Chess, son of Leonard Chess. When his father gave him an opportunity to start his own youth-targeted label, Marshall created Cadet Concept, then launched it with Rotary Connection. The group was pieced together from the guitarist, bassist and drummer of the white rock band the Proper Strangers, white church singer Judy Hauff (then the secretary for the archbishop of the Chicago diocese), black soul singer Sidney Barnes (just back in Chicago from a stint in Detroit working with a pre-Funkadelic George Clinton) and Minnie. The man assigned to stir this melting pot into the stoned soul stew it became was African American arranger/composer/producer, Charles Stepney, then-Musical Supervisor for Chess Records and its Ter Mar Studios.
Within the hippest musical circles, Charles Stepney is renowned as a progressive visionary to this day. His expansive classical training in orchestration, composing, piano and percussion (he adored Ravel), his salad days work as a vibraphonist on Chicago’s jazz scene (including some dates with Eddie Harris), and his bold, uncomprosiming ability to appreciate and synthesize music from around the globe made him a natural choice to take on the soft psychelicism of “The Rotary”’s experiments. Where the average musician hear music in blocks, Stepney heard full-on orchestral arrangements in his head before ever putting pen to paper. Sadly, he departed this earthly plane far too soon (1931-1976). He was way ahead of Chess in recognizing the astounding gifts of his adopted pupil, Minnie Riperton.
Maurice White, then a staff drummer at Chess who would go on to lead the ‘70s supergroup Earth Wind & Fire, recalls, “Minnie was a sweetheart – very humble. She really evolved under the wing of Charles Stepney. The way he discovered her octave range was one morning he caught her imitating string parts in the studio. He was flabbergasted! Charles really encouraged Minnie, sitting and working with her for hours on whole tone scales, developing her sound and volume. She had that soul and classical thing which, I believe, was influenced by Morgana King.”
Rotary Connection’s self-titled debut album was recorded and released in the late fall of ’67, emphasizing an ensemble vocal approach. Even then, Minnie was a standout. In the arrangements – including a wacky baroque treatment of Sam & Dave’s “Soul Man” – Stepney often utilized Minnie’s voice as a secret ingredient – a special effect or human synthesizer, if you will – swooping through the music in varying depths of the mix more as a member of the orchestra than of the singers. On the group’s second LP, Aladdin (spring 1968), she finally got to shine as a lead vocalist, most memorably on their evocatively epic treatment of “I Took A Ride (Caravan),” symphonic Middle Eastern exotica that showcases Minnie’s brilliance within a spellbinding backdrop.
It was during the early stages of Rotary Connection’s development that Minnie first encountered a man who would be her soulmate – a white, ramblin’ renaissance man named Richard Rudolph. “When I first met Minnie,” he begins, “she was singing with the Rotary Connection at a place called the Electric Theatre (also known as “The Kinetic Playground”) that I was managing. It was kind of the Fillmore of Chicago. I’ll never forget that first moment I saw here at the top of the stairs. As I was walking up, she just stood there looking at me. We had never been introduced. It was one of this kismet moments that you read about. We were pretty much inseparable after that. Of course, anyone was instantly attracted when they first met her. It’s just that after I met Minnie, I couldn’t think about anything else.”
Having Richard in her life during this time was a comfort as Minnie struggled to make a go of things with the band. Though Stepney often supplemented Rotary Connection with Chicago session greats in the studio, they were a colorful act live. When they weren’t in the studio making an average of two albums a year, they toured the Midwest and East Coast constantly, developing a fervent college and underground following. They sold records wherever they played, which as primarily as an opening act for the likes of Janis Joplin and Santana. But due to Chess’ lack of national radio promotion muscle and the group’s alternative concepts they never hit it big – not with their radically introspective and socially conscious Christmas album, Peace, nor with their fourth album, Songs, which contained brilliantly reimagined versions of rock and soul hits. Two pieces from Songs that featured Minnie were astounding.
First was "We're Going Wrong," one of three songs from rock trio Cream's Disraeli Gears album that The Rotary reworked for their album. Minnie's flawless technique coupled with a searing empathy for Jack Bruce's lyrics really gets beneath the skin of the song's spooky realization that something was terribly, terribly wrong in the world circa '68.
The second was an arrangement of the soul classic "Respect," penned and originally sung by Otis Redding but made famous by Aretha Franklin. Stepney and The Rotary turned the once-anthem into a duet between Minnie and Sidney on which both parties in a relationship are trying to come to an understanding. Stepney's orchestration brought such an operatic urgency to the piece that many people didn't initially recognize it as the same song on which sista Aretha had demanded some R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
When one considers the trajectory of Rotary Connection, it is common to conclude that they were just plain robbed. Rudolph muses, "It seems like everything conspired against them from becoming this truly great group. Things like their management turning down Woodstock for a gig at a festival in Toronto because it paid more money. If Rotary Connection had played Woodstock, you couldn't have kept them a secret any longer."
During the same November of '69 that Rotary Connection recorded its fifth album, Dinner Music, Minnie spent three days of splendor in the studio with Stepney and an orchestra recording her long awaited first solo album, Come To My Garden. Though she enjoyed the songs that she'd waxed with The Rotary up to this point, Minnie had always wanted to record some music in the vein of pop sensation Dionne Warwick - richly melodic music with intricate twists and turns plus a Sergio Mendes & Brazil '66 chaser that would really engage a listener with a touch of timeless class. With Charles Stepney as her Burt Bacharach, she more than had the musical element covered. The sweet surprise was that her Hal David lyricist for several of the songs would be Richard. The first evidence of this was the title track, "Come To My Garden."
"At first, I was writing prose and poetry," Richard explains, "then I picked up a guitar and started to write songs. I was never a great guitarist, but I got a hold of a Mickey Baker jazz book and learned all these voicings. I was interested more in writing, than playing. I remember having a dream, waking up and writing this song, 'Come To My Garden.' Minnie was right there with me. I don't know if it was about the place where we ended up getting married - which was a garden. I think it was just about our being together, Minnie loved the song. One afternoon when we were with Charles, she asked me to play (and sing) it for him. I was amazed when he actually liked it!"
"Charles asked if I could write to other people's music," he continues. "Being young, I told him I could write anything! Then this man turned around and gave me the most beautiful things you could ever imagine. His demos are my favorite things that I've ever heard in life ... I used to listen to them endlessly. Charles would play piano, vibes and melodica on them. They touched such an emotional core in me and I would be so inspired."
The initial Stepney/Rudolph collaborations yielded five songs for Minnie's Come To My Garden. The most famous of them is "Les Fleur," a lovely meditation written from the perspective of a flower. Stepney's music for "Les Fleur" was first recorded a year before by classically-trained jazz piano virtuoso Ramsey Lewis on his Cadet album, Maiden Voyage. Stepney used Minnie on Ramsey's version, singing a lovely refrain that, in reality, was just so much melodic jibberish. To this writer, it sounded like a little girl trying to say something to her mother about a rose she'd just picked. Or maybe "Mable, Katy, Sadie, Loya" were the names of women Minnie or Charles considered to be like roses in their lives. Richard wrote lovely words for these melodies which became the first verse of Minnie's version, but Stepney retained the mysterious phrases for the second verse. To fans who've tried to decipher what language Minnie is singing in or what it all means, you are hereby free to use your imagination (or "memory band").
Ramsey, who played piano on most of Come To My Garden, enthuses, "What was so great about Minnie is that the tone of her voice was as beautiful in the low register as it was in the high register. Never screechy, it retained a beautiful tone up there. Minnie was a beautiful, loving person. And Charles was so dedicated. If he was sitting over there right now, I'd tell you, 'That's music! We just call him Charles Stepney.'''
Another treasure from the Come To My Garden sessions is the love song "Completeness," one of two songs on the album which Stepney collaborated on with poetess Rose Johnson. Again, Minnie's voice soars in gentle solo and layered high register harmonies while Stepney scored celestial circles around her for one breathtaking performance. The song was later covered in 1982 (with a funkier yet no less intricate Jerry Peters arrangement) by singer Jean Carn (produced by Norman Connors).
A final selection from Come To My Garden is the entrancing "Expecting," written by Stepney with lyrics by The Rotary's Jon Stocklin. It hauntingly captures the mysterious workings of the female mind as eliptically as a mere man could muster.
Anyone who has had the pleasure of hearing a proper copy of Come To My Garden understands that their ears are in the presence of pure musical mastery. It was released in 1970, just after Chess was bought by the GRT company, and released on the Janus label. In the ensuing changeover, this fragile gem slipped between the cracks, a crushing experience for Minnie and all involved.
Meanwhile on the homefront, Richard and Minnie had their share of unnecessary stress due to their being an interracial couple circa the late '60s. Sometimes the situations were absurd, like the time they were pulled over at gunpoint by the police. Richard asked why they stopped them and the cop replied, "We had reports that Angela Davis was seen in the neighborhood."
Other times, the situations were downright ugly. The newlyweds, with a tenacious team of sympathetic legal supporters, had to take a landlady all the way to the Federal Housing Commission to stop her from evicting them without grounds. They saw the case through and won - in the name of justice - but soon after packed their bags and departed anyway.
Shortly after completing a final album by a revamped NEW Rotary Connection, titled Hey Love (another masterpiece featuring seven more Rudolph lyrics but only two semi-prominent lead vocals from Riperton), Minnie and Richard packed up her little boy, Marc, into a funky, customized Ford Econoline van, and headed for New York. Minnie told Richard, "I could do stuff here (in Chicago) for the rest of my life and it just wouldn't matter. I've got to get out of this pond!" It was the summer of '71.
They took a few meetings with record companies, when visited friends of Brewster Bay in Cape Cod. This is where they discovered. Minnie was pregnant again. After another trip to New York, Minnie grew tired, of waiting on the Buddah Group and Columbia Records to make a decision, so she brought everything down to basics on Richard. "Baby, can we just go someplace warm?" So they drove south, listening to Isaac and Sly on the 8-track all the way until they reached Miami Beach, where Richard had been raised. They stayed in Coconut Grove.
Friends turned Richard on to a farm community near the University of Florida in Gainesville. He and Minnie went to visit and fell in love with a sweet little three bedroom house behind a duck pond, with citrus trees out back and a screen door in front never in need of locking. The rent was $160. They bought a waterbed and moved right in. The good news was it didn’t cost a lot to live. The bad news was there was no way to make any money!
Richard tried his hand at jobs ranging from cobbling leather sandals to starting a handyman business. All the while, he and Minnie wrote their first songs together ... The best gig Richard had in Gainesville was as a disc jockey for its tiny FM station, WGVL. He went to Orlando, got his third class engineers license and wound up out in the woods, in the middle of nowhere, playing whole sides of Weather Report and Crusaders albums! His shift was Weekend mornings from sunrise to 10 A.M. as "DJ Little Wolf." Sometimes, he'd bring Marc (nicknamed "Ringo" because he loved the Yellow Submarine drummer) down to the station, open up the mic and read him something out of the newspaper. "What do you think about somebody treating another person that way," he'd ask? "That's not very cool, dad," Ringo replied and into a Stevie song they'd go.
Soon, little Maya was born and the family became a foursome. "As short as it was, I'm so glad we had that time to just live our lives together with the kids," Richard reflects. "We were totally away from that big city, music industry rat race. We got to concentrate on the real things in life. We were there for almost two years, never in the mindset of feeling rushed to get back to the record business. We learned something there. If you do things for the right reasons and you're not desperate, the things that you really want will happen. Energy attracts like-energy."
One day in '73, Steve Slutzah, a college rep for Epic Records who had been searching for Minnie essentially since the Rotary Connection had disbanded, got a tip that she was in Florida and looked her up. Richard played him a four-song demo he and Minnie had cut on an earlier trip to Los Angeles. Elated, Steve took the tape to Don Ellis, VP A&R at Epic in L.A. Richard continues, "Don flew out, sat on the floor with us on these big pillows as I played guitar and Minnie sang. Don really liked 'Seeing You This Way.’ We had dinner, then afterward, he said, 'Please, can we make a deal?' Next thing we knew, we were flying back to L.A. to make a record. It's so amazing how this stuff happens.”
That demo recording of “Seeing You This Way” from the family’s private collection is included in this anthology as a special treat featuring Richard playing guitar and Jerry Peters on piano. It is provided not as a performance to be considered alongside her pristine recordings, but rather as a peek behind the scenes of her creative process and her personality.
Once in L.A., the question was who would they get to produce the album? “There was really only one guy that Minnie wanted to work with,” Richard shares, “and that was Stevie Wonder. The company was like, ‘Yeah right!’ Steve had just made Talking Book and Innervisions. Well, we were staying at this house on Laurel Canyon and a friend of Minnie’s manger stopped by. When he found out we were trying to get to Stevie, he said, ‘I used to walk him on stage to the microphone!’ So, he checks around and some one tells him Stevie was cutting at the Record Plant. He calls, tells Stevie about Minnie, then hands her the phone. 30 seconds later, Minnie hangs up and says, ‘Can anybody give me a ride to the studio? He wants me to sing on something.’ It turned out to be background vocals on ‘It Ain’t No Use’ from Fulfillness’ First Finale (with Deniece Williams and Lani Groves).” Later, Minnie would be more prominently featured on his now-classic “Creepin’.”
Stevie and Minnie had met once before at the 1971 Black Expo in Chicago where Minnie was singing with Quincy Jones. In an account relayed by writer Margo Jefferson, Minnie shared, “I saw Stevie back stage, so I went over and whispered in his ear, ‘Keep up the good work.’ He asked me what my name was and I said, ‘Minnie.’ He started jumping up and down saying, ‘Not Minnie Riperton – it’s been my dream to work with you! You sing like an angel.”
A few hours after reuniting with Stevie, Minnie called Richard and said, “Come on down!” When he arrived, Minnie said, “Stevie, meet my old man!” “Stevie held out his hand,” Richard remembers, ‘and when I took it, he just kept holding it – talkin’ to me, talkin’ to other people, fooling with his keyboard, but all the time holding my hand. There was this amazing connection and I realized he was checking me out – seeing if I was cool. A lot of guys would have been freaked out, but I kind of got it. The three of us became great friends.”
Motown was not behind Stevie producing an album for Epic’s new songbird, but Stevie, being “El Toro Negro,” did as he pleased. Stevie and Richard got around this dilemma by creating a joint company, Scorbu Productions (“Scor” because Richard is a Scorpio and “Bu” because Stevie was very much a Taurus the bull). They set to work on Minnie’s Perfect Angel, using members of Stevie’s band, Wonderlove. “We’d be in the studio by 11 and go all night – laughing, talking, making music … and eating Roscoe’s fried chicken,” Richard reminisces.
When Minnie appeared Soul Train later that year, Don Cornelius introduced her stating that Perfect Angel was “one of the most beautiful albums we’ve heard in a long time.” The nine-song project – seven written by Richard and Minnie – was a marvelous patchquilt of styles that ranged from the righteous, reggae-rock mission statement of “Reasons” (with Stevie on drums), the sensual burn of “Every Time He Comes Around” (featuring Marlo Henderson on guitar), and two songs Stevie wrote especially for Minnie, “Take A Little Trip”/and “Perfect Angel.”
Then there was “The Edge Of A Dream,” a personal favorite of Richard’s. “Someday we’ll find something great to do with that song,” he says. “It was inspired by a combination of Dr. Martin Luther King’s life and our lives. Listening to Stevie playing that piano and Minnie’s voice really takes me back.” That song and the entire album were a perfect reflection of Minnie’s uncompromised artistry, which also meant it didn’t fit neatly into any one bag, radio format or record bin. “When Perfect Angel was first release,” Richard remembers, “nothing was happening with it. Epic tried three singles: ‘Reasons,’ ‘Take A Little Trip” and “Seeing You This Way,” but had no idea what to do with Minnie. It was until “Lovin’ You” that things started to pick up. I had to go back in the studio with Odell Brown and add an Arp string part for the 45 version to get them to agree to try a fourth single.”
Ahhh, “Lovin’ You,” one of the sweetest and simplest heart-on-sleeve love songs to ever grace the air waves. It began as chord changes on a guitar until one evening, in Gainesville, “I was just sitting there playing and I could hear Minnie in the kitchen rattling pans – probably cookin’ up a pot of beans. Then I heard her start to sing this melody over this jazz samba I was fooling around with. The tempo was faster than the way we ended up recording it. This was just after Maya was born, and Maya never wanted her mama out of her sight! So we got one of those lil’ Swing-a-matics for her and made an early tape of “Lovin’ You” with no words – just me playing and Minnie humming the melody, singing, ‘Maya, Maya.’ We made a loop, left Maya on the front porch swingin’ then snuck out back to hang out!”
When we brought “Lovin’ You” to the studio,” he continues, “we cut it at least three different ways, but it just wasn’t coming out the way Minnie and I wanted. Finally, Stevie said, ‘Let’s do it the way you wrote it!’ That meant I had to go in the studio and play guitar. Steve and I were really good friends, but I can’t tell you all the things he called me to get me in that studio! Once he did, he and Minnie were on the other side of the glass just giving me the hardest time. Then Stevie came in and put these two incredible Fender Rhodes parts on it. We thought, ‘This is unbelievable.’ Minnie sang her part and it was great, but she still felt something was missing. Stevie was going crazy, so he made me find our original two-track. There on the tape was a bird outside singing. Stevie said, ‘Well, get the bird then!’ And we did … but I can’t tell you how. It’s a secret.”
When the album was finished, Minnie went to Barry Feinstein's studio to shoot the cover art. A lover of clothes, she brought several outfits because he'd said he wanted to shoot all the sides of her personality. She told him, "I can't show you all of them, but I'll show you some!" The coveralls and the ice cream dripping down her fingers showed her playful side. "Everybody loved those pictures," Richard enthuses. "She was just being real. Then we started to think, ‘Do we dare?' And Minnie said ‘Why not!'" Onto the cover it went.
Perfect Angel became Minnie's only RIAA-certified platinum album, a million-seller that perched at the #1 slot on the R&B album chart for three weeks. "Lovin' You" was a gold-selling #1 pop smash in America and Britain, and peaked at#3 R&B here. Minnie played small and medium sized venues across the country with a stage set-up that included potted trees and birds twittering away in sparkling cages. Both Sidney Barnes and Cash McCall from the Chess days toured in her back-up band when they were available. Most importantly, Minnie was enjoying becoming known as "that lady with the unbelievably high voice."
For her third album, Adventures in Paradise, Minnie revisited the realm of sacred space as she had on Come To My Garden, only this time with a far more sensual undercurrent. She and Richard were thrilled to get Stewart Levine (another Scorpio) to co-produce the project with them because he had been at the helm of those Crusaders albums they enjoyed so much back in Gainesville. The cherry on top was they got two Crusaders to participate.
Crusaders keyboardist Joe Sample played throughout the album and co-wrote "Adventures in Paradise" with Minnie and Richard in their home. His signature is evident in the descending changes of the chorus. Minnie gets to both soar and get down to a growl urging all to live everyday as a passport to discovery. It was the album's third single.
Crusaders guitarist Larry Carlton, who arranged and conducted the rhythm, string and horn parts for the entire album, reflects, "I was a major fan of Minnie's, especially 'Lovin' You.' It was a great opportunity for me to stretch my arranging chops and surround her amazing voice with some things I thought would be cool. She made 'a tremendous statement with that record. And I think the way I backed her was pretty damn good!"
Another potent contributor to this album was singer/songwriter Leon Ware, the master sensualist and self-described "musical minister” who would, the very next year, be responsible for one of Marvin Gaye’s steamiest LPs ever, I Want You. That same vibe was flowing in collaborations with Minnie and Richard like “Baby, This Love I Have” from Adventures In Paradise, and the absolutely transcendental “Can You Feel What I’m Saying?” (with a touch of Shakespeare) from her next LP, Stay In Love.
Minnie first worked with Leon singing the duet “If I Ever Lose This Heaven” (which Leon co-wrote with Pam Sawyer) on Quincy Jones’ Body Heat album. It turned out Ware and the Rudolphs were Laurel Canyon neighbors whose children went to the same school. This musical ménage a trois convened in the Rudolph’s converted garage studio ‘til the wee hours, concocting songs that continue to ignite, to this day, the fire of desire.
The most famous of these is “Inside My Love,” a provocative musical portrait depicting a warm, seamless union of soulmates. Amidst all of its evocative poetry were the deemed-scandalous lines, “Will you come inside me / Do you wanna ride my love.” When this was released as the lead-off single, some people couldn’t see the forest for the bush.
“There were programmers at stations that wouldn’t play the song because they felt it was too risqué,” Richard admits, “which was absurd! If you really look at the lyrics, it’s about a much more spiritual trip. There is a duality, but we always believed that to truly have love and to express that love physically, you have to have the other side of it – the emotional side. ‘While we’re here / The whole world is turning …’
That is one of my favorite lyrics of all time. When we performed it live, people would fall out. They could never believe it when Minnie held that note. Minnie would introduce it saying, 'This is the song that got me banned. But I got a letter from a nun who said that she didn't think anything was wrong with it at all. In fact, she kinda got off on it...'''
"All I can say is we understood that that was going to happen when we wrote the song,' Ware says, chuckling slyly at the memory. “Minnie was just as daring as I was."
"I had that song title for many years," Ware continues. "When Minnie said she wanted to sing something that had a very sensuous yet classy message, I told her about my idea. This idea came from me going to church as a little boy. Whenever a sermon was almost over, there would this point where the organ would play real soft, you could hear a pin drop and the vibe would be completely hypnotic. The pastor would say, 'Won't you come inside the Lord,' and people would stand up - eyes closed and arms outstretched - as if they were being guided to the pulpit.
"That's why whenever somebody mentions 'Inside My Love' - in as much as the dilemma that people tend to have with sex and God - I always say that the real misconception is that we're doing something wrong when we're doing one or the other. It's always been quite clear to me that wherever you go with your heart can never be wrong. Hopefully, myself and people I've worked with like Minnie, Dick and Marvin, have said something that touched some nerves and will continue to touch some nerves."
Adventures in Paradise wasn't all erotica. In fact, two of the songs were downright darling. There was the second single, "Simple Things," a gentle reminder to never take for granted the basic blessings of life. Then there was the rapturous fable, "Love and Its Glory," which Minnie and Richard co-wrote with their road bassist, Ed Brown. It opens like a storybook with the heavenly harp of Dorothy Ashby, another of Minnie's many friends from her Chicago days at Chess.
It's a lonely world, my children / You gotta do the best you can / If you find a chance to love! You'd better grab it any way you can.
"Our lives were based around our children, each other and our music," Richard shares. "We wrote that song for the kids. We told them all the time, 'The world has become a place of deferred happiness, but it's the journey that's the adventure.' We came up with a story about Maya and an imaginary young man named 'Aliya.' Maya was just a baby and didn't quite 'get' the song. Whenever she heard it, she'd say, 'I am not a liar!’”
When recording was completed, it was time for Minnie to shoot another striking album cover depicting her in a silkily elegant ensemble with baby's breath in her hair ... and a lion chillin' by her side. It would be one of her most enduring images, but it came with a price. At one point, the lion playfully jumped up on Minnie, scratching her upper chest with his paw. She was startled but, thankfully, not seriously injured.
Adventures in Paradise, a Top 5 R&B album, was a gold-seller - good, but not as good as Perfect Angel. Its biggest hit was "Inside My Love," which peaked at #26 R&B but #76 pop. Yet it stands as the favorite album of the majority of her fans which was far more important to Minnie. Sadly, it was the last music she got to make before a devastating discovery would rock the very foundation of her existence.
Richard remembers, "We were in Sun Valley on her last day of shooting Flip Wilson's Winter Olympics TV special. She asked me, 'Do you feel something here?' It was the tiniest little bump on her breast. She was in perfect health, completely vital and full of energy, but we went to see a doctor that day. He said it was probably nothing, but decided to do a biopsy. The very next day - so fast - he said, 'It's matastecized. I've never seen anything like it. I think you should have a mastectomy immediately.' We got another opinion - from top people - and they told us, 'This doesn't rook good. We advise that you make a decision quickly.'''
All Minnie could think about were her two small children (3 & 7), wanting to be there for them. So she had a modified mastectomy two days later, but it was too late. "The oncologist walked into the recovery room and told me that the cancer had already spread into her lymph nodes," Richard says quietly. "He gave her six months."
True to her strength of character, Minnie Riperton lived a little over three years from that fateful day. Every day from that point on was about living, not dying. Initially and understandably private about her illness, she swiftly became among the first and most passionately vocal spokespersons for breast cancer awareness. She disclosed her condition on The Tonight Show while being interviewed by guest host, Flip Wilson. Minnie received the American Cancer Society's Courage Award, presented to her by President Jimmy Carter in a ceremony at the White House. She was soon after named Chairman of the Society's Awareness Program.
And she went right on making records. Her next album, Stay in Love: A Romantic Fantasy Set To Music, found her working with R&B veteran, Freddie Perren, who was versatile enough to handle her sophisticated fare while also injecting some timely disco spirit.
The nine-song album was conceived as a musical where the listener happens upon a woman's diary and reads the story of her one great love. "We approached it that way to keep Minnie mentally involved in the music," Richard says. This album contained the funkiest cut of her career, "Young, Willing and Able," with a stellar writing and playing contribution from guitarist Marlo Henderson. There was also "Can You Feel What I'm Saying?" which oozed eroticism on a celestial plane.
The delightful Brazilian daydream "Could It Be I'm In Love" found Minnie one-upping the long note she held on "Inside My Love," by this time holding notes, then breaking them up into precisely descending tones without taking a breath. Just as charming is the rarely heard "Gcttin' Ready For Your Love" which finds our heroine angelically poised to cross the threshold of girldom into womanhood. And the album-closing "Stay In Love" was a blissful renewal of vows that came closest to recapturing the innocence and magic of "Lovin' You." The acoustic guitar was played by The Tonight Show's Tommy Tedesco.
On May 9th, 1977, Minnie participated in one of George Benson's all-star 4 x 4 Concerts singing a version of "Lovin' You (Live Reprise)" that returned the song to its danceable uptempo origins. Minnie was the opening act for George's show that night at Avery Fisher Hall. At the end of his set, she joined him for an encore singing her biggest hit. An excerpt of this version - never before released and included here from Benson's personal archives - features solos by Grover Washington Jr. on flute and Joe Sample on electric piano. The rest of the band was Henson on rhythm guitar, drummer Harvey Mason, percussionist Ralph MacDonald, Jorge Dalto on piano, Ronnie Foster on synthesizer and fretless bassist Alphonso Johnson. The musicians were literally learning the song on the spot, but once they had the chord changes down, it turned into a jam on which Minnie cut loose with gut bucket abandon. "It was a meeean show, man," Benson enthuses. "Minnie tore that place up!"
Amazing songs aside, Stay in Love did not perform well sales-wise or radio-wise (the disco single, "Stick Together," stalled at #57 R&B). The Rudolphs were not pleased. "We didn't feel Minnie was getting the support she deserved," Richard states. "And I couldn't have that happening while she was dealing with this 'other stuff.' Every moment for her now was precious. I wanted Minnie where people wanted her and appreciated her." So, Minnie's attorney, Mike Rosenfeld, struck a fantastic deal that moved Minnie and her Epic catalog to Capitol Records (then headed by Rupert Perry) where her final three albums would be released. The first, Minnie, would be the last one released in her lifetime.
Capitol went all out for the recording of this album, which went to #5 on the R&B charts and Top 20 pop. Co-producer Henry Lewy introduced Minnie and Richard to English wunderkind, Jeremy Lubbock, who would go on to be a much in-demand composer and arranger. He brought a savoir faire to the arrangements that was pure brilliance. "Not only was Minnie an artist of the highest order and an exquisite human being," Lubhock shares, "she was also courageous enough to put her last album into the hands of a totally unknown arranger, for which I will be eternally grateful. I am merely one of the many who loved her - and miss her."
The world got its first taste of Minnie with the first single, "Memory Lane," a bittersweet piece considering that, like all of the songs that Richard and Minnie composed, it was torn from the pages of their life together. It was, indeed, a photograph that sparked the vivid opening line and the couple went on to complete the song with a young writer named Keni St. Lewis. The rhythm section was out of this world with the ever-tasteful Harvey Mason on drums, Chuck Rainey on bass, old Rotary Connection friend Phil Upchurch on guitar, and Victor Feldman on vibes.
Tennis buff Minnie had a ball of a whole ‘nother sort flirting with blind Puerto Rican superstar Jose Feliciano on a remake of “Light My Fire.” The song was written and first recorded by Los Angeles rock legends The Doors, but made a crossover hit by Feliciano in 1968. The glee in Minnie’s revisitation to the classic, with Feliciano right there lobbing salacious Spanish curves at her, is infectious. It also features a flute solo by the ubiquitous Hubert Laws and standout bass by Abraham Laboriel.
And the fun continued on “Lover And Friend,” the album’s second single, thanks to a little help from a friend. “We’d tried the song a couple of ways that we weren’t happy with,” says Richard. “So I called Stevie and said, ‘What do you think, man?’ We jumped into one of his rolling homes on wheels and headed to a nearby studio. He went in and did his thing, playing drums and all the keyboards. It was very sweet of him. By this point Minnie was having a tough time, but doing this music meant a lot to her.”
During these sessions, Minnie returned to a practice she rarely did once she'd become a solo artist, which was cover another writer's song. That the writer was confessional folk poetess Joni Mitchell reveals Minnie's exquisite taste. That the song was "Woman of Heart and Mind" (from Joni's 1972 collection, For The Roses) hints that Minnie may have relished stepping into the lyrical shoes of a woman with the kind of "time on her hands" to navel-gaze about a lover man and his little boy ways. Far more preciously rendered than Mitchell's rootsier original, the song is ornately arranged for strings, guitar, soprano sax and percussion. Mitchell purists may bristle because one key line was softened to "lay with strangers," but no one could deny the sheer beauty Minnie brought to the melody and Lubbock's added obligato that follows every verse. The recording was not released, however, until Minnie's posthumous Best of album.
The piece that most poignantly captures the stark autumn of Minnie's life is "Return to Forever," delivered direct from Richard's heart to hers. "I wrote the first part on guitar," he says, "but I had no idea where to take it. So I called on our friend (pianist) Randy Waldman." Once the music was completed, Richard composed his most soul-stirring lyric and Minnie voiced it with an empathy only she could give it. As Lubbock's chilling arrangement and Gerry Vinci's weeping violin lay bare the gray of the mood, Minnie animates every telling word. "Laughing in the face of time / If only we knew now what we did then ... "
Minnie dedicated Minnie to her grandmother and namesake, Minnie Matthews, who passed away at the lush, full age of 93.
Around 10 A.M. on the morning of July 12, 1979, Minnie Riperton died wrapped in the loving arms of her husband. She was listening to a cassette of a song Stevie Wonder had personally delivered to Cedars Sinai Hospital the evening before, written and recorded especially for her. She was 31.
The next year, Capitol released the posthumous tribute album, Love Lives Forever. Richard and veteran Chicago studio great Johnny Pate painstakingly produced it, wedding vocal demos that Minnie had begun to remarkable contributions from a stellar assemblage of her friends and peers, including Michael Jackson, Patrice Rushen and George Benson. The back cover was filled with their adoring testimonials.
The first single, "Here We Go," a soaring, uptempo love song, featured soul singer Peabo Bryson dueting with Minnie and the featured backing vocals of Roberta Flack. Those laying down the song's serious groove were drummer Mason, bassist Laboriel, guitarist Lee Ritenour and pianist Tennyson Stephens, with Tom Scott on tenor sax and the intoxicating harp of Gayle Levant.
Minnie's final single was the melancholy "Give Me Time". It was an outside writing contribution, but featured the familiar and overwhelmingly emotive harmonica of Stevie Wonder and the violin of Gerry Vinci.
In 1982, The Best of Minnie Riperton was released, including live performances, spoken musings and Joni's "Woman of Heart and Mind." One final song that Richard had written with Minnie in mind, "Now That I Have You," was recorded by phenomenal soul artist, Teena Marie, on her sophomore LP, Lady T (1980 - co-produced by Teena with Richard), which she dedicated to Minnie.
Today, Minnie is more than alive and well. She is thriving. Her recordings are used for film and television in contexts both reverent ("Inside My Love" in Jackie Brown, starring Minnie's good friend, Pam Grier) and irreverent ("Lovin' You" as lampooned on South Park). At least Minnie was in good company on South Park. They skewered Streisand, too! Richard insists Minnie would have enjoyed it all. "She loved to laugh ... that's one of the things that kept her going."
Many of today's finest young singers have been influenced by and/or paid their respects to Minnie, including Mariah Carey (who makes extensive use of her upper register), Trina Broussard (who brilliantly reworked "Inside My Love" for the film, Love Jones), Shanice (who beautifully covered “Lovin' You") and Chante Moore (who recorded "Inside My Loye" for the TV soundtrack New York Undercover, faithful to Minnie's original). Ms. Moore, an always thoughtful songwriter and singer, shares, "Minnie was such a sincere vocalist and writer. When you hear her music, you feel like you've gotten to know her. I appreciate any artist who is able to deliver themselves through the music. Yet, there's still a mystique about Minnie. I love her."
Even in hip hop, Minnie Riperton reigns like royalty. Her voice and songs have been utilized by highly respected artists such as Arrested Development, Mos Def & Talib Kweli (a.k.a, Black Star) and The Roots. Rapper Q-Tip, formerly of the groundbreaking trio A Tribe Called Quest, extensively sampled Minnie's music on hits like "Bonita Applebaum" (using Rotary Connection's "Memory Band"), "Lyrics To Go" (using "Inside My Love") and "Check the Rhime" (using "Baby, This Love I Have"). When contacted to share his feelings about Minnie, Q-Tip responded with the handwritten reply, "I was unaware of this request 2 give a quote 4 Minnie when, 10-minutes prior, I was listening 2 'Memory Lane' and an assortment of other genius songs. The word 'genius' is a powerful word and Minnie clearly wears it. She effortlessly pours her innovative tone into each phrase making us feel her sex, eroticism, passion, truth, power and genius. Yes, GENIUS!!"
Of her spirit, Leon Ware hypothesizes, "Minnie was naturally driven to be a mother to people. Anyone who met her almost immediately loved her. I've been very blessed to live and work around people of the caliber of Minnie. Those moments are the treasure we have that makes the other things we deal with in life worthwhile. It makes you feel like reaching and participating in the adventure with that much more passion."
Minnie’s greatest gift lies in the way she continues to affect everyone who takes the time to really feel the messages she was sharing in her lifetime. “When I listen to the music,” says Richard, “I’m excited and touched all over again. Some of the moments were so hopeful … so appreciative. I hope with this anthology that people remember her as she was – an amazing woman with an incredible zest for life.”
Selecting the songs for these two CDs was not easy. Given the breadth of Minnie’s work, it’s impossible to include everything. The hope is that the success of this tribute will lead to the deluxe reissuing of Minnie’s entire catalog, which has been out of print for far too long. The timeless penetration of Minnie’s music is reflected in the outpouring of emotion Richard receives everytime he encounters a new admirer.
"We got tremendous responses from people while Minnie was alive. But after she passed, people would find me ... you wouldn't believe some of the things they would tell me. The most prevalent message was how she touched them through her music. (Actor) Denzel Washington told me he got through the toughest time of his life listening to the Perfect Angel album ... over and over again.
"Minnie's work was never a purely commercial endeavor. Right or wrong, she wanted things her way. And she was doing it for all the right reasons. I call it the molecule theory - of molecules bouncing off of each other and taking with them ... an impression. If we can put something positive or right in the world, then people will come away from that random collision with that energy and take it to their next random collision.
"There is no telling what more Minnie would have been able to do. We were just getting going." While we continue to struggle with the wisdoms and pleasures she left behind, the spirit of Minnie Riperton dances among us ... in hopes that we might one day find our way back to The Garden.
- A. Scott Galloway
_____________________________________________________________________
My deepest thanks goes, first and foremost, to Minnie Riperton, with whom I have risen many a morning singing "Close Your Eyes and Remember." And to Mr. Richard Rudolph for sharing with me, in your home and office, the story of your life with Minnie.
Thanks also to George Benson, Maurice White, Ramsey Lewis, Leon and Carol Ware, George Daniels, Larry Carlton, Terry Callier, Ms. Chante Moore, Jose Feliciano, Q-Tip, Charles Barksdale, Ardenia Brown, Rick Scott, Graham Armstrong, David Nathan, Bill Schnee, Bob Norberg, Greg Ogorzelec, Tom Cartwright, Marlene Bergman, David McLees, Stephanie Gurevitz, Lawrence Tanter, Callendar's Cornbread, Rod McGrew, Phil Upchurch, Ronald Muldrow, Brian Burney, Kevin Donan, Miller London, Shaka Malik and the Chicago Soul writings of Robert Pruter.
I dedicate my work on this project to the Southern Sun memory of Ms. Judith P. Hunter (1939-2000) and to the memory of my dear friend Kym Winfrey, "the lioness" (1960-2000).
A fund has been set up in Minnie's name to benefit breast cancer research projects in the United States and abroad.
If you wish to support this fine effort, please forward your tax deductible contributions to The Minnie Riperton Fund/Concern Foundation at 8383 Wilshire Blvd. #337, Beverly Hills, Ca 90211, or call toll free at (800)867-2279.
Checks should be made payable to: Concern Foundation FBO The Minnie Riperton Fund.
When in cyberspace, visit www.minnieriperton.com
_____________________________________________________________________
I think it's fantastic that an anthology has finally been done for my mom. Her music is timeless, spanning generations young and old. Though I was young when she was creating these songs, I remember throwing flowers to her on stage, meeting world class musicians in our home, and some very nice after parties. I also vividly recall her touring with George Benson and the very close relationship she had with Stevie Wonder. It was a really cool, positive period that I will always cherish. Best of all is knowing that mom was - and remains and inspiration to so many people.
- Marc Rudolph
_____________________________________________________________________
The house just felt alive when mom was around. That woman had all these animals - birds, fish, THREE dogs...always music going on downstairs in the basement ... Marc and I in the studio with her doing handclaps on "Dancin' & Actin' Crazy!" People were really in love with her - always happy in her presence. That time we had together is my happiest memory.
I couldn't listen to her music for years. I would only associate it with profound loss. Her music was all I had left other than her memory. Then one day at college in my sophomore year, I locked myself in my room and started to play her records. I cried just like I knew I would, but there were songs that I loved hearing again and allowed myself to enjoy. The song "Perfect Angel" just fills me up with joy. I feel our magical time coming back to life every time I hear it. Once in a while, if I'm in the mood, I’ll put an album on and it'll sound sooo good. But I can never listen to the whole thing without weeping.
It’s still not easy. I'll always get chills whenever her voice comes on the radio. Only they're good chills now.
- Maya Rudolph
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Executive Producer: TOM CARTWRIGHT
Produced and compiled by: A. SCOTT GALLOWAY
Design: MARLENE BERGMAN'S FlRESIGN DESIGN
Photo Credits:
Front cover, Pages 1 & 9: Jim Marshall
Back cover: Barry Feinstein
Page 13: Mel Kaspar
Pages 16, 17 & 25: Kenneth McGowan
Page 18: Harold Johnson
Page 26: George Hureell
Page 28: Harry Langdon
Mastering: BOB NORBERG AT CAPITOL MASTERING
Mixing Engineer: BILL SCHNEE on Demo and Live tracks
Assistant: Jimmy Hayson
Studio Coordination: PAULA SALVATORE
Legal: DAVID BROWN, FRANK LOPEZ, STEVEN WEATHERBY
Production: BERNARDETTE FAUVER, CHARLES LEVAN, LIZ MANON, BRYAN KELLEY, CHRISTOPHER CLOUGH, GREGG OGORZELEC
Special Thanks: MIKE MACK, SAUNDRA NEWMAN, SHAWNTE FEARON, BILLY BOWLES, C.J. JIMERSON, KELLY ROBINSON, MONICA BRITTON, ANDY BOUGHTON
Extra Special Thanks To: DICK, MARC AND MAYA RUDOLPH
_____________________________________________________________________
This compilation (P) © 2001 Capitol Records, Inc.
Manufactured by Capitol Records, Inc., 1750 N. Vine Street, Hollywood, CA 90028
All rights reserved. Unauthorized duplication is a violation of applicable laws.
Printed in the U.S.A. 72435-29343-2-4
____________________________________________________________________Minnie Riperton
Petals - The Minnie Riperton Collection
Capitol Records
72435-29343-2-4
DISC ONE:
1. THE EDGE OF A DREAM (4:20)
(M. Riperton – R. Rudolph)
(P) 1974 Capitol Records, Inc.
2. YOU GAVE ME SOUL - Andrea Davis (2:40)
(B. Davis)
Courtesy of MCA Records
3. LONELY GIRL - Andrea Davis (3:02)
(Sugar Pie DeSanto, B. Davis)
Courtesy of MCA Records
4. RESPECT - Rotary Connection (3:05)
(O. Redding)
Courtesy of MCA Records
5. WE'RE GOING WRONG – Rotary Connection (3:20)
(J. Bruce)
Courtesy of MCA Records
6. I TOOK A RIDE (CARAVAN) (6:05)
(H. Ando)
Courtesy of MCA Records
7. COME TO MY GARDEN (3:13)
(R. Rudolph)
Courtesy of Janus Records, Inc., by arrangement with Celebrity Licensing Inc.
8. COMPLETENESS (3:24)
(C. Stepney, R. Johnson)
Courtesy of Janus Records, Inc., by arrangement with Celebrity Licensing Inc.
9. EXPECTING (3:55)
(C. Stepney, J. Stocklin)
Courtesy of Janus Records, Inc., by arrangement with Celebrity Licensing Inc.
10. LES FLEUR (3:16)
(C. Stepney, R. Rudolph)
Courtesy of Janus Records, Inc., by arrangement with Celebrity Licensing Inc.
11. STUDIO DIALOG (:34)
12. SEEING YOU THIS WAY (DEMO) (2:39)
(M. Riperton, R. Rudolph)
(P) 2001 Rudolph Productions
Licensed courtesy of Rudolph Productions
13. REASONS (3:25)
(M. Riperton, R. Rudolph)
(P) 1974 Capitol Records, Inc.
14. TAKE A LITTLE TRIP (4:11)
(S. Wonder, Y.L. Wright)
(P) 1974 Capitol Records, Inc.
15. LOVIN’ YOU (3:53)
(M. Riperton, R. Rudolph)
(P) 1974 Capitol Records, Inc.
16. EVERY TIME HE COMES AROUND (3:51)
(M. Riperton, R. Rudolph)
(P) 1974 Capitol Records, Inc.
17. LOVE AND ITS GLORY (5:10)
(E.T. Brown, M. Riperton, R. Rudolph)
(P) 1975 Capitol Records, Inc.
18. SIMPLE THINGS (3:44)
(M. Riperton, R. Rudolph)
(P) 1975 Capitol Records, Inc.
19. LOVIN’ YOU (LIVE REPRISE) – with George Benson Band (4:26)
(M. Riperton, R. Rudolph)
(P) 2001 George Benson. Licensed courtesy of George Benson
DISC TWO:
1. PERFECT ANGEL (3:22)
(S. Wonder)
(P) 1974 Capitol Records, Inc.
2. ADVENTURES IN PARADISE (3:15)
(M. Riperton, J. Sample, R. Rudolph)
(P) 1975 Capitol Records, Inc.
3. YOUNG, WILLING AND ABLE (3:44)
(M. Riperton, R. Rudolph, M. Henderson)
(P) 1975 Capitol Records, Inc.
4. GETTIN’ READY FOR YOUR LOVE (3:38)
(M. Riperton, R. Rudolph)
(P) 1975 Capitol Records, Inc.
5. BABY, THIS LOVE I HAVE (4:12)
(M. Riperton, L. Ware, R. Rudolph)
(P) 1975 Capitol Records, Inc.
6. CAN YOU FEEL WHAT I’M SAYING (4:17)
(M. Riperton, L. Ware, R. Rudolph)
(P) 1975 Capitol Records, Inc.
7. INSIDE MY LOVE (4:45)
(M. Riperton, L. Ware, R. Rudolph)
(P) 1975 Capitol Records, Inc.
8. LIGHT MY FIRE feat. Jose Feliciano (5:09)
(J. Densmore, R. Manzarek, R. Krieger, J. Morrison)
(P) 1979 Capitol Records, Inc.
9. COULD IT BE I’M IN LOVE (4:17)
(M. Riperton, R. Rudolph)
(P) 1977 Capitol Records, Inc.
10. STAY IN LOVE (3:16)
(M. Riperton, R. Rudolph, M. Henderson)
(P) 1977 Capitol Records, Inc.
11. HERE WE GO feat. Peabo Bryson (4:03)
(R. Rudolph, A. Phillips)
(P) 1980 Capitol Records, Inc.
12. MEMORY LANE (4:23)
(M. Riperton, R. Rudolph, St. Lewis, Dozier)
(P) 1979 Capitol Records, Inc.
13. WOMAN OF HEART AND MIND (3:42)
(J. Mitchell)
(P) 1981 Capitol Records, Inc.
14. RETURN TO FOREVER (4:07)
(R. Rudolph, R. Waldman)
(P) 1979 Capitol Records, Inc.
15. LOVER AND FRIEND (4:13)
(M. Riperton, R. Rudolph, St. Lewis, Dozier)
(P) 1979 Capitol Records, Inc.
16. GIVE ME TIME (4:25)
(L. Caston, L. Hurtado)
(P) 1980 Capitol Records, Inc.
____________________________________________________________________
I hear her voice in everything that is joyous, at peace and pure - in church bells at Christmastime, in the 'til-their-cheeks-turn-cherry laughter of children, in a breeze telling secrets to the leaves, in the caw of an eagle feelin' its freedom, or the cry my lady makes when love and oneness reach their peak. In her songs, always, there light. She rocks you in an oven embrace, seats you before the fireplace of her heart and pours until you say when. You never want these visits to end ... When it is time to go, you don't walk, you wing high on hope, passion and 1 he profound possibilities of simple earthly grace, You've beheld vistas of Eden, of jungle paradise by moonlight, and galaxies aligned by the harmony of ages.
"Your majesty," you genuflect. "Just Minnie," she replies.
With her astounding soprano coloratura, five-and-a-half octave range, and the intimate expressiveness with which she wielded it, Minnie Riperton sang the unabridged omnibus of life. Hers was a talent that could not be contained - She was the star of any musical situation into which she was placed, whether singing background, foreground or some slippery slope in between. Her gift always gleamed through, buoyant and crystalline.
It's impossible to overstate that there is so much more to Minnie than "Lovin' You," the charming acoustic love song with which she topped the charts in 1974. In this anthology, a sincere attempt has been made to offer a generous and varied sampling of Minnie's work - from her brief stint as "Andrea Davis" to her key role as the eyerywoman of the criminally underrated rock group Rotary Connection, to the rare masterpiece of her debut solo album, Come To My Garden, to the final albums she completed before breast canter claimed her life in l979. It is a canon this writer has come to affectionately refer to as Minnies from Heaven.
Minnie Julia Riperton was born on November 8, 1947, on the South Side of Chicago, the baby of eight. Her father, Daniel, worked for the railroad and her mother, Thelma, was a housewife. There was a great appreciation for music in her home. One brother, Ricardo, was a jazz pianist. Minnie embraced the arts at an early age, first focusing on ballet and modern dance before shifting to music and voice. She was also a member of the choir at the Sixth Grace Presbyterian Church, half a block down the Woodlawn Avenue on which she lived.
Minnie received operatic vocal training from Marion Jeffery at the Lincoln Center, a black community arts space smack in the middle of Chicago's roughest, most economically challenged area. Jeffery provided Riperton with a strong vocal foundation, emphasizing breath control and exercises that made her able to hold vowel sounds for extended periods of time. While studying, Minnie was mostly singing operettas and the occasional show tune. After several years of molding Minnie, Jeffrey was eager for her to study the classics further in the city's Junior Lyric Opera. However; a now-teenaged Minnie was showing more interest in modern music, particularly soul and psychedelic rock. After graduating from Hyde Park High School and a mere three weeks at Loop College, she dropped out to pursue pop music in earnest.
Minnie's career in pop music had actually already begun. Musician Raynard Miner heard her Singing in Hyde Park's' A Cappella Choir when she was 15. Impressed, he persuaded her to replace Vandine Harris in a girl group formed at rival Marshall High School (on the West Side) called The Gems. Miner, the group's blind piano accompanist, along With Gems manager, Rose Miller, brought Minnie to Chicago's legendary Chess Records where she signed her first contract as a member of the quintet (soon to be a quartet and, in its final days, a studio trio known as Girls Three). The Gems recorded a handful of cutesy singles for Chess, of which, Minnie was primarily featured on their last, three: "Love For Christmas” in '64 (b/w “All Of It:) and “Happy New Love” in ’65.
Chess Records, owned by Phil and Leonard Chess, was the honored home of roots black music by the likes of bluesmen Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, father of Rock ‘n Roll Chuck Berry, and R&B singers Mitty Collier and Billy Stewart. Throughout her stint in the Gems, Minnie – sometimes with the group and other times without – contributed backing vocals to hits on Chess such as the Dells’ “There Is” and Fontellas Bass’ “Rescue Me.” She can even be heard on the classic Pigmeat Markham comedy side, “Here Comes The Judge.” For these sessions, Minnie was paid $10 a recording. When Etta James and Sugar Pie DeSanto scored a breakout hit with the song “In The Basement,” Minnie got her first taste of the chitlin circuit, filling in for a sidelined James. The Chess sessions blossomed into work in Chicago’s lucrative radio/tv jingles market, as well as background work for non-Chess stars, including Ray Charles. Minnie’s voice also grace the phone for the Chess offices during her after-school job as their receptionist.
Chess’ folk-jazz singer/songwriter Terry Callier remembers, “When I was recording my album, Occasional Rain, I really found out how talented Minnie was. She sang backgrounds on my song “Do You Finally Need A Friend.” I put it down with just piano, bass and drums. When Charles Stepney (the producer/arranger for the album) called me back to the studio to play the finished version with Minnie’s backgrounds, I couldn’t move when it was over. I still go back and listen to it.”
The Gems eventually faded, but Minnie’s incredible talent, sunny personality and bewitching good looks were making her quite the popular girl. She was taken under the wing of producer/manager Billy Davis, a giant in the industry then who was the manager for most of Chess’ R&B roster. A younger man who took notice of Minnie was George Daniels, who is, today – thirty-five years later – among the most high-profile music retailers in the United States. Back in ’65, George was one of Minnie’s first boyfriends.
George escorted Minnie to her senior prom at the original McCormick Place (which later burned down). “The Red Sanders Band was playing,” he remembers. “They were very popular at the time – played all of the cotillions and club dates around Chicago. That was the first night I really got to experience hearing Minnie’s talent. Minnie was very popular in school, so Red called her up to the bandstand to sing Barbra Streisand’s “People.” Minnie killed it! When she started hitting those notes over the rhythm section and horns, it was over.”
Through Billy Davis, young George got a gig at Chess, too, first as a janitor then as a driver on the road for Billy Stewart. Through their association with Davis and Chess, Minnie and George got to hang out at funky nightspots like the High Chaparral and the Celebrity Club, soaking up all that good, grown-folks music.
By ’66, Minnie finally had a regional hit of her own the “Lonely Girl,” an escalatingly dramatic ballad of teen forlornment (personally produced by Davis, who co-penned it with Sugar Pie DeSanto) that dynamically showcased her range. It was banded with the more upbeat “You Gave Me Soul,” which was very similar to the ditties Minnie sang with The Gems. Minnie recorded both of these numbers under the “Showbiz” name, Andrea Davis. Chicago radio station WVON, owned by the Chess brothers, kept the single in good rotation, so Minnie enjoyed some local success.
Daniels witnessed soul singer Tyrone Davis call Minnie up to sing during one of his sets. “Minnie had the audience just cheering! I walked up and gave her a dollar, then everybody in the house started giving her dollars. At the bus stop on the way home, we counted our loot. That was our little hustle!” Daniels’ first days in the music biz came to an end when he had to face the draft board for service in Vietnam. Of those golden days prior, he concludes, “Minnie was a lot of fun, yet she was also the personification of someone who ate, slept and drank singing. That’s how she had complete control of her instrument.”
About a year after her Andrea Davis single, Minnie was slotted into a rock group dubbed the Rotary Connection. The band was the quirky, counterculture creation of Marshall Chess, son of Leonard Chess. When his father gave him an opportunity to start his own youth-targeted label, Marshall created Cadet Concept, then launched it with Rotary Connection. The group was pieced together from the guitarist, bassist and drummer of the white rock band the Proper Strangers, white church singer Judy Hauff (then the secretary for the archbishop of the Chicago diocese), black soul singer Sidney Barnes (just back in Chicago from a stint in Detroit working with a pre-Funkadelic George Clinton) and Minnie. The man assigned to stir this melting pot into the stoned soul stew it became was African American arranger/composer/producer, Charles Stepney, then-Musical Supervisor for Chess Records and its Ter Mar Studios.
Within the hippest musical circles, Charles Stepney is renowned as a progressive visionary to this day. His expansive classical training in orchestration, composing, piano and percussion (he adored Ravel), his salad days work as a vibraphonist on Chicago’s jazz scene (including some dates with Eddie Harris), and his bold, uncomprosiming ability to appreciate and synthesize music from around the globe made him a natural choice to take on the soft psychelicism of “The Rotary”’s experiments. Where the average musician hear music in blocks, Stepney heard full-on orchestral arrangements in his head before ever putting pen to paper. Sadly, he departed this earthly plane far too soon (1931-1976). He was way ahead of Chess in recognizing the astounding gifts of his adopted pupil, Minnie Riperton.
Maurice White, then a staff drummer at Chess who would go on to lead the ‘70s supergroup Earth Wind & Fire, recalls, “Minnie was a sweetheart – very humble. She really evolved under the wing of Charles Stepney. The way he discovered her octave range was one morning he caught her imitating string parts in the studio. He was flabbergasted! Charles really encouraged Minnie, sitting and working with her for hours on whole tone scales, developing her sound and volume. She had that soul and classical thing which, I believe, was influenced by Morgana King.”
Rotary Connection’s self-titled debut album was recorded and released in the late fall of ’67, emphasizing an ensemble vocal approach. Even then, Minnie was a standout. In the arrangements – including a wacky baroque treatment of Sam & Dave’s “Soul Man” – Stepney often utilized Minnie’s voice as a secret ingredient – a special effect or human synthesizer, if you will – swooping through the music in varying depths of the mix more as a member of the orchestra than of the singers. On the group’s second LP, Aladdin (spring 1968), she finally got to shine as a lead vocalist, most memorably on their evocatively epic treatment of “I Took A Ride (Caravan),” symphonic Middle Eastern exotica that showcases Minnie’s brilliance within a spellbinding backdrop.
It was during the early stages of Rotary Connection’s development that Minnie first encountered a man who would be her soulmate – a white, ramblin’ renaissance man named Richard Rudolph. “When I first met Minnie,” he begins, “she was singing with the Rotary Connection at a place called the Electric Theatre (also known as “The Kinetic Playground”) that I was managing. It was kind of the Fillmore of Chicago. I’ll never forget that first moment I saw here at the top of the stairs. As I was walking up, she just stood there looking at me. We had never been introduced. It was one of this kismet moments that you read about. We were pretty much inseparable after that. Of course, anyone was instantly attracted when they first met her. It’s just that after I met Minnie, I couldn’t think about anything else.”
Having Richard in her life during this time was a comfort as Minnie struggled to make a go of things with the band. Though Stepney often supplemented Rotary Connection with Chicago session greats in the studio, they were a colorful act live. When they weren’t in the studio making an average of two albums a year, they toured the Midwest and East Coast constantly, developing a fervent college and underground following. They sold records wherever they played, which as primarily as an opening act for the likes of Janis Joplin and Santana. But due to Chess’ lack of national radio promotion muscle and the group’s alternative concepts they never hit it big – not with their radically introspective and socially conscious Christmas album, Peace, nor with their fourth album, Songs, which contained brilliantly reimagined versions of rock and soul hits. Two pieces from Songs that featured Minnie were astounding.
First was "We're Going Wrong," one of three songs from rock trio Cream's Disraeli Gears album that The Rotary reworked for their album. Minnie's flawless technique coupled with a searing empathy for Jack Bruce's lyrics really gets beneath the skin of the song's spooky realization that something was terribly, terribly wrong in the world circa '68.
The second was an arrangement of the soul classic "Respect," penned and originally sung by Otis Redding but made famous by Aretha Franklin. Stepney and The Rotary turned the once-anthem into a duet between Minnie and Sidney on which both parties in a relationship are trying to come to an understanding. Stepney's orchestration brought such an operatic urgency to the piece that many people didn't initially recognize it as the same song on which sista Aretha had demanded some R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
When one considers the trajectory of Rotary Connection, it is common to conclude that they were just plain robbed. Rudolph muses, "It seems like everything conspired against them from becoming this truly great group. Things like their management turning down Woodstock for a gig at a festival in Toronto because it paid more money. If Rotary Connection had played Woodstock, you couldn't have kept them a secret any longer."
During the same November of '69 that Rotary Connection recorded its fifth album, Dinner Music, Minnie spent three days of splendor in the studio with Stepney and an orchestra recording her long awaited first solo album, Come To My Garden. Though she enjoyed the songs that she'd waxed with The Rotary up to this point, Minnie had always wanted to record some music in the vein of pop sensation Dionne Warwick - richly melodic music with intricate twists and turns plus a Sergio Mendes & Brazil '66 chaser that would really engage a listener with a touch of timeless class. With Charles Stepney as her Burt Bacharach, she more than had the musical element covered. The sweet surprise was that her Hal David lyricist for several of the songs would be Richard. The first evidence of this was the title track, "Come To My Garden."
"At first, I was writing prose and poetry," Richard explains, "then I picked up a guitar and started to write songs. I was never a great guitarist, but I got a hold of a Mickey Baker jazz book and learned all these voicings. I was interested more in writing, than playing. I remember having a dream, waking up and writing this song, 'Come To My Garden.' Minnie was right there with me. I don't know if it was about the place where we ended up getting married - which was a garden. I think it was just about our being together, Minnie loved the song. One afternoon when we were with Charles, she asked me to play (and sing) it for him. I was amazed when he actually liked it!"
"Charles asked if I could write to other people's music," he continues. "Being young, I told him I could write anything! Then this man turned around and gave me the most beautiful things you could ever imagine. His demos are my favorite things that I've ever heard in life ... I used to listen to them endlessly. Charles would play piano, vibes and melodica on them. They touched such an emotional core in me and I would be so inspired."
The initial Stepney/Rudolph collaborations yielded five songs for Minnie's Come To My Garden. The most famous of them is "Les Fleur," a lovely meditation written from the perspective of a flower. Stepney's music for "Les Fleur" was first recorded a year before by classically-trained jazz piano virtuoso Ramsey Lewis on his Cadet album, Maiden Voyage. Stepney used Minnie on Ramsey's version, singing a lovely refrain that, in reality, was just so much melodic jibberish. To this writer, it sounded like a little girl trying to say something to her mother about a rose she'd just picked. Or maybe "Mable, Katy, Sadie, Loya" were the names of women Minnie or Charles considered to be like roses in their lives. Richard wrote lovely words for these melodies which became the first verse of Minnie's version, but Stepney retained the mysterious phrases for the second verse. To fans who've tried to decipher what language Minnie is singing in or what it all means, you are hereby free to use your imagination (or "memory band").
Ramsey, who played piano on most of Come To My Garden, enthuses, "What was so great about Minnie is that the tone of her voice was as beautiful in the low register as it was in the high register. Never screechy, it retained a beautiful tone up there. Minnie was a beautiful, loving person. And Charles was so dedicated. If he was sitting over there right now, I'd tell you, 'That's music! We just call him Charles Stepney.'''
Another treasure from the Come To My Garden sessions is the love song "Completeness," one of two songs on the album which Stepney collaborated on with poetess Rose Johnson. Again, Minnie's voice soars in gentle solo and layered high register harmonies while Stepney scored celestial circles around her for one breathtaking performance. The song was later covered in 1982 (with a funkier yet no less intricate Jerry Peters arrangement) by singer Jean Carn (produced by Norman Connors).
A final selection from Come To My Garden is the entrancing "Expecting," written by Stepney with lyrics by The Rotary's Jon Stocklin. It hauntingly captures the mysterious workings of the female mind as eliptically as a mere man could muster.
Anyone who has had the pleasure of hearing a proper copy of Come To My Garden understands that their ears are in the presence of pure musical mastery. It was released in 1970, just after Chess was bought by the GRT company, and released on the Janus label. In the ensuing changeover, this fragile gem slipped between the cracks, a crushing experience for Minnie and all involved.
Meanwhile on the homefront, Richard and Minnie had their share of unnecessary stress due to their being an interracial couple circa the late '60s. Sometimes the situations were absurd, like the time they were pulled over at gunpoint by the police. Richard asked why they stopped them and the cop replied, "We had reports that Angela Davis was seen in the neighborhood."
Other times, the situations were downright ugly. The newlyweds, with a tenacious team of sympathetic legal supporters, had to take a landlady all the way to the Federal Housing Commission to stop her from evicting them without grounds. They saw the case through and won - in the name of justice - but soon after packed their bags and departed anyway.
Shortly after completing a final album by a revamped NEW Rotary Connection, titled Hey Love (another masterpiece featuring seven more Rudolph lyrics but only two semi-prominent lead vocals from Riperton), Minnie and Richard packed up her little boy, Marc, into a funky, customized Ford Econoline van, and headed for New York. Minnie told Richard, "I could do stuff here (in Chicago) for the rest of my life and it just wouldn't matter. I've got to get out of this pond!" It was the summer of '71.
They took a few meetings with record companies, when visited friends of Brewster Bay in Cape Cod. This is where they discovered. Minnie was pregnant again. After another trip to New York, Minnie grew tired, of waiting on the Buddah Group and Columbia Records to make a decision, so she brought everything down to basics on Richard. "Baby, can we just go someplace warm?" So they drove south, listening to Isaac and Sly on the 8-track all the way until they reached Miami Beach, where Richard had been raised. They stayed in Coconut Grove.
Friends turned Richard on to a farm community near the University of Florida in Gainesville. He and Minnie went to visit and fell in love with a sweet little three bedroom house behind a duck pond, with citrus trees out back and a screen door in front never in need of locking. The rent was $160. They bought a waterbed and moved right in. The good news was it didn’t cost a lot to live. The bad news was there was no way to make any money!
Richard tried his hand at jobs ranging from cobbling leather sandals to starting a handyman business. All the while, he and Minnie wrote their first songs together ... The best gig Richard had in Gainesville was as a disc jockey for its tiny FM station, WGVL. He went to Orlando, got his third class engineers license and wound up out in the woods, in the middle of nowhere, playing whole sides of Weather Report and Crusaders albums! His shift was Weekend mornings from sunrise to 10 A.M. as "DJ Little Wolf." Sometimes, he'd bring Marc (nicknamed "Ringo" because he loved the Yellow Submarine drummer) down to the station, open up the mic and read him something out of the newspaper. "What do you think about somebody treating another person that way," he'd ask? "That's not very cool, dad," Ringo replied and into a Stevie song they'd go.
Soon, little Maya was born and the family became a foursome. "As short as it was, I'm so glad we had that time to just live our lives together with the kids," Richard reflects. "We were totally away from that big city, music industry rat race. We got to concentrate on the real things in life. We were there for almost two years, never in the mindset of feeling rushed to get back to the record business. We learned something there. If you do things for the right reasons and you're not desperate, the things that you really want will happen. Energy attracts like-energy."
One day in '73, Steve Slutzah, a college rep for Epic Records who had been searching for Minnie essentially since the Rotary Connection had disbanded, got a tip that she was in Florida and looked her up. Richard played him a four-song demo he and Minnie had cut on an earlier trip to Los Angeles. Elated, Steve took the tape to Don Ellis, VP A&R at Epic in L.A. Richard continues, "Don flew out, sat on the floor with us on these big pillows as I played guitar and Minnie sang. Don really liked 'Seeing You This Way.’ We had dinner, then afterward, he said, 'Please, can we make a deal?' Next thing we knew, we were flying back to L.A. to make a record. It's so amazing how this stuff happens.”
That demo recording of “Seeing You This Way” from the family’s private collection is included in this anthology as a special treat featuring Richard playing guitar and Jerry Peters on piano. It is provided not as a performance to be considered alongside her pristine recordings, but rather as a peek behind the scenes of her creative process and her personality.
Once in L.A., the question was who would they get to produce the album? “There was really only one guy that Minnie wanted to work with,” Richard shares, “and that was Stevie Wonder. The company was like, ‘Yeah right!’ Steve had just made Talking Book and Innervisions. Well, we were staying at this house on Laurel Canyon and a friend of Minnie’s manger stopped by. When he found out we were trying to get to Stevie, he said, ‘I used to walk him on stage to the microphone!’ So, he checks around and some one tells him Stevie was cutting at the Record Plant. He calls, tells Stevie about Minnie, then hands her the phone. 30 seconds later, Minnie hangs up and says, ‘Can anybody give me a ride to the studio? He wants me to sing on something.’ It turned out to be background vocals on ‘It Ain’t No Use’ from Fulfillness’ First Finale (with Deniece Williams and Lani Groves).” Later, Minnie would be more prominently featured on his now-classic “Creepin’.”
Stevie and Minnie had met once before at the 1971 Black Expo in Chicago where Minnie was singing with Quincy Jones. In an account relayed by writer Margo Jefferson, Minnie shared, “I saw Stevie back stage, so I went over and whispered in his ear, ‘Keep up the good work.’ He asked me what my name was and I said, ‘Minnie.’ He started jumping up and down saying, ‘Not Minnie Riperton – it’s been my dream to work with you! You sing like an angel.”
A few hours after reuniting with Stevie, Minnie called Richard and said, “Come on down!” When he arrived, Minnie said, “Stevie, meet my old man!” “Stevie held out his hand,” Richard remembers, ‘and when I took it, he just kept holding it – talkin’ to me, talkin’ to other people, fooling with his keyboard, but all the time holding my hand. There was this amazing connection and I realized he was checking me out – seeing if I was cool. A lot of guys would have been freaked out, but I kind of got it. The three of us became great friends.”
Motown was not behind Stevie producing an album for Epic’s new songbird, but Stevie, being “El Toro Negro,” did as he pleased. Stevie and Richard got around this dilemma by creating a joint company, Scorbu Productions (“Scor” because Richard is a Scorpio and “Bu” because Stevie was very much a Taurus the bull). They set to work on Minnie’s Perfect Angel, using members of Stevie’s band, Wonderlove. “We’d be in the studio by 11 and go all night – laughing, talking, making music … and eating Roscoe’s fried chicken,” Richard reminisces.
When Minnie appeared Soul Train later that year, Don Cornelius introduced her stating that Perfect Angel was “one of the most beautiful albums we’ve heard in a long time.” The nine-song project – seven written by Richard and Minnie – was a marvelous patchquilt of styles that ranged from the righteous, reggae-rock mission statement of “Reasons” (with Stevie on drums), the sensual burn of “Every Time He Comes Around” (featuring Marlo Henderson on guitar), and two songs Stevie wrote especially for Minnie, “Take A Little Trip”/and “Perfect Angel.”
Then there was “The Edge Of A Dream,” a personal favorite of Richard’s. “Someday we’ll find something great to do with that song,” he says. “It was inspired by a combination of Dr. Martin Luther King’s life and our lives. Listening to Stevie playing that piano and Minnie’s voice really takes me back.” That song and the entire album were a perfect reflection of Minnie’s uncompromised artistry, which also meant it didn’t fit neatly into any one bag, radio format or record bin. “When Perfect Angel was first release,” Richard remembers, “nothing was happening with it. Epic tried three singles: ‘Reasons,’ ‘Take A Little Trip” and “Seeing You This Way,” but had no idea what to do with Minnie. It was until “Lovin’ You” that things started to pick up. I had to go back in the studio with Odell Brown and add an Arp string part for the 45 version to get them to agree to try a fourth single.”
Ahhh, “Lovin’ You,” one of the sweetest and simplest heart-on-sleeve love songs to ever grace the air waves. It began as chord changes on a guitar until one evening, in Gainesville, “I was just sitting there playing and I could hear Minnie in the kitchen rattling pans – probably cookin’ up a pot of beans. Then I heard her start to sing this melody over this jazz samba I was fooling around with. The tempo was faster than the way we ended up recording it. This was just after Maya was born, and Maya never wanted her mama out of her sight! So we got one of those lil’ Swing-a-matics for her and made an early tape of “Lovin’ You” with no words – just me playing and Minnie humming the melody, singing, ‘Maya, Maya.’ We made a loop, left Maya on the front porch swingin’ then snuck out back to hang out!”
When we brought “Lovin’ You” to the studio,” he continues, “we cut it at least three different ways, but it just wasn’t coming out the way Minnie and I wanted. Finally, Stevie said, ‘Let’s do it the way you wrote it!’ That meant I had to go in the studio and play guitar. Steve and I were really good friends, but I can’t tell you all the things he called me to get me in that studio! Once he did, he and Minnie were on the other side of the glass just giving me the hardest time. Then Stevie came in and put these two incredible Fender Rhodes parts on it. We thought, ‘This is unbelievable.’ Minnie sang her part and it was great, but she still felt something was missing. Stevie was going crazy, so he made me find our original two-track. There on the tape was a bird outside singing. Stevie said, ‘Well, get the bird then!’ And we did … but I can’t tell you how. It’s a secret.”
When the album was finished, Minnie went to Barry Feinstein's studio to shoot the cover art. A lover of clothes, she brought several outfits because he'd said he wanted to shoot all the sides of her personality. She told him, "I can't show you all of them, but I'll show you some!" The coveralls and the ice cream dripping down her fingers showed her playful side. "Everybody loved those pictures," Richard enthuses. "She was just being real. Then we started to think, ‘Do we dare?' And Minnie said ‘Why not!'" Onto the cover it went.
Perfect Angel became Minnie's only RIAA-certified platinum album, a million-seller that perched at the #1 slot on the R&B album chart for three weeks. "Lovin' You" was a gold-selling #1 pop smash in America and Britain, and peaked at#3 R&B here. Minnie played small and medium sized venues across the country with a stage set-up that included potted trees and birds twittering away in sparkling cages. Both Sidney Barnes and Cash McCall from the Chess days toured in her back-up band when they were available. Most importantly, Minnie was enjoying becoming known as "that lady with the unbelievably high voice."
For her third album, Adventures in Paradise, Minnie revisited the realm of sacred space as she had on Come To My Garden, only this time with a far more sensual undercurrent. She and Richard were thrilled to get Stewart Levine (another Scorpio) to co-produce the project with them because he had been at the helm of those Crusaders albums they enjoyed so much back in Gainesville. The cherry on top was they got two Crusaders to participate.
Crusaders keyboardist Joe Sample played throughout the album and co-wrote "Adventures in Paradise" with Minnie and Richard in their home. His signature is evident in the descending changes of the chorus. Minnie gets to both soar and get down to a growl urging all to live everyday as a passport to discovery. It was the album's third single.
Crusaders guitarist Larry Carlton, who arranged and conducted the rhythm, string and horn parts for the entire album, reflects, "I was a major fan of Minnie's, especially 'Lovin' You.' It was a great opportunity for me to stretch my arranging chops and surround her amazing voice with some things I thought would be cool. She made 'a tremendous statement with that record. And I think the way I backed her was pretty damn good!"
Another potent contributor to this album was singer/songwriter Leon Ware, the master sensualist and self-described "musical minister” who would, the very next year, be responsible for one of Marvin Gaye’s steamiest LPs ever, I Want You. That same vibe was flowing in collaborations with Minnie and Richard like “Baby, This Love I Have” from Adventures In Paradise, and the absolutely transcendental “Can You Feel What I’m Saying?” (with a touch of Shakespeare) from her next LP, Stay In Love.
Minnie first worked with Leon singing the duet “If I Ever Lose This Heaven” (which Leon co-wrote with Pam Sawyer) on Quincy Jones’ Body Heat album. It turned out Ware and the Rudolphs were Laurel Canyon neighbors whose children went to the same school. This musical ménage a trois convened in the Rudolph’s converted garage studio ‘til the wee hours, concocting songs that continue to ignite, to this day, the fire of desire.
The most famous of these is “Inside My Love,” a provocative musical portrait depicting a warm, seamless union of soulmates. Amidst all of its evocative poetry were the deemed-scandalous lines, “Will you come inside me / Do you wanna ride my love.” When this was released as the lead-off single, some people couldn’t see the forest for the bush.
“There were programmers at stations that wouldn’t play the song because they felt it was too risqué,” Richard admits, “which was absurd! If you really look at the lyrics, it’s about a much more spiritual trip. There is a duality, but we always believed that to truly have love and to express that love physically, you have to have the other side of it – the emotional side. ‘While we’re here / The whole world is turning …’
That is one of my favorite lyrics of all time. When we performed it live, people would fall out. They could never believe it when Minnie held that note. Minnie would introduce it saying, 'This is the song that got me banned. But I got a letter from a nun who said that she didn't think anything was wrong with it at all. In fact, she kinda got off on it...'''
"All I can say is we understood that that was going to happen when we wrote the song,' Ware says, chuckling slyly at the memory. “Minnie was just as daring as I was."
"I had that song title for many years," Ware continues. "When Minnie said she wanted to sing something that had a very sensuous yet classy message, I told her about my idea. This idea came from me going to church as a little boy. Whenever a sermon was almost over, there would this point where the organ would play real soft, you could hear a pin drop and the vibe would be completely hypnotic. The pastor would say, 'Won't you come inside the Lord,' and people would stand up - eyes closed and arms outstretched - as if they were being guided to the pulpit.
"That's why whenever somebody mentions 'Inside My Love' - in as much as the dilemma that people tend to have with sex and God - I always say that the real misconception is that we're doing something wrong when we're doing one or the other. It's always been quite clear to me that wherever you go with your heart can never be wrong. Hopefully, myself and people I've worked with like Minnie, Dick and Marvin, have said something that touched some nerves and will continue to touch some nerves."
Adventures in Paradise wasn't all erotica. In fact, two of the songs were downright darling. There was the second single, "Simple Things," a gentle reminder to never take for granted the basic blessings of life. Then there was the rapturous fable, "Love and Its Glory," which Minnie and Richard co-wrote with their road bassist, Ed Brown. It opens like a storybook with the heavenly harp of Dorothy Ashby, another of Minnie's many friends from her Chicago days at Chess.
It's a lonely world, my children / You gotta do the best you can / If you find a chance to love! You'd better grab it any way you can.
"Our lives were based around our children, each other and our music," Richard shares. "We wrote that song for the kids. We told them all the time, 'The world has become a place of deferred happiness, but it's the journey that's the adventure.' We came up with a story about Maya and an imaginary young man named 'Aliya.' Maya was just a baby and didn't quite 'get' the song. Whenever she heard it, she'd say, 'I am not a liar!’”
When recording was completed, it was time for Minnie to shoot another striking album cover depicting her in a silkily elegant ensemble with baby's breath in her hair ... and a lion chillin' by her side. It would be one of her most enduring images, but it came with a price. At one point, the lion playfully jumped up on Minnie, scratching her upper chest with his paw. She was startled but, thankfully, not seriously injured.
Adventures in Paradise, a Top 5 R&B album, was a gold-seller - good, but not as good as Perfect Angel. Its biggest hit was "Inside My Love," which peaked at #26 R&B but #76 pop. Yet it stands as the favorite album of the majority of her fans which was far more important to Minnie. Sadly, it was the last music she got to make before a devastating discovery would rock the very foundation of her existence.
Richard remembers, "We were in Sun Valley on her last day of shooting Flip Wilson's Winter Olympics TV special. She asked me, 'Do you feel something here?' It was the tiniest little bump on her breast. She was in perfect health, completely vital and full of energy, but we went to see a doctor that day. He said it was probably nothing, but decided to do a biopsy. The very next day - so fast - he said, 'It's matastecized. I've never seen anything like it. I think you should have a mastectomy immediately.' We got another opinion - from top people - and they told us, 'This doesn't rook good. We advise that you make a decision quickly.'''
All Minnie could think about were her two small children (3 & 7), wanting to be there for them. So she had a modified mastectomy two days later, but it was too late. "The oncologist walked into the recovery room and told me that the cancer had already spread into her lymph nodes," Richard says quietly. "He gave her six months."
True to her strength of character, Minnie Riperton lived a little over three years from that fateful day. Every day from that point on was about living, not dying. Initially and understandably private about her illness, she swiftly became among the first and most passionately vocal spokespersons for breast cancer awareness. She disclosed her condition on The Tonight Show while being interviewed by guest host, Flip Wilson. Minnie received the American Cancer Society's Courage Award, presented to her by President Jimmy Carter in a ceremony at the White House. She was soon after named Chairman of the Society's Awareness Program.
And she went right on making records. Her next album, Stay in Love: A Romantic Fantasy Set To Music, found her working with R&B veteran, Freddie Perren, who was versatile enough to handle her sophisticated fare while also injecting some timely disco spirit.
The nine-song album was conceived as a musical where the listener happens upon a woman's diary and reads the story of her one great love. "We approached it that way to keep Minnie mentally involved in the music," Richard says. This album contained the funkiest cut of her career, "Young, Willing and Able," with a stellar writing and playing contribution from guitarist Marlo Henderson. There was also "Can You Feel What I'm Saying?" which oozed eroticism on a celestial plane.
The delightful Brazilian daydream "Could It Be I'm In Love" found Minnie one-upping the long note she held on "Inside My Love," by this time holding notes, then breaking them up into precisely descending tones without taking a breath. Just as charming is the rarely heard "Gcttin' Ready For Your Love" which finds our heroine angelically poised to cross the threshold of girldom into womanhood. And the album-closing "Stay In Love" was a blissful renewal of vows that came closest to recapturing the innocence and magic of "Lovin' You." The acoustic guitar was played by The Tonight Show's Tommy Tedesco.
On May 9th, 1977, Minnie participated in one of George Benson's all-star 4 x 4 Concerts singing a version of "Lovin' You (Live Reprise)" that returned the song to its danceable uptempo origins. Minnie was the opening act for George's show that night at Avery Fisher Hall. At the end of his set, she joined him for an encore singing her biggest hit. An excerpt of this version - never before released and included here from Benson's personal archives - features solos by Grover Washington Jr. on flute and Joe Sample on electric piano. The rest of the band was Henson on rhythm guitar, drummer Harvey Mason, percussionist Ralph MacDonald, Jorge Dalto on piano, Ronnie Foster on synthesizer and fretless bassist Alphonso Johnson. The musicians were literally learning the song on the spot, but once they had the chord changes down, it turned into a jam on which Minnie cut loose with gut bucket abandon. "It was a meeean show, man," Benson enthuses. "Minnie tore that place up!"
Amazing songs aside, Stay in Love did not perform well sales-wise or radio-wise (the disco single, "Stick Together," stalled at #57 R&B). The Rudolphs were not pleased. "We didn't feel Minnie was getting the support she deserved," Richard states. "And I couldn't have that happening while she was dealing with this 'other stuff.' Every moment for her now was precious. I wanted Minnie where people wanted her and appreciated her." So, Minnie's attorney, Mike Rosenfeld, struck a fantastic deal that moved Minnie and her Epic catalog to Capitol Records (then headed by Rupert Perry) where her final three albums would be released. The first, Minnie, would be the last one released in her lifetime.
Capitol went all out for the recording of this album, which went to #5 on the R&B charts and Top 20 pop. Co-producer Henry Lewy introduced Minnie and Richard to English wunderkind, Jeremy Lubbock, who would go on to be a much in-demand composer and arranger. He brought a savoir faire to the arrangements that was pure brilliance. "Not only was Minnie an artist of the highest order and an exquisite human being," Lubhock shares, "she was also courageous enough to put her last album into the hands of a totally unknown arranger, for which I will be eternally grateful. I am merely one of the many who loved her - and miss her."
The world got its first taste of Minnie with the first single, "Memory Lane," a bittersweet piece considering that, like all of the songs that Richard and Minnie composed, it was torn from the pages of their life together. It was, indeed, a photograph that sparked the vivid opening line and the couple went on to complete the song with a young writer named Keni St. Lewis. The rhythm section was out of this world with the ever-tasteful Harvey Mason on drums, Chuck Rainey on bass, old Rotary Connection friend Phil Upchurch on guitar, and Victor Feldman on vibes.
Tennis buff Minnie had a ball of a whole ‘nother sort flirting with blind Puerto Rican superstar Jose Feliciano on a remake of “Light My Fire.” The song was written and first recorded by Los Angeles rock legends The Doors, but made a crossover hit by Feliciano in 1968. The glee in Minnie’s revisitation to the classic, with Feliciano right there lobbing salacious Spanish curves at her, is infectious. It also features a flute solo by the ubiquitous Hubert Laws and standout bass by Abraham Laboriel.
And the fun continued on “Lover And Friend,” the album’s second single, thanks to a little help from a friend. “We’d tried the song a couple of ways that we weren’t happy with,” says Richard. “So I called Stevie and said, ‘What do you think, man?’ We jumped into one of his rolling homes on wheels and headed to a nearby studio. He went in and did his thing, playing drums and all the keyboards. It was very sweet of him. By this point Minnie was having a tough time, but doing this music meant a lot to her.”
During these sessions, Minnie returned to a practice she rarely did once she'd become a solo artist, which was cover another writer's song. That the writer was confessional folk poetess Joni Mitchell reveals Minnie's exquisite taste. That the song was "Woman of Heart and Mind" (from Joni's 1972 collection, For The Roses) hints that Minnie may have relished stepping into the lyrical shoes of a woman with the kind of "time on her hands" to navel-gaze about a lover man and his little boy ways. Far more preciously rendered than Mitchell's rootsier original, the song is ornately arranged for strings, guitar, soprano sax and percussion. Mitchell purists may bristle because one key line was softened to "lay with strangers," but no one could deny the sheer beauty Minnie brought to the melody and Lubbock's added obligato that follows every verse. The recording was not released, however, until Minnie's posthumous Best of album.
The piece that most poignantly captures the stark autumn of Minnie's life is "Return to Forever," delivered direct from Richard's heart to hers. "I wrote the first part on guitar," he says, "but I had no idea where to take it. So I called on our friend (pianist) Randy Waldman." Once the music was completed, Richard composed his most soul-stirring lyric and Minnie voiced it with an empathy only she could give it. As Lubbock's chilling arrangement and Gerry Vinci's weeping violin lay bare the gray of the mood, Minnie animates every telling word. "Laughing in the face of time / If only we knew now what we did then ... "
Minnie dedicated Minnie to her grandmother and namesake, Minnie Matthews, who passed away at the lush, full age of 93.
Around 10 A.M. on the morning of July 12, 1979, Minnie Riperton died wrapped in the loving arms of her husband. She was listening to a cassette of a song Stevie Wonder had personally delivered to Cedars Sinai Hospital the evening before, written and recorded especially for her. She was 31.
The next year, Capitol released the posthumous tribute album, Love Lives Forever. Richard and veteran Chicago studio great Johnny Pate painstakingly produced it, wedding vocal demos that Minnie had begun to remarkable contributions from a stellar assemblage of her friends and peers, including Michael Jackson, Patrice Rushen and George Benson. The back cover was filled with their adoring testimonials.
The first single, "Here We Go," a soaring, uptempo love song, featured soul singer Peabo Bryson dueting with Minnie and the featured backing vocals of Roberta Flack. Those laying down the song's serious groove were drummer Mason, bassist Laboriel, guitarist Lee Ritenour and pianist Tennyson Stephens, with Tom Scott on tenor sax and the intoxicating harp of Gayle Levant.
Minnie's final single was the melancholy "Give Me Time". It was an outside writing contribution, but featured the familiar and overwhelmingly emotive harmonica of Stevie Wonder and the violin of Gerry Vinci.
In 1982, The Best of Minnie Riperton was released, including live performances, spoken musings and Joni's "Woman of Heart and Mind." One final song that Richard had written with Minnie in mind, "Now That I Have You," was recorded by phenomenal soul artist, Teena Marie, on her sophomore LP, Lady T (1980 - co-produced by Teena with Richard), which she dedicated to Minnie.
Today, Minnie is more than alive and well. She is thriving. Her recordings are used for film and television in contexts both reverent ("Inside My Love" in Jackie Brown, starring Minnie's good friend, Pam Grier) and irreverent ("Lovin' You" as lampooned on South Park). At least Minnie was in good company on South Park. They skewered Streisand, too! Richard insists Minnie would have enjoyed it all. "She loved to laugh ... that's one of the things that kept her going."
Many of today's finest young singers have been influenced by and/or paid their respects to Minnie, including Mariah Carey (who makes extensive use of her upper register), Trina Broussard (who brilliantly reworked "Inside My Love" for the film, Love Jones), Shanice (who beautifully covered “Lovin' You") and Chante Moore (who recorded "Inside My Loye" for the TV soundtrack New York Undercover, faithful to Minnie's original). Ms. Moore, an always thoughtful songwriter and singer, shares, "Minnie was such a sincere vocalist and writer. When you hear her music, you feel like you've gotten to know her. I appreciate any artist who is able to deliver themselves through the music. Yet, there's still a mystique about Minnie. I love her."
Even in hip hop, Minnie Riperton reigns like royalty. Her voice and songs have been utilized by highly respected artists such as Arrested Development, Mos Def & Talib Kweli (a.k.a, Black Star) and The Roots. Rapper Q-Tip, formerly of the groundbreaking trio A Tribe Called Quest, extensively sampled Minnie's music on hits like "Bonita Applebaum" (using Rotary Connection's "Memory Band"), "Lyrics To Go" (using "Inside My Love") and "Check the Rhime" (using "Baby, This Love I Have"). When contacted to share his feelings about Minnie, Q-Tip responded with the handwritten reply, "I was unaware of this request 2 give a quote 4 Minnie when, 10-minutes prior, I was listening 2 'Memory Lane' and an assortment of other genius songs. The word 'genius' is a powerful word and Minnie clearly wears it. She effortlessly pours her innovative tone into each phrase making us feel her sex, eroticism, passion, truth, power and genius. Yes, GENIUS!!"
Of her spirit, Leon Ware hypothesizes, "Minnie was naturally driven to be a mother to people. Anyone who met her almost immediately loved her. I've been very blessed to live and work around people of the caliber of Minnie. Those moments are the treasure we have that makes the other things we deal with in life worthwhile. It makes you feel like reaching and participating in the adventure with that much more passion."
Minnie’s greatest gift lies in the way she continues to affect everyone who takes the time to really feel the messages she was sharing in her lifetime. “When I listen to the music,” says Richard, “I’m excited and touched all over again. Some of the moments were so hopeful … so appreciative. I hope with this anthology that people remember her as she was – an amazing woman with an incredible zest for life.”
Selecting the songs for these two CDs was not easy. Given the breadth of Minnie’s work, it’s impossible to include everything. The hope is that the success of this tribute will lead to the deluxe reissuing of Minnie’s entire catalog, which has been out of print for far too long. The timeless penetration of Minnie’s music is reflected in the outpouring of emotion Richard receives everytime he encounters a new admirer.
"We got tremendous responses from people while Minnie was alive. But after she passed, people would find me ... you wouldn't believe some of the things they would tell me. The most prevalent message was how she touched them through her music. (Actor) Denzel Washington told me he got through the toughest time of his life listening to the Perfect Angel album ... over and over again.
"Minnie's work was never a purely commercial endeavor. Right or wrong, she wanted things her way. And she was doing it for all the right reasons. I call it the molecule theory - of molecules bouncing off of each other and taking with them ... an impression. If we can put something positive or right in the world, then people will come away from that random collision with that energy and take it to their next random collision.
"There is no telling what more Minnie would have been able to do. We were just getting going." While we continue to struggle with the wisdoms and pleasures she left behind, the spirit of Minnie Riperton dances among us ... in hopes that we might one day find our way back to The Garden.
- A. Scott Galloway
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My deepest thanks goes, first and foremost, to Minnie Riperton, with whom I have risen many a morning singing "Close Your Eyes and Remember." And to Mr. Richard Rudolph for sharing with me, in your home and office, the story of your life with Minnie.
Thanks also to George Benson, Maurice White, Ramsey Lewis, Leon and Carol Ware, George Daniels, Larry Carlton, Terry Callier, Ms. Chante Moore, Jose Feliciano, Q-Tip, Charles Barksdale, Ardenia Brown, Rick Scott, Graham Armstrong, David Nathan, Bill Schnee, Bob Norberg, Greg Ogorzelec, Tom Cartwright, Marlene Bergman, David McLees, Stephanie Gurevitz, Lawrence Tanter, Callendar's Cornbread, Rod McGrew, Phil Upchurch, Ronald Muldrow, Brian Burney, Kevin Donan, Miller London, Shaka Malik and the Chicago Soul writings of Robert Pruter.
I dedicate my work on this project to the Southern Sun memory of Ms. Judith P. Hunter (1939-2000) and to the memory of my dear friend Kym Winfrey, "the lioness" (1960-2000).
A fund has been set up in Minnie's name to benefit breast cancer research projects in the United States and abroad.
If you wish to support this fine effort, please forward your tax deductible contributions to The Minnie Riperton Fund/Concern Foundation at 8383 Wilshire Blvd. #337, Beverly Hills, Ca 90211, or call toll free at (800)867-2279.
Checks should be made payable to: Concern Foundation FBO The Minnie Riperton Fund.
When in cyberspace, visit www.minnieriperton.com
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I think it's fantastic that an anthology has finally been done for my mom. Her music is timeless, spanning generations young and old. Though I was young when she was creating these songs, I remember throwing flowers to her on stage, meeting world class musicians in our home, and some very nice after parties. I also vividly recall her touring with George Benson and the very close relationship she had with Stevie Wonder. It was a really cool, positive period that I will always cherish. Best of all is knowing that mom was - and remains and inspiration to so many people.
- Marc Rudolph
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The house just felt alive when mom was around. That woman had all these animals - birds, fish, THREE dogs...always music going on downstairs in the basement ... Marc and I in the studio with her doing handclaps on "Dancin' & Actin' Crazy!" People were really in love with her - always happy in her presence. That time we had together is my happiest memory.
I couldn't listen to her music for years. I would only associate it with profound loss. Her music was all I had left other than her memory. Then one day at college in my sophomore year, I locked myself in my room and started to play her records. I cried just like I knew I would, but there were songs that I loved hearing again and allowed myself to enjoy. The song "Perfect Angel" just fills me up with joy. I feel our magical time coming back to life every time I hear it. Once in a while, if I'm in the mood, I’ll put an album on and it'll sound sooo good. But I can never listen to the whole thing without weeping.
It’s still not easy. I'll always get chills whenever her voice comes on the radio. Only they're good chills now.
- Maya Rudolph
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Executive Producer: TOM CARTWRIGHT
Produced and compiled by: A. SCOTT GALLOWAY
Design: MARLENE BERGMAN'S FlRESIGN DESIGN
Photo Credits:
Front cover, Pages 1 & 9: Jim Marshall
Back cover: Barry Feinstein
Page 13: Mel Kaspar
Pages 16, 17 & 25: Kenneth McGowan
Page 18: Harold Johnson
Page 26: George Hureell
Page 28: Harry Langdon
Mastering: BOB NORBERG AT CAPITOL MASTERING
Mixing Engineer: BILL SCHNEE on Demo and Live tracks
Assistant: Jimmy Hayson
Studio Coordination: PAULA SALVATORE
Legal: DAVID BROWN, FRANK LOPEZ, STEVEN WEATHERBY
Production: BERNARDETTE FAUVER, CHARLES LEVAN, LIZ MANON, BRYAN KELLEY, CHRISTOPHER CLOUGH, GREGG OGORZELEC
Special Thanks: MIKE MACK, SAUNDRA NEWMAN, SHAWNTE FEARON, BILLY BOWLES, C.J. JIMERSON, KELLY ROBINSON, MONICA BRITTON, ANDY BOUGHTON
Extra Special Thanks To: DICK, MARC AND MAYA RUDOLPH
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This compilation (P) © 2001 Capitol Records, Inc.
Manufactured by Capitol Records, Inc., 1750 N. Vine Street, Hollywood, CA 90028
All rights reserved. Unauthorized duplication is a violation of applicable laws.
Printed in the U.S.A. 72435-29343-2-4
