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Rosie Gaines Close
Call I don’t want to mislead . we’re good friends now — it’s
just that we didn’t understand each other a lot back then. He was asking, ‘why’d
you have to leave now? You’re gonna break up the band,” and I was asking, ‘why
didn’t you put out my solo album? Why am I seeing all these other girls, girls
who aren’t talented at all, releasing material ?!‘ In the end, it got so that I
started thinking, ‘I was here first, and just ‘cause I — didn’t sleep with
you...!] Rosie’s talking about Prince. He was called that then, but she was
always a multi-instrumentalist, singer-songwriter who wanted to release a long
pined for, solo LP Since Paisley Park affiliates like Shelia E and Wendy & Lisa
had also done so — not to mention Vanity 6 and Appolonia — she needed to ensure
that she wasn’t just going to be remembered as the voice behind The New Power
Generation’s “Diamonds & Pearls.” “When I first met him,” she recalls, “he asked
me to join the band. I told him then that I wanted to be a soloist and he said,
“join up with us and I’ll put a record out on you.” The record didn’t come out
the next year. Four years went by, and the record still didn’t come out. So I
figured, let me go. Let me get back to doing what I was doing before I met him —
which was trying getting my thang out, and even that was a hard decision. Y’know,
I was getting older, I still wanted to chase my dream, and waiting like that
made me wonder if I was ever going to. “He didn’t take to it well and wouldn’t
release me from my contract, so we went through a period of being very angry
with one another. But you know, stuck in that contract ended up being a good
thing for me spiritually, I did a lot of song-writing, but I was broke!” She’s
laughing now. Well you would be if you were with Motown. That longed for solo LP
“Closer Than Close,” has finally had its umbilical cord snipped from the womb of
intention and released at the end of the month and it’s practically a solo
conception too. “Yeah, I played a lot of the
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instruments
myself — but we brought in a drummer and we have Paulinho da Costa on there as
well as a guitarist with a Country and Western background. Can you get that?!
That made for a different approach to Soul, I can tell ya . . Her own
(background) started off playing in a family band in the Bay Area of San
Francisco — ‘it all petered out after they grew up and got married, but I kept
going,’ — before she toured on her own for years on end to become — in her own
words — ‘more professional’. In those club years she started off on the Hammond
B3, before attaining the use of bass, drums, Fender Rhodes and her favoured
keyboards. The marriage of those skills during the wait-out period of her
contract with her lyrical frustrations meant that she had 177 songs to choose
from by the time the blue-print discussions for her album took place. “It was
more about finding a direction.” She laughs. “Because I see myself as a ‘multi’
person in terms of my approach to music — that I just don’t only do R&B — we had
to try and show that diversity.” True. And while there are dalliances with the
ghoul called MOR, tracks like “I Want You,” — where she sounds as vampy and
horny as Eartha Kitt — sit beneath the shade of soulful subtlety as horns, piano
keys and scatting backing singers add to the atmosphere. The jazzy tones of some
of the material has her sounding so laid back you’re envious, while the electro
funk that drives one of two Marley covers - namely “Concrete Jungle,” contrasts
the pace. But it’s on her own material like, “Get The Ghetto Off Your Mind,1
that we see more of the person, as well as the musician. “Sometimes,” she
clarifies, “you hear people say, ‘we come from the ghetto,’ ‘I didn’t have a
daddy.’ They use it as justification for what they do, or fail to do in life.
Yeah, the ghetto is a hard thing to grow up with — and you are treated like
animals — but after going through all that, the violence and all that exists
along with it, I still realized I could get myself out of it.” Ah hah. But since
poverty is now something of an hereditary trait in too many families, how
prepared is she for the possibility that her words will be looked upon as
nothing more than an entertainer telling somebody how to get it together? “I’m
not concerned with that cause by doing these interviews I can express that I
HAVE BEEN THERE. When an experience has been your own, people look at your words
differently — so many are quick to say ‘how can you tell me, when you ye never
worn my shoes?’ but I’ve worn them. I’ve been through the violence, the
shootings, and that, I think, gives me the privilege to say it. “I firmly
believe that “Ghetto is more about encouragement — I decided my way out would be
through music, but here I’m saying: look inside yourself and use the strength to
get you out.”