Everybody's Brother Read Online Free PDF

thinking we can change somebody’s life.

    My tastes in life and in music have always been unusually varied. In the beginning, I was introduced to music by the greats—by those soulful voices on the radio that became my first father figures. Then gradually, slowly but surely, I discovered the music of my own generation—all kinds of music. My uncle Ricky was an amateur DJ with a huge record collection. I would spend hours and hours over at his place, listening to the music and memorizing everything on the record labels and jackets—writers, producers, sidemen, everything. My knowledge became deep and encyclopedic—and ecumenical. Soon there were all sorts of other voices that spoke to me—like Prince, who blew my mind wide open then and still does every time I hear him. Or Michael Jackson, who worshipped Jackie Wilson and James Brown too, and had learned their lessons way before me and then created something all hisown that will live forever. And don’t even get me started talking about the genius of Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Bobby Womack, and Sly Stone. Then there were all the rockier voices that spoke to me too, like Mick Jagger singing “Miss You” with the Rolling Stones. I loved singing along with “Miss You” so much that when I think back, I’m pretty sure I must have been missing someone pretty badly myself. I also loved Boy George and Culture Club and Duran Duran—and we should never forget Kiss.
    Kiss scared the shit out of me growing up, and you have to study and examine what scares you because it means that on some level it connects with you. So I was frightened, but I was locked in, because you couldn’t miss them and you could never forget them. They created a sort of comic book version of rock and roll and that was right up my alley. I had a Kiss lunch box for a while. I also had a Bee Gees lunch box. I love the Bee Gees too. At the same exact time, I loved George Clinton too, and still do. I’ve always been drawn to artists who will go to extremes to spare your soul and blow the cobwebs out of your mind, the ones who change the game and redefine the rules. I am a student of that.
    The first singles I ever acquired came into my hot little hands because my sister, Shedonna, bought them for me. I will always be grateful to her for buying me the ABC single “Look of Love,” which came out in 1981. I really loved ABC—those were some funky British white boys making true “Lady Killer” music. Shedonna bought me “Wild Thing” by Tone Loc, and later “It Ain’t Over ’til It’sOver” by Lenny Kravitz. I loved that song then and I still do now.
    In the end, music helped save me, and Lord knows I was already needing some saving from an early age. Shedonna remembers how my lifelong passion for music led me to shoplift early on. “As a kid growing up, Lo would always head to the magazine section at the grocery store and take all the
Right On!
magazines, or the
Jet
magazines or whatever publication that had some about music inside it,” she remembers. “Anything that had to do with music, Lo wanted it, and he was going to get that magazine the best way he knew how, whether Mom was going to pay for it or not.”
    If the magazine had anything to do with secular music, Mom was definitely not going to buy it for me. When I was around four years old, our mother started getting serious about her religion. Our grandmother is a Methodist, and we went to church with her when we were staying there. But Mom liked a more fiery style of preaching and a more Pentecostal relationship with the Spirit. First we started going to Grace Covenant Baptist Church, where Mom—never one to do anything halfway—got herself ordained as a minister. She sang in the choir and made announcements. Sometimes she’d call for the offering when we needed money to pay the bills. She became friends with the pastor and his family, who used to babysit us. Every Friday night they’d come over for a supper of salmon croquettes