Teddy Riley sits down in the restaurant of the SLS Hotel in Beverly Hills and tells a server, “All I want is a lemonade and some French fries.” He and I will share two orders of fries, actually — one regular and one truffle.
The trailblazing R&B musician and producer — known for his run of hits that includes Keith Sweat’s “I Want Her,” Bobby Brown’s “My Prerogative,” Michael Jackson’s “Remember the Time” and “No Diggity” by his group Blackstreet — is particular these days about what he puts into his body.
“I don’t eat beef, I don’t eat pork, I don’t eat chicken,” he says. “The cleanest of all the poultry is turkey, so I’ll do white-meat turkey or I’ll do sea bass. No dirty fish — no shrimp, no catfish, no tilapia. And I do my herbs every day.”
Which herbs? “It’s a long list,” he says. “Vitamin C, zinc, key lime. I do my bees and my glutathione, and then I do my black walnuts because that’s a part of helping kill the parasites in the body.” Riley notes proudly that he refused the COVID vaccine. “I’m more into natural things.” On this recent afternoon, at least, he looks healthy and alert under a black ski cap, his eyes bright and his beard neatly trimmed.
“Gonna be 60 in October,” he says, not bragging but not not bragging.
Riley reflects on his six decades in a new memoir, “Remember the Times.” Co-written with author Jake Brown, the book chronicles Riley’s invention of new jack swing, the plush yet hard-knocking soul-music sound originating from Harlem that came to dominate Black pop in the late ‘80s and early 1990s.
New jack swing — the term was coined by the writer Barry Michael Cooper in a profile of Riley in the Village Voice — layered sensual vocals over programmed, sample-heavy beats, bridging the gap between R&B and hip-hop. The style presented a vision of upwardly mobile urban sophistication while acknowledging the harsh realities of life during the crack epidemic.
“The synthesized orchestral punches of Sweat’s ‘I Want Her’ are not used to soothe,” Cooper wrote in his feature. “They scream, they shake, they frighten you.”
New jack swing made stars of Sweat, Al B. Sure!, Heavy D & the Boyz and Riley’s trio Guy; the sound also offered renewed relevance to established acts like New Edition and Janet Jackson, both of whom hired Riley’s peers-slash-competitors Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, and the King of Pop himself, who recruited Riley to produce half of his 1991 album “Dangerous.”
“By then, I was very wealthy,” Riley writes in his memoir. Today his catalog of achievements includes nine children, two Grammys, four No. 1 singles on Billboard’s Hot 100 and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2019.
Riley says he and Brown completed “Remember the Times” 12 years ago but that he sat on the book until the correct moment had come to release it.
“I’m on spiritual time,” he muses between French fries. “I felt like it was the right time because this is the Year of the Fire Horse, and I’m a Libra.”
He’s probably also aware that new jack swing’s mechanized thump has found its way back into music, most prominently via Justin Bieber and the producer Dijon, who borrowed from Riley’s classic sound last year for Bieber’s Grammy-nominated “Swag” LP and for Dijon’s own album, the rapturously reviewed “Baby.”
Says Riley: “R&B is coming back to a good place — coming back to real artists.” He’s in town on book promo from his home in Dallas, where he moved a few years ago from Las Vegas, which he liked much better.
“It’s OK if I’m gonna be a homebody,” he says of Texas. “But going places — it just takes so long to get wherever you gotta go.” He’s not crazy about the humidity either. “And I love heat,” he clarifies. “Michael got me used to it — he loved heat. I’ll walk or jog and it could be 110 or 120 degrees. I’ve done it many times. Puts years on your life.”
“Remember the Times” stretches back to Riley’s childhood in Harlem, where the playground of his elementary school abutted the parking lot behind New York’s venerable Apollo Theater. When he was 5, a babysitter took him to a Gladys Knight gig there; as she sang “Neither One of Us (Wants to Be the First to Say Goodbye),” Knight instructed a stagehand to pick the boy up and put him onstage so he could dance, Riley writes, providing him with an early helping of the attention he’d come to crave.
“Everything in my life was like, You can’t make this s— up,” he says now. “Years later, I got to tell Gladys.” And? “She kind of remembered.”
As a young man in the early ’80s, Riley played in a couple of groups — one of them, Kids at Work, was a kind of New Edition clone assembled by an executive named Gene Griffin — while he also sold drugs on the street. (He writes that he got the idea for Johnny Kemp’s “Just Got Paid,” which would go on to top Billboard’s R&B chart in 1988, on the corner on a busy Friday night.)
Eventually, Riley got busted by a cop who gave him a jailhouse “come-to-Jesus talk,” as he puts it. “He asked the right questions: What are your goals? What do you want to do? Who do you want to be in life?” Riley says at the SLS, his voice low and soothing. “I told him, ‘I want to be a star,’ and he said, ‘You ain’t gonna be a star in here.’”
Newly focused, Riley produced groundbreaking rap singles for Doug E. Fresh and Kool Moe Dee, then formed Guy in 1987 with Aaron Hall and Timmy Gatling (who was later replaced by Aaron’s brother Damion). The trio signed to Andre Harrell’s tastemaking Uptown Records label and quickly began scoring R&B hits like “Groove Me,” “My Fantasy” (from the soundtrack of Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing”) and “Let’s Chill”; Riley’s role as the group’s mastermind led to a production deal of his own with MCA Records — “Teddy is one of the special ones,” the company’s chairman, Al Teller, told The Times in 1990 — and to the invite from Jackson to work on “Dangerous.”
In the book he writes about spending a week prepping tracks in New York before flying to California to meet Jackson at Neverland Ranch; the beat for “Remember the Time,” he reports, came to him after a girlfriend indulged his fantasy of having sex in an elevator.
Riley says Jackson was “the most unique singer” he ever heard. But he also talks about the late superstar as a kind of social justice figure. Asked why he felt compelled to write that, in their year and a half together, he “never saw anything inappropriate happen between Michael and young children,” Riley tells me, “I fight for Michael. His life was a necessity here for us, and I’m talking about every race. It’s not a Black and white thing or an Asian thing. It’s the government that wants that to happen — they want it to happen so that they can continue to make money by us fighting or hating on each other.
“If we had a peaceful world, do you think there would be any police?” he continues. “These are the things that he knows and he talks about, and they hated it because he was telling the truth.”
Riley used the money he made from “Dangerous” and from the MCA deal to relocate to Virginia Beach at the end of 1990, where he built a recording complex called Future Studios in 1991 and became a mentor to young producers like Rodney Jerkins and Pharrell Williams; he also formed Blackstreet, whose 1996 “Another Level” album would sell more than 4 million copies.
Yet an undercurrent of resentment flows through “Remember the Times” — a sense that Riley feels his legacy isn’t as secure as those of Jam and Lewis or Babyface and L.A. Reid, to name another duo that helped bring R&B into the age of hip-hop.
Riley says he took it as a compliment when Jam and Lewis went new jack swing for Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation 1814” — they “had to jump on the bandwagon,” he writes — but close observers will note that, of the five record-makers, only Riley has been passed over for the coveted producer of the year award at the Grammys.
“Michael wanted me to get it so bad,” Riley says of the Grammy, for which he was nominated in 1993. (He lost to Babyface and Reid, who won in a tie with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois.) “He said, ‘What?! This is so rigged.’”
Even so, Riley was hanging out with Jam and Reid just last night, he says, in a little get-together at Jimmy Iovine’s place. “Dr. Dre was there too,” he adds. “It was a vinyl moment. We had a stack of my songs and a stack of their songs and we were just listening to records. We all inspired each other — I stole some s— too.”
Riley sings the hook from “Let’s Chill” then sings the hook from “Tender Love” by the Force M.D.’s, which Jam and Lewis wrote and produced a few years before “Let’s Chill.” “Same chords,” he says.
Would you say you’ve gotten your flowers? I’m getting them. I got my star in Hollywood. Hopefully they’ll think about me for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Because I know I’ve done a lot of music — more than a lot of people who’ve been up there.
I got the impression from the book that you feel you were treated unfairly by the media at various points. When I used to live in Virginia Beach, there used to be bad things about me in the newspaper.
What kind of bad things? “Teddy Riley is broke.”
Were you? Far from it. At one point I filed for bankruptcy, but that doesn’t mean you’re broke — you’re just closing a company down and letting the debtors go after that. But there’s nothing good when I’ve done so much for Virginia. You can never get anything good out of a publication from Virginia.
Even today. Maybe today. They’re working on a ceremony for me to get my street, and they’re working on a museum. The museum will be called the Future.
After your studio. We’re talking about rebuilding the studio and making it an after-school program for the Boys & Girls Club. I think this’ll be the start of my humanitarian path where I can do something to help keep kids off the streets.
Pharrell speaks warmly about Virginia Beach. He’s like a favorite son. That’s because he’s from there, whereas I just moved there. I commend them for recognizing him — they gotta give it to one of us, and he deserves it. But I do too.
Having told his story up till now, Riley has big plans for what’s next.
He’s put together a new version of Guy called Guy 2.0. He says he’s discussing collaborations with Chris Brown and with Usher. And he wants to carry on the work of Uptown’s Harrell, who died in 2020, by relaunching the label that introduced Jodeci and Mary J. Blige.
“I think it’s gonna be the talk of the town,” he says.
He’s also floated the idea of working with R. Kelly, the disgraced R&B superstar who’s serving a 30-year prison sentence after a jury convicted him of racketeering and sex trafficking charges.
On social media last month, Riley posted a snippet of what sounded like Kelly singing Brown’s song “It Depends” over a phone line; a caption described Kelly as “still the king of R&B” and promised that new music was on the way.
At the SLS, Riley says he and Kelly have “talked a few times” and that he’s “bringing in investors” to help release some portion of the 25 albums Kelly has said he’s recorded in prison.
Why?
“Everybody deserves a second chance,” Riley says. “Everyone deserves to repent, and everyone gets forgiven by God when you come to him. People miss his music. I’m the messenger to bring R&B back.”
Riley says he’s well aware that some in the audience view Kelly as beyond redemption. Does he fear the risk posed by associating with him?
“If I was afraid, I wouldn’t be in this business,” he says. “Everybody has controversy — everybody went through things. Rick James came with another record when he got out of jail, and he was forgiven, right? They want to keep R. Kelly in until 2045? I don’t think he deserved getting the whole thing. I think he’s been punished.
“I’m a true believer of God, but I’m also a true believer of forgiveness,” he adds.
Has Riley forgiven the people who’ve wronged him?
“Of course I have — Gene Griffin especially,” he says of the former manager whom he accuses in the book of a variety of financial misdeeds. “I was at his memorial. I didn’t spit on his grave. I put a flower on it.”
On the R. Kelly question: Would Riley go beyond a business deal and actually make music with the imprisoned singer?
“I haven’t,” he says. “I’m not on any of the albums.”
But is that something he’d do if asked?
“I would,” he says. “It’s music — it’s not an act of what he’s done before. He’s got gospel records. Besides all the other stuff he did, he made music to make people strive to be the best. He’s asking for forgiveness. He has repented. What does that mean to everybody?”
The post Why is Teddy Riley finally releasing his memoir after sitting on it for 12 years? appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
