Let Love Rule - Lenny Kravitz Page 0,55

to sing on the chorus, and “Somebody’s Watching Me” became an international smash.

I’m a little amazed how much stuff I turned down at a time when I was so determined to make it. What do I attribute that to? What was I thinking? I wasn’t thinking. I was reacting. My gut simply said no.

As time went on, more opportunities would come my way, and I’d continue to turn down songs that had success written all over them. It wasn’t arrogance that made me pass over those opportunities. I wasn’t ego-tripping. If anything, it was the opposite. I never forgot one of my mother’s favorite admonitions: self-praise is no recommendation.

No, it was simply that the opportunities presented to me up until that point hadn’t allowed me to be my true self. I always knew that if I couldn’t express my musical soul, I wouldn’t be worth a damn.

LIPTON AND LOVE

After moving to California nine years earlier, my family continued flying back to New York for regular visits. Now I started going back on my own. Practically every month, I ran over to LAX and bought a ninety-nine-dollar ticket to JFK on a budget airline called People Express. With money saved from odd jobs and studio gigs, I zipped back and forth like it was a bus ride.

In New York, I returned to Brooklyn, where Grandma and Grandpa had kept their house at the corner of Throop Avenue and Kosciuszko Street. There was always a room there for me. Over in Manhattan, I stayed with the Bernsteins (my pal Adam and his dad, promoter Sid Bernstein) at their palatial pad at 1000 Park Avenue. Never wanting to overstay my welcome, though, I kept moving on. When none of my old Upper East Side pals was around to let me crash in their parents’ apartment, I slept on the floor of friends’ East Village lofts. I was all over the place.

* * *

I wound up in New Jersey because of Tisha Campbell. We had kept in touch since The Me Nobody Knows, and I couldn’t wait to see her again. She was a couple of years younger than me but already a pro, a gorgeous young woman who could act, sing, and dance with the confidence of someone twice her age. I was in love with her voice. I saw Tisha as a songstress, and I wanted to write and produce for her.

The attraction between us was so strong that, within weeks, I wound up living in her family home in East Orange, just outside Newark, the city where she’d been raised. It was cramped quarters. The household included Tisha’s mom, singer Mona Raye; her aunt Sharon; Sharon’s son, Eddie; and Tisha’s three brothers, Taye, Jermaine, and Stanley. The whole family accepted me, although her mother didn’t want me sleeping in the room with her daughter. But because Mona Raye had gigs, she was gone evenings, giving us time to slip into the bedroom to hang out. When it was time to turn in, instead of saying, “Go to bed, Lenny,” Tisha’s aunt Sharon would quip, “Go to floor.” The cold-ass wooden floor was my bed.

A few times, Tisha and I went to Mr. G’s, the nightclub where Mona Raye held court. The woman could sing. When she did Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child,” I thought of my own mother. It was Mom’s favorite song and one of her mantras: God bless the child that’s got his own. The soul got even deeper when Mona Raye called Tisha up to a sing a duet.

Mona had put Tisha together with Reggie Lucas, a Jersey-based producer who had worked with Madonna. I had different ideas about the direction I thought she should take. I saw her more as Whitney than Madonna. But Mona was happy with the way things were. Why should Tisha listen to me when she had a professional producer with hits under his belt? I didn’t even have a belt.

Despite our differences of opinion, I loved living in East Orange. Tisha’s household was wild. People coming and going night and day. It was fun. At times, there wasn’t much food in the house. Tisha’s brothers would battle over the last couple of slices of bologna. We had to improvise. We’d open a cabinet, grab a box of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, and drop in the seasoning packets from a box of Lipton Onion Soup. It filled our stomachs, and it actually tasted good. Tisha and I lived on Lipton and love.

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