DOMINIQUE TRENIER
in the middle. “From a label’s perspective, they wanted an album and wanted an album immediately. So they began to apply a lot of pressure—‘When’s it coming?’ ‘ We need it now!’—that kind of thing. D’s camp didn’t respond well to that.”
Virgin itself was in a state of flux. With new ownership, many staff members and executives were being let go, making the label all the more anxious to bring out a profitable record it had already sunk well over a million dollars into.
“There were probably endless hours’, days’, weeks’, months’ worth of music, but we never got a sense of when that album would come,” says Ray Cooper, Virgin’s copresident from 1997 to 2002. “We were always being told he was ‘ hitting a great creative streak’ or ‘nearly finished,’ only to see nothing. It just became you’d be thankful if he was back in the studio working on something.”
He was working. Those who’ve heard the music, while cautioning that it’s all unfinished, generally rave about it. Apparently, D’Angelo had been playing a lot of guitar, lending the tunes a distinctly rock edge. “The best way to describe it would be Parliament/Funkadelic meets the Beatles meets Prince,” says Elevado, “and the whole time there’s this Jimi Hendrix energy.”
“He was determined not to make a record like Voodoo,” Leeds says. “He wanted to make some kind of different record, so he was trying to let the music flow and see where it took him.”
Whatever progress being made halted around late 2004, as D’Angelo’s drinking escalated and Virgin lost its patience and cut off funding. For roughly a year and a half, little if any recording was done. In
January 2005, D’Angelo was arrested in Richmond and charged with disturbing the peace, possession of marijuana, carrying a concealed weapon, driving while under the influence, and driving without a valid license.
“After, there was a really not-flattering mug shot that came out,” says Trenier, who’d moved to Los Angeles by this time. “I was like, ‘Nah, this cannot be my man.’ I borrowed a tour bus and picked him up in Richmond.”
After D’Angelo’s first rehab stint in L.A., Trenier set up meetings with J Records honcho Clive Davis and Interscope head Jimmy Iovine, both of whom reportedly flipped when they heard the music. A new deal with J was in the offing, but then, in September 2005, a drunken D’Angelo crashed his Hummer in Virginia, landing him in the hospital. According to several sources, the J deal was then pulled off the table, and in the coming months, D’Angelo split with Trenier and Leeds and, by most accounts, alienated nearly everyone close to him.
“His girlfriend had left him, his attorney had had enough of him, his babies’ mothers and most of his family weren’t really in touch with him,” says Harris. “He’d basically hit rock bottom.”
Harris helped hook D’Angelo up with Irving Azoff, a high-powered manager, who in turn bankrolled his Crossroads trip. But after that rehab attempt, according to Harris, it took five months to get a meeting with Jermaine Dupri, then Virgin’s head of urban music, to discuss D’Angelo’s future. During that time, the singer recorded cameos for Common and Snoop records, but mostly hung out in Virginia and started boozing again. Early last year, Thompson leaked an unfinished D’Angelo tune called “Really Love” to an Australian radio station, fracturing their relationship. While they’ve since patched things up, Thompson has continued to keep his old friend at arm’s length.
“It’s a fear thing on my end,” he says, sighing deeply. “I’m afraid I’ll lose him. If I’m there and I lose him, I’ll have those feelings of guilt, like, ‘What could I have done to save him?’”
hile D’Angelo grew increasingly isolated, the rocky path he was traveling
was, ironically enough, quite crowded with like-minded compatriots. At
least three of neo-soul’s other late-’90s leading lights—Maxwell, Badu,
and Hill—have spent much of the new millennium on the sidelines.
Hill’s struggles have been well documented: She followed her 1998 break-
through, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, with an MTV Unplugged set four years
later that felt like the soundtrack to a real-time nervous breakdown. She’s yet
to offer a second studio album and, apart
from some aborted Fugees reunions,
occasional shows, and involvement with a
shady guru, much of her time has appar-
ently been devoted to her family.
Badu released her triple-platinum
debut, Baduizm, in 1997 and a success-
ful follow-up, Mama’s Gun, three years
later, and then said she had writer’s
block and went out on what she dubbed
“The Frustrated Artist Tour” in search of
inspiration. She eked out a slight EP in
2003 but was then largely silent, until the
well-received release of New AmErykah
(Pt. 1: 4th World War) last February.
Maxwell’s journey probably parallels
D’Angelo’s most closely. The Brooklyn-born
singer released three platinum albums
between 1996 and 2001, earning frequent
comparisons to D’Angelo, then seemed to
disappear entirely. A new album, Black
Summers’ Night, was originally slated for
spring 2004 but has been delayed repeat-
edly. Some close to him suggest that,
like D’Angelo, he’s been wrestling with a
rather ill-fitting public image as a sex god.
His label says he’s still working on his new
album, but there’s no release date slated.
In the case of all these artists, the repeated delays and disappearances
Then and now:
Maxwell in 2001, and in 2007
References:
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