LINER NOTES: Minnie Riperton, Adventures in Paradise (1975)
For her third album, Adventures in Paradise, Minnie revisited the realm of sacred space as she had on Come To My Garden, only this time with a far more sensual undercurrent. She and Richard were thrilled to get Stewart Levine (another Scorpio) to co-produce the project with them because he had been at the helm of those Crusaders albums they enjoyed so much back in Gainesville. The cherry on top was they got two Crusaders to participate.
Crusaders keyboardist Joe Sample played throughout the album and co-wrote "Adventures in Paradise" with Minnie and Richard in their home. His signature is evident in the descending changes of the chorus. Minnie gets to both soar and get down to a growl urging all to live everyday as a passport to discovery. It was the album's third single.
Crusaders guitarist Larry Carlton, who arranged and conducted the rhythm, string and horn parts for the entire album, reflects, "I was a major fan of Minnie's, especially 'Lovin' You.' It was a great opportunity for me to stretch my arranging chops and surround her amazing voice with some things I thought would be cool. She made 'a tremendous statement with that record. And I think the way I backed her was pretty damn good!"
Another potent contributor to this album was singer/songwriter Leon Ware, the master sensualist and self-described "musical minister” who would, the very next year, be responsible for one of Marvin Gaye’s steamiest LPs ever, I Want You. That same vibe was flowing in collaborations with Minnie and Richard like “Baby, This Love I Have” from Adventures In Paradise, and the absolutely transcendental “Can You Feel What I’m Saying?” (with a touch of Shakespeare) from her next LP, Stay In Love.
Minnie first worked with Leon singing the duet “If I Ever Lose This Heaven” (which Leon co-wrote with Pam Sawyer) on Quincy Jones’ Body Heat album. It turned out Ware and the Rudolphs were Laurel Canyon neighbors whose children went to the same school. This musical ménage a trois convened in the Rudolph’s converted garage studio ‘til the wee hours, concocting songs that continue to ignite, to this day, the fire of desire.
The most famous of these is “Inside My Love,” a provocative musical portrait depicting a warm, seamless union of soulmates. Amidst all of its evocative poetry were the deemed-scandalous lines, “Will you come inside me / Do you wanna ride my love.” When this was released as the lead-off single, some people couldn’t see the forest for the bush.
“There were programmers at stations that wouldn’t play the song because they felt it was too risqué,” Richard admits, “which was absurd! If you really look at the lyrics, it’s about a much more spiritual trip. There is a duality, but we always believed that to truly have love and to express that love physically, you have to have the other side of it – the emotional side. ‘While we’re here / The whole world is turning …’
That is one of my favorite lyrics of all time. When we performed it live, people would fall out. They could never believe it when Minnie held that note. Minnie would introduce it saying, 'This is the song that got me banned. But I got a letter from a nun who said that she didn't think anything was wrong with it at all. In fact, she kinda got off on it...'''
"All I can say is we understood that that was going to happen when we wrote the song,' Ware says, chuckling slyly at the memory. “Minnie was just as daring as I was."
"I had that song title for many years," Ware continues. "When Minnie said she wanted to sing something that had a very sensuous yet classy message, I told her about my idea. This idea came from me going to church as a little boy. Whenever a sermon was almost over, there would this point where the organ would play real soft, you could hear a pin drop and the vibe would be completely hypnotic. The pastor would say, 'Won't you come inside the Lord,' and people would stand up - eyes closed and arms outstretched - as if they were being guided to the pulpit.
"That's why whenever somebody mentions 'Inside My Love' - in as much as the dilemma that people tend to have with sex and God - I always say that the real misconception is that we're doing something wrong when we're doing one or the other. It's always been quite clear to me that wherever you go with your heart can never be wrong. Hopefully, myself and people I've worked with like Minnie, Dick and Marvin, have said something that touched some nerves and will continue to touch some nerves."
Adventures in Paradise wasn't all erotica. In fact, two of the songs were downright darling. There was the second single, "Simple Things," a gentle reminder to never take for granted the basic blessings of life. Then there was the rapturous fable, "Love and Its Glory," which Minnie and Richard co-wrote with their road bassist, Ed Brown. It opens like a storybook with the heavenly harp of Dorothy Ashby, another of Minnie's many friends from her Chicago days at Chess.
It's a lonely world, my children / You gotta do the best you can / If you find a chance to love! You'd better grab it any way you can.
"Our lives were based around our children, each other and our music," Richard shares. "We wrote that song for the kids. We told them all the time, 'The world has become a place of deferred happiness, but it's the journey that's the adventure.' We came up with a story about Maya and an imaginary young man named 'Aliya.' Maya was just a baby and didn't quite 'get' the song. Whenever she heard it, she'd say, 'I am not a liar!’”
When recording was completed, it was time for Minnie to shoot another striking album cover depicting her in a silkily elegant ensemble with baby's breath in her hair ... and a lion chillin' by her side. It would be one of her most enduring images, but it came with a price. At one point, the lion playfully jumped up on Minnie, scratching her upper chest with his paw. She was startled but, thankfully, not seriously injured.
Adventures in Paradise, a Top 5 R&B album, was a gold-seller - good, but not as good as Perfect Angel. Its biggest hit was "Inside My Love," which peaked at #26 R&B but #76 pop. Yet it stands as the favorite album of the majority of her fans which was far more important to Minnie. Sadly, it was the last music she got to make before a devastating discovery would rock the very foundation of her existence.
-- A. Scott Galloway
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