Crazy about Cee-Lo

The Gnarls Barkley soul singer talks about past work, new collaborations, solo projects, and family.

By Mosi Reeves
Creative Loafing
September 20, 2006

At the moment, Cee-Lo isn’t as crazy as he is weary. Here, inside his two-story Buckhead condo, he puts aside his celebrated role of vocalist, songwriter, producer and collaborator to focus on the role of father. He’s trying to make sure 5-year-old Kingston — who hasn’t seen his globetrotting dad in weeks and now is resisting a visit to his grandmother’s house — has his shoelaces knotted properly.

“You’ve got to make sure they’re loose,” Cee-Lo tells the boy.

Cee-Lo’s back in town after a grueling tour spanning (on and off) this summer as part of Gnarls Barkley, his collaborative project with producer and one-time Atlantan Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton. The duo’s debut album, St. Elsewhere, has sold millions of copies around the world, and its cathartic hit single, “Crazy,” threatens to become one of the most popular songs of the year.

Gnarls Barkley’s overwhelming success kept the former frontman for Atlanta hip-hop group Goodie Mob on the road. He and Danger Mouse performed this summer at massive festivals from Lollapalooza in Chicago’s Grant Park (where they played for 100,000 people) to the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.

By late August, however, Cee-Lo’s voice had grown strained from overuse, and he canceled several European concerts. Now he’s home again, albeit for a few days. A new round of concerts begins this month, highlighted by an Oct. 1 homecoming show at the Tabernacle.

While Cee-Lo helps his son, his road manager, Hank Johnson, and his cousin, Ensley Horton, hang out in the kitchen, chatting on cell phones. The condo is sparsely furnished, graced with little besides a leather bench and a large circular bed in the living room.

Piles of Brooks Brothers shopping bags and a mirror shaped like a blank CD lie in the corner. Perched on an easel is a canvas portrait of Cee-Lo by an artist named Bless, the singer standing amid a whirl of psychedelic images and colors — his expression is solemn and regal.

The stocky 32-year-old with the bald head and countless tattoos struggles to his feet and saunters over to the fireplace topped by a mantle hosting scented candles and incense holders. He picks up an incense stick and lights it. Then he inserts it into his mouth, where it hangs like a piece of straw. He removes it and lays it back on the mantle. “OK,” he announces. “Let’s do this.”

As he lies down on the bed and begins to talk, his son, cousin and manager all leave. With the kitchen light turned off, the living room is illuminated by candles and a calm descends upon the room. Although there’s nary a noise outside the condo, Cee-Lo speaks in a whisper, as if he’s lulling himself to sleep.

“I’m happy to be touring,” he says. “I’m going to places and walking out on stage to an audience that just loves this record. But I’m also a little saddened that my son has to go without me for extended periods of time. I don’t want that pain for him. I don’t want that absence, wonder and idle time to fester into something negative, rebellious or disobedient.

“I’m a family person,” adds the Atlanta native, who had his own struggles with authority as a youth. “I enjoy creating music and performing music. I don’t necessarily enjoy traveling.”

THOMAS DECARLO “CEE-LO” CALLAWAY (formerly Burton) is known for doing crazy things. In a video for his 2002 single “Closet Freak,” for example, he danced around vicariously in an Afro wig like some blaxploitation character.

“He’s real flamboyant,” says Cedric “Ced Keys” Williams, a keyboard musician who played and toured with Cee-Lo. Williams was with him on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles when Cee-Lo bought a kimono, a red-orange wig, glasses and clogs. That was funny enough. Then, back in Atlanta, Cee-Lo put on the outfit during a concert at the Tabernacle. “He walks out,” Williams recalls, “and folks just went crazy, man. It was, like, real … different.”

The playful weirdness shouldn’t be surprising, if you consider that Cee-Lo is the kind of artist who strides impulsively, even courageously, to the creative edge. “I’ve taken the red pill,” he explains in a reference The Matrix, “and I get to see how deep the wormhole goes. And it’s, like, ‘Wow.’” At the same time, he’s rooted enough to hold back a bit, leading to recordings that sound contradictorily unbridled and restrained.

Cee-Lo came up through the celebrated musical collective Dungeon Family, whose members include OutKast, Goodie Mob and Sleepy Brown. The Dungeon Family went on to produce some of the most resonant and popular recordings of the past decade and helped Atlanta become known as an R&B and hip-hop mecca. It also provided a creative zone well-suited to Cee-Lo’s eclectic talents and experimental temperament: He draws strength from environments that allow him to express his vibrant, complex personality — or what he once called his “perfect imperfections.”

To whoever listens, Cee-Lo can be impressively cerebral and intellectual. He’ll meditate on race, politics and religion — often referring to God but refusing to claim faith to any particular religion. The Tibetan word for “wisdom” is tattooed across the back of his head.

“Spirituality is so broad,” he says, adding that his parents, both of whom are now deceased, raised him Baptist. “That’s why it’s possible to be interpreted in so many various ways. There’s validity in all interpretations and practices.”

He met his former wife, Christina Johnson, in 1997 and the two immediately clicked. She recalls how Cee-Lo turned her on to new things, such as records by the Doors and Black Sabbath, and movies such as Trainspotting. “That was weird,” she says of the latter.

And his music draws from places as varied as his ideas: There is the blues- and gospel-influenced hip-hop of Goodie Mob; the mainstream rock of his collaborations with Everlast and Carlos Santana; the glossy radio-friendly pop of the Pussycat Dolls, for whom he produced the hit “Don’t Cha”; and, most recently, the electronic hip-hop soul of Gnarls Barkley.

Much like Cee-Lo himself, his music defies categorization.

CEE-LO FIRST BLIPPED into public consciousness with a simple verse and hook to OutKast’s 1994 single “Git Up, Git Out.” He rhymes on the chorus: “You need to get up, get out, and get something/Don’t let the days of your life pass by/You need to get up, get out, and get something/Don’t spend all your time trying to get high.”

The sound of his raspy voice — crisp and clear yet full of Southern twang and inflections — made an immediate impact upon those who heard it.

A year later, he teamed up with fellow Atlantans Big Gipp, T-Mo and Khujo to form Goodie Mob. For many hip-hop fans, the quartet’s debut, Soul Food, remains a beloved classic. The album draws part of its strength from the members’ street background (Cee-Lo himself was a self-described teenage gangsta who attended reform school). Instead of celebrating thug fantasies, however, the foursome presented cautionary songs informed by life experience.

“Dirty South” was a slang-filled track about Atlanta’s criminal underworld (it also helped give a name to the region’s sound), while the title track unapologetically celebrated Southern black culture, as Cee-Lo raps: “Fast food got me feeling sick/Them crackers think they slick/By trying to make this bullshit affordable/I thank the Lord that my voice is recordable.” Bolstered by mellow, bluesy beats from Organized Noize (Dungeon Family’s in-house production squad), Goodie Mob recorded an album of startling power and moral clarity.

The group released three gold-certified albums on Arista Records — 1995’s Soul Food, 1998’s Still Standing and 1999’s World Party — before Cee-Lo pursued a solo career. As influential as Goodie Mob was in its prime, however, it wasn’t a summation of Cee-Lo’s talents or his interests. So for the next five years, he explored his muse. There were conventional guest spots for his Dungeon Family and other rap artists, including Trick Daddy’s “In Da Wind.” And he created two solo albums on Arista — 2002’s Cee-Lo Green and His Perfect Imperfections and 2004’s Cee-Lo Green … Is the Soul Machine.

His solo work confidently weaved through an array of pop styles and formats, and it earned respectable reviews. “Perfect Imperfections” won a Grammy nomination, in fact. But the solo albums sold far less than the Goodie Mob albums. A similar approach worked wonders for Andre 3000 of OutKast, the musician to whom Cee-Lo is compared. So why didn’t it work for Cee-Lo? His longtime engineer, Ben Allen, thinks the industry had a hard time figuring out how to classify Cee-Lo.

“On his last solo record, [Arista] had the Neptunes, Timbaland and Jazze Pha produce tracks,” says Allen, who worked on Cee-Lo Green … Is the Soul Machine, as well as St. Elsewhere. “It’s all great, but it kept him in this box.

“The people that Cee-Lo knows in the music business have seen him as this urban artist for so long,” Allen says. “He’s really not an urban artist. I think he’s an international, avant-garde, experimental artist.”

SHORTLY AFTER THE RELEASE of Cee-Lo Green … Is the Soul Machine, Arista Records was shut down by its parent company, Sony BMG. Cee-Lo had recorded for Arista since his Goodie Mob days — it was the only label home he knew — and he feared getting lost in the sprawling Sony BMG system. So he asked to be released from his contract.

The experience came after some personal and professional highlights. He married Christina Johnson and celebrated the birth of their son, Kingston, in 2000, to go along with Johnson’s two daughters from a previous relationship.

Johnson says Cee-Lo’s label troubles had an adverse effect on everyone.

“It was very emotional and upsetting,” she recalls. “That’s when everything started getting turbulent. Like, ‘Oh my goodness, what now? What am I going to do?’ It wasn’t a happy time.”

While their relationship ultimately would not survive, the two remain close. “Christina has my heart,” he says. “That’s my sister. I love her like that. She’s a strong girl. She stuck with me through a rough time. And we had some good times, too.”

During these struggles, Cee-Lo threw himself into a variety of small projects. He developed a label, Radiculture Records, and mentored new acts. He collaborated with everyone from Jack Splash of Plant Life (an underground L.A. funk-soul band), to Jazze Pha, an old friend and producer in Atlanta who had created hits for Ciara and Ludacris.

“We first started off in Miami,” Jazze Pha says of his jam sessions with Cee-Lo. “And from there we started saying, ‘Hey, we should keep on doing this ’cause we like recording together. Let’s do an album.’”

They called the album Happy Hour. Cee-Lo even devised a slogan for it: “60 minutes of well-dressed drama.” In 2005, Capitol Records agreed to release the unfinished project through Jazze Pha’s new imprint, Sho’Nuff Records. For a while, it looked like Cee-Lo’s best shot at another major-label deal.

“I didn’t have an exclusive contract at the time, so I could plant my feet here and there,” Cee-Lo says. “[Labels] weren’t exactly kicking down the doors to sign me at that time. It was bittersweet because I was still able to be productive and record a great deal of music. I also think [Christina and I] were going through troubled times as a marriage.”

Danger Mouse, then a struggling producer himself, turned out to be among those eager to work with Cee-Lo after he left Goodie Mob. He was working with New York rapper Jemini the Gifted One when he asked Cee-Lo to rap on a track for their Twenty Six Inch EP. After the session, Danger Mouse sent Cee-Lo some demo tapes full of unused beats. He then proposed collaboration, and Cee-Lo readily accepted.

“Gnarls Barkley was made out of me wanting to impress him, because I was so impressed by the music,” Cee-Lo says of Danger Mouse’s beats. “He didn’t have to say a word. Something about the pain, detachment and graphic, cinematic and psychedelic quality of the music let me know that he had experienced something similar. It was probably his own pain, his own experience.

“But pain is pain. Can you dig it?”

EVEN AS DANGER MOUSE and Cee-Lo began work on a full album, their commercial prospects seemed bleak. “We were originally going to name the St. Elsewhere album Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo Green: Who Cares?” Cee-Lo says.

But their fortunes soon improved. In early 2004, Danger Mouse issued an unauthorized remix CD of Jay-Z’s The Black Album called The Grey Album. Hundreds of thousands of people downloaded the album from the Internet. Until then, he had only a cult following; suddenly, Danger Mouse was a media sensation.

Meanwhile, Cee-Lo wrote a song for Tori Alamaze, one of his Radiculture artists, called “Don’t Cha.” He eventually produced a cover version of the track for the Pussycat Dolls, a prefab girl group from L.A. Released in the summer of 2005, it soared to No. 2 on the Billboard singles chart, reaffirming Cee-Lo to the music industry as a major songwriting talent.

As momentum built around Gnarls Barkley, Cee-Lo stopped working on his other projects. In particular, Happy Hour suffered. Although Capitol Records planned to put out the album, the company had asked the duo to record a second single beforehand. The lead single, “Happy Hour,” eventually was released in late 2005, but Cee-Lo had already moved on before the second could be produced. Despite the project’s suspension, Jazze Pha voices support for Cee-Lo’s focus on Gnarls Barkley. “I never stand in the way of progress, especially for a true friend,” he says.

Cee-Lo and Christina Johnson’s marriage didn’t survive St. Elsewhere. The couple divorced in late 2005. “I think you can’t be going through something outside, and then come inside the house and it’s gone,” she says. “I think if you’re going through things emotionally, it’s going to affect every other aspect of your life.”

On the title track to St. Elsewhere, Cee-Lo sings, “I packed a few of my belongings/Left the life that I was living/Just some memories of it/Mostly the ones I can’t forget.” He adds, “Way over yonder there’s a new frontier/Would it be so hard for you to come and visit me here.”

The former couple — who speak kindly of each other — insist “St. Elsewhere” isn’t about Cee-Lo’s split with Johnson — this is not Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours or Marvin Gayes Here My Dear. Not entirely, at least.

“I’ve heard quite a few people assume that the album is borne out of that. In essence, and generally, it was,” Cee-Lo says. But he notes that other songs address topics such as feng shui (”Feng Shui”), suicide (”Just a Thought”) and adapting to any situation (”Transformer”). St. Elsewhere reflects the confusion, “bittersweet” artistic freedom and occasional despair in Cee-Lo’s life between Goodie Mob acclaim and Gnarls Barkley fame — a period that spanned much of the time he and Johnson were together.

But the best song to emerge from St. Elsewhere was “Crazy.” It begins with Danger Mouse’s simple yet propulsive bass and drums arrangement, and sets a scene for high drama reminiscent of 1960s songs by Shirley Bassey and Tom Jones.

Cee-Lo sings, “I remember when, I remember, I remember when I lost my mind/There was something so pleasant about that place/Even your emotions have an echo in so much space.” Then Cee-Lo wails out in a high falsetto, “Does that make me crazy?” He answers himself: “Possibly.”

Requests for an interview with Danger Mouse were denied by his management firm, Waxploitation, and Atlantic Records’ publicity department. When I interviewed him in March, Danger Mouse described Gnarls Barkley’s St. Elsewhere as “a lot of Miami bass, booty-shake stuff that’s in there. Me and Cee-Lo grew up in Atlanta. A lot of stuff that’s in there is a lot of stuff we listened to coming up. … There’s the Motown thing. There are electro influences in there. I try to put anything I can put into a song.

“This record we did together wasn’t very deliberate,” added the 28-year-old producer. “We didn’t try to make the kind of record that it turned out to be. We just did whatever we wanted to do, and over time it turned into something that sounded thematic and natural.”

GNARLS BARKLEY INITIALLY seemed destined for the same fate as Cee-Lo’s past work: critical acclaim and moderate sales. K.C. Morton, his manager, says Universal Records, Sony Music and Interscope all passed on signing the project. Then, Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse entered into serious talks with Downtown Records, a new label with a distribution deal with Warner Brothers’ Atlantic Records that hadn’t even opened its doors yet.

“We hadn’t opened our office yet, but I convinced them that this would be the right home for them,” says Downtown Records co-owner Josh Deutsch. The label signed Gnarls Barkley in late 2005, just before it officially launched in January 2006. “It was a leap of faith on both sides,” he adds.

Urban radio programmers initially rejected “Crazy,” and alternative-rock radio was cool toward the song. Some hip-hop fans wrote off the group as a facile attempt at pop stardom.

Those criticisms faded when “Crazy” became a massive international hit. Gnarls Barkley uploaded the song on the Internet in the winter of 2006, well before it became commercially available in April. It quickly spread around the Web, which built an early buzz for the project.

First, it topped the British single charts for nine weeks, equaling a record set by Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Then, “Crazy” spread to the United States, selling more than 1.2 million downloads and peaking at No. 2 on the Billboard single charts.

As part of the publicity push, Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo appeared in publicity photos dressed as pop-culture icons, including Superman (Danger Mouse) and Clark Kent (Cee-Lo) and as the infamous “Droog” criminals from the Stanley Kubrick film A Clockwork Orange.

“They’ve gone to great lengths to establish their own mythology by only appearing as famous duos in movies,” Deutsch says. “In every aspect of the campaign, we tried to establish the band as something unique and mysterious. A lot of that comes from Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo. They have really amazing and very definitive ideas about how they want to be perceived.”

All that publicity and the successful Internet release primed fans for the album. Since its release in May, St. Elsewhere has peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard charts, and reached the top-10 album charts in 14 countries. It’s been certified platinum, selling 890,000 copies in the United States to date, according to SoundScan.

With the summer coming to a close, the buzz about “Crazy” refuses to fade. It’s already been covered by such disparate artists as the Roots, Nelly Furtado and the Raconteurs. An animated video that turned Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo into ink on a Rorschach test claimed MTV Video Music Awards for Best Editing and Best Direction.

Perhaps more importantly, the same rap industry that didn’t know what to make of Gnarls Barkley subsequently has embraced the group. Much like OutKast before him, Cee-Lo was hailed for being courageous enough to deviate from the norm.

“Cee-Lo has very diverse music tastes,” Allen says. “OK Computer by Radiohead is one of his favorite records. The Gnarls Barkley record was, to me, his first opportunity to really stretch out and be himself.”

NOT SURPRISINGLY, many of Cee-Lo’s collaborators hope that once the Gnarls Barkley tour wraps up this fall, he’ll return to finish all those projects he started. Jazze Pha wants to complete the Happy Hour album and release it next year. Plant Life’s Jack Splash wants to continue working on the Heart Attack, the group he formed with Cee-Lo. Allen wants him to participate in a new supergroup called the Constellations. There is talk of putting out a third Cee-Lo solo album and putting out new artists on Radiculture Records. Even Goodie Mob wants to reunite with Cee-Lo.

Cee-Lo calls the potential projects “aspirations.” He refuses to speculate on which ones he’ll tackle first. “My touring schedule has been vigorous for the last six months, so I haven’t been able to be fully involved in any of the other aspirations,” he continues. If Gnarls Barkley’s popularity has done anything for him, it gives him a new plateau to surpass just as Goodie Mob did so many years ago.

“You can equate God with a few things. One of them is timing, and one of them is possibility,” Cee-Lo says. “Sometimes you can be ahead of your time. I’ve been called that a couple of times. ‘He’s ahead of his time,’ you know. But with God, he’s right on time.”

Source: atlanta.creativeloafing.com