Forever Yours

When I was thirteen I saw the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show and I immediately picked up a broom and imitated them playing something that was in their hands. Some-time later, I learned that what they had in their hands was called a guitar. Within two months I was standing at the loading dock of the Sears and Roebuck store, across from a park called The Fenway, with my arms outstretched, reaching up, while the warehouse guy lowered down my box with my bright red, shiny, new guitar in it. I took that guitar home and right away I started plucking the strings, singing to it, making up words, my hand doing what the Beatles had done.

By the time I was sixteen I was given a book by some people in a school for truants, dropouts and at-risk kids that I was going to at the time. The book was called 'Black Voices'. It was an anthology of poems and short stories by black poets and writers.

It was the first time I had seen or read a book like this with all African American writers and poets and it literally changed my entire life. I was now ready to begin my journey and knew that I wanted to be a writer or a journalist and that my guitar was a part of that. By the time I was seventeen I realized that I didn't know a damn thing about music. But I began saying things to my guitar that I knew about, drinking, drugs and girls, making up stories and poetry about life in the ghetto. Just like my 'Black Voices' book, except with music and words that I made up.

By the time I was eighteen years old I had left the projects for Lackland Air Force Base and Shephards Air Force Base in Texas, Misawa Air Force Base in Japan, Puson Air Force Base in South Korea, Tegu Air Force Base in South Korea and DaNang Air Force base in South Vietnam.

I later went to Los Angeles, where I found a guitar in Mexico and the words found me again. I met a woman who after she heard me say the words, on a guitar, put me in show business. I found a friend in the mail room at Warner Brothers and Columbia pictures called The Burbank Studios, and I would rite lyrics while he would play piano, giving notes to the chords that I would play on the piano for him.

It would be the first time I would write music and lyrics with somebody. Somehow that led to my being hired at Warner/Electra/Atlantic Records, (WEA) where someone thought I would do well to learn record distribution, marketing, accounting and sales. Then RCA Records hired me and I was trained in studio record production, music business, marketing, promotion, distribution, and A&R work.

A year I returned to Boston, met Maurice Starr, and got him a record deal with RCA Records, and he would introduce me to a young musician named Charles Alexander. We would call ourselves Prince Charles and the City Beat Band; and Maurice, his brother Michael Johnzon, Prince Charles and I would make some words and music and I would have my first hit record, "In the Streets", and go on t...