During the first part of the show, Sinbad was a big, adorable teddy bear, Chaka was her fabulous self, and Larry was the coolest dude you’d ever want to sit next to. I’d been waiting backstage with my husband, not expecting to go on the show itself, but when Sinbad introduced “the Funkateer Himself” with the iconic opening chords of “1999,” he caught my hand and wouldn’t let go.
“What—am I doing this? I’m not hooked up with a mic or anything,” I said, but he was already pulling me toward the stage manager who held a curtain aside. The stage manager and I smiled and shrugged at each other, and my husband and I walked down the stairs together and sat on the sofa next to Chaka after a quick hug from Larry. Things started out great. My husband cracked everyone up, talking like Mickey Mouse, and then he said something very sweet and heartfelt about how “being married did help a lot, opening me up to be more comfortable with speaking in public.” He went on to speak intelligently about the cause he’d been fighting for the past three years:
“What a lot of artists, I think, don’t recognize,” he said, “is that when they get into the business and they sign away the rights to the master recordings, it in fact makes you a slave, in the sense that the proceeds from those master recordings, for all of time, will go to whoever owns them.”
“Some cat who can’t play,” Sinbad said. The audience hooted for that, and we all laughed and nodded.
“Well, you said it, I didn’t.” My husband smiled. “What we’ve been trying to do with New Power Generation, what it stands for is a creative freedom and financial freedom to run and operate your own Genesis, so to speak, so that you reach a much brighter Revelation.”
There was a round of applause, and I was part of it. I was incredibly proud of the way he’d stood up for his rights as an artist, and he was finally starting to get people on his side. Not record people—music people. The people who loved and respected him and wanted to work with him, and the massive audience who just wanted to see and hear him do his thing.
“Now, when is this thing hitting?” Sinbad asked, holding up the Newpower Soul CD.
“Bam,” said , and the audience loved that, too.
He talked about “The One” and Crystal Ball and about how albums had drawn him to Chaka and Larry in the 1970s. Sinbad brought up the name thing and talked about why he himself picked the name Sinbad—for the daring dude in the old movies.
“That’s sort of a precarious situation for me,” said my husband, “because to people who love me”—this made the crowd go nuts and call out, “We love you!”—“to people who love me, I get off on the fact that they think of me as a prince. So I’m pretty much cool with that. It’s when they don’t respect the fact that I’ve adopted a name that has no pronunciation that it gets to be troublesome.”
Sinbad broke for a commercial. Tina, Larry’s wife, was not about to remain offsides after I came out, so she came and sat with us, which confused me a little, but okay—Tina was great, and Larry and Tina together were great as long as they didn’t start—
Oh, God. It started.
“Originally, when I had written this song,” said my husband, “I must admit, I was a little fearful to call it ‘The Christ,’ and my good friend Larry hit me to some things, and it woke me up to… or maybe—Let him explain it.”
Larry was already on the edge of his seat, more than willing to get in there and explain it.
“Well, actually we’ve had a number of, uh, very good Bible discussions,” he said, “and we do this on a regular basis, the whole family of us, and—”
“Well, that’s a different artist tour,” Sinbad quipped, trying to keep it light.
“Yeah, we do a lot together, and each day, each time you have these deep discussions, you enlighten to various things, and you make various adjustments in your life. You make various adjustments in a lot of areas.”
I sat there with a frozen smile, thinking, Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold up. Please.
“In this one particular Bible discussion we were having had to do with stauros, which is an upright stake or pole…” Larry went off on one of the arcane scripture lessons with which I’d become more familiar than I ever wanted to be. I squeezed my husband’s hand, but he was looking at Larry with rapt attention.
“… and come to find out,” Larry finally seemed to be wrapping it up, “Jesus actually died on an upright stake or pole.”
“He was impaled,” my husband said, and Tina echoed, “Yes, impaled.”
“Like this.” Larry demonstrated with his arms above his head. “He was impaled, as opposed to like this.” He opened his arms to demonstrate a crucified Jesus.
Something that felt like a fire alarm went off inside my head. How is this happening right now? Observing my husband from the corner of my eye, I felt my heart sink. No way would he have allowed Larry to go off on a ramble like that without agreeing in advance that that’s how this was going to go down.