Confronting a Musical Apartheid : Rocker Vinnie James Rejects Color Parameters of Pop but Also Forswears Anger

Children grow up wishing that their skins were black or white

Because you’ve taught them to believe that one was wrong and one was right.

--From “Here Goes Tomorrow,”

by Vinnie James

In a society knotted and distorted for 400 years by a tragic preoccupation with race, it is hardly surprising that music too becomes a matter of black and white.

Vinnie James hopes that he can help dispel the fallacy that sound is circumscribed by color. But for now, this Orange County-based acoustic rocker is stuck with it.

“When I meet people and they haven’t heard my music, they say, ‘So, are you a bass player?’ That’s the reaction, usually. A black man has to be a bass player.”

The bass is prominent in funk music, one of those pop domains that is reserved primarily for blacks, according to the prevailing racially tinged thinking. Rock music, meanwhile, has been virtually an all-white neighborhood since the mid-1970s, when pop radio began to divide the world into black and white on the theory that it could maximize profits by selling to narrowly segmented audiences rather than to listeners of broad and varied tastes.

On one side of town walk the musicians who trace their styles back to Ray Charles and James Brown. On the other live the heirs of Bob Dylan, the Beatles and the Who.

White musicians from Elvis Presley to the Rolling Stones to George Michael have been crossing over to draw inspiration from blues, jazz, and rhythm and blues, all originated by black Americans. But the flow of integration seldom moves in the other direction. Since the 1960s, when such black musicians as Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone and Arthur Lee of Love played key parts in the growth of rock, there has been a bare trickle of black songwriters and performers rising to primary roles as rockers.

The roster of black, post-’60s rock performers is woefully small: Tracy Chapman, Living Colour, Jon Butcher, the late Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy, Joan Armatrading, the Bus Boys, Bad Brains and 24-7 Spyz are among the few who come to mind who are identified more with rock than with soul, rap, reggae or R&B.;

(Prince has also made a large contribution to ‘80s rock, although much of his music falls more in the soul-R&B; tradition than in the Hendrix/Who tradition.)

So when a black man like James comes along, strumming an unaccompanied 12-string acoustic guitar with a rocker’s energy while singing in a husky, soul-tinged voice that recalls Graham Parker or Bob Seger, he is going to be noticed not just for his songs, but for his color.

“In America it’s bound to happen,” James said as he sat in his apartment in Huntington Beach. “I’m not saying I’m glad about (being singled out by race). But it will happen because it’s America. So be it. But I’m going to do everything I can do to make sure people feel silly when they do that, when they make that (racial distinction). I don’t think music should be exclusionary of anyone. If what you have to say is real, everyone needs to hear it.”

James will soon have a chance to be heard. Signed recently by Cypress Records, he is about to begin recording his first album; plans call for a release in February, 1990. After the recent commercial breakthroughs by Chapman and Living Colour, perhaps James’ opportunity is evidence of a belated tide of integration in rock.

James is a trim, well-muscled man in his late 20s who speaks with a confident, self-possessed air. With his clean-cut looks and gold-framed glasses, he almost looks the part of a young, rising lawyer or college professor. As he talks about the state of the music business, or about the social issues that are of key concern to him, something of a didactic streak comes out, a tendency to turn conversation into discourse.

But that tendency is offset by qualities that are more down to earth: a low-key charm, a wry sense of humor and a clear enthusiasm for spinning off a good, detailed yarn. In an increasingly nonverbal era, James is one of those avid talkers who seem motivated less by a need to hear their own voice than by a legitimate fascination for words, stories and ideas.

In a recent show at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano where he opened for Laura Nyro, James let his lyrics do the talking. He put his songs across with an instantly grabbing intensity of voice and gesture, his singing now gruff, now gentle, his body swaying or tensing as he strummed aggressive, unpredictably cadenced chords on his guitar. Appearing as an unknown, unadvertised opening act, James broke through quickly to Nyro’s audience and won strong rounds of applause with each number.

Most of the songs were as striking as the singer’s delivery. James often paints on a broad canvas, tackling subjects as large as the racial agony of U.S. history or the societal toll of the drug trade. By taking an imaginative point of view, or by summoning up strong details, James gives his songs focus and immediacy and avoids the vagueness and bland sloganeering that burden many rock attempts at social commentary.

Songs with an anti-drug slant are common these days, but James’ “Black Money” is exceptional because of its deep, dignified sorrow and restrained anger in depicting a society nodding toward sedation.

I have a vision that tomorrow may come

And find us all sleeping in the heat of the sun.

They’re going to cancel all of our tickets

And leave us for dead

While memories of our failures dance on in our heads.

So lose all your needles and kill all your snakes,

Burn all your demons and dance on their graves

‘Cause “cool” is a word that will never describe

The pain that you see in a smack junkie’s eyes.

Black money leaves a stain.

Other songs come across with a forthright zeal, a conviction that deep-rooted social ills will one day be rooted out. “Freedom Cried” is about the march of racism through U.S. history, told with a boldly imaginative stroke: The song’s first-person narrator is not an individual, but an abstraction--the soul of U.S. history itself, trying to sort out just why it has been so inflamed with racism.

In the end, James envisions the cries of the oppressed finally hitting home within the American soul, signaling the dawning of a transformation.

Then when I could not subdue her,

I had to listen to her

And she was making sense

And I had no defense.

Freedom cried and she kept me up all night.

Instead of just leveling indictments, James said, he wants to be known for bringing a more hopeful vision to his music: “You can’t be angry. That is a very bad thing. As a songwriter you’ve been gifted. There’s a lot of things to communicate besides anger. Life needs tenderness. In our communications we need tenderness. Tenderness gets the point across a lot better than if you’re screaming in someone’s face.”

James said the creative journey that has brought him near to crossing rock’s racial barrier was spurred by his own teen-age confrontations with social barriers against blacks. He was born in Harlem and spent his early years there. His father left the family when James was small; his mother, a court stenographer, provided a home with a keen emphasis on learning and culture.

By his teens, the family had moved first to New Jersey and Washington, D.C., and finally to Manassas, Va., where James said he became one of a handful of black students in a predominantly white school.

“That’s where I found out about racism,” he said. “I got to see what the Southern black thing was all about. It was like a subservient people. I got to feel pain for being a certain color. I never went to dances in high school. I didn’t get dates--white girls weren’t allowed to go out with black boys. I wasn’t allowed to date these people that I liked.”

Instead of hostility, James said, rejection bred in him a philosophical curiosity about racism: “In Manassas, everything I saw made me want to find out, ‘Why are things like this?’ It made me want to go out and see why these things existed. I needed to see why they acted this way, to get inside someone’s head who hated black people. I decided to go out and find the truth.”

James said he still has that determination: “I want to spend my life learning what makes one person want to oppress another person.”

James said he set out in search of answers with hitchhiking trips during his high school years--the first steps toward what he described as a nomadic life that has taken him to such places as Aspen, Colo., where he made money singing in clubs; Alaska, where he worked in a salmon-processing operation, and Mexico, where the bilingual James played a supporting role in a Mexican soap opera. James said he also “dabbled in college” in Virginia and Upstate New York. There was a brief marriage that produced a daughter, now 10.

James began writing poetry, then accompanying himself on guitar, early in his teens. He cited Jackson Browne as his favorite songwriter and key influence.

“I didn’t choose the acoustic guitar because I wanted to deviate from the norm” for black pop acts, he said. “I chose it because it was the closest instrument to hand when I began to want to play, and it’s the best instrument, along with the piano, for accompanying lyrics.”

After Mexico, James came to Southern California because “people had told me I had good songs, and I probably should do something about it.” While leading an itinerant existence in Orange County, James formed his first band, Rumbletown, in 1985.

It happened almost by accident, James said, after he struck up a conversation at the Orange County Fair with a stranger who turned out to be a rock guitarist. Another accident brought James in contact with Mike Jacobs, an independent, Garden Grove-based record promoter who became Rumbletown’s manager. James was getting copies made in a print shop when he approached another customer with rock-related materials to copy. She turned out to be Jacobs’ assistant. That led to James sending a rough tape of Rumbletown to Jacobs, who at the time was also a talent scout for EMI Records.

“The first time I heard the tape, I said, ‘Get me this kid’s number!’ ” Jacobs recalled. “The songs were OK, but mainly it was his voice that struck me.”

There were rounds of auditions and demo tapes, but no bites from record labels.

“Nobody wanted to know about a black guy with an acoustic guitar,” Jacobs said. “They were afraid of how you could market a black guy doing this type of music. It was pre-Tracy Chapman, and pre-Living Colour. They just didn’t get it.”

Rumbletown broke up late in 1986, and James went back East to be with his mother, who was living in Maryland.

“I told him to keep sending me songs, and when I had the right one, I’d shop it” to record labels, Jacobs said. “When the folk thing became big again, it started getting people’s attention,” thanks to the success of such folk-based artists as Chapman, Suzanne Vega and Michelle Shocked.

Jacobs sent James’ tape to Cypress Records early this year, and--according to Lori Nafshun, the label’s vice president for Artists and Repertoire--”It was just a matter of days before we were in serious negotiation.”

James moved back to Orange County about three months ago when it became clear that a recording deal was going to come through. Nafshun said James’ debut album will probably feature both spare, acoustic production and numbers decked out with band backing to highlight his rock ‘n’ roll side.

When the album comes out, James’ record company and his manager are keen that he not be labeled as a “male Tracy Chapman.” Like Chapman, James is black, performs solo on acoustic guitar and writes songs with a strong social conscience.

“We’re staying away from (identifying James with Chapman) like the plague,” Nafshun said. “I feel that people might not give him a chance if he were seen as the new Tracy Chapman.”

Cypress could be seen as merely jumping on a bandwagon, which Nafshun fears could make it harder for James to be acknowledged as a singer with a style and a viewpoint of his own.

“Folk is a dirty word,” James said. “We call it ‘the F-word.’ But when somebody compares me to somebody who sells as many records as Tracy Chapman sells, that’s a good sign--as long as they’re not speaking out of the narrow vocabulary of racism. The music will definitely speak for itself.”

One of James’ concerns is that he be heard by blacks as well as whites. He is well aware of the radio segmentation that makes it difficult for an act geared to album-rock radio to be heard on stations that stick to a black music format.

James said he was encouraged by a recent performance he gave in Los Angeles at a convention for A&M; Records personnel (A&M;, a major label, serves as distributor for the independent Cypress). As he walked off the stage, James said, he was met by the next act due to play, a group of black rappers newly signed to A&M.;

“They all just came up and went, ‘Whoa, you are def.’ They gave me the best compliment anybody could give.”

Also impressed was Nelson George, a veteran author and music journalist who chronicled all sectors of black music for Billboard magazine before recently joining the Village Voice as a columnist. George, who had attended the convention as a guest speaker, recalled last week from his office in New York that he was “knocked out” by James: “Another black person who was there said to me, ‘He reminds me of a black John Cougar Mellencamp,’ and I would agree with that. He could be a hell of a rock ‘n’ roller.”

George thinks that black rockers’ once-dim prospects have improved since Living Colour’s breakthrough to platinum success (Living Colour is touring as opening act for the Rolling Stones).

“There have always been black rock ‘n’ roll bands. They just never got signed to labels,” George said. Labels “said they couldn’t get played on (rock) radio. The ‘80s is an era of corporate strategies and marketing campaigns. The unspoken, sometimes-spoken understanding was that white audiences wouldn’t accept blacks. That was the falsehood, and there was no one to challenge the falsehood” until the success of Living Colour showed otherwise.

“Now, I don’t think there’s anyone out there saying a white audience won’t accept a black rock ‘n’ roll band,” George said. “To me, Vinnie’s horizons are very broad. I think he is a potential star.”

James acknowledged that he is dreaming of big things: “I say to myself every day that I’m going to win the Grammy (for best new artist). It’s a motivational thing.”

But James said his coming opportunity to reach a broad audiences has not changed his approach: “I’m a songwriter for life. If I make a living doing that, that’s good.

“The greatest thing a record affords me is to be able to share other people’s lives. I used to hitchhike to do it. Now I’m going to go on tour. It’s the same thing. I am going to continue traveling and continue to learn about people, and pass on my knowledge.”