Teddy Riley Is MCA’s Kind of Guy

Will it be too cold in January to put out a hot dance track as the second single from the new Guy album? That’s Teddy Riley’s theory.

“I want to go with a love song, like ‘Let’s Stay Together,’ as our next single,” says Riley, who writes, produces and performs in Guy. “Wintertime is the best time for ballads. It’s when people want a chance to cuddle up and get close to each other.”

Don’t laugh. Teddy Riley is the E.F. Hutton of today’s black music. When he talks, people listen. And when he makes records, he makes hits. Winter or summertime.

Popularizer of a new kind of dance music known as New Jack Swing, Riley has already made his mark as one of the industry’s hottest writer-producers, having fashioned such dance and rap hits as Bobby Brown’s “My Prerogative,” Johnny Kemp’s “Just Got Paid,” Kool Moe Dee’s “How You Like Me Now,” Al B. Sure’s “If I’m Not Your Lover,” Heavy D & the Boyz’s “We Got Our Own Thing,” the Winans’ “It’s Time” and Guy’s “My Fantasy.”

Now, at 23, he’s headed for the executive suite too. Betting that the hits will keep on coming, MCA Records has signed Riley to an exclusive five-year contract that gives him his own label, Future Enterprises Records, and gives MCA a huge shot of credibility in the black music community.

“This is a very important deal for us,” says MCA Records Group chairman Al Teller. “Teddy is one of the special ones. We’ve already been Teddy’s artistic home, but this gives us a broader relationship with one of the most creative people in the music business today.”

According to Riley, he’ll sign five artists to the label over the next year, personally producing each project until he develops a team of young writer-producers to do many of the projects themselves. In the past, Riley has been a sonic gunslinger, winging in to produce a pair of songs for an artist, but rarely handling an entire album himself. He says his MCA deal gives him both more security and control over his productions.

“It means I can make sure the groups develop the right way musically,” he says, taking a break from producing a new Kool Moe Dee record in New York. “I got tired of the way it had been working, with people giving me two songs here, two songs there. I’m not naming any names, but I’m tired of messing around with a lot of acts that don’t know what they’re doing.”

By having his own label, Riley hopes he won’t repeat the experience he had producing Bobby Brown’s “My Prerogative.” “I never got paid for that,” he says. “I got nothing.”

Riley blames the problem on previous management entanglements, from which he’s since been freed. He says Brown wasn’t involved in any of the financial dealings, but he doubts he’ll be producing any future songs with him. “My label comes first. The problems on ‘My Prerogative’ were other people’s fault, not Bobby’s.”

Riley’s real beef is with a legion of New Jack Swing copycats, who’ve lifted his silky funk rhythms (much as he borrowed them from Prince, Cameo and Bootsy Collins). Unfortunately, his imitators’ songs tend to focus on sex and . . . more sex. Raised on gospel music (his mother still sings in the church choir), Riley says he tries to write songs with positive messages.

“The lyrics on our Guy album don’t disrespect women--we don’t say women are poison or not worthy of love. I think there are too many songs about sex and violence, songs with no message in what they’re saying. It gets monotonous.

“I think if I’m going to grow as a producer, I’m gonna have to take my sound and go somewhere new with it. I don’t want to repeat myself and do stuff you can hear everywhere on the radio. I want to keep making it fresh, leave the old stuff behind.”

Riley is also leaving New York behind. He says he’s moving his entire studio complex to an undisclosed Southern state, where he has a new home. “I wanted to go somewhere slow, where I won’t have to walk out of my house and worry about who’s going to shoot me every morning,” he says. “Where I’ve moved, all I have to worry about are raccoons!”