Cues From a Higher Power

The official reason that gospel superstar Kirk Franklin is 45 minutes late for an interview is a traffic snarl between his hotel and the Hollywood sound stage where he’s also scheduled to tape an episode of the TV show “Motown Live.”

But the hotel is close enough that you could walk it in 45 minutes, so the more likely reason is that he’s just in no hurry to do the interview.

Franklin--a 5-foot-4 Texan who has shaken up gospel traditionalists by mixing such alien elements as hip-hop and R&B; with the sacred strains--will talk and sing all day about Jesus.

But questions about him and his stardom cause him to squirm.

And those questions have been coming faster and faster since 1996, when his single “Stomp”--a vigorous, funk-minded heavenly rejoicing--became the biggest hard-core gospel hit in the secular R&B; world since the Edwin Hawkins Singers’ “Oh Happy Day” three decades ago.

Vibe magazine, the nation’s leading R&B; and hip-hop journal, has already put him on its cover, describing him as the man who has put the “ ‘go’ back in gospel music.” It’s a sign of the respect he enjoys in the secular world that such pop stars as R. Kelly, Mary J. Blige and U2’s Bono joined him on “Lean on Me,” a socially conscious track on Franklin’s just-released album, “The Nu Nation Project.”

“Kirk Franklin means to gospel what Bob Marley meant to reggae,” says Jimmy Iovine, the co-head of Interscope Records, which bought half of Gospo Centric Records in a multimillion deal to bring Franklin into the label’s fold.

“He’s someone who can move gospel further into the mainstream. The first time I saw him live, I told myself, ‘I’ll be seeing this guy in Dodger Stadium someday.’ He just blew me away . . . like a cross between James Brown and Bruce Springsteen.”

Franklin is not a great singer like Sam Cooke or Al Green. His talent is as a writer, producer and arranger--casting other singers into the lead role on album tracks. Think of him in the studio as the gospel equivalent of Babyface, complete with self-effacing manner.

Though Franklin is eager for pop sales and exposure, he feels the accompanying media attention places the emphasis on the wrong element--the messenger rather than the message.

“I’m a church boy through and through, and that makes all the secular attention on me a challenge because that attention is completely contradictory to what we believe,” he says, sitting on a couch in the dressing room.

“You are supposed to think of your brother first and believe that you [are a success] if your album only sells one copy as long as that copy touches one soul. . . . But in the secular world, the attention is on you. . . . What do you think? What do you do? How great you are.

“That means a daily battle . . . because I know that if I ever pass by a mirror and think that it’s me doing all this, that’s the first day I fail.”

Franklin doesn’t have the aura of a star as he walks around the sound stage, waiting for rehearsal. There’s nothing flashy or charismatic about him. He’s sporting Gucci jeans and a designer shirt, but he doesn’t wear them with a GQ chic or swagger.

It’s not until he steps onstage to join Al Green and others in a version of R. Kelly’s “I Can Fly” that he shows the spark that makes him such a concert force.

As the band begins, you can sense the adrenaline starting to flow, leading to swift, unexpected twists and turns--as well sudden, gruff vocal asides.

It’s the kind of show-stopping wallop that record executives surely saw decades ago in such young gospel talent as Cooke and Clyde McPhatter--and made the executives dream about the money to be made if they could get these artists to apply all that passion to secular music.

What’s interesting about Franklin is that he’s committed to staying in gospel music--and that means a constant struggle with things like secular interviews.

Franklin proves an elusive subject even after you’ve got got him cornered in the dressing room. While polite, he breaks away at the slightest knock on the door--and the knocks are frequent.

At one point, he perks up when he just hears through the closed door the voice of singer Yolanda Adams. Right in the middle of a question, he shouts at the closed door, “Yolanda, is that you, baby? I’ll be out there in just a minute.”

When Interscope’s Iovine stops by, Franklin is on his feet, shaking hands and flashing his handy humor.

“When am I going to make that record with Marilyn Manson?” he says to Iovine, whose Interscope roster also includes Manson, the shock-rocker whose music has been criticized by some conservative groups as harmful to youngsters.

Later that same humor surfaces when he gets his photo taken with Vicki Mack Lataillade, who signed Franklin to her fledgling Gospo Centric label when he was an unknown.

“Look at this woman,” he says when Lataillade walks up. “When I met her, she was working out of her garage. Now she’s flying from Madagascar to Tibet, signing up gospel groups. She’s going to have someone in every country. She and Saddam Hussein are working on an album.”

They both laugh.

The closeness is obvious.

Not everyone in the gospel world, however, shares their vision of expanding gospel’s boundaries. Some gospel and church leaders feel the message and identity of gospel music is threatened by mixing it with secular elements.

On his new album, Franklin finds room for a playful skit in which a disgruntled gospel fan is angered when Franklin’s music comes on the gospel radio station. “I recognize that filth. That’s Kirk Franklin . . . ,” the voice says. “Get me some James Cleveland!”

Lataillade feels confident that Franklin will maintain the integrity of gospel despite the growing attention.

“I think Kirk has only grown stronger as his music has reached a wider audience,” Lataillade says. “He is more determined than ever to take advantage of this opportunity and spread the word to a world that needs to hear it. He’s not just a musician. He’s a preacher--and that’s a powerful combination.”

If Franklin is so uneasy with secular attention, the obvious question is: How did this “church boy” ever get from the Baptist choir circuit in Dallas to the top of the pop charts?

* You could say his natural talent took him there.

Young Franklin demonstrated so much musical ability and so many leadership qualities that he was named director of a Dallas church choir at age 11--and was actually paid $25 a week, most of which he spent on normal kid things, including video games and clothes.

In his albums, that early promise blossoms in music that reminds you in some numbers of the spirited, seemingly spontaneous testimony that is most often associated with black gospel and in other numbers with the finely crafted, pop-shaded R&B; of Stevie Wonder and Lionel Richie.

In “The Nu Nation Project,” Franklin designs songs in a variety of styles, virtually tailoring them to specific singers the way Babyface did on the “Waiting to Exhale” soundtrack album.

* You could also say Franklin had the good luck in 1993 to have his demo tape get to Lataillade, who was desperate for talent for her new, grass-roots gospel label. She didn’t have enough money to pay established acts big advances, so she needed to find a novice. She believed in him and the ability of gospel music to find a wider audience.

“To me, gospel music was just too traditional, and I kept seeing all these great singers and groups over the years being pulled away by the secular music world, . . . from Aretha Franklin to Jodici,” Lataillade says. “My goal was to try to keep some of that great talent in gospel.”

* You, too, could also score an assist to Iovine, who had brought rap into the mainstream in the early ‘90s after going into business with Death Row Records, chiefly to get Dr. Dre, who is widely regarded as the cream of rap producers. Iovine was intrigued by the growing success of gospel music, which has almost doubled its share of the $12-billion-a-year U.S. record industry from 2.5% in 1990 to 4.5% last year. John McClain--the same then-Interscope executive who introduced Iovine to Dr. Dre.--led Iovine to Franklin and Gospo Centric.

* To Franklin, however, there is only one answer to the question of how he got to the top of the gospel world, how he came up with the idea of moving gospel into secular styles: God.

“If God gave me a song, I’d write it,” he says during the dressing room interview. “If God gave me a certain style to do it, I’d do it. There was never a time when I sat down and said . . . [in an exaggerated voice] I’m now ready to take gospel music to where it has never gone before.

“People ask if there was a master plan. There is a master plan, it’s just not my plan. You just walk in his plan.”

Franklin can’t remember a time when he wasn’t around gospel music. Abandoned by his parents at birth, Franklin was raised by an elderly aunt who brought him along with her to church, where he fell in love with the choir singing.

The church helped keep the youngster away from some of the danger spots in his Fort Worth ghetto neighborhood. “It wasn’t shootin’ and killin’,” he says, reassuringly. “Just winos and weed and prostitutes.”

Though many outsiders think of all black gospel as having the fervent, dance-and-shout flavor of Pentecostal music, Franklin said the Baptist church he grew up in was actually quite sedate.

So he eventually began dividing his time between listening to gospel music at church and secular music away from it. The latter records, by such artists as Stevie Wonder and Sister Sledge, made him “feel like movin’.”

When he was 11, he and his aunt changed churches, and the services at the new church had a bit more energy. When he took over the choir direction, he moved it even further in a contemporary music direction.

While that part of his life was exciting, the involvement with church music caused him to be taunted by some of his schoolmates.

“To be a church boy in the ‘80s was not cool,” he says. “The girls weren’t interested in you; nobody was interested in you. So, I started rebelling. . . . I tried smoking and drinking and my [aunt] and I started falling out.”

It was about this time that he had a life-changing experience. He was 15 when he heard that a boy in the neighborhood was killed when a gun fell out of the closet and discharged.

Despite his decision at the time to dedicate his life to God, Franklin had relapses.

At 17, he got a girl pregnant. They never married, but he maintains a relationship with his son, who now spends every other week with Franklin and his wife, Tammy, who live in the Dallas suburb of Arlington. The couple also has two daughters.

Franklin isn’t ordained by any church, but he says he considers himself a minister.

“What people don’t understand about Christians is that just because you give your life to the Lord doesn’t mean you are perfect,” he says about the pregnancy issue. “I’m 28, and I still struggle every day. That’s the misconception of what mainstream society feels about Christianity. It’s like: ‘Christian, boom, perfect.’ You’re no better than anybody else. Everyone struggles. The thing is, now you have a release for the struggle. You have someplace to go to for help. . . . Jesus.”

As soon as the interview is over, Franklin rushes over to the sound stage to catch the rehearsal of Al Green, one of the great R&B; and gospel singers ever. Franklin says he learned a lot about performing by watching secular artists--including Prince, Tina Turner and Michael Jackson, whom he calls the greatest performer ever.

“I try to pick up something from everybody to take my message further,” he says. “And you want to spread that message because you see the good it does. . . . That’s the joy in all this, . . . when you have people come up and tell you they were thinking of committing suicide and they heard your song.”

Asked about goals, he interprets it as a question about the future of gospel music.

“I think gospel music is going to be a focal point in society because of what society is facing. We have gotten very wise in the ‘90s, but we have gotten weaker. Science is king and there are some things even science can’t answer. I hope gospel music can help provide some of those answers.

“It’s great that more people are listening to the message. I just pray that the music stays in its pure form. I hope it doesn’t turn into just an inspirational message . . . a sort of ‘put a smile on your face and have a good day’ type of music, . . . music without a real message. I hope gospel maintains its integrity.”

But what about personal goals?

Franklin studies the question, then smiles.

“Sure, I’ve got goals, but you don’t want to know it. It’s nothing flashy, nothing that is exciting to read about.”

Encouraged to continue, he says, “My goal is that in five years or whatever, I’m still faithful to my wife, . . . that I’m a good dad, . . . that my children know me, not just about me through a video or a magazine.”

Franklin is getting restless, sensing the questions are focusing on him again--not his music.

He sits still for one more question.

Sure, he says, there are lots of temptations that accompany his success.

“Sex is every man’s problem,” he says. “From the president to the pope, every man wrestles with that. Any man who says he doesn’t is a liar. . . . What helps me is my fear--my fear of God cutting me off. Him not using me. Him not being able to trust me with a microphone, . . . not letting me continue to do his will and write songs. . . . That’s my fear and my strength.”

*

Robert Hilburn, The Times’ pop music critic, can be reached by e-mail at robert.hilburn@latimes.com