Vibe.com, May 13th, 2004
Photograph by Sarah A. Friedman
It's almost midnight. Do you know where R. Kelly is? Regina Daniels doesn't, and she probably should. It's part of her job description. She's the wife of George Daniels, the owner of both branches of the legendary Chicago record store George's Music Room, and, by default, R. Kelly's honorary sister, personal publicist, and, with her husband, a confidante involved in many of his affairs.
Only there's no real managing of R. Kelly. The 37-year-old singer does what he wants when he wants. ("I'm in nobody else's hurry," he says.) Right now, he's somewhere in Los Angeles, either shaking and baking flunkies on a basketball court, creating his next multiplatinum hit in a music studio, drinking McDonald's coffee, huddled alone in a corner, thinking of his beloved late mother, or-if that really is him on the infamous sex tape-he could be doing God knows what with whom wherever. One thing's for sure, if you're waiting to interview Robert Kelly, you might as well get comfortable.
"He didn't get at you yet?" Daniels asks. There's a slight frog in her throat. A television blares in the background of her suite at Santa Monica's tony Viceroy hotel, where she would like to be enjoying the comfortable king-size bed, instead of tracking Kelly down to do an interview. Only she wasn't really asleep. You can't do that when you're on the clock with the R. It's a nocturnal life of take-out food and late-night phone calls.
"Let me call Junebug," she says. Junebug is Kelly's uncle and personal assistant. She pauses. "I'll find out what's going on." Fourteen hours later; call at 10 a.m., 2 p.m. Four hours more; check with Donnie Lyle, Kelly's music director, Fred Wesley to Kelly's James Brown. Nothing.
There's a certain resignation in Regina's voice now. "You know Robert," she says. "It might be 1 a.m. before he comes back to the hotel."
This erratic behavior, coupled with the masked-avenger, R&B; Pied Piper role, has forced other issues to come to the fore. And somewhere along the way, Kelly became the "black Elvis"-screaming fans, teenage bride, controlling old-school former manager, huge security entourage-with all the genius as well as the issues. "I haven't studied Elvis, but I've followed enough interviews and documentaries of him to know," Kelly will say later. "And I see parallels."
Kelly and Elvis Presley have the same birthday, January 8. Elvis had Graceland, Kelly has an estate he purchased a half an hour south of Chicago-a place he rarely visits, since most of the time he sleeps at the studio.
And where Elvis had his "Memphis Mafia," R. Kelly has his Loveland posse: Lyle, bulky and bald in his hooded sweatshirt; Regina and George Daniels; and various members of the security team. Rounding out this cast of characters are the legal beagles who need to meet with him-often.
But Kelly insists his group of handlers doesn't compare. "I don't have a crew," he says. "I just have a small bunch of people around me I feel I can trust, people that pretty much just came to my rescue."
Still, even Regina, George, and crew can't deliver him from public scrutiny. "Media, do your job. Just don't make my job so hard," R. Kelly will say two days later at 3 a.m., sitting cozily in his tour bus. He'll be gobbling down takeout from P.F. Chang's China Bistro and laughing as he says it, oblivious to just how much the reverse is also true.
This is R. Kelly Land, where the absurd is ordinary and the real world is a galaxy far, far away.
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Listen to R. Kelly's "Happy People" Hi / Lo
