BLVR: So, who are the Yodas?
AT: Back in ’97, D’Angelo and I were sorta living through Star Wars episodes. But the thing is, I’m probably the only man alive who has not seen Star Wars.
BLVR: Shocking.
AT: I went to see it when I was six, and I fell asleep. When it got rereleased in ’97 I went again and fell asleep.
BLVR: Do you normally fall asleep in the movies?
AT: Ever since Rain Man I’ve realized that if I sit still for more than two hours, I’ll fall asleep. Anyway, I never saw Star Wars. So one day D says, [his voice gets deep and growly, a solid impression of D’Angelo; he pantomimes pulling on an imaginary joint twice, three times], “Yeah nigga. The way I see it [pulls on the joint again] the radio stations and the media is like the Death Star, and I’ma be Luke Skywalker. It was this whole revolution that was going to save music. Q-Tip was gonna be Harrison Ford. Lauryn [Hill] was gonna be Princess Leia. Erykah [Badu] was Queen Amidala. I said, “Who am I gonna be?” D said, “You’re gonna be Chewbacca.” I said OK. I accepted the role of Chewbacca without knowing who the hell Chewbacca was. But I knew that Yoda was the wise figure. I said, “Who’s gonna be Yoda?” He said, “We gotta divide Yoda up into different people and they’ll just be collectively known as Yoda.” So, it was Jimi [Hendrix], Marvin [Gaye], James Brown, [Bob] Marley, George [Clinton], Stevie [Wonder], Al [Green], Aretha [Franklin], Miles [Davis], and Nina [Simone]. We had a token white entry. Who was it? Oh, Joni [Mitchell]. The youngest one of all the Yodas is Prince. They are the elements that we refer to when we talk about Yoda.
BLVR: Who’s out here now who’ll be a Yoda for your kids thirty years from now?
AT: D’Angelo. Quiet as it’s kept, the reason why I worked on Voodoo was because I wanted to be a part of something that could possibly be on that level. [AT played on most of the songs and was musical director for D’Angelo’s tour.] One day my kids could say, “Wow, my Dad was a part of that.” My involvement was never monetary. I didn’t get the rest of my check.
BLVR: Are you still owed money from Voodoo?
AT: Stop playing.
BLVR: How much are you owed?
AT: Stop playin! You know I can’t go there.
BLVR: Four figures? Five figures?
AT: If creating music were a political party, then we were sort of being socialists. But it should be that way. Here’s a funny sidenote. John Mayer is incredibly underrated. Ohmigod. Severely. His whole Abercrombie and Fitch, nice guy, moms love him, that’s whatever. He wants to do his Voodoo so bad it hurts. I just finished workin with him and the songs we were doin were John Mayer–esque, but it was the stuff we were doin in between. I mean, it was like Voodoo all over again. We worked on his song for an hour, and then we worked on five other songs that were just crazy awesome. Then my manager calls and says, “How’s it going?” I say, “Man I ain’t had this much fun since Voodoo. Man, we did this one song, and then we created like five other songs.” He said, “Whoa, whoa. How many songs you work on?” I’m casually like, “Maybe six.” The next day all the jamming stopped. His manager was like, “Do the song you’re supposed to do. All this extracurricular jamming you’re doing is costing us money.” See, the way you’re supposed to do business is, if you add a chord or something significant, you might be a songwriter, or if you do whatever you might be a producer. We blurred those lines during Voodoo. It was just, let’s get it done. We’ll deal with the business later.
BLVR: So you’re a writer and producer on Voodoo, but you were neither paid like that nor credited as a producer.
AT: I was paid for my work on Voodoo.
BLVR: You were paid as a worker, a session drummer. Not as a writer and producer.
AT: I wasn’t.
BLVR: How much are you owed?
AT: I can’t tell you, Touré. But my point was that I saw him as the chosen one…
BLVR: A lot of people thought that.
AT: I still think it. Even though we’re not cool, I still think it.
BLVR: Was there a fight?
AT: It’s just me becoming a new person, and one of the roles of the old me was my role as enabler. But I can’t control my world and then go do maintenance on his world.
BLVR: Making music with D’Angelo is more than going to the studio and jamming?
AT: It’s so much more than that. It’s a whole lifestyle.
BLVR: Because he’s a genius? Because he’s troubled?
AT: He’s all of that; but more than that, he’s amazingly insecure. I mean, everyone’s insecure, but he’s insecure to the level where I felt as though I had to lose myself and play cheerleader. Some nights on tour he’d look in the mirror and say, “I don’t look like the video [‘Untitled,’ which featured nothing but a chiseled, naked D’Angelo from the waist up.]” It was totally in his mind, on some Kate Moss shit. So, he’d say, “Lemme do 200 more stomach crunches.” He’d literally hold the show up for half an hour just to do crunches. We would hold the show for an hour and a half if he didn’t feel mentally prepared or physically prepared. Some shows got cancelled because he didn’t feel physically prepared, but it was such a delusion.
BLVR: It was the trap women often fall into, thinking they’re fat when they’re not.
AT: Yes. In the world of karma, it was sweet poetic justice for any woman that’s ever been sexually harassed, that’s ever had to work twice as hard just to prove she could work like a man. Literally. When we started this Voodoo project, we were like, “Man, we’re gonna give a gift to the world, and not on a pretentious level. We’re gonna create something that’s totally our world, and we’re gonna bring people to our world and they’re gonna love it, and it’s gonna be art.” But the first night of the Voodoo tour the “take-it-off” chants started not ten minutes into the show. This is a three-hour show. And he had mastered all the tricks from the Yodas. The Al Green Yoda tricks of him giving a wink to the drummer, and all the music stops, and Al Green goin away from the mic and singing to the audience without the microphone. We planned every trick out. But the girls are like, “Take it off! Take it off!” That put too much pressure on him.
BLVR: To be the sex god.
AT: Yep. And by night four he was angry and resentful. He was like, “Is this what you want? Is this what you want?”
BLVR: He was being viewed as a sexual being and not as a genius.
AT: They didn’t care about the art, they didn’t care for the fact that Jeff Lee Johnson was doing the note-for-note “Crosstown Traffic” solo in—
BLVR: They wanted to see the abs, the bod.
AT: They wanted “Untitled.” He hated every moment of that. So… to motivate him past night four became problematic. He’d say, “Well, [frustrated] let’s do ‘Untitled’ earlier.” We’d say, “No, you gotta end with ‘Untitled.’” Then it became just compromise. How can we stop the bleeding so that we can at least get the show out [of] the way before the “take it off” chants come? But no night was unscathed. Three weeks into it, it became unbearable. Absolutely unbearable. So as a result, the cheerleading starts. If we need him to get out of his disappointment, depression thing, you might have to start at four o’clock in the afternoon like, “What’s up, man [with exaggerated happiness]! Yo, let’s go record shopping!” Like, let’s con him into being happy all day! We go record shopping, then it’s like, “Let’s go to Roscoe’s! Oh, that’s right, you can’t eat, so you go exercise. All right, Mark [the physical trainer], you’re it.” Mark comes, trains him. I come back. “Yo, man! I got this new Prince joint!” We watch Prince. We get amped. Rewind it a couple times. “Alright, you ready? I’ma get dressed, and in fifteen minutes we’ll get in the car, go to the venue.” Some nights that would work. Other nights he’d just be psychosomatic. Like, “Yo man, I can’t do it.” I’m like, “What?” He’s like, “I can’t do it.” I’m like, “Just go out there. They love you!” He’s like, “They don’t love me, man.” That’s the respect and love thing. He wants the respect. I want the love.
BLVR: Everyone wants what they don’t have.
AT: He was like, “They don’t understand. They don’t get it. They just want me to take off my clothes.” So every night for eight months it was how to solve this Rubik’s cube in one minute, before the bomb detonates. Every night. And sometimes I failed.
BLVR: And the show did not go on.
AT: The show didn’t go on.
BLVR: How many shows did you cancel?
AT: Maybe three weeks’ worth. We threw away at least two weeks of Japan.
BLVR: That’s unbelievable. What’s going on with him now? Is he retired?
AT: He’s recording. I heard he’s got, like, four songs done. I know him, he’ll stop at song twelve. But what he wants is to get fat. He doesn’t want his braider braiding every nook and cranny of his hair. He doesn’t wanna have to have ripples in his stomach. He doesn’t want the pressure of being “Untitled” the video.
BLVR: So we’ll never get that kind of unbridled sexuality from him again.
AT: I don’t know.
BLVR: Do you think “Untitled” was a mistake? Because I remember when he was shooting that, and he did not want to make that video. They had to coax him into doing it, and maybe he was right to not want that if it created expectations that he wasn’t emotionally prepared to shoulder.
AT: Had he known what the repercussions of “Untitled” would’ve been, I don’t think he would’ve done it.
