E-mail a friendEddie Levert
airdate June 27, 2007
Eddie Levert is co-founder of the R&B group and ‘05 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees, The O'Jays. He sang lead on such million-selling hits as 'Love Train' and 'For the Love of Money'—the theme song of The Apprentice TV show—and also co-wrote songs for the successful trio and other artists. Levert's recent projects are both collaborations with his late son, Gerald. The book, I Got Your Back, offers a glimpse into their rare father-son bond, and 'Something to Talk About' is their second duet CD.
Eddie Levert
Tavis: When R&B superstar Gerald Levert died suddenly last year at the young age of 40, he and his legendary father, Eddie Levert, Sr., were working on a book and a new CD. Thanks to Eddie Levert's perseverance, both projects are now out and serve, I think, as a fitting tribute to his late son. We'll get to the CD in a moment. The new book, though, is called "I Got Your Back: A Father and Son Keep it Real About Love, Fatherhood, Family, and Friendship." Eddie Levert, Sr. of the mighty O'Jays, it's good to see you.
Eddie Levert, Sr.: Hello, Tavis, how you doing?
Tavis: You all right, man?
Levert: I'm good, I'm good, I'm good.
Tavis: Are you back on the road now?
Levert: Yes, yeah.
Tavis: You back on again?
Levert: Of course, of course.
Tavis: Yeah, can't stay (unintelligible).
Levert: Until they fire me. (Laughter)
Tavis: When you're the lead singer, that's kind of hard to do. Kind of hard to fire the lead singer.
Levert: Well, they usually fire the lead singer. (Laughter) (Unintelligible) Too many irons in the fire.
Tavis: How many years, the O'Jays now?
Levert: We're close to about 47.
Tavis: Forty-seven years.
Levert: That's something, huh?
Tavis: Ain't that something?
Levert: Ain't that something? That's something. Look at that.
Tavis: Look at that.
Levert: I needed a haircut then. (Laughter) I need one still.
Tavis: I know you've been asked this before, but not by me. To what do you attribute the staying power? Forty-seven -- that's like half a century, almost.
Levert: Yes. I think, Tavis, it's --
Tavis: And I'm really impressed you did it, since you're only 29.
Levert: That's it. (Laughter) You see, I keep that dark hair -- no jokes, Tavis. (Laughter)
Tavis: I ain't saying nothing.
Levert: I think it's mainly because we take pride in doing what we do. And we love our audience, and we don't want to insult their intelligence by doing a bad show. If it's only three people, they are just as important as 3,000. And so that's the way we go about it, and we always -- we cultivate our marketplace. We stay with the people who love us, and we feel like if we stay at home, charity starts at home, spreads abroad. That means that they will bring everybody else to the table. All we gotta do is just keep serving them.
Tavis: I love asking this question of people who've been around doing what they do so well for so long. Give me a handful of songs, three to five songs that you all, with all the stuff in your musical corpus, give me three to five songs you have to sing, and if you don't, them Negroes are going to riot.
Levert: Okay, "Love Train."
Tavis: You've got to do "Love Train."
Levert: "The Backstabbers."
Tavis: "Backstabbers."
Levert: "Stairway to Heaven."
Tavis: "Stairway to Heaven."
Levert: "Family Reunion."
Tavis: Right.
Levert: I could keep going.
Tavis: Those are ones you have to do.
Levert: Have to do these.
Tavis: Gotta do them, yeah.
Levert: Have to do it. "For Love or Money." Have to do them.
Tavis: What is it about the lyrics to the music that really makes the O'Jays soundtrack really the soundtrack of our lives? I'm sure you know that. Your music is really the soundtrack of people's lives born in a certain period of time.
Levert: Because I think they apply this to the everyday living. This is something that don't change. See, the lyrics to those songs even live today.
Tavis: Yeah, they still work.
Levert: The "Love Trains," the "For the Love of Money," "The Backstabbers," it's right now. It's still today. You know what I'm saying? And those lyrics never change, because those people are always there, "The Backstabbers." It's always necessary to get on the "Love Train." It's always necessary "For the Love of Money." How can you get around for the love of money? How can you get around? They always need it, and money will buy a lot of things. And it still does buy a lot of things. Sometimes the wrong things, but it still buys.
Tavis: We've discussed this before, but it's always, I think, a fascinating question to explore, and that is the notion of love at the center of the O'Jays' music. Now "For Love of Money" is a whole different kind of concept. But I'm talking about real love that is at the center of all of your music.
Levert: You can't have anything -- you can't really have anything without love. The good book says that love covers a multitude of sins. If you apply the love, it can also give you that forgiveness that you need in life. I have a thing that you first must love yourself, Tavis, before you can love anyone else. And if you practice love, then you can -- then the 10 commandments, they just fall in place, man.
It covers the whole -- it's the whole spectrum of why we're here. We're supposed to love thy neighbor as you loved yourself. You do these things and you'll be -- and everything will go well with you.
Tavis: Let me come at this conversation about the book, that really goes to the heart of your relationship with Gerald, who we miss so dearly. Let me come at this in a different way, if I might -- a bit unorthodox question. The book focuses in on what made the relationship work, but the thing I like about the book is that unlike a lot of folk who lie when they write books, they don't talk about the challenges of the relationship.
Because that's where the stuff is. When you talk about the stuff you had to get over to make the relationship work, so we'll get to the good stuff in just a second. There's so much good about Gerald and about the relationship, but what are the challenges of being -- we loved seeing Eddie and his son Gerald perform together, and you sound good together and you seemed good together, and that's the good stuff.
But underneath that, you are his father, and there had to be some challenges -- as there is in every father-son relationship. Tell me about the challenges of making the relationship work.
Levert: Look, I can't paint a picture and say to you that me and my son's relationship was hunky-dory all the time, because he saw a lot of wrong that I've done, and I saw in him a lot of wrong that he was doing. And in raising a son, you've got to -- sometimes you get to the place where you say, well, maybe I can correct in him and get out of him some of those mistakes that I made. And by him seeing those things --
Tavis: He's like, "You can't tell me nothing."
Levert: Absolutely. Absolutely. (Laughter) So it's like when we'd have one of our little tiffs, and the first thing we would say, I am not that kid that you could whup and send to the bed, and I'd have to go there and not say anything. I am not that kid any longer. And I said, "I don't want you to be that kid any longer." That old thing that you say? I love you, no matter what.
You can't change that. There's nothing you can say, there's nothing you can do, there's nowhere you can go and stop me from loving you. And no matter how you talk to me, there's nothing you can do to change that. And we used to go at it and I'd sit there and he'd say some things that were hurtful, but I'm the guy that has to go and look in the mirror every day, and I know they're hurtful but the only things that can really hurt you, Tavis, is things that are true. And once you learn how to live with that, you can also take everything and say yeah, it hurt, but it didn't hurt bad enough to stop me from loving you.
Tavis: What advice do you have for how to navigate the journey, the relationship of being a father and a friend? And I ask that because so many people don't know how to do that, and they cross the line. Some people are too much of a father and not enough of a friend. Some folk got the friend thing down, but they don't know how to be a parent. How do you do both of those things?
Levert: I think someone has to always take the position of being an adult in the situation. Sometimes it has to be the kid that maybe take the position of being an adult. And sometimes, it has to be the parent that takes the position to be an adult. Because we all have those childish moments that we don't want to forgive or forget.
Tavis: Even as an adult, we can act like a child sometimes.
Levert: That's right, that's right. So somebody --
Tavis: Somebody's gotta be the adult.
Levert: -- has got to take on that situation and be the adult. And that's what me and Gerald was able to do. Sometimes we could decipher those moments that he had to be the adult or I had to be the adult and we don't let it go any further than that. Someone has to take responsibility for what's going wrong. Someone has to take that role on and say, well, I'm going to be bigger than this moment, and I won't let it just overshadow what we have going, and we're going to resolve this by me taking on a grown-up posture or him taking on a grown-up posture.
Tavis: Was there ever any tension in your relationship born of the fact that he wanted to do what Daddy did, and you were very successful, but because you knew the pitfalls and the hurt and the pain that comes along with trying to navigate your way to being a success in the music business, was there ever any tension in the relationship around his wanting to do what Daddy does?
Levert: Not tension, but it was more so I didn't want this to be what he wanted to pursue. I didn't want that to be -- go to college. Get an education. Then weigh your options. But he was having no parts of that. He wanted to be in the music business, and that's my choice, and I just knew that once he made up his mind, that I grabbed him by the hand and I went around kicking down doors. Now I also told him, though, once you get inside the door, it's on you. I can't help you do what you have to do once you get inside the door.
Tavis: I can only imagine then, given what you've just said, that there had to be nothing better than him sounding so much like you, and the two of ya'll on stage together.
Levert: That was one of the pitfalls that we had to get past, because a lot of record companies, a lot of people in the business said "Okay, well, he sounds so much like you, what are we going to do with two of you?" (Laughter)
Tavis: Write two checks.
Levert: Yeah, right. (Laughter) That's right. So consequently, what I had to end up telling them that, well, somebody's got to go, they were saying. And I'm saying, well, if my being in this business has not proven that I'm worthy, then I need to be out of the business. He needs to knock me out of the business. If I'm not worthy, then I don't need to be in the business. If I can't hold up my end of the business and he's going to come along and knock me out, then I deserve to be gone.
Tavis: And since you taught him everything he knew but not everything you knew, you ain't going nowhere.
Levert: How I'm going to let that happen? (Laughter)
Tavis: And he said, that's not going to happen. (Laughter)
Levert: That's right. I'm going to still be here. And I learned how to -- it could never work with two of us rolling around on the floor. So I had to take on the posture of being --
Tavis: Being the adult. (Laughter)
Levert: That's right.
Tavis: I'm not getting on the floor. (Laughter) You said it. Somebody's got to be the adult, and I'm not rolling down on the floor.
Levert: (Laughter) That's right.
Tavis: Tell me how you managed to get this thing done and get it out, the new CD.
Levert: Well, Gerald, some of this, his reference vocals were (makes noise), you know what I'm saying? You could keep. But he always wanted to do things over and over again. So his reference vocals were keepers. It's good, feel-good music. It doesn't sound like piecemeal, but I'd have to -- to be honest with you, it was very emotional for me, and it was a few moments in there that I almost fell apart. But I got it done, and the last song on that CD --
Tavis: "The Simple Life."
Levert: -- simply -- yeah, it sums up everything that me and him was about. Everything that we wanted to do, everything that was -- and you knew him as well as I do, and that was him, and that's us. That's what we do.
Tavis: Well, as I said at the top of this conversation, I think it's a fitting tribute to the life and legacy of one Gerald Levert, gone too soon. The new CD from Gerald and his daddy, "Something To Talk About." That last track again, "The Simple Life," Eddie said sums up the relationship. So pick up the new CD and the new book, written along with Lyah Beth Leflore, featuring, of course, the thoughts of Eddie Levert, Sr. and the late, great Gerald Levert, the greatest soul singer of his generation. Eddie, good to see you, as always.
Levert: Thank you, sir. Always good.
Tavis: Appreciate you, man. That's our show for tonight. Catch me on the weekends on PRI, Public Radio International. You can access our radio podcast through our website at PBS.org. I'll see you back here next time on PBS. We'll leave you tonight with Eddie and Gerald Levert performing on our program together back in 2004. Until then, good night from L.A., thanks for watching, and keep the faith.
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