 R& B singer-songwriter-multi-instrumentalist Teena Marie was bouncing her daughter, Alia Rose Noel, on her knee, emitting the kind of gleeful coochie-coochies that can spring only from a mother's love.
Alia had been staying with relatives for the past few days, and Marie hadn't been sleeping well, missing her daughter badly and feeling sad and lonely. In the middle of a recent phone interview, Alia came home, effectively ending the conversation. All thoughts of music and career were superseded by the joyous reunion.
At 40, Teena Marie is all grown now, no longer the wide-eyed, awe-struck teenager who was such a sensation in the '70s and '80s. It has been a long and sometimes difficult road for Marie, who sings tonight at the Coach House.
Lawsuits, label changes and audience capriciousness have all helped put the brakes on a career that was among the most fruitful of its time. But Marie says she is more concerned with family now.
Currently label-less, she remains a vibrant performer and a strong draw in concert, where she has been concentrating her efforts. Her last album, Passion Play, was a self-released effort that disappeared soon after it hit the racks in 1994. Marie is now embroiled in legal issues over the album's distribution but is working on a pair of new projects that she plans on shopping to the big leagues once in the can.
"One is a spoken-word project, and one is a regular music album. The spoken-word project happened because I always wrote poetry and prose throughout the years, and my friends would always tell me, 'You need to publish this stuff.' So I started putting it all together, and when I was done there were almost 40 pieces.
"They came out so well I started setting them to music, and I even started writing a play around the whole thing. That's almost done. Some of the pieces are like '50s bebop, one piece is industrial jazz, there's a piece that's all strings.
"The other project I'm working on is a real romantic album. It's kind of like a Marvin Gaye I Want You type of album, very sexy and very romantic."
Teena Marie was born Mary Christine Brockert in Santa Monica, one of six children in a musical family. She was a professional singer at age 8 and also appeared in television commercials. She was drawn to the soul music she heard on the radio growing up.
"I came up with the Motown camp, and right after that in the '70s was the Philly soul camp. I listened to and loved all black music."
She fantasized about being signed to Motown, a dream that came true when she was 17 and Berry Gordy personally offered her a deal.
With a sultry, jazz-inflected vocal style, Marie was a sensation on the R&B charts with such hits as "I'm Just a Sucker for Your Love," "Lady T" and "I Need Your Lovin'." In 1981, she landed a Grammy nomination as Female R&B Artist of the Year--one of the very few white performers ever to be so honored. But her relationship with Motown soured, and in 1984 she won a lawsuit against the label for nonpayment of royalties. She jumped ship to Epic Records that same year and continued to chart through the end of the decade.
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For all her grievances with Motown, she remains proud of her association with the label.
"I'm not bitter, although I did lose millions of dollars," she said. "But I gained so much more. . . . I don't judge success in terms of dollars and cents. I dreamed about being with Motown all of my life. You take the bitter with the sweet.
"And you know what? Berry came to a concert of mine about a year ago, and I was really, really surprised and happy to see him. I hadn't seen him in 13 years, and it was very nice."
Marie's last major label release was Ivory on Epic in 1990. How is it that someone with her track record winds up without a record contract?
"I'd like to know that myself," she answered with a sigh. "But not just for me--for quite a few other artists who are out there too. It's a very sad thing. I don't even want to start naming names. It's just kind of sad that after all the music we do, that it ends up like this. I don't know why it happens, but I know I don't like it."
However, she added, her priorities have changed. She has more important things on her mind.
"I just want to raise my daughter and help her to be a strong woman in her own right, to keep her spiritual. She's only 4 years old, so I have a long way to go yet. That's my everything."
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