Lovin’ You
Let’s check out the formula. You grow up loving literature, pick up the guitar in college, and then, while you and your young wife-who you adore-are looking after the baby, noodle around until you find a melody, its lyric, and the simple chord changes that will turn your work into a monster hit that continues to attract listeners thirty years after its release.
Richard Rudolph offers no set of instructions to those who would follow in his foot steps, but more or less that’s how he and his late wife Minnie Riperton came up with “Lovin’ You”, the chart topping single that exploded off her solo LP, Perfect Angel, in 1975.
Rudolph and Riperton met back in the day, while he was managing a rock ball room in Chicago and she was performing with the Rotary Connection, a band signed to the Chess/Checker label produced by the legendary Charles Stepney. Featuring Minnie’s stratospheric soprano weaving around and over a rhythm section, elements of the Rotary Connection sound would find their way into the production values Stepney brought to a subsequent set of recordings he made with the session drummer who played on those RC dates, Maurice White. Featuring songs they co-wrote, including “That’s The Way Of The World,” and “Reasons,” Stepney and White would make their own history with Earth, Wind and Fire.
One of Rudolph’s compositions, “Come To My Garden,” caught Stepney’s ear, and it became the title track of Minnie’s first solo album, which Stepney produced for GRT, the label that purchased Chess Records. The pair would write a number of songs together before the Rudolphs moved to Florida.
“I’d started messing around with “Lovin’ You” in 1971, when we were living in Chicago,” says Rudolph. “We went to visit some friends in Cape Cod, and one of them, Bert Malatesta-who had a great influence on me musically-encouraged me to complete it. Minnie was pregnant with our daughter Maya at the time (the couple also have a son, Marc).
“After Maya was born I’d play the song all the time at the little house we had in Gainesville. It was idyllic, with a duck pond, a hammock, and a screened in front porch. One day while Minnie was cooking she started to hum along, and she came up with the final melody. Then I wrote the lyrics and developed the bridge. For a while though, the song remained within our Gainesville property.
“A couple of years later Don Ellis, who was head of A&R at Epic Records at the time, came down to Gainesville to meet us, and signed us to their label. We moved to LA to record the album, and when Epic asked us who we wanted to produce it Minnie told them Stevie Wonder. Why not? Not only is Stevie a genius, he was also at the peak of his popularity at the time.
“At the time Stevie was practically living in the old Record Plant with his band, Wonderlove. We met someone who knew Stevie and was able to get him on the phone. As it turned out, Stevie was a huge fan of Minnie’s, and he asked her what she was doing. A half hour later she’s in the studio singing background on one of his tracks! Shortly after we met he agreed to produce Perfect Angel, but there was a hitch.
“Stevie was signed to Motown back then and was afraid they wouldn’t let him work on the project. The only way he’d consent to producing the record was if I agreed to co-produce it. Come on…me co-producing with Stevie Wonder?! But my presence, along with the pseudonym we came up with for him, El Toro Negro, and the production company we created, Scorbu Productions, provided Stevie with some cover, so I agreed.
“What an experience working with him was. Every night we’d show up early at the Record Plant, because you never knew when Stevie and his band-Ollie Brown, who shared drum duties with Stevie, Michael Sembello, Deniece Williams and Lani Groves, among them, would appear.
“We tracked “Lovin’ You” a couple of times but it didn’t feel right, so Stevie asked to hear the original demo, which we had recorded down in Gainesville on a two track recorder. We actually made a loop of that demo that we played for Maya while she was in her Swing-o-matic. It would make her think her mother was there while Minnie and I slipped off for some private time! The demo was just Minnie singing to my accompaniment on the guitar.
“Sembello, then a brilliant young guitarist [who would later enjoy pop success as a solo artist with “Maniac,” a single that appeared in the film Flashdance] was recovering from surgery for carpel tunnel syndrome and experiencing a lot of wrist pain, so Stevie to me to play the guitar part to a click track. Me, playing guitar on an album produced by Stevie Wonder? The idea seemed ridiculous, but they insisted that I do it, so I stepped into the booth and put on a set of headphones. I was having a little trouble laying down a serviceable pass, and so in an effort to loosen me up Stevie and Minnie started saying the most obscene things to me through the talkback mic! Eventually we got a usable take on tape. Stevie added a pair of beautiful Rhodes parts, Minnie sang the track, and we thought we were done.
“But Minnie felt that something was missing, and so went back and listened to the original demo again. Although we hadn’t focused on it, a window had been left open while we were recording and the sound of a bird singing had made its way onto the tape. If you needed to add a bird song to a multi-track today you’d just comb through production library CD’s, and there were LP’s of natural sounds back then, but they weren’t readily accessible. So Stevie, Minnie, and I headed off to the UCLA botanical gardens with Stevie’s Nagra. Minnie could sing like a bird, and she started to engage one. I can still remember Stevie sitting there with his headphones on pretending to be an engineer! Eventually he captured the sound that we added to the track.
“Then we moved on to the rest of the album, and when it was finished went out on the road to tour behind it. Plans called for me to stay with the kids, not perform, but there were a few problems with the band that I had to straighten out and I ended up in the middle of things playing guitar and a little flute.
“We found ourselves performing in Portland one night during a huge blizzard. We look around and see that people are putting their arms around each other and having a great time as we’re playing “Lovin’ You.” We told the label that they had to release it as a single, but they resisted, saying that it would compromise their strategy of marketing her as an R&B singer. But we told them she was a singer, period, and insisted.
“Then we went back into the studio with Gary Starr, a friend of ours who we initially met when we were all living in Chicago and he was an in demand engineer. Odell Brown, a brilliant musician-also from Chicago-was in our band, and he brought his ARP string ensemble into Village Recorder one night and Gary tracked him. Finally, we went back to the Record Plant to mix.
“I believe we worked on a Neve board, an early one that had no automation capabilities. Bob Margouleff, who was a member of Stevie’s Wonderlove crew, was the engineer on that session. The mix sounds simple, but it required some thinking, particularly regarding the way Stevie’s Rhodes parts were handled. These parts are harmonically advanced and work perfectly together as a pair, but the Rhodes has pulsing overtones that can overwhelm a mix, particularly when it’s as exposed as it was on this record. Eventually we got things right, and the single was released in short order.”
“Lovin’ You” sky-rocketed to the top of the pop charts and became a #1 hit across the globe. “We’re still licensing the song all over the world,” says Rudolph. The day we spoke, Rudolph had capped a deal with a Romanian production company.
Dreams tumble, though, and the Rudolphs’ perfect flight hit hard winds in 1976 when Minnie was diagnosed with breast cancer, which claimed her in 1979. Richard Rudolph went on to become a successful producer in LA, where he still lives, and is currently the Chief Creative Executive of Music Sales West/Rudolph Productions.
