As an original member of the legendary group, The Commodores, Lionel Richie helped to craft the “Motown sound” and as a solo artist, the four-time Grammy Award winner gave us life-changing classics like “We Are The World,” karaoke favorites like “All Night Long,” and unforgettable love songs like "Three Times A Lady," "Hello," "Truly" and "Zoom."
In fact, Richie was so good at love songs back in the day, that it reflected in his playboy lifestyle singing and performing on the road.
"I don't care whether you're 19 and sexually possessed - you can't [have more than three girls a day like me] and put on high-heeled boots and run across the stage every night. That's why drugs became so inviting: because you get a hit of this, and it gives you the stamina. But how long does it last? And then you're in rehab...or you're falling down on stage and passing out halfway through the show."
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According to Lionel, it was the fear of having illegitimate children that eventually caused him and his bandmates to keep it in their pants.
"It wasn't the sex and it wasn't the drugs. It was...babies," he tells the magazine. "The first time you get that phone call when someone says... 'hey, guess what?' That's called fear, shock and awe. That's when I realized the gun was loaded, you know what I'm saying? That puts the fear into the heart of any 19- or 20-year-old."
Nowadays, Lionel says he's just happy to hear about all the sex that he's inspired others to have.
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"Y'know something? I get more compliments from men than women. Guys use one word: thanks," he laughs. [They tell me], 'The greatest times of my life, Lionel, you were right there, baby.'...It's the simplicity of the songs, I think, that works."
These days, the 68-year-old music veteran is still touring and mesmerizing crowds, and taking time to reflect on what’s helped to keep him in the game for so long.
“There’s a word I try to practice in my life called balance and what I use as my equilibrium is my kids,” Richie said in an upcoming episode of Oprah’s Master Class (airs June 22). “They treat me like Dad; they don’t treat me like Lionel Richie."
Richie’s three children, the most well-known being Nicole Richie, helped to anchor the artist...
...in an industry known for its excess of everything good and bad.
“Maintaining a quality relationship with your family, with your kids, it’s very difficult,” he says, adding that “success is lethal. You like girls? You get ALL the girls! Like dope? Like alcohol? Now that you have it all, can you survive it?”
“Having kids changed me tremendously because I realized how lucky I was to have a mom and dad. And I started meeting a lot of friends in the business, they didn’t know their dads. They only had moms and some didn’t have moms or dads.”
The late, great musical genius Prince actually has to take credit for first starting Richie on this journey to fatherhood. Because it was at a Prince concert where the two met.
“The discovery was not the show for Prince,” Lionel said. “The discovery was: there’s a 2-year-old on stage with Prince playing a tambourine.”
That little tambourine player was Nicole, whom Lionel met backstage after the show. The singer, who knew Nicole’s biological parents, realized later that Nicole’s “family situation was falling apart” and wanted to help.
“I think we decided that ... what we’ll do to kind of give you some stability was we’ll be like legal guardians, but nothing more,” he said.
That eventually led to Lionel and his then-wife, Brenda Harvey Richie, adopting Nicole. At this point, the “All Night Long” singer was at one of the heights of his career and explained to Nicole that while work required him to be gone for weeks and sometimes months at a time, he would always come back.
“I remember you had abandonment issues for obvious reasons. You’d been handed around to every relative in the family,” he said. “I remember what I said to you. I said, ‘I’m never, ever going to leave you.’”
That was a promise he made to Nicole, and soon Lionel realized, in the midst of touring and songwriting, that he ended up getting the same thing in return.
“I think you (speaking to Nicole)...changed my life a great deal in terms of softening my heart, because everything up to that point was about songwriting and the business and touring,” he said. “All of a sudden I found something that I could actually fall in love with that was never going to leave me.
The Tuskegee, Alabama native not only passes on the lessons he learned from his own father, but also the strength of his grandmother. In he late 80s, his grandmother was diagnosed with breast cancer and survived to live to be 103 years old. Inspired by her, Richie is a long-time breast cancer activist, raising more $3.1 million dollars to the cause.
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