ILOSM family, Lionel Richie did an interview with GQ Magazine, and he held nothing back about his sexcapades from back in the day. Richie let the world know that he is not just the “Hello” singer who likes to be romantic with the love of his life…nah, there’s more to him than that.
It turns out the “All Night Long” singer confessed that back in the day, he and his Commodore compadres were trying to go “all night long” with as many women as they could say “Hello” to…LOL. Peep excerpts from Richie’s interview below….
[Lionel Richie] on having a high bed-notch count “When the touring [with the Commodores] started we knew we were gonna do a hundred shows in as many cities, maybe more, in a year. So we decided: we’re gonna make love to every girl in the world. That was our mission statement.”
On whether he kept score
“No, no, no. I mean…we all kept score, yeah. We were college guys, so we liked stats. And when you start out, it’s madness: there’s one in the morning, one in the afternoon, one in the evening. It’s great. You’re killing it. But all of a sudden you get to the fifth show and you’re, like: Everybody get out of my room! You can’t do it. I don’t care whether you’re 19 and sexually possessed – you can’t do that 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, and what kind of bullshit is that? Or you’re falling down on stage and passing out halfway through the show.”
The Commodores
While Lionel doesn’t pretend that he now lives like a preacher (he said “I’m in the love seduction business”) he tells why he started slowing down that period of his life:
“It wasn’t the sex and it wasn’t the drugs. It was babies. Holy shit! 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?….you start hearing stories from guys in other bands of ‘I went to Philadelphia to meet my kid’, ‘I went to New York to meet my kid.’ That puts the fear into the heart of any 19- or 20-year-old. A lot of guys didn’t care. But fortunately enough, The Commodores had a different standard there. We had some basic ground rules. As much as I would love to think we were dangerous we weren’t as dangerous as the dangerous guys. We were Ivy League funksters as opposed to the hard core.”
The Commodores
On getting pleasure from stories of how he helped get other people get laid
“Y’know something? I get more compliments from men than women. Guys use one word: thanks. ‘The greatest times of my life, Lionel, you were right there, baby.’ Or, ‘Hey, Lionel – I’ve made love to you many times.’ And I’m, like, ‘That’s a lie. I’ve never touched your ass in my life!” It’s the simplicity of the songs, I think, that works. A guy once came up to me and said, ‘Hey, you wrote ‘We Are The World”? You should have called it “I Populated The World”‘ heh-heh-heh-heh-heh!”
Can’t knock Lionel Richie and the rest of the Commodores for what they were doing in their hey day. They were young men, their hormones were running rampant, and they were in a position where every woman of their dreams were offering themselves to them like they were in a Piccadilly’s buffet line.
We’re glad that the Commodores were fortunate enough to have wisdom that steered them in the right direction and didn’t allow their hormones to overshadow their hunger for creating great soul music.
