“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.”

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!”

We 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.