In case you’re not yet up-to-date on last week’s big R&B news event, TLC member T-Boz revealed in an interview on The Mo’Nique Show that she and the girls were not only sexy & cool (givens), but that they were downright crazy too. Here’s the story.
It’s 1995, TLC’s second album CrazySexyCool has been nominated for a Grammy (which they won) and the girls have just found out that the album has made their label, Arista Records, quite a bit of money. Like piles and piles of money. Piles to the tune of $75 million kind of money. This was surprising. Not because the album wasn’t great or didn’t deserve it (it was and it did), but because each of the three members of TLC — T-Boz, Chilli & Left-Eye — had only received $50,000 a piece for their contributions.
Now I’m no math major, but if you take what the label made, divide it by what the girls made ($150,000 total), carry the two, and … uh yeah, they got fucked. Like 500 to 1 style. Yeah.
But what do you do. Music 101 folks, record labels are horrible money-suckers, never to be trusted. So it goes, right? Well, not if you’re TLC. Left-Eye decided this was unacceptable and they should do something about it. So they loaded up on guns & ammunition, charged into Arista headquarters, hunted down label-head Clive Davis, and held him hostage, at gun point, and demanded their money. No joke. They even had a limo driver to getaway in.
And it probably would have worked too, except that in pointing their guns at the head of Arista, they had also inadvertently broken up a meeting between Davis and Puff Daddy (as he then called himself). And Puffy, being Puffy, not liking the idea of anyone getting between him and his business, called the cops. As T-Boz eloquently put it, Puffy “snitched.”
Fortunately for TLC, Davis decided not to press charges — likely cause he didn’t want the bad publicity — and the girls went home empty-handed. So yeah, the record company still won out.
But still, pretty bad-ass, right? Great album too.
Comments
keyboards
November 17th, 2009 - 1:53:15 AM
It was a very unfortunate for the TLC to be paid less and then had to return home empty handed. This was the situation after having a hit album that earned $75 million for the company.