An afternoon with Dick Griffey: his philosophy and thoughts on business, with reflections.

On July 19, 1994, I was privileged to spend several hours with Dick Griffey in his office, interviewing him, being interviewed by him, sitting in on a presentation with a high-profile client. From the moment Griffey welcomed me into his office, I knew something special had happened. There was no pretension: This very busy, very successful man had made time for me.

My pre-interview research had supplied the basic information: I knew that, for over two decades, Dick Griffey, Chairman of the Board of Sound Of Los Angeles Records (SOLAR), had accomplished great things in the entertainment world and returned profits from his business ventures to the community.

His business dreams began to develop when he was a young, promising drummer and student at Tennessee State University. Armed with a rich musical heritage developed and encouraged by his mother, Dick Griffey progressed from an ambitious young man to the owner of the second largest African American-owned record company in the United States.

Griffey entered the entertainment business in the mid-sixties when he discovered the key to business operation: "I started thinking how entertainers come and go, but business people are always here." He used his talents first as the booking agent for a highly successful nightclub, which he co-owned with former schoolmate and ex-New York Knicks player/coach Dick Barnett, but he quickly branched out into concert promotions under the company name Dick Griffey Productions and earned the distinction as the most prominent African American promoter in town. At that time, he was promoting domestic and international tours for some of the nation's biggest acts, such as Stevie Wonder and The Jacksons.

Not content with these achievements, Griffey became talent coordinator for the nationally syndicated television dance program Soul Train. "Concerts were becoming routine to me," he explains. "When you promote a concert you basically do the same thing every time. I was looking for new challenges." The Soul Train venture was so successful that in 1975 Griffey and the show's producer, Don Cornelius, went on to form Soul Train Records. Starting with one small act, Griffey carefully nurtured the label and, after an amicable separation from Cornelius, reorganized the company and founded the SOLAR label in 1977.

Since that time, Griffey has directed SOLAR Records to both national and international prominence. Recording under the SOLAR and CONSTELLATION labels are numerous R&B and pop acts, including Shalamar, The Whispers, Lakeside, Midnight Star, KLYMAXX, Carrie Lucas, The Deele, and Babyface. Griffey has always believed in giving new talents the opportunity to create and develop their craft. He was the first to recognize songwriters/producers James "Jimmy Jam" Harris and Terry Lewis, Reggie and Vincent Calloway, Leon Sylvers and Antonio "L.A." Reid, and Kenny "Babyface" Edmonds, to name a few.

With a SOLAR branch in full operation in Lagos, Nigeria, and distribution of SOLAR records in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Benelux, Griffey's acts have consistently reached and scored well on the music charts, selling millions of records throughout the world. Griffey has now expanded his business from Dick Griffey Productions and the SOLAR and CONSTELLATION record labels to include Griffco, a talent management company which handles various entertainment and public figures, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson; Spectrum VII Music and Hip Trip Music, publishing companies that administer publishing catalogs, including copyrighting, television licensing, royalty, and printed music services; Galaxy Studio, a state-of-the-art recording facility which includes a sound studio, rehearsal room, and writers' room; and the J. Hines Company, a distribution firm which serves as Griffey's memorial to his mother and mentor, Mrs. Juanita Hines. All of these businesses are housed in the multi-million-dollar, multi-story, Griffey-owned and operated Solar Towers located in Hollywood.

What I received from my visit there was a gift of insight into Dick Griffey. He shared his special thinking, the motivation behind his many accomplishments, and his humanitarianism. I began to understand what makes a man a legend in his own time. While most people can only dream of major accomplishments, Dick Griffey makes them a reality. On the day that I met him, two of his companies were repeaters on Black Enterprise's 100 Top Industrial/Service Companies: African Development Public Investment Corporation (#22) and Dick Griffey Productions (#57).

I cannot share with you the force of the man's presence, but I will share with you some of the wisdom he imparted.

Dick Griffey on Why He Founded the African Development Public Investment Company

Through my Africanness, I always had a vision that Africans and African Americans should come together and benefit one another. We are the only people that are from nowhere. Caesar Chavez is a Mexican American, Robert Kennedy is an Irish American, George Deukmejian is an Armenian American. Jesse Jackson is a Black American. Where do Blacks come from? I always understood that we were Africans. Not understanding that is what makes it difficult for us in this world. Until we make that connection, it will remain difficult.

Koreans can come here and do business because they have support from Koreans at home. They have the support of the Korean Bank. There is an ethnic connection that is necessary and very strong.

We seem to be out here floating around, having come from nowhere, and all we can think to do is to copy, and try to be like white people instead of adopting from our own culture. I feel that is our biggest problem both psychologically and economically here in America.

A prime example of someone who was able to adopt his culture is Rocky Aoke from Japan. He became a billionaire selling his culture, Benihana's - Japanese food. We never connected. We never sold our heritage. We never healed that wound caused by separation from our motherland. Until that wound is healed, we will continue to be limited in what we are able to do. So, I have set out to try to bridge that gap, make that connection.

I have traveled to Africa extensively. But I also feel that I am a part of the African American Revolution. The biggest problem with our revolution is that we have few business people involved in it. Jesse Jackson could go out and make a speech and rally fifty thousand people by saying, "I Am Somebody." But then he would have to go back to his office and call saying, "Dick, could you send me a donation of ten thousand dollars? They're getting ready to turn my phones off." Even to be an idealist, to be a revolutionary, you have to have money. My way of being involved in the revolution is to do something positive and substantive. We have written, we have sung, we have marched, we have picketed, we have boycotted, we have spoken. The children are not going to follow us until we do something positive. If they can read that Dick Griffey set up an oil deal with Angola which created one hundred million dollars, and that Angola decided it wanted to build houses and hired the McKissack Brothers and the African American Fund to build them, that would do more to bridge the gap than all the speeches, all the talking, all the writing, and all the singing we will ever be able to do. We must have some positive, substantive victories together in order to bridge that gap.

I have also wanted to have something that will stand on its own, something that is not necessarily dependent upon Corporate America. You will find that most of our businesses are dependent on Corporate America. Over the years, I, too, have been dependent in that way: My record company and my music company were always distributed by RCA or Warner or MCA or Capital or Lasky or through a joint venture with SONY. I feel strongly that we Africans need to do something for ourselves that can stand on its own, where we do not need those intermediaries.

Dick Griffey on African American Music and the Music Industry

I ask young cats, "How long you been doing music?" Most will say, "I've been playing since I was five. I played in the band at school. I was singing in the church choir. I was doo-wopping on the comer with the guys." And I say, "You know what, it actually started before that. It started when your ancestors came here from the motherland and brought this very special culture with them." Now, we have taken that culture and mixed it with European technology. Some of us have learned how to play keyboards and violins, and how to operate computers. We then fused that with our experience from our neighborhoods - whether it was love, hate, good, bad, gangster, or otherwise. We put the culture, the technology, and the life experiences together and came up with the hybrid art form that is the most popular, most copied, most profitable, most valuable art form in the history of mankind - African American music. The Michael Jackson Collection is more valuable than the Van Gogh Collection.

I call our music, African American music, our greatest natural resource. African American music creates billions and billions of dollars in many areas - not just on the record side, but in song publishing, performing rights, societies, concerts, and merchandising. The record industry alone did 30 billion dollars in business last year. Of that 30 billion, probably eighty percent of it is created by our culture. When I say our culture - whether it is Michael Jackson or Michael Bolton - that is our culture. Whether it is Miles Davis or Kenny G, it is our culture. Whether it is Hammer or Vanilla Ice, it is our culture. In other words, African Americans and people who copy us. It is our culture which is responsible for generating all of these dollars, but we are not much better off than our ancestors. We are only creating assets for others.

BET, the black-owned cable television network, is just Black music. All it does is project African American musical images. Currently, it is a publicly traded company worth millions of dollars. There are over five hundred radio stations in this country. All they do is play Black music, and they are all worth millions of dollars because people listen to it. So this Black music is a fuel which creates a lot of businesses for a lot of people, but we as a people do not own nearly enough compared to the contributions we make.

Our ancestors used to pick cotton. They worked all day on someone else's land, and at the end of the day, they put it in a sack and turned that sack over to the master, who would then go to market and distribute it and give us back a royalty. We would get enough to have a little shack and a horse and buggy. They called that sharecropping. Today, what we do is we pick each other (i.e., Michael, Janet, Snoop, The Whispers). In the end, that comes down to a commodity that we call a master, the master tape, that you then turn over to the master, who markets and distributes it and pays us back a royalty so we can get a bigger house and a Mercedes. The name of the game is still the same. We are still sharecropping in an industry that is based on our culture. We are not building wealth because we continue to create assets for other people instead of creating assets for ourselves.

This is a very closed business. There are so many of us who have the resources and talents, yet can not get into this business. The so-called Big 6 pick and choose who they want to be in it; then they pick and choose how they want you to be in it. I looked at the case of Ice-T, a young man who had a song out called "Cop Killer." The lyrics to the song said, "If the cops come into our communities and mistreat us and beat us and put us in jail unjustly, we will retaliate, we will defend ourselves." Warner Communications chose to drop him from their roster saying, "We have creative differences." A Black man cannot talk about killing the police. But that same corporation will take George Bush's fitness expert, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and allow him to star in movies like Terminator I and II, where he kills all the cops in the movies and blows up the police station. So the white man can kill the police and blow up the police station, and the Black man cannot even talk about defending himself. I say, "There is something wrong with that. We need an alternative." Although I disagree with much of what these rappers say, I do defend their right to say it. I defend their right to be properly represented.

Dick Griffey on Why He Founded the J. Hines Company

Here in this country, white folks have been smart. Distributors have the best of everything. It is not necessary for them to be very talented, since they have an infrastructure that says, "If you want to get your product to the marketplace, you have to come through me." Whether you are Pavarotti or M. C. Hammer or Miles Davis, you have to go to one of these guys to get your creation to the marketplace. Not only does this hold true in music, this is true across the board.

Basically, the distributor controls your life. He takes your product, gets first count of the money, tells you how many he sold; then he pays you, if and when and how he gets ready. So distribution really controls the marketplace. It matters not what kind of genius you are. You can come up with the greatest idea in the world, but if you cannot get it to the marketplace, you may as well not have thought of it, because distribution controls you.

I have really been encouraged by some of the young people I see, some of the rappers, neighborhood entrepreneurs. They are not sitting around waiting for the man to give them a chance. They are going into the studios, making their own records, and selling them at the swap meets. They are telemarketing from their homes. They are selling five and six thousand units (tapes and/or CDs) in their neighborhoods. So I said to myself, "If these young people, with their limited resources, can sell five or six thousand recordings in their neighborhoods, with my expertise and my resources behind them, they could sell five or six million recordings around the world. They have the right to be heard, they deserve that chance. There needs to be an alternative distribution system in this country. Why should African Americans in Compton, California, have to go to Westwood to make deals with Europeans to sell rap records to African Americans in Compton?" Think about that! Not only are we the creators of the art, we are the primary consumers. We can think up something, dream up something, and make it. Do we then have to go to Corporate America and cut a deal to turn around and ship recordings back to ourselves to sell in our own neighborhoods? I figure that, four hundred years after slavery began, we are smarter than that. We have to be able to figure out something better than that.

I was bold enough to try to change things and came up with a program called "From Slaveship to Ownership." It is time that we started owning what we create. The first thing we must do is explain to people what we mean by ownership, since it is such a foreign concept to us. Ownership means owning the properties, owning the contracts, owning the masters.

Part of the problem in our community is that the elders did not teach the young. Although the music business is the biggest industry we have in the African American community, there is no college or university to teach you how to succeed in this business. The white folks are not going to teach you. They will teach each other, but not you.

"From Slaveship to Ownership" is designed to create new businesses, new record labels. We are not interested in signing new acts. We are interested in developing more Barry Gordys who can develop the Temptations and Whispers of the future. I want to develop young people who are talented, have a good work ethic, and want to be in the business to be label owners. And we also want to establish the J. Hines Company as the distributor of choice for African American music, both nationally and internationally.

Allow me to bring this a little closer to home. Have you ever heard of The Whispers' Christmas Album? Everybody's heard of The Whispers' Christmas Album. I asked Butch Lewis if he had heard of The Whispers' Christmas Album when he was here and he said, "Yeah, man. I bought the LP, an 8-track, a cassette, and I just bought a CD." He bought the album four times. The value of being in this business is in the owning of the tape, the building and owning of the library. Money was made each time Butch bought the album.

My Reflections

As I listened to Dick Griffey speak, I thought, "How exhilarating to hear this African American businessman talk about establishing guidelines, moving outside the control of the Corporate (white) structure, and not blaming the Corporate structure for his condition." His words evoked true freedom, empowerment through one's Africanness. He had conjured a legacy to pass on to the generations of African and African American children to come. I sat a bit taller, a proud descendent of the enslaved Africans who had long ago been brought to these shores. As the old ones used to ask, "Is he The One?" And we can say in a loud voice, "Yes, one who has come and will teach some of us to be slaves no more."

When Dick Griffey spoke of the need for businessmen to join the revolution, he was not speaking merely from a philosophical point of view. Griffey has been a warrior, and at times the war has had great impact on him. In 1984, while at a meeting of the United Nations' Special Committee Against Apartheid, Griffey announced that SOLAR would take all profits received from sales in South Africa and return them to the revolutionaries there. An article in Billboard Magazine estimated those profits to be approximately $300,000. Immediately after the announcement was made, the South African government banned all SOLAR products, and the country's Broadcast Institute banned all SOLAR products from the air waves. Griffey and SOLAR eventually won the right to use the air waves, but not before suffering the ugly scars of censorship.

Dick Griffey is a man of great character and strong convictions. He has invested in numerous organizations over the years, including the Black Music Association, PUSH Trade Association, Black Entertainment Lawyers Association, Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, City of Hope, Recording Industry Association of America, United Negro College Fund, American Cancer Fund, and Tennessee State University. Griffey is proud to have been a supporter of the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African revolution throughout the years - especially during those years of struggle during which Nelson Mandela was in prison - when the ANC was led by Oliver Tambo, Nelson Mandela's law partner. He also supports SWAPO, South African Peoples Organization, under the leadership of Sam Nujomo. In 1989, Griffey founded the Coalition for a Free Africa (CFA) and, with others, sponsored a telethon to raise funds for the victims of apartheid. The telethon had the added responsibility of bringing to the attention of the world community the suffering endured, on a daily basis, by the people of South Africa. With his face to the world, Dick Griffey represents the best of what is African American.

Brenda T. Myers, CEO of Myers and Associates, a Los Angeles-based consulting firm, is a writer and poet. She recently published A Little Piece of Me, a book of poems and writings.