Free Everybody's Brother by CeeLo Green Page B

“Chickenhead” became “CeeLo Green.”

    With all due respect to Kermit the Frog, I must say that for me it’s actually been pretty easy being Green—and definitely much easier than being known as Chickenhead. At the time, I was always wearing the color green, and that went into my thought process. But also back then Sleepy Brown told me that I had a voice like Al Green—which is high praise indeed because the Reverend Al is clearly one of the all-time greats. In my mind, changing from Thomas DeCarlo Burton into CeeLo Green came to mean that I was a natural—it suggested that I was born to do this. I knew I would certainly be the one and only CeeLo Green. Like Ol’ Dirty Bastard would say, “There’s no father to my style.” And in my life, there had been no father at all, just a void I kept trying to fill. So in choosing my own last name, in redefining myself as CeeLo Green, I think thatwas a way for me to say once and for all that I was my own man. And the Dungeon was the perfect place to invent myself as my own masterpiece.
    I was already writing raps, making beat loops using a floor-model dual tape player, trying to figure out how to produce and arrange. But I knew I would need a lot of help and there was no shortage of talented help in the Dungeon. Out of nowhere, or so it seemed, Organized Noize and the Dungeon Family became like a Motown in Atlanta, creating a whole new Sound of Young America as Berry Gordy and his winning team had once done in the Motor City. Our sound was very genuine, very honest, very vulnerable, very moody. There was a lot of musicality, with live instrumentation. We seldom used samples. And the songs talked about a common knowledge that pertained to all parts of the country, all people.
    In a flash, Organized Noize was in demand to make hits for everybody. (They would go on to write and produce some of the biggest hits in the whole world—we’re talking global smashes like “Waterfalls” by TLC, on which I gladly and proudly sang background vocals, and “Can’t Let Go (Love)” by En Vogue.) Meantime, the Dungeon Family was growing into one big tangle of talent and ambition, tied together by history and blood. Gipp even married Joi, a singer who was also part of the scene. So the Dungeon Family was real family. But in music and organized crime, being part of a family can really help or really hurt.
    The main players in the Dungeon Family were youngguys from the Dirty South who had big egos and even bigger chips on our shoulders. As young men with fresh attitudes so commonly are, we were all in a rather big rush to stake our claims and make our marks. So the atmosphere in the beginning wasn’t exactly “All for one and one for all!” For us, at first, it was more like “Let’s all keep pushing like hell in the same general direction until one of us finally breaks on through to the other side.” That way, we figured, once one of us made it through the front door of music’s big time, then we would keep the door ajar long enough for all of us to flood into fortune and fame.
    As fate would have it, the Dungeon Family’s first breakthrough arrived in late 1992 when Organized Noize was able to place our little brothers OutKast’s track called “Player’s Ball” on the LaFace Christmas album called
A LaFace Family Christmas
. At the time, OutKast’s playful Yuletide effort stood out in a very big way. Here was this really strong, really street rap track on an album full of much slicker seasonal soul and R&B material. Looking back now, this was the moment when our gang finally began to move out from the Dungeon and get our first peek at the outside world of possibilities. OutKast getting one of their songs released proved to us that the same thing could happen for all of us.
    That was the good news. At the same time, having OutKast break out first from the Dungeon Family also led to a little confusion as well. As a result of the order of events back then, Goodie Mob became