Free Every Little Step: My Story by Bobby Brown, Nick Chiles

performer. There was no question. But when he stood on the side of that stage without doing anything and they loved him, that told us something. It was maybe two months later that they changed the tour. Suddenly Bobby was closing the show. It happened that fast. I don’t know of any situation I can think of where someone started out a tour as the opening act and in that short period was headlining.
    It’s not that Bobby has ever been a great singer. Bobby has been a great entertainer. Some people were just born to entertain. In my opinion, to this day there has not been another Bobby Brown. There are people who can dance, people who can sing, but when you look at Bobby Brown in his prime, the way he worked the stage, his entire persona, it’s hard to touch that. The only thing close that I’ve seen, people who have a persona like that, you have to go back to James Brown and how he commanded the stage. You have to go to Prince, how he commanded a stage. Or Michael. Bobby Brown commanded a stage in that way. That was the magic of Bobby. And add to it his being a bad boy. Singing those love songs, the way he brought an edge to it. That just worked. He was the original bad boy of R & B.

    The Bad Boy Is Born
    There was an undeniable sexual energy I brought to the stage, even as a teenager. It became clear to me very early on that whatever I was doing had a serious effect on the ladies. Everywhere I went, I was swimming in a sea of beautiful faces. They couldn’t get enough of me—and the feeling was very mutual.
    Hollywood stars, starlets, singers, dancers, groupies, regular girls, church girls—I screwed them all. I was with some of the most beautiful women in the world. Just imagine: The year I had the number one album in the country, 1989, I was only twenty—a twenty-year-old who suddenly had millions in the bank and women climbing all over him. A twenty-year-old who just a few years earlier had thought he was too dark and ugly.
    To put it mildly, I went buck fuckin’ wild. My thinking was, get as much as you can while you can.
    I remember one particular week when I happened to be in LA and one of my friends was dating a woman who danced with Madonna. Madonna told her friend to have me come to the studio, where she was working on an album. In 1989 she was at the height of her powers—and her sexiness. Like a Prayer had just been released and it seemed like everybody was talking about her and her knack for pushing the sexual envelope.
    As soon as I got to the studio, we were introduced. Before I knew it we were in the bathroom. We got together a few more times, but I wasn’t interested in dating her—she was just too wild, even for me.

    A FEW WORDS FROM MARVIN “MARVELOUS” M C INTYRE
    Growing up in Roxbury, I was a good friend of Tommy Brown, Bobby’s older brother. Bobby was just a nappy-headed little five-year-old when I met him for the first time. As he got older, Bobby used to tell me, “Marvelous”—which is my nickname—“when I get on, you need to roll with me. You’re the smartest kid I know from the hood, so I want you around me.”
    I wasn’t sure if I should feel complimented—after all, I wanted to be the smartest kid he knew, period. Not the smartest from the hood. But I always remembered what he told me. So in 1988, I was working in corporate America in Atlanta when Bobby called me. I was twenty-six and had graduated from college in New Hampshire. He was about to go on the Heart Break tour with New Edition and Al B. Sure and he said, “Marvin, I want you to come with me.” He had recorded the Don’t Be Cruel album and they had just released the singles “Don’t Be Cruel” and “My Prerogative,” which were starting to blow up.
    I told him, “If I’m going to do this with you, I’m not doing it for the money—I’m doing it for the challenge and the experience.” So that was my introduction to the music business. Almost thirty years later, I’ve never looked back.
    When we went