Cover Story: Golden touch

Will Dallas Austin fall out of Atlanta’s good graces?

IT’S A QUIET Monday night at the Royal, a classy lounge on Trinity Street downtown. OK, it’s not just quiet. It’s dead. DJ Ruckus is spinning Rick Springfield and Guns ‘N Roses. The clusters of French armchairs and row of wrought-iron bar stools sit empty — until a guy dressed in cargo shorts, big-laced sneakers and a Billionaire Boys Club T-shirt ambles in with some friends.</
He grabs a seat at the far end of the bar. He orders a drink and proceeds to nurse it. For the most part, he keeps his fidgeting hands in his lap. Occasionally, he nods his head to the music. His friend, Jazze Pha, is keeping the mood light. And with a little time, Dallas Austin begins to loosen up. But not too much.

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He’s been back in the States for less than a week. It wasn’t that bad over there in Dubai, he says in a hushed voice, glancing away when the topic comes up. Definitely could have been worse. Still, he adds, “it’s good to be home.”</
That’s the gift of a golden touch.</
GO AHEAD, LAUGH. It’s hokey. Cliché. PR fodder. But we’re putting it out there, anyway:</
Just about everything Dallas Austin touches turns to gold.</
Hold on. We’re not saying we love everything he puts out. We’re not in total awe of the songs he’s produced for Pink, Madonna, Gwen Stefani and Michael Jackson. His most recent big-screen project, ATL, was pretty cool, but it wasn’t exactly a cinematic masterpiece. And that theme song he wrote for the city’s overpriced branding campaign? Let’s just pretend that never happened.</
The thing is, people are so quick to point out Austin’s near superhuman qualities — that he’s a visionary, that he possesses a mythic calm, that he showed signs of genius as a teenager — it’s hard to deny them. His name practically has become a brand in itself, yet he’s not running around like some megalomaniacal jerk. He’s got the respect of the mainstream and the street. He’s got millions and millions in the bank. He wears flip-flops to business meetings. He’s only 35. And he’s super chill.</
When you come right down to it, Dallas Austin — boy wonder, self-made man — is easy to like. And in no case has that been more obvious than in his love affair with the city of Atlanta.</
Um, until now. And you just can’t help but want to ask: Dude, what were you thinking?</
But Austin’s not talking about what went down in Dubai — at least not until he does the inevitable radio interview with V-103’s Ryan Cameron. And the city that used to be his biggest fan has clammed up, too.</
Austin was the first, and so far only, hip-hop star to be fully embraced by the Atlanta establishment. The city’s branding campaign cherry-picked him to write Atlanta’s theme song. A fawning mayor counted on him to christen Atlanta with something “young and hip.” Austin also happens to be one of the city’s most civic-minded celebs, with a foundation that helps inner city kids and a track record of raising funds for noble causes. He’s so marketable, in fact, that he spoke on Atlanta’s behalf at the 2004 G-8 Summit.</
What other hip-hop stars are popular enough to enlist a conservative U.S. senator such as Orrin Hatch, along with Quincy Jones and Lionel Ritchie, to ride to their rescue if they got into trouble with the law?</
Yet the mayor has withheld comment on Austin’s Dubai debacle. There’s been no “Thanks for all the hard work” or “We’re still behind you, Dallas” — not even a “We’ll sit down and talk about this when the time is right.” Seriously, Shirley: Where’s the love?</
Austin wasn’t accused of beating up his girlfriend. He didn’t burn down anyone’s house. He wasn’t caught with an underage girl — or an underage boy. He was nailed with a little coke — enough to fuel a few modest users through a night of immodest partying. Perhaps it was the way he was caught that’s the problem. Getting busted by customs officials in a devoutly Muslim city-state — even one that’s actively wooing celebrity tourists — isn’t the most diplomatic move. But he seems to be doing a good job repenting. Just last week, the Dubai courts accepted Austin’s guilty plea — and Dubai’s leader, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, promptly excused him from having to serve the minimum four-year sentence.</
Will the city find similar forgiveness in its heart? The initial silence of city leaders speaks volumes about their disapproval of Austin’s indiscretion. Will he now join the ranks of so many other hip-hop stars with tainted pasts? Or will this faux pas wind up being remembered as a mere tiff? Will Atlanta and Austin make up?</
State Sen. Kasim Reed, D-Atlanta, an entertainment lawyer who also served as the mayor’s campaign manager, has a unique perspective, having walked both those streets. He stresses that he has no idea how Shirley Franklin feels about the incident. “I haven’t discussed it with her at all,” he says.</
But he’s willing to bet that Atlanta will forgive and forget when it comes to Austin’s cocaine conviction. “This wasn’t a situation where you had some entertainer who was being arrogant or loud or dismissive of the judicial system,” he says. “I think people are going to welcome Dallas back and allow him to share his experience and then judge based upon the information he shares. I don’t think it’s going to be more complicated than that.”</
Not everyone would be worthy of such sympathy, says former city Councilman Derrick Boazman. He first met the music producer when Austin was a teenager and, more than a decade later, entertained the grown-up Austin’s bid to build a film production center at Lakewood Fairgrounds in Boazman’s council district.</
“Had it been 50 Cent or somebody, people would have said, ‘Who gives 50 cents about 50 Cent being stuck in a jail somewhere?’” Boazman says. “You’re proud of everybody that comes through here. But you don’t want it to be a crew of rappers that rode through with what ended up being carnage left behind. You kind of didn’t have to worry about that with a Dallas Austin.”</
True, he’s not the guy who rolls into Vision and buys a bottle of Cristal for each of his 30-member entourage. He doesn’t demand a private dining room when he eats out. His Sandy Springs home might have a glassed-in garage that shows off the Ferrari and Escalade, in addition to a window behind the bar that offers an underwater view of the swimming pool. But he’s still so gracious as to invite the governor and mayor over for the occasional shindig. (Yes, they showed.) And although he has raised Atlanta’s profile as a music and film mecca, his humility remains as renowned as his chart-topping songs.</
Some say that Austin’s image is carefully cultivated, that he produced his persona with the same precision he applies to a multiplatinum album.</
“I think the older he gets, the more he knows how to work his notoriety to his advantage,” says underground soul goddess Joi, who has worked on and off with Austin since the early ’90s. “He knows how to use everything in his being to pursue and get exactly what he wants. So even his quiet and his cool have a purpose.”</
TO UNDERSTAND how the city got so hooked on Austin, you have to consider what was going on in Atlanta in the late ’80s.</
In 1989, two friends, Antonio “L.A.” Reid and Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds, had just come to town from California to set up a record label called LaFace. The production team quickly proved to be a star magnet. Thanks to Reid and Edmonds, a young Bobby Brown — just a couple of years out of New Edition and already boasting 6 million in sales of Don’t Be Cruel — gravitated to Atlanta. And others followed.</
But it wasn’t just Reid and Edmonds who were gearing up to change the face of Atlanta’s music industry. Two teenagers were striking out in a nearby but parallel universe.</
The year LaFace opened shop, a 16-year-old named Jermaine Dupri was only months away from stumbling upon a pair of pre-teens at Greenbriar Mall whom he would later dub “Kris Kross.” Dupri went on to form So So Def Records, and Kris Kross put the label on the national map.</
And when 11th-grade dropout Dallas Austin wasn’t hanging out at Jellybeans skating rink in southwest Atlanta with a girl named Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins — paying close attention to which songs really got the skaters going — he was working the lights, playing keys and producing tracks for a Prince-inspired disco group called Princess and Starbreeze.</
Boazman remembers hanging out at the band’s recording space with his friend Rex Evans after they’d finished their shifts at Shipfeifer restaurant on Peachtree Street. Evans was dating one of the band members. “And there would be Dallas, kind of in the background early on, working the boards,” Boazman recalls. “He was just a little kid. But he was kind of running the show.”</
Joyce “Fenderella” Irby — who was a member of the all-girl R&B trio Klymaxx — noticed Austin’s precociousness, too. So she asked him to produce a track for her, featuring legendary beatboxer Doug E. Fresh. The song, “Mr. DJ,” climbed to No. 2 on Billboard’s R&B chart in the spring of 1989.</
Austin had his first hit. He was 18 years old.</
“He was like this kind of whiz kid,” Boazman says. “He was making it happen, and he definitely had the respect of the people, like Joyce and others, who were working with him.”</
Over the next two years, producer Michael Bivins of Bel Biv Devoe, the group that spun off of New Edition after Bobby Brown’s 1986 departure, sought the whiz kid’s help with some fellow prodigies. So as not to make Austin self-conscious about his age — or perhaps to draw attention to it — Bivins asked Austin to produce some songs for kid rockers Another Bad Creation and doo-wop heartthrobs Boyz II Men.

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The first two songs Austin wrote for ABC, “Iesha” and “Playground,” broke into Billboard’s Top 10 on both the R&B and pop charts in late 1990 and early 1991. And lest anyone reach the mistaken conclusion that Austin was enjoying a bit of beginner’s luck, the album he produced for Boyz II Men, Cooleyhighharmony, rose to No. 3 on Billboard’s pop chart a few months later.</
Austin was on.</
But what, exactly, was he on to? Austin was an instant commercial success — but, based on what he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in those early years, he was having some trouble identifying with the music he produced: “It’s just weird that I have a gift to do music I’m not really into. My gift is knowing what other people could like.”</
While Austin had a knack for anticipating a hit — a gift he’d culled at Jellybeans years earlier — what he lacked was a muse.</
IN THE MIDST of the hype surrounding ABC and Boyz II Men, Austin headed to Nashville. He was spending time in a studio there, working on his own band, Highland Place Mobsters, when in walked an Amazonian inspiration — a force that would challenge his mainstream sensibilities.</
“A friend of mine that was an engineer at the studio had told me to come by because there was a young guy who was a producer from Atlanta that didn’t know anybody in Nashville,” Joi, a Nashville native, recalls. “So I ended up coming by with a bunch of my friends. And he and all of his friends were there, and we just ended up hanging out for the next week or so.”</
She doesn’t remember Austin as much of a talker. But she sensed something beneath the surface. “We clicked musically. We clicked personally. We clicked.”</
She wouldn’t realize how much they clicked until she moved to Atlanta and started working with Austin in 1993.</
In the meantime, however, the foundation that Austin laid at the skating rink was beginning to pay off.</
The girl he used to pal around with at Jellybeans, T-Boz, had caught the attention of L.A. Reid’s wife, Pebbles. From the moment T-Boz and her bandmates — Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes and Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas — met with L.A., Pebbles, Babyface, producer Darryl Simmons and Austin in the Reids’ basement, the girls were destined for stardom.</
And they wanted Austin along for the ride.</
TLC insisted to L.A. that Austin produce their first record, 1992’s “girl-power”-infused Ooooooohhh ... On the TLC Tip. Dubbed the fourth member of TLC, Austin would wind up running his own label, Rowdy Records, an offshoot of Arista, thanks to his connection to the band.</
By the time Joi moved to Atlanta, the music scene — helmed by LaFace, Bobby Brown, Boyz II Men and TLC — was hot. But it wasn’t really her scene. “Even though they were dope and I recognized that they were dope, it just was not what I did,” Joi says of the artists coming out of Atlanta at the time.</
She was looking for someone willing to record an album with all-live instrumentation in a style evocative of British soulsters Loose Ends. She also was fiercely opposed to the packaging and labeling that was a prerequisite of mainstream music. With her tough-girl image and independent streak — coupled with a supermodel bod and avant garde style — she drew the inevitable comparison to sexually charged, funk-soul diva Betty Davis, who was married to jazz icon Miles Davis. (Joi herself would marry a local legend, Big Gipp of Goodie Mob, though the two would later divorce.)</
What Joi had in mind was a world away from the kind of music Austin was producing. But she agreed to sit down with him one night in 1993 at his Atlanta studio, Dallas Austin Recording Projects. And what happened at DARP changed everything.</
She explained to him what she wanted to do with her music, and Austin told her about some sounds and songs he’d been experimenting with. Austin believed his new material was special, and he wanted to go in a different direction with it. But he felt he didn’t have the right artist to sing and write the lyrics.</
They quickly got together on a track. Austin had the basic music and part of the hook; Joi added the rest of the hook, conceived a story for the song to tell, and then wrote the words. The track became “Sunshine & the Rain,” an underground hit when it was released in 1994.</
“We listened to it over and over and over and over,” says Joi, her voice growing dreamy with the recollection. “And everybody kept coming in and out of the studio, and they were just like, ‘What is this? What is this?’ And it was just this sort of thing that ended up being pretty hypnotic and opening up both of us to a whole other realm that neither one of us expected.”</
That’s how Austin saw it, too.</
“For the new material I was writing, I had a vision of a very creative girl, someone who would be a leader, who could write and improvise,” Austin told Fanfare magazine in July 1995. “Joi was the one I was looking for. Creatively, Joi is like my soulmate.”</
WHILE HIS experience recording Joi proved fulfilling (he produced her first and second albums, as well as two tracks for her third), none of her records netted significant sales. Her debut, Pendulum Vibe, became a classic — but not a chart-topper. Due to the dissipation of Freeworld, a short-lived label of Austin’s to which Joi was signed, her sophomore album, Amoeba Cleansing Syndrome, was never released. It earned notoriety as one of the most coveted bootlegs to come out of Atlanta.</
Instead, it would be T-Boz, Chilli and Left Eye, as well as child star Monica, who would become Austin’s commercial successes.</
He won a Grammy in 1999 for Best R&B Album for TLC’s third record, FanMail. Earlier this year, he released ATL, the film he produced along with T-Boz, based on their experiences growing up in Atlanta. He also forged a long-time (though on-and-off) relationship with Chilli, and they had a son together in 1997.

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Thus it was 1992’s Ooooooohhh ... On the TLC Tip that got Austin inextricably intertwined with Atlanta’s cultural identity. And he was getting rich, too. By 1993, at age 22, ABC, Boyz II Men and TLC had made Austin a multimillionaire — and a coveted name.</
In 1994, he wrote and produced four songs for Madonna. He also was seen dancing with her at Velvet, and he took her to an Atlanta Hawks game where they sat courtside. Shortly thereafter, he worked with Mick Jagger and hobnobbed with him at Mumbo Jumbo. Austin also collaborated with Janet Jackson, and he’d bring her to Tongue & Groove one night, then show up with Naomi Campbell on another.</
Michael Krohngold, who owned all three clubs (Velvet and Mumbo Jumbo have since closed), counts Austin as a friend — and considers him very much unlike some other A-list patrons.</
“He is very low-key, and very relaxed, and very modest, and not full of attitude,” Krohngold says. “He has brought in several big-name people over the years. But he’s so nonchalant and so void of attitude, he’s unlike some of the other producers.”</
That attitude would win him points in a city desperate for entertainment industry role models. With the departure of Reid, who left to head up Arista Records in New York, Austin cemented his role as Atlanta’s favorite son. (Reid was a mere stepchild, anyway.)</
As if to make his devotion to Atlanta crystal clear, Austin would later criticize Reid in the AJC for leaving Atlanta: “If you want my opinion, I would have stayed at LaFace in Atlanta and I would have kept building it and become one of the most powerful, driven music labels there was.”</
In another show of how serious he was about his ties to Atlanta, Austin tried to broker a deal with the city in 2000 to lease the 125-acre, city-owned Lakewood Fairgrounds. He wanted to turn the spread into a recording studio and a film production center, which he hoped would revitalize the south side and provide jobs for Clark Atlanta University-trained technicians.</
When he showed up for a meeting with then-City Councilman Derrick Boazman, Austin was decked out in cut-off pants, flip-flops and dark shades. He also brought with him Steve Labovitz, an attorney who was the former chief of staff to Mayor Bill Campbell. It was obvious to Boazman that Austin was the real deal. “You could see the wheels turning when he talked about his vision,” Boazman says. “He has this kind of mystical element about him. He has this kind of creative force in him. He’s just a presence. This guy is really thinking about big ideas and dreaming big dreams.”</
According to Boazman, Austin was willing to write a check for around $8 million to take over the lease from the current tenant, Ed Spivia. In the end, Boazman says, Spivia insisted upon $12 million to relinquish the lease and the deal fell through. (Spivia wound up forming a lucrative relationship with HiFi Buys to rent out the property’s massive amphitheater.)</
“I really pushed, pulled and shoved,” Boazman says. “Because it was Dallas Austin, and I really wanted the hometown boy to do something big on the south side.”</
Losing the Lakewood deal didn’t stop Austin from extending his roots into the community, though. He formed a foundation that pays for recording studios in inner-city schools. He fought for his films Drumline and, to a greater extent, ATL to be filmed locally. Austin even entered the political arena, chairing the 2004 campaign of former state Rep. Doug Teper, who made an unsuccessful run for DeKalb County CEO. And over a three-month period earlier this year, Austin was chosen as an inductee to the Georgia Music Hall of Fame, hosted a gala with Mayor Franklin to raise money for music education, greeted well-wishers at the Atlantic Station premiere of ATL, and was invited to speak at Jane Fonda’s celebrity roast.</
He didn’t make it to Fonda’s event, though. As Jane informed the disappointed crowd, Austin was hung up in Dubai.</
Three weeks later, the news broke that Austin had been jailed for over a month in the Muslim city-state, charged with possession of cocaine.</
WHILE IT’S doubtful the Dubai conviction will have a noticeable impact on Austin’s credibility in the entertainment biz, the drug charge does have the potential to chill the mainstream establishment’s enthusiasm for him. Sure, Austin can continue to be pop and hip-hop’s golden boy. In a landscape riddled with club shootings, prison stints, rehab visits and bad reality TV, a little negative press has a pretty short shelf-life.</
But can Austin remain the king of crossover?</
One way of gauging the city’s forgiveness factor is to consider what Atlanta would be like without Austin — in the unlikely event that he were to pull an L.A. Reid.</
State Sen. Reed points out that without Austin, Atlanta’s star quotient might have the potential to dry up. “I think that we would not be the home of so much talent. Dallas was a part of creating the incubator, so to speak, for that talent.”</
It’s also worth noting that some seriously powerful figures fought for Austin’s release. Atlanta’s leaders ought to be far easier to win over.</
“Every person that I heard [from] with knowledge of the situation thought that at the end of the day, something was going to be worked out,” Reed says of the political elite who backed Austin. “He had been contrite. He acknowledged that it was a mistake from the very beginning.”</
And there’s yet another, simpler principle at work: Atlanta might need Austin more than Austin needs Atlanta.</
“I think the mayor has understood that this is a real generation that grew up with the music, and this is something that ain’t going away,” Boazman says. “Hip-hop is here to stay, whether we like it or not. So I don’t think this would be something that would make her distance herself from him. His talent is not tarnished by this. And I think it will be a learning lesson, and he’ll learn and move on.”</
Then there’s Austin himself. The Dubai arrest marks his first public stumble in a career that has spanned nearly two decades. By all accounts, he handled the incident with trademark aplomb. His determination, his drive, his cache and his creativity have been evident since he was a 16-year-old working the lights for Princess and Starbreeze — probably before. He’s anchored to a vision. He knows how to give the people what they want. And he’s grown accustomed to coming out on top.</
After all, he’s said to have the golden touch.</
“He will do what he has to do to get what he wants,” Joi says. “There isn’t a ceiling for him. He doesn’t see limits. He sees what he can do, and he does it.”