Bobby was determined to kick his habit before reaching Hollywood, sweating the junk out of his system on the Greyhound bus ride west from Grand Rapids. By the time anyone from Motown met him, Bobby was clean. Switch - which consisted of Bobby and Tommy DeBarge, vocalist Phillip Ingram, Williams, Eddie Fluellen, and Jody Simms - was offered a contract.
Released in 1978, Switch's self-titled debut featured the standout "There'll Never Be," which rode the Billboard R&B charts for 26 weeks, peaking at No. 6. The album went on to sell a million copies and formed the sonic template for future groups as diverse as Jodeci and Mint Condition.
"The night we wrote 'I Call Your Name' was a strange one," says Williams of the achy slow-jam, which was sampled in 2006 by Polow Da Don for Rich Boy's big hit "Throw Some D's." "Bobby was dating LaToya Jackson," Williams says, "and she was the only girl on his mind. One night, he started fooling around on the Fender Rhodes. I started singing along, and next thing you know we had a song. I'm not saying the song was written for LaToya, but they were in love, and Bobby couldn't wait to play her the completed song."
While Bobby was working on that second Switch album, Mark and Randy DeBarge visited Los Angeles to see what their brothers were up to. Before long Bunny, Mark, Randy, El, and James made the journey west. Lichters leased a five-bedroom house and took them to buy instruments. "Motown put us on salary, because we were starving," says Bunny by phone from Grand Rapids. "Because he'd lost the Jacksons, we became his pet project." Motown encouraged the DeBarges to fire their managers and sign with DePassse and Jones management, which was affiliated with Motown. They eventually agreed.
While family acts like the Osmonds and the Sylvers had become passe after the Jackson 5 left Motown in 1975, the acclaim of DeBarge's 1982 sophomore album, All This Love, inspired a new generation of brothers and sisters -like Five Starr and The Jets - to bum-rush the sibling scene. But DeBarge stood head and shoulders above the rest. Romantic, pop-friendly R&B jams like "All This Love," "I Like It," "Who's Holding Donna Now," "Love Me in a Special Way," and their biggest pop hit, "Rhythm of the Night," from the 1985 Motown film The Last Dragon (Tri-Star Pictures), made the group crossover stars.
But the DeBarge family was ill prepared for the challenges of celebrity. Back in the 1960s, when Gordy's hit factory was still run like a mom 'n' pop shop, the "old" Motown was renowned for artist development that included everything from dance lessons to etiquette classes. The label's 1972 move to L.A. killed that tradition. "Coaching? What coaching? I haven't been fortunate enough to have people around to show me things. I wish I did," El said to the Los Angeles Times in 1984. "Basically, I'm out there by myself."
That same year, James DeBarge, the second youngest of the group, married Janet Jackson. She was 18. He was 21. He was a rising star at Motown, and she was struggling to break away from a notoriously insular family. James met her because his brother Bobby was dating La Toya. "James and Janet started secretly seeing each other," says Bunny DeBarge. " Then they came to Grand Rapids and eloped. For the Jackson family, it was a nightmare. Nobody knew how serious it was, but they were so young." The marriage was annulled after several months amid allegations of James' drug abuse. It's long been rumored that Janet gave birth to a baby girl who was then raised by her older sister Rebee. All parties involved have denied the story for decades. "They say the kid's in Europe or that one of my brothers or sisters is raising it," Janet said in the May 2001 issue of VIBE. "But no, I've never had a child."
It was also in 1984, during DeBarge's four-month stint as the opening act on Luther Vandross's sold-out "Busy Body" tour, when the family discovered just how famous they'd become. This was the year of Michael Jackson's Thriller, Prince's Purple Rain, and The Police's Synchronicity, but DeBarge was driving their fans every bit as crazy as those household names. "Girls would jump onstage, pull out our hair, tear off our clothes, and sometimes scratch off our skin," says James by phone from California. "It got even scarier when we stopped off in Detroit to perform at a record shop. The crowd broke down the barricades and smashed the windows. We had to get a helicopter lift from the roof. There were a lot of Beatles-type moments."
Nevertheless, in the classic Motown tradition of separating powerful lead singers from successful groups - Diana Ross from the Supremes, Smokey Robinson from the Miracles, Michael Jackson from the Jacksons, Lionel Richie from the Commodores - it wasn't long before divide-and-conquer tactics apparently went down with DeBarge. "They made El think that he was better than his brothers and sister," says El's 71-year-old mother, Etterlene. "Michael was the star of the Jacksons, but I thought my kids made them look like crap," continues the woman who refers to herself - even on her MySpace page - as Mama DeBarge. Speaking by telephone from her home in Grand Rapids, Mama's voice is as soothing as peppermint tea, but she still harbors bad memories of Motown, which she's channeling into the book she's working on, titled The Other Side of The Pain. "Everything became about what Motown wanted, not what the kids wanted," she says. "My kids were fighting like enemies."
But according to Bunny, it wasn't just label troubles that derailed the DeBarge family's dreams of showbiz glory. "We weren't able to sustain our success because of our childhood," she says. On the surface, they seemed like a model family. But the parents' relationship was troubled. "Interracial marriage was still controversial and we were talked about everywhere," recalls Bunny. To make matters worse, Bunny says her father was "always fighting" with her mother. "Mom came from a loving, church family," says Bunny. "She wasn't used to people who were violent."
Even family friends could sense the trouble at home. "To put it simply," says Williams, who has known and worked with the DeBarges since they were all youngsters, "their father was psychotic."
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