"The producer is more than someone who just plays keyboards and says, ‘I produced this.’ The producer is the overseer, the person who brings in the right elements while making sure the music and vocals are correct. Sometimes I play all the instruments, sometimes I just bring in the right people and sit back.” After releasing four studio albums, Klymaxx broke up in 1986.

Cooper as a producer

Bernadette Cooper stayed in Los Angeles, producing tracks for Cheryl Lynn, Shalamar, Mazarti, Nia Peeples, and Madame X, a funky new wave trio she put together with singers Alisa Randolph, Iris Parker, and Valerie Victor. Releasing one single from their self-titled 1987 album, the hypnotic “Just That Type of Girl,” the trio broke up the following year. With no other projects on the horizon, Bernadette retreated to the lab and began working on her solo album.

Signed to MCA Records, which had absorbed the SOLAR in 1984, Cooper worked with Louil Silas, the executive who had taken Bobby Brown, New Edition, Pebbles, Jody Watley and Bell Biv DeVoe to multi-platinum success. “Louil was a very interesting gentleman,” Cooper says. Trusting her professionalism and creativity, Silas let her be. “They (the record company) let me do whatever I wanted to do.” In the fall of 1990, Cooper released her first, and thus far only, solo album, Drama According To Bernadette Cooper.

Staring at the bizarre cover shot by Glen Wexler, one of the first digital photographers in the business, Cooper stood in front of an eerie movie theater clad in a black straitjacket. Artfully, the title was spelled out on the marquee. “The name of the album summed up what I was going through at the time,” Cooper says twenty-four years later. “I was going through a lot of changes. I found the black straitjacket in a club one night and decided to wear it for the shoot.”

With some completed material and a lot of ideas, Cooper went the familiar ground of Studio Masters. “That’s where a lot of the SOLAR acts worked; I had a relationship with them, and I was used to the place.” It was also the spot where Funkadelic, Bootsy’s Rubber Band and Diana Ross recorded. Cooper recruited engineer Gerry Brown, who also worked with her on Madame X.

“I first met when Bernadette when she produced ‘New Dress’ (1987) for Cheryl Lynn, and we’ve been working together ever since,” he says. “Bernadette is smart and funky as hell, and as a producer, she knows exactly what she’s doing. The way she worked with the musicians, she guided them toward delivering some great work.”

Brown has since gone on to a renowned career working with many top-tier artists including Jill Scott, Usher and Leon Ware, but he and Cooper remain good friends and collaborators.

“Whatever came out of my head during those sessions was what we did,” she says. “There were a lot of things that made the album and much that didn’t. I work best when I don’t have someone hovering over me, so what you hear on Drama is the sound of freedom.” A few of Cooper’s other collaborators on Drama included an uncredited Lenny Kravitz as well as her good friend Teena Marie, Chuckii Booker, John Patitucci and Rob Bacon. Although Drama wasn’t Bacon’s first session, it was his first commercial release.

 Cooper listened to him play and, liking what she heard, urged him to stay. “Bernadette came up with great concepts for each track and those concepts always helped me when coming up with the music,” he says. “Forget about being a good producer for a woman; she is just a powerful producer, period”s 

Famed soul singer Teena Marie, who had befriended Bernadette a few years before when Klymaxx performed at the Roxy on Sunset, was another regular at the Drama sessions. “Teena came over to me after a Klymaxx show a few years before and said, ‘You’re the baddest one in the group.’ I was cool on the inside, but inside I was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s Teena Marie.’ Afterward, she invited me to her limo to smoke a joint, and we became buddies.”

Teena sang on the comical title track and "Epilogue: Movie Produce Her.” Says Cooper, “Back then, things were different. We’d just call each other and say, ‘I’m working on a project, come by,’ and we were always there for each other. Of course we got our credits, but there wouldn’t be any discussion of money or anything. We’d just show up at the studio and do our thing; nowadays, with many musicians, it’s about the money first and the artistry second.”

Teena Marie’s former housemate and protégé Lenny Kravitz also came by Studio Master. Laying down the chicken-scratch guitar over Cooper’s dominant drums and bass on “Let’s Be Discreet About It,” the song has a lustful vibe as Bernadette sings about creeping and cheating with a married man. Having recently signed to Virgin Records, Kravitz didn’t want to be credited. “He had his reasons,” she says.

While Cooper maintains that there was no formula to the album, she regrets adding a rapper to the track “I’m That Girl.” Although it had worked for her label-mate and former Shalamar member Jody Watley, who used Rakim on her song “Friends,” the rapper Cooper hired was no microphone fiend. “I don’t even know who that guy is,” she says, “he was just some random guy and his rap was wack. The song would’ve been fine without it.”

Still, at the time, she had more pressing concerns. In the spring of 1990, after handing in Drama, things began changing at MCA.  Louil Silas left to start his own label, and his replacement, Ernest Singleton, seemed indifferent to Cooper’s project. Though it was decided that the first single would be the campy funk of “I Look Good,” a track that recalled the retro-pop goofiness of Cab Calloway by way of Kid Creole and the Coconuts, not much was done in the way of promotion.

“We shot a video, but at the same time, Ernest was telling me he didn’t believe in videos,” Cooper says. “I think ‘I Look Good’ was a good record, but we were going into the hip-hop era and the sound of music was changing. It was more about rap and Teddy Riley’s new jack swing sound. What I was making was different, a little more sophisticated.”

 With the single doing poorly, MCA decided that the music wasn’t “Black enough,” switching her abruptly to the alternative division. “The alternative people had no idea, so I just got caught up in a little ball of confusion.” After releasing the second single “Stupid,” about a woman so sprung that she buys her man a Ferrari while putting his name on her checking account, the record was virtually ignored within the company and soon faded to black. “I’m also guilty of getting involved in situations, and before you know it, you’re paying somebody’s rent.”

 

Despite its brilliance, the 1990 album remains an underrated gem. Seven years after Drama According to Bernadette Cooper was released, with the diva having relocated to the East Coast, superstar Bette Midler covered “I Look Good” in her stage show Diva Las Vegas, which was also an HBO special.

~Michael Gonzales~

​

READ COOPER'S PROFESSIONAL BIO