Colors of Passion (♫)
COLORS OF PASSION (1986)
R. Morris
Recorded at MDF Studios, Hollywood, February 1987
Personnel:
Richard Morris—guitars, vocals
Craig Nieves—bass
Lee Coltman—drums
Ken Lee—keyboards
Engineered by Mark Frankovitch
NOTE: This song’s lyrics were re-written as my first Spanish song, Oh, Que Soledad,” in 1990.
The Story Behind the Song:
Race, ethnicity and religion have always been predominant overtones in my life. Growing up in a “melting pot,” Chicago, being cared for by a black woman as a child, having school friends with six-syllable surnames and having dated quite a few women of distinct colors and ethnic backgrounds, one could say that mine has been a life enriched by my ability to see beyond the color of one’s skin. Perhaps it has something to do with my being color blind…
Eleanora Wilson was the first black person I ever knew. She worked for my great-grandfather at the Dr. Dolnick Community Center on California Avenue in Chicago’s West Rogers Park. Eleanora was the cleaning woman, caretaker, errand-runner, short order cook and babysitter—exclusively my babysitter. What I remember most about Eleanora—who I believe may still be alive to this day—was when she made me my first Coke Float. One fine spring day after school I came to the Dolnick Center, as I did everyday after school, and headed straight for kitchen where I could usually catch the tail end of the Cubs game on Eleanora’s small black and white television with its coat hanger antenna. She sat me down on the tall black swivel stool at the large butcher block table in the center of the kitchen and set a small white desert bowl in front of me. She went to the freezer and took out a carton of vanilla ice cream, set it on the counter where she cut off a small square slice, carrying it on the knife and dropping it in my bowl. Strange, I thought, she’s never served me ice cream in a bowl before. And before Ron Santo could rip one into center field, there was Eleanora filling my bowl with Coca Cola, completing immersing the ice cream and producing the most unbelievable bubbles and foam I had ever seen outside of a bath tub. “Your granddad likes these,” she said as she handed me a spoon. My first Coke Float.
Over the years I got to know practically all of Eleanora’s family: her sons and daughters—even the ones who died, the boys shot or stabbed and her daughter whose young son couldn’t wake his mommy up one morning—and her other daughter Wilma Jean who was every bit as gorgeous as Diana Ross. And her son-in-law A.J. who was the Center’s janitor who, despite my great-grandfather’s wishes to the contrary, would let me into his secret lair in the bowels of the boiler room—where he had his own little black and white tv with a coat hanger antenna—to watch Cubs games or Garfield Goose.
My grammar school experience was also one of tolerance and broad-mindedness as my classmates came from literally all corners of the planet: Greece, Iraq, Cuba, India, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, China, Korea, The Philippines—even Alabama (that would be you Mike!). In my neighborhood we grew up eating tacos, falafel and gyros and watching curiously as Hasidic Jews in their long black coats and beards walked past Indian women in their long colorful saris and dotted foreheads along Devon Avenue.
As ethnically diverse as my neighborhood was in the 60s and 70s, surprisingly very few—hardly any really—African American families lived there. In fact, the only time I had heard of African Americans coming into our neighborhood was when my father was held up at gunpoint by “three people of color” in our front hall on Washtenaw one evening in about 1980.
So the song was born out of a number of personal experiences and relationships and the episode of my father being robbed.
There are a number of other deeply personal themes in the song including a parents’ reaction to their child’s relationship with someone from other than their own ethnic, racial or religious background and my own ignorance, prejudice and resentment drawn from the experience of being left by a woman who had entered into a relationship with a man whose ethnicity was different from my own.
In the end, the song was just a way of confronting my fears of the unknown. My girlfriend at the time went on to marry a Korean-American man and have a beautiful family and a privileged life. I married a Spanish woman with whom I had two wonderful children, and I currently live with an amazing woman from the Netherlands who, as fate would have it, I met more than a dozen years ago and with whom I’ve had two children, beautiful girls born in December 2009 and June 2011. So life takes its twists and turns…
After all these years, I have to wonder if Eleanora, way back when I was just a little boy, was trying to tell me something when she mixed that dark, caramel-colored soda pop with that creamy white vanilla ice cream. “Your granddad likes these,” she used to say. I still do.
Lyrics:
I never would love you the way
The way that I love today
Can you see the man behind slanted eyes?
And I never could hate you the way
The way that they hate you today
Can you see the men behind all their lies?
The colors of passion just fade
Is prejudice in fashion these days?
Can you see the man behind slanted eyes?
And when they come to harm you they’ll say
They’re here to charm you, just pray
That they have the fear of God in their hearts.
My father he asked me if I, slept with a black girl last night,
Daddy can you see darkness only at night?
The colors of passion just fade
Is prejudice in fashion these days?
Daddy can you see darkness only at night?
Sarah don’t hate your family
They just can’t see things plainly,
Have trust
That maybe someday they might understand.
The colors of passion just fade
Is prejudice in fashion these days?
Can you see the man behind colored skin?
Sarah don’t hate your family
They even hate me,
Have trust
That maybe someday they might understand.
