Much of what was to sustain Rikki Stein over a lifetime in the often seedy world of music he had already learned in the seedier worlds of gambling and real estate. Still only a teenager, he had learned, among other things, the joys of commission-taking and the ways of satisfying the proclivities of voracious men.
That he was destined for a life of improvisation and living by his wits was clear from an early age. Born in wartime East London, Stein felt too much unease with the familiar—the brooding Judaism of his forbears, the strictures of school and familial expectations, the brash hierarchy of the workplace, even his given name Eric.
“I always felt like a stranger in a strange land and struggled with the notion that, somehow, I had been delivered to the wrong address.” Eric soon gave way to Rikki, religion to irreligion, and, following the prospect of one more beating, the inhumane discipline of school to the effervescent education of the streets. Even the sartorial preoccupations of his parents were too much of a familiarity. Solace, some solace, came in the protean plenitude in uncertainty, where, for example, a stint as a café owner can result in a lifelong entanglement with facilitating the making of music.
As Stein prowled London in search of purpose, Fela, the man to whom he was to become friend and manager, was deciding, in the very same city, which blast of the trumpet worked best to cut to the heart of people. Perhaps they walked past one another, maybe even sat in the same places, given Stein’s early fixation with jazz and jazz clubs, one of which he opened as a teenager. Having managed to divine in music management a balance of dependence and independence that suited his instincts for insubordination, England gave way first to France, then to the United States (where, like Fela, he would get his first taste of social activism and a whole host of funky psychedelics), then back down to earth in Morocco with the mind-bending artistry and spartan discipline of the magical maestros of Jojouka, later to Ghana for a wife and to Guinea for a troupe. Stein’s life unfolds across three continents, but Africa, it would seem, provided Stein with the paradox of an anchor wrapped in a rush. Africa is where he found transcendence.
Stein was on one of his countless trips to Africa when I met him in 2017. I had, at the time, only the broadest sketch of his origin story since Moving Music, Stein’s autobiography, would not be published for another seven years. He was not so much a person as Fela’s manager, whose grudging penitence would best be accepted as an opportunity to wash Fela in even more light. Grudging penitence, because that meeting had been the outcome of a bizarre series of events. It had struck me that we all had been nodding along like zombies to an idea—romantic as it was—that only seemed to acquire more gravitas with every passing year of Nigeria’s dysfunction. “Fela was a prophet.” A fathomless being maybe, but a prophet? Come on. A short commentary followed, in which I let it be known that the idea of Fela being some sort of farsighted seer was little more than the sort of comforting brew on offer in beer parlours—and at newspaper stands. Just like the present-day beatification of Peter Obi, it hardly bears sober analysis.
Ever the custodian of Fela’s legacy, Stein somehow tracked down my Twitter account (“I know how to use my machine well!,” he said) to berate me for besmirching Fela’s legend. And as if his appearance wasn’t strange enough, Stein soon sent another message, this time so conciliatory that I managed to extract an interview from him.
It struck me, in preparing for our interview, that the Stein I found on the internet was little more than a parade of rehearsed soundbites, much the same words repeating the same stories and sentiments with metronomic regularity. To compound matters, Stein’s line of work meant that he had learned—and taught us all—to subsume himself under the outsize myth of stars like Fela.
It would not have been altogether surprising then if Moving Music had been a Fela biography rather than the memoirs of Rikki Stein. Stein, who was first Fela’s friend before a professional relationship developed and soured between them, is a goldmine of exclusive insights into—and stories about—Fela. There is more here of Fela’s geniality and exacting genius, and how his mercurial impulsiveness very gradually laid waste to a great African institution. Ultimately, though, Fela may be the shiniest orb in Stein’s firmament, but was far from his only associate. As I began to discover during our encounter, the man himself is a cultural institution. And at a personal level, I found him fascinating.
I wondered about this Englishman’s worldly accent and the origins of his propensity to append “man”, that obsolete Americanism, to every second sentence. The Nigerian inflections did not so much surprise me; running around with Fela and, later, shouldering his legacy, will do that to anyone—never mind Stein. Early Stein may have been plagued by existential unease, but this version had acquired a chameleon-like ability to blend in anywhere. I was fascinated by the tell-tale twinkle of mischief in his eyes and the brief edge of steel I glimpsed in his manner when I strayed into what seemed to be uncomfortable territory. Why had his reaction to my Fela piece swung from apoplectic one moment to placating the next? Why had he found my essay following our interview in bad taste? And why had he thought a physical and dispositional comparison to former Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger was made to demean? What did he mean that his job was stupid, which, as he’s fond of repeating, “if you did not love you could not do”? If our encounter taught me anything beyond insights into Fela’s behaviour, it was that a cloud of cliché was blotting the essential Stein from view.
In this sense, Moving Music is liberatory. Freed, finally, from the constraint of looking after the needs of others, the inveterate manager found time during the Covid-19 lockdown to move himself into view, producing a riveting account of a life lived in colour. (I will confess that I read it in the deep, deliberate cadence of Stein’s voice.) I speak from experience when I say Stein can spin a good story and these memoirs brim with them. From being swept up in the tide of heady rebelliousness in 1960s USA to marshalling a tidal wave of civil society forces against Yoweri Museveni on behalf of Bobi Wine in the 2010s. From stumbling upon Woodstock and stumbling into Michael Eavis (and eventually into and out of Glastonbury) in Somerset. Fela—and largely as a secondary character—only takes up 13% of Moving Music’s 273 pages.
Recounted with remarkable candour and a cocked eyebrow, Moving Music moves Stein beyond sketch into relief, and from cipher to person. It is, as he describes it, “a multitude of triumphs and calamities, comedies, tragedies, and cautionary tales”, some as jaw-dropping as they are harrowing, all served with a measure of mirth. In this book, Stein emerges as a happy-go-lucky generalist auto-didact with a knack—like the deus ex machina in a classical Greek drama—for appearing on watershed scenes at the right time.
The hunter of inspiration and “personal growth”, the sort of reader whose curiosities petrify in unyielding monuments like 48 Laws of Power and The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, might mistake Stein’s title to mean it offers a manual for becoming a successful purveyor of music. There’s not much here for such a reader. Stein is out to entertain, not feed anyone pituitary hormones for personal growth. At best, you can divine how his “stupid job” of connecting talent to opportunity required perspicacity but also outsize optimism, bullish faith, and a diminished distaste for bullshit. Opportunity—such as in Stein’s prominent involvement in Fela! and its offshoots—sometimes wears the garb of the improbable. In Moving Music, Stein is not shy to show how often opportunity is bullshit.
If Nigerian audiences will look askance at what they might consider Stein’s unwelcome detour from the true object of their interest (read: Fela), the patient Nigerian reader will be rewarded with the unwitting appearance of a tale from the grotty underbelly of Nigeria where politics (often indistinguishable from crime) and culture mix, where patron-crooks cultivate grasping talent and the latter posture as canny receptacles into which inordinate treasure can be secreted. The answer to how a big-ticket big-money Broadway production, scaled down though it was, could have found its way down to Nigeria can be found in these pages. Seun Kuti, to whom fumes of the crusading fire from Fela’s expired belly seem to have passed, can be found soliciting Mr. Broken Shackles himself, one Bola Ahmed Tinubu of indeterminate origin, occupation, and means, who may or may not be Nigeria’s president today. “Bring it now, Uncle!”
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Kayode Faniyi is a critic of culture currently exercised by the interactions between ethnicity and representation in Nigerian art.
