When Luther Vandross died July 1, 2005, at JFK Medical Center in Edison, New Jersey at the tender age of 54, his passing left a void in the music and entertainment industry that has yet to be filled. Director Dawn Porter efforts to fill that gap with a sensitively drawn cinematic portrait, Luther: Never Too Much, presented in its New York Premiere as a Spotlight Documentary at Tribeca Festival 2024. It Premieres on CÑN New Year’s Day.
Co-produced by Jamie Foxx, among others, the film draws on rare archival footage, touching interviews with family, long-time musical and personal friends, a host of celebrities and the singing legend himself to trace the rise to fame and fortune of a visionary kid from the Bronx. Luther: Never Too Much is a visual anthem to the power of music and the enduring spirit of perseverance.
Mariah Carey, Valerie Simpson, Patti LaBelle (Luther formed her first fan club while in high school), Dionne Warwick and co-producer Jamie Foxx are just a few of the celebrity voices that contribute their verbal brushstrokes to this intimate portrait.
“Luther loved the female singers,” childhood friend and fellow musician Fonzi Thornton offered at the outset of the film. “He studied their intonation, their versatility and their range.”
In particular, Luther was obsessed with the Supremes, whom he almost worshipfully watched on the old Ed Sullivan Show. He would even sketch their costumes while he watched them on TV. His sketching would later inform the elaborate gowns he would design for his backup singers in his shows throughout his career. (I once personally encountered Luther in Paris as he was leaving the salon of the famous French couture and costume designer Madame Gres, the noted “master of the floor-length Grecian goddess gown.”)
“He would go to the designers and hand them a sketch and say, ‘I want this!'” said backup singer Ava Cherry. “They would be the designs for our hand-beaded gowns.”
Luther: “If my mother wanted to punish me,” he told TV interviewer Dick Cavett, “all she had to do was threaten to keep me from watching Ed Sullivan. All week, I’d do the dishes. Take out the garbage. Whatever it took!”
One late Sunday night when Ed Sullivan was on and everybody in the house was in bed,” Thornton recalled, “I get a call and it’s Luther. ” The Supremes are on. Man, did you see Florence miss that step.”
Luther’s obsession with style extended to the great Dionne Warwick, whose star was on the rise. “He loved her grace, her elegance as a singer,” said friend and fellow singer Ava Cherry.
Harlem was the epicenter of Black Culture in the 1960s and Luther and his pals did everything they could to become a part of it.
“The Apollo. That was the center,” Cherry enthused. There was music EVERYWHERE! You could just walk down the street and hear music blasting.”
It wasn’t long before Luther and his friends formed the music group Listen My Brother. They became a sort of musical mascot to the Apollo. “We got to see all of the shows for free,” friend and musician Carlos Alomar offered. That was the big benefit.” In those days, James Brown, Ray Charles, “Little’ Stevie Wonder, Aretha, Gladys, were the names that frequently adorned the famous marquee on 125th Street near Frederick Douglass Boulevard.
One day, a television producer named Jim Henson wandered into the Apollo to hear the young group perform. He was working on a new children’s program that would change the face of TV called Sesame Street.
“When you saw Sesame Street, you saw Harlem!” Alomar declared. “The neighbors sitting on the stoop. The stairs going up and everybody sitting and talking and singing outside. That’s Harlem!”
“The rhyming, the rhythm. For want of a better word, that was Rappin’!
“When you heard us singin’ A, B,C,D,E,E,G on Sesame Street. That all came from Harlem!”
We see a young Luther in old PBS footage leading the group in songs that spoke to each of their identities, their hopes and dreams and their culture.
“Those songs we created became the mantras we’d repeat for the rest of our lives,” Alomar reflected.
Another issue that became apparent was Luther’s deep-seated insecurity over his color and his weight.
“If you were dark and heavy, that was a problem,” Thornton recalled. “If you were dark and heavy and could sing your ass off, that’s a different story.
Later in life, Luther’s struggles with his weight and his inherited diabetes and heart disease would overtake him. (Luther was pre-deceased by his father and all of his four siblings by diabetes and asthma.)
Luther’s creativity was boundless. “He was constantly writing,” Thornton recalled. “He had composition books that were already crammed full of his notes. They were also stuffed with loose pages containing his lyrics.”
Luther later wrote commercial jingles that became ‘hits’ in their own way (Juicy Fruit Gum, Mountain Dew, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Kodak, NBC).
Before his solo breakthrough, he served as backup singer for the likes of Bette Midler, Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway. He appeared on albums produced by Quincy Jones and even took the helm as producer himself for Aretha Franklin’s Gold-certified, Award-winning comeback album Jump to It.
Luther’s star also shone on the Great White Way, writing “Everybody Rejoice/A Brand New Day” for the hit 1975 Broadway musical The Wiz.
The small screen of television was too limiting for Luther’s emerging talent. He committed at an early age to a life in music. After graduating from William Howard Taft High School in the Bronx in 1969, After attending Western Michigan University for one and a half semesters, he dropped out. Music would become his Masters.
“This was going to be it,” Luther recalled of the moment. “I was going to concentrate my life on this and if it disintegrates, that’s it!”
Luther’s first brainchild was the group Shades of Jade. “He saw this pair of lime green shoes in a magazine and decided that if we were going to be called the ‘Sahes of Jade,’ then we all had to wear these lime green shoes,” recalled childhood friend and fellow musician Carlos Alomar. “The shoes cost 24 dollars, and I know there was no way my family was going to spend that kind of money.
“So, one day, Luther shows up at my doorstep. Mind you, mine is a traditional Puerto Rican household, and he starts talking to my mother in his broken Spanish. “Muy importante…. Verde…e l zapato….” Finally, my mother comes out and says, ‘Here. Give your friend this $25 dollar. Go get the shoes!’ I mean Luther had a vision. He had determination. Even then!”
From CNN Films, debuting on CNN, OWN and MAX in 2025
Shades of Jade made the rounds in Harlem, performing at local festivals and the famous amateur night at the Apollo. ‘Shades’ later morphed into the group ‘Listen My Brother, which became the Apollo’s theater workshop. More on that later.
“We used to get each other work back then by taking each other on our gigs,” musician and arranger Marcus Miller reminisced. That’s how Luther wound up as one of the backup singers at a recording session with David Bowie. It was a turning point in Luther’s career.
In the archival footage, Bowie can be seen pensively listening to playbacks of the backup singer’s tracks. Luther’s voice not only rang out above the rest, he was constantly coming up with new vocal ideas that could be worked into the main body of music. Before long, Luther was collaborating with Bowie and a song he had written called Funky Music (is a Part of Me) was reworked to become Bowie’s hit song “Fascination” in Bowie’s Young Americans album of 1975. It was Vandross’ first published songwriting credit.
In one fateful encounter, a star is born. Luther formed his own group Luther the following year.
Director Porter takes the viewer on an intimate, behind the scenes view of the triumphs and pitfalls of one of the meteoric careers of the entertainment industry.
In many ways, the songs Luther wrote and performed, reflected the highs and lows of his own life, as much as they became part of the soundtrack of our own.
“Any Love,” he once told Oprah on one of her shows, “is probably one of my most autobiographical songs.”
“”I hated that song!” personal assistant Max Szadek exclaimed in the film. “Because the desperation is there. It’s dangerous because he’s singing about wanting ANY love!”
Luther’s personal life has become so much fodder for the tabloids as rumors about his sexuality and speculation over his ballooning weight and sudden weight loss threatened to overshadow his success.
“It’s tragic that such a great talent is constantly being reduced to this single factor,” expressed Richard Marxm who co-wrote several of Luther’s hits.
“Marcus Miller put it even more succinctly. Fortune is great. “Fame, not so much.”
The disinformation campaign reached a fever pitch, culminating in a report that the singer had died. To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of Luther’s demise were greatly exaggerated.
There are many high points in the film that elicit tears, both from the viewer and from participants in the film. For example, the camera in closeup catches tears welling in the eyes of his idol, Dionne Warwick as Luther serenades her with his rendition of her hit song “A House is Not A Home” after she was presented the Image Award by the NAACP.
“Baby Doll, that was the definitive version of my song!” Dionne enthused to director Porter’s incisive camera.
Luther’s version featured an attention-grabbing introduction, which the singer penned himself with the help of arranger Nat Adderly, Jr, “It was the first full arrangement I ever wrote for him,” Adderly recalled fondly.
Another autobiographical moment is recounted late in the film, with the creation of his hit song “Dance with My Father.”
“I got a call from him (Luther) one night at about the three in the morning,” his friend Carlos Alomar recalled. “He came down to the car and played me the tape of a song he was writing called “Dance with My Father.”
‘This is going to be my career defining song.’ Luther told me. “I may have to struggle with the studio. But this is it.”
“He had put a flag down in the sand!”
Luther’s mother, Mary Ida Vandross reacted to the song and its intimate portrait of a relationship that had been truncated by the fact that Luther’s father had died from complications of diabetes (a condition that also plagued the younger Vandross) when the singer was just eight years old. The song recalls a poignant memory of Luther being lifted onto his father’s shoulders and his father dancing with he and his mother before putting him to bed. “I was in awe,” Luther’s mother said in the film. “I couldn’t see how he would remember all of that.”
Mary Ida, his mother, says, “I was amazed at how well Luther remembered his father, how we used to dance and sing in the house. I was so surprised that at 7+1⁄2 years of age, he could remember what a happy household we had.”
Despite the fact that Luther was unable to promote the song due to being hospitalized as the result of a stroke, the song became the title track of his thirteenth studio album, and a huge success. “Dance With My Father” earned Luther the Song of the Year and Best Male R&B Vocal Performance Grammy Awards for 2004.
“Dance with My Father” was the last top 40 hit for Luther Vandross in the United States prior to his death in 2005.
Luther: Never Too Much will debut on CNN, OWN and streamer MAX in 2015. For more, visit tribecafilm.com.
