California Loved

By the early '70s, Roger and Lester had been joined in the group by older brother Larry, who'd returned from Vietnam to become the band's conga player and road manager; youngest brother Terry joined in 1977. Now playing as Roger and the Human Body, the Troutman brothers had a regional hit in the late '70s with "Freedom," and in the winter of 1978, they caught a break when Bootsy Collins' brother, Phelps "Catfish" Collins, saw them play at the Cincinnati club Never on Sundays. Catfish was impressed with their stage presence and promised to tell Bootsy about them. "Bootsy called the next day and asked could we be in Detroit," remembers Terry, at the time still a teenager. "We said, 'Heck yeah!'" Within days, the band was in Detroit, and Parliament leader George Clinton was hooking them up with Warner Bros., where they recorded their eponymous debut album, having changed their name to Zapp along the way.

Zapp was a hit, with Roger's talkbox giving his not-so-strong singing voice a futuristic, almost omnipotent Black Wiz sound, one the family rode to a decade of success. The first three Zapp albums went gold and Roger's solo releases all eventually went platinum, with All the Greatest Hits selling over 2 million copies. Zapp toured as many as 300 days a year. They scored Top 10 hits with songs like "I Can Make You Dance," "Doo Wa Ditty (Blow That Thing)," "Dance Floor (Part 1)," and the slow, smooth groove of "Computer Love" with Shirley Murdock. Roger, meanwhile, had solo hits (performing simply as Roger) with 1981's cover of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" and 1987's "I Want to Be Your Man," which topped the R&B chart and reached No. 3 on the pop chart.

Taking a cue from their grandfather Dock, whose business successes had planted the family's roots in Ohio, the Troutman brothers used their record industry money to form Troutman Enterprises in 1980. The company built and rehabilitated hundreds of lower-income homes in the Dayton area, hiring and training unskilled people to do the work. By the mid-'80s, Larry had put aside his congas to manage the band and run the business full time, picking up the nickname "Dollars" for his business savvy.

"Larry always believed that you could have platinum records and fame but still end up with nothing," says Dale Degroat, who joined Zapp as a keyboard player in 1984. "He believed that the houses would survive longer than the music."

Larry Troutman was right. By the late 1980s, the rise of hip hop and the commercial decline of funk had blunted Zapp and Roger's appeal as a mainstream act. 1989's Zapp V was the last original output as a band for one of the most commercially successful and consistent black music cliques of the decade, and Bridging the Gap, released two years later as a Roger solo record, marked the singer's last new album.

But the '90s marked difficult times for Troutman Enterprises as well, with the family business sinking into bankruptcy in 1992, reportedly after funding fell through on a planned real estate development project, leading to a cash crunch. Court files showed debts at nearly $4 million, along with more than $400,000 owed in back taxes, and by 1996, a judge changed the case from a bankruptcy reorganization to a liquidation. Once soaring, the Troutman family's fortunes were in difficult straits.

Roger Troutman's fortunes, meanwhile, were about to bounce back big time, his influence on a younger generation of musicians poised to bubble up and explode.

While he was working on it, Roger Troutman had some major doubts about the song that would herald his artistic comeback and become one of the biggest hits of his career. Actually, he hated it.

"Dre and Roger were in the session," says Terry, remembering the story as Roger told it. The pair had met several years earlier when Dre called Troutman for help with a talkbox effect on Snoop Dogg's first album. Now they were working on "California Love," which Dr. Dre originally intended to put on his own album. "There was a song called 'Woman to Woman,' by Joe Cocker. ... It was funky. Dre took a loop of that, and that was all [he] had. Roger was like, 'No.' He said he kept challenging [Dre], saying, 'Are you sure you want me to do this?'" Dre was sure, and pushed back. "So Roger did the best he could. He really didn't have any lyrics. He just did some ad-libs on it."