She’s done hard time, and now she’s got a big deal
By Chris King
Of the St. Louis American
This is a story that will be told many times, in many places, and may help to make Penelope the next hip-hop star out of the Lou and the first woman rapper from here to claim the national stage.
It’s an unlikely story of how a questionable phone call and the refusal to snitch put a young artist with a record deal in a federal prison, and how the clever remake of perhaps the greatest American party song (about a sailor longing for his girl gone to Jamaica) landed her a much better deal once she got out.
She already has bought a brand new house in North County with the advance, and she celebrated her good fortune and one of her son’s birthdays this past Saturday at Club Chinchilla. We should hear a single in July and see the record in October from Universal.
Longtime readers of the American will know the beginning of this story, because Bill Beene told it at the time. In October 2000, local rapper Penelope, a Sumner grad from the streets with a tight flow, landed a deal with For Real, which had also inked Nelly and the St. Lunatics.
Then, in December 2000, according to Penelope, she was indicted on federal charges, when a cousin who had been behind bars for years called her to relay a message of interest to drug enforcement agents.
She said that when she wouldn’t snitch, she was sentenced to 56 months and sent to a federal prison in Bryan, Texas, landing behind bars on August 27, 2001. In addition to her freedom, she lost her record deal there.
While locked down, she earned a certificate in business communications from Blinn College, studied to become a personal trainer, got in some trouble and was sent to the hole, and badly missed her two sons.
A few months before her release, her brother, Antonio Jones, was murdered in Edwardsville, Ill., in front of his two sons.
Penelope finally left prison on February 5, 2004. She was released to six months of surveillance at Merrs Center for Girls, a halfway house in Downtown St. Louis.
“I wasn’t coming home with the mind-frame to become a rapper,” Penelope said.
“What bothered me most was my brother’s death. This was my best friend, who had been with me. He had built a studio in his house so I would have all the equipment I needed.”
Rather than throw herself back into the rap game, she went around the corner from the halfway house to Gold’s Gym, where manager James Julian gave her a chance and gave a young ex-con a job.
She was still grinding away at the gym and living at the halfway house when Tubby, the manager of a West Coast music publishing house, happened to have lunch in Los Angeles with two women from St. Louis. When he head their hometown, he remembered the story about the girl with the deal who went to jail, and asked if either of them knew this Penelope?
One of those two women had once managed Penelope, in her former life. She made the connection. Tubby flipped Penelope “Get That Money,” a track featuring 50 Cent and Lloyd Banks.
“I did 16 on that, and they loved it,” Penelope said.
“Tubby wanted to manage me. Something about him, I believed him.” She was back in the game.
The game advanced at two very different levels. In the industry, Tubby grew. He got a job with LA Reid’s publishing company, Hitco, and became its general manager.
On the streets, Penelope grinded. She snuck out of the halfway house and into basement studios to cut her tracks, laying her bars beside verses by Lil’ Flip, Snoop Dogg and The Game.
When she completed her commitment to Merrs Center for Girls on August 2, 2004, Penelope fell under the watchful eye of Theresa Telford, a probation officer who somehow maintains trust in her fellow woman.
“She let me go out of town for meetings, with her permission,” Penelope said. The deal grind was on for real now. “We were looking for a single,” Penelope said, “to seal the deal.”
The song that sealed the deal was Penelope’s idea, along with producers Bam and Ryan of Starbound. She thought to make a hip-hop song out of “Louie, Louie,” the party anthem made famous by The Kingsmen and Animal House, but originally written by Richard Butler in L.A. in 1956, a throwaway song with a Latin beat about a guy complaining to a barman named Louie because his girl sailed away to Jamaica.
Tubby took “Louie, Louie” to P. Diddy, J Records, Atlantic Records, Def Jam. Everybody loved it. “It was kind of like a bidding war, for a minute,” Penelope said.
Penelope decided she liked Atlantic. There was only problem. Sylvia Rhone of Universal had been out of the country when Tubby and Penelope made their rounds, and now she wanted her opportunity. “She was the only female,” Penelope said. “I wanted to give her a chance.”
After the meeting with Universal in L.A., Penelope still wanted Atlantic. But, when she got back home, her phone rang relentlessly.
“Sylvia is not having it,” Tubby said, when Penelope finally picked up. “Listen to what she offered me.”
“I got a huge deal,” Penelope said to me in the offices of the American. “You probably want to know how huge.”
She called her lawyer, Todd Rubenstein, in New York.
“I hate when clients throw money around,” Rubenstein said to me. “Believe me, this will be one of the biggest deals of the year. And it’s different than any other deal.”
He explained, “There are college funds for her kids. There are things the label has to support, like her reaching out to mothers in similar situations like hers, and kids with parents in prison. It’s very positive.”
It’s also for five records, Penelope said, which is a huge commitment on the part of the artist.
But what about the music itself? Penelope spun some tracks for Bill Beene and me. “That is a hit,” Beene said, flatly, when he heard “Louie, Louie.”
It is a hit, but a lightweight one, in the spirit of “Cotton Eyed Joe” or “Who Let the Dogs Out?”
I was far more impressed by “Hustle,” with a deep soul hook (produced by J.R., from L.A.) that Marvin Gaye might have sung if his daddy hadn’t shot him in the chest. “I was born a gutter child,” Penelope spits, “and raised to run wild.”
And, trust me, everybody will be getting it to her nasty club song, produced by homeboy Brad Young. It has a title I can’t print here, but everybody loves to hear these particular words whispered in their ear.
Now, Penelope has her work to do. She has a gang of tracks to polish and edit into a record. This Saturday, she is off to L.A. to work and to hit the BET Awards. She will be in and out of town from now on.
What about those boys, when she is gone?
Stupid question.
“My family,” she said. “The same people who had them when I was in prison.”
