Photo by Paco Sanchez
Color Me Badd, the R&B crooners from Oklahoma City known for “I Wanna Sex You Up” and “I Adore Mi Amour,” perform Nov. 4 at the Richmond Coliseum in a stop on the “I Love the ‘90s” tour. We talked with original member Mark Calderon, who breaks down the origin of the group’s name and its unlikely collaboration with Insane Clown Posse.
Richmond magazine: You are on a whirlwind of a tour; how is that going?
Mark Calderon: It’s been really great, just going to different places all around the country. We’re going to areas that we’ve never been before. … Take, for instance, last night: York, Pennsylvania. We had a ball, a great time. It feels like old times to me. … Everyone is just a little older, I guess, and that’s really all that is different. Because the music is the same.
RM: Where did the name Color Me Badd come from?
Calderon: There was something that we never realized as a group [before we chose this name]: we had different cultures in the group. Me, being Mexican-American; Bryan, who’s white [and] Indian-Native American; Sam, who is a white boy, and Kevin, he was African-American — but we were all buddies in high school and we never looked at the color thing at all. It was all about singing, music and trying to get the girls. … [Later,] we still weren’t for sure who we wanted to be, but we had to come up with a name because we had graduated high school. … Our manager at the time, he said “You guys’ name is Color Me Badd.” We were sold because we had multiracial members in the group. The record labels, when they saw we were a multiracial group, they really didn’t have anything to do with us. At that time, there just [weren’t] multiracial groups. … It was Giant Records who decided to take a chance on us.
RM: What does “being discovered” look like?
Calderon: They waited till we graduated before they sent us to New York to do demos and such. It took us about two years to get signed. I remember being 19 years old and signing the record contract. It was shortly after that the “New Jack City” soundtrack album came out, and it was cool because we were the only group on that whole soundtrack that didn’t have a name then. … We had a song called “I Wanna Sex You Up,” and it was the highlight of the album. No one saw us coming. The soundtrack took off. I remember the record company calling me and saying, “We need you guys out here in L.A. immediately — we need an album in two weeks.”
RM: How did the Insane Clown Posse connection happen?
Calderon: They [Joseph “Violent J” Bruce and Joseph “Shaggy 2 Dope” Utsler] were both big fans of Color Me Badd. They knew everything about us, and they asked Bryan [Abrams], and Bryan ended up recording some songs with them. And then Bryan had me come along and wanted me to write some stuff for them and we ended up with a song called “Ghetto Rainbows.” It’s definitely [a] crossing of genres that you wouldn’t expect.
