When did you feel that kind of pressure during your initial run?

I almost had a nervous breakdown in Puerto Rico one time; trying to go to the gym, trying to go to rehearsal, trying to go to this, trying to do that, because you have to maintain, you have to keep up with it all.

It’s not really normal for you to be completely enamored with your own success, and when there are people screaming at you all day, girls are coming at you … It will cause you to really think – I didn’t cure cancer, I didn’t cure polio, I didn’t do the first open heart surgery.

You’ve gotta kinda start telling yourself that there’s something that you’re not.

Do you still have any memorabilia from that era?

You know I’ve moved so many times … I used to have the glasses from “Gonna Make You Sweat,” which I bought on 42nd street for $5.

Obviously I have a lot of the trophies, the AMAs, and stuff. I have a lot of the magazine articles. I kept the AMA invitations. I have the Grammy invitations. Your name is in the Grammy manual, I have that.

We didn’t win a Grammy the year we were up, but they gave everyone a medallion.

There have been a number of controversies surrounding C+C Music Factory, and specifically, “Gonna Make You Sweat.” Tell us about how Zelma Davis, and not Martha Walsh, ended up in the video for the song.

That type of vocal imaging has been going on for years.

You remember the movie The Five Heartbeats, they touched on it.

Ben E. King was in The Drifters, and George Treadwell fired Ben E. King and replaced him with another singer. (Charlie Thomas then lip-synched the songs King had recorded with the group)

When we did the Soul Train Awards, everyone lip syncs on the Soul Train Awards, except Mr. James Brown. I did it, Rakim did it, Heavy D did it. They would always have your vocals playing over the music.

It’s funny because I’m doing a book now called Lip Sync that kind of touches on that phenomenon. It’s trying to educate the public as to what’s actually going on with vocals.

Obviously you want to see the original vocalist, but it doesn’t always happen that way. When Audrey Hepburn did My Fair Lady, a lady named Marni Nixon actually did all the vocals. She did all the singing vocals on My Fair Lady, she did all the singing vocals on The King and I, she did all the singing vocals on West Side Story.

20th Century Fox actually threatened her, at the time, not to tell anyone. Eventually she became tired of doing it, and became her own Broadway sensation.

So that type of thing is not uncommon. Sometimes you do it because you have to do it.

Martha Walsh wasn’t really prepared to go on the road. You remember, when “Gonna Make You Sweat” came out, I was 24, 25. I had to go and do 50 free shows to do one paid show, and do all of these in-stores for Columbia Records. You couldn’t really ask an industry veteran like Martha Walsh to do that, so I brought Zelma into the group.

Zelma was a friend of mine from uptown. I was introduced to her by my choreographer. She sang on “Here We Go (Let’s Rock & Roll),” and “Things That Make You Go Hmmmm…” and she would’ve probably sung “Gonna Make You Sweat,” but she wasn’t in the group at the time.

I was just surprised that Martha wanted to sue us, because she did it knowing that she had done it before (she sang the vocals on Black Box’s Dreamland album), so that was what was really interesting about it.