Seventies funk icon Darondo talks limos, ladies, and his Bay Area legacy

And the fleet of girls who reportedly stayed plastered to his arm? "I had a bunch of girls around me; I won't say they weren't. But I didn't want to keep a bunch of [guys] around!" And the girls who lived in his penthouse? "It was a cold pad. I had about four or five girls, but I was renting rooms to those girls." And the cash transactions? "Sometimes the girls would run up to me on the street and give me their money. I wasn't asking nobody to stay on no streets. I ain't hit nobody upside the head."

By the late '70s, Darondo's musical career had come to an end. It was partly because of a financial dispute with Dobard, but Darondo never really saw himself as a professional musician. "Music was a hobby, and I was having fun. ... I was singing because I liked singing."

His exit from the music scene was also expedited by another adventure. From the late '70s to the early '80s, Darondo produced and starred in a series of late-night cable-access shows, the most famous being the Doze Comedy Hour and Darondo's Penthouse After Dark. "On the Penthouse, I might have some fine young ladies with me, and I might have some champagne," he remembers. "We did it like that, and I ended up having [a] hit program on the TV that went on for about four or five years."

Even though his television shows brought him more attention than his music ever did, Darondo's days in the fast lane were almost over. The freewheeling hedonism of the '70s had given way to the darker, more cynical '80s, and he was on the cusp of a breakdown. "I was moving too fast. I had that thing going on, that cocaine thing," he says. "I said, 'This ain't me.' The best way to get off of anything is to leave people alone. You gotta get away from whoever is messing with it. Go to a place where you don't know nothing. I got on a plane and swoosh ... I was in London, in Piccadilly [Circus] at the Ivanhoe Hotel."

Darondo didn't stop there. After staying in London for a few months ("I was just cutting up," he remembers), he took a ferry to France and headed for Paris, where he would cavort with French women (he's a big fan), play blues in Parisian clubs, and, eventually, get ripped off by local pickpockets. Next, he took up a job playing guitar on a cruise liner and traveled to places like Trinidad, Grenada, and the Virgin Islands.

When he returned to the States, Darondo was "fresh" and sober and ready to leave the high-octane janitorial life behind him. He enrolled in college, and soon after became a physical therapist and a speech pathologist ( "the best job I ever had"). He married, had a kid, and in the '90s played the real-estate market, amassing enough money to allow him to live very comfortably in the South Sacramento suburb of Elk Grove. Music was absolutely the last thing on his mind.

When Gilles Peterson heard Darondo's long-forgotten single "Didn't I," the British tastemaker put it into rotation on his radio show and eventually included it on his 2005 compilation, Gilles Peterson Digs America. Ubiquity's Andrew Jervis heard the song, and contacted Darondo about reissuing his first two singles as well as a few recently unearthed demos and outtakes. Released in 2006 on Ubiquity subsidiary Luv N' Haight, Let My People Go garnered positive reviews in Rolling Stone, XLR8R, and Urb.

Though Darondo initially thought the idea to release his old material was "crazy," he warmed over when positive reviews started rolling in. "I never imagined this," he says. "People give me all kinds of shoes and clothes, everywhere I go. And I read all this and look at all this stuff on this MySpace. I think I must've done something. I thought, let me jump back into it. So here I am again."

Whether his upcoming show and album signal a final bow for Darondo or yet another new chapter remains to be seen. But if the singer's past is any indication, one thing is for sure: His return to the music world is bound to be entertaining.