RIKO LITTS

By the time you hear the bells, he’s already airborne.

There’s always been a calculated cool to Riko Litts — not distant, not detached, just coiled. Back in the heyday of The Phobes — D.C.’s slickest, sharpest-dressed export — he was the tiepin crooner with a switchblade smile. The guy who could drop a sonnet into a soul stomp without breaking stride, who made heartbreak sound like a secret mission briefed in a jazz club at midnight.

Mod swagger, garage grit, and a voice that could melt steel or seduce the entire second balcony — Riko wasn’t just fronting a band, he was running an operation. His lyrics read like wiretaps from a love affair gone covert. Think Curtis Mayfield if he flew fighter jets. Think Smokey Robinson taking on a guerrilla army with a speargun.

When he joined The Get Quick in ’05, he didn’t blend in — he redefined the silhouette, sharpened it like a knife. While the rest of the band charted constellations of chaos and myth, Riko carved the melody into something lean, lethal, and impossible to imitate. He didn’t chant; he charmed. He didn’t invoke spirits; he knew the room. Every room.

Off-stage, his hobbies are as finely tailored as his wardrobe: vintage aircraft restoration, long-range spearfishing, and the occasional moonlight rendezvous on a Triumph that shouldn’t be street legal. He’s been known to play bass while suspended upside-down, just to keep some blood in his head.

There are rumors, of course. That he once escaped a doomed recording session by ejecting through a skylight. That he seduced an entire panel of government censors over brunch. That he keeps an emergency stage suit in a titanium briefcase buried in the Mojave.

But none of that matters when the lights hit and Riko Litts opens his mouth.

Because when he sings, everything else drops away — the espionage, the exile, the endless chase scenes — and you’re left with the echo of something true, dangerous, and devastatingly smooth.

And you remember this:


Some stars don’t burn out.


They glow inward.

The Suited Flame at Center Stage


Filed from The Orpheum, Los Angeles, 03:17 A.M.

There’s a moment — right around the bridge of “Criminal Devotion” — when Riko Litts steps forward, flicks his cigarette offstage like a spent fuse, and the room just stops. Doesn’t freeze. Stops. Like even time knows it’s been outclassed.

Tonight, it happened again.

He wore a cream suit, cut so sharp it could draw blood, and a narrow silk tie that whispered London ’66, Detroit ’72. There’s nothing mystical about Riko Litts — no incense, no chakra-speak, no cosmic rambling. Just a man with a voice like sandpaper dipped in honey and a stage presence honed like a switchblade.

No one stands back and watches Riko perform, his performance absorbs you, sweeps you up like a tornado.

He earned his stripes fronting The Phobes, that pre-millennium DC outfit with too much talent for their own good and a frontman who sang heartbreak like he’d stolen the blueprints for it. They did Mod the American way — fast, emotional, and in Italian leather shoes. Even back then, Riko was something else: a Northern Soul torch singer with punk guts and literary chops. Otis Redding with a dive bar tan.

Since 2002, he’s been The Get Quick’s secret weapon — part velvet, part razorwire. The band spirals into dimension-hopping chaos and Riko cuts through with something timeless: groove, drama, story. He doesn’t sing so much as narrate a seduction. Every bassline he plays feels like the soundtrack to a high-stakes getaway. Every verse is loaded like a .38 in the glovebox.

Outside of music? He restores vintage planes. He hunts with a speargun. Sometimes underwater, even. He once talked a border guard into waving him through a checkpoint using nothing but a wink and a B-side from a lost Stax session. He drinks bourbon neat and tips extravagantly. He never rushes. He chooses moments.

“And I thought proper frontmen were extinct,” someone muttered next to me during the encore.

Not while Riko Litts is in the building.

— Mark Question, 2007