BY 1988, BOBBY BROWN’S CAREER was in freefall. Two years prior, he was voted out of New Edition, the quintet he started with four Boston friends, in part because of his rebellious streak. Then, in 1987, his first solo album, King of Stage, fizzled at No. 56 on the Billboard 200, despite a No. 1 R&B single, “Girlfriend.” “We had to regroup and find out what my identity was as a singer,” Brown told Fred Bronson, author of The Billboard Book of Number 1 Hits, in the early 1990s.
What Brown discovered was a sexual swagger that fueled the six-month climb of his second solo set, Don’t Be Cruel, to the top of the Billboard 200 on Jan. 21, 1989.
Brown, then 19, and the album’s main architects, Antonio “L.A.”…