Traveling Soul (25 page)

Another friend has gone and I feel so insecure

Brothers, if you feel this way, you're not by yourself

We have lost another leader, Lord, how much must we endure?

If you feel this way, you're not by yourself

But if they think we have no one to lead us

That then we've lost the fight and every night no one can breed us

They don't know every brother is a leader

And they don't know every sister is a breeder

And our love, you see, is gonna help the world be free

We're going to move at a scarlet pace

Keep every brother on the case

They don't know, to help a sister help themselves

We cannot let our people be until we're all out of poverty
.

He molded those words to a melody as the news of King's death shot around the country. Stokely Carmichael said, “Now that they've taken
Dr. King off, it's time to end this nonviolence bullshit,” but after the past three summers of riots, no one in the ghetto needed instructions on what to do. They razed Baltimore, DC, Louisville, Kansas City, and Wilmington, Delaware. They also set buildings ablaze in Cabrini-Green and Lawndale.

Plumes of black smoke towered so high over the ghettos in Chicago that people could see them from the Loop a couple of miles away. Dad watched those dark clouds threaten the horizon. He now lived far from the carnage, in a Hyde Park townhouse with my mother, Tracy, Sharon, and me. Hyde Park was an integrated neighborhood of middle and upper-middle class families near the University of Chicago. In terms of social status, he'd moved far from the riots. But in terms of his heart and spirit, he couldn't separate himself from the despair roiling Chicago's black community. One day, he and my mother traveled to the West Side to witness the destruction there. They saw a hellish scene. This was no mere disturbance; it was a war zone.

Many of my father's acquaintances still lived in the West Side and Cabrini ghettos. They were trapped in the violence. A woman named Lillian Swope, who used to let Curtis practice in her row house on Hudson, said, “A truck came through here—right down Oak Street … The young men actually pulled the driver out of the truck, and emptied the truck and just took all the man's stuff out and they was beating him so bad that they almost killed him.”

Rioters destroyed the stores on Oak Street, close to where Grandma Sadie lived, and they wrecked Del Farms and Pioneers grocery stores. They beat random white people with bricks. A melee erupted in the cafeteria of Curtis's old high school as black students threw food and smashed their plates.

The National Guard stormed Cabrini to restore order by any means necessary. Soldiers in tanks plowed down the small streets. Others drove in Jeeps, clutching rifles with bayonets affixed to the barrels. The Guard set a curfew and patrolled the streets at night, sweeping the neighborhood with piercing lights. Meanwhile, all day and night police traded gunfire with roving gangs that were trying to impose their own sort of order. Shootouts, broken windows, crumbling structures, fires, violent deaths—these now
defined the project. It would never again be the idyllic place my father once knew with gardens, parades, and doo-wop groups on the corner.

Cabrini resident Zora Washington recalled the hopelessness she felt when at last the violence and destruction subsided. “Black people had torn it up and the powers that be were not going to fix it up,” she said. “You knew that. It was a scary time. It gave you a scary feeling. How could you help not being depressed? It was like we lost hope. The person that could do it for us was gone. It was a terrible time.”

Watching his city burn, Curtis kept on pushing. He bought a small brick building at 8543 Stony Island Boulevard in South Chicago and opened the Curtom studio and offices. He began auditioning and signing acts with Eddie, including June Conquest, who had released a single on Windy C. Her single “What's This I See” was Curtom's first release. It became a hit in Chicago as the riot's flames died down, although it didn't make noise nationally.

The Five Stairsteps also joined Curtom, as did the Symphonics, a band from Philadelphia. Eddie recalled auditioning the Jackson 5, but my father passed because Curtom already had a family band. Needless to say, that wasn't his best business decision.

He was right to have high hopes for the Stairsteps, though. They'd prove that in 1970 with the smash single, “O-o-h Child,” which rose to number eight on the pop chart, and has since inspired more than twenty covers and earned a ranking on
Rolling Stone's
500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Unfortunately, they recorded the song for Buddah, not Curtom. They switched labels after my father's workload became too much for him to give them the attention they needed.

Dad made another good choice in signing Donny Hathaway, but he couldn't make that work either. “Donny could do everything,” Eddie said. “Sing, arrange, produce, play keyboards, write songs—many talents. But, he butted heads with Curtis a lot. Both men had equal skills yet had very strong and stubborn personalities. Curtis wouldn't do things Donny's way and vice versa.”

My father's need for control didn't allow Donny the space he needed to create, so Donny asked to get out of his contract, saying he no longer wanted to make music. When he later began talks with Atco Records, Dad cut all ties with Donny and forced my mother to do the same with his wife, Eulaulah. Curtom suffered as a result. In the end, Donny did his most important work with other labels, including two gold albums with Roberta Flack for Atlantic.

Rounding out Curtom's first lineup—and providing another frustrating missed opportunity—was the Impressions' old road band, the Winstons. They cut only one single on Curtom before changing labels and releasing the Grammy Award—winning “Color Him Father” on Metromedia Records.

The Winstons hold an extraordinary place in music history. The B-side to “Color Him Father” was an up-tempo, instrumental version of “Amen” called “Amen, Brother.” It contained a six-second drum-break that became the underpinning of hip-hop. In the 1980s, dozens of artists used the “Amen” break as the basis for their songs. Listen to N.W.A's “Straight Outta Compton.” That's the “Amen” break. It has appeared some thirteen hundred times throughout hip-hop history. Hundreds of artists—from Salt-N-Pepa, to Tupac Shakur, to Jay Z, to Tyler the Creator—have used it.

Its influence goes further still. As hip-hop gained steam in the '80s, the “Amen” break crossed the Atlantic Ocean where it became the foundation for techno, raga, jungle, and drum-and-bass music in the United Kingdom. An entire culture formed around six seconds of a drumbeat from a group my father lifted to fame, playing their version of a song the Impressions made popular.

Curtom missed all these opportunities. It is hard not to imagine the possibilities had my father signed the Jackson 5, kept the Stairsteps and the Winstons, and given Donny free rein. Music history itself would be different, and Curtom might very well have reached Motown-like heights. But for better or worse, Curtom's fate rested in my father's hands.

As spring turned to summer, Eddie got Curtom running at full speed using everything he'd learned in a decade turning Curtis's songs into hits. “One thing you knew, you knew the DJs,” he says.

You knew the record stores—the Mom-and-Pop as we called them, they're the ones that report to
Billboard
, they report to
Cashbox
. You knew the distributor for the record itself. Between maybe three distributors in Chicago, they together had all the product coming in. So now you got to pick a company that is strong enough to distribute your record. Curtis and I shopped around and went with Buddah Records. Whatever door they had open, we were going through the same door. They had the Village People, they had Casablanca, which was a big, big label back in those days. They were smokin'. We had a free ride.

The more Curtom gained its footing, though, the further my father grew from Fred and Sam. When they learned he wasn't going to give them shares in the label, they questioned the wisdom of passing up half a million dollars at ABC. My father harbored no such apprehensions. With each new success, he became more self-assured. He was only twenty-six years old and had already led one of the most successful careers in popular music history. With Curtom, he stood at the helm of his own emerging empire. More than ever, he was master of his fate. As he told
Jet
magazine, “With my own label, I control myself.” He used his control to help his family again, moving his mother out of Cabrini. Within a few years he'd provide housing for her, Grandma Sadie, and Judy.

He felt proud of these accomplishments, and that pride began to eclipse his insecurities. At the same time, he remained a complex man occasionally haunted by his past. He went to a dentist to get his teeth fixed, but that didn't fix his mind. He still remembered the taunts of Smut and the poverty he'd escaped. Sometimes these issues drove him in positive ways, helping him achieve great things. Other times, they hurt him and those he cared about. Nowhere did they cause more trouble than in his relationship with my mother. He felt himself losing her, and
it scared him. He could write about it movingly, as he did on
We're a Winner's
“I Loved and I Lost”—“She was so beautiful like flowers full bloom in May / Her kiss was like the roaring wind, it left me speechless, with nothing to say / I loved and I lost.” He couldn't do the one thing that might have kept her—remain faithful.

The temptations he faced only grew as he gained more power, confidence, and influence. His songs had already made him an icon; Curtom made him a titan. He'd done what a black man in America wasn't supposed to do—snatched control from a system designed to subjugate him. As a result, more people wanted a piece of him than ever.

Running Curtom put him under incredible pressure, and deciding whom to trust became an issue of dire importance. He and Eddie now had to handle business concerns they knew little about—accounting, office management, record pressing. For months, they had no hits, which worked well since they didn't have the capability to print enough records to meet the demands of one. My father struggled in a situation that didn't play to his strengths. He never had a mind for mundane day-to-day tasks. Big-picture ideas, like starting his own label, he could handle. When it came time to run the label, he needed help.

Rather than folding under the pressure, he did what he'd always done—relied on his guitar. While Eddie arranged distribution with Buddah, Dad began cutting Curtom's first full-length albums for the Impressions and the Stairsteps. His confidence soared.

At the same time, the 1968 presidential race heated up. Three days before King's assassination, Johnson announced he would not seek another term, and Robert Kennedy became the frontrunner to win the Democratic nomination and the presidency. Republicans threw their fate in with Richard Nixon, Eisenhower's vice president, who had lost to JFK in 1960. Nixon showed no signs of sympathy for the movement.