Traveling Soul (36 page)

At the same time, Dad rehearsed a new band for a tour that would include a jaunt through Europe, with John Abbey's help, and a show at New York's Bitter End. To escape the Chicago winter and the Hawk—and the bitter cold of a failed relationship—he brought the band to the house in Atlanta he'd bought in 1968. It was a nice place with a swimming pool out back. The whole thing felt like a big sleepover party—just my father, Craig, Henry, Lucky, and a new drummer named Tyrone McCullen, hanging around the house jamming.

They worked on old Impressions' material, learned several songs off
Curtis
, and fleshed out a few new ideas my father brought in, including the excellent cuts “I Plan to Stay a Believer” and “Stone Junkie,” which he'd written in the midst of a doughnut binge. “Me and [Marv] were driving into Chicago eating a box of glazed doughnuts,” he said. “I don't know how we got hooked on 'em … We got into a conversation about junkies, and before we got downtown, I had written ‘Stone Junkie.'” My father often said every conversation could end up as a song, and “Stone Junkie” showed just how true that was. He didn't need much. Just a word or two, and his imagination would set off running.

As the year turned, he told the guys why they were rehearsing so much. “We're going to cut a live album,” he said. He made the decision after talking to Marv and Neil Bogart, who worked for Buddah, and realizing the Bitter End would make a great place to tape. Craig reacted with
apprehension. “For real?” he said. “Man, I don't even know the names of these songs.” My father reassured him. “Don't worry about it,” he said. “I might not even know them myself, but let's go do this.”

Craig still felt nervous. The band had never performed together, and now they learned their first performance would appear on a live album. That was my father, though. He'd get an idea and have to do it now. Otherwise, his inner Gemini would kick in, and he'd change his mind.

The camaraderie in the band kept everyone's spirits high as they arrived in New York in January 1971 to find the Big Apple frozen and frigid. The youthful exuberance of the rehearsals followed them to Greenwich Village, and though winter had hit with particular severity, it didn't stop Craig from taking on an ice-cream challenge. The Bitter End served enormous ice-cream sundaes meant for two or more people. Craig boasted he could eat one by himself, so the club's management offered him a deal: if he could finish a sundae by himself, he could eat free for the group's three-night run. “Curt, watch this,” Craig said. He proceeded to eat several sundaes, gorging himself on sugar. Those were the kinds of antics that made touring bearable. It impressed my father so much, he mentioned it when introducing the band, and it made the final pressing of the album.

They gave twelve performances at the Bitter End, from which my father put the album together. “We were fortunate enough to find a studio that knew what they were doing,” he said, “and it was really as though we weren't recording at all—until you walked out of the place and saw this thing that looked to me like a little milk truck.” The studio they found was none other than Hendrix's brainchild, Electric Lady Studios. After the recording, Dad edited the tapes with Hendrix's old engineer, Eddie Kramer.

A live album is meant to capture an experience that is impossible to capture, because while the music can be recorded, the magic of seeing a concert in person cannot. Perhaps because the Bitter End is the size of a matchbox, or perhaps because the crowd each night was riveted to the music, or perhaps because the band shared such a tight bond, or
perhaps for some indefinable, mysterious reason,
Curtis/Live!
succeeds in a way few live albums do. Embedded in the grooves on the record is the feeling the listener is sitting at one of the little wooden tables amid the ninety or so people in the mixed-race audience, watching the band on the soapbox-sized stage.

The album kicks off with “Mighty Mighty (Spade and Whitey),” which had taken on new life in the two years since the Impressions cut it. My father's phrasing is funkier, looser, and he takes the song a step further than he did with the Impressions. On the original version, he sang, “I'm gonna say it loud /
I'm just as proud as the brothers too.” Now, he puts extra muscle in it, singing, “I got to say it loud / I want to say it loud /
I got to say it loud / I'm black and I'm proud.” In the intimate setting, the crowd's delighted reaction is palpable.

Next, my father eases into the deep groove of “I Plan to Stay a Believer,” which features heavy lyrics like “Why don't you look around? / Haven't you found that the judgment day is already in play for the black / And now come time for the ofay?” He had now brought three racial slurs into pop music's lexicon on his first two albums—“nigger,” “cracker,” and “ofay.” After singing a verse about the American Indian civil rights movement, which had just flowered, he ended with more excellent wordplay:

We're over twenty million strong

And it wouldn't take long to save the ghetto child

If we'd get off our ass, ten dollars a man yearly, think awhile

Twenty million times ten would surely then set all brothers free

What congregation with better relations

Would demand more respect from society?

The crowd applauded this formula, even though some album reviews singled out that line as symptomatic of my father's downfall as a writer (today we'd call such people haters).

For his part, he explained the change in his lyrics like this: “Lately my lyrics have been more conscious of surroundings, of minorities. They're designed to try to motivate minority groups, to make them keep
on pushing and see that they do belong … Right now, there's a growing audience of all kinds of people looking for music like that. They want to get down to some heavier music that relates to actual happenings in the world.”

After “I Plan to Stay a Believer,” the band kicks into “We're a Winner.” The song injects crackling energy into the crowd, which replaces the missing Impressions, supplying backing vocals on the chorus. Through the people clapping, hollering, shouting, cheering, and testifying, it's easy to tell how much my father's music meant to his audience and how deeply they felt his message.

Then, in the middle of the song, he breaks it down. “You know, you might recall reading in your
Jet
and Johnson publications, a whole lot of stations didn't want to play that particular recording—‘We're a Winner.' Can you imagine such a thing? Well, I would say, as I'm sure most of you would say, ‘We don't give a damn, we're a winner anyway.' Right on?”

Met with cries of “Right on!” and “Preach, baby!” my father feels the audience. “We got a little strength out there tonight,” he says, laughing. “Putting the fire under us. Outta sight.” Then, he sings the original version of the song, the one Johnny made him change in the studio because of its incendiary lyrics. “We have just another version we'd like to lay to you about here,” he says, “believing very strongly in equality and freedom for all, and especially we people who are darker than blue. We'd like to just lay another version to you, trying not to offend anyone but basically telling it like it is.”

If radio stations didn't want to play the song in 1968, the live version might still be considered too risqué for radio today. To the already political lyrics he adds the original lines “No more tears do we cry / The black boy done dried his eyes,” and, “There'll be no more Uncle Tom / At last that blessed day has come.” Radio might not have been with him, but the crowd was there one hundred percent.

Curtis/Live!
dropped in May 1971, a month after
Curtis
took the top spot on the R&B charts. It spent thirty-eight weeks in the top one hundred pop, hit number three R&B, and created renewed interest in
Curtis
.
Critical reception was mixed, many writers complaining my father didn't sound as good without the Impressions, but time has rightly judged the album a classic.

One complaint voiced by many critics deserves special note—the claim my father's voice sounded thin in comparison with the new music. Of course, it would have been impossible for him alone to equal the power of a three-man group. But what the critics mistakenly bemoaned was in fact a refining of his vocal style. It takes a mature artist, a master, to understand that sometimes the best way to make something louder is to make it quieter. My father used the thinness of his voice, the imperfections, the subtle warbles, to draw the listener closer. By pulling back, he invited his audience to lean in and pay intimate attention to what he said. It worked because his words were so powerful, so uncompromising, so true. If the audience missed the Impressions, they didn't show it. With two blockbuster albums in the span of one year, Curtis was undoubtedly a solo artist.

On these first two solo albums, Dad moved his message far beyond what any other artist of the time had done, retaining his crown as the premier social commentator into the new decade. But at almost the exact moment of the release of
Curtis/Live!
, two developments changed the cultural landscape, outpacing my father and driving him to go further with his music.

In April, as Dad performed with B. B. King and the Last Poets, the film world went through a major shift with Melvin Van Peebles's
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song
, the first so-called blaxploitation film. Blaxploitation movies were the first in Hollywood history made almost entirely by black people. They depicted gripping tales of inner-city life that either glorified drugs and violence or simply showed the world the reality of the ghetto, depending on one's politics.

Sweetback
launched a movement and spoke to black people in a way no movie had before. As actor John Amos said, “[Melvin] went out and made a movie that generated so much revenue against the production
dollar spent that it literally made the industry sit up overnight and say, ‘My God, there's an audience of black people out there that will pay to see movies about black people.' Now, how they managed to overlook that for all the years since the inception of the business remains to be explained.”

Blaxploitation movies served another important psychological function. They were the first to feature black actors—mostly men—as heroes, central characters, and eventual victors. This marked a major shift. As Huey Newton wrote, “As I suffered through Sambo and the Black Tar Baby story in
Brer Rabbit
in the early grades, a great weight began to settle on me. It was the weight of ignorance and inferiority imposed by the system. I found myself wanting to identify with the white heroes … and in time I cringed at the mention of Black.” Newton noted that this “gulf of hostility” led to the surge of anger and militancy that had taken over the movement. “We not only accepted ourselves as inferior; we accepted the inferiority as inevitable and inescapable … Rebellion was the only way we knew to cope with the suffocating, repressive atmosphere that undermined our confidence.” That rebellion was at the heart of the blaxploitation genre.