Traveling Soul (44 page)

His office at the new North Side Curtom headquarters was the same size as the hovel that once housed his entire family at the White Eagle, but the room he now occupied served a far different function. He sat at the central hub of a humming business with managers, arrangers, artists, engineers, accountants, lawyers, secretaries, publicists, and distributors. The building also boasted a sixteen-track studio (soon upgraded to twenty-four tracks), “two of the juiciest psychedelic lounge areas around,” according to
Jet
magazine, and several other offices.

The more Curtom grew, the more the label's day-to-day operations consumed Dad's time. Unfortunately, he never excelled at day-to-day operations. With the benefit of hindsight, he'd later admit, “That was probably no good for me, or the company, and for the customer that had so much expectation for me. The whole name of the game was to make money. The investors want to hear one thing—‘I want to make money.' Probably what people should have done, and I probably should have done myself, was just laid back and kind of watched things for a while.”

Laying back was never his thing. He was laid-back, sure, but he didn't
lay back
. His work ethic, always tremendous, now became superhuman as he entered the busiest phase of his career. “The name of the game is longevity,” he told
Jet
. “Stars are made to burn out, and I don't intend to see that happen. And that's one reason why I try to do as many things and own as much of myself as possible…. Once you've become successful, you've got to work twice as hard to keep being successful. In other words, if I make a million dollars this year, I've got to make two million next year to support ongoing functions that I own.” He didn't just want money, though. He wanted respect. “This is what makes me want to go higher on the ladder of success,” he said. “I would like all types of people to listen to my music and get something out of my songs.”

My father set out to gain that respect in unfamiliar territory. Curtom's new home on the urbane North Side was light years removed from the gritty South Side where he'd lived and worked most of his life. With the change of scenery came a change of personnel. Johnny was gone forever, along with Eddie. Craig joined Aretha Franklin's band, and only Lucky and Master Henry survived from the original group. Marv beefed up the in-house staff, bringing in a new crop of industry professionals to help with the minutiae of running a business. Leroy Hutson left the Impressions to start a solo career. On top of that, a new form of music began crowding the charts—disco. Despite these shakeups, Curtom stood on the cusp of a big year with album releases from the Impressions and Leroy, as well as my father's new album and a live recording/
public-television broadcast featuring a retrospective of his entire career.

Continuing a frustrating trend, however, my father couldn't quite get out of his own way.
Super Fly
had earned four Grammy nominations, and Dad received an invitation to perform at the ceremony in early March 1973. Perhaps it was the added pressure of success, or perhaps it was the increased consumption of weed, but whatever the reason, that night his insecurities mushroomed into full-blown paranoia. When the time came for his performance, Dad waited in the wings while his band kicked into “Freddie's Dead.” A fog machine spread smoky ambiance across the stage as he walked out. When he started singing, it didn't stop blowing. For the entire performance, billows of fog blocked him from the audience's view. He felt like a fool in front of his peers, not to mention the people tuning in on TV.

Then,
Super Fly
lost in every category, often to songs or albums that didn't approach its commercial or artistic impact. My father sulked back to his hotel room, crestfallen. Toni got in his ear and convinced him the whole thing was a white conspiracy—Whitey wouldn't let a guy who sang “Superfly” win. Seething, the smoke machine's fog still burning in his nostrils, he called Marv and demanded he cancel the college tour William Morris had booked for him.

Marv warned him, “You're going to be so caught up in lawsuits, it's not worth it,” but for a man who changed his mind with such ease, my father could also be immovable as a boulder. Marv enlisted the help of Neil Bogart, and they went to my father's room to try to dissuade him, but he wouldn't budge. They cancelled the tour, he got sued and lost a good deal of money, and William Morris refused to work with him again.

He ran into similar trouble a few weeks after the Grammys at the Academy Awards. “Freddie's Dead” was nominated for Best Original Song but later deemed ineligible because the movie only features an instrumental version. Dad tried to play off the insult, saying, “I'm glad I was in a position to let everybody see what the Academy Awards are—a personalized social club with exclusive members. I'm from R&B music, so I'd rather lose an Oscar than to lose in the streets.” But his words belied the damage to his ego.

Perhaps my father can be forgiven for his hasty reaction at the Grammys. After all, racism didn't end because
Super Fly
hit the top of the pop chart. Dad still struggled in a world with limited opportunities for black people, even famous ones. His records sold to white audiences as well as black ones, but he couldn't bridge the gap at concerts. He tried crossing over at the Aragon, a white rock club in Chicago, but received a cool reception. Promoter Jerry Mickelson took an unfortunate lesson from that show. “You learn the market,” he said. “Take Curtis Mayfield. He was hotter than a pistol, and he died in the Aragon. So we learned that you can't do a black act up there.” The success of black artists like Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone with white rock crowds proved the lie in Mickelson's statement. Further proving it, Stone played the Aragon in 1974 and killed.

Even so, the fact remained that after escaping the chitlin' circuit, forces beyond Curtis's control still restricted his career. About crossing over, Marv said simply, “It didn't work. We wanted it, but it didn't work. His audience at concerts remained mostly black even through the '70s, but it didn't bother him. He was a realist and accepted it for what it was.”

He turned, as he always did, to music. Dad worked on the follow-up to
Super Fly
first. Like never before, he had the world by the ear. As always, he tried to fill that ear with a meaningful message. On his previous three studio albums, he'd dealt in-depth with many aspects of black life in America, but he hadn't yet touched the Vietnam War. He'd written peace anthems like “Stop the War” and “We Got to Have Peace,” but these didn't examine the black experience in Vietnam, and he felt compelled as always to tell the whole story.

His transition from the movement to the war mirrored the world around him. White liberals had long since shifted their energy from civil rights to war protests, but by 1973, Vietnam consumed the black community, too. The
Black Panther
newsletter printed a stark message aimed at black soldiers returning home, and it summed up the issues my father would put to music. “I know you dream about home,” it read. “But
when you come home, come home and realize that you have a fight here…. When you get back home, you're going to see that same oppression. They're going to promise you a job; but you're going to be out of a job.”

Amid the din of war, Dad couldn't get one phrase out of his head, the one he'd heard the year before while touring army bases—“back to the world.” It gave him an angle to tell his story, and he used it as the title for both the album and its leadoff track.

With
Back to the World
, he showed that he still had his finger on the pulse of the ghetto, even though he'd become a rich and famous man, now living in a swanky new condo near the top floor of 4170 North Marine Drive. From his perch atop the city, he wrote about a soldier just returned from war and the malice he faced on his return, much in the mold of Marvin Gaye's
What's Going On
, and much like the real-life experience of Uncle Kenny.

With Johnny gone, Dad brought in Rich Tufo to provide harmonic backdrops. Tufo served as a sort of utility man at Curtom, sometimes producing or arranging a session, sometimes handling paperwork or publicity. His work ethic rivaled my father's. “My day runs anywhere from fourteen to fifteen hours a day,” he said. “It's divided up depending on whether I'm working on any particular project at the time. If I'm not, I may be dealing with publishing, copyright clearances, A&R.”

My father worked with Tufo in much the same way he worked with Johnny. “Usually, when Curtis is ready to begin a project, he's already put down in demo form his ideas, songs, whatever,” Tufo said. “Then, I take it from there—put down the rhythm charts. He may come in with a particular selection and we'll juggle around. Then we go in, do the rhythm tracks, the vocals, then add the sweetening. We usually lock ourselves in for a week. That's before we actually get into the studio—and we'll get together either here or at his home.” Tufo's style was a departure from Johnny's, but his work helped usher in a new period of success for Dad's music, both as a solo artist and a writer/producer on multiple film soundtracks.

Back to the World
was my father's second consecutive album to hit number one R&B, but it was a slight fall in fortunes from
Super Fly
.
The first single, “Future Shock,” hit number eleven R&B but peaked at number thirty-nine pop. Dad's lyrics are as on point as ever, with lines like “Our worldly figures playing on niggers / Oh see them dancin', see how they dancin' to the ‘Superfly.'” That line could have been a simple shout-out to his previous work or a searing comment to his listeners about missing the message behind the lyrics of his most famous album as they ate up the dance beats. Still, many critics panned the single for borrowing too heavily on sounds he'd already explored.

The album also contains one of my personal favorites, “Right On for the Darkness.” The song wasn't released as a single, but it became one of my father's most influential cuts, reverberating through the hip-hop age. Many artists in the '90s sampled the song's opening guitar lines, most notably Chicago native R. Kelly on his 1999 smash hit “Did You Ever Think.”

Back to the World
was a solid effort, but on the heels of the monumental critical and commercial success of
Super Fly
, it was viewed as a slight disappointment. Critical failure can spell disaster for any artist, and
Back to the World
hinted at shifts in my father's music that would cause many critics to desert him as the '70s wore on. Perhaps the biggest shift was his increased use of falsetto. It was, as a
Rolling Stone
reviewer noted, “an intensely masculine falsetto,” and he'd used it since the earliest days of the Impressions. But now he began using it almost exclusively, seldom dipping down into his natural register. His voice became higher and thinner than ever, which critics had complained about since
Curtis/Live
.

Also, the new studio changed the sound of his records. The drums are thinner. The bottom end—bass guitar and bass drum—punches rather than rumbles. The snare skews toward high frequencies, sounding more like a piccolo snare than the deep wooden
thwap
common in R&B music. Master Henry's polyrhythmic force fills less sonic space.

As Curtis's sound changed, disco moved the sound of the time in a different direction. Disco revolved around booming drums, slapping bass, slick production, catchy melodies, and glitzy string lines. Dad didn't pay much attention to that, though. He still shied away from listening to other people's music, and the few times he did, he seemed more interested
in studying it than taking pleasure from it. While making
Back to the World
, for instance, Tracy recalls him putting on Marvin Gaye's “Let's Get It On” to get a sense of the tempo and dissect what had made the song such a huge hit. Disco didn't mean anything to him yet, but soon the forces of commercialism would bend him to its insistent beat.

For the time being, his fans stuck with him. They made
Back to the World
a commercial smash, although advance orders for the album had already guaranteed that. The success kept him in the public eye, including more appearances on
Soul Train
, and it also created a surge of interest in
Curtis
, which went gold that same month based on renewed sales.