Although we had three lead singers, we didn’t follow the model of The Four Tops or The Temptations, singing and dancing in front of the group. We were more like Three Dog Night or Sly and the Family Stone, incorporating different lead vocalists within the group. This would prove to be a very important distinction that would later result in my participation in a whole new style of the contemporary live-band experience.
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Happy couple that we were, Janet and I became the proverbial Colorado hippies, roaming the state in our VW bus with our bed in the back. It was the counterculture era, and songs like “Psychedelic Shack” and “Cloud Nine” were all over the airwaves. Like a lot of other young people in 1969, we experimented with drugs. Back in the more innocent, pre–Charles Manson flower-children days, you could trust people. There were parts of Denver where makeshift communes and minicommunities thrived and where hip folks could congregate and hang out. We lived, learned, and carried on. It was an extremely idealistic time in my life. Oddly, many of those former free-spirited hippie types have gone on to become some of the most conservative and rigid people you could ever meet.
I must admit, my hippie days were the most flowery and wonderful days of my life. Natural food, good weed, fine mescaline . . . and acid, occasionally. We didn’t smoke a lot of weed because at the time we didn’t have enough money to spend on marijuana. Instead, we would place a dose of mescaline on our tongues. I had learned about mescaline and magic mushrooms from an interesting horn player I met in Denver, a guy named Andrew Woolfolk, who was a year older than me.
Before John Denver sang “Rocky Mountain High” and “Take Me Home, Country Roads” on the radio, Janet and I drove our VW up to Boulder early in the morning and journeyed into the mountains. We would watch the sun come up—an extraordinary experience on mescaline. We went up there many times, and during one sunrise Janet began to weep so hysterically that I thought she might be bum tripping.
“What happened?” I asked her. “What’s the matter?”
“I can see.”
“See what?
Turns out that she had just gotten a proper pair of eyeglasses, and when she saw the sunrise clearly for the first time on mescaline, it was so beautiful and powerful that she broke down in tears.
Janet and I enjoyed a very carefree relationship. Together we were vagabonds, moving easily from one situation to another with a minimum amount of planning, hassle, or commitment. We would book tickets for a holiday train trip into the Rocky Mountains through a travel company called Jack and Jill. Instead of skiing, we would drop acid and marvel at the mountainous vistas in the country, and I would fish. Janet and I made love in the open air, one of our favorite romantic pastimes.
We also had magical times at the music festivals, breathing the clean mountain air. At one outdoor concert in Washington Park, Jimi Hendrix and Buddy Miles jumped up onstage and serenaded the crowd. It was a timeless period of unparalleled optimism, featuring amazing musical heroes and icons like Jimi and Buddy.
So, would I recommend drug use to anyone? No, especially not today. The open-mindedness of the bygone days of the late 1960s was a sign of the times we lived in, and by the grace of God I made it through okay experimenting with natural substances. Luckily neither Janet, myself, nor anyone I knew suffered any bum trips or went crazy. The late 1960s was a unique era, a completely different, innocent environment, especially when compared to the current use and abuse of corporate pharmaceuticals like cocaine, methamphetamine, Oxycontin, Ritalin, and powerful medicinal marijuana.
I won’t lie to you: I enjoyed getting high and experimenting with drugs. Once, though, I did a show high and thought that I was something else onstage! It felt great performing stoned—that is, until I heard a tape of the show. I sounded awful! So I decided enough of that, forget the illusions. My music was far too important, particularly when it came down to the quality of the music as opposed to the quality of the high.
God watched over me during that crazy countercultural era! For instance, one day as I was driving on the freeway, I slowed down to make a turn in the center median to reverse direction. I was struck at high speed by a dump truck that was also attempting to make the same U-turn in the middle of the interstate. The collision seemed to take place in slow motion, and I was catapulted out of my funky VW bus headfirst. Flying through the air, I landed hard on the ground. The impact of the crash knocked the shoes right off my feet. At first I thought my legs were broken. In a state of adrenaline delirium, I got up and ran for the roadside and saw that the VW was totaled—completely demolished. The ambulance and the police came to take me to the hospital. I suffered one lone scar. They put my foot in a cast, but once I got home, I took the cast off and climbed into the bathtub.
A week later there was a similar accident on the same stretch of freeway involving similar vehicles, except that everybody involved was killed instantly. When I went down to inspect my totaled Volkswagen bus, I thought about how I’d been spared and how I’d cheated death by surviving the crash. I didn’t see my survival as an act of happenstance. I felt as if God had a plan for me.
My new domestic life with Janet progressed quickly. At twenty years old and soon to be a father, I had a three-story house with a basement and big front and back yards. I was now a provider. Working “normal” jobs in the real world had only reminded me how much harder I would now have to work in order to accomplish my creative goals and dreams as a musician.
I hadn’t become a working musician simply to accumulate worldly possessions. To me it wasn’t about delusions of grandeur or the glitz and the glamour. My equation for success meant honoring the purity of the music while trying to imitate the sounds I constantly heard bouncing around in my head!
5
THE MOST INTERESTING MAN IN THE WORLD
The most influential music person I met in Denver was a man named Perry Jones. To me, Perry was the most interesting man in the world. He had everything going for him. He had a life full of experience, including service in the war in Vietnam and a stint as a radio deejay. He was fashion forward and a real ladies’ man. He sported a giant Afro and carried himself like a male model. He was a mover and a shaker. And like me, Perry played the drums.
Raised in Des Moines, Iowa, Perry listened to Wolfman Jack and was hosting teen sock hops at thirteen. One Christmas night when the Viet Cong had mercilessly bombed Perry’s battalion’s compound in Southeast Asia, the USO canceled the holiday party. In response Perry staged his own music show for the troops. Coming home from Vietnam, Perry left Des Moines and resettled in Denver and soon became “psychedelicized.” He would later describe himself as a “Rocky-Mountain-hippie-meets-Superfly.”
Perry got turned on to hard-rock music and underground radio and worked with famed Colorado music promoter the late Barry Fey, helping Fey stage concerts featuring leading acts like Joe Cocker and Country Joe & the Fish. With the advent of FM underground rock stations—most notably free-form, highly rated KFML in Denver—Perry deejayed progressive music ranging from Tom Rush to King Crimson to Muddy Waters. Six years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Perry saw the 1970s as highly charged and revolutionary. He watched in awe as R&B music transformed itself from the traditional music of the chitlin’ circuit to the psychedelic hybrids of rock and soul.
By 1970 Funkadelic had trumped the sounds of Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone with a farther-out blend of blues, funk, and psychedelia. Even earlier, regional labels such as Chess Records had been pushing the envelope with ambitious bands like the Rotary Connection, a group decades ahead of its time, which featured an amazing five-and-a-half-octave lead vocalist named Minnie Riperton and a master arranger named Charles Stepney. Rotary Connection was just one band we loved that experimented with innovative and progressive arrangements of rock, soul, and jazz and that were hallucinogenic and “out.”
One night in 1970 Perry visited the 23rd Street East nightclub and saw a fantastic band tearing
it up on the bandstand. It was Friends & Love. Jones loved our sound and saw our potential. Because of our mutual interest in mixing divergent styles of music, he and I struck up a fast friendship. Perry instantly became a mentor to me and the other members of the band, especially Larry Dunn.
After Perry first saw us play onstage, he pulled me aside and said, “You guys are great. One day you’re gonna make somebody a whole lot of money.”
Then he began his critique.
“But the next thing you need to do is change your act!”
Perry advised me to step out a little. Play the congas and percussion while you sing! He had just seen an incredible show at Mammoth Gardens in Denver featuring a band called Eric Burdon and War. Their hit “Spill the Wine” had crossed over big-time from underground radio to Top 40 audiences. Although Burdon was best known as the white front man of the legendary British Invasion band The Animals, his latest conceptual band, War, featured a nearly all-black lineup that included one other white member besides Burdon, Lee Oskar on harmonica. War was quite revolutionary for its time. Perry saw us in that same vein.
Another touchstone band that put the zap on Perry’s head was Santana. Led by the San Francisco Mission District–based guitarist Carlos Santana, Santana was immensely popular in Denver, combining hard-driving rock and roll with Latin percussion and rhythms and a strong sensibility of the blues.
Perry was the first truly professional record promotion guy I had met. He worked out of Denver for Transcontinental Distributing, a regional record distributor responsible for promoting singles and albums to local AM and FM radio stations. Perry also serviced retail outlets throughout Colorado; Utah; parts of Nebraska and Kansas; and Phoenix, Arizona. He’d walk into the local radio stations and record stores with a box full of the latest LP and single releases from Transcontinental’s product lines, which included Warner Brothers, United Artists, Liberty, Mercury, and Roulette. Perry soon became the conduit that turned me on to brand-new, happening music. I would hang out at his apartment and sort through the two hundred singles and one hundred album titles he received each week.
Perry deeply influenced my constant thirst for new sounds. We would listen to important new artists like Joni Mitchell and Crosby, Stills & Nash as well as more obscure ones like Baby Huey from Chicago. James “Baby Huey” Ramey led a rollicking band called Baby Huey and the Babysitters. He recorded for Curtis Mayfield’s Curtom Records, where pianist-arranger Donny Hathaway served as his arranger. Baby Huey weighed between 350 and 400 pounds—which is how he got his name, from the cartoon character. Huey later died of a heart attack resulting from his heavy intravenous drug use.
Meanwhile, Friends & Love, buoyed by Perry’s enthusiasm, became one of the most popular bands in and around the Colorado area. We frequently played Denver’s top two clubs, the 23rd Street East and the Shapes. For the time being, I was happy with the band’s regional success and my ability to make a decent living for myself, Janet, and our baby that was on the way.
6
NEW HORIZONS
Change was heavy in the air for me and my friend Perry Jones in 1970. Earl Wolf, Perry’s boss at Transcontinental Distributing, had alerted him that that he might be in the running for a very interesting position in the music industry. At the recommendation of Earl and a few other people, Warner Brothers Records contacted Perry and flew him down to Puerto Rico to interview him for a new promotional position that was opening up at the label. Perry was ecstatic; this could be his dream job.
Much to his delight, Perry was interviewed by two legendary Warner Brothers record executives, label president Mo Ostin and executive vice president Joe Smith. Warner Brothers and its sister label, Reprise Records (started by Frank Sinatra), were quite well known for being a progressive record label group that was also very artist friendly. In 1967 Ostin had attended the fabled Monterey Pop Festival and signed The Jimi Hendrix Experience to Reprise. Warner Brothers also had given two of its top artists, Peter, Paul and Mary and the Grateful Dead, unprecedented full artistic control over the music they recorded and released on the label.
Headquartered in Burbank, California, instead of New York City or Los Angeles, Warner Brothers was a major creative juggernaut in the record business. During the time Perry was interviewed, it was in the process of expanding its empire to become Warner Communications, adding two more legendary labels, Elektra Records, founded by folk maverick Jac Holzman, and the R&B beacon Atlantic Records, to its conglomerate roster.
In the fall of 1970 Perry was offered the chance to be the first black national music promotion director in the history of Warner Brothers Records. (His official position was “national promotion director for special marketing,” and for unknown reasons, Warner chose not to include the word “black” in his job title.) What a break! The label had elected to expand its promotions-executive roster to incorporate a full-time staffer like Perry, who would help develop African American acts signed to Warner. These acts included the soul-funk outfit Charles Wright and the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band, the progressive and eclectic ensemble Earth, Wind & Fire, and a few new signings, including a gospel-flavored group called The Stovall Sisters and the esteemed jazz pianist Herbie Hancock, who was entering an exciting phase of experimenting with electronic instruments à la Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew.
Warner had made the financial commitment to ramp up a new black promotion department partly at the behest of ex-NFL football great and actor Jim Brown. In addition to starring in movies on the Warner film lot, Brown had an eye to start managing music acts. He had advised Warner Brothers that starting a black music department would be in their best interests if they had aspirations to expand their black-audience horizons and blossom into a full-service, full-format label similar to the large East Coast entities like Columbia and RCA.
Perry phoned me, excited about his new job. He quickly relocated, moving from his apartment in Denver into a sunny duplex in the Hollywood–Los Angeles area on Crescent Heights Boulevard. It was an unbelievable turn of events. Perry had hit the big time, and I was genuinely pleased for him. If anybody could handle such a groundbreaking position, it was Perry.
Of course, Perry wasn’t shy about extending a special invitation to me, his dear and loyal friend. “Philip,” he said, “if you would ever feel like coming out to Los Angeles, just give me a call.”
I could hear the wheels turning in Perry’s head as we spoke. He was a man of ideas.
Perry began his job training with Warner Brothers when Ostin and Smith sent him to New York City to spend a few weeks with the crack promotional squad at Atlantic Records. Atlantic was arguably the most successful R&B label in history, with superstars like Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett recording under its famed banner. Atlantic label executive Ahmet Ertegun, like Ostin and Smith, had already moved the famed R&B and jazz imprint toward mass-appeal rock success by signing Led Zeppelin and Crosby, Stills & Nash in 1969. Atlantic and Ahmet were also in the process of stealing The Rolling Stones from stodgy London Records.
When Perry later reported to work at Warner’s Burbank offices, he was introduced to Maurice White, bandleader of Earth, Wind & Fire, and the two hit it off immediately. Perry later visited Maurice’s apartment so they could more fully discuss the concept that White envisioned for his band, and what promotional efforts they could undertake together to break them nationally. Maurice believed that music had a positive, life-affirming power that could change the world. He also believed that our bodies are sacred temples and that music, like a proper diet and lifestyle, could raise people’s consciousness a few notches and elevate their personal goals. Music could have a cleansing effect on its listeners, and could be more than just background noise against which to party or get high. The two had a very long, philosophical, and productive talk as Maurice spelled out his musical vision in grand detail, describing how he hoped to transcend the genre of R&B and create a blend of other musical forms that encompassed jazz
, blues, and rhythms from around the world. Face-to-face, Perry was mesmerized by Maurice’s extensive and persuasive ideas, which borrowed from many religious and global truth-seeking sources. While listening to Maurice elucidate his lofty ambitions for Earth, Wind & Fire, Perry’s love for hippie, free-form rock and new kinds of soul music came flooding back into his psyche.
7
“REESE” AND VERDINE JR.
Maurice White is ten years older than I am. In terms of life wisdom and experience, a ten-year difference is a significant amount of time, almost a generation.
Maurice White was born December 19, 1941, in Memphis, Tennessee. He grew up very poor in the projects on the south side of Memphis. Like me, he became obsessed with the drums as a kid and played in the drum and bugle corps. His mother, Edna, had left Memphis to start a new life in Chicago and married Dr. Verdine Adams Sr., a podiatrist. Maurice remained in Memphis and was raised by his grandmother. Every year Edna would send for young Maurice, and he would journey from Memphis to visit his extended Chicago family, which included young Verdine Jr. and Maurice’s half-brother Freddie. All three stepbrothers became passionate about music at an early age.
Although they were technically half-brothers, Verdine Jr. looked up to Maurice as a full-blooded older brother. While the ten-year difference in their ages would have made it likely that the pair would find separate paths socially, such was not the case with Maurice and Verdine. Throughout his childhood Verdine, built tall and slim like Maurice, preferred the company of older people to kids his age. The two were close, and Verdine undoubtedly viewed Reese—Verdine’s nickname for his older brother—as the ultimate hipster and all-around cool guy. On the other side of the coin, Maurice was an astute listener and observer of the young. Reese respected Verdine, and the two communicated freely with each other and exchanged ideas about the one thing they truly had in common—namely, their mutual devotion to music. The synergistic relationship between the two would later play a key role in the evolution, formation, and reaffirmation of Earth, Wind & Fire.
Shining Star: Braving the Elements of Earth, Wind & Fire Page 5