Shining Star: Braving the Elements of Earth, Wind & Fire

by Bailey, Philip

  Ralph’s tryout was conducted at Beal’s house in the Baldwin Hills area of Los Angeles. Beal’s father was a dentist who owned a nice place in Leimert Park. Verdine had already seen Ralph play onstage at Maverick’s Flat, just as Ralph had seen me there playing congas with the Stovalls. Ralph set up his drums, Beal and Verdine plugged in, and the three began to jam, playing through a few numbers as a guitar power trio. Neither Maurice nor I was on hand for the audition. Maurice, waiting to hear back from his brother, trusted Verdine’s opinion implicitly. He realized that Verdine was the one who was going to have to play with the new drummer. Verdine gave Ralph an immediate thumbs-up.

  Prior to finding Ralph, Maurice had auditioned a woodwind player named Ronnie Laws, the younger brother of famed jazz flautist Hubert Laws. Ronnie, like his older brother, was a very gifted and jazzy musician. Larry and I were both excited to have Ronnie in the band, mostly because we were such huge fans of Hubert’s CTI records, and we especially loved Quincy Jones’s 1969 release Walking In Space, which featured Hubert on flute. Back in Denver, Larry and had I listened to that record over and over again!

  When I first joined EWF, I messed around with a lot of different instruments—including guitar, harmonica, and drums. (Maurice had asked at my audition if I played piano, and though I couldn’t, I wasn’t going to tell him no. As soon as I sat down and tried to pick out a few chords and lines, he saw right away that I wasn’t really a piano player, and that’s when I recommended Larry.) The reason I wasn’t originally hired to be a lead singer was because in the early stages of the group nobody knew exactly what our roles were going to be. The band was evolving. I knew I could sing and play percussion, while Maurice didn’t know how much drumming he was going to do. Would he sing from behind the drums or venture out in front? EWF was a work in progress, and as we began writing songs together, Maurice’s and my roles as vocalists became more defined. In the early days no one in the band could interpret, cowrite, and shape our songs better than Maurice and me. We developed a nonverbal synergy, and I was better able to grasp the Concept without the two of us doing a whole lot of talking about it. Once the new songs surfaced, our roles quickly solidified. Maurice looked to me to become a co–lead singer; he would sing lead on certain songs while I’d take that role on others.

  Maurice had already forged a signature vocal style on songs like “I Think About Loving You” from The Need to Love album. After I accepted my new role as a singer in EWF, I asked myself, Who’s the hottest modern singer making the most impact? Sly Stone! I already had knee-high boots just like Sly’s that I wore onstage, even though they killed my feet, nearly bringing me to tears.

  Still, I asked myself, Whom should I emulate? It dawned on me: How about being me? If I can just be true to myself, nobody can beat me at my game. It came to me as divine inspiration: I would become the best me that I could be, and discover my own human potential. Finally, I didn’t have to wear those boots anymore, and after my epiphany I threw them away.

  By the summer of 1972 the EWF lineup was starting to gel. We had a female vocalist named Helena for a quick moment until we found out that Jessica Cleaves was available since she’d left Friends of Distinction. Jessica used to drop by to visit Maurice and Verdine after they moved into a house on North Westmoreland and Fountain Avenue in Hollywood. We loved her, and I was elated when she accepted Maurice’s offer to join the group.

  Then came the period when we did a few warm-up gigs performing the material from the first two Warner albums. One early Earth, Wind & Fire appearance was in the Oakland East Bay area with another group on the bill, The Sisters Love, an act Sly Stone was developing. I remember the crowd yelling back at us, “Bring back The Sisters Love!” It was at that show that guitarist Michael Beal decided to pack it in. He couldn’t hang any longer with the new lineup and lost hope. After he left, finding the right guitar player would prove to be a long search. In the meantime Maurice chose a young session player, Roland Bautista, to replace Beal. Unlike Michael, Roland was much more of a rock-style guitar player.

  Later that summer it was reported in the music press that Earth, Wind & Fire had reorganized and that Maurice White had gotten himself seven “whiz kids” to take over from the previous older, more established band members. The new lineup was set: Maurice White, myself, Verdine White, Larry Dunn, Ralph Johnson, Jessica Cleaves, Roland Bautista, and Ronnie Laws. With all of us in our early twenties, we were pretty green on the national scene, rookies full of energy and optimism with no opposition to Maurice’s steering the ship and defining the group’s new musical direction. Maurice now had everything he needed in terms of raw talent to proceed without pushback or opposition. We were in the “vessel” together, crafting a new, exciting sound and direction. With our combined talents, we crossed several stylistic boundaries of music, including R&B, rock, jazz, fusion, and pop.

  Make no mistake, Earth, Wind & Fire was definitely Maurice’s vision, even though it wasn’t quite clear at that point what the final vision would evolve into. For my own part, I was prepared to go along for the ride and give the new group enough time to take shape and gain traction. Don’t think that we weren’t looking at the popularity of Sly and the Family Stone or War—as well as forerunners like James Brown—while we were trying to find our way.

  When I first joined the band, there wasn’t a specific stylistic road map for us to follow. EWF was a unique assortment of genres and musical personalities. Vocally, Maurice and I were both heavily inspired by Sérgio Mendes and Brasil ’66. Brasil ’66 was composed of four men and two women, with Sérgio playing piano and arranging the music. We both liked that Mendes sound: that high- to low-octave, singular-voice sound where the melody is sung in a high register with multiple voices, then sung in the lower register with more voices. It comes off sounding very airy, cool, and breathy. Their tunes were tight, catchy, and seamless, with vocal arrangements of contemporary hits and standards that featured mixed world rhythms like Brazilian samba and jazz changes with a positive bounce. We listened carefully to early albums like Herb Alpert Presents Sérgio Mendes & Brasil ’66 and Equinox. Mendes later recorded hit covers of The Beatles’ “Fool on the Hill” and Dusty Springfield’s “The Look of Love.” When you analyze our songs in the context of high-and low-octave blend, there’s a lot of Brasil ’66 shining through!

  Originally I was vocally trained as a baritone, but I could also sing falsetto. I didn’t really know I had a falsetto until a voice teacher heard me singing in that register in a nightclub one night and explained exactly what a falsetto was. I loved female vocalists, so I was imitating Dionne Warwick, one of my main influences. I loved her sound as well as the songwriting of Burt Bacharach and Hal David. I sang a lot of Dionne’s material in the clubs, and Nancy Wilson’s songs, too. I loved imitating the great singers I heard on the radio and on the records my mother and her friends played in Denver, which is how I unknowingly developed my falsetto. I was singing to match the key of the original recordings.

  Maurice also had that high-to low-octave vocal blend going on, which became more pronounced when I joined the band. To Maurice’s surprise, he also could sing in a great falsetto, so we could come up with our Sérgio Mendes–style harmonies when we arranged the vocals. I’m a natural baritone, and since Maurice was, too, when we sang up and down the scale together, we soon developed a unique and natural style that would become our Earth, Wind & Fire signature vocal sound.

  Early on, the band members were feeling one another’s musical chops. I played percussion and sang in a high voice, my great falsetto. Ralph Johnson was an “in-the-pocket”–style drummer, and Verdine and Ralph, as a rhythm section, hit it off instantly. Larry’s keyboard chords were richer than those found in your standard pop and blues progressions. Roland Bautista played his rock-style chords bathed in lots of guitar effects.

  We checked one another out. Who had what to offer? Who brought what to the table? I felt the constant ebb and flow of energy a
s our talents and strengths meshed. Even with a ten-year “generation gap” between Maurice and the rest of the new lineup, Maurice embraced our youthfulness while we respected his leadership and street-oriented experience. There was something about our youth that was contagious, and the new lineup gave Maurice a burst of energy and inspiration in ways he never imagined or anticipated. We were open vessels, and Maurice melded our exuberance with his worldliness.

  11

  MAURICE AND THE WHIZ KIDS

  Maurice led his new band of rookies not by intimidation but by example. Case in point, he turned us on to eating nutritiously as a group. We started going to health food stores together, places like Johnny Weismuller’s American Natural Foods on Hollywood Boulevard. In the 1970s health food stores were esoteric little mom-and-pops, nothing like today’s conglomerate food chains such as Whole Foods. I remember the first time Maurice made us fresh vegetable soup. I got a serious vegetable high! My whole body went crazy with energy. Campbell’s soup didn’t do that for me! Because Maurice had been around the world, he taught us how to eat with chopsticks and got us to try different kinds of cuisines. The first time I tasted organic food—a tuna sandwich stacked with lots and lots of sprouts on nine-grain bread—I thought, Damn, this is good . . . and different! It was a long way from smothered pork chops and my mama’s cooking. Under Maurice’s guidance, everyday life was a learning experience. It was a time of discovery.

  If Maurice were an animal, he would be a cat, innately highly aware of movement and of everything around him. Maurice doesn’t necessarily gravitate toward groups of people or cliques. More of a one-on-one person, he’s not the gregarious type who hangs out a lot. In social situations, he’s likely to pull away.

  Maurice is a sponge for information; he doesn’t accept things at face value. He looks deeper into the soul and adopts a humanitarian point of view. Early on, Maurice felt empathy for the suffering and plight of humanity. Through his extensive travels he had experienced the pain and indignity of racism, segregation, and violence. That’s why he created a new kind of band; his music would be a healing balm for the ills of society.

  In his earlier days in Chicago, Maurice drank alcohol. I’d seen pictures of him with the Ramsey Lewis Trio before he stopped drinking, and he was noticeably heavier. Ramsey once told me that when Maurice played with him, he was very soft-spoken, almost to a whisper. Then, as he adopted his new awareness through proper diet and meditation, operating more from an Eastern philosophical standpoint than from a traditional Western Judeo-Christian one, Maurice became the slim and trim guy we all recognize.

  Maurice also turned us on to self-help books like Napoleon Hill’s The Master Key to Riches and Think and Grow Rich, as well as Psycho-Cybernetics: A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life by Dr. Maxwell Maltz, which deals with self-image psychology. EWF’s message was to bring the people to a higher consciousness.

  We might as well have been in college, it was such a hands-on educational journey. Maurice would sit with me at his house on North Westmoreland and Fountain Avenue and talk about his favorite subjects. He wanted to produce music that had a universal appeal. At the time, he felt that music was geared too much toward very specific groups, and he wanted to create something that sounded new but was familiar across the board.

  Maurice believed that music should be a positive force in people’s lives and help them rise in personal stature. When he explained such lofty ideas as maintaining the dignity of music, we band members were at first too young to know what that meant. Most of us just wanted to be in a group that was smokin’ hot.

  Yet under Maurice’s guidance Earth, Wind & Fire did come to signal a new era in music. While Sly and the Family Stone achieved fame by wanting to take us higher, Maurice was operating on a different level of “family.” He wanted to take the listener to a higher plane of consciousness, not to a higher altered state. His philosophical approach was more universal than personal or family-oriented. While Sly fried his brain on drugs, Maurice didn’t; he wanted EWF to embark on an earthly, holistic path. It wasn’t about re-creating a psychedelic experience, or indulgence in drugs; Reese’s musical idea was grounded in love, personal power, spirituality, and lifting the consciousness of humanity.

  Maurice studied Eastern philosophy and was profoundly touched by its reverence for the arts, and he was distressed that that dignity and respect had been abandoned by the artists and musicians in Western society who were high on drugs and lived to party. Maurice felt that such errant lifestyles tarnished the level of esteem in which musicians had once been held. While playing in Chicago, he saw firsthand how drug and alcohol abuse took its toll; jazz legends shooting heroin; blues masters passed out on booze. I had never actually witnessed that kind of decadence. I had only seen the Billie Holiday movie, Lady Sings the Blues, and when anybody mentioned heroin, I thought of Ray Charles.

  Drug dealers and the drug culture were an inescapable part of the landscape of show business, and I had seen a little of it in the bars and clubs. As a band EWF didn’t embrace that kind of behavior. Maurice did not indulge, and he wasn’t going to put up with anyone who did. As a result, drug abuse wasn’t something we were tempted by. By the grace of God, my own single-mindedness for the music had enabled me to escape that scenario, whereas many other bands and artists convinced themselves that they could handle hard drugs without paying the consequences—which was not the case.

  Our mission was to tell people, “Hey, you’re naturally high, and you can maintain that natural high by discovering who you are—by opening your third eye.” We weren’t just saying it, we were living it. Within our entourage were people who were into holistic medicines and herbs. Later, as we toured around the country, be it DC, Philly, or Los Angeles, that crowd became a part of our fan base. Instead of drug dealers and druggies hanging around the band, we had folks bringing us teas, juices, and herbs, the opposite of drugs and toxicity. We were forging a natural path. My body responded to the wholesome natural organic foods, while my mind was opened by the recommended readings. And Maurice was the catalyst for all that. What we discovered through him is what we sang about.

  —

  After moving out of Perry’s place, Janet and Sir returned to Los Angeles and we shared an apartment on Blackwelder Street with Larry Dunn and his wife, Debbie. They lived in one room, while Janet, Sir, and I shared another. Perry’s on-again, off-again wife, Jean, lived in the same building. Our coffee table/dining room table was one of those giant telephone-cable spools. Although we had a high chair and a crib for Sir, the rest of us slept on waterbeds—not the expensive ones on pedestals, but the funky ones with the hardwood frames resting on the floor. As Sir ran from Larry’s room to our room, I was afraid my new son would fall down and bust his head.

  EWF also rented a house in the Hollywood Hills, where we rehearsed, and conducted interviews and meetings. I don’t recall who paid for that house—it might have been the record company–but Leonard Smith, our road manager and Maurice’s right-hand man, lived there for a while. That’s where we mapped out our future. While Maurice was our conceptual leader, a collaborative spirit also existed. Maurice wasn’t like Stevie Wonder, who was a total package, self-contained through his singular vision, talent, and ability. To a great extent, Earth, Wind & Fire’s vision was a group collaboration.

  Because we wanted EWF to be about more than just the music, we interviewed a stage director from Las Vegas to see if he could help us put together our live show. In Maurice’s view there had to be rhyme and reason to our onstage visual presentation, and he had drawn a series of preliminary sketches to illustrate his ideas. During our first meetings he had shown me the drawings. He had sketched the eight members and how he envisioned Earth, Wind & Fire would appear onstage. The chemistry between Maurice and his seven whiz kids enabled him to take what he had on paper and make it into a reality onstage and in the studio.

  When I first joined the band, Janet had painted the
set of congas that I brought out from Denver. They were black, and I had three of them, so Janet painted an E on one, a W on the second, and an F on the third. In the early days each member of EWF was responsible for figuring out his or her wardrobe. Of course we had no money by way of a clothing allowance; that would come much later. So when it came time to fashion my own look in the band, I knew two things: We weren’t going to wear matching doo-wop suits or outfits, and we weren’t going onstage dressed like a rock and roll band in T-shirts and jeans. Janet and I cruised through Hollywood’s thrift shops and used-clothing boutiques looking for stage clothes and finally came up with the idea for me to wear tie-dyed thermal underwear and long socks!

  There was an army surplus store near Studio Instrument Rental (SIR) off Santa Monica Boulevard and Vine Street that sold thermal long johns that we dyed various bright colors. Then I would throw on a loose, hippie-type shirt and over that a vest, too. Later Janet found a shop that sold striped socks and colored leg warmers of the kind that professional dancers wore. Finally, Perry’s wife, Jean, knitted the band those groovy woolly crocheted caps, the same kind she made for Sly Stone to wear on his album covers. In the very beginning, for us there were no African prints, robes, or exotic attire. It was just us funky do-it-yourself folks being ourselves.

  Maurice and I connected seamlessly on the artistic side, and I could comprehend his ideas and musical direction without his having to overly clarify. Not having to explain everything in minute detail is an important asset in artistic collaboration. Out of everybody in the band, it was Verdine and me, and sometimes Larry, who could best transpose what was going on in Maurice’s head. What I needed to learn was how best to present my own ideas to him so that I could contribute on a higher level.

  What I had quickly come to love about being in California was that everything was so open. Ideas were open; the music was open. Places like New York and Chicago were cool and hip, but tight, cliquish, and insular. You had to wait to get your shot, whereas in Los Angeles something was going on every night. You could hang out at clubs and parties and network (before they called it that). Everybody in the room was hip. If a person wasn’t somebody, then he was on his way to becoming somebody.