One effect of our crossover success was to help put more African American music industry executives on a faster career path. The major-label infrastructure at Columbia had patiently molded us into a major act, but our breakthrough created a ripple effect, boosting the presence of black executives within the corporate music structure. Or as Maurice reminded us, “It’s all about economics. Black radio is expanding, and the labels want to profit by it.” More important, we became one of the first modern black bands beyond the rock crossover success of Sly Stone to prove that African American music and musicians could have an explosive impact, from niche gold status to mainstream platinum, not only on R&B audiences but on all types of music lovers—black, white, Latino, Asian older adults, and beyond, both domestically and internationally.
With the release of Gratitude, a familiar face rejoined our ranks when my old friend Perry Jones returned as a road and tour manager. After Perry had returned to Denver, he became involved with a nightclub, held down a Sunday night radio show on KFML, and opened up a record store. He also worked again with Barry Fey, the biggest concert promoter in the Colorado market. Perry helped book us at the Denver Coliseum, where we sold all 10,500 seats. My “homecoming gig” was one of our biggest-drawing shows on the tour. Afterward Perry hosted a hotel get-together with the band and met with Bob Cavallo out on the deck of the penthouse. Bob was very happy with the results of the concert, and a few months later Perry got a call from Maurice inviting him back as a tour manager. It was great to have him around again.
Now capable of consistently drawing five-figure arena crowds, we were poised for our biggest road trip yet. My perception was that larger halls were just another venue to play: tonight a 10,000-seater, next year maybe a 20,000-seater. That was great, as long as we were making steady progress, and that’s how I saw it: as a step-by-step process. I wasn’t particularly in awe of the numbers. As long as we pushed onward, we had no choice but to keep moving forward.
We kept the growing Earth, Wind & Fire hysteria in check as best we could. Don’t forget, we were younger than most musicians. Groups like Led Zeppelin and The Who were older and more road-experienced and cocky, so they did more of that hedonistic, crazy hotel-wrecking stuff than we did. That’s not to say mischief didn’t follow us. We were a bunch of twentysomething guys with a whole lot of energy having fun. But I was so into the music, I just rode with it. I liked the good life too much to jeopardize it by acting the rock-star fool. Besides, Maurice wouldn’t have stood for it.
While the easy women and temptation were still out there, the music remained foremost for me. The Concept had worked. We hadn’t been created by a record label or some Svengali manager, like the Monkees or New Kids on the Block. While we did have creative and organizational help from Columbia and Cavallo-Ruffalo, we had shaped our own personas and destinies.
During this period I became pretty much an absentee father and husband. When Sir was little, he could barely comprehend what I did for a living. All he knew was that I wasn’t there at home, which was unfortunate. I think back to my childhood days when my mother was too busy working to show up at my school concerts. As a parent I now sympathized with the situation and forgave her.
Whenever I did get home, say, for birthday parties for the kids, I might be in the other room asleep, resting up for the next gig or show. As a result, I missed practically all of my children’s back-to-school nights. I also wasn’t there for Sir’s or Trinity’s school dances. That was Janet’s job, to get them prepped for life, and to raise them.
There were some fringe benefits for the kids in having a famous dad. They got to wear EWF stage costumes for Halloween! Trinity had the prom dress of a lifetime, and Sir got to drive my Mercedes to his prom. (I’m only just now hearing about their driving exploits while I was gone.) While there was no substitute for their having a full-time dad, my kids enjoyed having nice new cars at an early age and went to great schools and took incredible vacations. While it wasn’t my choice to neglect them, being away from the family was the nature of the profession. If I was on the road performing, it’s because that’s what I did for a living.
I became more of a supervisor than a father, telling Janet what she needed to do or what I expected to be done. It was an unintentional impulse, since I was accustomed to having staff on the road seeing to my needs and getting things done on a timely basis. I was so used to a highly mechanized routine that when I got off the road, I had trouble readjusting to “real life.”
Janet stayed with me through some tricky times. When I came home to Los Angeles from touring one night in 1978, I had a confession to make. I told Janet, “I have something to tell you. I’m having a baby.”
At the time Janet was pregnant with Creed, our third child. “I know,” she said. “We’re having Creed.”
“No,” I said. “I mean, I’m having another baby.” And I had to confess to her that I had had an affair on the road with Jeanette Hutchinson from The Emotions and that she was pregnant with my child.
Janet threw a huge fit, so I put her out on the front porch to cool off.
Janet had her hands full raising our kids. (In addition to Sir James, who was born in September 1971, and Trinity Donet, who was born in March 1975, we would have Creed Ellington Bailey, named after my heroes Creed Taylor and Duke Ellington, who arrived in January 1978, and Philip Doron Bailey, who was born in August 1981.) As a mother, she was strict in terms of discipline. The children didn’t dare cross Janet or lie to her, but when it came to social activities, she was more permissive than I was (when I was around). When I was in town, the family adhered to a stricter, more regimented set of home rules, and once I left to go out on tour, it would revert back to Janet’s way of running the household and being more lenient.
Looking back, I realize that Janet suffered as a result of my extramarital activities. She was a great mom, but she would hibernate in her room a lot, going through down periods and dealing with her sadness, especially after my affair with Jeanette. She was dealing with her own life issues of raising the children and running a household without me. After we moved the family back to Denver for a few years, Trinity had memories as a young girl of sharing a large brass bed with her mother. She would pretend to be asleep but listen to Janet weeping on the telephone and discussing with her aunt Debbie the different women I was involved with at the time. After a while, Janet began to smoke weed and drink E&J brandy to numb her sorrows.
As Janet suffered through the rejection and the isolation she was thrown into, she also started using street pharmaceuticals to mask her pain and hanging out with people who were far beneath her. I was the “main dude” in the Bailey family and within our social circles, and as my wife, she lived in my shadow. She probably should have kicked me to the curb, but in our reality, we both felt that once you got married, you stayed married, no matter what. Besides, Janet felt she didn’t have the necessary job skills or a college education to start over. What was she going to do with four children without a husband? Divorce scared the hell out of her. Staying together made sense. But with Janet using, and me womanizing out on the road, we drifted further apart.
In August 1978 Jeanette gave birth to a daughter she named Pili Asabi Foluke Titilayo Bailey, whom I affectionately call “Pili.” Pili is a Swahili name, meaning “second born.” The rest of her name translates to: Asabi—she is a choice birth; Foluke—placed in care of God; Titilayo—where happiness is eternal. Janet was pragmatic about the situation. She decided there was nothing she could do about it, so she accepted it. Whenever I wanted to visit with Pili, Janet insisted that I bring her to the house, and nowadays she’s part of the extended Bailey family. Pili and I are very close. Today she’s a successful career woman who has college degrees and is happily married with a son, who is my seventh grandchild.
—
For six years straight the band was almost always together. Not a day passed that band members—particularly me, Verdine, Larr
y, and Maurice—didn’t talk, exchange musical ideas, or check up on one another three, four, or even ten times. Under Maurice’s leadership, whenever we traveled, we kept pretty much to ourselves. While it wasn’t intentional, the EWF troupe was a close-knit one, a cult of sorts guided by our ethics and idealism. We were either touring, writing, or preparing new material and arrangements for the future, or in the studio.
Things were moving so fast, a year felt like a month. With very little spare time, we had little opportunity to stop and smell the roses and enjoy our accomplishments, let alone share them. Maurice didn’t necessarily run a profamily organization. For instance, there weren’t any relaxing Earth, Wind & Fire barbecues. We didn’t fraternize outside of the music. There weren’t any picnics or parties or family get-togethers to celebrate our success. That stuff didn’t happen.
The sold-out arena tours started around 1977, and the days became more and more of a blur. For security reasons we’d book an entire hotel floor, sequestered and isolated on one level in order to get us to the concert hall and back efficiently. Out on the road Verdine lived in his hotel room with his extensive wardrobe. Verdine loves his clothes and carried the most luggage. With four or five wardrobe changes a day, he had a different look going. Larry lived more like a hermit, a typical night person. Even during the day, he kept the curtains pulled tightly closed or covered the windows with a bedspread so he could sleep all day. Later we’d go out together to the clubs until two or three in the morning. With arrivals, departures, sound checks, and show times carried out with military precision, our movements were constantly accounted for. We couldn’t just walk out on the street or go anywhere unless the outing was prearranged.
With a total of sixty-seven people on the payroll and seven or eight tractor-trailers to haul our equipment and a propjet and buses to transport us, we whirled from city to city. Large-scale production effects had been added to our arena shows, with lights and explosions. Drums levitated! Once the big money came streaming in, Maurice put it back into the show, creating spectacles never before staged. He hired both the late, great magician Doug Henning and the famous illusionist David Copperfield as consultants, enhancing our show with state-of-the-art magic tricks and theatrical effects. Earth, Wind & Fire needed to be spectacular and cutting-edge at all times.
I wasn’t concerned about the extraordinary costs required to put on such extravagant shows. For example, Henning and Copperfield had concocted a magnificent and extraordinary opening. Before we came out, the house darkened, and you could hear these incredibly loud rumblings and frightening sounds. It was symbolic of the elements of the universe erupting. Then, after three loud crashes on a gong, came the booming voice of Leonard Smith:
“Presenting . . . Earth . . . Wind . . . and Fire . . .”
Nine tubes rose up from the fog-filled stage. Inside each pod was a member of EWF, “hibernating” and wearing a beautiful cape. After another large explosion the tubes disappeared, the fog cleared, and we emerged accompanied by a prerecorded bed of kalimba music! We danced around the stage, flashing the grand capes like matadors. Even our managers and roadie crews went bananas. They’d seen it in rehearsal and were still cheering! The screams from the crowd during this segment were so loud it was sometimes unbearable. One time Bob Cavallo was sitting in the middle of the house, right in the vortex of the noise, and the opening roar was so loud he dropped down to his knees and covered his ears.
We had built a substage under the stage proper so that we could perform sensational magic tricks, such as disappearing and reappearing throughout the show. We would climb up inside pyramids, and then the pyramids would explode and shatter, only to reveal us safe and sound, standing out among the audience. Our timing had to be perfect. We rehearsed over and over to the letter in order for everything to go off without a hitch. The magic tricks never had a major misfire or miscue.
There was one trick where we were ushered into a spaceship by a group of androids. The spaceship would fly upward and dangle over the stage. People would be literally shaking! It was priceless seeing the looks on their faces when the androids converged at the front of the stage, took off their masks—and were us! How did we do it? Out of respect for the magicians, we signed a waiver not to divulge Henning’s and Copperfield’s secret art forms. It’s best to keep the mystique.
We did have a few screw-ups. In one of the productions we would stand under a flying laser eagle and a giant floating globe. The stage was raked sharply to allow us to look down on the audience. The road crew would spread sticky Coca-Cola on the floor so that our feet stayed in place when the lights burst on. One night they forgot to put the soda on the floor and instead turned on the fog machine. As the fog wetted down the raked floor, we ran out and lost our balance, stumbling and bumbling around the stage. Satterfield flew up in the air feet first, landing hard on his ass. Larry and I burst into hysterical laughter at Sat’s expense.
I regret not having film footage of those monumental shows. It was not yet the video era, so not a lot of film exists in the archives. We never hired a professional movie crew to capture our performances. Plus, Maurice didn’t like TV. He was a purist, and during the late 1970s television sound wasn’t that great. Plus, television studio hands wouldn’t let us mix our own music. If you were doing live television, the guy in the control booth opening and closing the mics would be the same person in charge of mixing your extravagant sound needs. Maurice, the audiophile perfectionist, wanted it done right or not at all, and I had to agree with him. Even though we did shows like Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert and Burt Sugarman’s The Midnight Special, whenever we could, we’d go in and fix what was wrong or listen beforehand and mix it right. As big as Earth, Wind & Fire were, in the long run our lack of television exposure cost us. Our fan base could have been much bigger if more people had known how amazing an experience our live appearances truly were! Due to our lack of film and video exposure, the band did not have a definitive face, like The Rolling Stones had with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, for instance. We should have been branded better visually, especially during the span of our hit records.
To keep our standards high we also began to use topflight stage directors and choreographers. At my suggestion the band flew out to New York to meet with George Faison, the famed Broadway choreographer of The Wiz. I had seen the show in New York, and its pacing and energy were so tight and dynamic that I had excitedly told Maurice about it.
Soon Faison was instructing us on how to move around and dance more eloquently onstage. We weren’t a band that was into choreography—until George came on the scene. He taught us double pirouettes and so many moves that we felt like dance students, and I still remember the long, grueling rehearsals. Damn, man! What did this have to do with the music? But it was necessary to get us to where we had to be. Our goal was to move so naturally onstage that we weren’t thinking about it. George also advised us on the set list with regard to pacing and timing. He monitored the patter between songs and the way we would close each show. George was responsible for teaching me how to hit my mark.
Next we hired the acclaimed Hollywood costume designer Bill Whitten to create exotic, one-of-a-kind glittering outfits—some costing as much as $20,000 apiece. They made our stage entrances quite an exhibition. Bill was a flamboyant and eccentric character who had also designed wardrobes for the Jacksons, Elton John, Michael Jackson, and Neil Diamond. He wore fancy brocade slippers and a tunic and had flowing shoulder-length hair. He would scour the world in search of fabrics, spend months detailing the costumes, and then bring his creations over with his helpers, ordering us, “Try this on. See how this looks on you.” He had an incredible imagination, and was way out there! He once dressed me as a royal Egyptian pharaoh in full regalia—gold lamé and chains with intricate crystal and rhinestone beading dripping from the fabric. Bill’s creations looked astounding under the bright lights. We employed a wardrobe crew backstage to help us in and out of the quick costume c
hanges. Louis Wells, our current wardrobe adviser, was then a young man fresh out of college, and worked with Bill Whitten during that period. us.
Although Cavallo was against our spending so lavishly on costumes and onstage productions, money was no object when it came to the Concept. Out on the road EWF was a dominating force as pop, R&B, and rock fans thronged to our shows. We were selling out the Los Angeles Forum five nights in a row, followed by three or four consecutive nights at Madison Square Garden in New York and the Spectrum in Philly. Leading up to a tour, Maurice would rehearse (and pay) the band for about six weeks. To expend that much prep time today would be cost-prohibitive. However, at the time, nobody felt overly concerned about our finances. At least not yet.
By the spring of 1976, we began work on our next album, set to be titled Spirit. “Getaway” would be the breakout single that opened the album, another multiformat hit. The second single, “On Your Face,” would do okay as a midcharting record on the R&B charts. In addition to our success on the Top 40 and R&B airwaves, adult/contemporary radio, aimed at older listeners aged thirty-five to fifty-four, began to heavily embrace Earth, Wind & Fire, particularly our ballads. While airplay on “adult” radio wouldn’t spark the megasales that Top 40 or R&B—later dubbed “urban radio”—did, adults would join our loyal fan base for years to come.
During the recording of Spirit, Charles Stepney ramped up his arrangements in Chicago on six of the nine tunes. Meanwhile, Larry had written the music for a new song in Los Angeles. After we finished recording it at three in the morning, we commented on how beautiful it sounded. Yet Larry seemed strangely melancholy. Originally titled “I Gave You Love,” Larry’s song would serve as the title track for the new album once Maurice added lyrics to it and renamed it “Spirit.”
Shining Star: Braving the Elements of Earth, Wind & Fire Page 17