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

by Bailey, Philip

  Maurice would debut more artists under the ARC banner, including another Ramsey Lewis record to follow up the successful 1974 soul jazz classic Sun Goddess, which Ramsey had made with Maurice and Stepney in 1974. Ramsey’s first ARC record, Tequila Mockingbird, would be coproduced by Larry Dunn and include guest appearances by Verdine, Al, and Johnny Graham. Maurice would next introduce two new artists to the ARC roster, a talented young female vocalist named Deniece Williams and the hot-looking female trio The Emotions.

  Fueled by the money he scored from Columbia Records to debut ARC, Maurice built himself a lavish headquarters for ARC that we called the Complex. When Maurice renegotiated his deal and was resigned by Columbia, Reese scored his boatload of money from CBS to set up his new musical empire. The Complex, situated near Pico Boulevard and Corinth in West Los Angeles, was a center for offices, a recording studio, and rehearsal rooms. Reese spent gobs of money to remodel the building. I believe he changed the new carpeting in the Complex more than once because he didn’t like how it looked once it was installed.

  Shortly afterward we signed new contracts with Maurice’s company on account of his new pact with Columbia. Then, when Maurice scheduled his big gala opening of the studio and record company, the members of the band were not invited! Not only were we not part of the festivities, we didn’t even get a share of any of the ARC money.

  On January 9, 1979, we appeared at the United Nations for a high-profile concert on behalf of UNICEF (United Nations International Children’s Fund), a benefit entitled “A Gift of Song.” We performed “September” at the General Assembly in New York City. Rod Stewart, ABBA, Olivia Newton-John, John Denver, Kris Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge, and Donna Summer also took part, and while some of the artists, like ABBA and the Bee Gees, cheated and lip-synched their songs, the concert raised a million bucks. I remember how aware I was that we were within a whole new power circle, even though we had been enjoying our share of massive and influential pop-culture success.

  A few weeks later, on February 15, Earth, Wind & Fire snared three Grammy Awards—Best R&B Vocal Performance by a Duo, Group or Chorus for All ’N All; Best Arrangement for Accompanying Vocalists for “Got to Get You into My Life”; and Best R&B Instrumental Performance for “Runnin’,” the instrumental we had slaved over in the studio.

  The most perplexing thing about the Grammy Awards ceremony was that, when we won ours in the 1970s, the R&B categories were not televised. Our Grammys were simply announced and awarded prior to the telecast. We earned seven Grammys—and not a single televised acceptance speech. Our Best R&B Vocal Performance by a Duo, Group or Chorus in 1979 didn’t make it onto the airwaves. How ridiculous was that?

  While we were ecstatic over the accumulating accolades and awards, I started to suspect the band members were being kept in the dark about Maurice’s business dealings. At recent shows a distinct separation vibe had been going down. After each concert Leonard Smith would usher Maurice into a private limo and off they’d go. We didn’t see Reese at the hotel, and he began to hang out with the band members less and less. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, change was imminent, though not necessarily in a good way.

  23

  THE WHITE BOY BEHIND THE BLACK VELVET CURTAIN

  Despite the momentum of All ’N All and the additional infusion of hit singles like “September” and “Got to Get You into My Life,” we still felt the loss of Charles Stepney, especially in the songwriting and arranging departments. Maurice was feeling pressure to fill the void and to keep our winning streak going. We needed a new personality to help energize our musical inner sanctum.

  Enter a twenty-nine-year-old piano player from Victoria, British Columbia, named David Walter Foster. Foster had migrated to Southern California and had begun playing around the Los Angeles music scene. In 1974 he was hired to play piano for the house band backing up the first live performances of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which began its first long-run engagement at the Roxy in Hollywood. After a year and two weeks he was promoted to music director of the production. The Rocky Horror Picture Show turned out to be a fortuitous stepping-stone. Foster would later meet young session musicians like David Paich (son of the great West Coast jazz arranger Marty Paich) and Jeff and Steve Porcaro, who would help Foster break into the tight ranks of the LA studio musician scene.

  Between 1975 and 1979 Foster became a much-sought-after studio musician. Even though his studio pay quickly graduated from ordinary “demo” scale to single scale and double or triple scale, he would soon experience the potential downside to being a busy on-call session player, and risk getting burned out.

  In 1978 Foster and David Paich cowrote the disco hit “Got to Be Real” for songstress Cheryl Lynn. By the end of the seventies, Foster’s ambition was to phase out of his role as a hired-gun session man by scoring a gig with Earth, Wind & Fire as a songwriter, arranger, and studio hand, hoping that could help clear the way for him one day to become a successful record producer and songwriter.

  David had long been an enormous fan of Earth, Wind & Fire. In December 1975, when Tower Records in Los Angeles stayed open past midnight to allow our fans to be the first to purchase a copy of Gratitude, he stood at the front of the line. At that time, in addition to his session work, David was also a journeyman keyboardist for a pop group called Skylark, which scored a one-off hit on Capitol Records called “Wildflower.” He next formed an album-rock trio called Airplay with guitarist Jay Graydon. Many of the backup musicians who played on Airplay’s lone album would later unite to form Toto. An ex-hippie from Northern California named Bill Champlin, who had played in his notoriously funky San Francisco rock band, the Sons of Champlin, would also contribute background vocals.

  Foster and Graydon sat down with Champlin and wrote the melody and lyrics for an extraordinary song that would forever change the course of David’s musical career, as well as ours. “After the Love Is Gone” was one of those once-in-a-lifetime songs cast in the style of “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” by the Righteous Brothers. Foster and Graydon wrote the melody while Champlin wrote the lyrics.

  When Foster and his friends finished writing the tune, David performed the piece—sitting on a bed—for one of his music industry friends, a woman by the name of Carole Childs. (Childs would later join the David Geffen Company as an A&R executive.) When David finished the song, she was floored.

  “I’ve got to introduce you to Maurice White.”

  Childs set up an audition for Foster at Sunset Sound Studios for Maurice and the band, and to play us his new song. Maurice had already told Verdine and me about this new kid he wanted to check out. David recalls sitting down at the piano, his heart nearly pounding out of his chest. He had been an admirer of EWF since its inception, and here was his big chance to plug a song for us.

  Admittedly David wasn’t that great of a singer, but I knew right away that “After the Love Is Gone” had the makings of a major hit. In our business, song is king. It’s what creates careers. You can take a lesser singer and give him a great song and make him a shining star. There was magic in the room when we first heard it, and while everybody felt the vibe, you never knew for sure what would transpire further up the management/record company chain of command, and whether they would love it or not. Foster waited for the verdict from Maurice.

  “We’re going to record that song,” Maurice assured Foster, looking him in the eye and smiling.

  David replied, half dumbfounded, “When?”

  “Tonight.”

  That night we retreated to the studio and rolled twenty-four tracks on David’s song.

  Our treatment of “After the Love Is Gone” would levitate from verse to chorus. Maurice’s steady vocal on the lower registers smoldered throughout the verses, counterbalanced by the soaring falsetto parts I provided on the chorus, which contained the hook of the song. By the time the song reached its climax, highlighted by a searing bebop-styl
ed saxophone solo by Don Myrick, it had become a tour de force.

  “After the Love” was not an easy piece to sing, and from a strictly technical standpoint, you could make the argument that it is flawed. Its overambitious architecture demands a multioctave range, and theoretically, to do it justice one person can’t perform the entire song alone. Maybe it should have been sung by a female vocalist with a higher and wider gospel range. Luckily EWF had the necessary combined range and vocal firepower to handle it. We solved the inherent problems in the song’s structure by having Maurice do the verses with me singing the chorus, enabling us to capture the breadth of its notes and emotions. (It wasn’t the first time Maurice and I had to double up roles to rescue a song.)

  After the fruitful collaboration on “After the Love Is Gone,” Maurice invited David to join him and the band at Reese’s twelve-acre compound in Carmel, California, for a writing session to compose more new material for the upcoming I Am album. Maurice’s Carmel estate was awesome. It had three houses on it—and not just casitas or guest quarters but full-blown houses! Maurice’s was the largest, a very homey and warm single-level, Mediterranean-style home. The furnishings and spiritual artifacts were carefully arranged according to feng shui principles. Freddie had his place, while Verdine stayed in the third house on the property. The estate had multiple swimming pools and plenty of land, with orange groves and vineyards. While it didn’t have an oceanside view, the beauty of the trees and countryside was exquisite. I know Reese had spent a whole lot of money on the property. For example, after putting up rich mahogany walls, he plastered over them when he decided that they weren’t what he wanted. I also believe some people took him for a financial ride. The front door alone cost $35,000. We occasionally did some rehearsing up there in a small room, and at other times some writing. Only a select few band members were invited to spend time there. While the rest of us were thrilled to be buying our first homes in our early twenties in nicer areas of Los Angeles, Maurice lived in Bel Air and enjoyed the luxury of a sprawling Carmel estate as his retreat.

  To say that Reese and Foster’s writing session was prolific would almost be an understatement. In a single sitting, from 7:00 p.m. until 7:00 a.m. the next morning, they sat at the grand piano in Maurice’s living room and wrote eight more songs for the album.

  The creative process opened an artistic floodgate. There were no musical rules. Together David and Maurice would create the germ of a song and then compose a few noteworthy hooks with the aid of a cassette recorder. Foster took his place at the piano and began playing various lines and phrases. The key was to be musically adventurous, to cast the creative chains of the writing process aside, the same methodology Maurice and I used to collaborate on songs like “Reasons” and “Devotion.” Anything goes! There was no attempt to adhere to any musical formats or to stay within certain commercial boundaries, be it R&B, pop, black, white, or beat-oriented dance music. Song was king.

  “Just play, and I will sing along. Whatever you want to do, do it,” Maurice told Foster.

  The more adventurous the two got musically, the more Maurice thrived, and the more he encouraged Foster to flesh out the various musical ideas that came pouring out. It was as if the music were flowing through them and not from them, a very liberating and productive experience for the young Canadian. As is typical in many pop-songwriting collaborations, Maurice and David labored primarily on the music. Soon after, Maurice would dispatch lyricist Allee Willis to finish the bulk of the words.

  Especially striking was how much leeway Maurice was willing to give David in order to keep the process moving. Foster, whose main diet at the time was fast food and grilled cheese sandwiches, managed to score a hot dog during the wee hours of the morning, a very unlikely entrée to be consumed at Maurice’s healthy compound. Foster’s sitting at the piano with a hot dog in one hand and a cigarette in the other were major taboos that Maurice abhorred. Yet he tolerated David’s bad habits in order to not break their concentration by having Foster leave the piano to go outside and smoke.

  The majority of the songs for I Am came from that one writing session in Carmel. From there we took the material to band rehearsals in New York, and later to the studios in Hollywood—which were in three different locations in Los Angeles: Sunset Sound, Hollywood Sound Recorders, and Davlen Sound Studios. George Massenburg engineered all sessions using his proprietary EQ (equalization) system and tight microphone techniques, keeping the sound crisp and clean.

  Foster played acoustic piano on nearly every song and keyboards alongside Larry. In order to keep his piano sonically isolated, he performed his piano parts behind a thick black velvet curtain enlisted to prevent sound leaking in from the drums and the bass. During the sessions, when Jet magazine dropped by to write a feature about us, we joked about “keeping the white boy behind the curtain so that nobody could see him.”

  Foster also helped to arrange and coarrange most of the nine tracks. In addition he turned us on to Jerry Hey, a remarkable horn and string arranger who would help us fill the Charles Stepney void. Like Step and Tom Tom 84, Jerry was a master at creating super-tight horn and string charts. He had done some fine arrangements on Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall album. Arranging in the late 1970s meant no synthesizers or computer programs. It was a pen-to-paper operation, much like what Mozart and Duke Ellington had accomplished centuries and years earlier.

  Foster was so proud of his work on I Am that he wanted to impress his studio friends with the headway he had made within the group. While later working on an Alice Cooper session with Jeff Porcaro and David Paich, he sneaked into the studio vault and pulled out the twenty-four-track tapes for I Am and brought them up on the studio monitors to play them for his friends.

  Besides “After the Love Is Gone,” I Am featured a bevy of tight, catchy hits, with “Boogie Wonderland” being the most commercial tune of the bunch. That song, written by pop songwriters Jon Lind and Allee Willis, was originally presented to Al McKay, who was in the studio recording an ARC act, Curtis the Brothers, for Maurice and Cavallo-Ruffalo. During that time we had vowed we would never cut a disco song. The first time and last time I visited Studio 54 in New York City, I felt utter disdain for disco, because so many of the songs sounded monotonous, fueled by robotic beats. After Al cut an instrumental track for “Boogie Wonderland,” it was Cavallo’s idea to hand the tune over to EWF.

  When we agreed to cut “Boogie Wonderland,” Maurice and I decided that if we were actually going to record a disco number, we would pull out all the stops and do it our way. The arrangements and orchestrations were punchy, our response to the dreaded disco era. It was Al and Maurice’s idea to use a slamming female trio, The Emotions, that had just joined Reese’s new ARC label, to augment the groove. Influenced by German producer Giorgio Moroder’s immaculate beat-driven hits with Donna Summer, we took it a step further and featured three layers of vocals, with Maurice singing lead, plus The Emotions, and my voice added to the top of the heap. Cutting “Boogie Wonderland” was actually a quick no-brainer. The four-to-the-floor kick drum at about a hundred twenty beats per minute, plus the high hat on the upbeat, automatically made it disco, while Verdine kicked in a walking disco bass riff augmented by David Foster’s flashy piano intro, punctuated with traces of Latin percussion. I actually found Allee Willis’s lyrics to be deceptively deep and cerebral and I’ve grown to love the tune, which we use to open our live shows today.

  While David worked with us in the studio, Foster was amazed that the more we added to our studio tracks, the better our music sounded! For most artists and producers, adding superfluous instruments and vocals weighs down the sound and obscures the vocal performances. With EWF, the more guitar parts, vocal harmonies, keyboard fills, and horn and/or string charts we added, the better and richer our sound became. It’s one of those intangibles about the magic of Earth, Wind & Fire’s music. Our arrangements are busy—there’s always something going on—yet there’s clari
ty in that busyness. The golden rule in producing popular music is “Don’t let anything get in the way of the vocal.” We break that rule all the time, which is one aspect of how we achieve our unique sound.

  At the conclusion of the I Am sessions, David was informed that if EWF released their versions of his songs, Maurice would be entitled to a piece of the publishing royalties. David, realizing his rookie bargaining status, agreed. He received good news with the bad. Because he had worked so diligently on the album, Maurice gave him a half point’s credit on the album—which amounted to one-half percent of the album revenues. In addition to being paid session and arranging fees, David was compensated as a cowriter on six of the nine tunes featured on the album, as well as given a small share as a producer. To the chagrin of many of the band members, David ended up getting what no one else in the group ever received—a healthy piece of the action from an EWF album!

  24

  “MAN, THE TUNES IS PISSED . . .”

  As a major African American superstar act grossing amazing ticket sales all over the world, Earth, Wind & Fire began to be publicly criticized. We were scolded by the NAACP for not hiring enough African American stage hands and road crew. Not only were we spending a tremendous amount of money to buy, operate, and transport our sound, lights, and staging, but we also hired highly experienced and expensive technicians who had worked with other large touring rock bands, mostly white bands like Electric Light Orchestra and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. These were the high-roller acts that featured levitating pianos and drums that spun around. We needed a special caliber of stagehand capable of entering an enormous empty shell of an arena like Madison Square Garden and hanging our vast array of speakers, lights, and hydraulic stage gear. We didn’t hire on the basis of color, but qualification. Looking back, perhaps we should have been more diligent in employing personnel from the African American communities.