It was a shock, a wake-up call beyond description. At that point I was thirty-two years old. Lord have mercy, life had just gotten deadly serious. The $2,500-a-week salary that I had been counting on, and which I had comfortably lived on, was no more—done, over and out! How would I deal with it?
It happened rather unceremoniously. We each received a letter in our pay packets advising us to remove all of our personal possessions and musical gear from storage, otherwise they would be sold out from under us. The band owning its own sound and lights had created a huge financial burden and tied up a lot of money, and we had also paid a quarter of a million dollars for wardrobes. Now the equipment and road cases were to be liquidated! Tragically, the wardrobe cases containing the grandest costumes went with them. Most were not rescued. Years later I was contacted by someone who had bought one of the wardrobe cases for a few hundred dollars, wanting to know if I wanted to buy back the costumes! In hindsight maybe I should have, but emotionally, at the time, I didn’t appreciate the legacy. I just thought it was over with.
We could have been forewarned that EWF was going to be disbanded. By using the term “back burner,” Maurice seemed to imply that Earth, Wind & Fire was on hiatus. Walking out of that infamous meeting, that’s not how I saw it. In my opinion Earth, Wind & Fire had broken up, and anybody who said differently was in denial. You don’t tell people that you’re going to sell all their stuff in storage when you go on hiatus. You don’t stop speaking to band members for the next few years.
Who could have conceived how big Earth, Wind & Fire was going to be? Who could have foreseen our demise? Looking back, we needed a proverbial corner man, as in a boxing match. Had we still had Charles Stepney and Clive Davis in our corner—like Michael Jackson had Quincy Jones—we might have been able to make it through our creative malaise. Clive was wise, a sage. I learned a lot whenever I spoke with him.
The questions became, What happens next? How do you reinvent yourself? EWF was an archetypal band of the 1970s, and yet we didn’t understand the dynamics of the 1980s. Michael Jackson understood the 1980s. Maybe the Concept didn’t apply anymore. The world wasn’t about peace, love, and positivism. The 1980s were about economics and music for cold hard cash. And we didn’t anticipate the video world being as influential as it would become. We shot videos merely as promotional vehicles, while Michael Jackson premiered them as major milestone events. We both had our long string of hit records, but we dominated our era with spectacular concert events, while Michael Jackson dominated his throughout the multimedia age in people’s living rooms.
In the end it was Maurice’s decision to disband EWF the way he did. The managers worked for him, and not the other way around. Who knows if Reese realized what the consequences of his actions might be? He claims today that while the breakup might have appeared abrupt, it was not done impulsively, and that he thought long and hard before doing it, and was sensitive to the impact it would have on everyone involved.
My own belief is that Maurice was overwhelmed and overleveraged, and in response he panicked. Soon afterward he would shut down the ARC label, then split with Cavallo-Ruffalo and Massenburg. Was he in a space where he was sabotaging himself? It’s what New Age guru Deepak Chopra calls “the fight-or-flight response.” Reese took flight because the musical era was changing, and he reacted by fighting back with automatic anger and fear. Maybe he had too much static in his head, and his strong personality worked against him. After enjoying success as an outside producer working with artists like Deniece Williams, The Emotions, Jennifer Holiday, and Barbra Streisand, Maurice might have felt that he had become more important than the band.
I couldn’t help but feel bitter. Bottom line, I was dumb, naïve, and inexperienced. On one level I was intimidated and afraid. On another level, I was shocked, appalled, and crushed with disbelief. On yet another level, I was in denial. But then the recovery started. At some point, you have to recover.
I made it through, grounded in my Christian faith. In retrospect, who could have known the best way to react and then emerge from a painful breakup? For me, I had to forgive. Not for anybody else, but for myself. I had to look inside myself and say, “Whatever is in store, God will continue to take care of me.”
So I made my decision to go it alone. What would be in store for me as a solo artist?
I was caught in a real bind. I couldn’t become a session player because I didn’t read music like studio players, and I hadn’t cultivated those kinds of connections. After singing and playing with EWF for eleven years, how could I go to somebody and say, “I need a gig”?
I went home and examined my personal assets. I had a house in Los Angeles that my family was living in, and another house in Inglewood, where my sister Beverly stayed. Janet and I had a twelve-unit piece of income property on Normandie Avenue in LA. When I went down to Pep Boys on Pico Boulevard to purchase something, my EWF credit card was rejected. I panicked! It was too much, so I told Janet, “Let’s just move back to Denver. We can pare down our lifestyle by leaving California.”
So we sold our stuff and moved back to Denver. But in hindsight, I saw that you can’t go back home. I may have been overreacting, but we did move, and the family ended up staying there for four years. And that’s where my children found out what community is about; we didn’t have that same sense of neighborhood in Los Angeles.
For the rest of the band, the breakup was a nightmare. Some members lost their homes and fortunes, and some went into counseling after suffering nervous breakdowns. Even Maurice’s brothers weren’t immune from the axe. Maurice and Verdine weren’t speaking to each other during this terrible time, and Freddie had moved on. Verdine became a record producer and directed music videos. For a while Ralph Johnson wrote songs and coproduced an album by The Temptations with Al McKay, which begat the hit “Treat Her Like a Lady,” but he ended up working at the Federated Group on Sunset and LaBrea, selling stereo equipment. When Maurice’s girlfriend came into the store to buy a stereo for Maurice’s son, it was Ralph who had to sell it to her. He even did some work on a construction site.
Prior to the Meeting, Cavallo-Ruffalo had scored me a solo record deal with Columbia, and my first album, Continuation, which I had cut in 1983 with the late George Duke as producer, came out after the release of Electric Universe. The record was straight-down-the-middle R&B/pop and featured George Duke on keyboards and my friend Nathan East on bass, along with guest backing vocal support from Jeffrey Osborne and Sister (“We Are Family”) Sledge. Jerry Hey arranged the horns. For my solo debut, I could sing in my tenor voice as well as my trademark falsetto.
As a result of Continuation’s modest Top 20 success on the R&B album charts, I had something to build on toward a future career. Becoming a gospel singer gave me another platform. In 1984 I recorded a gospel album for Word Records on their Myrrh label called The Wonders of His Love, which went gold and won a Grammy. I traveled on tour with pop gospel star Amy Grant, and refocused. I became wiser about band finances and how people were to be compensated. Sometimes I paid my sidemen more than I was making, and I played in smaller halls, but at least I was musically active.
26
EASY LOVER
In 1984, as I was preparing to work on my second album for Columbia, I launched my new post-EWF pop/R&B solo career with team Cavallo, Ruffalo & Fargnoli managing my musical affairs. Janet and the family were headquartered in Colorado, and I kept an apartment in Los Angeles.
I went to see Phil Collins play at the Forum in Los Angeles with his band Genesis on their Mama Tour that January. My former cohorts, the Phenix Horns, were playing with him, and Sat and Don, now part of Phil’s musical entourage, had invited me to the show. Admittedly I wasn’t that familiar with Genesis and Phil’s music, but I was blown away by the concert. Internationally Phil was bigger than life and was playing everywhere. While I was writing and gathering material for my second record, I told Jamie Shoop, who worked with my ma
nagement team, “I’d like to cover one of Phil’s songs. Do you think I could get a song from him?” She was able to get in touch with him and found out that Phil was a huge Earth, Wind & Fire fan. One conversation led to another, and management suggested reaching out to him to see if he wanted to produce the entire album! Why not? It was worth a try.
Phil consented to do it—wow!—and as he and I had exchanged songs, I made plans to go to London. When I was getting on the plane to England, Roxanne Seeman, who had worked on “Sailaway” with me on the Faces album, brought me a cassette of a song that she had written with Billie Hughes called “Walking on the Chinese Wall.” I took it with me. Ralph Johnson submitted a song he cowrote called “Go.” Then Phil played me a song he had found called “Children of the Ghetto” and we added that to the list, too.
We spent a great deal of productive time writing songs and recording in London. I brought my bass player friend, Nathan East, along with me for the project. I told Phil he needed to get to know Nathan, because he was the ultimate cat! Nathan ended up working with Phil for many years, as well as with Eric Clapton. Nathan later joined the smooth jazz quartet Fourplay with pianist Bob James, guitarist Lee Ritenour, and drummer Harvey Mason.
Working with Phil was the best. We were the same age, and he has an easygoing personality and is unassuming and not egotistical in any way. For him, it was all about the music, and he wasn’t caught up in the star thing that was exploding around him. We would just show up at the studio and roll tape, and after the day’s work Phil would turn us on to some incredible Indian food joints around London—not to mention imbibing many pints of lager and lime. I started gaining weight when I was over in the UK, so I took tennis lessons and worked out in the gym when we weren’t making music.
After we’d finished recording, we laid down the horn parts in Los Angeles. Of course I used the Phenix Horns and hired Tom Tom 84 to arrange them. Then it was back to London, where, as we listened to the finished tunes, we realized that we needed one more up-tempo song. I started singing a bass line in the studio, and Nathan jumped on the keyboards and added a part. Then Phil climbed into the drum booth, and after we laid down the basics, we finished up a rough mix of an instrumental track. Phil then took the track home that night and wrote the lyrics. When we came back to the studio the next day, Phil and I performed the duet. At that point, “Easy Lover” was done, and so was the album, Chinese Wall. It was released in the United States in December 1984 and in the UK in February 1985.
“Easy Lover” was one of the biggest pop records of 1985, and catapulted me to a whole new musical plateau. Oh, my God! I thought I had seen hit-record success with EWF, but it was nothing like this. Compared to the crossover track record of EWF, this was really the big time. The record was flying out the door like popcorn, selling 500,000 singles a week, and the record company promotion people were going crazy. It was wild. Wherever I was, driving all over the United States, even in the so-called flyover states between the East and West coasts, “Easy Lover” was a radio staple in heavy rotation on four different contemporary music formats—Top 40, urban, adult/contemporary, and album radio. The closest I had come to having such a monster hit was with “After the Love Is Gone.” “Easy Lover” also did well internationally and stayed number one in the United Kingdom for four weeks. It was on Top of the Pops and BBC Radio One so often that every hipster in London and every clothing boutique in the UK were blaring the song. Later that year, we won an MTV Video Music Award, and “Easy Lover” was nominated for a Grammy.
Chinese Wall did well for me. It gave me autonomy, confidence, and authority in my own life and career. It also gave me a greater appreciation for the legacy of Earth, Wind & Fire and for what we had contributed musically. I could now view EWF from a different, more aerial perspective, after having been out of the eye of the storm for a few years.
I had become my own shining star, and I now viewed the music of EWF more objectively, realizing that its legacy was far bigger than the sum of its hit records. Maurice was right when he taught me to be true to the music and to the Concept. I discovered that our body of work was something I should be proud of. It had a lineage all its own, and it would only grow more valuable in the years to come.
—
When young musicians and singers ask me for professional advice, I tell them that in order to succeed in the arts, you have to love what you’re doing more than you hate the changes and difficulties you’re going to have to endure to survive in a business as wacky as the music industry. Case in point is what happened to me following the success of Chinese Wall.
The record executives at Columbia were elated with the success of “Easy Lover,” and came to me with an idea for my third album. In 1985 the label sent me back to London, where we put together an all-star lineup of players to help me record my next batch of songs. The list of contributors was awesome. Joining me in the studio were guitarists Jeff Beck, Nile Rodgers, and Ray Parker Jr., keyboardist George Duke, and Phil Collins returning on drums. We recorded a few songs, and then Columbia sent me to New York City to work in the studio with two other hot production/songwriting teams: Full Force and the System. Later I met up with Nile Rodgers in Manhattan, and we cut another set of songs. I also went into the studio in Los Angeles with Randy Jackson, who had just become Columbia’s new West Coast head of A&R.
This whole musical course played out for almost two years as we stockpiled more and more new songs. The reason the project was taking so long was that there had been multiple changes of personnel within the label, and responsibility for my record was transferred to different A&R staffers. Hence the stops and starts. Some thought that my third album should be more pop, while others felt it should veer stylistically toward an urban/R&B sound. As a result of the back-and-forth creative process, I was no longer touring and generating income to support my wife and four children, whom I had since brought back to Los Angeles from Colorado. Although I was becoming uncomfortable sitting on the sidelines and living off royalties, I didn’t make waves or cause a stink about not having a follow-up record released in a timely manner.
Finally, in 1986 my third solo album, Inside Out, was quietly released. It was a hodgepodge of different directions and producers, and didn’t chart the success of Chinese Wall.
Soon after I was summoned to a meeting with Randy at the label’s Century City headquarters. He hemmed and hawed nervously about the progress of the record’s release and finally confessed that because of the many changes of label executives, including the appointment of Tommy Mottola as their new president, Columbia was making big changes. Randy talked about the label’s shift of creative direction and suggested I meet with other record companies. He said that he had gone to bat for me with his superiors, but now I was being dropped from the label!
I put on my best front and smiled and walked out the door, sunken and depressed. I had waited all this time, and now I was immersed in a cash-flow crunch as a result of the downtime and broken promises.
I got into my car and headed back home. As I drove onto the freeway, I was flooded with and paralyzed by every negative emotion that an artist could suffer—anger, disappointment, rage, trepidation, resentment, bitterness, and fear. I was so scared, upset, and rattled that I pulled the car over. Then I simply bowed my head and prayed. I told God, “Lord, you’ve taken care of me and my family this far along, and I trust that you will continue to help me. Right now I feel horrible, but I’m putting my life into your hands with the fervent hope that this will work out in some way.”
I soldiered on for a while doing a few musical collaborations, and years later, I turned on the radio and heard, out of the blue, a song by the newest hip-hop sensation, MC Hammer. Hammer had just scored a megamonster hit called “U Can’t Touch This,” a song that dominated radio and the MTV video channel. When his album Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ’Em came out, it featured the song I heard, which had an all-too-familiar riff and sample. It turned out tha
t MC Hammer had covered an obscure song called “On Your Face,” which I had cowritten with Charles Stepney and Maurice White. Hammer’s album went on to sell nine million units! The publishing royalty check I received for one-third ownership of that song was staggering—and came just in time to meet my family’s economic needs. Hammer also sent me a framed platinum album of Please Hammer, which hangs in my home studio. I looked at this whole roller-coaster ordeal as a journey of faith and trust in God.
—
During the whirlwind cycle of “Easy Lover” I had heard nothing from Maurice. He didn’t call to congratulate me on my hit record. But, then, why would he call and pass on his good wishes? What was he going to say? He had kicked me out with no severance pay after eleven years’ service, and at that point there was no contact between Maurice and any of the band members. Verdine wasn’t treated any better than anybody else. The two brothers continued to speak rarely during the “hiatus.”
One day Larkin Arnold, a Columbia vice president on the West Coast, ran into me at a CBS record function in Santa Barbara. Larkin asked me straight up, “Why don’t you talk to Maurice? You guys have to get back together, man. You need to call him, and you need to put the band back together!”
I stared at him blankly and said nothing. Larkin got the message. Then he said, “Okay. I’m going to call him.”
I can’t honestly remember if I contacted Maurice or if he called me after Larkin broke the ice, but we did have a sit-down after not having spoken to each other in a few years. We talked about what it would be like if we got back together. Cut a couple of records and take it slow, on a trial basis? As Maurice and I spoke more seriously about the matter, I told myself that I needed to view the whole scenario as if we were entering a new era. I had to forgive Maurice and move on, but when we decided to re-form in 1987, I assured him that things were going to be different. My newfound success had put me on a different bargaining level. Chinese Wall had been certified gold in the United States in 1985, while Maurice’s long-awaited self-titled solo debut on Columbia barely cracked 200,000 copies that same year. My solo success forced Maurice to deal with me as an equal—just as Phil Collins had treated me as an equal—and not as a little brother.
Shining Star: Braving the Elements of Earth, Wind & Fire Page 21