Traveling Soul

by Todd Mayfield

  Black soldiers like Uncle Kenny had to deal with double rejection on their return home. Not only did the militant antiwar crowd greet them with hateful sneers, the country for which they risked their lives still refused to accept their humanity and respect their basic rights. Five heavy years had passed since the Civil Rights Act, and it seemed nothing had changed but the law. Reality remained rigged against black Americans. Many retaliated.

  A Time magazine poll in 1970 found that more than two million black Americans counted themselves as “revolutionaries” and believed only a “readiness to use violence will ever get them equality.” The poll also showed that the number of those who believed blacks “will probably have to resort to violence to win rights” had risen 10 percent since Malcolm X’s assassination. Meanwhile, the Black Panthers continued gaining support even as their organization fractured. Newton said, “Every one who gets in office promises the same thing. They promise full employment and decent housing; the Great Society, the New Frontier. All of these names, but no real benefits. No effects are felt in the black community, and black people are tired of being deceived and duped.”

  Check Out Your Mind hinted at the way my father would deal with these depressing changes. The album pushed the Impressions further into funk than they’d ever gone with the singles “(Baby) Turn On to Me” and “Check Out Your Mind,” which hit numbers six and three, respectively, on the R&B chart. The album was a good effort, although it only rose as high as twenty-two R&B and missed the pop chart. Still, it sold based on the power of the singles. Curtom had another hit to its name.

  The album’s release deepened fractures within the group. While Fred and Sam always stood behind Curtis’s songs, neither liked “Check Out Your Mind.” Fred, who spent so many late nights listening to my father pluck out new songs in his hotel room, saying, “Curtis, you just wrote us another hit,” couldn’t say the same about “Check Out Your Mind.” “That was a tune that I didn’t really care about,” Fred said. “I don’t know what he was thinking where writing that song was concerned. But it never killed me.”

  That particular track also illustrated the musical reasons my father needed to go solo. Having to account for three voices didn’t give him room to do much but sing on the beat. He couldn’t deliver lines in idiosyncratic ways that came to him spontaneously because he had two other guys whose job was to follow his lead. As a result, it changed the subtext, the attitude, and the meaning he could imply behind his lyrics. He needed to be funkier, freer. While the interplay among the three voices added power to a song like “People Get Ready,” it detracted from the funky grooves Dad wanted to explore.

  He felt ambivalent. On one hand, he said, “Of course, the Impressions were just the perfect bunch of fellas to be able to express yourself.” On the other, he said, “Not being with the Impressions allowed me, in my mind, to be more free about things I felt I had to say. It was more risky for the Impressions to sing songs like ‘Choice of Colors’ and ‘We’re a Winner.’ For getting airplay, that wasn’t the norm. I didn’t mind taking those chances myself, but I was always concerned of the fellas’ feelings.”

  As the Impressions finished recording Check Out Your Mind, Dad decided to leave the group. He didn’t say anything, but he began writing songs for his first solo album, more self-confident than ever, and conscious of the anger fueling the militant surge in black culture. He was also conscious of another feeling in himself—after touring Young Mods, he wanted to focus on building Curtom. The constant slog of touring always weighed heavy on him, and by focusing on the label, he saw a way to shuck that weight while keeping his career moving forward. As he said, “I’ve been on the road for twelve or thirteen years now and I can’t recall living in my hometown for any more than three months at one time. I’ve never been in Chicago for one whole year since I’ve been in the business. You know, I’m born under the star Gemini and they are supposed to be very changeable people. So I’m making a change to try to do other things.”

  Midyear, he made his break. Nothing happened to force his hand, no dramatic falling out or heated argument. In his customary seat-of-the-pants way, my father simply picked up the phone one evening, called Fred, and said, “Fred, I’m going to try to go on my own and see what I can do. You and Sam can do the same thing. Y’all go on your own and see what you can do.” Fred called Sam and told him the news, and that was it. My father left the group.

  Fred, Sam, and the Impressions, three of the most important forces in Dad’s life for more than a decade, no longer occupied his mind. The boyhood dreams, the endless miles traveled in the green station wagon, the lonely nights trying to steal sleep in motel beds, the harmonizing and fraternizing all came to an end. Dad struggled with the decision. “Leaving the Impressions was a lot like leaving home,” he said. But he knew he was right. “When the time is right, you have to go. You need to make it on your own.”

  Even though their split had been building since the dissension over owning shares of Curtom, it still stung. Fred said, “I felt bad for a simple reason: I had a family, Sam had one, and we always looked to Curtis—he was a great writer, and you’ve lost that now, so what do you do? You can’t never replace a Curtis Mayfield.”

  For years, Curtis, Fred, and Sam were so close that if you saw one of them, you usually saw the other two. They spent more time with each other than they did with their own wives. Yet, as he’d already shown, my father had the ability to turn off his emotions and make cold, calculated business decisions when he felt it necessary.

  Recalling this side of him, Tracy says, “You saw a good and evil. The evil part came out when it was about business. I always separated the parent from the businessperson. Because the parent was very nice, soft, sweet, but when he puts his business hat on, you’ve got a different animal there. He becomes something that you don’t want to be around. When it came to business, he was about business. If he’s making the money, he wants all of it.”

  Fred and Sam decided they wanted to keep the group going, so they auditioned lead singers and found a replacement in Leroy Hutson, former vocalist in the Mayfield Singers. To the press, my father painted it as brightly as he could. “The Impressions are still the Impressions,” he said. “One brother doesn’t stop the show. I’m sure [Leroy will] live up to whatever I was with the Impressions.” He must have known that was impossible, but that was a problem for Fred and Sam, not Curtis.

  Soon after the split, my father put the final touches on his first solo album. After more than a decade of writing with others in mind—either the Impressions, Jerry, Major, Gene Chandler, or countless others on OKeh and Curtom—he now thought solely of himself. No expectations hung over his head. He could paint his songs with all the darkness and pain that lurked in the ghetto. His pallet was wide as the world. He also had a tight band to match the material, including “Master” Henry Gibson, whose percussion would come to define much of Dad’s solo career.

  He toiled through July and August, even putting in a marathon forty-eight-hour session to finish the album on time. Eddie recalled dozing off in the studio as my father polished and perfected a song. Curtis would then shake him awake and ask, “What do you think, Tom? What do you think we should do with this?” Eddie would answer with something like “Well, we should bring the horns down a little bit here,” and then fall back asleep as Curtis kept working.

  Curtis came out in September, just weeks after Dad performed his final concert with the Impressions at Chicago’s High Chaparral. It marked a bright moment for him, but it came amid more darkness. Days later, Hendrix choked to death on his own vomit. Saddened by the loss, my father connected himself to Hendrix in clearer terms than ever before. “There were movements sometimes that he brought to his music that would make you immediately think of [me], where he actually does a little falsetto with his voice and makes a few Curtis Mayfield chord structures,” he said. “Every once in a while I have a need to hear that, Jimi and Buddy Miles and Billy Cox, just those three musicians lock in so well.�
�

  That was high praise coming from a man who rarely listened to his contemporaries. There was little time to mourn Hendrix, though. A month later, Janis Joplin overdosed on heroin and Baby Huey fell dead of a drug-related heart attack in a Chicago motel room. Times were strange, dark, deadly. Curtis captured it all.

  No one could have been prepared for the album except my father and those who helped him make it. It starts with the sinister opening strains of “(Don’t Worry) If There’s a Hell Below, We’re All Going to Go.” Lucky’s bass growls menacingly as a woman exhorts the book of Revelation, and my father, with a heavily processed voice, shouts, “Sisters! Niggers! Whities! Jews! Crackers! Don’t worry. If there’s hell below, we’re all gonna go.” Then, he lets out a demonic howl as Slabo’s horns and Hampton’s strings ride atop the bass, drums, guitars, and percussion, laying down a wicked backdrop for some quasi-apocalyptic soothsaying. While Sly Stone had recorded a song that said “nigger” several years before, “Hell Below” was among the first mainstream recordings to use the word, setting the scene for both the unflinching honesty of my father’s solo career and the hip-hop age it helped spawn.

  As the song progresses, my father’s obsession with producing different sounds in the studio—assisted by his newfound love for weed—takes off like a V-2 rocket, with trippy guitar and vocal effects that sweep across the sonic field, sounding like the haunted hangovers of a nightmare. The drilling bass, the urgent string arrangement, the pounding rhythm section, and the fuzz guitar intertwine in cascading crescendos. Curtis didn’t just have his finger on the pulse of the new decade; he was in the bloodstream.

  Clocking in at almost eight minutes, the song played more than twice as long as anything he’d done with the Impressions. It focused on the groove, with few chord changes. Part of that came from his new recording habits. Instead of handing Johnny a demo tape and waiting until the session to hear the arrangement, now he locked in the rhythm beforehand with Lucky, putting more emphasis on the bass guitar than ever before. “He used to sit down with Lucky and they just would do rhythm,” Sam said. “They’d sit down and learn songs. Lucky would listen, and they would play along with what Curtis was playing, and learn the songs, so that when they went into the studio, he knew exactly the way the song was going.”

  The heaviness of the groove meant the melodies had less room for complexity, something critics would disparage my father for on much of his solo work. It took critics years to understand that Dad had a hard message to deliver, and he needed a solid musical platform to deliver it. Too many chords would have impeded the message. He knew what he was doing, and he didn’t have time to wait for critics to catch up.

  With his new lyrics, Dad became a true street poet in the vein of Gil Scott-Heron and the Last Poets, who had recently debuted with politically charged, nationalistic poetry set to music, aimed at raising the consciousness of black people. He now used the dialect of the street and the terror of the times to create something as devastating as a shot of heroin to the vein.

  His phrasing is almost that of a rapper as he sings:

  Sisters, brothers, and the whiteys

  Blacks and the crackers, police and their backers

  They’re all political actors

  Hurry, people running from their worries

  While the judge and his juries dictate the law that’s partly flaw

  Cat calling, love balling, fussing, and a-cussing

  Top billing now is killing, for peace no one is willing

  Kinda make you get that feeling

  Everybody smoke, use the pill and the dope

  Educated fools from uneducated schools

  Pimping people is the rule, polluted water in the pool

  And Nixon talkin’ ’bout don’t worry, he say don’t worry

  But they don’t know, there can be no show

  And if there’s Hell below, we’re all gonna go.

  By the end of the song, as Hampton’s nervous string line meanders around the hard groove, Dad takes a moment to question himself, to hope there might be some light within the bleak picture he has painted. He sings:

  Tell me what we gonna do

  If everything I say is true?

  This ain’t no way it ought to be

  If only all the mass could see

  But they keep talkin’ ’bout don’t worry.

  In the second track, the light is nowhere to be found. “The Other Side of Town” contains some melodic traces of the Impressions’ “Choice of Colors,” but the message is much tougher. Curtis’s confrontation with the Afroed man in San Francisco and his observations of the increasing violence tearing through his community gave him license to bare his teeth. While “Choice of Colors” pulled a few punches, “The Other Side of Town” plays like a fist to the throat. “The need here is always for more,” he sings. “There’s nothing good in store / On the other side of town.” Instead of placing the burden of change on his black audience, my father described the stark reality of what they faced in cramped ghettos, forcing the grim picture onto the long-averted eyes of white America. “I’m from the other side of town / Out of bounds,” he sings. “Depression is part of my mind / The sun never shines on the other side of town.”

  Anger shows through in his reading of the lines “Ghetto blues showed on the news / All is aware, but what the hell do they care?” He had never delivered a lyric with such accusation, pointing directly at the side of town where the sun did shine.

  Next, the mood lightens briefly on the gorgeous ballad “The Makings of You,” which shimmers with Hampton’s fine orchestration. It remains one of my father’s most beautiful love songs, and it was the first song from the album he performed on television, in Cleveland on Don Webster’s Upbeat show.

  But the focus goes back to the message on “We People Who Are Darker Than Blue,” by which point Dad had already presented three of the best songs he’d ever written. “Blue” blew them out of the water. It starts as a slow blues, as he confronts society’s expectations of black people. “We’re just good for nothing they all figure,” he sings, “A boyish, grown up, shiftless jigger.” (As Andrew Young said, “It’s ‘jigger’ but he meant ‘nigger.’”) He confronts black people’s feelings of self-worth relating to skin color, singing, “High yellow girl, can’t you tell / You’re just the surface of our dark, deep well?” Perhaps most powerfully, he confronts the white world’s version of history, singing, “Pardon me, brother, as you stand in your glory / I know you won’t mind if I tell the whole story.”

  Then, the song stops and shifts abruptly. Master Henry’s congas take control as the rhythm section pushes into fast, syncopated funk. And when my father sings, “If your mind could really see / You’d know your color the same as me,” it is clear how far he’d grown beyond his work with the Impressions. No longer was there a choice of colors; now there was only one. Black.

  He even pointed to the song as evidence of why he chose to go on his own. “Songs like ‘We People Who Are Darker Than Blue’ transcended the roster of the Impressions,” he said. “[It was] more of what was in my head during those times.” The polyrhythmic, Latin-tinged breakdown highlighted another aspect of his music that transcended the Impressions. “It was the ’70s,” my father said. “Time to get away from just R&B and be freer as to the happenings around me.”

  Sam and Fred were surprised by the power of the new songs. To this day, they debate the meaning of “We People Who Are Darker Than Blue.” In an interview in 2008, Sam said, “I took it as a person that was very, very angry … The thing I got from it was, ‘Are you going to let them do it to you?’ Who? Are you going to let who do it to you?” Fred, providing the obvious answer: “At the time, he was talking about white folks … He ain’t talking about black folks. Get up, go out, do something for yourself. That’s what I took that meaning as.”

  My father’s audience was equally surprised. No one had made an album like this before, least of all the Impressions. Sure, socially minded songs formed a
major part of the movement, but to put so much on the A-side of a record—and in such a personal manner—was bold and new. It was the work of a man who knew exactly who he was and what he wanted to say. He’d commented on society before, but now he climbed in its skull, poking around the demented mind of a decade that would witness the death of free love and the advent of mass paranoia.

  As fans digested the A-side, they learned the new Curtis brought nothing but straight truth. No longer was it a message song or two surrounded by love songs. Now he held a mirror to the realities of ghetto life and forced his audience to look into it, song after song after song. As he described his motivation, “The latter part of the ’60s and the early ’70s brought about a feeling in me that there need to be songs that relate not so much to civil rights but to the way we as all people deal with our lives.”

  If my father proved he could be an incisive commentator on the first side, he proved he could still be a damn good motivator with “Move On Up,” the opening song on the second side. Rhythmically, it is perhaps the most complex song he ever wrote, and it contains a drum break that predicted the rise of hip-hop in the next decade. Two other things are especially important about the song. One, he chose to put it on the B-side and start his first solo album with the super-heavy, brutally honest “Hell Below.” The decision showed Dad’s guts and merit as an artist. From a commercial point of view, it would have made more sense to hook the listeners first with the positive, infectious ear candy of “Move On Up” and then lay down the dope. My father decided that his message was too important and put it up front. And two, he went even further by releasing “Hell Below” as the first single, instead of “Move On Up.” Again, the message came up front, and the audience responded. “Hell Below” went to number three on the R&B chart.