Though the Brown deal fell through, Curtom had cobbled together Baby Huey’s attempts at making an album, resulting in the posthumous The Baby Huey Story. Ruby Jones also put out her self-titled debut album, on which she covered my father’s “Stone Junkie.” At the same time, several other Curtom releases were selling at a fast pace, including a single released in July of the previous year by Moses Dillard and the Tex-Town Display, featuring a young Peabo Bryson. That single, “I’ve Got to Find a Way (to Hide My Hurt),” sold a quarter million copies.
Everything was working. Curtom was flush with money.
After Dad finished touring Roots, his feelings on the album changed, due in equal part to his mercurial nature and his insatiable need to create something new and better. “It’s sort of funny,” he said, “but I guess as a writer I have to be a good critic as well and though I am pleased with it and people tell me they feel it’s one of the better things I’ve done, I kinda feel I would like to try it one more time and come up with something fresher and stronger. But that’s just the way I work, I have to keep on writing so by the time the album was out some of the stuff seemed stale to me.”
Roots was old news. He’d thrown himself into rehearsing new songs for the Impressions. While at Fred’s house one day, he gave an interviewer a taste of what to expect, saying, “We’re working on several new things, new ideas and concepts for a fresh new album for the group. It will be a somewhat ‘down’ album and the tunes will include timely things relating to what’s happening around us as well as love tunes. There’s another ‘Stop the War’ song, which is nothing new and something everyone has already said, but I feel it’s an important message; and there’s a tune called ‘Potent Love’ which I think might prove to be a single. It’s a love song and a very tasteful track.”
With such constant writing, my father pulled off the staggering task of creating an entire record label’s worth of music by himself. Perhaps he knew that no one could keep up such a workload forever, but for the time being, his songs gave him total control over the fate of his Curtom family, the same way they had given him control over his own fate and that of his actual family. After so many years of success, his decision to go solo had catapulted him to a level he’d never imagined.
As the label grew, so did Marv’s influence. It remained a source of friction between Curtis and Eddie as they split further apart, their fifteen-year friendship and partnership fraying. “I told Curtis, ‘If we want Marv Stuart in our company, we could put him in here as an advisor, pay him what he earns, and leave it at that point so that we can watch everything that’s going down,’” Eddie said. “But Marv had really done a job on Curtis—nothing I could say or do to change him.”
My father called a meeting with his two partners and said he wanted Marv to take over the day-to-day operations of the label and Eddie to handle promotions since that was his expertise. Dad would handle the creative side, as always. Eddie didn’t like it one bit. He stared Marv dead in the eye and said, “I want you to buy me out of the company.”
It would take roughly a year before my father cut ties with Eddie, but everyone knew Marv had won the battle. Marv had an advantage over Eddie beyond his white skin—he knew girls who liked to party. “I heard they liked threesomes,” my mother says. “And you know, they were getting high. Marv along with Curtis. They both smoked pot and snorted cocaine. So, who knows what they did? I don’t really; I was never there. [Curtis] was too trusting of people. If they said, ‘We got you covered,’ come bring some girls in, they have a party, he forgot about the business.”
In such a way, my father went deeper into trusting the wrong people—accountants, employees, “friends.” He knew someone was doing something wrong when the IRS began hounding him again. This time, they wanted more than his Webcor tape recorder. He owned a building with Marv in Berwyn, Illinois, which he had to sell to pay off the government.
“He didn’t want to listen to me about a lot of things,” my mother says. “I knew someone that was stealing from him, and I told him, and he said unless I told him who told me he was just going to let him steal. Someone would call me and say, ‘You need to tell Curtis to watch out for so-and-so because he knows how to steal the money from him,’ and Curtis, you know, he could have a whole lot of money and leave it there, go leave the building, and he doesn’t know, it might be $5,000 in there, and then when he came back, it might be $4,200. And I would tell him, but he didn’t listen to me.” Again, for all his business acumen and obsession with owning himself, my father often acted directly against his own interests.
Even though they had separated, my parents stayed in each other’s lives, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Once, when Dad went over to visit, a man called the house for my mother. Tracy answered the phone, but when Dad found out it was another man, he snatched the phone and hung up. Then, he stormed into the bathroom, where my mother had just finished bathing Sharon, and started screaming. He pulled my sister out of the tub, knocked my mother down between the wall and the toilet, and kicked her. “I had a huge bruise on my thigh,” my mother says.
It wasn’t the only time he used physical violence. My mother recalls, “Another time when I wanted to do something, he wouldn’t, and I think Kenny was there that time, and he punched me in my stomach. I started to call the police, you know, have him arrested, and Kenny asked me not to.”
It’s hard to know what was going on in my father’s mind during those times. He was not a violent man by nature, but he was under incredible pressure and experimenting with mood-altering drugs—a dangerous proposition for a man who could shift into a foul disposition at a moment’s notice, even when sober. There was no excusing his actions, and he didn’t try. It wasn’t the last time he’d use violence to control a woman, either.
Within the previous two years, my father had entered uncharted territory in every aspect of his life. He moved far from his relationships with Fred, Sam, Eddie, and my mother, and grew close to people who didn’t have his best interests at heart. But at the same time, he had never been more successful. And he now lived and worked on his own terms. As the year ended, Eddie saw where things were headed. He made plans to sell his share of Curtom while Marv lured my father into moving the studio to the North Side of Chicago.
Dad had quit the Impressions in large part to spend more time at home working at Curtom, but with the wild success of his first three solo efforts, he found himself touring as much as ever. After one of his last shows of the year—a gig at Lincoln Center in New York City—writer Phil Fenty and producer Sig Shore slipped backstage with a script in hand and a proposition. “We hope that you might be interested in scoring this movie,” they said as they handed him the script. My father almost fell out of his chair. He’d wanted this break for years, and it had finally come.
The result would define him for the rest of his life.
10
Super Fly
“Hard to understand, what a hell of a man,
This cat of the slum had a mind, wasn’t dumb.”
—“SUPERFLY”
Somewhere between New York and Chicago, late 1971—Sitting on an airplane, the Super Fly script in his lap, Dad couldn’t stop the music from coming. “Wow, was I so excited,” he said. “I’d written a song just flying back home from New York. It took me hardly no time to prepare the songs and that’s how it began … I began writing immediately upon reading the script. I was making notes and coming up with the songs already. That was just a fantastic adventure for me.”
Reading the terse script, he felt drawn to the main character, Young-blood Priest. By name alone, Priest was an obvious archetype, a broadly drawn amalgamation of every drug dealer and pimp who stalked the ghettos. The main difference—Priest wanted out. Curtis said, “I didn’t put Priest down. He was just trying to get out. His deeds weren’t noble ones, but he was making money and he had intelligence. And he did survive. I mean all this was reality.”
Even closer to reality, my father felt, was Pries
t’s fall guy, Freddie. “Reading the script, I started feeling very deeply bad for Freddie,” he said. “Between his friends, his partners, and his woman, he was catching a hard time. ‘Freddie’s Dead’ came to me immediately. While you might not know a lot of pimps and drug dealers, we do meet quite a few Freddies.”
Dad crafted “Freddie’s Dead” on the Fender Rhodes piano he kept in his basement bedroom of the three-flat house—he said it only took him five minutes to write. He liked to work late into the night, long after we’d fallen asleep. In the morning, sometimes we’d see the aftermath of a songwriting session. As Tracy recalls, “I remember all this legal paper balled up everywhere on the floor. And I remember picking one up to read it and it just said ‘Freddie’s Dead’ on it. I was like, ‘Who’s Freddie? Who’s dead?’”
Dad had another song already written—“Ghetto Child”—which he tried to cut during the Roots sessions. It fit the Super Fly script perfectly. He renamed it “Little Child Runnin’ Wild,” and as he explained, “I started writing [‘Little Child Runnin’ Wild’] three years ago. It never seemed to come out right, though. And then, all at once, while I was scoring the movie, everything fell into place.”
To score the rest of the film, Dad received rushes of the scenes and watched them on a Sony VO-1600, a huge, heavy, professional piece of equipment that was a precursor to the VCR. The rushes came on three-quarter-inch videocassettes, each one the size of a book, featuring a timeline running across the bottom of the screen so he could sync the music exactly where he wanted in each scene. He had the machine set up in a room he used as a home studio, and sometimes he’d let us watch the tape while he worked. Other times, my brothers and I would sneak in and watch the famous bathtub love scene while he was napping.
Though we were still young, we’d grown accustomed to watching Dad work in such an intimate setting. He made a point of including us in his professional life whenever possible, often letting us sit in the Curtom studio as he recorded. We learned quickly, however, that watching someone write a song isn’t nearly as exciting as listening to the finished product.
Dad was more than excited, though. On top of giving him a chance to score his first movie, the Super Fly script called for a cameo performance featuring “The Curtis Mayfield Experience,” which would mark his first time on the silver screen. Because of scheduling conflicts, the band had to shoot the scene for the movie before recording the album, so late in December 1971, Dad called Craig, Lucky, Henry, and Tyrone and said in typical last-minute fashion, “Hey, we’re going to go do this movie. We got to go to New York.”
Dad had written a song called “Pusherman” for the scene, but he hadn’t had a chance to work it out in the studio. Filmmaker Gordon Parks Jr. needed a finished song for the shot, though, so the band booked a session at Bell Sound Studios in New York to cut it. Craig recalls, “I think we went in at night, because we had to go do the movie thing the next day.” The band hadn’t heard any of the other songs my father had written, but if “Pusherman” was any indication, they were in for something special.
When they arrived on set, as Craig recalls, “That’s when we found out what movie making is all about. We’re just standing there, and they’re adjusting the lights. They’re trying to get all the entrances right and things.” The band mimed the song while the actors attempted to nail the scene, take after take. The next day, they did it again. As my father learned on the first Impressions’ tour, what once seems glamorous often becomes mundane when viewed up close. Movies were no different.
Shooting the scene was a bit tedious, but it only lasted two days, after which the band embarked on another European tour. They had a shaky opening at the Rainbow in London on Sunday, January 23, 1972. The support band, Bloodstone, went on more than an hour late and performed to an indifferent audience. During Curtis’s set, the PA crapped out, and the sound engineer didn’t know he had to make up for Curtis’s soft voice and left the microphones too low. On top of that, Craig’s guitar was beset with technical problems. Frustrated, my father ended the show early.
Despite these difficulties, a concert review in NME that appeared a week later provided a glimpse into the growing appreciation white audiences in England showed my father. Reviewer Roger St. Pierre wrote, “As for those who did turn out, apart from a fair leavening of blacks, they were the kind of audience you’d expect at any rock show … Perhaps the long-hairs have suddenly, belatedly but pleasingly, turned on to soul music; perhaps they’ve always secretly dug it anyway; perhaps they were there just because it’s the latest trendy thing. But, maybe it’s because—at long last—the barriers between musical forms are really coming down and good music per se is the new fad.”
Whether or not those barriers were coming down in Europe, they still loomed large in America. This dichotomy became more confusing as Dad’s popularity in Europe continued growing. He made several TV appearances there, including The Old Grey Whistle Test in England and Beat Club in Germany. In an interview with the German hosts, he explained his message music for a European crowd that didn’t live the day-to-day struggles of life in America, saying:
My comments I guess are more for the States, because black people in the States have gone through many of the things that I talk about—more so, I would imagine than in most countries, even though we do have the prejudices and the hang-ups of not only black people but most minority groups everywhere. I feel that it’s very important to me to make people at least take in what I stand for, how do I feel, what do I represent. I think the masses overall today, when they come to see an artist, if they spent their money, they are more interested in the overall picture. Not just make me laugh, or make me feel good, but make me understand what you mean. What do you stand for? Love, appreciation, and anything else starts out first with respect. If I can establish some identity as to making you respect me as a human, and then accept me as an entertainer, then let’s do that.
In his mind, that sort of respect wasn’t just a personal need; it represented a way to cure the social ills he sang about. As he’d say years later, “Segregation will only end when people get to know the people they think they hate. To start to know somebody is to respect them.”
One host asked him, “So your function is sort of, well, it is similar to that of a preacher?” My father replied, “I would suppose so. My grandmother was a preacher, and I came up in the church, not that I really try and relate my works with that, but I suppose in one way or another it did have a great effect to me as to my lyrics.” The host then asked about his performance style: “You have this cool and very special way of performing, which is not the cliché of black music being performed. It’s very cool, it’s very in a way sophisticated, convincing. It’s not ecstatic in the sense we apply the word ‘ecstasy’ to black music.” “Well, I agree with that wholeheartedly,” my father said. “I’m glad that at least in my presentation, I can bring about more status as to white people understanding that we are not as entertainers just people that turn flips, and holler ‘Shake your shaggy shaggy,’ and ‘Do your thing,’ but we also are people that think and want to progress and have culture and identity as well. Why not sell that in my music?” That was as full a summary of his musical philosophy as he’d ever given, and it helped create a European fan base that would sustain him in later years.
Apart from television shows, he mostly played military bases in France, England, and Germany, where all the soldiers said the same thing—“I’ll be glad when I get back to the world.” “Back to the world” was their slang for returning home. The phrase rang in my father’s head, much like “It’s all right” almost a decade before. He logged it in his memory for later use.
Dad returned home in February to finish Super Fly, but other obligations demanded his attention first. On February 22, he appeared on the Dick Cavett Show and felt snubbed when Cavett didn’t invite him to sit for an interview as he did with so many other artists. Cavett’s producer said, “What does he have to talk to him about?” My father recogn
ized that comment as a dig. It was a negation of the massive success he’d achieved and the toil it took to achieve it.
Next, Dad returned to his old group. The Impressions hadn’t recorded since Check Out Your Mind in 1970, so they hit the studio to cut the songs they’d been rehearsing at Fred’s house. The resulting album, Times Have Changed, introduced Leroy Hutson as lead singer. Dad wrote seven of the eight songs on the album, including his most powerful antiwar song ever, “Stop the War,” featuring a haunting, passionate vocal performance from Sam.
My father produced the album and played on it with Craig, Lucky, Tyrone, and Master Henry. Times Have Changed failed to chart, but it contained several powerful songs, including the beautiful title track, as well as a song my father would use later for himself called “Love Me.” The Impressions’ first effort without him might not have created a stir, but it was a strong album unfairly overlooked.
After wrapping Times Have Changed, Dad received more rushes of the Super Fly film and didn’t like what he saw. He said, “Reading the script didn’t tell you ‘and then he took another hit of cocaine’ and then about a minute later ‘he took another hit.’ So when I saw it visually, I thought, ‘This is a cocaine infomercial.’” He was no prude, nor from what I heard was he a stranger to cocaine—I was told he’d begun experimenting with it by the time of Super Fly, and soon he would enter a period of heavier use. He had also lived the truth of the movie’s seedy scenes during his childhood in the White Eagle. “I didn’t have to leave my neighborhood to be surrounded by the things that Superfly is about,” he said. “It was easier than most scripts because it was about an environment that I knew. It’s not that the ghetto is thriving with pimps and pushermen, it’s just they are a very visible part of the ghetto. If you stand on the corner, you’re gonna notice the pimp, because he’s so bright. If he goes by twice, you’re gonna remember him and get to know him, while you might not remember somebody else who goes by five times. And you have to understand that half of every big city is the ghetto.”
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