Traveling Soul

by Todd Mayfield

  They overcame another struggle with help from an unexpected place. In need of a superfly hog—the sweet street-hustler car they felt a character like Priest would drive—Adams serendipitously ran into a real-life pimp with just such a ride. “I can remember sitting in the shoeshine parlor in the Theresa Towers, and a gentleman pulled up with this black Cadillac El Dorado with these big headlights,” Adams recalled. “This gentleman walked in, and he was slick as he wanted to be. A guy by the name of KC. He sat down next to me on the rack, I’m getting my shoes shined, you know, so I go, ‘Hey, man, that’s a bad ride. We thinkin’ about doing a movie, and I’d like to maybe let them look at your car to use in the movie.’ So, he gave me his number. It took me three weeks to get in touch with him. Consequently, when we finally talked, he said, ‘Man, ain’t no niggas makin’ no movies. You jeffin’ me?’”

  After Adams convinced him, KC let them use his car, which features heavily in the film. Fenty decided he wanted more than just the car, though. “We said, ‘Let’s put KC in the picture,’ because KC was wonderful,” Fenty said. “When we ran out of money, KC would just, [snaps fingers], ‘Buy ’em some food.’ He would buy food, he had his own wardrobe, and he knew what to say.”

  Even so, production difficulties haunted the actors and crew. “When you shoot a picture like this, you’re very flexible,” Fenty said. “If you can’t get in someplace, or if you get thrown off of a corner, you can’t just fold it and wait for tomorrow. You got to find something else you can get.” Adams recalled, “We didn’t have anything but raw bones and guts. We didn’t have the luxury of saying, ‘We can shoot this scene over.’” They didn’t have the luxury of a professional wardrobe, either, so most of what the actors wore onscreen came from their own closets, or from Adams’s bevy of fly vines.

  After Warner Brothers agreed to back the film, they held a sneak preview in Westwood, a predominately white California neighborhood. Reviews came back tepid at best, and Warner Brothers threatened to back out. They were, after all, taking a chance on backing such a movie. Shore wheedled, saying, “What the hell did you expect in that theatre? This is a white-bread town.” As he recalled, “The next picture they screened it with was with Shaft at the Fox Theatre in Philadelphia. Of everybody that came out, they were all raves.”

  Spurred on by my father’s music, the movie caused a fracas when it opened in New York in August 1972. “We decided we would go down and watch the lines for the movie,” Fenty recalled. “They ran out of tickets, and there was still a lot of line left. Somebody went around the side of the building, and they broke the door open. You saw this mass of people with police trying to stop them breaking into the theatre trying to see this movie. That was a very, very high moment for Gordon and myself. That was our little picture, and people were actually breaking into the movies to see it.”

  Super Fly briefly knocked off The Godfather as the highest-grossing movie in the country, and it was the third-highest grossing film of 1972. Dad took Tracy, Sharon, and me to the movie’s premiere in Chicago. Even though I was only six years old, I still remember the excitement and electricity in the air. I had seen many of the scenes on video while he was in the process of making the soundtrack, but seeing it on the big screen with the score made it seem bigger than life. Obviously, Super Fly wasn’t meant for a young audience, but I believe Dad was so proud of his accomplishment that he wanted to share it with us.

  While the movie follows a pusher trying to escape street life, beneath the surface, it is about the same things my father had been singing about since “The Other Side of Town” and “Underground”: the dynamics of power—who has it, who needs it, who is denied it.

  The movie has a strong moral center. At the end, Priest wins through intelligence and cunning, not violence—although he did give the cops a good beat down before driving off with his life, woman, and money intact. As my father noted, “In all the films at that time black people were portrayed as pimps and whores, who usually got ripped off at the end. Superfly had enough mind to get out of all that, and let the authorities know that he saw through their games.” In other words, unlike every other movie, this time the black man won.

  Crowds loved it. Critics did not. They’d fallen hard for Super Fly the album, but a furor erupted over Super Fly the movie. The Times of London said, “You could find more black power in a coffee bean.” Vernon Jarrett, a black reporter for the Chicago Tribune, called it a “sickening and dangerous screen venture,” going on to say,

  In real life, white biggie Warner Brothers and white producer Sig Shore and black writer Phillip Fenty and black director Gordon Parks, Jr. got themselves together and are selling to the black community a cinema brand of cocaine designed to appeal to the same people that are the targets of the hard-drug traffic. The truth is—ain’t nobody stuck anything to the man.

  Tony Brown, dean of Howard University’s School of Communication, said in a Newsweek cover story, “The blaxploitation films are a phenomenon of self-hate. Look at the image of Superfly. Going to see yourself as a drug dealer when you’re oppressed is sick. Not only are blacks identifying with him, they’re paying for the identification. It’s sort of like a Jew paying to get into Auschwitz.”

  Critics couldn’t stop the movie from influencing the culture, though. Soon, black men everywhere wore Priest’s hairstyle, “the Lord Jesus,” with long, flowing locks curled and pressed. Cadillacs, decked out à la Priest’s superfly hog, crept down ghetto streets across America, moving just slowly enough to give the whole neighborhood an eyeful. The clothing of the street hustler became mainstream fare, too—suits with wide lapels and intricate stitching, mink coats, and platform shoes with three-inch heels. That last sartorial trend couldn’t have come soon enough for my father, who at five-foot-seven loved to wear platform leather and suede boots. In those boots, he stood two or three inches taller. Of course, he wasn’t the first or last artist to surreptitiously enhance his height. Everyone from Bob Dylan to Prince took advantage of heels in the same way.

  Critics also couldn’t stop a generation of kids who lived through the realities on the screen from absorbing every nuance. A decade later, they’d dig through their parents’ records and chop up beats they found from Curtis, James Brown, the Isley Brothers, and others, to create a new art form—hip-hop.

  While James Brown was arguably the most influential of the group, an especially strong link exists between Super Fly and hip-hop. The movie’s gritty depiction of street life, the way Ron O’Neal swaggers through every scene as if he owns the entire world, the gratuitous martial arts scenes, and Curtis’s slick, streetwise songs—these elements are imprinted on KRS-One’s Criminal Minded, Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Nas’s Illmatic, the Wu-Tang Clan’s Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die, and Snoop Doggy Dogg’s Doggystyle, among dozens of others.

  As Public Enemy’s Chuck D said, “When hip-hop became the thing, of course you’re going to reach back to what influenced you, what touched you in the past. The words from Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions just meant everything. The rhythms and the pacing we might not have incorporated as much as maybe something more percussive and aggressive like a James Brown, but there was something in Curtis Mayfield’s stance that we used.”

  The film inspired more than just a young generation of musicians. Armond White, film critic for the NY Press, said, “I remember in the theater in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1972—the climax was when [Priest] told the cop off. He says, ‘If I so much as choke on a chicken bone’ what would happen, and the entire theatre, including myself, we leaped to our feet, and we stood, and screamed, and applauded, and clapped our hands, and stomped our feet. It connected psychically with people at a perfect place and time to provide that kind of catharsis.”

  Michael Gonzales, noted R&B and hip-hop journalist, had similar memories. “The first time I saw Superfly was at the Lowe’s Victoria on 125th Street,” he wrote. “Next door to the Apollo, the theater wa
s a hundred feet away from the pigeon-eyed view of the movie’s opening shot. Filled with young folks who couldn’t wait to enter into that playa playa netherworld of hustlers, scramblers, dames, and gamblers, folks were psyched. As the reel started rolling, music spilled from the speakers and the audience hummed along, mouthed the words, or sang aloud to the soundtrack.” Gonzales also credited the “neo-psychedelic red logo” on the “Freddie’s Dead” single with inspiring “a million graffiti artists.”

  Despite the success of both soundtrack and movie, though, the critical excoriation stung. My father, who never wasted time arguing with critics, fought back, saying:

  The way you clean up the film is by cleaning up the streets. I can see where those guys are coming from, and how they look upon Superfly as a dope movie. But it’s just as easy to see it as an antidrug movie, which is what I think the critics don’t give the people enough credit for seeing. I mean even an anti-dope commercial can be looked at as a dope commercial. You can’t do nothing about drugs by pretending they don’t exist. You just have to be able to give people credit for knowing what’s good and what’s bad. That’s why I wanted “Freddie’s Dead” put out as the single. Because the average dude realizes that he’s more like a Freddie than a Priest. And Freddie’s just the average guy who might have been able to be saved except that he fell in with the wrong crowd. More people are gonna realize that they’re like Freddie and if they don’t watch what they’re messing with they’ll end up dead. There’s one other thing that the critics of Superfly seem to miss. For the budget of less than $300,000, there isn’t that much you can do. The film had to be about things that go on in the street because this is the only place they could afford to shoot it.

  In another interview, he continued his argument. “Forget the critics,” he said. “Ask somebody who has had a true taste of street life. They know this was the only way we could make an honest film about the drug culture. Nobody called James Bond, Tarzan, or Frankenstein ‘white exploitation’ movies. If there is a dollar to be made in adventure films, why can’t black people make it?”

  Craig echoes that last thought. “This was another opportunity for a black artist to do another movie score in that vein of what they call black exploitation,” he says.

  It’s exploitation, but at the same time, it seems like if you got that many people workin’, I don’t know who you exploiting. It seems like a black employment situation to me. All they were filming was what was normal anyway. The type of cars and stuff that was in Super Fly, hey, I seen that stuff back in ’63, ’64. The pimps around here had those same kind of cars, and they were immaculately dressed and all that … This is nothing new.

  Even late in his life, Dad defended the movie. In a 1996 interview, he said, “These films were positive for us. Prior to blaxploitation, we didn’t dare show any intellect in films. The black characters were always getting killed. But with Shaft and Superfly, things were different.”

  For his part, O’Neal provided some of the most full-throated defense of the movie. In an interview shortly after the release, he said, “Super Fly is about people who don’t believe in the American Dream at all—have no reason to … What Super Fly does, I think it provides a measure of hope in some lives that, believe me, do not get any spiritual enlightenment from the Doris Day show. Black people that I’ve come in contact with, they take a personal pride in my role in the film. There seems to be a general feeling that they have advanced somehow. My success is indeed a success for my people.”

  With Sweetback, Shaft, and Super Fly, the blaxploitation genre exploded. A pattern formed in which a world-class artist created an album that helped sell the movie and often overshadowed it. It happened with Bobby Womack’s Across 110th Street, Roy Ayers’s Coffy (written for the movie that introduced Pam Grier to the world), Marvin Gaye’s Trouble Man, and James Brown’s Black Caesar—all excellent albums that resulted in some of the best work by each artist.

  Even Johnny Pate got back in the mix, scoring Brother on the Run and Shaft in Africa. Dozens of other examples exist, but of all these soundtracks, Super Fly remains in a class by itself. It transcends the genre and time period in a way no other blaxploitation soundtrack does. Perhaps that’s due to its unprecedented and unrepeated success on the charts. Perhaps it’s because my father spoke about real life issues that remain relevant some forty years later, and will likely be relevant in another forty years. Whatever the reason, critical opinion and cultural impact have set Super Fly apart from the competition—and it was damn stiff competition, too.

  After the movie became a smash, it propelled the soundtrack to even further heights. Dad was no stranger to the top of the R&B chart, but Super Fly did something else—something Dad had never done before and would never do again. When the Billboard pop chart came out for the week of October 21, 1972, at number one with a bullet, it read: “Curtis Mayfield, Superfly.” After fourteen years in professional music, including countless albums and singles for dozens of other artists, he reigned supreme on the pop chart for the first and only time.

  No other black artist had hit the top of the pop chart with an album like Super Fly. It was the grittiest, hardest album Curtis ever made. He painted his most unflinching picture of ghetto reality as black people experienced it—drugs, pimps, pushers, depression, despair, destruction. More than ever before, he spoke directly to the concerns of his people. He wrote no songs of conciliation, no messages of peace and understanding between races. In return for that, the public—both black and white—gave him the highest status in popular music.

  It seemed contrary to everything black performers had experienced throughout history. For half a century or more, conventional wisdom held that white people wouldn’t buy “race records,” although white people had always discreetly listened to black radio stations. Such reasoning formed the underpinning of segregated radio. The only way black artists could break through those chains was to walk that tightrope between worlds, between voices. With Super Fly, Dad not only cut that rope, he replaced it with a new model of artistry.

  One can debate forever the reasons why that happened. Certainly, the movement and the music of the 1960s helped make it possible. Perhaps the recent years of hard drugs, brutal assassinations, and bloody war also readied the record-buying public for Super Fly’s unflinching honesty. Regardless of why, however, it happened—and it would happen for black artists with increasing frequency in coming decades. It’s hard to imagine the fearless honesty of hip-hop catching on with white suburbia—and influencing the music, culture, fashion, and language of the entire world in the ’80s and ’90s—if not for the success of an album like Super Fly.

  At the moment of his greatest success, however, my father also had a moment of great weakness. His history of occasional abuse—the darkest realization of his insecurities—continued with Toni. On vacation in Nassau in October, right around Super Fly’s ascendance to the top of the pops, he and Toni got into a late-night argument as Tracy, Sharon, and I slept in another room. When the commotion startled me awake, I walked out to find policemen hulking in the doorway and Toni with a black eye. Dad never did these things in front of us, but we’d see the aftermath.

  Toni lived with Dad in the three-flat house, and they had vicious fights there, too. “Everything was done behind closed doors,” Tracy recalls. “She’s cooking and next thing you know, it’s like doors slamming and they’d fight. You heard the commotion; you heard the voice; you heard the screaming. [One time] me, Sharon, and Todd were out in the hallway. We were scared. I remember thinking, I’m the oldest; I’ve got to protect my brother and sister. I don’t know what to do, though.”

  We already knew our father had two voices—the soft, whispering coo he used in songs, interviews, and normal interactions, and the stern, fatherly tone he used when we did something wrong. As he and Toni went at it, we learned he had a third voice—a trembling, frenzied scream that only came out in fights with women. “That was a whole other voice,” Tracy says. “That went into a
whole other realm. It was very shaky. It wasn’t high-pitched—it was very manly, but shaky. And scary.”

  When the fighting stopped and things cooled down, Dad would return to his normal self—the affectionate, doting man who bought gifts and wrote love songs. That side of him attracted women; the other side made it hard for them to stay. He was an uncompromising partner in love, just as in business. He expected others to bend to his will, and they usually did. He never directed his violent side at Sharon, Tracy, or me—or any of his children—but physical abuse toward his significant others remained an occasional and inexplicable occurrence of weakness for some time.

  Still, Dad and Toni stayed together. He still hadn’t divorced Helen, so he invented a new term, calling Toni his “spiritual wife.” Apparently it was good enough for her. At least for a while.

  In November, Dad and his spiritual wife flew to New York to tape the first episode of a new ABC show called In Concert. The show featured concert performances from Curtis, Bo Diddley, Seals & Croft, Jethro Tull, and Alice Cooper, all taped at Hofstra University in Long Island.

  Hanging out before the taping at Buddah’s offices in New York, a publicist told Curtis that Super Fly had held the top position for another week. “We lost our bullet, but it was crowding up the page anyway,” she joked. Super Fly would hold the top slot for four weeks in total.

  My father then left for his taping. As he stepped in the elevator, Buddah copresident Neil Bogart yelled to him, “Curtis, wait! We’re gold, Curtis! ‘Freddie’ was just declared gold!’” Bogart brought a bottle of wine and a glass. “Well, this is the first time we’ve ever partied in an elevator,” my father said. Toni responded, “This is the first time for a lot of things, Curt.”