Traveling Soul

by Todd Mayfield

  Back to the World was my father’s second consecutive album to hit number one R&B, but it was a slight fall in fortunes from Super Fly. The first single, “Future Shock,” hit number eleven R&B but peaked at number thirty-nine pop. Dad’s lyrics are as on point as ever, with lines like “Our worldly figures playing on niggers / Oh see them dancin’, see how they dancin’ to the ‘Superfly.’” That line could have been a simple shout-out to his previous work or a searing comment to his listeners about missing the message behind the lyrics of his most famous album as they ate up the dance beats. Still, many critics panned the single for borrowing too heavily on sounds he’d already explored.

  The album also contains one of my personal favorites, “Right On for the Darkness.” The song wasn’t released as a single, but it became one of my father’s most influential cuts, reverberating through the hip-hop age. Many artists in the ’90s sampled the song’s opening guitar lines, most notably Chicago native R. Kelly on his 1999 smash hit “Did You Ever Think.”

  Back to the World was a solid effort, but on the heels of the monumental critical and commercial success of Super Fly, it was viewed as a slight disappointment. Critical failure can spell disaster for any artist, and Back to the World hinted at shifts in my father’s music that would cause many critics to desert him as the ’70s wore on. Perhaps the biggest shift was his increased use of falsetto. It was, as a Rolling Stone reviewer noted, “an intensely masculine falsetto,” and he’d used it since the earliest days of the Impressions. But now he began using it almost exclusively, seldom dipping down into his natural register. His voice became higher and thinner than ever, which critics had complained about since Curtis/Live.

  Also, the new studio changed the sound of his records. The drums are thinner. The bottom end—bass guitar and bass drum—punches rather than rumbles. The snare skews toward high frequencies, sounding more like a piccolo snare than the deep wooden thwap common in R&B music. Master Henry’s polyrhythmic force fills less sonic space.

  As Curtis’s sound changed, disco moved the sound of the time in a different direction. Disco revolved around booming drums, slapping bass, slick production, catchy melodies, and glitzy string lines. Dad didn’t pay much attention to that, though. He still shied away from listening to other people’s music, and the few times he did, he seemed more interested in studying it than taking pleasure from it. While making Back to the World, for instance, Tracy recalls him putting on Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” to get a sense of the tempo and dissect what had made the song such a huge hit. Disco didn’t mean anything to him yet, but soon the forces of commercialism would bend him to its insistent beat.

  For the time being, his fans stuck with him. They made Back to the World a commercial smash, although advance orders for the album had already guaranteed that. The success kept him in the public eye, including more appearances on Soul Train, and it also created a surge of interest in Curtis, which went gold that same month based on renewed sales.

  After Back to the World, the Impressions began work on their next album, this time without Leroy Hutson at the helm. Instead of finding a new singer they cut the album, Preacher Man, as a duo. No Impressions album before or after features only two singers. The album was unique for another reason—for the first time ever, Curtis didn’t write any of the songs. Instead, Tufo produced, arranged, and wrote most of Preacher Man. He provided strong material, but the album sunk like a stone, struggling to hit number thirty-one R&B and missing the pop chart. Modern critics have since burnished Preacher Man’s reputation, but that didn’t help at the time.

  A similar thing happened with Leroy’s first solo album, Love Oh Love, which Curtom released next. It didn’t place well on the charts, but like Preacher Man, Hutson’s album is now considered a classic, if overlooked, piece of Chicago soul. Both albums proved how elusive and impossible it was to predict a hit.

  For the final Curtom project of the year, my father gathered Fred, Sam, Jerry, Leroy, and Gene Chandler together for an era-spanning, lineup-shifting night of music. Channel 11 in Chicago broadcast the performance, and Dad recorded it as a celebration, a retrospective, and a reunion.

  It was a good moment to look back. Over the previous three years, he had left the Impressions and hoisted himself and Curtom to the pinnacle of the music world. He’d changed the face of R&B and soul music, sold more records than ever, made more money than he could count, and crafted a legacy apart from his work with the Impressions. At the same time, he was always a man of few friends. As Curtom grew and my father grew closer to Marv, that became truer than ever. He’d lost (or severed) his close relationships with Eddie and Johnny. His relationships with Fred and Sam changed again now that he no longer wrote for them, and new faces at Curtom surrounded him. Perhaps a night with old friends would recharge his creative battery.

  With the amount of work he was about to undertake, he’d need it.

  Curtis in Chicago didn’t approach the impact of his first live album, Curtis/Live, but it was an impressive showcase highlighting the best parts of Dad’s career. The performances crackle with energy, beginning with a spirited rendition of “Superfly.” Then, my father says, “Ladies and gentlemen, if we may, we would just like to take you back a ways. Before us we have a few gentlemen, and I count myself as part of us, a group known as the Impressions—still the Impressions.” He introduces Jerry, Fred, and Sam, and says, “I’m going to let Sam speak on the song we want to present to you while I play on it.” My father begins plucking the inimitable chords as Sam says, “This is a tune that takes us back to 1958—a tune entitled ‘For Your Precious Love.’” Then, the Impressions drop into the gorgeous backing harmonies as if they’d never stopped singing them. With Jerry at the helm for the first time in almost fifteen years, they provide a jaw-dropping rendition of the song that started it all. For the people who had only just come to know Curtis through Super Fly, it provided a powerful lesson on the length and breadth of his career.

  Curtis in Chicago also features a sweet version of “If I Were Only a Child Again,” featuring my brother, sister, and me. On the day of the taping, we were playing outside in the street, running around, getting dirty. Without consulting my mother, Dad called and in his typical spontaneous fashion said, “There’s a car coming to get you guys.” He didn’t tell us why. A few minutes later a limousine pulled up and took us to Channel 11, where we found him in the midst of an intricate production. We watched most of the show from the crowd, but when he got to “If I Were Only a Child Again,” he called us onstage.

  When my mother saw the broadcast, she became furious—her children’s first appearance on television showed us looking dirty, wearing raggedy play clothes. That was life with my father, though. The small details never occurred to him. He got the idea to have us appear on the show, and he did it. Making sure we put on clean clothes and looked presentable didn’t cross his mind.

  Before playing the song, Dad asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up. I said baseball player and Sharon said nurse. Then, he turned to Tracy. “Hey Tracy, what do you want to be when you grow up?” he asked in his soft voice. Tracy responded, “A musician.” Tracy would make his dream come true.

  As a child, Tracy picked up the guitar and soon moved to bass, but he never felt supported in his musical endeavors. There again came Dad’s split personality as a Gemini—on one hand, Tracy says, “He mentored me, I looked up to him. He’s the one that cared whether I ate. He put the clothes on my back. He was in my life as far as guiding me.” On the other, when it came to music, he says, “I thought I was being more or less discouraged from playing. I would get derogatory comments every now and then…. I remember him getting mad at me because I couldn’t tune my guitar when I was a little boy. I remember picking the guitar, and he’s like, ‘That’s not in tune!’ I’m thinking to myself, it sounds good to me. He picked the guitar up, tuned it, and gave it back to me, ‘That’s nice and tuned.’”

  Perhaps Dad’s complexities wouldn’t allow him
to recognize his son’s burgeoning talent. The rejection made Tracy work harder to impress him, but it also showed the intricate inner workings that made it hard for Dad to deal with competition. It was almost a subconscious reflex—the same one that had left him the sole creative force at Curtom—and it continued throughout his life. In a few years, Tracy started a group called Sapphire that won two citywide talent shows in Chicago. Dad couldn’t quite support that endeavor either. “He invited us to the studio,” Tracy recalls.

  We recorded a session, and after the session, you know, you want to hear something good. All I remember him saying is, “OK, cat, this is what y’all should sound like.” And he put on [his song] “Do Do Wap Is Strong in Here.” And that was it. We just listened to it and said, “Well, I guess you don’t like us.” He just kind of laughed, and talked a little bit, and then left. It was subtle, I guess. He just didn’t acknowledge if he heard me play. I remember him coming in the studio, and he was like, “Oh, cat, who’s playing keyboard?” I said, “That’s me, Dad.” And he didn’t say nothing. He just looked at me.

  For a man not threatened by James Brown, Marvin Gaye, or Smokey Robinson, it is hard to understand why Dad felt threatened by his own son. Perhaps it was because he never had a father to look up to, and he struggled to understand Tracy looking up to him. Or maybe it was because he remained haunted by his past. In a short time, he’d gone from kids calling him Smut to people revering him all around the world. He pushed himself to become one of the first black men to own his own label, and he made himself a millionaire in a business designed to take advantage of him. Such dizzying changes of fortune didn’t come with a guidebook. His subconscious insecurities could still complicate his life, even when his conscious mind didn’t want them to. He had evolved beyond most of those hang-ups, and as he got older they bothered him less, but some scars remained on his psyche.

  Curtis in Chicago features one other Impressions song of great significance beyond their brilliant performance that day. After “For Your Precious Love,” Curtis, Fred, and Sam sing “I’m So Proud,” the song that once inspired a young Bob Marley and the Wailers. The Wailers never tried to hide my father’s influence on their music, and they’d already covered several of his songs, including “Long Long Winter,” “I Made a Mistake,” “Keep On Moving,” and “Another Dance.” When not covering Impressions songs, the Wailers often used them as inspiration for their originals, like “Diamond Baby,” based on “Talking About My Baby.” The influence went beyond Marley, too—as Wailers biographer John Masouri noted, Curtis’s songs were the most covered, or “versioned,” in Jamaican music.

  Even though Marley and company had released four albums since the mid-’60s, they remained a regional act. In 1973, that changed. As Curtis cut Back to the World, the Wailers released their first album on Island Records, Catch a Fire, which rocketed them onto the world stage. Songs like “Slave Driver,” “Concrete Jungle,” and “400 Years” painted searing pictures of racism and its consequences that gave even Curtis a run for his money. At the same time, cuts like “Stir It Up” and “Kinky Reggae” showed how influential the Impressions’ harmonic style remained on the burgeoning reggae stars.

  When the Wailers performed on The Old Grey Whistle Test, the world began taking notice. Marley had just begun growing his dreadlocks, bringing Rastafarianism—an Ethopian-Hebrew spiritual belief system that became a political Black Power movement in Jamaica—to the mainstream. For the rest of the ’70s, Marley would match Curtis album for album, carrying the torch of unflinching social commentary and setting it to new rhythmic structures like ska, rocksteady, and roots reggae.

  Marley would pay his most enduring homage to Curtis and the Impressions with “One Love/People Get Ready,” which became a defining anthem for the island of Jamaica. On the song, which the Wailers had first recorded in 1965 before Marley reworked it for his 1977 Exodus album, Marley quotes a large portion of “People Get Ready,” making his strongest connection to Curtis and the group that had inspired the Wailers to form. For copyright reasons, Dad was even listed as cowriter of the song.

  As 1973 ended, my father rode a wave of momentum that started with Curtis, hit an unprecedented peak with Super Fly, and rolled on with the success of Back to the World. He also entered his thirties, and a casual observer might have expected him to take a break and let others take over the business while he watched his royalty money roll in. Instead, he started a new label with Marv called Gemigo, cut two solo albums, and agreed to score two movies. He was never further from taking it easy. He stood in the middle of the most productive, creative, and successful run of his entire career. As Marv put it with a heaping of understatement, “Curt’s pretty busy right now.”

  No matter how busy he was, he maintained a strong presence in his children’s lives. When he was in Chicago, we’d never go more than a few days without seeing him. We often stayed at his house on the weekends, and when he went on tour, he made sure to send postcards and call whenever he could. We understood he didn’t have a normal job, or keep normal hours, or live a normal life—in fact, many people in our lives never let us forget it. He’d take us to the studio often, where we watched him in the hustle and bustle, commanding his world. Because of his efforts, we knew him in a way he never knew his own father.

  In 1974, Dad’s world entered a state of flux. Curtom’s distribution deal with Buddah was set to expire, and though Dad didn’t know what would happen after that deadline, he poured himself into new work. Early in the year, the cast and crew of the movie Three the Hard Way shot scenes at Curtom as the Impressions recorded the soundtrack. Gordon Parks Jr. directed the movie, his second since Super Fly. The cast featured three of the biggest black action stars of the era—Jim Brown (The Dirty Dozen, Slaughter), Fred Williamson (Black Caesar, Bucktown), and Jim Kelly (Enter the Dragon, Black Samurai), as well as Super Fly’s Sheila Frazier. The Impressions also had their first acting gig in the movie.

  Writing duties for the soundtrack fell on Lowrell Simon, who had scored minor hits under Carl Davis with his group the Lost Generation. Not long after, Simon would also write for another Curtom group called Mystique, featuring two former members of the Lost Generation.

  After wrapping Three the Hard Way, Dad began work on another soundtrack, this one for the film Claudine. Since the film featured a female protagonist, he wanted a female vocalist. As luck would have it, Gladys Knight and the Pips had just left Motown and signed with Buddah in 1973, releasing “Midnight Train to Georgia,” which hit number one pop and R&B and won a Grammy Award. They were hotter than ever, and they agreed to sing for Claudine.

  As he had with Super Fly, my father related to the story of Claudine right away. The movie follows a single mother on welfare and the ravages it wages on her children, her romantic relationships, and her life. “I had experienced all of that growing up,” he said. “Welfare, living in a home without a father; I knew welfare pretty good, because my mother was on it.” Just like with Super Fly, he could get inside the characters and write about their lives with depth and empathy. In a way, Claudine also allowed him to pay tribute to his mother’s struggles. On cuts like “Mr. Welfare Man,” he seems to write in Marion’s voice:

  They just keep on saying I’m a lazy woman,

  Don’t love my children and I’m mentally unfit

  I must divorce him, cut all my ties with him

  ’Cause his ways they make me sick

  It’s a hard sacrifice not having me a loving man

  Society gave us no choice, tried to silence my voice

  Pushing me on the welfare.

  Gladys Knight gives a superior vocal performance, capturing the anguish of so many women stuck in a similar situation. I watched many of Gladys’s vocal sessions from the control booth and developed a huge crush on her. I’m sure I wasn’t the only eight-year-old boy in love with her, but I got to watch her perform in a way few others have. I’ll never forget the way she made time to talk to me during breaks in recording.

>   The next cut, “To Be Invisible,” features some of my father’s most heartbreaking poetry. Inspired by a scene in the film, he wrote about how poverty can steal one’s individuality and control, with lines like “To be invisible will be my claim to fame / A girl with no name / That way I won’t have to feel the pain.” Again, Gladys’s performance touches the soul, and Dad liked the arrangement so much he hardly changed a note when he recorded his own version for his next album.

  Claudine also features the supreme funk of “On and On,” which hit number two R&B and number five pop as a single, as well as another hit single in “Make Yours a Happy Home,” and Gladys provides a beautiful rendition of “The Makings of You,” originally from the Curtis album. The soundtrack shot to number one on the R&B chart, and the movie did just as well, grossing $6 million and earning a bevy of award nominations, including an Oscar nod for Diahann Carroll, Golden Globe nominations for Carroll and James Earl Jones, and a Golden Globe nomination for “On and On.”

  The only downside for my father was that the album came out on Buddah, not Curtom. Still, he climbed back on top doing something he loved. As he said years later, one of his favorite things was “hearing someone else record one of your songs, something that you had prepared, produced, and worked out for another artist—to find that it was a hit, to know that you could not only do for yourself, but you could do for others.”