Dad also had plans to do for himself, and he began cutting his next album, Sweet Exorcist. Perhaps because of the demands on his time, he relied mostly on songs he’d given to others, including “Ain’t Got Time” (the Impressions), “To Be Invisible” (Gladys Knight and the Pips), “Suffer” (Holly Maxwell), and “Make Me Believe in You” (Patti Jo). Still, he said, “The album allowed me to say some things I’d wanted to say for quite a while, things that were in my mind which I wanted to get out.”
The retreads often followed the original versions closely, but there were important differences, especially on “Ain’t Got Time.” The song is funkier than the Impressions’ version, and my father’s phrasing is looser. He also augmented his voice with multitracked backing harmonies, a trick he’d use with great effect on his future work. He changed the song’s structure, wrote a new chorus, and added new lyrics, including the lines “Make a mess of me / Which wasn’t supposed to be / We were supposed to change / It couldn’t be arranged.”
He’d written the first version of the song—one of his last singles with the Impressions, recorded during the Check Out Your Mind sessions and released in early 1971—as his relationship with my mother crumbled. He cut the version on Sweet Exorcist with the new lyrics just as his relationship with Toni, his “spiritual wife,” ended.
Dad never explained his breakup with Toni, but just before she disappeared he had a peculiar mishap, severing the tendon on his left middle finger. The injury was so serious he faced the prospect of never playing guitar again. He tried to play it off, saying he was holding a glass pot and it broke in his hand. Even as a child, I didn’t buy that explanation.
Doctors reattached the tendon, but he couldn’t straighten his finger, so he had to attend physical therapy. I sat with him in his rehab sessions, mulling over the accident in my mind. The best I could guess was that Toni stabbed him. I had no evidence, just a feeling. Their relationship was always volatile, and a stabbing certainly wasn’t outside the realm of possibility.
Whatever happened with Toni, it didn’t take my father long to find someone new. He met Altheida Sims through Craig and quickly fell in love again. They’d stay together until the end of his life. The new romance spurred one of his greatest love songs, the title track, “Sweet Exorcist,” on which his falsetto sounds lighter, thinner, and more sexual than ever. As he coos and croons, guitars and organ weave around each other like lovers entwined. “Sweet Exorcist” is a mature love song, too, full of the contradictions of life. He sings about depression and hard times but also about the persevering power of love. He even mixes in message music, singing, “The love she gives, it makes me feel so black and proud.” And he shouts out Annie Bell, singing, “I know I believe in the spirit, Traveling Soul was alone, a part of me.”
Next is his version of “To Be Invisible,” at which point his fans might have noticed that for the first time since he left the Impressions, he hadn’t presented a single message song on his new album. He made a conscious decision to ease back on jeremiads after the success of Super Fly, proving himself a canny evaluator of his audience. “We’ve shouted the message from the roof-tops and if people haven’t cottoned on to it by now then they never will,” he said. “It’s like a paper that carries nothing but headlines: in the end they lose all effect. To carry on writing in that vein would be just like beating people’s heads against a brick wall and in the end they resent it.” He also spoke about the direction he intended to go, saying, “It’s now time to carry the message in a more personalized vein, that way people relate easier. General statements are all very well but fit the statement into a personal context which the listener can place himself into and you then have something with much more impact. That’s the way I’m writing songs now.”
With that in mind, the only message-like song on Sweet Exorcist—“Power to the People,” an infectious anthem in the mold of “Keep On Pushing”—makes more sense. Unlike his previous solo work, it doesn’t bite or sear. It encourages, lifts, prods. Critics lambasted the song’s title and what they saw as its trite message, and by 1974, the phrase was indeed tired—the Panthers had used it as a motto, saying, “Power to the people; off the pigs,” and John Lennon had a popular single of the same name in 1971. Still, the song is heartfelt and lyrically complex. Perhaps part of the song’s joy comes from the fact that Nixon stood on the verge of resigning the presidency. He’d recently been caught up in the Watergate scandal, and the public hearings played out on national television. Dad had good reason to sing, “God bless great America!” Nixon was going down.
Despite a number-three R&B hit with the single “Kung Fu,” however, Sweet Exorcist faced even more disapproval than Back to the World. A review in Rolling Stone was emblematic:
Like many an overextended or depleted artist, Mayfield has dug into his past for material for this album, which sounds hastily conceived and then competently executed to meet some contractual deadline. Four of the seven tunes were written prior to 1971…. The very titles of the two new numbers, “Kung Fu” and “Sweet Exorcist,” signal the lack of invention…. The music is competently routine. Almost all of it is in the Superfly boogie-down mold, but without the extras that made the best Superfly cuts stand out…. All that’s left is Mayfield’s basic competence in using the studio. At this point, the Superfly-derived material the Motown writers have been coming up with for Eddie Kendricks is far superior to what Mayfield can come up with.
Robert Christgau, music editor of the Village Voice famous for his “Consumer Guide” record reviews, gave Sweet Exorcist a grade of C, calling “To Be Invisible” the only interesting song on the record. Of course, out of all reviewers of my father’s post—Super Fly work, Christgau was usually most off point.
Dad rarely wasted his time paying attention to critics, but perhaps these reviews contained valid points. It was an undeniable fact that only two songs on Sweet Exorcist were new. My father had stretched himself way past thin and didn’t have the time to create to his highest standards. “I can’t come in [to Curtom] and write, which I didn’t know at the beginning,” he said. “I thought I’d be able to do that, but when things start happening, there’s decisions to be made, you have your other artists to deal with. So usually I find myself as a client in my own place—I have to call in and book my time like everyone else.”
Sweet Exorcist also contained many halfhearted nods to current trends without fully engaging any of them. Most obviously, there was the title itself. Now a legendary horror film, The Exorcist came out at the end of 1973 and remained a cinematic phenomenon well into the next year when Dad released his album. While my father claimed the film had nothing to do with his album title, the comparison wasn’t hard to make. At the same time, martial arts and Eastern mysticism became hot, due in large part to Bruce Lee’s recent death and David Carradine’s hit TV show, Kung Fu. It is worth noting that the top-selling single of 1974 was a disco song called “Kung Fu Fighting.”
While Eastern mysticism had enthralled many black Americans for decades—Sun Ra, for example, had pushed it in Chicago since Curtis was a child—it now hit another renaissance in black culture. Still, Sweet Exorcist’s far-out cover—“a skeletal Hokusai sea with reefs of doomed and skeletal men, which met with little critical favor,” as one writer described it—drew questions from fans and critics alike as to what exactly my father was getting at. In an era when artists like Parliament, Earth, Wind & Fire, and Sly Stone took mysticism in R&B to new heights, Sweet Exorcist lacked the conviction to stand out in the crowd.
Despite these problems, the album sold. It went gold, hitting number two on the R&B chart. Continuing the downward trend since Super Fly, though, it only reached thirty-nine on the pop chart. The album also marked another shift in Curtis’s music. From that point on, he returned to his Impressions-era ratio of one or two message songs per album, surrounded by love songs.
In a way, he had no choice. The Watergate scandal was everywhere, inescapable, thrust into the face of a generation
still reeling from the Pentagon Papers’ proof that the government had sent sixty thousand boys to die in Vietnam based on lies and deception. The public needed an escape from politics. Disco gave it to them.
My father seemed to need an escape, too. As his relationship with Altheida deepened, he became more of a recluse than ever. “His behavior patterns changed, and not for the good,” Sharon says. “He was more withdrawn. They would just be in the room for hours and hours on end, and we would be left to our own devices.” In the apartment on Marine Drive, Dad fell further into abnormal behavior. Some people whispered rumors attributing it to cocaine use. Tracy recalls seeing strange people hanging around, people we didn’t know. “They would be feeding him information,” Tracy says. “It felt strange, whatever it was.”
We could only guess what was going on at the time. He never did anything in front of us. Instead, he stayed locked in his room while we entertained ourselves. He wasn’t always getting high in his room—like his mother and Annie Bell before him, he did many normal, everyday things from that sanctuary, and because he kept such late hours, many times he’d just be in there sleeping. Still, as we got older we noticed the pattern getting worse, and we assumed why.
One day, as Sharon recalls,
they were in the room for so long, and we had nothing to do. We hadn’t had anything to eat, there was nothing to do in that condo, and so they had all these boxes of tissues. We went on the balcony and started tossing tissues out into the open air and watching them float. Maybe an hour later, my dad comes out of the room, we all go out to get something to eat, and there are tissues everywhere down below. He made a comment about it like, “What in the world? I wonder what happened.” I felt like that was definitely the beginning of him withdrawing and being irresponsible when it came to caring for his children when they were in his presence. That made me very angry. It made me not want to go and visit.
As he withdrew, the day-to-day issues of life—never his strong point—became even harder to handle. Stacks of unopened mail sat neglected on his table for months. Bank statements, bills, and letters piled up in forgotten corners of the apartment. Sometimes we couldn’t get in touch with him because he’d forgotten to pay the phone bill and the phone company cut off his service.
Like always, he had the grand vision but needed others to execute it. For a man so concerned with control, this left him at the mercy of people who did know how to execute—people who couldn’t write a song but could keep two sets of books, or lift a few thousand dollars here and there without him noticing. I noticed these things, though, and I became more interested in the business. I saw a way to protect my father by learning to do the things he couldn’t. Later in life, I’d get my chance to try.
While life with my father became difficult during this period, the Gemini in him made sure that we also saw another, better side. As often as he withdrew, and as much as he broke promises—little things, like saying he’d show up somewhere and then forgetting to do it—he also proved his love for us constantly. Always a practical joker, he went out of his way to fill our lives with excitement. “I think he got a kick out of scaring us, like Halloween-type stuff,” Tracy says. “He would set up these elaborate things because he was a very funny person. He liked magic. He would do magic tricks for us.”
He showed us the world, taking us on vacations to California, Hawaii, the Bahamas, and other places, often on a moment’s notice. He gave us advice, telling us over and over again the importance of owning ourselves. “He was always like the old wise man,” Tracy says. “He would get astute—philosophical, really deep answers.” He lectured on the dangers of borrowing money, especially from shady characters. “That’s when they own you,” he always said. He spent time with us, bringing us to Six Flags, playing chess, taking us shopping. He’d often pick us up after school, drive to a store, and say, “Pick out what you want.”
He even doted on us. “He was always concerned with, ‘You want something to eat, cat?’” Tracy recalls. “He always wanted to feed you. ‘You want me to fix you some fish, cat?’” Sharon also remembered his efforts to maintain a presence in our lives, saying, “It felt like we were always in connection with him. I didn’t feel like he was an absentee father. I felt like my mom did a good job and kind of insisting that he did interact with us, and I think that he made a pretty good effort to have us around him when he was in the studio.”
He also protected us with a ferocity that let us know we could trust him when in need. At his house in Atlanta, which we visited often, we made friends with some white kids who lived nearby. One day as we swam in the pool, they came over and hurled rocks and racial slurs at us. When Dad found out, he shot out of the house in a fury with no shoes or socks on, chased the kids through the woods, caught one of them, and dragged him back to the house. As the boy wriggled and cried, his parents came to get him. My father laid into them and made them apologize. “He did what any father would’ve done to protect his children,” Sharon says. “And he acted immediately. He didn’t hesitate. He didn’t even wait to put shoes on or anything; he wanted to know who was inflicting harm on his children. So I remember feeling like my dad is going to protect us.”
Dad didn’t face disrespect like that often. Most people stood in awe of him. Watching the way people reacted to him, we learned about the power of stardom. Each of us dealt with it in our own way, but we all learned what he already knew—fame and money cloud everything. They make everyone’s motives suspicious. They make it hard to recognize one’s real friends or know whom to trust. In my eyes, being Curtis Mayfield’s son was the proverbial double-edged sword. It set me apart, but not always in a good way. I felt everyone wanted something. People always asked, “How’s your dad doing?” No one ever asked about my mother.
That’s not to say having a famous dad didn’t come with many advantages. But sometimes such a thing precedes you. I often got upset when people introduced me as Curtis Mayfield’s son, as if that’s all I was. Sharon felt the same way. She says, “I didn’t want to be identified as Curtis Mayfield’s daughter. I just wanted to be like everyone. I’ve never in my whole life told anyone that Curtis Mayfield was my father. Anyone who knew, knew either before they met me, or they heard it from someone. And I remember times growing up that I denied it. I didn’t want the attention. I didn’t want the questions.” The same held true for Tracy. “You don’t want to tell people who your father is because there’s a lot of jealousy out there,” he says. “When some people found out or some kids found out, it wasn’t a happy thing; it was more of a jealousy kind of thing.”
While we understood his importance, the life we lived was all we knew. Others might have counted him as a hero; to us he was just Dad. “I have an early memory of being aware of other people’s reactions to him in public,” Sharon recalls. “I would think, ‘Why are they so excited about him? He’s just my dad.’ I knew that he was a singer. I just thought, ‘Well, he’s not Michael Jackson.’ At the time when I was growing up, the Jackson 5, they were just it.”
We also learned how to deal with these things graciously. He made sure we appreciated what we had. We never had to worry about money, but he couldn’t forget going to bed hungry while his mother wept, so he expected us to remain humble in the face of good fortune. He still lived modestly for a man of his means. His main extravagances were cars—with his Super Fly money he bought a 1974 convertible Rolls Royce Corniche, baby blue with cream interior. In summertime, he’d roll out with the top down, come around the house, drive it over to the office. Still, he never went for huge houses or flashy possessions, and even when it came to cars, he preferred bouncing around in his brown soft-top Jeep Wrangler.
While we learned to remain humble, he learned that we didn’t always feel comfortable with shows of wealth. At the time, Sharon and I attended a Catholic school in a rough neighborhood. One day after school, my sister walked outside and, as she recalls, “Here comes Curtis Mayfield driving up in a Rolls Royce. The excitement that that would caus
e, and then me getting into that car, and everyone watching—that made me a little bit uncomfortable, and I remember asking, ‘Dad, the next time you pick us up, can you park a little ways down?’ He was tickled by it. The next time he parked half a block down from the school.”
After Sweet Exorcist, the Impressions released the Three the Hard Way soundtrack, which only hit twenty-six on the R&B chart and missed the pop chart. At the same time, they worked on another album called Finally Got Myself Together. Yet again, my father passed off writing duties, this time to a team of writers including Ed Townsend, the man the Impressions replaced in concert more than a decade before, the first time they played for Georgie Woods in Philadelphia. Townsend wrote the title track, which went to number one R&B—the only Impressions number-one hit my father didn’t write. They would never reach the top of the charts again. Though the album did well, Fred and Sam could see they were no longer a top priority at Curtom. They began looking for a way out.
Finishing off a busy year, Curtom released four more albums in 1974—Leroy Hutson’s The Man!, the Natural Four’s self-titled album, Bobby Whiteside’s Bittersweet Stories, and Curtis’s third album of the year, Got to Find a Way. The last begins with a reworking of the song “Love Me,” which he’d given to the Impressions on Times Have Changed. This time, it’s called “Love Me (Right in the Pocket),” and is an undeniable piece of rhythmic, sexual soul. Again, my father sings near the top of his range, almost whispering the lyrics, and providing his own backing vocals—soulful “doo doos” and “mmhmms.” The song also contains his clearest nod to Hendrix, as a wailing wah-wah guitar noodles over the entire thing, giving the listener a tantalizing taste of what a possible May-field/Hendrix collaboration might have sounded like.
The next song, “So You Don’t Love Me,” is another heartbreaking ballad of lost love. Again, he provides his own gorgeous backing vocals, and in the chorus he hits what might be the highest note of his career when he sings the line “I guess I got to find me a better place.” Just like on “Sweet Exorcist,” my father showed great maturity, singing again of the pain and struggle inherent in life. He’d written breakup songs before, but never had he approached the subject with such nuance and maturity.
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