Side A ends with another slow soul shuffle called “A Prayer,” in which he dipped back into the gospel of his youth. Like in the previous song, his lyrics contain a mixture of world-weariness and hope, the kind only a true artist can convey. In a way, these were message songs—not about the movement, but about life in general, full of the accumulated wisdom of a man who had been on the top and the bottom and everywhere in between, who had seen great success and painful failure, who knew about love and hate, wealth and poverty, equality and discrimination, fame and obscurity.
The only real message song on the album, “Cannot Find a Way,” is a dark answer to the album’s title. The combination forms a poignant comment on what had happened to the movement—it began with a mass of people demanding a way forward and ended with the disillusionment of realizing that, in fact, they could not find a way. The lyrics serve as a sort of coda to the movement:
People across the country, they all protest the same old news
The white and black, rich and poor
Find we’re all standing in the same old shoes.
We just cannot find a way
Preacher man, trying to do the best he can
But the text he preaches seems obsolete
And we suffer still over the land
We just cannot find a way.
In total, other than the sexy, upbeat opening track, Got to Find a Way plays like a man battling serious depression over losing love in his life and hope in the world. The album’s strength is even more impressive considering that he’d already written two other albums that year. It remains one of my favorites, but at the time it removed my father further than ever from the disco craze. It also marked the worst chart showing yet for his solo career.
Critics once again lamented his music as being unfocused and drawing too heavily on Super Fly—type jams without the inspiration that made his previous work so strong. The slide in ratings still didn’t concern him, though. He said, “I suppose I was somewhat arrogant about many songs. But, if I liked it and I felt it deep in my heart, it didn’t matter if it sold or not. I was with it.”
Modern critics have taken a kinder view, citing the album as a classic of ’70s soul. AllMusic.com led the charge, saying that “Curtis Mayfield hit a stride during the ’70s that was unparalleled among R&B/soul performers from an album standpoint” and that he “continued his run of excellent albums in the ’70s with Got to Find a Way. This album had more love songs than some of his earlier material, although he didn’t tone down his searing attacks on American injustice and hypocrisy. His vocals continued to be alternately poignant, urgent, and accusatory, while his lyrics, production, and arrangements were once again magnificent.”
Dad paid the critics no mind, anyway. He had too much else to focus on, as always. Curtom prepared to switch its distribution to Warner Brothers Records in 1975, and while he wrote his next album, There’s No Place Like America Today, two new movie offers came his way.
He wrote There’s No Place Like America Today in Atlanta during two weeks of depression. “I just had to work this depth out of my system,” he said. “Often it’s hard to accept how bad things are, you want to think about how things should be, but sometimes it’s good to take inventory, to face what’s happening. If you know what the foundation is, then even when you’re flying high, you know where you’re going to land. It was a long way from Superfly … I don’t think of it as depressing, more of a drama album.”
In many ways, it was his last great message piece, ending a decade of making the most consistent and powerful message music of any artist of his era. As he described it, “America Today takes a hard look at some of the things that sour our life experience…. There is much to celebrate in America today that’s good, even great. But for too many people, too often, there is still something sour waiting around the corner.”
He spoke candidly about the album cover—a take on Margaret Bourke-White’s classic black-and-white photograph, “There’s No Way Like the American Way,” but this time featuring a full-color image of a happy white family driving a comfortable sedan superimposed over a black-and-white photo of people waiting on a soup line. He’d begun thinking in terms of class, not just race, as he pondered his generation’s place in American history, saying:
It’s not meant as a racial connotation but merely a difference in class situation. While the situation isn’t as bad today as it was then, there is a general air of feeling that we may be headed in that direction … Of course, I’m aware that I couldn’t be where I am today if I had lived forty years earlier and I’m pleased that things have improved so much during that time—but my arrival isn’t of much help to the people who are suffering today because to them it’s as real as it was for the people of the Thirties … In the Thirties, the doors simply were not open, it was as easy as that. I would have been too early and it wouldn’t have mattered one little bit whether I had had the ability or not then.
America Today simmers with understatement. Unlike his previous solo albums, which were full to the brim with orchestration and percussion, he left the new songs full of space. They creep and crawl from the speakers as his falsetto draws the listener in close, producing an effect as devastating as anything he’d done.
The song “When Seasons Change” is one of the slowest Dad ever wrote. It unfolds with no urgency, secure in its power and message. He felt so strongly about it that in later years, he’d often use it to close concerts. His lyrics deal with themes he’d been exploring a lot on his last few albums, themes he learned as a child from his mother—despair, depression, and spiritual strength in the face of life’s impossible vagaries. “Time make you suffer,” he sings. “Praying to Jesus: ‘Make me a little stronger’ / So I might live the life a little bit longer … Look all around, and see yourself so weak and so vulnerable / So you try to be strong, but your money ain’t too long, and it’s so terrible.”
He had good reason for those feelings at the time. Not only had the movement ended, it seemed the country was heading straight back into the nightmare that caused it to start. National unemployment rates for black people remained nearly double that of whites, racial violence broke out in Boston and Pensacola, Florida, and the New York Times reported that conditions in the Watts ghetto in Los Angeles were worse than before the 1965 riot. School busing remained a dangerous endeavor, with children often put in the middle of terrible violence as protestors hurled rocks or worse at the buses, and it would take another year for the Supreme Court to rule that private schools couldn’t discriminate based on race, which meant that many white schools still refused to follow a twenty-three-year-old law.
My father didn’t just witness these things on the news, either. He lived them. Police sometimes stopped him in Atlanta for the infamous crime of driving while black. One time it happened with Sharon in the passenger seat. He got out of the car to speak with the officers, who began asking questions that all had the same end in mind—how did a black man get such a nice car? As Sharon recalls, “When he got back in the car, I could sense that he was furious. He was livid. Steam was coming out of his ears. I said, ‘What’s wrong, Dad? What happened?’ He said, ‘Nothing, baby’—he always called me baby—and he mumbled something. I realized in that moment that they were just two white police officers who were harassing him for no reason.”
As it happened to him, it also happened to his brother. Uncle Kenny moved to Atlanta, but he couldn’t find work. He recalls:
I had two honorable discharges, twenty-three letters of appreciation, but all that still wouldn’t get me a job. One time I went looking for a job out there. I was presentable, I felt, and I walked in this place. It advertised that they were hiring, and I walked in and asked the lady, “Ma’am, are you hiring?” She said, “No, not at the time.” I said, “OK, thank you, ma’am,” because Mama always taught me to be polite. I come out of there, and I was looking at the paper in case there was something in that area, and a white guy come up to me, and he said, “Are they hiring?”
I said no. He said, “Well, I’m going to go in there and check anyway.” So he went in, and when he came out he had a job.
Once again, the control Curtis earned with his music allowed him to help his family in times of need. He gave Uncle Kenny a job with Curtom doing record promotion, covering radio stations in the Southeast (he’d also hire Aunt Judy as a receptionist for a short time). “I basically dealt with the secondary radio stations,” Uncle Kenny says.
When they branched me out and started moving me north, then I did Ohio, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and all that. The ma-and-pa stations, after they got to know you, there wasn’t none of this payola like there was with the big companies. They were good people. I could walk in there with any of Curtis’s product or anything off the Curtom label, they would get on it and they would report it to the trades. Everybody thinks that these big radio stations are the ones that push the music. They was not back in them days. It was always the ma-and-pa, the little small radio stations that pushed your record up. Most of the time, all those guys wanted you to do, you’d buy them a sandwich, take them to lunch. One guy out of Birmingham, Alabama, Shelly Pope, he always wanted you to get his laundry out.
Though his audience had declined, my father could still vent his feelings through music. On America Today, he drew on the spiritual strength of Annie Bell to make sense of his country’s state. Speaking about the spiritual messages prevalent in the album, he said, “I’d like to think that you could sing most of my songs in a church or in a tavern or in the streets. I believe that every man not only has his God, but is, within himself, his God. Through having come up with my grandmother, and her being a preacher, I guess what I’ve taken from her is the ability to communicate these inspiring messages for those who want to take it.” He also said that the song “Jesus” was “the closest I’ve come to real gospel since the ‘Keep On Pushing’ days.”
Some critics saw America Today as a return to form. Others saw it as a further descent into unfocused jams. Christgau gave it a D+, saying, “It appears [Curtis] was seeking new standards of incoherence.” Yet again, the trend continued—critical and commercial decline at the time but eventual vindication as future generations recognized it as a classic album. Still, it marked his third straight solo release that failed to meet his expectations of success and was an inauspicious start to Curtom’s deal with Warner Brothers.
In fact, the Warner Brothers deal had gone sour almost before it started. Neil Bogart was the reason Curtom made the switch to Warner—he’d just left Buddah and started a label and promotional company under Warner Brothers’ umbrella. Dad followed him with the understanding that Bogart would promote Curtom’s product the same way he’d done with wild success at Buddah. As soon as the ink dried on Curtom’s deal, though, Bogart split. Curtom hired its own promotion team, but it didn’t have the pull of a major label behind it. This led to a further decline in Curtom’s fortunes.
Luckily, while his solo albums failed to hit, he was able to keep his hard-earned spot at the top of the music world with the help of movies. For the rest of Curtom’s stay at Warner Brothers, soundtracks kept them in business. Earlier that year, Warner Brothers had approached my father and asked him to score their new comedy, Let’s Do It Again. According to some sources, they also asked him to star in the movie alongside up-and-coming soul man Al Green. Dad pulled out of the project because he didn’t have the time and didn’t like the script, but Warner Brothers went ahead with the film, hiring Bill Cosby, Sidney Poitier, and Jimmie Walker (famous for portraying J.J. on the sitcom Good Times, set in Cabrini-Green).
After some convincing from Warner Brothers, Dad rejoined the project to write the soundtrack. The opportunity appealed to him because it “brought about a different type of thing because it was a comedy,” he said. “And I wondered to myself what kind of songs I could write if I wanted to be funny.”
As he wrote, he knew exactly whom he wanted to sing the songs—his old friends the Staple Singers, whom he’d known since his days on the gospel circuit with the Northern Jubilee Singers. “I could hear what was going to happen where,” he said. “The songs were written specifically for the group. A lot of times, they can’t hear what you can hear. Those are the tools of a creative person. You can actually see the whole picture—you see how it will turn out.”
Like his last several albums, Let’s Do It Again was remarkably strong and consistent. Somehow, he still hadn’t run out of ideas. The material was also far more sexual than the Staples were used to. Mavis Staples recalled, “When we went into the studio and Pops heard his part—‘I like you lady, so fine with your pretty hair’—he said, ‘Man, I ain’t singing that, Curtis,’ and Curtis said, ‘Pops, come on. It’s a movie score. It’s not changing your religion. Do it for me, please?’ And Daddy just got tickled. He couldn’t say no to Curtis. He was that inspiring.”
The album went gold, and the title-track single hit the top of the R&B and pop charts. The movie also hit big with audiences, including a young kid in Brooklyn named Christopher Wallace. Late in the next decade, Wallace began rapping on street corners to entertain his friends, eventually making a demo tape under the name Biggie Smalls—the name of the outsized pimp in Let’s Do It Again. A few years later, Wallace rose to the top of the music world as the Notorious B.I.G. with his debut album, Ready to Die.
By the end of the year, my father sputtered with exhaustion and still piled more work on himself. In 1975, he’d written a new solo album, two soundtracks, and Curtom had released albums from Leroy Hutson and the Impressions. They all toured the United Kingdom to support their albums, and when they came back, Warner Brothers relaunched the Gemigo label.
On top of that, Dad started another publishing company, Mayfield Music, which meant that Curtom now handled six of his publishing companies at once. He also joined Don Cornelius in an attempt to license a vacant AM radio station, which they hoped to make into a Top 40—styled black station. “I’m not really a radio man,” Dad said, “but my music is on the radio a lot, and Chicago is my place of business, and I feel that my own ethics and community involvement would be a big asset to a radio operation.” The plan never came together, but perhaps it was just as well. It’s hard to imagine how he would have found the time to make it work.
In 1976, the Impressions released Loving Power, which didn’t do much. Then they quit Curtom. Curtis had never been further from his old group, but he was too busy to dwell on it. After the Impressions left, he worked on finishing the second movie project he’d taken on the year before—Sparkle. He’d already written and recorded the entire album with his voice as a placeholder. “I was writing the songs not knowing really who was going to do them,” he said. “I didn’t know really until two or three weeks before we released the album who was going to sing it.”
What he didn’t say was that someone had already sung it—the film’s cast, including the future costar of Miami Vice, Philip Michael Thomas. Understandably, the cast members reacted with dismay when they heard their version of the soundtrack was scrapped because Curtis didn’t like it. Lonette McKee, one of the female leads, said, “The next thing I knew, Curtis Mayfield was giving an interview saying he couldn’t understand how they could cast unknowns … He made it hard, deliberately setting the keys of the songs in uncomfortable registers for all of us.”
Whether or not that accusation was true, it’s hard to blame my father for making the switch. At the end of 1975, Atlantic Records’ in-house legend, Ahmet Ertegun, approached Dad about working with Aretha Franklin. Like Curtis, the Queen of Soul had recently released a string of unsuccessful albums. She listened to the music he’d written for Sparkle and jumped on board. “I’d never gotten into Aretha until this,” Dad said. “I was very pleased with my music and the contents even before I knew she was going to do it. And her singing just brought everything together.”
Recording only took five days because, as Franklin recalled, “[Curtis] likes to work fast.” Also, they worked well together. “He pretty much le
t me have a free hand,” she said. “Our only real disagreement was over one note—he wanted me to sing one way, but I had another way in mind. So we recorded both versions, and what you hear on the album is his concept. He was the producer, so I let him produce.” Even when producing a woman who many believe to be the greatest singer of all time, my father wouldn’t relinquish control.
The Sparkle soundtrack hit number one R&B, as did the single “Something He Can Feel.” The album went gold that year, proving Dad’s music could still captivate the music world. Tracy recalls him saying he liked Sparkle best out of all the albums he’d made, but it continued a frustrating trend—even though his music remained strong, it seemed he could only succeed when someone else sang his songs.
With his next solo album, Give, Get, Take and Have, he sought to break that trend. He wrote a batch of songs aimed at the pop charts, even giving a brief nod to the disco craze on “Party Night.” That song in particular was a microcosm of the forces directing his songwriting. It showed a man torn between his heart and commercialism, between the music he loved and the music that was currently popular. As a result, the album doesn’t quite cohere despite excellent songs like “In Your Arms Again,” “This Love Is Sweet,” and “P.S. I Love You.” The only bright spot commercially was that the single, “Only You Babe,” hit number eight R&B.
Give, Get, Take and Have was his worst-selling solo album yet, and another critical failure. With the pressure of running Curtom taking up more mental space than ever, and with his family life deteriorating from increasing solitude and probable drug use, he simply didn’t have time to construct an album as seamless and powerful as Curtis or Super Fly. Creating a work of art takes absolute focus, ample time, and unrelenting determination. My father only had the latter. He’d always said he wanted his music to be about more than “shaking your shaggy shaggy.” He wanted to give people something to think about while they danced. But several of the songs on Give, Get, Take and Have feature some permutation of the phrase “shake it,” with nothing more serious as a counterbalance. It seemed he was giving in.
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