Steve Tolbert, who had flown down in his private jet, was infuriated with everybody, and King put all the blame on me. Steve was upset over the decision to make the concerts free to the public, because now he would have to wait till the movie from the event and the festival recordings were released before he could recoup his investment. The concerts themselves were a joyful spectacle. The local groups were given priority to perform by the Zaire big shots, and many of the visiting artists’ performance times were reduced. The Cameroon jazz saxophonist Manu Dibango and rhythm-and-blues queen Etta James did not even get to perform. All three concerts started at seven in the evening and went on until around four in the morning. The fact that my colleagues and I had enough supplies to stay high helped us to keep up with all the mayhem and over-the-top demands. Tempers were on the edge all around. B.B. King would not talk to me when I came to ask him to stand by for his performance. He just sat there and stared at me, pissed off for having been made to wait so long. When he finally went onstage, our staring competition and my begging him to come on had lasted over twenty minutes while the capacity crowd waited patiently.
At check-out time, so many people had been charging drinks and food to their rooms that the incidental costs totaled about $190,000. The day after the last concert, Ian Bradshaw, Steve Tolbert’s business manager, flipped out and had Alan, Stewart, and me placed under house arrest in the hotel by Mobutu’s people. Nga managed to get Alan out of there and onto the plane with the rest of the departing musicians. All the film was confiscated and sent to Mobutu’s office. Miriam Makeba helped us get it released by convincing the president that the film and tapes were better off if they were sent back for processing, editing, and mixing so that they could generate funds to pay off the outstanding debts. If the film and tapes remained in the president’s vault, then everybody would be the loser. The president, who had great respect for Miriam, gave in to her request. A few days later, Nga and I saw Stewart off. Ian Bradshaw had left the country in a huff, cussing us out, but nobody was interested in listening to his shit. Life had to go on. We felt bad about Tolbert’s financial setback, but we were certain it would be repaid through the release of the film, music videos, and recordings. Big Black, whom we had brought along as a spiritual drummer for the music festival, remained behind in Ali’s camp. Ali wanted to train to his drum rhythms.
All in all, the experience had been extremely educational—I certainly learned a lot about working under acute pressure and unreasonable demands. Working with government personnel, the military, boxing promoters, recording crews, film crews, thousands of artists, more than 200,000 music fans, print and broadcast media, hotel staff, stage crews, construction crews, and travel agents had demanded a great deal of calm, presence of mind, teamwork, and temper control, which was very difficult at times. I had made great friends with many Zaireans, especially musicians and government officials. For a change, I had been too preoccupied with work to frolic with the beautiful women, even though I did have my fair share under the circumstances.
I totally lost touch with Steve Tolbert, who lost his life the following year when his plane crashed in Liberia on one of his many business trips. Our relationship with Don King worsened. When we returned to America, he demanded an additional ten percent from us for the film and recording rights, but we told him to kiss our asses. When we got back to New York, we were hit with a court injunction from King on all the film and recordings we had done in Zaire. Leon Gast waited until the statute of limitations expired and then got producer David Sonnenberg to raise some capital for its completion. Twenty years after the event, When We Were Kings, Gast’s film, won an Oscar for best feature documentary. What is funnier than everything, though, is how Leon Gast and Lloyd Price forgot that the money for the project came from Steve Tolbert because of our initiative and hustle. They claimed all the credit and never gave us any. Most sickening of all was Don King’s arrogance and how he sabotaged everything of ours once we wouldn’t let him have his way with us. Perhaps he was still steaming from the embarrassment Jagger had laid on him in New York. I have never seen the film and have not had any desire to do so.
The experience armed us to tackle any big project, and earned us a great deal of respect in the entertainment industry—although we came out of the project with no material wealth, we had managed to put together one of history’s most memorable music spectacles.
16
WHEN STEWART AND I left Los Angeles to set up office operations in New York for the Zaire festival, we had just moved into a gigantic mansion on an estate in Brentwood, one of north Los Angeles’s most luxurious suburbs. With Hedzoleh Soundz having disbanded, Stanley Todd, the group’s leader and bassist, had been talking up some Ghanaian and Nigerian musicians he knew in D.C. that we could use to replace the deserters. Stanley was anxious to go there and start organizing them.
When we returned from Zaire, Stanley had moved to Washington, D.C., and begun rehearsing with the musicians there, along with Hedzoleh percussionist Asante and guitarist Jagger. Stanley had now switched to guitar, and Yaw Opoku was playing the bass. Rounding out the outfit was percussionist Guy Warren and Stanley’s drummer brother Frankie Todd, both from Ghana, and Nigerians Adelaja Gboyega on keyboards and saxophonist/composer Julius Ekemode.
After closing up shop on the Rumble concert, I spent some time in New York with my sister Barbara. During this visit, I saw trumpeter Donald Byrd at Carnegie Hall. Byrd, a fellow Manhattan School of Music alumnus, was performing with his group from Howard University, the Blackbyrds, on a bill with the great poet-musician and singer Gil Scott Heron. Donald introduced me to producer/promoter/manager Bob Young of Charisma Productions, which had offices in the nation’s capital. When I got to D.C., I stayed with Bob Young for a while and he helped set up rehearsal arrangements for our newly formed group; later I moved out to my own place next to Stanley and Frankie Todd in Alexandria, Virginia. We gave our group the name OJAH, Nigerian slang for “very close friend,” because we wanted to put the memory of Hedzoleh Soundz behind us and also avoid more accusations of theft from Faisal Helwani.
OJAH was a more African-urban-oriented unit, and like Hedzoleh, we all sang. I Am Not Afraid, which I recorded in 1974 with Hedzoleh and on which we were joined by the Crusaders’ Joe Sample on piano and Stix Hooper on drums, was instrumental in shifting our style more toward a heavy mix of jazz, highlife, mbhaqanga, Congolese rhumba, and rhythm and blues. On it, we did the very first versions of “Stimela,” the song I’d composed in Woodstock before heading off to Africa. “The Marketplace” was about meeting a beautiful young lady at her stall in Kinshasa’s public marketplace and the wonderful romance that follows. It begins as a typical Congolese rhumba, and then shifts into a fast Soukous–Kwassa-Kwassa dance rhythm, the kind made popular by Franco and Rochereau’s bands back when I first went to Zaire. “African Secret Society” was a lilting rhythm and bluesish rhumba about young girls who went to initiation schools in Liberia when I lived there. On graduating, they were paraded through the streets, their bodies painted with different colored ochre clay, layers of beads around their waists and necks and loincloths cut out of animal skin. On “Night in Tunisia,” Dizzy Gillespie’s classic jazz composition from the early 1950s, we did a fiery drum and percussion “mambo” style with avant-garde harmonics based on the contemporary jazz styles of Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman. It had a dark, eerie jungle voodoo feel to it. Joe Sample really enjoyed setting atonal, dissonant chord structures into the texture of the song. It felt very much like “ethnic Africa meets Harlem jazz on a dark, misty night in old New Orleans.”
We had never played the songs from this album at concerts. We started to rehearse them with OJAH for our upcoming shows. The group was also preparing new songs like “Excuse Me Baby Please,” a spirited, up-tempo, township mbhaqanga, brassy dance groove with horns screaming in the upper register, riffing guitars, a bouncing bass line, and flowing electric keyboards, with the percussion and drums laying down heavy rhythm, pumping on
the second and fourth beats. It was a happy dance instrumental with a foot-tapping, thumping, stomping, hammering thud repeating over and over.
Another instrumental, “A Person Is a Sometime Thing,” was a medium-tempo, heavy R&B groove with a happy unison horn melody reminiscent of the 1950s–1960s Horace Silver Quintets. Julius Ekemode and I played solos on all the instrumentals. “Ashiko,” written by Ekemode, was a very catchy, repetitive, Yoruba-lyric, Afro-beat groove with jazzy horn and keyboard riffs, dancing congas, and African jembes. Ekemode sang the lead vocals, and the ensemble singing chants were a cross between Osibisa and Fela’s vocals. “In the Jungle,” an African highlife, rhythm-and-bluesy, medium-tempo vocal with me singing lead and the band answering “In the Jungle” on the chorus, was a funny parody about Tarzan beginning to lose control of his powers deep in the African bush, and the modern African citizen forcing him to go back where he came from. “Mama” was another Afro-beat dance groove with a very heavy Fela influence and stinging horn riffs. Bob Young got us a few local gigs in clubs around the Washington and Baltimore areas. Oscar Cohen, at Associated Booking Corporation, lined us up on a tour that would take us through Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Atlanta to Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago, Albuquerque, Phoenix, Denver, and Boulder, then to Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and finally Los Angeles.
In Los Angeles, Stewart informed me that Bob Krasnow had terminated our contract with Blue Thumb Records because we had taken too long to go on the road in support of the I Am Not Afraid album. But Stewart had just completed a successful negotiation with Neil Bogart, who had left Buddah Records to form his own Casablanca record label, to which he had already signed Parliament Funkadelic, led by George Clinton and Bootsy Collins, and the rock group KISS. Right away, OJAH went in the studio with Stewart producing once again. We recorded all the new songs we had been playing on the road; the session went fast because we had dug so heavily into them over the six months we had been rehearsing and performing. The band members were outstanding musicians, each one really excelling on his instrument. They were also very good singers, and we really sounded great together. The audiences loved the band, the women were especially infatuated with Stanley, Adelaja, Yaw, Guy, and Ekemode, who were all very good looking and athletically built. The women were always screaming their names from the audience and went crazy when I introduced them individually on the last song of every show. The album, The Boy’s Doin’ It, became quite popular.
When Stewart and I first went to Lagos, Fela had taken us to a performance of young singer/composer/pianist Johnny Haastrup, whose quartet played an Afro-beat style that was heavily influenced by highlife, jazz, R&B, and Yoruba folk music. He had the most beautiful voice and a great personality. We encouraged him to come to America and try to break into the music industry there because we were convinced that he would make it. Johnny came to California without the rest of his group and stayed with friends in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Alone, he was not able to project his unique style, nor was he able to find musicians from his country who could do his style of music justice. He returned to Nigeria and Ghana only to return to L.A. two months later with the assurance that there was a major demand for our music in those countries. He had already lined up venues, and if we gave him the word, he would hurry back to West Africa and begin promotion for the concerts. This news excited the band members, except for Ekemode.
With the exception of Yaw Opoku and Ekemode, the rest of our band was heavy into cocaine, marijuana, and booze. Our master drummer/percussionist, Asante, was not into coke but loved smoke and the band’s favorite liquor, Jack Daniel’s. We drank beer like mineral water. The band lived for music, women, and getting high. Given our three vices, it escaped our minds that Johnny’s idea was not such a great plan after all. Neil Bogart found it hard to understand why we were so keen to travel to Africa, at a time when his company was trying to promote our album in the States. But nothing could be done to change our minds. We were going to Nigeria and Ghana, and that was final. In our euphoria, we justified our trip by insisting that the majority of the band had not been back home in many years and needed the pilgrimage as a much-needed morale booster. We argued that we would come back strengthened and energized. “But you are good enough as you are. Why not go after a year of touring? Then you will really have established yourself,” both Stewart and Neil observed. We were adamant. We just had to go.
The second week of July, 1975, we arrived in Accra and checked into the Tesano Gardens Hotel amid major mudslinging by Faisal Helwani, who had been giving interviews in the press and on radio stations, denigrating and vilifying my name with charges that I stole Hedzoleh Soundz from him in the United States. Nothing materialized from Faisal’s past threats, and we ended up spending a lot of time at his Napoleon Club residence, where he entertained us lavishly during the duration of our stay in Ghana. We also found that cocaine had made its way into West Africa and was readily available at extremely low prices. Although our concerts flopped, we had a hell of a good time in Accra. I was only happy that Neil Bogart and Stewart Levine were not there to witness the futility of the first leg of our trip—much against their advice.
On July 24, we left Accra for Lagos. Our plane was the last one allowed to land in the country. A military coup had just taken place in which another soldier, Murtallah Mahomed, replaced Yakubu Gowon, who had been the head of Nigeria’s military government. Our instruments were impounded along with our other equipment, and we were sent into the city to fend for ourselves. It was clear that no tour was going to take place while the country was in a state of emergency. To kill time, the band hung out a lot at Fela’s home and his African Shrine club. Fela had just come up with a concoction called “Felagoro,” which was a freshly squeezed marijuana paste extracted from the choicest flowers of the weed and bottled; one teaspoon completely blew you away, and you had to wash it down with freshly squeezed orange juice because it was very thick in texture, extremely bitter-tasting, and powerful. Fela warned us that one teaspoon was enough, but Stanley Todd vowed that he could take two teaspoons and nothing would happen to him. We were walking out of Fela’s yard, when Stanley keeled forward and blacked out, landing face-first on the ground.
When the coup ended with the death of Murtallah and the ascension of Olusegun Obasanjo, the state of emergency was lifted and an army colonel friend of mine helped us retrieve our equipment. We never got to perform during the six-week state of emergency resulting from the coup. Broke and very embarrassed, I sent the band back to America, where we were scheduled to go on tour in a months’ time, and cabled Stewart to wire money to me in Monrovia in care of my friend Chuchu Horton at the Bank of Liberia. Ekemode was very upset with me, especially for having agreed to embark on this trip after warning me of its futility back in L.A. He also reminded me of how much Neil Bogart had opposed it. However, the band wrote it off as bad luck and looked forward to the next tour in the States.
I returned to Washington, D.C., at the beginning of October to rejoin the band. We rehearsed in the nation’s capital and after a couple of weeks we hit the road again, beginning on the East Coast. We went back to Pittsburgh, Detroit, and finally Chicago, where we played the entire month of December at the Jazz Workshop on the North Side and Purve’s Place in South Chicago. At the beginning of 1976 we moved into a new studio belonging to singer/composer Curtis Mayfield. Stewart joined us there to begin production on a new album. In between touring, we completed the album, Colonial Man, at New York’s Midtown Studios. It was full of satirical sociopolitical songs about colonization. “Vasco da Gama” was a cha-cha salsa condemning the Portuguese explorer for his expeditions to the Far East, during which he stopped at the South African coastal bays for fresh water and supplies. “Vasco da Gama, he was no friend of mine,” the hook line went. “Cecil Rhodes” was a similar putdown, in this case of the British entrepreneur who exploited the rich mineral deposits of South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. “A Song for Brazil” was a samba-salsa in praise of the music o
f that country, which grew out of the slave community that was forcibly removed from Africa to the state of Bahía by Portuguese traders. This was the general flavor of the whole record. Neil Bogart gave us some trouble over the album’s theme, because he was in the business of producing hit records, not political protests. He was deeply disappointed, and told Stewart and me that the record would not sell because the Casablanca sales staff would not know how to market it. Furthermore, only students of history would know what the fuck I was singing about. All in all, it was a major downer. In the spring of 1976, Neil Bogart made a last-ditch effort to help us come up with a hit record by spending time with us in the studio and exhorting us to think of popular subjects, catchy phrases, and commercial grooves—but to no avail. We weren’t focused enough to understand what Bogart was trying to do. This was our loss because Neil, who had been very enthusiastic about OJAH, slowly recoiled from us and very soon had nothing to say about us, to us, or for us. The album was well reviewed and some of those songs have become classics in my repertoire, but at the time it just seemed like another opportunity lost.
Miriam Makeba was about to embark on a West African tour of Senegal, Togo, Benin, Liberia, and Gambia, and asked us to join her. She felt that it would be very significant to showcase South African music there. This was the beginning of another ridiculous event in this period—I kept taking one step forward and two back.
Still Grazing Page 39