Mama grabbed my hand and said, “Sit down, boy.” She swallowed deeply. “Sandy, ain’t no opportunities here for a boy like you. You won’t get nothin’ staying round here. Memphis ain’t the place for you. I’ve always told you to keep on movin’, and if you don’t go now, you’ll never get out of the South.”
Mama always had a forward-looking quality, and now she was looking ahead for me. Still, she wasn’t that good of an actress. That she really didn’t want me to leave was written in the folds of the skin on her face.
I left her in a sad mood. How I wish I could let go of that picture! I wish I’d been able to get back to Memphis and see her when I got on my feet, but it wasn’t meant to be. I guess Mama would say, “I’ve done the work the good Lord wanted me to do.” Within six months of my leaving Memphis, she would be gone to cancer.
All the strength I have now, over fifty years later, is because Mama simply loved me enough to take me in. I was not her blood, but I was her son. Her wisdom and her vision that I would “get the world’s attention”—something she said to me over and over again—were the genesis of my drive, my commitment to positivity, even before I had a vision of my life’s work.
Some nights, when I think of her, I walk out to my deck overlooking West Los Angeles and look up to the stars. Mama, thank you, I whisper. Your soft black hand got me over the fear of being left behind. Your steadfast, move-forward personality is my inheritance. I love you.
Through devotion blessed are the children,
Praise the teacher that brings true love to many
Your devotion opens all life’s treasures
And deliverance, from the fruits of evil
—“Devotion,” Open Our Eyes, 1974
Booker T. slowly drove me to the train station. I saw a beautiful train, The City of New Orleans, which ran from New Orleans to Chicago, dark brown steel with Illinois Central painted in bright orange on its side. I can still close my eyes and see it. Its largeness, its modernism, represented to me change itself—moving forward, a new day.
My girlfriend, DJ, and I were crying like babies. It felt like we were in one of those classic black-and-white movies where two lovers are parting. The train was loudly hissing, and we were kissing and hugging. It was youthful, romantic, and bittersweet all at the same time. Booker stood on the platform watching us, saying with his slumped shoulders that he did not want me to go. A part of me—albeit small—wanted to stay too, if only to make him happy and continue our musical journey together. He was even more emotional that day than I was. He knew, I knew, that our little world was coming to an end, and that I would probably never return.
Suddenly I heard “All aboard!” I shook Booker’s hand and then gave him a hug before walking up the narrow shiny metal steps. I looked back one last time.
3
I’ll Never Lose Chicago Blues
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.
—Aldous Huxley
The Illinois Central slowed down into Union Station Chicago. The concourse was even bigger than I remembered it. Mother Dear saw me first and yelled my name. She ran to me and hugged me tightly. Her smile said she was happy to have me in her world. I was glad to be there.
I felt brand-new. Chicago was larger than Memphis in every way—big buildings, wide streets, and lots of noise. Walking down Michigan Avenue for the first time, I saw white and black people brushing up against one another, hurrying by. In a shock to my Memphis, Tennessee, mind-set, these downtown black and white businesspeople almost looked like equals. Between car horns blowing in the congested traffic, I could hear the slowly passing cars blasting hit songs on the radio: Bobby Lewis’s “Tossin’ and Turnin’,” Ray Charles’s “Hit the Road Jack,” and most of all the Shirelles’ smash “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” seemed to play on an endless loop. I was hypnotized by all this big-city modernity.
Back at Mother Dear’s, after a few weeks it became apparent that we really didn’t know each other that well. I started to feel more like her brother than her son. It would be our dynamic for the rest of her life.
Over the years, while I was still in Memphis, we had built up somewhat of a friendship through letters. I hadn’t conceptualized her full role as a mother on my short trip to Chicago years earlier. It didn’t take me long to realize, however, that she was custodian over everyone and everything in the household. She had six other children—with two more soon to arrive—so it was an active household. She was also wife to Dr. Verdine Adams Sr.—“Adams,” as she called him. I learned that he was a podiatrist, and called him Dad.
Dad had a high degree of worldliness: he was articulate and spoke five different languages. He was a prince among his peers. Tall, lanky, and dark, just as his son Verdine Jr. would be, he was a brilliant man. I quickly got to know him, and came to respect him a great deal. Dad was always reading. He had a lot of books in the apartment, many of them medical but also on subjects as diverse as world history and sociology.
Mother Dear was b-u-s-y, always preparing meals and managing our household in the Henry Horner projects of Chicago. The projects, built in the early 1960s, were adequate; this was long before the degradation of the mid-1970s and the hellhole they became in the 1980s, with all the gangs, drugs, and violence. Back then, it was actually a cool place to live. The apartments were clean and orderly, and parents did in fact parent.
Dad and Mother Dear had, it seemed to me, the best apartment in Henry Horner. They lived in one of the shorter buildings, with only seven floors. Most of the other buildings were taller, fifteen or twenty floors or so. The walls in apartment 104 had a white cinder-block look to them, much more attractive than Lemoyne Gardens in Memphis. There were four bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen, a living room, a very long hallway, and a laundry room in the basement. Mother Dear gave me my own room. Although I was grateful to have my own space, I felt kind of bad, because I knew Monte and Ronald were being displaced.
But this was still Chicago. It was still the Henry Horner projects, with its share of thugs and all the ills of society. And as with everything else in America, whatever the ills may be of mainstream society, they’re always worse for black folks.
After about six months in Chicago, Dad got me a job at St. Luke’s Presbyterian Hospital. Due to his connections as a doctor, I was given a decent-paying job as an orderly in charge of central service. When I got my first check from the hospital, I was happy, but not for long. Dad informed me that I had to share my entire check with the family. Even though I’ll always be grateful to them, this arrangement was not going to work for me. I understood the expectation to fork over the money. There were a lot of mouths to feed. And at eighteen I was a grown man. Men provide. The household needed the cash, plain and simple. But I had big plans for my earnings: first, to buy a professional drum set, and then hustle to find gigs. I wanted to build a life of music. Money represented the freedom to do that. Freedom was important to me, then and now, so I quickly moved out.
Mother Dear did not want me to leave. She cried uncontrollably, which made me uncomfortable. She felt she was losing me, yet again. She confessed her fear that I didn’t have enough street savvy to go out and compete in the world. Chicago was an unforgiving place, especially for naive Negroes from the South. She thought I would end up in a ditch or alley, dead.
Dad tried to reassure her. “It’s OK, Edna, he’ll be back in six months,” he said. I was determined not to fail and have to return home. I was ready to face the world head-on.
I was lucky that I immediately found a roommate. James Bowen was a streetwise cat. We got a place on Van Buren Street, and my portion of the rent was $90. I’m ashamed to admit that my silverware, sheets, dishes, toilet paper, and towels were all courtesy of St. Luke’s Presbyterian Hospital. I was a skinny man with a BIG coat. I’m surprised they didn’t hear me clanging my way out the door!
Bowen and I had a good time. James could really pull the women in, and Chicago had a l
ot of women to be pulled in. I understood what it truly meant to be a player for the first time. Not in an exploitative sense, but in grasping how to talk to adult women with a confidence that exuded manly sexuality. I learned the delicate art of showing women total courtesy on the surface but also letting them know that I was completely incorrigible in the bedroom. Women seemed to love that. Even though I was still too shy to fully enjoy the hookup aspect of my living arrangement with Bowen, I did start to have a manlier swagger.
After getting settled in my new living arrangement, I made my first big purchase: a beautiful set of Gretsch drums. I got all the accessories new: hi-hats, cymbals, hardware, and pedals. I paid for the drum set in full to prevent anyone from coming to repossess this set like they had when I was fourteen. Gretsch drums had bigger shells than most, which gave them a deeper, more distinctive sound.
Even though I had bought these drums, the drum thing kind of faded into the background during those first months. I was obsessed with making a living and making my way on my own. Within a couple of months of getting the place on Van Buren Street, I enrolled at Crane Junior College (now Malcolm X College) on the West Side. It was in this period that I set my sights on a career in medicine. Since I did not have any impressive male role models as a child or young man, I naturally gravitated to Dad’s profession—for all the right reasons, I thought. A black man who is a doctor is a prince. Not unlike a preacher, a doctor is revered and respected in his community. Who wouldn’t want that for himself? Not to mention that if I followed the set path of college, medical school, and then residency, I could guarantee a decent living. There was very little risk.
Dad being such a renaissance man also pulled me in. Observing him speak to people in different languages in the sterile white hallways of St. Luke’s Presbyterian was a turn-on. Even then, I was attracted to people who knew something about everybody—and that was Dad. Though I didn’t really know him at all, he was the father that my soul deeply wanted. Father had been just a word to me, an idea. When Dad sent me that bike years earlier to Memphis, he had become my idea of a father. Going to medical school was my way of embracing that full-fledged relationship.
At Crane I met bassist/trombonist Louis Satterfield and saxophonist Don Myrick, who would be with me for the next thirty-five years as friends and later as the core members of the Phenix Horns, Earth, Wind & Fire’s horn section. A great cat named Chuck Handy was also a part of our little circle. But it was really a God-sent angel named Fred Humphrey, a pianist who would ultimately go on to help me define myself as a musician and a man, who would profoundly change my life.
Fred read everything. Mysticism, health food, yoga, Afrocentric studies—anything of interest to him, he ingested. “Maurice, you need to check this one out,” he would often say just before squeezing a book under my arm. He opened my mind up to new paradigms of thinking, new and different ways of looking at life. Fred and I would rummage through Rose Record Store and Seymour’s Jazz Record Mart, both on Wabash Street. Seymour’s had a big brown bulletin board where musicians tacked up phone numbers, a community service for people trying to find musicians and musicians trying to find gigs. Rose Records boasted of having any record in any genre at the best price. We would thumb through rows and rows of albums and 45s for hours. Fred, always the pioneer, was interested in the relatively new form of avant-garde jazz. He picked up Ornette Coleman’s album Free Jazz and said, “This is this kind of stuff you should be listening to, Maurice—this will open you up.” I seemed to be a sponge to Fred’s living water, soaking up everything he put before me.
Fred continued to distinguish himself as the greatest influence over my life, and even that feels like an understatement. I didn’t realize it at the time, but he was my guru. Just being in his presence was transformative. After hanging around him for about six months, I thought a lot about the choice I’d made to study medicine. I wondered whether I was doing it to please Dad or please me. Dad emphasized security. Who could argue with that? Being a musician seemed flighty, of course, unless you made it. Dad knew and I knew that making it in music was a crapshoot, at best.
I had grown increasingly restless. I didn’t talk to Fred directly about this uneasiness. I probably talked around it, in circles or riddles. However, I think he knew what I was going through. Fred just naturally encouraged me. His words were perpetually, “Be your own man.” “Honor your heart.” “It’s your one and only life.”
The music life began to scream at me, sometimes through my nocturnal dreams, sometimes through the feeling I got when I practiced intensely. By early 1962, I knew something had to give.
“Dad, I have something to tell you,” I said.
“What, Sandy?” Dad asked.
“I don’t think medicine is for me.”
“What in the world do you mean, not for you? Isn’t that what you want?”
“Well, actually no. Music is what I’m supposed to do.”
I think it was those words, “Music is what I’m supposed to do,” that stumped him. It said that I believed this was my calling, something higher that I had no control over. He didn’t respond affirmatively, but he didn’t respond negatively either. He was neutral. He patted me on the back and said, “Do your thing, boy.”
If it hadn’t been for Fred’s spiritual light, I wouldn’t have had the strength or the courage to chart my course back into the drums. He inspired me: after being around him, I had all the confidence in the world. It was like a bright light turned on in my consciousness, showing me that music would be my destiny. I knew that I would stay with it, come what may. Fred Humphrey was the soul who transformed me from Sandy White of Memphis, Tennessee, to Maurice White of Chicago.
Fred gave me yet another book around this time, and it became my Bible. The Laws of Success by Napoleon Hill changed me forever. In fact, it’s not an overstatement to say that it fundamentally altered my mental and spiritual DNA. The principle that contained the most force for me was that you have to have a definite chief aim for your life.
What I did know for sure was that I wanted to be the best musician. I wanted to be cool. I wanted to be one of “the cats.” Fifth Jacks was a jazz club around the corner from my spot on Van Buren Street. All the hot musicians would come from all around to sit in. It was a highly competitive atmosphere. Everybody smoked non-filtered cigarettes and drank booze. Guys would sit around a large round table and loudly pontificate about who played the best solo, who had the most technique, or who had the greasiest feel. I would go there just about every night after work, soaking it all up, then foolishly wander the streets after Fifth Jacks closed. Block after block, I would fantasize about being Philly Joe Jones or Art Blakey. I wanted to be respected and revered like they were. My fantasies weren’t limited to my street wandering. Falling asleep, I would have dreams about playing at Fifth Jacks and being the newly crowned star of the night. In those dreams, I would be unknown to the audience. As I took my seat behind the drums, the white spotlight would hit me center stage, and I would just play my ass off, sweating and gyrating with the crowd cheering me on. All this enthusiastic tension was building and building in me. I practiced a lot. After a few months of this volcano brewing inside me, I felt I had enough skills to take my sticks down to the club.
We tried to be cool
Flat tops up stove pipes down
Finding out the good stuff
You never gonna learn in school
Comes easy in this part of town
I brought my sticks, we’re sittin’ in all night
Better be quick, gotta hold on tight
It’s gonna be a real jam down delight
—“Chicago (Chi-Town) Blues,” Millennium, 1993
When the fateful night arrived, I stepped toward the bandstand and said confidently, “Let me sit in.” The pianist looked at me with great skepticism, a cynical smirk on his face. It was clear that he did not like me. He quickly shouted out “Cherokee,” the jazz standard that Ray Noble wrote and Sarah Vaughan, among others,
had recorded. The version I knew was Charlie Parker’s, which was pretty fast. The pianist counted the song off faster than I had ever heard that song before or since. I tried like the devil to keep up, but I couldn’t. I’d blown it. The piano player sneered at me and said, “Get off the stage, kid.” My shoulders slumped, and I got up from the drum set, grabbed my coat, and got out of there as fast as I could. My head hung pretty low walking home. I was embarrassed, humiliated, and hurt. I can still feel that sting fifty years later.
As in all disappointments, there is the possibility of redemption. That’s how I have always looked at life. I started practicing drums at a level previously unknown to me. Everybody in the jazz world knew about the long and intense practice sessions of Charlie Parker and John Coltrane. They would shut themselves off from the world, removing any distractions while refining their gift. Sometimes, through the power of repetition, they would almost become catatonic. I used what I heard about them and made it my own, not letting anything get in the way of my practice ritual. It was grueling. It reminded me of the hardworking days in the cotton fields under the sun in Osceola. I was practicing in nonstop three-hour stints two times a day, four on the weekend. I could wring the sweat out of my T-shirt like it was a dishrag. I was young, strong, and most of all persistent, with an incredible desire to be the baddest drummer going. It was an education in hanging tough.
Early in 1962 I met James Mack, the band director at Crane Junior College. James was an instructor of the highest order and a true “music man’s man.” Well versed in jazz and classical, he still knew what was on the pop charts. He went on to be one of the principal arrangers at Brunswick Records, as well as working for Chess, Capitol, and Columbia Records. James was a big guy in size, but one of the gentlest spirits I’d ever met. That man is the godfather of much of the significant talent that came out of Chicago. Willie Henderson, Leo Graham, and Tom “Tom-Tom” Washington, who would later become one of Earth, Wind & Fire’s principal arrangers, all studied under him.
My Life with Earth, Wind & Fire Page 4