My Life with Earth, Wind & Fire

by Maurice White

  Fred had come a long way musically—and fast. As I remember it, he went from playing with sticks on the floor to being a real professional in no time flat. I gave him Donny Hathaway’s first album. At the age of sixteen he got the gig with Donny. I was surprised that Mom and Dad let him go out on the road at such a young age. I think the fact that I knew Donny made their decision easier—and Donny knew Dad wore a size 13 shoe. He would have kicked Donny’s ass to Detroit if anything happened to Fred. Fred played in Donny Hathaway’s band until the fall of 1972, when he moved to Los Angeles. Working steadily, he did sessions all over town and was starting to make a name for himself. Soon he was back on the road as the drummer for my friend Lowell George’s band, Little Feat.

  “What about Fred joining the band?” I asked Verdine.

  “What about Ralph?”

  “Ah, we can make it work.”

  “But Ralph . . .”

  I didn’t consider Ralph’s feelings. It wasn’t personal; I had to do what was best for the group. Verdine and Ralph were close, just as a drummer and bass player should be. Verdine called Ralph his “checkmate Charlie,” always looking to him to see how we were doing onstage on any given night.

  Bringing a new member into an established band is always tricky. It’s not only about music, it’s about personality and trust. Fred wasn’t just another cat, either. He was my and Verdine’s brother. I knew this was the right decision; the musical bond based on blood and psychic ties between V the bassist and Fred the drummer would be above anything that Ralph could ever compete with. Their kinship would show up in the music.

  Fred had gotten off the road a day before meeting with Verdine. He had about seven newspaper articles that mentioned him performing with Little Feat, and was excitedly waving them at Verdine. V looked at the articles for one second and said, “We want you to join the band.”

  Our first gig with Fred was in Missouri at the St. Louis Arena. The impact was immediate. Everyone in the band could feel the difference. Fred’s musical aggression turned up the heat, putting our live show groove on lockdown. Fred had perfected the same technique I had worked on more than ten years earlier—the ability to play energetically at slow and soft tempos. This made our entire show more intense.

  The St. Louis show gave Fred a great introduction to the band. We soon had two drummers playing live: Ralph’s drum kit placed stage right, Fred’s drum kit stage left, with Larry Dunn’s keyboard set up in the middle. I knew it was a challenge for them to get it together. Who would plays the fills? Who would play the backbeat? This was not an easy musical thing to do. It didn’t help the situation at all that Fred was cocky, young, and a bit arrogant. Since I was bandleader and Verdine was really second in command with the live show, I think Fred felt nobody could tell him anything. Ralph Johnson gradually started playing the drums less and less and became a front man instead, singing background vocals at center stage with Philip and me.

  Some of the band liked Fred, some didn’t. Saxophonist Andrew Woolfolk and our production manager Frank Scheidbach said they were babysitting. Reluctantly, they both seemed to take Fred under their wing. Yet others took their sweet time to warm up to baby brother Fred. Given the musical and personality complications of Fred joining EW&F, I must give Ralph credit for being mature and having a spirit of graciousness and cooperation.

  By and large the band cooperated with my choices. Earth, Wind & Fire never argued about what we were going to do next. The guys gave me their respect, as they all came to see the value of being in a band that was focused. Unlike in many bands, there was no voting. I generally met with the guys one-on-one. What helped me tremendously was that we didn’t participate in excessive drinking and drugging. I led by example. I wanted to glow and be a shining example of the merits of the clean life.

  The only constant activity in the band’s life was gigs. The recording studio felt like a rest stop on an interstate highway. At every stop we’d handle our business and then get back on the road. Back and forth across the country we went. It was still exciting, but gigs started to have a sameness for me. This all changed in early 1974, when Bob Cavallo called.

  “You won’t believe where we got an offer to play,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “The California Jam.”

  “The California what?”

  Every decision, big and small, was having an impact on our career. According to Bob, the California Jam offer was in direct response to who EW&F was becoming, imagewise. At the time we had a cult following. As black guys, our lyrical commitment to higher consciousness and our support of meditating and healthy eating were starting to set us apart from our counterparts.

  The California Jam was a concert for the rock elite that served a 95 percent white audience. These kinds of gigs weren’t foreign to us. At that point, we were opening for ZZ Top, Faces with Rod Stewart, and others. As the only black act on the bill, we definitely represented a new kind of Negro. Society, in a variety of arenas, was becoming more accepting of a different kind of black man. In the previous year Maynard Jackson and Tom Bradley had been elected as mayors of Atlanta and Los Angeles. Significantly, white majorities had elected both. Atlanta being the hub of the South and Los Angeles being the king of the West, these elections signaled that white America was becoming more accepting of black folks.

  We almost had to cancel the California Jam gig. We were on a cross-country flight back to Los Angeles, a week or two before the show, when Larry Dunn cut his finger badly on a razor-sharp paper towel dispenser in the plane’s bathroom. There was blood everywhere. It took him a long time to completely heal. I don’t know how in the world he played that gig with bandages and stitches, but he did.

  Arriving a day before the show, I quickly realized that this was not just another outdoor concert. The hotel was so far from the staging area that we had to be flown in by helicopters. It was our first helicopter ride. We flew so close to the ground, I thought we were going to hit the trees. Then seeing the expanse of the area was awe-inspiring, if not a little nerve-racking. The stages were literally built on train tracks, so they could move them in and out quickly. They had fifteen-story twin towers where the 54,000-watt sound system was placed.

  The California Jam was a once-in-a-lifetime event. Featuring Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Black Sabbath, the Eagles, Rare Earth, Seals and Crofts, and Black Oak Arkansas, it was called the West Coast’s Woodstock. Before we took the stage, someone tapped me on my shoulder: Jim Brown, who was hanging out backstage with two of the finest women I had ever seen.

  “Reece, it looks like your vision is coming to pass,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Man, this a fucking rock concert! This isn’t some soul music festival.”

  It had been only two and a half years since I told Jim that I wanted to be treated like a rock act.

  Taped for ABC Television, the concert was great exposure for us. We had just gotten some new outfits, and we were ready. There were at least 250,000 people at the Ontario Fairgrounds, which is fifty miles east of Los Angeles. As always for any of our shows, Verdine did something special: one of his outrageous bass solos. By the way, the whole idea of Verdine doing bass solos was from V and I going to see Fred play with Donny Hathaway at the Troubadour in Hollywood in the early 1970s. Willie Weeks, the bass guitar legend, took a bass solo that was sooooooo badass that I whispered to Verdine, “Okay, we gotta do that.” But as always with V’s huge stage presence, a bass solo just wasn’t a bass solo; it was always an entertaining, theatrical performance piece. The audience loved it.

  A short while later we got the opportunity to open for Sly and the Family Stone at Madison Square Garden. From the beginning, Sly was the only group I had to compare us to. I saw the way his music was universal and reached beyond color lines. He was what I aspired to for EW&F. We had opened for Sly before, but not on this level. This wasn’t Greensboro, North Carolina, or a theater or some college. This was the Garden. This was New York City.

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nbsp; The moment Leonard said, “Presenting the elements Earth, Wind & Fire,” my stomach was in knots and my legs were shaking. I don’t think I had ever been that nervous for a show in my life. We did all we could to make it special. Verdine had acquired the actual harness that Mary Martin used in Peter Pan. At the appointed moment, he shot straight up in the air like a rocket and hung high above the stage, his legs wildly flailing in the air while he kept on playing his Fender bass. The Garden went into a full-on frenzy. We killed them—even Sly took a backseat that night. I don’t recall many nights where I felt more appreciated and validated after a show backstage.

  I talked briefly with Sly after the show, exchanging small talk about both of our bands’ future plans. To my disappointment, I quickly realized that cocaine had taken over his life. He was coherent, but he went through about three different mood swings in five minutes. Sly had always symbolized genius to me, but now he symbolized excess and abuse. I felt bad.

  Even though we had smoked a diminished Sly and the Family Stone, that performance gave us a lot of confidence. Not long after, we were doing an equal-billing concert with War at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, New York. It had previously been agreed that we would go on last, but their management got into an expletive-laden shouting match with Bob Cavallo, demanding that they be last.

  Bob came to me on the bus. “They want to be the headliner,” he said, rolling his eyes. I was silent. I thought about it for a second and then said sure, we’d open for them, which squashed the dispute. I motioned for Verdine to step outside of the bus and whispered to him what was going on. Verdine, the drum major, informed everyone else. We hit the stage and burned it down to a smoldering crisp. Competing only with ourselves, we kicked a little higher and played a little harder. We did one encore, and the audience was screaming and clapping in rhythm, more, more, more, more! To aggravate the audience, I said, “We’d love to play for you longer but we have to make way for War.” The crowd hit the roof! They started booing and throwing stuff, and half the audience just got up and left.

  At that time War had way more hits than us. They had “Slippin’ into Darkness,” “The World Is a Ghetto,” and “Cisco Kid.” But we had something more than hits; we had energy, musicianship, and a theatrical sixth sense. The word got around quickly: you never, ever want to follow Earth, Wind & Fire, whether you are a rock, pop, or soul act.

  I didn’t have the showmanship one expects from the lead singer of a band. I couldn’t dance worth a damn. But my movements became the Maurice White groove. I harnessed a great confidence that radiated. I was finally becoming comfortable as a lead singer, after a twenty-year journey that had taken place in stages. Seeing the girls at Booker T. Washington High go crazy for my friend David Porter and watching Joe Duke’s flashiness and Squash Campbell’s onstage antics were the first things that helped me conquer my shyness onstage. Witnessing Ramsey’s confident yet smooth and controlled way of communicating with an audience was another stage. Recording “Open Our Eyes” was yet another. Finally I learned to put away my inherent shyness and to “turn on” by simply walking up the steps to the stage, waiting for the lights, and just doing it.

  12

  Accepting Life

  Remember when life’s path is steep to keep your mind even.

  —Horace

  On May 24, 1974, Duke Ellington died. Duke represented the best of what America could produce. I went to the newsstand and bought every major newspaper so I could clip the obituaries for posterity. I was pissed off; I didn’t feel enough respect had been paid to this American icon’s passing. Duke—composer, pianist, and bandleader—was bigger than the president of the United States to me. Duke and Count Basie were guys who worked very hard to keep their respective bands together, and I saw myself in that tradition.

  Once in the mid-1960s I saw Duke’s bus parked on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. I looked with awe at the big letters painted on its side: Duke Ellington & His Orchestra. My whole understanding of the word bandleader started and ended with Duke Ellington. He had the absolute highest musical standards, and nothing got in the way of his music. I heard many stories of his struggles to keep it all together once rock and roll was born in the late 1950s. But right up until his death, he kept his band working. I was a jazzster by heart, and his departure represented the end of an era to me.

  Later I got some devastating news: Mother Dear had breast cancer. It hit the family hard, but Mother Dear was optimistic: “I’m going to have the surgery, and I’ll be fine.” Surgery was a radical double mastectomy.

  Mother Dear talked to all of the older kids, but as best I can tell, she and Dad kind of kept the two youngest, Karen (ten) and Margie (twelve), away from it, trying to protect them. Her illness made my head spin. I wanted to spend as much time with her as I could to talk more, face to face. My excuse was the endless 1974 and 1975 tour schedule of two hundred–plus shows a year. I felt guilty. In my choice to be a musician, I had intentionally elected not to have a normal life—that traditional life where I would come home every night for dinner, raise a child, or be there for Mother Dear in her illness. I think Dad was doing the best he could to cope, but he had his limits, understandably. My sister Patt, who was almost finished with her studies to be a nurse, was really the point person in the family, whom we all turned to, to keep us updated. Thanks be to God, Mother Dear gradually got better.

  Around the same time I found out that Evelyn, a wonderful friend whom I’d seen off and on since my Ramsey Lewis days, was pregnant—and I was the father. She was happy. Once I got over the shock, I was happy too. My only disappointment was that I knew I would not have the time to spend with Hemeya (Mimi), my first child, and my only daughter. Even though I didn’t know what a father was in everyday practical terms, I had enough sense to know that not being around physically left me lacking from the start. To try to heal that breach, I bought Evelyn a house in Philadelphia so she would have a cool place to raise Mimi. Being a good provider is the first law of fatherhood, but it is certainly not enough. As a matter of fact, on a certain level it’s not really being a father at all. You leave a child with a myth and wishes about who you are, as a man and as a father. And I became the enemy sometimes, because of that truth and because of some falsehoods. My relationship with my daughter has always been strained. I am not proud of it. I have some shame about it too. I take responsibility for the toll it has taken on her and myself.

  I would have other opportunities down the line with my other children to be a father who not only provided for my children’s material needs but also was present in their lives. But the hard, cold reality is that if you are not physically present, you really can’t be a total father. That’s an issue I would be working out for the rest of my life.

  The next major change in my life had to do with money. After almost five years of nonstop touring, things were starting to pay off. I got what I considered to be my first big royalty check, for $67,000. To get that at one time was significant. As much as I believed in myself and what I was doing, when I looked at those zeroes, I was convinced that we could make it.

  The path from starting a band to rock-and-roll stardom is simultaneously complicated, rewarding, often disappointing, and glorious. The corporate suits would say your record is doing great or your record is a flop or your record sold this number of units this week—blah, blah, blah. I was trained to remain neutral and not to respond either positively or negatively. Chess Records had burned a stone-faced coolness in my psyche. The audience’s response was my only true barometer for how Earth, Wind & Fire was doing.

  We placed “Devotion” earlier and earlier in our set. We would abruptly halt the music, and the entire crowd would continue singing the lyrics: “You need devotion, bless the children.” I think this first happened at the Civic Center in Pittsburgh. This affirming response continued in city after city as we moved down the East Coast. DC, Roanoke, Richmond, Hampton, Norfolk, Greensboro, Charlotte . . . on and on, the feedback confirmed our popularity. People w
ere listening to the records! Fans showed that they related to us not with superficiality but with seriousness. After the shows, folks would come to us and talk about raising their consciousness. Conversations about diet and God went side by side with discussions about the night’s performance. There was a scene developing around us. The guys felt validated by the kind of fans we were attracting. There are many things that can destabilize a band, lack of success being the big one. And on the road at least, we were starting to feel successful.

  We went back to the studio in June to sketch out some new ideas. Soon after, we headed back to New York for something or another, and I took the cassettes of those sessions. A couple of the tracks we had recorded I knew we were not going to use, but I thought they could be great instrumentals. I was really excited about a thing called “Hot Dawgit.” It came to me in my sleep, as many of my ideas did, that this could be great for my old mentor and friend, Ramsey Lewis. I found him on the road in Washington, DC.

  “Hey, what you doing?” I asked.

  “Well, I’m actually in the studio,” Ramsey said. “But we had to come play this date in DC. I’m going right back to Chicago and jump right back into the studio.”

  “That’s kind of why I called you, because we just came out of the studio, and there are a couple of tunes that we’re not going to use. I think they’d be good for you. In fact, one of them is a smash. This could be bigger than ‘The “In” Crowd.’”

  “Mmm,” Ramsey said. I could almost hear his ears perk up. It was total manipulation on my part to mention “The ‘In’ Crowd,” because that was a huge record for Ramsey, one of the first jazz records to cross from jazz to R&B to pop to rock. Without hesitation, Ramsey said, Let’s do it! I understood Ramsey’s vibe, and I believed this was the vehicle that would let him balance between the pop, jazz, and R&B worlds of 1974.