Jerry and I went to Century City Hospital to meet with Charles. As we walked into his hospital room, Charles was slightly dozing off.
“Rooney, what are you doing here?” he said.
“Man, I just wanted you to talk to Jerry about these arrangements.”
“Rooney, pick up those scores on the table over there.”
Charles used special scoring paper. Most score lines are a quarter inch apart, tops. His score lines were triple that size. He liked that paper because it was easier to see when he was conducting. I gingerly picked up the huge score, both of my arms extended out in front of me. I carefully laid it on his lap in front of him. He slowly put on his glasses and started turning the gigantic paper.
He looked over the top of his glasses at Jerry with speculative eyes. “Boy, you think you can handle this stuff?”
“I believe so, sir,” Jerry responded respectfully.
“There are going to be a lot of people there. You’ve got to be sharp.”
Charles wanted Jerry to know that this was a gig of confidence as well as skill—no place for meekness.
Charles got better, well enough to return home to Chicago. Before he left, he stopped by the studio. His sense of humor had returned, and he was joking and jiving around with Verdine and me. We all had big smiles. His playfulness reassured me that he was going to be cool. “See ya soon, Rooney,” he said as he walked out of the studio.
Now that Charles was on the road to recovery, we got back to work. The sessions were going particularly well.
On Monday afternoon, May 17, I called Charles to see how he was doing and update him on where I was.
“Rooney, man, I was just thinking to call you,” he said.
“Man, we just finished doing some overdubs on ‘Getaway,’ and it’s burning, man—just burning!” I said.
“Man, that’s cool. I should be out there in two or three weeks.”
That same evening we were working on the title track of Spirit when a call came through from Rubie, Charles’s wife. He had just died of a heart attack on the front steps of his home. Charles got out of here at the age of forty-five.
No matter how death comes, sudden or not, it’s always a shock, and Step’s death was so abrupt. He left behind Rubie and three young daughters.
That we were working on “Spirit” when we got the news that Step had died has always seemed providential to Larry Dunn and me. The song had an odd origin. The music to it was on a tape Larry had given me almost two years earlier. It just sat in my home studio, and I would periodically pick it up and play it at night. It was a beautiful piece of music. Its jazzy chords always seemed to make me feel melancholy. I had come to just listen to it for pleasure. In addition, Larry always said he had a strange, sad feeling when he composed the music to “Spirit” years earlier.
We must make our brother see
That the light he is shining on you and me
And the land he gave, roads we must pave
Looking through each other’s eyes
Humanity will rise in love
And our spirits will be at one with thee.
—“Spirit,” Spirit, 1976
I can still see Charles standing on his front porch; it’s wintertime, and we’re talking about music. Rubie, his wife, is telling us to come inside, it’s too cold to be standing out there. We’d enter the house, passing by the baby grand piano, and head straight down to the basement. His basement was Step’s heaven. Many times it was filled with smoke, but music overpowered the atmosphere. There was his Fender Rhodes, his Moog synthesizer, and standing in a corner, its pipes hanging down like a cathedral organ, his vibraphone. He didn’t have a drum set, but he had boxes that I would occasionally beat on. There were all kinds of thick and thin books scattered around, on music orchestration and whatnot.
I can see the Emotions practicing in his basement, Wanda and Sheila’s huge shiny Afros bouncing back and forth. I see Charles and me secretly chuckling behind the girls’ backs, watching them stick their fingers in the air when they sing a high or low note. I see myself holding the door open for him as he walks up the steps at Paul Serrano’s studio, right before we recorded the Emotions’ first album. I remember him very gently tapping his right foot on the cabin wood floor while playing for me the first time the beautiful and melancholy chord changes to “That’s the Way of the World” up at Caribou Ranch in the Rocky Mountains. I even remember his smile the last time I saw him in Los Angeles. I have lots of good memories.
By the time I asked Charles to come into the world of Earth, Wind & Fire, he had already written, arranged, and produced a lot of music. He had pretty much worked all the time after joining Chess Records in Chicago. But in the snobbish West Coast music business world, a lot of people who didn’t know the Chicago music scene thought Charles was an overnight sensation. It was insulting that he was seen as a Johnny-come-lately—he had such an illustrious body of work. It’s just that EW&F took off in a way none of us could have ever imagined, even myself. But what is still of comfort to me is that he made it clear that he was glad I’d called him. The money he made with us, especially on That’s the Way of the World, was significant to him. The money from Chess Records was one thing, but this was at a whole different level. I’m really proud that our work together in that short period was his most successful. If he had lived, he would have moved on from EW&F and gone on to be another Thom Bell or Quincy Jones. He just ran out of time.
EW&F had been a band for four years when I finally had the money to call Charles to the Open Our Eyes sessions. It was my old friend coming to lend a hand to my cause. Charles had a grasp of music that couldn’t be denied. He could write music for the Chicago Symphony one minute, jazz the next minute, and deepest soul music after that. He could listen to a song one time and transcribe it immediately. He brought all that musical maturity to a young band’s boundless energy.
He was hard on me. I hated being called Red, that southern term for fair-skinned people like myself. He would occasionally call me that—and, trust me, he was the only cat who could. Or sometimes he would call me Rooney Tunes because, as he would say, I always had a song in my heart. We laughed a lot. He was friend, coach, collaborator, and—most of all—he represented for the band a towering musical standard, helping everybody grow, keeping our true north. It was more than appropriate that his last album with us should be dedicated to him.
I wrote on the album sleeve:
With every man, the departure of spirit must take place. It is a destiny that is inevitable. We, EARTH, WIND & FIRE, were blessed to have had a gifted spirit work among us. He has now departed to the next plane. He left us with much beauty and inspiration for humanity to feed upon. The works in this album are dedicated to Brother Charles Stepney (1931–1976). May God embrace his spirit with love.
Gone too soon.
Part IV
Full-Spectrum Music
17
Musical and Spiritual Progressives
Sadness bears no remedy for the problems in your life
While you run your race, keep a smilin’ face—
Help you set your pace
—“On Your Face,” Spirit, 1976
I was fortunate that in the aftermath of Charles’s transition, I had a lot to do. It kept me moving straight ahead and not dwelling on his absence. I coped with Charles’s loss privately, of course. It was yet another example of my limitations in dealing with emotions. It might leave something to be desired for me personally, but it was what it was, and it is what it is. I did listen to the blues for some sort of healing after Charles left—more than I had in a long time. Pulling out my Chess Records Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters vinyl, I blasted it on my big new JBL home speakers.
I knew the band was concerned about what we would do without Step. Charles was coach, I was quarterback, and in their minds, Step was the guy who could put me in my place.
I continued to trust in music and immediately got back to work. We were way behind on the preparation
for the new album release and subsequent tour. Spirit may or may not have been our best record commercially, but it was by far our most important one, solidifying Earth, Wind & Fire as musical and spiritual progressives. It was the right album at the right time and a foundational building block in our story, with the perfect blend of black church and mystical spiritual optimism. Another great thing about Spirit is that it established a black masculinity for the band that was different than the one generally expressed in public. I wanted to show that black masculinity was evolving in America. As the civil rights movement gradually wound down after the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, so did the militaristic Black Panther–type persona. Spirit introduced our new public persona as sons of a royal and noble Africa, a persona that we would continue to express in our album covers, wardrobe, and songs.
I had been carrying a mental picture for a long time that I couldn’t let go of: an album cover with the band dressed in white, standing, eyes closed, in front of three huge white pyramids—meditative and spiritually Eastern in flavor. With the addition of some Sufi-style placing of our arms, this became the album cover for Spirit, another attempt to broaden our audience and appeal to a wider view of consciousness. Certainly some of my motivation was to awaken spirituality as opposed to religion—African Americans were already well versed in Christianity, whether it was the Pentecostal church of my childhood or a more subdued Baptist version—but it was more about me sharing me with the world. Egyptology, mysticism, Buddhism: these were all things I was discovering and was excited about personally. Our vibe was definitely Afrocentric, but not a separatist one; it was about community—the family of man. By the time our listeners had digested Spirit, it was abundantly clear to them that we stood for something. And that made our hard-core fans, at least, believe that when they supported us, they were standing for something too. This sentiment is essential to the life and legacy of Earth, Wind & Fire.
There is only one romantic song on the Spirit album, “Imagination,” and even that has a philosophical slant. Everything else is our distinctive blend of social and spiritual progressivism. The first single, the driving ball of fire “Getaway,” set a new tone for us. However, with the exception of “Getaway” and the instrumental “Biyo,” the album is introspective. Even the other two up-tempo songs, “Saturday Night” and “On Your Face,” are kind of laid-back. That mellow feeling was probably just a reflection of the cosmic vibe around us.
That cosmic vibe was also reflected through a feeling of confidence within the group. Things were flowing in our favor. With Spirit’s release, we felt like we really didn’t have any competition, with the single exception of my friend Stevie Wonder, who had just released his classic Songs in the Key of Life. Our contemporaries—bands like the Ohio Players, Mandrill, War, Kool & the Gang, Cameo, the Commodores, Con Funk Shun, and Parliament-Funkadelic—didn’t carry our cachet, which was partly musical and partly about business. The Isley Brothers made great albums, and they did it without horns, which was notable in that era. Song after song, they created classics, but their live show was boring. Mandrill, possibly the must unsung band of the early 1970s, had an Afro-Cuban vibe that was undeniable. Unfortunately, they just couldn’t score the big hit that could have kept them moving higher.
But Earth Wind & Fire had reached a cruising altitude in 1976. The success of That’s the Way of the World had given us stability. Our live album Gratitude gave the public a window into our arena concert experience, while it also robustly increased our ticket sales. More and more, Bob Cavallo, Verdine, George Massenburg, and Frank Scheidbach were starting to act as copilots—Cavallo with the business, Verdine and Scheidbach with the live shows, and George in the studio. Climbing and climbing, we started to experience a new level of respect among our peers and a cultural respect among our core fans. Within the band, the concept had firmly taken root. We had the power and the glory.
On November 8, 1976, we were featured in the relatively new People magazine in an article titled “‘A Higher Force’ Is the Tenth Member of Maurice White’s Ascetic Earth Wind & Fire.” To the public at large, EW&F would always be hard to categorize, but after six years our message and purpose had finally caught on.
I believed that diet was a spiritual practice that could raise my vibration. I read books about how healthy eating choices created more oxygen in the blood. More oxygen means a clearer mind and less damage to your organs. The band members were taking better care of themselves, too, by managing their appetites. Some of us were strict vegetarians. In our riders—the demands a band specifies at their performances—we requested that the food supplied backstage for the band and crew consist of raw fruits and vegetables, soups with no meat stock, juices, and lean meats. In bold type, the rider demanded, “No Kentucky Fried Chicken”! A few of us exercised together like never before, while others picked up scuba diving and martial arts.
Spirit instantly became our most successful album to date; That’s the Way of the World and Gratitude eventually all got to double platinum, but Spirit shot there the fastest. This quick success made me want to put on a tour that would be a step above any previous tour. I wanted an Egyptian-themed stage that reflected the album cover: three huge white pyramids with hydraulic doors that would open up and reveal the band waiting inside. At the end of the show, the band would return to the pyramids, and the hydraulic doors would close. A technical feat and a first in the rock-and-roll business, this staging was definitely ambitious. I can’t say enough good things about my production manager, Frank Scheidbach, in making my theatrical dreams come to life. I gave him complete autonomy and financial freedom to do whatever he needed to be done. At one point the accountants were giving him grief about something he hadn’t requisitioned the money for. Frank spoke to me about it, and I told the accountants, “If Frank wants something, it’s the same as me saying it.”
I had started down a precarious path, spending money I didn’t have for tours. I got some money from Columbia for tour support but not nearly enough, and even that money was taken out of my royalties. In the ensuing years, this became not only a monetary problem but a psychological burden, but it was a sacrifice I was willing to make to create an amazing show. Being the boss was expensive, indeed, but there was no turning back. I borrowed money from banks and other financial institutions. I borrowed money from myself. No one but maybe Bob and I knew what was going on behind closed doors at my meetings with bankers, accountants, and vendors.
Meanwhile Frank had recruited an art director, Joe Gannon, from my friend Neil Diamond. Joe was the first guy in rock and roll to create moving sets—sets that were fluid, strong, and still mobile enough to be taken down each night and packed into trucks. Scheidbach got Joe to throw together sketches and set designs. Verdine, the point man on stage production, worked with Frank. When they got it down to two or three choices, they brought me in. When I first saw the mini stage mockup, I said to myself, This is really going to cost, but, damn, it looks so cool.
This was our first real big set. Before that, we were just on risers, our speakers on stands to the right and left of us with a sash or thin curtain in front of them.
Building the set would not be without its challenges. It seemed as if every Thursday or Friday, the head of construction, John McGraw, would call Frank to complain about a problem. One issue was that the heavy hydraulic doors kept overlapping and hitting each other. Frank had to go back and forth to Boston to make sure it could work. On the plane, he would examine the stage model and diagrams. By the time he arrived in Boston, he’d have assured himself that the blueprints were correct. He’d share his ideas on fixing the situation and then head right back to LA. Frank flew to Boston six or seven weeks in a row, so much that the joke around the office was that he had the opportunity to become a member of the mile-high club.
On opening night of the tour, the stage was filled with three massive pyramids surrounded by fog. The lights rose as the hydraulic doors slowly opened, revealing us standing there, dressed
in red robes, silently glaring at the audience. I had never heard anything like the roar of the crowd. It was an earthquake-like rumble that was deafening. I must admit the opening cheers made the financial sacrifice well worth it. We proceeded to put on a spectacular performance. In 1976, this kind of elaborate production was extraordinary. The spectacle and the audience’s response to it were gratifying, and helped to heal our minds after the loss of Stepney.
The Spirit tour, which went to eighty cities, ultimately was our most successful tour to date. We were outgrossing Elton John and the Eagles in most venues. In most markets our audiences were now firmly 40 percent black and 60 percent white. This started to complicate things along racial lines.
A lot of our black fans back then didn’t buy tickets in advance. Black folks, accustomed to performers like Sly Stone and other groups canceling, had learned to wait until the last minute to purchase a ticket to be certain they weren’t wasting their money. EW&F started out as a cult band, with a loyal following. The colleges that built our career paved the way for us to be the first black arena rock act. From there we went to doing multiple nights at the biggest venues in the world. However, when our audiences became more diverse, there were not enough tickets to go around. Two nights at Madison Square Garden in New York, three nights at the Spectrum in Philly, or four nights at the Forum in LA were not enough shows.
But nowhere was this more apparent than in Chocolate City—Washington, DC, which had always been one of our best markets for ticket and album sales. For years we played at the DC Armory. After “Shining Star,” we started to play in the brand-new 22,000-seat Capital Centre on the outskirts of town, in Landover, Maryland. We would play there two or three nights in a row. Some folks thought they could come to the box office and buy a ticket, but we were sold out for all the performances weeks in advance. In 1976 there was a big riot outside before our show. People were breaking windows and vandalizing cars because they couldn’t get tickets. It made the national news. Our fans eventually got the message: purchase tickets early.
My Life with Earth, Wind & Fire Page 21