But what we did with Verdine stands out as the theatrical milestone of the tour. Simply put, Doug created a way for Verdine to levitate above the stage.
The All ’N All tour was so technically involved that before we took it out, we had to have several run-throughs at Sunset Gower Studios, a movie studio with enough space. We had to fly the crew in. Many of those cats lived out of state. They needed practice in setting up and tearing down the complicated sets, to make sure that it would all work on the road. When Columbia Records found out what we were doing, they thought it would be a good idea to fly in journalists from around the world, as well as about three hundred friends and celebrities, to give them a shortened version of the show. It turned out to be an Arabian-themed media junket.
As Verdine said, “People left that junket and they didn’t know what to think. It was that show opening, with those tubes coming down out of the sky. Then at the end of that show, when we wave good-bye and get in that damn pyramid and the thing explodes! It was like we’ll never be able to top our own damn self. God wrote that show. You can tell. That spectacle really converged everything. The record was right. The show was right. The audience was ready. And it had been a building process.”
Some artists have a meteoric rise to stardom, but that wasn’t the case for Earth, Wind & Fire. This slow, steady ride gave me an appreciation that I don’t think I would have had otherwise. Being able to call on Doug Henning and George Faison was about the money to do so, but it was also about having the faith that I could see long-held desires for the band come to pass. During the years of this building process, our exploding popularity would give others a chance to ride our wave. Deniece Williams had quickly become a star. Verdine had produced his first act, Pockets, through Kalimba Productions. Both would serve as opening acts for the tour: Pockets would go on first, Deniece Williams second, and finally EW&F. Earth, Wind & Fire didn’t need an opening act, but I was building a Kalimba Productions synergy, the idea being that EW&F’s tour audience would become their tour audience.
The All ’N All tour opened on October 2, 1977, at Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati, having sold out several weeks in advance. We always toured in the winter, and we had toiled in previous years to catch planes. I wanted everyone to be as comfortable as possible. I leased a plane, a Vickers Viscount four-engine turboprop. That model was a workhorse for a lot of us in rock and roll: Rod Stewart, Styx, Barry Manilow, Boston, America, Bad Company, and others leased the same model. It wasn’t a very fast plane, but it was an incredibly reliable and comfortable one. We called the plane the tuna boat because it seemed the two stewardesses we hired were always serving us tuna sandwiches. It made things much easier for the band; we could leave immediately after the gig, get to the next town, and sleep. I’m very serious when I say that this was really the first time in years that we could get some serious sleep. We could play in NYC one night, do a gig in Philadelphia the next night, and fly back to NYC to stay there because it was a better hang in the Apple. We also had a shiatsu masseuse travel with us because we were putting out so much physically every night.
Earlier in the year I had made a commitment to Robert Stigwood, the manager of the Bee Gees. Stigwood had resurrected their career with the history-making success of the Saturday Night Fever sound track. The sound track was still hot as a firecracker, being played all the time on the radio. My favorite song on it, “How Deep Is Your Love,” would be the number-one record in the country at the end of the year. The very next week their song “Too Much Heaven” would replace “How Deep Is Your Love” at the top of the charts. Additionally, Stigwood had just produced another sound track, Grease, for the hit film starring Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta.
Stigwood seemed to have a golden touch. When he approached me about having the band appear as a guest in a movie musical based on the Beatles album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, I said OK. But with the tight scheduling that I put upon myself, I had completely forgotten about it.
“Hey, did you cut that Beatles song yet for Stigwood?” Bob reminded me.
“Oh, man, I spaced—totally forgot about it.”
“It’s due in three weeks.”
Since I’d waited until the very last minute, many of the songs they had given me to choose from had already been taken by the other artists. But “Got to Get You into My Life” was available, and Verdine and I settled on that. We walked to Sam Goody in NYC to buy the record.
EW&F packed a lot of activity into six days. We played two nights at Madison Square Garden on November 24 and 25, figured out a plan for “Got to Get You into My Life,” and George Faison threw us a beautiful party at his home in New York City. He had me close my eyes and walk up to the front door, where Stevie Wonder, Valerie Simpson, and Nick Ashford said “Surprise!” He had the party planned weeks in advance. The reception was typical of the admirable way George Faison showed us love.
On Tuesday, November 29, we played a gig in St. Paul, Minnesota, at the Civic Center. We had one day off before we had to play on December 1 in Denver at McNichols Arena. We flew in immediately after the gig and arrived at the hotel, got a few hours of rest, and Larry Dunn and I found an old upright piano in the hotel ballroom to musically work out “Got to Get You into My Life.”
“Man, give me some crazy shit for the intro,” I said, “like bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop.” I always thought in rhythm, and Larry figured out the notes in five minutes flat. I tapped on the piano and sang, and Larry played. I went back and forth, discussing the basic feel, and in about forty-five minutes we were done. We loosely rehearsed it in the ballroom with the rhythm section guys. George Massenburg flew up from LA and brought his usual bag of tricks of microphones, preamps, and everything else he would need to make things happen right. We chose a relatively new studio called Northstar in Boulder, Colorado. Our version of “Got to Get You into My Life” was all recorded very quickly—the whole thing, top to bottom, was done in probably a forty-eight-hour period. But it’s a testament again to how in sync we were, as a rhythm section first, and then Philip and I vocally.
We burned through two shows in Seattle on December 16 and 17. Although we were scheduled to leave the next day, our longtime pilot Duke said we should get in the air right after the gig. Duke always looked at weather plans, but he followed his instincts too. We flew back home to Los Angeles. On my birthday, December 19, I drove to the old MGM backlot in Culver City, California, where we filmed our segment for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. We had no real planning; when it came to filming our scene, all we did was bring the current road show to the soundstage. I made this scheduling tight as I could to get our scene in the can and give the band and crew some time off for Christmas, because we had a three-night stand in Baltimore on December 27, 28, and 29.
After filming our scene, director Michael Schultz said to me, “Man, this was more fun than it was work. You guys having those tubes coming down from the sky and all, I felt like I was at an Earth, Wind & Fire concert. All I had to do is point the cameras and say cut!”
Beatles producer George Martin, who also produced the sound track for the film, ran to me the second we finished shooting and said, “Damn, we should have done the whole sound track like that!”
In essence, the other musical acts in the film tried too hard to be true to the Beatles’ original songs, which I believe was their creative undoing. I revered the Beatles, too, but I decided to remain true to our rallying cry: any material that EW&F touched, we had to put our own spin on it. In the case of “Got to Get You into My Life,” we swung it—hard. We cooked a jazzy, greasy Memphis groove with a touch of big-band swing. Verdine could have walked the bass line like he was playing upright bass with Count Basie—it was swinging that hard. I think it’s one of Verdine’s best bass performances on record, and, according to Paul McCartney, it’s his favorite Beatles cover.
However, the word was out about the movie. A flop was coming. Sensing disaster about the film’s fortunes, Cavallo called me. “Reece, this
record is great, but I promise you, the film will absolutely kill it. Let’s drop the record early,” he implored.
“Don’t I have a contract that gives them first dibs on the release?”
“Absolutely not!”
“Work it out with Columbia.”
Bob did. Cavallo and my longtime lawyer Jeffrey Ingber were savvy guys. For the most part, I was well advised. Having the control over “Got to Get You into My Life,” even though it was created for the film, was a small example of their attention to detail on my behalf. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band did turn out to be a complete bust in every way. Critics panned it as one of the worst films ever—but we got another big hit out of it. “Got to Get You into My Life” had to have been the only successful thing associated with that film.
I think it had kicked in by now to management and the band that my dislike of overexposure had a good effect on EW&F’s charisma, and consequently they stopped pushing me to do more television. But Natalie Cole and Bob urged me to do Natalie’s TV special on CBS. Natalie had exploded on the music scene, becoming a big star overnight. She was a class act, too. In late March 1978 we taped a segment for The Natalie Cole Special. George Faison would help conceive and execute what I consider our best television appearance. George thought we could do a cinematic performance, with three wardrobe changes in our eight-minute appearance. For it to work, we would have to prerecord the music, which kind of annoyed me because I’d never been a fan of lip-synching. For this reason I wanted our prerecorded music to have a live feel to it, with all the nuance and changes to the music that would naturally occur onstage. We did a medley of “Serpentine Fire,” “Saturday Nite,” “Can’t Hide Love,” “Reasons,” and—with Natalie joining us—“That’s the Way of the World.”
The All ’N All tour never stopped rolling between filming Sgt. Pepper’s and The Natalie Cole Special. For our crew, this tour would test their ability and work ethic. We had first-class roadies, and though our riggers were expensive, they were the best money could buy, highly specialized in arena rock venues. But just like so much in the mid-1970s, regulations were tightening. Right along with new smoking sections on airplanes, mandatory seat belts in cars, and mandatory helmets for motorcycles on interstate highways, the arena rock business started to be more regulated in terms of safety. Our riggers had to keep up with every new technique and regulation to hang speakers from arena ceilings and, in our case, to create complicated magical effects too.
This winter of 1977–78 was particularly grueling. Duke, our pilot, was always saying, “Maurice, it’s going to take longer tonight—I’ve got to fly around yet another snowstorm.” It was cold and nasty even out west. Our crew started to get really sick. We always used 80 to 90 percent the same cats due to technical requirements that were always evolving from year to year. Even with an advance team to get to the next venue early to do the preliminary work, it was still punishing. We also had a lot of one-nighters.
Frank Scheidbach knocked on my hotel door one time. “Maurice, the crew is on their last leg.”
“What do you need?”
“We’re going to need a doctor to meet us in each city.”
“No problem—work it out.”
We had three buses designated solely for the crew. A doctor in Seattle, Washington, suggested that we turn one of those buses into a rolling hospital where the sick guys could stay, in an attempt to quarantine the wicked flu bug/pneumonia being passed around the crew.
The pace of the tour was so fast that I had to be reminded what city we were in before we hit the stage. I think one time maybe Philip said we were in Boston, but in fact we were in Dallas. The tour seemed to go on forever. Demand was high, so dates kept being added. I don’t know about the rest of the band, but like many things in life, I wished I had savored it more. It was such a great tour for us, even though it was a bitter winter. On the final night of the tour, I arranged for all the crew to come out to the stage, and I told the audience of our crew’s major contribution to the show that they had just witnessed. The audience gave them very loud applause.
The All ’N All album and tour was a milestone, the best-selling R&B album of 1978. It was a great musical record, and the beginning of another phase for us.
21
Beginnings and Endings
Somethin’ happened along the way
What used to be happy was sad
—“After the Love Is Gone,” I Am, 1979
The rest of 1978 would be full of beginnings, and beginnings of endings. For Marilyn and I, our ending had started a year earlier. By 1977 we were not getting along at all. Something was undoubtedly wrong in our relationship. I didn’t want any more demands put upon me. No, I wasn’t getting married. I wanted my freedom. I was drifting away, and so was she. It was obvious to everyone around me that we had hit a rough spot. Marilyn could be awfully pushy. She would come to the studio and get in my face. That really, truly pissed me off, even if it was only about appearances. I didn’t want anyone to know anything about my relationships. I was private.
I had other women I would occasionally see, but not many. In my twenty-five years of being on the road, I tried to be discriminating, recognizing the intellectual as well as the potential sexual compatibility of the women I was meeting. Since I was turning down 98 percent of the women who were coming on to me, I thought I was being a very good boy. Beyond the other hands I held, I just wasn’t cut out for marriage. There was an obsessive side to me. I needed to be obsessive to focus, especially in music—not just in writing it but in searching for it, recording it, traveling the world to perform it, watching the business to sustain it, and most of all having the quiet time to start the process all over again. It was very time-consuming.
Marilyn moved out of my condo in Beverly Hills. We were off and on, more off than on, for many years to come, though ultimately she would become one of my most consistent and closest friends—just rock solid. On the bright side, after Marilyn moved out, my sister Patt Adams, who had finished her nursing studies in Chicago and moved to LA for work, moved in. Patt would live with me for over twenty-five years, becoming my confidante and friend as life rolled on with its inevitable twists and turns.
Late in 1977, Leonard and I were grabbing a sandwich at the corner of Santa Monica and Palm in West Hollywood while my car was being washed at the Santa Palm Car Wash, when Ellene Warren walked in. Although I had known Ellene since 1972—she had designed some of my personal clothes in years past—I hadn’t seen her for a while. She had always been talented. I asked her out for dinner, and not long after that, we were in a relationship. One thing that made Ellene special to me was that she had her own career and her own life that she was very much committed to. She also didn’t ask me for any kind of certainty about our relationship, which was refreshing.
Even though Marilyn and I were apart, she was never far away. So there I went, putting women into compartments in my life. Why? Because I could. I felt a certain amount of entitlement. There were also other women in the mix. Now, however, I often wish that I had been more truthful with the significant women in my life. If I had been more honest about where I was—or more importantly, where I wasn’t—there would have been less hurt feelings. Fewer expectations. More understanding. I didn’t tell Marilyn about Ellene, and vice versa. Eventually, each would both know the other existed, but beyond that, I kept it cool.
There were two or three other significant romantic relationships along the way that had a lot of meaning to me as well, women I cared for and respected. But one was in New York, and another had a very demanding career that kept our rendezvous to a minimum. In the early days of EW&F, I would pick up girls after a show, but I quickly became a little weary of that. Consequently, I started a practice of flying women in to meet me while I was on the road. These were women that I had kept in touch with, some even from my Ramsey Lewis days. Most were fun and breezy. Some were intellectual, and all of them were sexy. I didn’t have the guilt demon at the door—I wasn’t ch
eating on a wife. They would meet me in cities far and wide, hang out with me for a few days, maybe fly on our plane to the next city or two. Then I would fly them back home.
Of course there was the most casual of casual sex in the 1970s. The feminist movement encouraged women to break free of sexual norms. For some this meant exercising their power through taking control of their sexuality, even if it manifested as a tiny bit of promiscuity. There were women backstage that desired to give you a blow job just so they could say they gave you a blow job. I had several women show up at my hotel door with nothing but a trench coat on. I had one who broke through security on the airport tarmac and grabbed me from behind. For the musician on the road, the sexual revolution of the 1970s was a mere extension of the “artistic nightlife,” where you deluded yourself that creativity and “free love” were inextricably entwined.
With all that said, I still can’t bring myself to reveal to the public all I felt about my romantic or sexual relationships. I believe that one of the reasons that people in my line of work are always getting married, separated, divorced, and married, separated, and divorced, over and over again, is that they never come to terms with who they really are. This may sound selfish, but the truth is that I didn’t want to wake up with the same woman day after day, year after year. I was not attracted to the normal household as defined by the dominant American culture—married or not.
I like having my own space and my own set of freedoms. Furthermore, I was truly, madly, deeply in love—caught up in the rapture, if you will—with what I was doing. It was more than just a job to me. I really believe it was what I was born to do. I never was one to analyze why this or that person was in my life. I believe people come in for a season, and when it’s done, it’s done. I went with my feelings. Being single was not a problem for me; it was a pleasure, in fact.
My Life with Earth, Wind & Fire Page 24