“Yo, motherfucker, it’s Miles.”
I was elated. “Hey, man, what’s happening?”
“Where did you get those yellow leather pants from that you had on in Belgium?”
“Oh, man, they were custom made. So how have you been—”
“Later.”
Click!
That was Miles.
Meanwhile my initial solo single, “Stand by Me,” got into the top ten on the black chart and to No. 11 on the adult contemporary chart, and then it stalled. As I’ve said before, in the ’80s, if your first single didn’t do well, it was difficult to get the promotion department fully behind the second single. The ballad “I Need You,” the next release, did far better on adult contemporary stations, but it stopped there. I didn’t criticize Columbia at the time, but I did feel they could have done a more across-the-board campaign—a less segregated approach to the promotion of my album.
Of course I was disappointed with that album’s lack of success, but I am proud of it. Still, I was more hurt than I ever let on. I wish I had done a few more solo records. I was a little shell-shocked at its nonperformance. I had put almost a year into recording it, and I just didn’t know if I was prepared to give up another ten months to do another solo record, and subject that work to the whims of the music business, whims that were increasingly out of my control. I took it personally.
After my solo record came and went, I just dove into more work. I worked with a young jazz/R&B trio, Pieces of a Dream, on a smooth jazz record called Joyride. Soon after that, I got a call from my old pal Neil Diamond. He wanted me to produce some songs on his upcoming album. Neil understands his gift as a stylist and was not afraid to use that gift in new and different ways. We had fun and laughed an awful lot during the recording.
In the summer of 1986 I produced the sound track to Armed and Dangerous, a comedy starring John Candy and Eugene Levy. Bill Meyers worked closely with me, and he also did the score.
In the meantime, Philip Bailey had started calling. He had moved back to Denver during our hiatus to have a more normal life and regain his financial bearings. At first the calls were just getting-reacquainted kind of chats, laughing at the same old jokes and so on. But after a few conversations, he got to his real agenda. He wanted to do another Earth, Wind & Fire record.
When I disbanded the group in ’84, I had every intention of putting it back together, but my enthusiasm had waned—greatly. I wasn’t sure about it, creatively, financially, and psychically. At that time I loved being in the studio and going home without having to soon go on tour for five months. I was enjoying my life as it was. It was not that I didn’t miss working with the band, but it didn’t seem to be the right time to put it back together. Verdine and I were going through a tough period. We were not getting along. We’d barely spoken for a few months. The problem revolved around the responsibilities of the Carmel property, and we had reached an impasse. At the same time, we probed Al McKay and Larry Dunn to see if they were up to rejoining the band. They both declined. Without Larry and Al on board, I realized that the previous era of Earth, Wind & Fire was truly over. I already felt this on some level, but their decision not to come back crystallized it for me.
Philip was persistent, though, and eventually I relented. I agreed to do this comeback record, and Philip and I formed a mini partnership for the album. Columbia Records was definitely all for it. I would like to say it was all a creative decision, but things were getting tight for Philip financially, and they were really getting tight for me, so a part of my decision was monetary.
What nobody knew but Art Macnow and my lawyer was that Columbia/CBS—soon to be Sony Music Entertainment—was squeezing me hard. Columbia wanted to offset some of the money that it had lost on the ARC investment by going after my royalties. Consequently, my royalty stream was very dramatically reduced. I had assets, but I had an awful lot going out and very little coming in. The Carmel property was expensive to maintain. Originally the costs were going to be shared by Verdine, Fred, and myself but we never reached an agreement on what would work for them financially. I had bought Marilyn and my son, Kahbran, a house up in Laurel Canyon, and I bought a house for myself in the Beverly Glen section of Bel-Air. And those were just a few of my expenses. Fortunately, I got a royalty check just in the nick of time. It wasn’t gargantuan, but with it, I was able to restructure things. I sold some assets and started to rebuild my financial world.
To bring a new energy into this comeback album, I asked a young cat I had recently been working with, Sheldon Reynolds, to join the re-formed EW&F. Sheldon had been in the Commodores’ backup band for a few years. A guitarist, vocalist, and all-around good guy, he brought in a youthful and creative spirit. The first song we cut was the title track, “Touch the World,” a gospel song written by the Reverend Oliver Wells. It was a great session, with Ricky Lawson on drums, Nathan East on bass, Sheldon on guitar, and the one and only George “Daddy” Duke on piano. To top it off, my good brothers Edwin Hawkins and the late Walter Hawkins sang with us. I had always loved the Hawkins brothers; we had a friendship for over twenty-five years. There was so much heart and so much light between them. My Christian brothers and sisters would call that session anointed, and I say amen to that.
She walks with a beat as she works the street in the dead of night
She’s been laid off and her kids must eat and his money’s right
A world away beneath the sun the earth goes dry
A hungry starving people search for food as their babies die
I tell you, we can touch the world
When we can meet them all at their need
We can touch them where they are
Help them to believe, touch the world
—“Touch the World,” Touch the World, 1987
“System of Survival,” the first single from Touch the World, quickly became a No. 1 R&B record. With the Touch the World album in the marketplace, I started to plan a tour. Ralph Johnson and Andrew Woolfolk were back on board. I hired a drummer for the ages in Sonny Emory. He is the best live drummer post–Fred White EW&F ever had. The other great thing about this period is that Verdine and I had settled our differences, and he was back playing bass. He greatly assisted in brainstorming for the tour. There is no Earth, Wind & Fire live show without Verdine White, period. We rekindled and continued our highly unique personal and professional bond. From the start, V was a true believer in my vision of Earth, Wind & Fire. He was a source of energy and endurance that I needed to have in the band. Years earlier, on our live album Gratitude, after Verdine takes a monster bass solo, I say to the crowd, “That’s my main man.” He was, and he is.
Regretfully, the Touch the World tour planning soon became the same old story of me writing large checks. I’d cut a deal with Philip in which his money was guaranteed no matter what the financial outcome of the tour. This made my mini-partnership with him end when it came to financial responsibility for the tour. I don’t blame him. If I could have gotten that deal, I would have taken it too! Ron Weisner, who was EW&F’s manager for a brief time, and promoter Tom Hulett of Concerts West were convinced that everybody was waiting for an Earth, Wind & Fire comeback tour. They blew all that smoke, and I sucked it right up. They truly believed it, and I went all in with them. We built the biggest and costliest stage that we ever took out on the road—a white horseshoe-shaped behemoth designed for big arenas. I hired LeRoy Bennett of Prince fame as lighting director, Michael Peters of Michael Jackson Thriller fame for choreography, and James Earl Jones of Star Wars fame to record a Darth Vader–like dialogue for the introduction to the show. Big money all around.
We were on the road for most of 1989, but the Touch the World Tour had its troubles. We were not selling out the big arenas, as Weisner and Hulett had envisioned. A month in, we stopped the tour for six weeks. Cutting the stage almost in two, we retooled for smaller venues: six to ten thousand seaters. Once we’d overhauled our expectations, we did well. But I still came off the road
in major debt; I never financially recovered from the initial outlay of cash for the original tour concept. Damn.
30
Blindsided
Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens.
—Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
I woke up one day in 1990 shaking.
Just like that. I felt fine in every other way besides this uncontrollable tremor in my hand. Looking back, however, I had little telltale signs. Around 1986 I started getting tiny hand tremors. Years earlier, my leg would sometimes shake in bed. I just thought it was stress or something. It stopped, and I forgot about it. But this morning was clearly different.
It was a completely new feeling.
It was an odd feeling.
It was a disturbing feeling.
At first I saw health practitioners in the alternative medicine world. Some of them were herbalists, some dealt in mind-body, others were more esoteric. They all basically said I had some kind of nerve disorder. All I could do is what I always did: find my fulfillment in music.
By the early spring of 1991 my tremors had become significantly worse. I could no longer rely solely on alternative medicine. I told Art, and he set up an appointment with a neurologist, Dr. Mark Lew at USC. They did a battery of tests that went on for hours, ruling out multiple sclerosis, Huntington’s, and Lou Gehrig’s. Finally Dr. Lew said simply, “Mr. White, you have Parkinson’s disease.”
My heart sank. I had prepared my mind for the worst—but damn, Parkinson’s disease? First person I thought of was Muhammad Ali, who had made the public more aware of Parkinson’s disease and was now its public face. Of course, I did not tell anyone. I refused to claim the identity of a person with Parkinson’s disease. Some of that was ego, and some of it was spiritual. I didn’t want the extra mental weight of people seeing me a certain way, especially since I did not want to see myself that way. It’s not that I wasn’t accepting the truth about my condition; it’s just that I didn’t want to make it the focus of my life. Not to be positive about it would have been a betrayal of all the spiritual work I had done, and ultimately a betrayal of myself. I also had an ally in Dr. Lew, who told me that staying positive would help with Parkinson’s. In any event, the news remained locked up within me. I was trying to ignore the symptoms, trying to ignore the negative thoughts swirling around in my head.
Yet there’s something about those nights when you crawl into bed alone, and all you’re left with are your thoughts—the thoughts that the demands of the day have kept at bay. But I never panicked. In the weeks following the diagnosis, I wondered: Why Parkinson’s? Parkinson’s is an old person’s disease, right? I was only forty-nine years old, and since I’d had tremors since ’86, the disease must have truly started when I was forty-five. I ate impeccably, exercised religiously, took vitamins, and meditated. I knew it didn’t do any good to dwell on the cause, but I briefly went through those motions. Was it inherited? I asked myself. Was it unresolved painful emotions from my childhood? Or all that DDT I breathed in as a child in Memphis? Who knows?
I had always rejected the pernicious new age belief that you create your illness. I think that kind of thinking is a complete rejection of the most basic realities of life: shit happens. What I didn’t reject was the belief that the thoughts you have around the unexplainable ups and downs of life are important. They say you think 70,000 thoughts a day. With all that chatter going on in your head, it’s hard not to let negativity slip in. It would not be enough to demand of myself, “Stop thinking about Parkinson’s disease.” I would have to replace the thought with something else. I would have to find the good in this situation, no matter how bad it might appear. Find something I could hold on to. Find something that could help me keep my head skyward. It was the ultimate irony that the very thing I had unfailingly promoted in my music would be the very thing that I would need to radically embrace. Have mercy.
When you hear words like “You have Parkinson’s disease,” it moves energy all by itself. It moves energy in you. It moves energy in the people who care about you. It moves energy in anyone who knows that you have it. For these reasons, telling folks, at least right then, was not for me. What made my outlook brighter is that my sister Patt accompanied me to Redlands, California, seventy miles east of LA, to see a Parkinson’s specialist. He said that it looked like I had an extremely slow progression of the disease. I was ecstatic. He said I could go on and do everything I had been doing for some time to come. That helped me a lot psychologically in those early months of the diagnosis. I had gotten something of a reprieve.
Even with this slow progression of the disease, I would have to come up with a plan to deal with it. For the next nine years of my life, it would remain a secret. My creativity, my health, and my life in public would all have to adjust. But in time it would become a negotiation between keeping a secret and Parkinson’s harsh reality.
31
Not Fitting In
Wanted: a man who will not lose his individuality in a crowd, a man who has the courage of his convictions, who is not afraid to say “No,” though all the world say “Yes.”
—Orison Swett Marden
An unexpected metamorphosis took place in the music business in the late 1980s and early ’90s. Hip-hop became the dominant form of black music, and any other form of black music was swept to the side. When Niggaz4Life by N.W.A. went No. 1 on the Billboard 200 album chart in 1991, it was a milestone. Likewise, when Guns N’ Roses released their Appetite for Destruction, tons of sound-alike artists were signed in the wake of both groups’ huge success. No complaint there: that’s just the way the small minds of the entertainment industry work. Their flavor-of-the-month mentality doesn’t take into account that anyone with a trend-setting sound is highly idiosyncratic. James Brown, the Beatles, Prince, Nirvana, Parliament-Funkadelic, Sly Stone, Led Zeppelin, Stevie Wonder, Elton John, and others all marched to their own individual sound and became legends because of it.
The enormous racial difference of this time was that established adult white artists like Phil Collins, Tori Amos, Celine Dion, and so many others were not asked, either outright or subtly, to make their music harder, like Guns N’ Roses, or to have the angst of Nirvana. Could you imagine asking Elton John to dress or sound like Kurt Cobain?
On the other hand, black artists, adult and young adult, new and established, were told outright or hinted at by the black A&R guys or their white bosses to make their sound more “street.” For over a decade, “street” became the operative word in the black music business for more hip-hop-influenced, or harder. “Street” was code for a certain set of musical, visual, and lyrical sensibilities. In the DNA of that code was a request for blacks to ultimately prove that they were “black enough.” Even a successful band like Earth, Wind & Fire was still somewhat scrutinized through that “street” lens.
Some of this “black enough” litmus test was in large part built upon the misguided belief that one African American journey is more authentic or “blacker” than another. I came from the projects of Memphis, Tennessee. But coming from the projects did not make my experience more authentically black than that of someone who did not.
The irony of all this was that I spent a lot of Earth, Wind & Fire’s creative capital to erase the idea that black masculinity was a one-size-fits-all concept. I worked hard at establishing the band’s identity beyond the stereotypical ideas of black manhood, whether it was the supersexed stud, the criminal, or the super athlete. Nor did I want any part of the hypermasculine crap that seemed to me to be a good portion of the hip-hop culture, all this look-at-me-see-how-tough-I-am bullshit. I wanted EW&F to always represent an intellectual, thoughtful man—a man skilled in his musical craft, independent in his thinking, spiritual and otherwise; a black American and yet a man of the world.
The beautiful elements of hip-hop gave younger artists a wider lyrical palette
to draw upon. Their lyrics were not just love songs; they included other aspects of life, even if sometimes these were traumatic ones. Their stories were refreshing for black music. Who needed another song about rockin’ me tonight? The larger question became, however, whether they could take those traumatic experiences and portray them from a higher viewpoint—in other words, develop a social consciousness.
The worst elements of hip-hop celebrated the tough-talking, self-glorifying antisocial behavior—or, as I like to say, the “saying nothing, talking loud” attitude. At its zenith, that swagger became what the bona fide black person was. Some say it is still with us. A few years later I saw Don Cornelius, my old acquaintance from Chicago and creator of Soul Train, at a restaurant. He had given up the show’s hosting duties in 1993. When I asked him why, he humorously said, “Niggers, Reece, niggers!” I fell out laughing.
Sadly, during this era a lot of young black artists were simply trying to fit in when they started calling girls bitches and hos or throwing one-hundred-dollar bills at the video camera or bragging about who they shot last night or what it feels like to wear a $50,000 watch. The overwhelming majority of these kids weren’t from the mean streets of Compton or Brooklyn, but from the suburbs. They were just trying to fit in and get paid. Even singers who weren’t so-called gangsta tried to appear tough and hard to appeal to the lucrative fetish created by certain expressions of hip-hop. These artists were selling themselves short. They had an opportunity to not only make money but create a legacy of dignity.
Throughout this time, young artists were constantly seeking me out. “How can I achieve greatness and longevity in this business?” they often asked. I told them, one, to create something that their grandchildren wouldn’t be ashamed of, and two, to be who they were. Some got it, and some looked puzzled. The problem in the arts, I would tell them, has always been and always will be gatekeepers or people in power telling you that you’ve got to fit in somehow. And that’s a despicable lie.
My Life with Earth, Wind & Fire Page 32