Ultimately, particular aspects of hip-hop culture will have to answer the question: Do they degrade or uplift black character and culture? Music is more powerful than we can ever know. Neuroscience has now proven what Plato, honorable spiritual leaders, and kids have always known: music has a divine way of getting into your system, into your psychological and emotional DNA.
Despite hip-hop’s growing dominance on radio, EW&F reestablished itself with the No. 1 R&B hit “System of Survival.” Back in Los Angeles, I met with the Columbia Records vice president of A&R. He was polite, but he more than insinuated that Columbia wanted more from EW&F than just a No. 1 R&B hit and another gold album. Platinum records were our domain, and he was determined to return us to glory. He suggested that we include younger guest artists on our next album to hip things up. To show I had a spirit of cooperation, and that maybe I was hip too, I agreed. Big-ass mistake.
I liked the music on Heritage. I liked the tracks we came up with. I even liked the two young guest artists we worked with, the Boys and MC Hammer. But when you’re an adult artist who has had a bunch of hits, like Earth, Wind & Fire, it looks like you’re trying too hard when you put younger people on your record for the sake of having younger people on your record. That makes it not about music, or a new sound; it makes it about marketing. It’s not that I was unwilling to embrace change. But when it looks forced, it’s over before it starts.
When Heritage was released, Verdine, Phil, and I went on the Today show, where Bryant Gumbel interviewed us. Toward the end of the interview, he asked,”Do you ever wish you hadn’t called a halt to it back when you did?” I responded, “We needed the break.” Riding back in the town car to the hotel, I thought deeply about Bryant’s telling question. It made me wonder, how relevant could EW&F really be? I knew we could still have a one-off hit, and our past hits would always make us a concert draw. But between our age, pop/R&B being drowned out by hip-hop, and the ever-growing market for all things gangsta, was it even possible for us to regain our position as consistent hit makers?
For all those reasons and more, I chose to move closer to my jazz roots. I wanted to be free of the box of producing singles that ended at 3:24. I yearned for older forms of music, for more live instruments, for letting the music flow freely, unconstrained by commercial demands. I did some songs on Ramsey Lewis’s 1993 record Sky Island. A year or so later I did a wonderful jazz album, Urban Knights, which featured Ramsey, Grover Washington Jr., Victor Bailey, and Omar Hakim. It was like coming home, though some people were surprised that I would choose to produce an instrumental jazz album. The project was so successful for the record company GRP that we recorded Urban Knights II two years later, in ’97.
It’s not that I abandoned contemporary R&B/pop music. I worked with Barbara Weathers of Atlantic Starr, Prince protégée Jevetta Steele, and the one and only James Ingram. But out of all the albums I produced in this period, I am proudest of the one I did with El DeBarge, In the Storm. I knew El from his early days in California. When we started working, he jokingly reminded me, “Maurice, you were always giving me books!”
El always had a beautiful understanding of what works for him. In the more and more restricted framework of 1990s R&B/hip-hop, El still held on to a sense of musical adventure. I was called into his project after his label, Warner Bros., rejected what he turned in. El, for all his troubles, was a giant of a talent—a monster at writing melody and chord changes. His troubles made it challenging to keep him focused and to get him to the studio every day, but when he was there, there was never a more musically expressive cat.
As much fun as I was having returning to my jazz roots and working with creative young people, it was also around this time that I was also subtly reminded of the Hollywood fame game. Since my birthday is close to Christmas, on December 19, for many years the large foyer in my home would be filled to the brim pretty much through December and January with all kinds of gift baskets, international food, wine, flowers, exotic plants, and desserts—baskets upon baskets of unopened gifts. I would give 90 percent of it away. In the late 1980s, however, as the hits stopped coming and my low profile became even lower, I gradually noticed that, year after year, the deluge of baskets became less and less. It’s the old Hollywood story of fame, fair-weather friends, and where you put your value. You can’t win the Hollywood fame game. You can’t win because it’s inherently inauthentic. It’s designed to betray you. It’s not about you; it’s about what others believe about you and what others want from you. Thanks be to God I didn’t have my eggs in that basket. If I had, I would have fallen hard around this time. It can be hard to wash off the superficial love of the entertainment business.
I suppose it’s inevitable that what goes up must come down. MTV’s beginning attitude toward black music cannot be underestimated in the major role it played in EW&F’s dwindling fortunes in the early 1980s. But hindsight being 20/20, of course, maybe I could have done things differently. Nowhere is this more debated than in the leadoff single choices for our albums. As I acknowledged before, in the 1980s the first-released singles were becoming like the box-office opening weekend for movies. If your first single didn’t do well, your album was toast. Between radio promotion dollars and music videos that could cost from a quarter million to a million dollars, it was tough to reignite full-throated excitement for your second single. A one-and-you’re-done mentality dictated the terms.
David Foster transformed Chicago into an AC powerhouse in the early 1980s by focusing the band’s singles on ballads, giving them a second life. This approach extended their recording career into the late 1980s, until their lead vocalist, Peter Cetera, left. Lionel Richie’s “Hello” and even unknown groups like Champaign, with their soulful hit “How ’Bout Us,” took over AC radio in the early ’80s. After our success with the ballad “After the Love Is Gone,” the Monday-morning-quarterback thinking is that we should have rammed our lush ballads down radio’s throat. This could have sheltered an older EW&F from the fast-food whims of R&B/hip-hop radio and kept us in the friendlier adult contemporary radio format.
But I took a counter position, believing in the essence of the EW&F sound. EW&F always meant power to me. High energy. Strength and masculinity. Big shows. Bold sound. Electrifying, up-tempo music. I never saw EW&F as a ballad band, with that continuous stream of softness and vulnerability. Ballads were just something you did as a part of your career. That musical disposition drove my psychology. Consequently, Earth, Wind & Fire never released a ballad as the first single to any album, ever. I completely ignored the fact that songs like “Reasons,” “Can’t Hide Love,” “Love’s Holiday,” and “After the Love Is Gone” were a part of our identity too, and important to who we had become as a band.
I say all this because by the 1980s we were older, established hit makers, not the young lions. We didn’t need to power our way into our listeners’ psyche. We had their attention. All of our albums from the 1980s and ’90s—Faces, Raise!, Powerlight, Electric Universe, Touch the World, Heritage, and Millennium—had great ballads. Songs like “You Went Away,” “Could It Be Right,” “Straight from the Heart,” “We’re Living in Our Own Time,” and “Anything You Want” could have been the leadoff single from any of those albums. But none of those songs ever saw the light of day on the radio. Whether I was blind to changes in the music business or clinging to an outmoded idea, it’s still hard to know whether ballads could have extended Earth, Wind & Fire’s popularity on the radio in the ’80s and ’90’s. But I do know for sure that I did not give the public, the band, and myself a chance to find out.
Most of the 1990s continued to be about me trying to keep my health issues private, return to my jazz roots, and still make Earth, Wind & Fire records in a very different musical climate. I’m so blessed that EW&F started when it did, at a time when record companies would let you grow into a career. They looked at things long-term back then. On the contrary, starting in the mid-1980s, an artist could sell a million albums, have their next
album not do as well, and get dropped by their label, never to be heard from again. One-hit wonders became more commonplace. Artists who had genuine talent were becoming disposable as toilet paper. Things had indeed radically changed. Again, thanks be to God that Earth, Wind & Fire already had a career.
What most people don’t know about the music business is that when you record an album, the money the record company puts out is nothing more than a loan. All the money for the recording, marketing, and anything else must be paid back to the record label before it starts paying royalties on sales. I spent millions on recording. As a consequence, in the glory days of my career, the mid- to late 1970s and some of the ’80s, I would get a $0.00 statement from Columbia Records, which meant that I did not recoup. Part of the reason, too, was that whatever money was there was being spent recording the next album. There was never a long enough lull in recording activity for the coffers to be filled. The debt was essentially rolled over. And much to accountants’ and managers’ chagrin, I would reach into my own pocket and pay the band something, just to keep them motivated. To this day, I continue to pay the band royalties twice a year, based on the individual agreements I have with each member.
It was a blessing that two positive financial things happened during this period that made life easier. One, our records finally started to recoup—all the money had been paid back by my royalties. Likewise, in the ’90s, when compact disc players became affordable, people began buying our entire catalog over again. Money started flowing in—in a big way. I wasn’t the only benefactor from the creation of CDs. The compact disc lifted the entire music business. From 1988 to 1998, worldwide sales grew from roughly $6 billion to $13 billion.
The second helpful thing that happened is that we started to go to Japan frequently to perform. The Japanese people have always loved EW&F. They seem to love the songs and what the music personifies. In all my years of touring, this was the first time that I personally made a profit. In all those tours of the mid-1970s, I’d come off the road roughly $500,000 in debt. I got it down to $300,000 a few times, but never under that. But our tours in Japan in the late 1980s and early ’90s were serious moneymakers for me. They put me back in a strong financial position and wiped out all of my debt.
32
A Time of Symbolism
I thirst but never quench
I know the consequence, feeling as I do
We’re in a spinning top
Where, tell me, will it stop
—“I’ll Write a Song for You,” All ’N All, 1977
On Valentine’s Day 1992, my youngest child, Eden, was born. I was fifty years old. Ellene Warren, whom I had been seeing regularly, was the mother.
I had kept the women who were dominant in my life, and in turn my children, at arm’s length for most of my life. Much of that was simply the reality of my being gone so much, and some of it was due to my desire to have space for my career. I may have lacked in the romantic commitment department, but I was generous with the mothers of my children.
Throughout the mid-1990s, Ellene gradually became a bigger part of my life. When we casually started up, she never pressed me for any kind of definition of our relationship. That was a breath of fresh air to me. Little by little, any doubts I had that she really loved me—for me—were dissolved. Left standing were my love for her and her commitment to me. It would be over twenty years after Eden’s birth before I realized that Ellene was the love of my life.
I have three children by three different women. I did not witness any of my daughter’s childhood, and I missed a good portion of my younger son Kahbran’s, so I’ve been trying to do a better job with my youngest son, Eden. Eighteen years later, the induction ceremony for the Songwriters Hall of Fame in New York was held on June 17, 2010. I truly wanted to attend, even though I didn’t like to go to many public events at that point in my life. But when I found out that the event was the night before Eden would be graduating from high school, there was no question where I would be: at Eden’s graduation.
About the same time that Eden was born, Bob Cavallo briefly came back into my business life. After the creative interference on Heritage, I had had enough and wanted out of my deal at Columbia Records. We met with only one label, Warner Bros. Records. Its president, Mo Ostin, said, “Maurice, it would be an honor to have Earth, Wind & Fire on Warner’s.” No fuss, no muss. I signed with Mo. This was the end of EW&F’s sixteen-album association with Columbia Records. Mo was known to everyone in entertainment as an executive who actually encouraged creativity—a rare breed indeed. Over his career he signed Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Steely Dan, Prince, and the Talking Heads—all trendsetters in their own right.
In late 1992 we started recording our next album, Millennium. In my mind Millennium was supposed to be Earth, Wind & Fire’s last album, and in many ways it is. I saw it as symbolic that EW&F’s career would end where it started, at Warner Bros. I wanted to conclude Earth, Wind & Fire’s recording career in a manner that was respectful to our musical legacy. For the most part Mo Ostin gave me complete creative freedom; the whole idea was that this was to be a return to the classic EW&F sound. And I achieved some of that on the album.
Besides Eden’s birth, Cavallo being back around, and the return to Warner Bros., there was so much personal symbolism swirling around in my head during that year of recording Millennium. Early on in the project, my childhood buddy Booker T. Jones came by to visit me at Studio 55 in Hollywood. We reminisced all day and into the evening about growing up in Memphis and our youthful musical adventures together.
Our reunion was a diving board into what I wanted the lyrics of this final album to be. My old friend Jon Lind, who was experiencing a big hit with Vanessa Williams’s “Save the Best for Last,” turned me on to lyricist Brock Walsh. Brock and I talked for hours, mostly about my youth. The conversation felt therapeutic. Brock came up with lyrics that set an appropriate tone to where I had been in my life.
Booker T’s at the front door,
Saying it’s time to go
Coltrane’s at the Mother Blues tonight
63rd to South Shore
We’re cruising in the Dyna-Flo
Ain’t no way they let us play, but then
they might
—“Chicago (Chi-Town) Blues,” Millennium, 1993
Even more symbolic was that Don Myrick, my friend from the jazzmen of 1963, saxophone soloist on “Sun Goddess,” “Reasons,” and “After the Love Is Gone,” and band member in Earth, Wind & Fire from 1975 to 1982, was shot to death by police in a case of mistaken identity in Los Angeles on July 30, 1993. Don answered the door with a butane lighter in his hands; the police mistook it for a weapon and shot him dead. At his funeral there was an air of sadness and racial frustration; his death was so senseless. Many of us from the band and the EW&F family were at the memorial. Like many funerals it was a mini reunion, full of reminiscences.
Six weeks after Don Myrick’s death, our new album for Warner Bros., Millennium, was released. We did two pivotal television performances in the early promotional support of the album. On October 14, 1993, we performed the first single from the album, “Sunday Morning,” on The Arsenio Hall Show. Later in the month we taped a segment for The American Music Awards 20th Anniversary Special. For these two TV appearances, the band was great. I was not. My lackluster performance couldn’t be written off as age, or me toning down my stage persona. People knew something was wrong. After the television appearances, rumors circulated about my health. Some time later, after several inquiries, I had to release a statement saying that I was not sick, just retired from the road. This seemed only to make the gossip worse. People started calling my office, asking if it was true that I had cancer, AIDS, or multiple sclerosis. I began wearing sunglasses all the time. The sunglasses were symbolic for me; I was trying to hide my Parkinson’s disease. If I didn’t let anyone get close, maybe they could not see that I had this earthquake rumbling in my body.
It was ironic to me that I’d sp
ent my entire life rejecting drugs, and now I would be taking them for the rest of my life. For over a decade I had difficulty getting my drug strategy together, the proper combinations of this one and that one. And the drugs had side effects. In many ways I was worse off in 1993 than in 1996, and I was better in 2003 than in 2000. Parkinson’s being a degenerative disease, I should have been getting progressively worse, not better. It was confusing to others, and most of all confusing to me, but it was all a result of my drug regimen.
I was still playing tennis in the early 1990s, and still feeling strong, yet I would get tired suddenly, out of the clear blue. Some of that was due to the side effects of the meds, some due to the disease. My doctors kept explaining to me that Parkinson’s is a highly uncertain disease. You can have it for decades and keep doing what you always did, driving, exercising, the whole bit. You also can have it for one year and be completely disabled. That’s how wide the variables can be. Since I was fortunate and had a slow progression of the condition, I was still trying some alternative treatments coupled with conventional medicine. By now, however, I had to start negotiating when I would take my medications based on what responsibilities I had during the day. In the studio, if I got a tremor in my hand, I would quickly stick my hand under my thigh and sit on it so no one could see the shaking. I started dropping and breaking glasses at home. Eventually, trying to hide my symptoms became exhausting.
33
Letting Go
The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
My Life with Earth, Wind & Fire Page 33