Shining Star: Braving the Elements of Earth, Wind & Fire

by Bailey, Philip

  I don’t remember much about the Sunset Sound showcase gig, other than that the room was smoking hot and we were in full dress-rehearsal mode again. We wore our stage costumes and had planned a short thirty-minute set of material, which we performed in a blur. I recall Clive Davis walking in with a couple of his Columbia lieutenants in tow.

  Verdine leaned over to Maurice and asked him, “Which one is Clive?”

  Maurice pointed him out. “The cat in the white Gucci loafers.”

  After our brief performance Clive approached Bob and said, “I don’t want to be coy, but I think that I like them a lot. We will be talking.”

  A few days after the Columbia showcase, Maurice announced with a big smile on his face that Clive was very interested in signing the band. Davis had the foresight to take a chance on us, partly because of the huge crossover success Sly Stone already had had for CBS. We had the same edge as well as the same crossover potential. But EWF was a different kind of band than Sly and the Family Stone. We shared a universal message of joy in our songs, and I’m sure that Clive saw us as a logical progression from the music Sly was producing.

  Davis and Columbia were also willing to buy out the Warner contract, but first he needed to see us play a live gig in New York City so that his staff could see us perform in a proper concert environment. Although Davis had the power—and the inclination—to sign us to Columbia, it was important for him to include his promotion executives and A&R group in the decision. Our next hurdle was to find a show in New York City that we could attach ourselves to as quickly as possible. It would be difficult to book us into a club in Manhattan since we were primarily a West Coast talent without an East Coast audience. (Even when Perry Jones was taking the band around the Northeast, he had trouble setting up paid East Coast nightclub gigs.) How could we make this happen?

  Cavallo finally came up with a crazy idea, but pulling it off would be like a miracle. He contacted one of his other music clients, singer-songwriter John Sebastian, the former leader of The Lovin’ Spoonful, who was scheduled to headline a concert at the Philharmonic Hall in New York City. (Philharmonic Hall is now called Avery Fisher Hall and is part of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts complex.) Built in 1962, it featured state-of-the art acoustics and was a perfect venue for a folk-rock act like Sebastian. The seating capacity was about twenty-five hundred, just right for us, large yet intimate enough for Columbia to check out our act.

  The problem was, John Sebastian had no problem selling out the Philharmonic Hall on his own. Frankly, he didn’t need an opening act, especially since the show was billed as “An Evening with John Sebastian.”

  Cavallo called Sebastian anyway. “John, I need a favor from you.”

  “What is it, Bob?”

  “I have this hot new band I’m representing, and I gotta have Clive Davis see them in New York.”

  “What kind of band are they?”

  “Uh, uh, eight black folks. But when Clive sees them play, he’s gonna want them on Columbia. Can you help me out, John?”

  Sebastian, an easygoing fellow, was willing to help. “Will I hear them from my dressing room?” John asked, hoping for a little peace before going onstage.

  “No,” Cavallo said, biting his tongue.

  “Well, make sure I don’t hear anything.”

  God bless John Sebastian. He gave us our all-important, much-needed break, and it was a safe bet that he could hear every note we played that night from his headliner’s dressing room.

  Along with an audience scratching their heads at the sight of a dancing, all-black eight-piece power ensemble opening for a laid-back singer-songwriter like Sebastian, Clive and his entourage attended the show, as promised. Cavallo and Clive sat about halfway down on the left aisle of the Philharmonic Hall. After about two songs, Clive leaned over to Cavallo.

  “This is great! We have a deal.”

  I remember that, as the band was heading back to the hotel, one of the promotion men from Columbia approached Maurice, Verdine, and me and said, “The man is looking for you.”

  The three of us looked at one another. We thought he was talking about the police, and soon our walk turned into a slow trot, which then turned into a jog.

  “No, no, no!” the promo guy said, running after us, “I’m talking about ‘the man’ man. Clive Davis is the man.”

  We visited Clive at the label headquarters at the CBS Building at 51 West Fifty-second Street, nicknamed Black Rock. We couldn’t just go up in the elevator but had to check in through security downstairs. Later the label invited us to see the band Chicago (forced by the actual Chicago Transit Authority to shorten its name) play at Madison Square Garden and offered us tickets to see any other CBS artists we wanted to. It was a different culture and atmosphere from Warner Brothers.

  The tricky part of this whole wacky scenario was that Cavallo had to be extremely low-key in his dealings until the contracts with Columbia were signed. He didn’t want word to reach Joe Smith and Warner that their archrival Columbia had put in a bid to sign Earth, Wind & Fire out from under them. In fairness, Warner Brothers at the time was a victim of its own arrogance. John Sebastian and EWF were both Warner artists, and had there been a halfway astute Warner contingent present that night at Philharmonic Hall, or even a single Warner A&R or promotion person in the audience to check out the new band that Maurice had assembled, we would not have been granted our release!

  Instead, we kept cool and were out the door at Warner a few weeks later. Cavallo bought out the EWF contract with money supplied by Clive Davis and Columbia, and after Maurice signed the new recording contract, we were set to enter the studio and begin work on our first album for Clive, which was to be entitled Last Days and Time. Everybody was stoked.

  But there was a twist: When Earth, Wind & Fire moved from Warner Brothers to Columbia, a pivotal business decision was made between Cavallo-Ruffalo and Maurice White that would deeply affect the course of the band for years to come. Back when Maurice drove the entire band out to Tarzana to meet our new manager and sign individual contracts, Cavallo had taken him aside and held him off. He convinced Maurice in a subsequent meeting that he shouldn’t let the entire band own anything. He advised Maurice that he alone should own the production, the publishing, and the name and should retain total leadership and control. His logic was that if eight band members each had a voice in the band’s direction, nothing would get done properly, and the project would lose focus and fail. Cavallo felt Earth, Wind & Fire needed one person to call the shots—preferably someone whom management trusted—and since it was Maurice’s concept from the start, he should be the man in charge. A separate compensation plan would then take care of the other members of the group. Once a year, Cavallo suggested, Maurice and management would get together and distribute money among the band members according to how important each was to the group as a whole. That money would come from a percentage of the profits. Unbeknownst to me, I was to be a key man in Earth, Wind & Fire, so I would receive one of the larger annual shares. Although I did not know that at the time, I still felt the need to enrich my role in the band and become more indispensable.

  Maurice took his managers’ advice, convinced that, although we had just scored a major coup in getting EWF signed by Clive Davis to Columbia Records, the road to fame and fortune was fraught with fallen stars, ruined plans, and broken dreams. In Maurice’s mind, we had a hell of a long way to go in order for us to become shining stars.

  14

  NOT A FUNK BAND

  In its infancy the second incarnation of Earth, Wind & Fire enjoyed an early underground college buzz, as the group maintained a pocket of fans in the Washington, DC; Philly; and Baltimore areas from its Warner Brothers days. College crowds were more adventurous, and because the first EWF lineup was Afrocentric, our early student audiences were more African American than mixed or white. During my first EWF tours, I experienced my own brand of c
ulture shock. I had grown up playing in places like Aspen and Vail, so when I got to larger cities like Philly and DC with Maurice and the guys, I was stunned. Whoa! My playing experiences had been with audiences that had been predominantly white, mixed at best, and I was comfortable with that dynamic. Now all these people looked like me, and there was a whole bunch of them. I had never seen so many black folks in my life! I felt as if I were in Africa.

  Once we got on the road, we grew up. We started wearing goatees and got hipper. Traveling the country and visiting those colleges, we got a feel for what America was about. Then we found ourselves, too. Back in 1972, in order to get exposure to the circuit of college audiences and student venues—eschewing the traditional R&B chitlin’ circuit—there was an audition convention of sorts held every year in Cincinnati where bands would be invited to perform. When we had played that gathering, we were placed on a showcase bill with the progressive jazz ensemble Weather Report and power drummer Billy Cobham’s latest fusion band. Subsequently we scored a few college gigs with Weather Report. At the time jazz fusion was becoming very popular on the concert circuit as well as in smaller halls and nightclubs. Being jazz-influenced ourselves, we were okay doing those kinds of shows, as we could stretch out and develop our chops onstage. At the time, that was right down Maurice’s alley, he being a drummer at heart.

  We played a particularly memorable gig at Temple University in Philadelphia that year, performing material we had learned from the first two albums. We were getting through to the students, partly because they could relate to our youthfulness and partly because they were looking for something fresh. We also owed our early ascent to loyal college radio stations like WHUR-FM at Howard University in Washington, DC. WHUR broadcast a jazzy format, and it was one of the first stations to get behind our records. By the time we headed down to Howard University to play, we already had a following in DC, a mostly African American crowd that was hip to our music. It was my idea to add some rearranged cover tunes like Bread’s “Make It with You” and Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” two songs I sang live in Denver with Friends & Love. In addition we performed a couple of Sly Stone tunes.

  From a purely stylistic standpoint, Earth, Wind & Fire was a commercial fusion group, as opposed to a funk band like Cameo or the Ohio Players. By musical definition, funk groups weren’t running through the cycle of fourths in a tune, like we were. James Brown–influenced funksters like Parliament-Funkadelic, George Clinton, and Bootsy Collins didn’t use bebop horn licks on top of Afro-Cuban rhythms like we did. EWF had a unique collection of cultural and world influences. Also, Larry on keyboards was playing big “spread” chords and extended jazz chords instead of basic pop and rock triads which, in combination with Maurice’s exotic concept of rhythm and ear for creative melodies and my multioctave vocals, thoroughly broadened our sound. Plus there was an unmistakable gospel influence that Maurice and I both had acquired from growing up in the church and singing in the choir.

  I use the term “fusion” for just what it means: all different kinds of music combined. I’m talking about a fusion of genres, world sounds of different musicality. Whatever you hear in EWF’s music, from gospel to classical, we made a commercial yet original, entity.

  During the recording of Last Days and Time, we had Ronnie Laws on woodwinds and Roland Bautista on guitar. Yet we were in transition as far as the roles of guitar and horns were concerned. Roland was very rhythmic, but had more of a rock feel in his phrasing, while Ronnie was definitely a straight-ahead jazz horn player. Reese hired Joe Wissert to return as producer, and he and Maurice laced ribbons of big-band-style horn arrangements throughout the record. The album included our melodic covers of “Make It with You” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” but wasn’t without a sense of humor, featuring a couple of twenty-three-second snippets like “Interlude #1,” a short burst of squawking free-jazz saxophone à la Albert Ayler, or “Interlude #2,” a piano spoof of Thelonious Monk meets pianist Bent Fabric’s 1962 novelty hit “Alley Cat.” The album’s high point is “Power,” the instrumental jam we created in the studio that brought the house down at the Uptown Theatre.

  What was interesting about the artwork of Last Days and Time was that it leaned heavily on the transitional schematic drawings that Maurice first showed me when he was recruiting me and the others to join EWF. To Maurice’s delight, Columbia hired Mati Klarwein, the artist who painted the illustrations for the famed Miles Davis Bitches Brew cover, to create the gatefold artwork for Last Days and Time.

  To me it was still all about the music. As I sought to forge my own musical identity, I made a conscious decision for the time being not to listen to one artist I dearly loved: Stevie Wonder. So deep was my admiration for him that I was sure that if I listened to him too much, his styles would rub off on me and I would end up perceived as a pale imitation.

  In the studio, the vocal sound of EWF was finding its way through the combination of two primary voices. Jessica Cleaves was playing less and less of a role with the band. As Maurice wrote the bulk of the material, he and I worked closely in tandem on the vocal arrangements. Once we saw that the other guys in the band weren’t accomplished singers, and since I was in charge of making sure the live background vocals were up to par, soon it became easier for Maurice and me to sing most of the vocal parts ourselves and double-track everything in the studio. We didn’t realize that by splitting the vocals between the two of us we were developing a key element of the EWF sound. We weren’t out to consciously exclude the other members. Rather than recording umpteen takes with people who couldn’t stay in tune or execute the proper phrasings, Maurice and I could sing the parts together instinctively.

  The way that we injected variety into the overdubbed vocal parts was to approach them with different attitudes. One version might be noticeably edgy, while another would be sexier, more breathy. We would then merge these multitracks of the various “attitudes” to create a single unified vocal sound. The two of us were very much in synch throughout the process of creating our intricate vocal arrangements. Maurice and I were forging a strong bond creatively, partly because we both came from similar family backgrounds in which there was a limited strong male presence. Yet our bonding wasn’t that of close buddies; it remained one of mentor and student.

  —

  Although we made steady career progress with a Columbia recording contract, a new album, and the support of an aggressive management team, we encountered a few rough patches along the way. We hit a major bump on the road in our relationship with Perry Jones.

  At the end of 1972, after we’d left Warner, Perry also departed from the label. He ended up staying at Maurice’s house on North Westmoreland for nearly four months. Gone with Perry’s Warner gig were his generous expense account, the promo goodies, and the pretty girls who hung around him. While crashing at Maurice and Verdine’s pad, Perry was under the impression that he would have an opportunity to take the reins and manage EWF. But then along came Bob Cavallo and Joe Ruffalo, followed by Leonard “Bafa” Smith, who joined the team from Jim Brown’s BBC group. He served as Maurice’s right-hand man and called himself the “general manager” of EWF. Leonard was a big, strapping, handsome bald dude, Maurice’s jack of all trades. On the road he was both a manager and a babysitter for us younger band members. Most of us came from small cities and hadn’t done a whole lot of traveling. Leonard was a very macho dude with a deep, booming voice who would introduce our live shows.

  It sounds crazy, but it was Leonard who taught me how to write my first check. When I found a new apartment, I had to pay the first and last months’ rent, so I filled out the lease agreement and handed Bafa the check. He looked over everything and then said, “Come over here,” and showed me the proper way to write a check. Before that I didn’t even have a checkbook.

  In many respects I grew up within EWF—on a personal, manly level—from the most basic stuff like check writing to wearing deo
dorant and colognes to dressing fashionably, and all of that formative stuff. Most of us had gone from Mama and living at home straight to EWF, without a period in between in which we could become self-sufficient, independent men.

  Given the management presence of Cavallo and Bafa, things soon grew awkward between Perry Jones and the rest of the group. Because he was so close to Maurice and to me, Perry was perceived by Cavallo-Ruffalo and Leonard as a threat and a distraction. Having Perry around caused tension within the ranks, until at the end of the year he left Southern California and returned to Denver. I felt bad seeing Perry go, since he had done so much as a friend, and hoped that one day our paths would cross again.

  The biggest challenge in the band’s infancy was touring, as our bookings were very touch and go. In the early days we experienced many false starts and failed attempts at putting the new lineup on the road. Maurice would spread the word: “We got this gig. Meet at the airport at such-and-such a time.” Then I’d show up and get a call from Leonard on the white courtesy phone.

  “Didn’t happen. We’re not gonna do it. Come on back.”

  I have to say, to Maurice’s credit, he never let himself appear down-and-out in front of the band. He was positive about bad news and saw it as a means for something good to happen for us. He was a great example for a twenty-one-year-old like me. Tenacious about the Concept, he was tested on every front, and could have said at any time, “Man, I can’t do this. I have too many guys depending on me.” Instead he would tell us, “Okay, we’ll hang in there. It only means there’s something better for us on the horizon.” It’s tough holding up an entire organization during those tough times.

  Also, Maurice was so particular about making sure that we were ready to be seen live that his perfectionism delayed our ability to earn money on the road. In the very beginning he wouldn’t take certain gigs because he thought doing so would destroy our mystique. He used to say, “The same people who paid ten dollars to see you in a club ain’t gonna pay fifteen dollars to see you at the Forum.” He would avoid the smaller places and instead kept the band busy rehearsing. That, in turn, made it hard to keep food on the table to feed my family and pay the rent. With the mounting pressure of supporting a wife and son, I often had to think about whether I should take another job on the side or change professions altogether.