At one point I was feeling so discouraged that I began looking through the job opportunities section in the newspaper. When Hop Johnson caught me scanning the want ads, he took a no-holds-barred approach. In his eyes, Earth Wind & Fire demanded nothing less than total dedication.
“Philip, either you’re going to be a musician or not,” he said, snatching the newspaper out of my hand. “If you’re going to be a musician, then go back in and practice. If not, then sell your damned congas!”
This was exactly what I needed to hear. Hop’s challenge made me want to commit to the band even more. I learned that even though times were lean and scary, and despite the unfulfilled promises of shows and tours, I needed to hang in there and believe in the Concept.
Things would soon change after Earth, Wind & Fire played the monumental gig at the Uptown Theatre, the 2,000-seater in Philly where we shared the bill with New Birth and The Manhattans. It was one of the most exciting shows we had done. People weren’t expecting to see us on the floor when the curtain opened. At first we were loudly booed and heckled by the crowd, but we won them over. We finished our set with the crowd up on its feet.
In preparation for our first album on Columbia, we were invited to play a special showcase at the CBS convention in London. We were scheduled to perform a brief set in front of not only the executives from the label but also their entire sales department, branch offices, promotional divisions, and A&R staff. Columbia spent a fortune flying in employees from all over the world. The CBS national conventions were a big deal, and a chance to unveil the newest acts and releases for the coming year in a party atmosphere. The label put us up in a posh hotel in London called Grosvenor House, where we celebrated Verdine’s twenty-first birthday.
We shared the bill at the convention with another new, much-heralded label act, Azteca, a Latin rock spin-off group fronted by ex-Santana percussionists, brothers Pete and Coke Escovedo. Azteca had full bars set up in their hotel rooms, and they took full advantage of them. As for us, true to Maurice’s influence, we stayed clearheaded and ready to rumble.
When we broke into our “Power” jam and then “Make It with You,” the CBS contingent went crazy. Unfortunately for Azteca, their set was flat. They even got smashed on the airplane coming back. Once again, taking the high, wholesome road and the clean-living approach that Maurice espoused worked to our advantage.
Released in April 1972, Last Days and Time sold a respectable 40,000 units and stuck around on the Billboard charts for twenty-five weeks. The first time I heard myself on the radio was when Larry and I, along with our families, were living in our tiny apartment on Blackwelder Street. When “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” came on the air, Larry and I were euphoric.
“That’s us! That’s us!” We were jumping up and down, going crazy. Larry and I both came from modest backgrounds, but here we were, struggling and trying to make it. And now we had a chance. We felt that the band was on a nice, solid trajectory, and that our first Columbia record was the start of a fruitful relationship with the label, though not the end of the dues-paying era needed to kick the band—and the Concept—into full gear.
15
THE STATION WAGON TOURS
Soon it was time to tweak the Earth, Wind & Fire lineup again. Horn player Ronnie Laws was on his way out of the band. He had ambitions to pursue a solo career like his older brother, Hubert, so I stepped in to recommend Andrew Woolfolk, who had played with me in Denver. Andrew was a versatile horn player and could play flute as well as tenor and soprano saxophone. Just as I had done with Larry Dunn, I remember excitedly phoning Andrew, who at that time was studying with the famous bebop saxophonist Joe Henderson in New York, to tell him that we had an opening in the group. (I had invited him to the gig we did in New York when we opened for John Sebastian while Ronnie was still in the band.) A short time later, Andrew auditioned and succeeded Ronnie.
The next adjustment was to change guitar players. Roland Bautista was a great axe man and an able studio session player, but he didn’t quite have the commercial sound Maurice had in mind for the band. We needed to beef up our guitar section rhythmically. When Roland left the band, somebody from New Birth told us about a killer young guitarist in Kentucky named Johnny Graham, who was a funky and bluesy player. We sent him a plane ticket to Los Angeles without having heard him play a note.
Maurice told me about another guitarist he had met named Al McKay. Al had played with Charles Wright and the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band, the other R&B group that Warner had on its label alongside EWF in 1970. Bill Cosby supposedly helped form the band, but soon after McKay joined he could see that it wasn’t going to live up to its potential. Maurice had first met Al in a music club in Seattle called the Black and Tan. At the time Maurice was still working with Ramsey Lewis, and Al was on tour with the Watts 103rd. Like me, Al was also a drummer, which gave him something in common with Maurice as well when the two first met. They exchanged phone numbers, and when Maurice relocated to LA, he kept in touch with Al. Jessica Cleaves, who went to high school with Al, highly recommended him.
Soon after they met, Al received a call from Maurice to audition for the first version of EWF, but Al had by then begun working with Isaac Hayes and couldn’t fully commit to playing with the band. Al later got a job with Stax Records working as a musical contractor with various artists on the label once they hit the road on tour. The second time Maurice called Al to audition, now to replace Roland, Al showed up at the rehearsal hall in Hollywood, which was surrounded by mirrors and looked more like a dance studio than a rehearsal hall. Al plugged in and jammed with the entire band, which had just added Woolfolk on saxophone. I was in attendance, along with Larry, Verdine, Ralph, Maurice, Andrew, and Jessica. Johnny Graham also auditioned that day.
I remembered seeing McKay play live at the Whiskey a Go Go, and was well aware of his badass musical style. I liked Al’s playing, and I thought that he could light a fire under the band rhythmically and become an integral part of our sound. In addition to gigging with Isaac Hayes, he had also played with Ike Turner and Sammy Davis Jr. During the audition McKay sensed that we had something special going on and was simpatico with the other band members.
Once Maurice hired him, McKay warned us that his gig with Stax as a music contractor might interfere with our schedule. One weekend when we had a gig in San Francisco, Al couldn’t make the show because of a conflicting date that he couldn’t break. This pissed us off big time, and Maurice was so upset that he fired Al from the band. Subsequently we hired Johnny Graham as Al’s replacement. Although Maurice and I agreed that Johnny was great, there was something missing without Al in the band. In November 1972 Maurice decided to bury the hatchet, and invited Al to drop by his house and join us, the band, for Thanksgiving dinner. After that, the band would proceed with two hot guitar players, Johnny and Al.
Al was the consummate funk rhythm player with his James Brown–style chicken scratchin’ licks, while Johnny came from the meaty, bluesier Albert King style of guitar playing. Johnny was the hotter soloist. His solos burned because of his secret technique: He used light strings and tuned them down a half step. Whenever he bent a string, it would push his leads into the stratosphere. Al made no bones about being an R&B funk guitar player, even when we tried to turn him on to the heavy jazz fusion players that Larry, Andrew, and I loved to listen to. We played him Chick Corea and Miles Davis, some of which he liked, most of which he didn’t.
When Al first joined the band, we were fairly jazz-oriented and acted like jazz musicians onstage, with nobody dancing or smiling very much. At first Johnny and Al played on the same side of the stage and began competing against each other at shows, each guy turning up the volume more and more. It bothered me whenever the band played too loud, so we moved Al to the other side of the stage, next to Verdine. In addition to Al’s chunky guitar rhythms, it was he who got the band moving around a lot more onstage. McKay liked to dance and play, and th
e more Al and Verdine strutted their stuff, the more the rest of us joined in. Pretty soon we had our own dance steps, moving and grooving with a different energy. Bringing in Al and Johnny definitely made us a slicker live band.
Having Al on board also brought a more commercial and radio-friendly structure to our sound. Because Maurice came from a recording background with Chess, and he and Al were older, both had similar concepts of tonal structure and how it could be used to put down a groove and make it simple. Whatever Al laid on top of Larry’s fancy jazz chords gave our material more bounce. Instead of closing our eyes and digging our music, we’d want to move around and dance to Al’s lines.
Al played a fat Gibson L-5 hollow body box guitar from the days when he gigged with Sammy Davis Jr. He also had a sweet Gibson red 345 double cutaway that was a gift from Isaac Hayes, which provided a thicker and fuller sound. With EWF, Al also played a Fender Telecaster and a Gibson Les Paul Custom.
Once we began recording Head to the Sky in early 1973, I gave Maurice a song with lyrics I had written called “Evil.” It became my first piece to appear on an EWF album. Previously I had brought different songs to him, and on occasion Maurice would listen intently and then rub his nose with the palm of his hand and say, “Yeah . . . pretty nice little idea . . . you gotta break that down, though.”
“‘Pretty nice little idea’?”
I could have interpreted his critique as a backhanded compliment, and if I had been as supersensitive as some of the other guys were about Maurice’s comments, then I might have felt intimidated about bringing him more material in the future. But I wasn’t. Maurice was brilliant at taking a song’s central idea and improving it by putting his stamp on it. I looked at it this way: No matter what songs I brought Maurice, even if he looked at them as just “pretty good little ideas,” I would at least have learned what he wanted, and I knew I was going to get better at the submission process. Reese’s criticisms only added to my determination. As a result I ended up being the cowriter on many other EWF hits, once we connected creatively.
Maurice decided to open Head to the Sky with “Evil,” and it became another college radio favorite. With a funky duo of guitars, we began stretching out our songs with layers of my falsetto vocals. “Zanzibar” was an experimental thirteen-minute-long tour de force jam with Afro-Cuban percussion, Larry’s organ and Fender Rhodes electric piano, plus a CTI Records–style trumpet solo. By combining those distinctive jazz layers with bouncy, funky guitars and Maurice’s creative melodies, our sound tightened up.
We posed shirtless for the cover art of Head to the Sky, sexy and silly young men with a whole lot of energy who were just plain crazy. None of our waistlines measured more than twenty-nine inches. Jessica, who was at the center of the photo, was our little princess, until she began missing gigs and getting sidetracked with certain substances. Eventually Maurice had to let her go. Everybody loved Jessica like a sister. She was the sweetest thing with those beautiful eyes and her great voice, and I was sad that we weren’t able to work it out. Jessica wound up being the last female core member of the group, as after her departure Maurice decided to discontinue the female vocalist role and go on with just the guys.
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While Earth, Wind & Fire aspired to lift our listeners with hope, humanity, and positivity, 1973 signaled the start of a new sociopolitical era. The World Trade Center became the tallest building in the world as Richard Nixon, during the Watergate scandal, announced to the American public, “I am not a crook.” OPEC nations began flexing their economic muscles and restricted the flow of oil to the United States, causing sharp increases in gasoline prices and signaling the arrival of blocks-long gasoline lines, and American troops were finally withdrawing from Vietnam and coming home.
The 1973 release of Head to the Sky heralded the beginning of our Earth, Wind & Fire station wagon tours. In those days we were playing a lot of college gigs to younger, jazz-loving audiences. We performed at a large outdoor show for a New York City college on its campus. It was the first time such a big crowd turned out to see us. Once we began to hear “Evil” on the radio, we figured things were moving forward.
For these tours, there were no more U-Haul trailers or vans for us. Instead we would fly to the East Coast and rent four or five station wagons. We carried our gear, drums, amps, and guitars, loaded up our own luggage into the back of each vehicle, and took turns driving. Ralph loved to drive. While Larry wasn’t the greatest, I was a pretty decent driver. Johnny and Al drove a little whenever they were needed, and Verdine, well, forget it. We would cover the entire East Coast this way, checking into Holiday Inns, setting up at the venue and performing our act, then leaving for the next town in the dead of night. We were young and could handle the rigors of the road, motorcading from town to town, college to college.
Although I was an experienced road warrior—I was used to loading and unloading drums and Hammond organs from back when I traveled all over Colorado playing in small groups—I had never had the best sense of direction. One time when we had a gig on the northeast side of Washington, DC, we hung out afterward at a late-night party until about four in the morning. I was in charge of driving the band back to the Holiday Inn, but the Northeast, Northwest, Southeast, Southwest addresses got me so confused that I was completely turned around.
It was funny at first. Everybody laughed at our being lost and that I had no idea where we were. After driving around in circles, we’d end up back where we started, right near the Washington Monument. Then we found ourselves in the midst of heavy early-morning rush hour traffic. By then, the guys were so angry at me that I wasn’t allowed to drive again for quite a while. After another late-night gig, I stole the car keys and hid them. It took the band all night to find them, and we didn’t get back to the motel until almost sunrise, when we had to check out and leave again. I thought I was being funny, but nobody else did.
None of us was a novice in terms of touring, and we weren’t averse to bunking two to a room, except for Maurice, who would book himself into a suite or his own room. We were so young, traversing the country, ordering room service, and ODing on cheesesteaks in Philly and buffalo wings in Buffalo. Luckily, the station wagon era didn’t last for more than a year or so, just until we could afford to hire a roadie or two.
Maurice did not hang out with us after the shows but would take a car back to the hotel while the rest of us were out and about in search of parties. There were very few occasions when that he spent free time with us as a group. Apart from the age gap, Maurice had been a well-traveled musician with Ramsey Lewis, and was already road-tested and worldly while we were going through our early, partying phase. Unless we were in Manhattan hanging out with VIPs, Reese would make himself scarce while we were out chasing women, smoking herb, playing chess, or getting our hair braided.
Being on the East Coast was a different world for me. I had never been called a nigger in all my life until the time we got stuck in New Jersey on one of our station wagon tours. We had gotten seriously lost on the New Jersey Turnpike, and when we stopped at a filling station to get gas and directions, the people there would not sell us any fuel. I was so green that at first I thought they must not have heard my request.
“Excuse me, sir,” I said, but they just sat there, looking at me as if I were crazy. The attendant muttered under his breath as I walked away. But being from Denver, I didn’t know any different. I guess I should have sensed the weird vibes and left, but I went back to the door and repeated myself.
“Excuse me, sir?”
The guy snapped back at me, “I said, nigger, get outta here!”
Dawg! I only wanted to know how to get to New Brunswick, and there I was, a grown man, crushed. That hadn’t ever happened to me in Colorado or California! I’ll never forget how demoralized I felt. The man didn’t even know me. How hurtful. I got back in the car and told the guys what had just happened. We were silent all the way to the hotel. Sti
ll, it was a different dues-paying experience than that of our R&B chitlin’ circuit predecessors, who drove from coast to coast and throughout the Deep South, routinely putting up with the adverse racial climate across the country. At least we didn’t have to endure that.
Back off the road and between recording sessions we had the hottest of jam sessions, which kept us sharp. Larry and I—and now Andrew—practically lived on top of one another on Blackwelder Street. Ralph used to come over and hang out with us, and we would play our instruments all day whenever we didn’t have any gigs or recording planned. I found an old Wurlitzer piano, and somebody else gave me some vibes.
We drank carrot juice, and used aloe vera skin cream, a medicinal herbal remedy originating in North Africa. At one point the entire band tried becoming vegetarian. That didn’t last long. Verdine got into transcendental meditation (TM) through Bob Cavallo and his wife, who hooked him up with a retreat in Laurel Canyon.
We were becoming an insulated—and opinionated—bunch. To us, groups like Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes were drill-team doo-wop stuff, “shoo-shoo-pa-doop.” Being young and cocky, we soon got our clocks cleaned and learned a valuable lesson.
One night we opened for a band at the Armory in Washington, DC. We came out and did a flower-child set to polite applause and felt we had done all right that night—until Parliament Funkadelic came onstage and funked us right out of the building! We got our pants blown off! Funkadelic revved up a hellacious groove amid a thick cloud of smoke. The party got hot and heavy from the very first song. The whole venue was transfixed, with a packed house of nothing but black folks swaying from side to side. It was a different experience for me! It’s something we laugh about nowadays, but at the time, we weren’t used to getting knocked off the stage so severely. After the gig we sat around our motel rooms, moping and feeling hangdog. Then Maurice said, “We’ve got to go home and rehearse!” Thinking about it now, EWF didn’t have the chops to compete with a band like Parliament Funkadelic. Getting our asses handed to us was the best way for us to learn to toughen up our sound.
Shining Star: Braving the Elements of Earth, Wind & Fire Page 12
