While we were making progress live and in the studio, we hadn’t yet developed the sharp edge that EWF is now known for. Since getting blown out at the Armory, we still chuckle (and cringe) whenever someone has the audacity to call Earth, Wind & Fire a funk band. But it was the Armory show that helped us go home and face the fact that we needed to inject some elements of funk and swing into our sound. Once we returned to LA we practiced our butts off, recharged, and got it together. While being upstaged had been a tremendous shock to our systems, it didn’t happen again.
16
MIGHTY, MIGHTY CHARLES STEPNEY
With our lineup settled in and two Columbia albums under our belts, Maurice had met his early crossover goals. He had two strong attributes that made him a great bandleader. Number one, he was relentless and would not give up or throw in the towel when dealt a setback or disappointment. He could turn bad news to his advantage. Second, Reese knew how to bring in reinforcements when he felt it was time to raise the bar. In the winter of 1973, as we repaired to Caribou Ranch Studios in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains to record our third Columbia album, Open Our Eyes, he also wanted to add an extra dimension to our arrangements—and he knew just who to call. It was his hope that this new team member, an old friend and associate from his Chess Records days in Chicago, would vault us into rarefied gold- and platinum-record sales status and bring the material and our performances into a tighter focus.
Looking back, had Charles Stepney not been introduced into our ranks, there would have been no Earth Wind & Fire, or certainly not as we currently know it. This man made that much of a difference. As Maurice told me recently, “Charles was a very talented individual who made a great contribution to EWF, and through EWF, to humanity.”
Charles was a genius, a musician, songwriter, producer, engineer, and arranger all rolled into one. I know the term “genius” is overused, but not in this case. Charles was the creator behind the studio band Rotary Connection, an esoteric ensemble that mixed soul, pop, avant-garde, and psychedelia into a progressive sonic stew. In 1970 Stepney brought Rotary Connection vocalist Minnie Riperton into the studio to record an amazing solo debut called Come to My Garden, which harvested an R&B/Top 40 crossover hit of the same name. (Like EWF, Minnie landed a record contract with CBS. After a couple of big hit records, she died in 1979 after a fatal bout with breast cancer.)
Even before I joined EWF I had been a huge fan of Minnie’s, completely enamored of her incredible vocal range and her sweet harmonic styling. Perry Jones, Larry Dunn, and I loved listening to Come to My Garden. Now Charles Stepney, the man behind her music, was playing on our team. I regarded his joining the EWF team as an act of divine intervention. I was so caught up in Minnie’s magic that I felt blessed to be mentored by the same guy who had guided her star!
Physically, Stepney was an unassuming black man. He was a bit of a frumpy guy and reminded Larry and me of Yogi Bear. Charles looked more like a math teacher or a scientist than a record producer. He stood about five-seven and, the consummate studio rat, smoked like a chimney and drank lots of coffee, but wasn’t a drug user. He was a devoted family man and avid father, not a wild man by any stretch. Charles was a grounded individual—grounded like a rock—and very wise. He could say very little and still communicate quite a bit. His talents as a brass arranger and orchestrator were out of this world, and he banked major credibility with the studio musicians with whom he worked, including giants like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. In addition to his work with Rotary Connection, Charles produced a couple of “artists’ artist” albums by elite Chicago guitarist-folksinger Terry Callier and jazz/R&B session player Phil Upchurch. In 1968 Stepney also produced two albums by Ramsey Lewis for Cadet Records, which is probably where Maurice experienced the Stepney magic firsthand, watching how the man could write orchestrations seemingly right off the top of his head, including a trio recording entitled Maiden Voyage and a charming record Ramsey cut accompanied by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (with Moog synthesizer) called Mother Nature’s Son, featuring Ramsey’s interpretations of songs from The Beatles’ self-titled 1968 release universally called “The White Album.”
Stepney also produced another influential work on Cadet called Freedom Means by the Chicago R&B group The Dells. This very eclectic and unusual album features an angst-ridden, heartbreaking ballad called “The Love We Had (Stays on My Mind)” as well as some strangely middle-of-the-road, R&B-sounding covers, including Bread’s “Make It with You” (which we also covered), Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “One Less Bell to Answer,” and a medley combining Rod McKuen’s “If You Go Away” with the theme from Love Story. The Dells and their burly baritone lead singer, Marvin Junior, had a sound that influenced Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff to sign Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes to their Philadelphia International soul label. As you might recall, the Blue Notes featured a young lead singer named Teddy Pendergrass, a baby version of Marvin Junior!
With his no-sun studio tan, Stepney lived like a hermit and wasn’t exactly the picture of health. He worked in his four-track studio, tucked in the basement of his Chicago home—a nondescript single-family dwelling he shared with his wife and kids—composing and combing through technical manuals and constantly tinkering in his “writing room.” Whatever technology was new in the world of recorded music during the 1970s, Charles was up on it. If he couldn’t play a particular instrument, he would buy one, take it to his basement, and sit there until he mastered the darned thing. Charles was also a consummate songwriter, conductor, and musician who played vibes, keyboards, and piano. He could not only talk the talk but walk the walk, and showed us exactly what to do and how to do it.
If Maurice was the mastermind of EWF, Charles would become the gale force behind the creator. His contributions in the studio were incalculable. During the Open Our Eyes sessions, he taught me how to sing a song that I had cowritten with Maurice called “Devotion,” one of the early pieces that expressed the band’s spiritual side. The lyrics of “Devotion” were inspired by my going to catechism class when I was a boy attending Catholic school. (Catechism is like Sunday school for Catholics, except that you attend every day in the summer.)
Charles went over the entire structure of “Devotion” with all the musicians. The man had perfect pitch. He could break down and show Maurice and me the exact voicing we needed to further polish our seamless harmonic vocal arrangements. He would also strengthen and rewrite certain rhythms. Because jazz changes were important to everyone in the band except for Al McKay—who would comment on the “funny style chords” we were coming up with in our songs—instead of having Al play the whole chord and its extensions, like Larry did, Charles would tell Al to play part of the chord, but instructed him specifically as to which two notes to omit!
It was amazing to watch Charles work. I recall his coaching Andrew Woolfolk through a driving Coltranesque soprano saxophone solo on a short, free-jazz passage we called “Spasmodic Mood.” During those sessions Andrew was having problems navigating the song’s changes. Charles broke it down by suggesting that instead of tackling the complex solo as a whole, maybe Andrew should concentrate on one particular scale. Afterward, he worked through Andrew’s intricate bebop solo note by note until Andrew got it right. It was as if Charles had visualized the whole thing in his head beforehand.
Stepney was also our Minimoog specialist and technician. He was the one who did our synthesizer programming, which had to be tediously dissected note by note because, at that time, the keyboard wasn’t polyfunctional (or polyphonic), meaning that we couldn’t play multiple notes and chords on it the way we can today.
Charles was a visionary, a philosopher, a father figure to the band members, and a big brother to Maurice. Maurice respected him as he did no other human being, and Charles was one of the few men Reese would take advice, criticism, and direction from. Maurice respected Stepney because Stepney wasn’t intimidated by him. If Maurice wanted to do something in the
studio that sounded wrong, Charles would scold him, “Now, Rooney, we don’t do that.” Surprisingly, Reese was okay with that, though woe be to the band member who tried the same maneuver. Charles also encouraged us to write songs and put together music that incorporated more than just our individual parts. Our drummer, Ralph, would often sit with Charles at the piano, working on augmented chords and musical ideas.
Stepney became our George Martin and our Quincy Jones, making sense of what was floating around in our heads. One cold day Maurice and I visited him in Chicago as he toiled amid the cigarette butts and coffee cups in the basement of his house, tinkering with the postproduction tracks for Open Our Eyes. One song Charles played us on the four-track tape recorder he used to store musical ideas was a funky little number he called “Tee Nine Chee Bit.” After filling up all four tracks, Charles would bounce them around and remix them.
Together Maurice and Charles had fire and swagger; they were a dynamite team. It was plain to see that the new songs on Open Our Eyes that featured Stepney as engineer, arranger, and producer were getting tighter and tighter. Charles was leading us toward scoring that elusive hit record!
Which is what happened with “Mighty, Mighty,” a tune that Verdine and Maurice cooked up. Not only did the song unfold with a catchy hook in the chorus, but Charles overlaid my multitracked vocal parts in a way that would become a key ingredient of Earth Wind & Fire’s signature sound. Combining Al McKay’s thick funk chords and riffs with Andrew Woolfolk’s interwoven saxophone fills and countermelodies, “Mighty, Mighty” became a multifaceted, creative success. Hallelujah! Although the song peaked at number fifteen on the Billboard R&B singles charts, in my book the song qualified as our first bona fide hit! Open Our Eyes wound up staying on the Billboard album charts for thirty-seven weeks.
We followed up “Mighty, Mighty” with the soulfully introspective “Devotion,” which featured another layered vocal performance by yours truly. By now I was feeling extremely confident with my role in the band. When I first heard the finished version of “Devotion,” I was so impressed with the synths and chord changes that Stepney had added that I concluded that the song wouldn’t have been effective without them. Charles was hearing elements of sound in his head that nobody else had imagined. Two other tracks on Open Our Eyes, “Kalimba Story” and “Drum Song,” marked an important recording milestone for us: the debut of Maurice’s African thumb piano, which he first discovered during his stint with the Ramsey Lewis Trio. The kalimba would come to represent a significant and exotic recurring musical ingredient for EWF. (Kalimba would later also be the name of Maurice’s personal production company.)
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Recording Open Our Eyes in Nederland, Colorado, at the opulent Caribou Ranch was a Rocky Mountain homecoming. The studio was a converted barn getaway built by James William Guercio, the producer and manager of our labelmate Chicago. We were one of the first bands after Chicago to record there. Hundreds of famous albums have been cut there since, including Elton John’s Caribou, Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, and Rock of the Westies.
The funniest thing about Open Our Eyes is the cover photo. I’d rank it one of our worst. Maurice decided he wanted a group shot taken in the high altitude and thin air of the Rockies. There we were, early in the morning, standing in the mountains, frozen to the bone! Looking at the picture of us wearing our colorful costumes and robes, you have no idea how bitterly cold it was up there! If you could only see the snot running out of our noses as the photographer said, “One more time.” And if that wasn’t bad enough, something then went wrong with the camera’s original exposures, so we ended up having to go to the Rockies twice! If you look closely, you can see by the looks on our faces how pissed off and unhappy we were. When the photo rushes from the session were sent to us, we were in Germany on tour. The art department needed someone to sign off in a hurry, or we would miss our album release date. When Joe Ruffalo showed me the final cover photos, I was mortified. I looked as if I had just come from a mortuary. The label tried fixing it, but we only looked worse. Even with the airbrushing and touch-ups, I definitely looked as if I were ready for the casket. I cried the first I saw the original finished cover.
Cover art aside, the album, buoyed by our first hit, “Mighty, Mighty,” sold 500,000 copies. Open Our Eyes became our first gold record and our first hit album for Columbia! By then Earth, Wind & Fire had two Warner and three CBS releases, and it’s hard to imagine a major label today being that patient in waiting for an artist to succeed. One of the main reasons we had chosen to record for Columbia Records was that, back when Perry Jones was still struggling for recognition at Warner, Clive Davis had already built an impressive black music division within a major label structure. Consequently the success of black record executives came about in part as a result of Earth, Wind & Fire’s success and the crossover groundwork we helped lay during the early 1970s. The corporate atmosphere was a-changin’. African Americans were making inroads inside corporations like Xerox, IBM, and now CBS Records. That way once Clive’s promotion staff set out to acknowledge black radio stations, specifically black program directors and general managers, the African American promotion men found they could better relate to black disc jockeys and music directors. Powerful black programmers and music directors had certain domains: You needed Frankie Crocker on board at WBLS in New York, or Georgie Woods at WDAS in Philly, and Rodney Jones, who ran WVON in Chicago, on your side. These were the men who had to be on board, playing our records.
We knew our fan base had to start with black listeners in major R&B markets like Philadelphia; New York; Chicago; and Washington, DC, or risk fading away. Our strategy was to establish that firm R&B (or urban) base and then expand. Maurice had envisioned that, however, when he refused to sign with African American–based companies like Motown, Stax, or, for that matter, Chess.
Unfortunately, just as we gained a valuable, creative ally in the studio with Charles Stepney, we would lose our most important supporter on the record company front. Between the releases of Head to the Sky and Open Our Eyes, Columbia Records dismissed Clive Davis and escorted him out of the building in connection with an internal investigation concerning fraudulent invoices processed by someone within the company. Replacing Clive as label president would be the hard-nosed Walter Yetnikoff, who would send the label into a whole new, frenzied era while across town Clive would launch a competitive giant, Arista Records, the label that would be responsible for such pop successes as Whitney Houston and Barry Manilow. With Clive, the man who signed us, now gone, would we have the necessary corporate allies to become the crossover band of our dreams?
With the combined talents of Cavallo-Ruffalo, Columbia, a road crew headed by Leonard Smith, and producer and arranger Charles Stepney, we had built an organization that finally had gone gold. And while we maintained our strong roots in the R&B community, our music was becoming edgier and more socially aware. We felt the need to cross Maurice’s message of spirituality and positivism over to a deeper, wider, mainstream American audience. Right around the time of Open Our Eyes, we opened for Sly Stone at Madison Square Garden in New York. We killed him that night. By then he was done, though, and our time had come. I recall that during that gig, Verdine flew up into the air in a harness, and the audience went nuts.
To keep in touch with my roots during this heady period, I made a pilgrimage to Denver, drove my car up into the mountains, and reconnected for a few days, breathing in the clean mountain air. Being in Colorado again made me aware of the stark contrast between who I had been back in Denver and who I was now in Los Angeles. But as I continued to discover myself as an artist and performer, in the mountains I pondered many questions: Who am I? What’s my style? What is my fashion? What do I want to look like? What’s my swagger? One day it all came to me, basic and direct: If I concentrated on becoming the best I could be, no one could do it better than me. If I was secure enough in my abilities, I could become myself witho
ut reservation or fear of intimidation of being “found out” or exposed. It was up to me to discover and enhance the better parts of myself. I visualized myself as a shining star. This would be an image that I would ruminate on for quite a while, and a theme that would soon emerge as the central inspiration for one of my best songs.
17
SHINING STAR
Between 1971 and 1976 Earth, Wind & Fire would release seven major-label releases, which meant we were constantly caught up in the cycle of recording and writing songs. After Open Our Eyes struck gold, we returned to the Caribou Ranch with our team in late 1974 to make our crucial follow-up album. This time we arrived with a new band member, Maurice having decided we needed more edge on the drums. As Reese put in more and more time writing and producing, he found less time to devote to actually playing the drums himself. He soon hired a logical successor—his younger half-brother Freddie White.
Freddie made his bones as a professional drummer at age sixteen playing with the late, great singer-keyboardist Donny Hathaway. You can hear Freddie on Hathaway’s finest record, a 1972 Atlantic release simply titled Live. Live is a record respected and revered by Donny’s fans and fellow musicians alike. Hathaway had a sweet, soulful singing voice, and a rousing, rhythmic keyboard style in the spirit of Stevie Wonder and Brian McKnight. He was also a monster bandleader. Live is ridiculously funky and tasteful. It contains cooking versions of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy,” and his signature live and audience-driven magnum opus, “The Ghetto.” Side one was recorded live at the Troubadour in Hollywood, and side two was cut at the Bitter End in New York City. Maurice’s Chicago friend Phil Upchurch plays guitar in Hathaway’s band on side one, and Cornell Dupree plays on side two, while Freddie drums on both sides. In addition to playing with Hathaway, Freddie also drummed briefly for Lowell George and Little Feat when he moved out to California from Chicago. Freddie’s credentials were very impressive. He wasn’t merely gravy-training on his older brother’s name. Prior to his joining the group, whenever we’d visit Chicago, he was just Verdine’s little brother. I had never suspected that he was such a gifted musician.
Shining Star: Braving the Elements of Earth, Wind & Fire Page 13
