Combining Ralph and Freddie on drums was a fantastic idea. I liked playing with two drummers, and they meshed well. I had wondered how Freddie’s joining EWF would impact Ralph’s role, but apparently Ralph had a thick enough skin about it so that once they got the ego stuff out of the way, it was back to the groove. Besides, Ralph was a survivor. When he was first hired, on occasion Ralph and Maurice clashed. But soon they realized that in terms of playing, each musician had his own approach. The same rule held for Ralph and Freddie.
Since Maurice recorded a lot of the drum parts himself in the studio, Ralph wasn’t as active in the studio sessions. Reese orchestrated the tracks and was often the creator of the music, so he knew exactly how he wanted things played. Bringing Freddie in stirred the pot a little. Maurice employed Freddie mainly because he needed a more sustained, steady, and consistent groove. While Maurice himself was jazzy and fiery and could groove, as could Ralph, Freddie’s beat was downright infectious. As a singer I loved how Freddie put it down in a whole new style. He was part of the new school of drummers of the day, with more of a solid beat. Maurice came from another era and could swing. Ralph, a West Coast groove player, had a smoother style of keeping the beat. Freddie relied less on fills and lived solidly “in the pocket.”
Adding my congas to the mix was a whole different thing. Congas don’t matter a lick until you have the groove already locked down. If the foundation and essential groove isn’t solid, the extra piece of percussion just adds noise. With the rhythms firmly in place, my percussion would be the icing on the cake. And that’s what made EWF “tick-tock.”
Adding Freddie and Al McKay and taking out some of the jazzier elements while injecting more R&B and edgy groove, our sound was taking on a different fire during rehearsals. We now had the perfect rhythmic blend for the new music we were about to record at Caribou Ranch. I could sense our next record was going to be a killer! This was to be the album that would become our breakthrough, That’s the Way of the World.
After enlisting Freddie White on drums, the second new weapon in our creative arsenal was the addition of a mixing and engineering studio ace named George Massenburg. As our sound became fatter and more complex with the addition of strings, brass, and orchestral arrangements, we needed more clarity, punch, and polish in the mix on our albums. That’s where Massenburg came in. It was Bob Cavallo who first suggested, on Lowell George’s recommendation, that we bring him to the Caribou Ranch. When Cavallo first contacted Massenburg, who came from Baltimore, he was living in France. It was difficult reaching him in Europe, as in those days you couldn’t just phone somebody in Paris. (It took six months for residents to obtain phone service!) So we sent George a letter asking him to work with us. George accepted and flew out to the States—to the Caribou Ranch and Los Angeles—just in time to record That’s the Way of the World.
Returning to Colorado energized me. Maurice and I became inseparable there, cowriting songs. We had some very special moments composing lyrics and discussing life together at Caribou. I had my two-year-old son, Sir James, with me, and Maurice and I would go out for walks in the countryside. Reese would open up and talk about his younger days growing up in Memphis, and we would compare childhood experiences. There were no distractions as the lyrics, philosophies, and music flowed out of us effortlessly.
We didn’t have any typical songwriting process but just grabbed pen and paper and went at it. We’d often switch roles as to who had the responsibility for the music and who wrote the lyrics. Composing can be a very cerebral and curious process. I have a theory about different plateaus of creativity. I believe lyrics and melody come from three levels: surfacing from a third power to the second power, and then upward to the first (and primary) power of our creative consciousness. When we composed songs, I’d hatch an idea buried in the third power of my mind—the intuitive level. As I began writing, I would woodshed the ideas back and forth to Maurice, bringing the song up to the second power—the development level. With the tweaks, rewrites, and changes we completed the process at the first power, the completed level. While I may have written most of a given song initially, without Maurice being the yin to my yang, I could never have brought it to full fruition by myself.
Though some may use a different terminology, I suspect that’s how most cowriters collaborate. The seed of an idea can begin in the lowest layer of the psyche. You can’t quite spell it or draw it out completely. Then, as someone else throws out ideas, the song begins to take shape as you start to isolate what in the material works. Finally, once the body of the song and the concept are fully intact, the process speeds up considerably, and soon you’re able to polish it off to its final first layer.
Ideas for a song come to me in waves: The first verse. The hook. Chorus and bridge. I might realize that the third verse is actually the most powerful part of the song, so it becomes the opening. Once the reassembled song unfolds, it’s almost done. When writing lyrics, I need a seed plot—the body of the song—clear, strong, and succinct enough to spark its energy.
Charles Stepney used to say that originality comes in three waves: imitation, assimilation, and creativity. How, as youngsters, do we learn to speak or walk? First we imitate the steps or sounds that we take from different sources. Then we assimilate them into our own bodies. From them we begin to create our “brand,” our walk, our own voice. That’s how we learn to do anything, for that matter. We walk our walk only after we have imitated who and what we see. In music, you can create something that’s different, but it’s ultimately a product of the twelve keys of the scale.
It sounds basic, but the creative process is much more interesting if you actually have something to say. A song is easier to write if you have an idea to convey. You can come up with great music and riffs all day long, but if you don’t have a message, how can they be the basis for a great song? The core strength of a song comes from the central theme of its lyrics. “Shining Star” is a good example. The theme of “Shining Star” is that we are all special in our own way. It became an important song to me because of the time I spent asking myself, What will it take to one day succeed?
The message? I can become that shining star, and that tune became our first Top 40 crossover hit. It was a hallelujah moment cowritten with Maurice and Larry that set me ablaze creatively. Typically, once we hit the studio with a song, we didn’t know what was going to happen to it or what Maurice might add to it. In the case of “Shining Star,” Maurice began his magic by bringing the band in and explaining everyone’s parts. When he played back the completed track for Bob Cavallo, Bob said, “You’ve got your first number one record.”
To Bob’s credit, he was astute about assessing a song’s hit potential. He would often take Verdine and me out for walks and talk to us. I don’t know what he would tell Maurice and the others, but he would urge us, “You guys gotta take it to the next step!”
Just before we sent the final master of “Shining Star” over to the record company, it underwent one more round of tweaks. Massenburg and Cavallo sneaked back into the studio in the middle of the night, bringing Freddie White in with them. On the drum track, they had Freddie hit the second and fourth beat of each measure, hard on the snare. Those touches made “Shining Star” much more pop-friendly, giving it a bit of a rock beat. The next day Bob called Maurice into the control room to play back what they’d concocted.
Maurice was pissed off at first, but after he listened to the track a few times, he told Bob he couldn’t hear a difference. But I knew. Maybe he didn’t want to let on, but Maurice could hear it. Once the song shot straight to the top of the charts, it was no longer an issue. We had our first across-the-board number one hit record on Top 40 and R&B—simultaneously! I didn’t mention anything to Maurice about the last-minute snare hits. I was pleased that my message of personal success hit the airwaves worldwide while Bob, George, and Freddie’s two- and four-beat punches brought that sucker home!
18
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nbsp; TTWOTW (THAT’S THE WAY OF THE WORLD)
Making That’s the Way of the World was the happiest time for Earth, Wind & Fire. We had the team solidly set up and we were exceeding our expectations. Everybody was in high spirits playing together in the studio. This was right before the floodgates burst and the pop craziness began; the band was in the honeymoon phase of its relationship. Everything was in place: We knew our roles, and we were ready for whatever was about to come our way. Or so we thought. Maurice was working on ideas for making the live stage productions more elaborate and theatrical. We had made enough noise both on the touring front and in the record stores that people knew we were for real.
Columbia was excited for us to deliver the new record and hired one of the hottest music photographers—a lensman named Norman Seeff—to take our pictures for the front cover. Each band member was photographed individually, with Seeff shooting each of us in midair while jumping up and down on a trampoline, so that as he snapped our photos, we were in various states of flight. Afterward he cut out each black-and-white character portrait and arranged them all across a clean white gatefold album cover. It’s interesting looking at that cover. Almost everyone is in motion—me, I’m doing the boogaloo. Maurice has both feet firmly on the ground with a satisfied grin on his face. Like the Zen master, he’s in control.
This was the first record on which I could stretch out and compose ballads. As a writer I was creatively on fire, having cowritten five of the eight songs. Al McKay’s scintillating opening chords and riff on “Shining Star” were phenomenal. Although “Shining Star” shot straight to number one on the charts, the love ballad I sang lead on and cowrote, “Reasons,” was soon to become one of our top signature standards. On “All About Love,” Maurice expounds his doctrine of positivism, preaching that we are as beautiful as our thoughts. Reese then mentions astrology, occult sciences, mysticism, and world religions—introducing EWF’s message of universalism—in order to promote understanding of the inner self. With swelling strings and brass from Charles Stepney’s deft charts, the song expands into a big production piece.
As happy as I was with the band, I was also becoming a perfectionist in the studio while cutting tracks with the other band members. I was death on the other guys if they made mistakes. I had no mercy—none at all. Finally Charles approached me one morning at breakfast in his fatherly way and spoke with me about my behavior.
“You know, Phil, it’s only music.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, perplexed. Music was the driving force in my life—and I knew how important it was to him. But Charles insisted.
“It’s only music, Philip. Music is not more important than relationships,” he said.
More wisdom from Charles: There’s a way to do things, but there’s also a way to bring out the best in people without tearing them down. People are more important than the task at hand. This would be a vital lesson I would take to heart at a later stage of my career.
As we toiled on our new record, Earth, Wind & Fire became involved with another movie project. Following the success of Sweet Sweetback, we hooked up with another filmmaker, a producer-director named Sig Shore. Shore had previously directed a few commercials and made some films about skiing but had achieved cinematic success as the producer of Superfly, the red-hot blaxploitation movie that sold more than thirty million dollars in tickets. Curtis Mayfield’s famous soundtrack spawned three crossover hits and sold more than a million copies. Shore had sold Maurice on the idea of working together on a film that would feature our music, with That’s the Way of the World as its official soundtrack album. In Shore’s film, also called That’s the Way of the World, the movie’s protagonist was a hot record producer named Coleman Buckmaster (played by Harvey Keitel) who, according to the story line, worked with our band on his label. We costarred by playing ourselves, known as “the Group.”
Of course, we had never acted in the movies before, and I think we did a fairly admirable job, considering we were all celluloid rookies. I recall filming some scenes in New York City. We performed “Happy Feeling” and actually cut the song in a roller rink during one of the takes. Although we recorded it again once we got back in the studio, we ended up using the original take because it felt so much better. In one scene of the film, Keitel’s character, Coleman, shows a piano player some notes in the studio. As the piano player plays the chords, we see that it’s Charles Stepney.
Making That’s the Way of the World (the record) was a spiritual experience for me and took all of us out of ourselves. It was as if God had been guiding us through the record. When Maurice played us the finished mix and sequence of the finished album, I thought we sounded like angels, and the strings sounded like heaven. I was profoundly moved.
It didn’t go as well on the movie front. Unbeknownst to me, our managers were very unhappy working with Sig Shore. Bob felt that Maurice and the band had held up our end of the deal, writing some great songs, but the movie was another story. It turned out that Shore had sold us a bill of goods about a lot of things. He promised he was going to hire a big director, but ended up directing the film himself. (Maybe that’s what he had had in mind all along.) He was convinced that he had created something extraordinary and special and that it was going to make his career as a major Hollywood director.
When we attended a screening of the film in Los Angeles, we were shattered. It was a lousy movie with a bad story line, to boot. The quality of the record stood so far above that of the movie, it was embarrassing. Verdine started to cry when the film ended. We were extremely concerned that Sig’s dog of a movie would damage our careers.
Then an angry Cavallo took us aside. “I know you guys are hurt, but I want you to know I’m going to fix this.”
The unfortunate part of our original arrangement was that we’d made a deal with Shore granting him a piece of our record, while we would own a piece of the action on his film! Just as Bob had liberated us from our Warner Brothers record contract, he now sprang into action with Shore. He arranged a meeting with Sig, who began by bragging about how great his new film would do, so Bob challenged his ego and Hollywood vanity.
“If you’re so confident,” Bob told Sig, “why don’t you take back our piece of the picture, and give us your piece of the publishing on the record?”
“Done,” Sig said.
Cavallo quickly had all the rights to our songs reverted back to us. Thank God. Bob was so relieved. Once the film was released, it played on only a handful of screens around the country, and died in just a few days. Even though it was distributed by United Artists, Keitel wouldn’t promote or talk about the film, and it soon vanished.
That’s the Way of the World (the album) became a milestone for us upon its release in March 1975. It went on to sell three million copies and won a Grammy for Best R&B Vocal Performance by a Group. The album, along with “Shining Star,” topped both the Billboard singles and album charts simultaneously and garnered two more mass-appeal EWF hits! Hidden in small type on the back cover of the album was the message that TTWOTW was the original soundtrack for the Sig Shore production. Nobody cared one way or the other about the film.
Meanwhile, back on the creative front, Charles Stepney was feeling dissatisfied with the production credit he had been receiving. Maurice did have an odd way of crediting producers on our records (“odd” being a generous description). While Charles had elevated our game on Open Our Eyes, it was Joe Wissert who had been credited as coproducer alongside Maurice. Although Stepney was named as “associate producer,” Charles was the man. As Reese and Charles took over the producing helm, the music got too deep for Joe, who became “executive producer.”
Charles had since graduated from “associate producer” to “coproducer.” He wasn’t the kind of person to be overly concerned about his credits and billing. One of the reasons he went along with them at first was because, to him, it was about the music. That would soon change. C
harles was given cowriter credits on some of the songs, and the arrangements and synthesizer parts that he contributed from his basement studio became very much a part of the overall Earth, Wind & Fire sound, inspiring Maurice and me to write great lyrics to accompany them. For instance, on “See the Light,” which I cowrote, Charles added a unique 7/8 time signature along with some stylish trills on the lush strings and orchestra. Charles’s presence was also strong at our sessions, during which he seriously challenged us younger musicians; nobody was immune when he screwed up. Once, although Ralph was laying down a fine, smooth drum track, Stepney stopped in the middle of the tune and mashed the intercom button.
“Rooney, you need to play on this one, man.”
Young Ralph slunk out of the room and headed back to the Rocky Mountain resident cabins.
Shining Star: Braving the Elements of Earth, Wind & Fire Page 14
