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

by Bailey, Philip

At other times Stepney would nearly knock Larry off the keyboard bench, moving over to finish a part Larry was struggling with. Instead of exiting the studio, Larry would stand behind Stepney to watch and learn as Charles finished the track. Although Larry felt like a bumbling Barney Fife looking over Charles’s shoulder, he sucked it up and benefited from the rejection.

  “I’m gonna get it,” Larry would sigh. “I may not have the feel on this one, but I’ll have it the next time.”

  But Charles was feeling growing resentment over his credit as coproducer for the TTWOTW sessions and believed that our records should simply have been credited with “Produced by Maurice White and Charles Stepney.” In LA one day, he came to visit Larry in Culver City, to hang out. Larry used the visit as an opportunity to surprise Charles and give him his gold record for the album. When presented with the framed award, Charles appeared lukewarm about it. After Larry vibed him over his indifference, Charles perked up.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” he confided to Larry. “I’m appreciative of the accolades I get from you folks, but I’ve done a lot more and greater music than just Earth, Wind & Fire.” Charles then reminded Larry, “your credit is worth much more than the money that you make from it.

  “Let me ask you a question,” Charles continued. “If one cat is a producer, and the other cat is a producer, then what the fuck is a coproducer?”

  Especially with the success of TTWOTW, Charles Stepney had changed the game for us. He had given us polished hit songs, and though we were writing tunes on our own, he brought us enlightened arrangements. We became like his sons, and he was like our father. Whenever he spoke, we listened. When he said something didn’t work, we stopped playing it. We had that much respect and admiration for him.

  Soon I began asking myself, How long will he be with us? I felt torn between two camps: respect for Charles’s immense talents and contributions to our sound and loyalty to Maurice as our leader. I guess that’s the way of the world.

  19

  RIDICULOUSLY FINE

  With Open Our Eyes gaining gold-record status and That’s the Way of the World racking up triple-platinum sales, we knew the band was ready to crest. Prior to this breakthrough, we were featured as an opening act on quite a few concert tours, eclipsing and catching headliner bands off guard or sleeping. War, for instance, was never the same after they toured with us. We also opened up for Curtis Mayfield and a funk band from Brooklyn called Mandrill, which had difficulty following us. Our craziest cobilling was an eight-week tour with Uriah Heep, a Spinal Tap-type hard-rock band from London. Although we were not compatible with Uriah Heep’s brand of British “art” rock, the audience cheered loudly for us when we exited the stage—as loud as when the headliners hit it.

  As their opening act, we brought heat unto “the Heep.” Uriah Heep felt the love we were getting from their audiences. They opened their show with a long organ intro, and one night Larry learned the part note for note and played it to start off our set before we went on. The crowd cheered. Then we chanted, “The Heep can’t take it! The Heep can’t take it!” By the time the tour rolled into Oklahoma, their road manager informed us, “Look, you guys gotta go.”

  On April 6, 1974, we were booked as part of an eight-band show at the California Jam rock festival held at the Ontario Motor Speedway in Southern California. It took over an hour to get from our hotel in Anaheim to the stage at the speedway festival grounds, even though we took a helicopter to the gig. We went on second, right after Rare Earth, a Motown rock band known for their hits “Get Ready” and “I Just Want to Celebrate,” songs that I had sung during my Top 40 days back in Denver.

  The Eagles came on after us, followed by Seals & Crofts, Black Oak Arkansas, and Black Sabbath. At nightfall Cal Jam hosted its headliners, Deep Purple and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. (I have the framed poster of that memorable gig on my wall.) Unlike Woodstock, Cal Jam was very organized and featured multiple stages. The massive crowd—250,000 people had turned up—was orderly, and is technically one of the biggest audiences we’ve played for in the United States. Although I don’t think that performance changed the course of our careers, Cal Jam was definitely a great opportunity for us to gain extra exposure playing among the white rock and roll acts featured on the bill.

  I enjoyed the nonstop touring circuit. Being a young road warrior, I was more than happy to be constantly traveling. In 1975 Janet gave birth to our second child, a daughter we named Trinity. While I was working, Janet and the children happily settled down in a house in Los Angeles. EWF became my synergetic family. I spent more time with them than with my own brood.

  The thrill of touring was enough to keep our band members euphoric for quite some time. Whenever things got too serious, wherever we traveled, Larry Dunn would play the role of band jokester. He kept everyone in stitches with his wry comments and energy. Nobody tried to throw Larry into the pool—he had been lifting Hammond B-3’s since he was thirteen years old. Andrew Woolfolk was also a jolly prankster. He might fill your hotel room trash can with hot water and balance it atop your bedroom door, just waiting for you to return late at night. We had a lot of fun on the road, more fun than serious times, caught up in a whirlwind of fantasy.

  We lived modestly, doing what we loved for a decent salary, starting at about six hundred dollars a week with enough per diem cash and pocket money to get by. Nobody seemed strapped for funds or swimming in debt. Housing and apartments were affordable. Accountants and financial managers came into the picture. For instance, if one of us needed to lease a car, someone in the manager’s office would set it up. It may not have been a Mercedes—maybe a Volkswagen or an Audi—but we could sign the papers and get on with it.

  Larry Dunn became our de facto musical director at age twenty-one. Being a member of Earth, Wind & Fire became a structured job. In preparation for long tours, we would show up at our rehearsal studios in Los Angeles every day at 12:30 and work until 6:00 in the evening. For the first two or three weeks, we would split up and rehearse the basics with the rhythm section—Verdine, Freddie, and Ralph—along with Al, Johnny, Andrew, and Larry. Maurice and I would work out vocal arrangements in a separate room. Afterward we would all converge on the big stage for a few days of final run-throughs. We needed to be in good physical shape in order to perform the required stage moves and song segues. By opening night we were tight, or as Bugs Bunny used to sing: “We knew every part by heart.”

  As for costuming, we no longer had to create our onstage wardrobes. No more buying our clothes from Capezio’s and army-surplus and used-clothing stores. By this point Maurice had found and hired Martine Colette, a professional costume designer, to create our stage wear.

  Martine was a very eccentric lady. She lived by a dam where the 210 Freeway in Los Angeles ran into the San Fernando Valley. When Janet and I first went over to her house to pick up my costumes, she had a tiger living in the backyard! And poisonous snakes, too! I found out that Martine was an animal-rights activist, and when people brought exotic animals home from overseas and didn’t know how to properly take care of them, they would call her, and she would pick them up and care for them. When Sir and Trinity were little, we would visit Martine and her wonderful zoo animals, which she had in cages around her home. Martine would go on to found a wilderness preserve in Southern California, a 160-acre animal sanctuary called Wildlife Waystation. She is still its director today. Martine later adopted Michael Jackson’s chimp, Bubbles, but I first knew her as the original costume lady for EWF.

  One day while we were on the road, Maurice announced that we needed to add horns to our live show. Hooray! We were tired of Larry having to play the horn parts from our records on his keyboards, and Maurice wanted the pizzazz and the authentic “zaps and pows” of a real, live horn section. He hired a kicking group composed of his old Chess Studio buddies: saxophonist Don Myrick, Michael Harris on trumpet, and the inimitable Lou Satterfield on trombone. Maurice, Sat, and Don had a lon
g history together back in Chicago, and Lou had played bass on Fontella Bass’s “Rescue Me” alongside Maurice in the studio. Originally we wanted to call them the Earth, Wind & Fire Horns, but Maurice was advised against it, so they became The Phenix Horns. Although they were formed as a separate entity, they fit hand in glove with our sound. Myrick and Satterfield created the most awe-inspiring, complex horn charts in memory. Don and Sat also worked with Charles Stepney on our arrangements. Even today they’re nearly impossible to replicate onstage.

  The Phenix Horns were older, close to Maurice’s age. Don Myrick, the spokesman of the three, was beyond special as an instrumentalist, on a par with many of the great jazz saxophonists, like Wayne Shorter or Paul Desmond. He would teach me bebop songs line for line so I could scat to them. Satterfield was like a grandfather, very witty and funny, and in addition to being a fierce musician, he was very knowledgeable about Afrocentric culture. Michael Harris was younger than Don and Sat and had a playful, wild streak to him. Michael was a very gifted trumpet player but was later replaced by Rahmlee Michael Davis.

  Because the Phenix Horns were Maurice’s contemporaries, they, too, boasted more life experience than we younger members, and we looked to them for guidance. Sat had been Verdine’s bass teacher back when Verdine was a teenager. A Buddha of musical knowledge, Sat had a series of off-the-cuff one-liners that I still recall today, borderline malapropisms packed with wisdom. One of my favorite Sat sayings was: “Don’t let what you’re thinking mess up what’s really going on!”

  Sat also used to say, “Son, you’ve got to pay for your fun and folly,” meaning there are consequences for everything you do. Nothing is free, and one day there’s gonna come a bill. It was a prophetic warning, considering my conduct on the road concerning the ladies.

  —

  From the first day Janet and I were married, I had little intention of remaining faithful. As a child I didn’t witness much faithfulness in my parents’ generation. With Janet back in Los Angeles, I was free to play the field and hook up with the finest-looking women in every city and town. As our live concerts gained popularity with many adoring female fans, the temptation to stray from the path of marriage proved too much to resist. Soon I had a woman in every port. The glitz and glam of being an Earth, Wind & Fire member felt like a combination of Mardi Gras and a three-ring circus. As soon as EWF hit a city or town, I began my womanizing routine.

  On one tour in Germany, Don, the sax player, and guitarist Roland Bautista had an argument over one particular groupie and were going at it. When Maurice caught wind of the situation, he yelled out, “Hey! Hey! What’s going on?” Then he got real serious. “Look! Are we here for the music or the bitches?”

  Larry replied drily, “The bitches!”

  There was a pause, and then everybody, including Reese, just fell out with laughter. That incident became a running joke with the band before we would go out onstage.

  One day we landed in Philadelphia in our thirty-passenger charter jet. As we filed off the plane, I spied a gorgeous woman in the airport lounge who was . . . ridiculously fine! Supermodel tall and statuesque, she had a beautiful face and a lithe body to match. EWF band members were as alert as hound dogs when it came to sniffing out female talent, and once we got off that plane, everybody’s gaze veered directly to her. Typically, if I noticed a lady I particularly fancied, I would alert Leonard—our road manager, Bafa—and give him the signal.

  Well, the lady came up to my hotel room, and as we lay there afterward, she reached over and asked me, “Can I use your phone?” As she made her phone call, it was clear that she was speaking to her dude and telling him that she would be with him shortly. As she hung up the phone and got dressed, she remarked candidly, “You know, when I first saw you get off that plane, I said to myself, ‘Oooh, I just got to have him.’”

  Alas! The hunter became the hunted. Although I had been through this scene many times before, this particular time I felt . . . so cheap! The joke was on me! I felt so small, as if I were an inch tall.

  I told Maurice what had happened. We could talk about anything; inspirationally, he was my brother, father, and homey rolled into one. Writing songs like “Devotion” and “Shining Star” together, we shared a deep, single-minded belief in ourselves. That’s what made us such seamless writing partners.

  After my experience with the ridiculously fine girl in my room, we wrote the song “Reasons” together. Maurice and I penned what became a classic tune in response to the multitude of women on the road. Today, when people tell me how much they love “Reasons,” or when they admit that they got married to that song, I’m always surprised because it’s not a romantic song. It deals with the physical love and passion of a one-night stand, and the mind games and illusions that occur at the time.

  Didn’t anyone bother to listen to the lyrics?

  20

  JUPITER! JUPITER! WHAT IS THE ANSWER?

  By now we had become so famous that on tour we couldn’t enter the front doors of a hotel to check in but had to sneak around the back. Security would escort us from the plane to the hotel to the gig, back to the hotel, then back to the plane and then on to the next city. One day at a hotel in Atlanta, we arrived to find a horde of fans, mostly women, waiting for us. As I headed toward my room, a female fan ran up to me in a seeming panic.

  “Jupiter! Jupiter!” she pleaded, referring to a song we had begun performing in concert, “What is the answer?”

  I gazed at her with a genuine feeling of compassion. “You know, baby, it’s just a song.” Then security grabbed her and led her away, leaving me confounded. Jupiter? What was the answer?

  That song, which I had cowritten with Maurice, Verdine, and Larry, would later appear on the All ’N All album. As she was led away, I repeated to myself, It’s just a song! But to this woman it was much more, as if something we had composed held the key to the secrets of the universe. The incident gnawed at me, forcing me to realize that I hadn’t a clue about spiritual wisdom. In fact, I was about as dense, spiritually, as you could get. And to think that our most die-hard fans thought that we held the answers to the mysteries of life. That woman was actually searching for meaning in her own life, and she thought that I had it! That struck me and stopped me in my tracks. I hadn’t bargained for the responsibility of all this.

  At the time I was okay with Maurice’s brand of pluralistic universalism and harmony. Although Maurice had been raised by his grandmother in the Baptist Church, according to our music, all religions and philosophies held equal authority on the path toward salvation, and even the artwork on our albums conveyed that message. For example, the inside gatefold for All ’N All, created by Japanese sci-fi illustrator Shusei Nagaoka, depicted twelve golden iconic symbols resting on twelve pedestals with an open holy book in front of them. These symbols included a Star of David, a cross, a menorah, a Buddha, and the caduceus (the symbol of medicine: intertwining snakes on a staff surmounted by wings). There were also two Egyptian symbols—the Eye of Horus (signifying a unified cosmos) and the ankh (suggesting eternal life). This amalgamation of sacred iconography typified Maurice’s approach to universalism.

  At first I had been so swayed and influenced by his spiritual views that during one trip home to Denver, I had informed my mother, “You need to take that white Jesus off your wall. How do you know the Bible isn’t just the white man’s book created to keep black people down?” Yet at the same time, I was uncomfortable with that pre–New Age stuff. While Larry and I had been raised as Catholics, and we were afraid of the hocus-pocus astrological ideas, Reese and Verdine went to readers, psychics, and soothsayers. All of that was part of the LA landscape at the time. (Remember First Lady Nancy Reagan and her personal astrologer, Linda Goodman?) While the band did get into transcendental meditation, mysticism gave me the creeps. I didn’t want any soothsayer telling me what was going to happen to me. What if they told me that I was going to kick the bucket? Who
wants to hear that kind of premonition?

  The Jupiter incident in Atlanta might have shook me up as much as it did because it drew attention to how much mysticism actually surrounded me. Looking back, my telling my mother that Christianity was a way of keeping black people down only revealed that I was the one who was lost. I enjoyed the trappings of success, and although I was jetting around the globe in private planes and selling out big arenas, I was troubled. I didn’t really know anything about Catholicism except for the routines of going to confession and attending catechism as a child. Nothing had stuck, spiritually. I talked to Larry about it, and he agreed that all he had gotten from the Catholic Church “was sore knees because I didn’t understand Latin.” I had also attended the Baptist church with my mother, where I’d see people shouting and falling down and stuff when I sang in the choir.

  Los Angeles was like going to another land, another planet. It’s not a spiritual place, but a very hedonistic one, and I had become infatuated by what was going on around me. I was like a kid in a candy store, buying anything I wanted, eating as much as I wanted, anytime I wanted it, and in all the different flavors and colors. In LA everything was at our disposal, and with people living this seemingly decadent life, many of us thought it was going to last forever, and that there would be no consequences and no end to it. You got caught up in its illusion, a high that was very much a lie. But being in your twenties, you didn’t focus on it from that perspective; you simply got swept away by it.

  This wasn’t the first time that these issues had unsettled me, which leads me to the story of how I first got saved. I attended a church service in Chicago at the Life Center Church of God in Christ on Fifty-fifth Street and South Indiana Avenue. The Reverend T. L. Barrett was the resident pastor. Along with Larry Dunn and Andrew Woolfolk, I had decided to pay a visit to Barrett’s church because we had heard that the Life Center was a very popular place, and that its congregation drew lots of younger folks. Plus, there was a host of fine-looking ladies who attended the Life Center, and that was good enough for me, as I was always on the prowl.