On the Sunday that we attended the service, Barrett preached about the dangers of making decisions while reacting in the heat of anger and pain—a subject I could heavily relate to. During the sermon Barrett quoted a New Testament passage, Matthew 11:28: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Come learn from me. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
When I heard that verse, I cried uncontrollably, cried as never before in my life. I couldn’t stop weeping, and it didn’t matter that people were staring at me! I couldn’t hide my involuntary tears, and it was through that experience that I began to seek out an understanding of the Bible and my core Christian beliefs. That was the moment I gave my heart to Christ. Once I had that epiphany in Chicago, I prayed, God, I’m going to stop trying to determine what is true or not true. Instead I’m just going to ask you to answer these questions in my heart.
—
Not long after the Jupiter incident, I got on a plane back to Los Angeles and was seated next to a lady, a complete stranger. She turned to me and asked me a question out of the blue.
“Do you have a personal relationship with God?”
That marked the first time I had encountered witnessing of that kind.
“A personal relationship with God?”
I thought about that word, “relationship.” I had said my Hail Marys and had been confirmed in the Catholic Church. But a personal relationship with God? Not really.
“You mean, like, do I speak to God, and does he speak back?”
The woman nodded.
I didn’t have that kind of relationship with God.
When I got home I told Janet about the religious questions I’d been asking myself, and she revealed to me that, coincidentally, she had been out looking for a home church for us. We ultimately found one after much searching. I met Dr. Billy Ingram, one of the young associate pastors at a church near our home. (This was before Billy earned his doctorate degree.) Because he was my age, Ingram taught the youngadults’ ministry. We became fast friends, and when he left and founded the Maranatha Community Church on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Los Angeles, I became a charter member. Dr. Ingram was an author, educator, poet . . . and a percussionist, just like me. We had a lot in common, and we were very close friends for many years. (On March 8, 2011, Dr. Ingram died unexpectedly of a massive heart attack. To this day, I miss him.)
Back on the road and on another flight soon afterward, I discovered that there was one seat left open on the plane, right next to a priest. I used that opportunity to continue my spiritual search and asked the priest some pointed questions about adultery. He listened to my queries and then stopped me in the course of our conversation.
“You know, Philip, let me explain: It isn’t about not committing adultery any longer so that you won’t go to hell. Jesus already died for that. It’s about your not violating the relationship!”
Here was that poignant word again: “relationship.”
My seatmate on the previous flight had spoken about a personal relationship. Now this priest was talking about violating a relationship while explaining that God loves us. I began to savor the concept of having a relationship with God, which is what I had been searching for when I was first converted in Chicago with T. L. Barrett. It started to make sense.
In 1975 we went on tour in Europe with Santana to promote the release of That’s the Way of the World. We were the opening act and given only twenty minutes to do our thing, which felt strange considering how big we had become as a gold and platinum act in the United States. Santana’s crew had a large timer set on the side of the stage, strictly counting down our allotted time; when the clock flashed red, it was our signal to get off. Every night it was as though the clock got red faster, almost as soon as we started playing. At the time we had the number-one record straight across the board, and we were the opening act? I think it partly had to do with the inability of the music industry to equate a top-notch African American band like ours to conventional superstar rock acts like The Who or The Rolling Stones. Sometimes the racism was more overt. One critic from London even wrote something like, “I don’t like black bands, but you can’t say these guys aren’t good.”
Leon Patillo was a young vocalist with Santana who had a deep interest in the Bible. I didn’t know that Leon was a devout Christian when he approached me and introduced himself.
“What’s that under your arm?” I asked him, pointing to the book he was carrying.
“My Bible,” Leon replied.
“Know anything out of that book?” I asked him.
Leon did.
“Then why don’t you teach us?” I suggested.
During the rest of the tour, after each concert Leon regularly conducted Bible study with Larry, Andrew, and me. Larry had had his own spiritual awakening when, prior to the Santana European gigs, he enrolled in a transcendental meditation program. I approached him about it at the beginning of the tour. “Ooh, Larry,” I teased him, “you’ve got that same look in your eyes as Maurice and Verdine have!” While cruising through Europe on the tour bus, Larry began chanting his mantra until he heard a voice inside his head abruptly interrupt him.
Stop doing that!
According to Larry, he was told by the voice, Tomorrow you will be stopping at an army base in Germany. The next day our bus arrived, as predicted. Larry was then ordered by the voice to buy a Bible at the base bookstore. He dutifully bought a little white Bible, the same one he used to study with Leon, Andrew, and me.
We concentrated on the New Testament, and would meet in Leon’s room or in one of ours. I used an annotated Dake’s Bible, which T. L. Barrett had recommended I pick up. The four of us managed to work our way up through the book of John. (After recording three bestselling albums with Santana, Patillo would leave the band in 1978 amid his strong religious beliefs.)
At that time I was beginning to open up to new ideas. This being my first international tour, everything around me was brand-new. I inexplicably felt a heightened consciousness and awareness of experiencing God in a personal way. It was a memorable and pivotal experience, and the first time I had explored the Bible as the sole source of my truth.
Having strayed from EWF’s universalist tenets and more toward traditional Christian values, I began asking myself questions like, Is Jesus who he says he is? I’m open. Please reveal it to me. The idea that I needed a savior to atone for my sins—based on the premise that God gave us his son, Jesus, to save us and that we couldn’t save ourselves—was something I believed and embrace to this day.
So I prayed that God would make me known to his will, his way, and his truth for my life. Although I was saved in Chicago, I still needed to embark on a spiritual journey of discovery. Change would occur through a chain of events in which God revealed himself to me in a way that enabled me to wholly embrace Christianity and the Bible as the central truth and key to my salvation.
—
I had clearly reached a fundamental impasse with Earth, Wind & Fire. While our audiences viewed us as a spiritual force, I realized our perceived mysticism no longer held water. Once I was introduced to true spirituality, a line in the sand was drawn as to how Maurice and I related to each other.
On the way to Germany during the European tour with Santana, Maurice had noticed a few of his band members with open Bibles in the back of the tour bus, and confronted us.
“Whaty’all doin’?” he asked.
“Studying,” I said.
“Studying what?”
“The Word.”
“What word?”
“The Word of God,” I told him.
Maurice grimaced. “Hmm. That’s funny, because God never wrote no book. The white man wrote a book to keep black people in bondage.”
I could see Maurice was irritated as he walked back to the front of the bus.
Maurice and I
had come to a parting of the ways in our beliefs, but it’s not as if we had a huge falling-out over religion. Prior to my conversion, my gaze fell in the shadow of Maurice’s gaze. Now that I had seen the Christian light, my life changed, and the dynamic of the band also changed as other members embarked on a similar spiritual journey, though maybe not on the same scale as mine. I believe God speaks to you on the level that you’ve reached. He will find you wherever you are. He’ll find you on the big arena stage. He might find you on the showroom floor or in a corporate cubicle. He might find you while you’re incarcerated. There’s a lot of ways God reaches out to us, and that’s how he found me.
I guess if there was a copilot in EWF, it was me. My relationship with Maurice differed from everyone else’s, and I had always had strong praise for his ability to raise humanity’s perceptions through our music by elevating spiritual consciousness and awareness of the divine as a positive force. Maurice accomplished that on many levels, promoting self-improvement and self-esteem. Through his leadership we impacted many people’s lives by strengthening and encouraging them through our lyrics and songs. That’s not to be trivialized in any shape, form, or fashion.
However, conflicts over spiritualities did arise. While I was deep into my new awakening, we were recording a song called “Diana.” Maurice had written it as an homage to the Greek goddess of hunting, the moon, and childbirth. It had a lead vocal part that I had to lay down in the studio. I found I couldn’t sing a song to a pagan Greek goddess. It was something I felt uncomfortable doing, so I summoned the nerve to confront Maurice about it.
EWF managed to cut the song, though it ended up in the vault, and was released years later. At that time, Maurice recognized that my conversion was real, and he respected me for it. We now held different spiritual beliefs, though I still considered Maurice to be as sensitive and responsive to different points of view as he had always been. It was his choice to make “Open Our Eyes,” the title track on our third Columbia album. And we did write “Devotion” together, which was based on subject matter straight out of the Word.
Still, things had changed between us. Up until my conversion, Maurice had been my personal guru, but once I changed course, I saw the effect it had on our relationship. At the same time the dynamic within the band itself was starting to alter, and I could see its members beginning to grow apart. I sensed change on the horizon for EWF, and matters would indeed soon come to a head.
My faith would be tested greatly when my mother passed away on June 16, 1975. The previous summer I had had a premonition that I would have to prepare myself for her not being around much longer. Although she wasn’t ill at the time, I felt that I had to start dealing with the inevitability of my parent passing on. At the time my mother would speak about dying in melancholy tones. She had lived a laborious existence that would have put wear and tear on anyone. I think she had various illnesses and was not being properly diagnosed or cared for, primarily because she refused to go to the doctor for checkups or various ailments.
She was in her seventies when I lost her. One day she suffered from bad headaches and high blood pressure, then got very sick and started throwing up. She suffered a major stroke, and never regained consciousness. She slipped into a coma and was in the hospital for a week. Looking back, it was the best way to go, because had she recovered, she would have remained in an unconscious state.
I was in Los Angeles when I got the news of her stroke. I flew to Denver and spent the week in the hospital at her bedside. I was holding her hand and sang a song to her—“The Lord’s Prayer”—on the day she passed away. That day will be forever etched in my memory. I swear she opened her eyes at the end of the song, and then I saw what looked to be a mist pass through the corner of the room. Denver was very windy that day, and when I opened the window, I saw a rainbow stretched across the sky.
I stood next to her casket and sang at the funeral. I had asked T. L. Barrett to fly in from Chicago to deliver the eulogy. After the funeral I went back out on the road. During such intense grieving periods, I believe God puts you into a metaphysical capsule and protects you from the sad realities around you. I remember I didn’t cry before and after the time she died, but later, on the plane, I broke down and sobbed uncontrollably. I couldn’t stop the tears from flowing. It was one of those delayed reactions.
My mother had toiled all her life, and—like mother, like son—many of her skills rubbed off on me. She taught me how to iron my butt off. Today I can clean a house like nobody in this world. Even today when women try to iron my clothes, I look at the result and say, “Hmm. That’s okay, I’ll do it myself.” I was glad that my mother could see me succeed before she died, and while she was very proud of my accomplishments, I’m not sure she necessarily ever came to understand the music business. If I had told her I wanted to move back to Colorado and get a job in the civil service, her response would have been, “Baby, I think that’s good,” and not, “What the hell are you talking about?” Her generation believed in working hard and following the rules, and if you had an honest job and kept at it until your retirement, then you did well.
21
SING A SONG OF SPIRIT AND IMAGINATION
The bigger EWF got, the more I reflected seriously on my family background and the effect it had had on my ability to forge relationships with my wife, Janet; my mentor, Maurice; and women in general. As a child, I developed an innate coping mechanism to make up for my mom and dad’s split and especially for my father’s neglect. I found that the damage and emptiness I felt often played itself out in my inability to trust others and open myself up to important intimate relationships. I remain in a constant state of healing and learning because of that brokenness. Much later I wrote about it in a song called “Lonely Broken Hearted People,” which described the passing on of those coping skills to the next generation.
Can we help a lonely broken hearted person?
See their tears become their laughter,
Paint the canvas of their hearts
With the colors of the rainbow.
Change their frown into a smile.
With the band out on the road, though, I continued my devilish diva ways. Just as in my days with Friends & Love, I expected no less than perfection from myself and total dedication from everybody else. One day we played an amazing gig with Stevie Wonder and Patti LaBelle at the Pine Knob Music Festival in Michigan. It was hot and crazy enough being on the bill with two of my idols. We’d gotten a great reception, which was amazing. LaBelle brought it on, followed by Stevie Wonder. I recall sitting on the stage about thirty feet away from Stevie. He sounded absolutely remarkable to me. His singing and background vocalists were letter perfect. I went back to the hotel after the show, where all the guys were elated. Yet there I was, walking around, pissing on everybody’s parade, pouting, moaning, and spouting crap like, “We sounded like shit. Our vocals were out of tune and we played too loud and too fast!”
Maurice called me over and pulled me aside.
“You acting like a bitch.”
“What?”
“You actin’ like a bitch! I understand you want things to be perfect, but you gotta give it time! Stevie has been doing this a lot longer than we have. And we will get there. Meanwhile, you can’t be pouring water on everybody’s fire! Those guys did a fantastic job, and we got a great reception. Let them celebrate!”
I stood embarrassed and humbled. “I’m sorry.”
The time came for the daunting task of following up That’s the Way of the World, and Columbia Records wanted a record . . . and quick! Since we were living out on the road, we decided to record the band live, to try to capture the magic we were feeling on the stage. We hired a remote-recording crew to follow us around the United States. Maurice also had five polished studio tracks he wanted to include, and the result was the Christmas 1975 holiday release of Gratitude. The record featured live songs from performances in Chicago, Los Angeles, S
t. Louis, Atlanta, Boston, and New York City, as well as the first cities that had embraced us, namely, Philadelphia and Washington, DC.
Gratitude marked the recording debut of the Phenix Horns, who excelled on the studio tracks as well as on the concert material. The Horns would soon become the strongest part of our signature sound. Production credits were split. The live tracks on Gratitude were produced by Maurice and Joe Wissert, while the studio pieces were produced (not “coproduced”) by Reese and Charles Stepney. The arrangements were credited to both Earth, Wind & Fire and Charles Stepney. George Massenburg’s squeaky-clean mixes and engineering remained on board as well.
One of my favorite tracks on the record is a studio song I cowrote called “Sunshine,” in which I incorporated the recurring image of a shining star in the lyrics. Also featured was the chart-topping pop and R&B hit “Sing a Song.” Like “Shining Star,” it featured sparkling rhythm guitar work by Al McKay. The group vocals I coarranged were pretty slick, too. Maurice’s seductive lead vocal on the ballad “Can’t Hide Love” gave us another hit single that March.
I was thrilled when Columbia scheduled a special midnight release of Gratitude in December 1975, which took place at Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. A long line of eager fans stood waiting to purchase the first pressings of the record. Like That’s the Way of the World, Gratitude would quickly be certified triple platinum by the RIAA, debuting on the album charts at number one. The album topped the Billboard album charts for three weeks and was number one on their R&B album chart for six weeks! We had reached a pinnacle of crossover success.
In the early years of EWF our primary audience was African American. But after two triple-platinum records and three R&B/Top 40 double-format hits (“Shining Star,” “That’s the Way of the World,” and “Sing a Song”), we began to notice our core audience shifting dramatically. We were drawing a lot more white fans because of the realities of disposable income. Whites, who could more easily afford the tickets, tended to order their seats in advance; traditionally black audiences were more likely to “walk up.” Looking out from behind the microphone, I also saw a lot more Latinos and mixed couples. It was gratifying to see Maurice’s Concept growing demographically.
Shining Star: Braving the Elements of Earth, Wind & Fire Page 16
