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

by Bailey, Philip

  While we were recording in Los Angeles, Charles suffered a heart attack, but kept right on working. He was taken to Central City Hospital in Chicago. Verdine had a buddy who was a doctor there, so we checked up on Charles regularly. I remember Verdine telling Maurice and me that he hoped Charles would get some much-needed rest.

  Then, on May 17, 1976, after cutting basic tracks at Hollywood Sound, we got the phone call: Charles was found dead in his home in Chicago by a family member. We were floored by the news. His death would affect us both personally and professionally, altering our course tremendously.

  Ordinarily, today when people suffer from heart disease, having a coronary artery bypass is a fairly standard procedure. Had Charles undergone such a routine operation, he would have been fine, but the procedure wasn’t nearly as common then as it is now. Back then, when someone like Charles suffered a heart attack, the odds were far greater that he would be stricken again. And that’s exactly what happened.

  We finished Spirit, which indeed has a heavy spiritual aura, after Charles’s passing. Charles had suspected he was in bad health—he was a diabetic and had a problem with high blood pressure—and had suggested that if anything were to happen to him, his friend Tom Tom Washington could step in as our arranger and orchestrator. Washington was a skilled producer, arranger, pianist, and drummer from Chicago. He masterfully arranged the title track in Stepney’s absence. While “Spirit” is very gospel-oriented, and is a glorious song honoring Charles, the tune I love the most is “Imagination,” which has a celestial, even angelic, sentiment that reminds me of Charles.

  The powerful bridge on “Imagination,” with its rich layers of vocals and orchestrations, makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. “Imagination” is also one of my finest vocal performances on record. Although it wasn’t a commercial hit record, it’s one of our very best songs, and sadly, it was the last song Charles arranged for us. Spirit was ultimately credited as “Produced by Maurice White and Charles Stepney.” Charles had finally posthumously attained the proper production credit on a full album that he so rightly deserved. Had he lived, he might have become a more prominent arranger and producer than Quincy Jones.

  The entire band flew to Chicago to attend Step’s funeral and to pay our respects to his widow, Ruby. We didn’t know how Maurice took Stepney’s death, as he didn’t cry or grieve in front of the band. My guess is that he internalized it. While I’m sure Charles’s death shocked him, he wasn’t the type to openly express his feelings. Instead he reacted through his actions, and from that moment on, our studio output would spiral to gigantic proportions.

  22

  GOT TO GET YOU INTO MY LIFE

  When we were booked to coheadline at a stadium in Kansas City with the Commodores in 1977, I decided, on a whim, to search for Eddie, my elusive father. It’s not that I was necessarily on a serious emotional quest to locate him; it’s just that I had heard he was living in Kansas City and I was in town. It was as good a time as any to reach out and contact him. In the phone book I found an Edward A. Bailey in the listings, so I phoned him cold. Bear in mind that I had had no contact with him since I was three years old.

  “Hi, this is Philip, your son,” I announced. “I play with a group, and we’re in your town.”

  Eddie hesitated, apparently speechless. How could he not have been blown away?

  “I can’t believe this,” he uttered in disbelief.

  So I invited Eddie Bailey—my dad!—to our stadium performance. Our show was to be held at a packed outdoor stadium in front of thirty-five thousand people, with both the Commodores and EWF at the top of their games. I think Eddie knew what Earth, Wind & Fire was, and I suspected he might even have heard about me through the press. He was sincerely taken aback when I told him what I was up to, brought him to the gig, and slapped a backstage pass on his shirt.

  From that experience we struck up a casual relationship. I had a day off the next day, so I made arrangements to visit him at his home. One of the first questions I had to ask was about that night in the blizzard with the crowbar, and how he had threatened to kill my mother. He confirmed the story my mother told me. He had gone back and forth, torn as to whether or not he was going to leave his first family for my mother, sister, and me. After the military stationed him to Idaho, here was his chance to make a move, and my mother rejected him. When I pressed him as to why I never became a part of his life afterward, he simply replied, “Philip, you don’t always do what’s right at the time, you do what is expedient.”

  The huge plus in my reaching out to my father was that I felt incredibly proud to be able to introduce him to Maurice and Verdine and say, “This is my dad.” I had known Maurice’s stepdad and Verdine’s dad, Dr. Verdine Adams Sr., the podiatrist, and in some ways, he became my stand-in father. He even used to work on my feet. But that day in Kansas City was a surreal moment. To have Maurice meet him, smile, and tell me, “Man, Philip, you look just like him,” was a special moment. Plus, Maurice was right—I did look more like Eddie than like my mother.

  We talked about what he had been up to. During his hitch in the service, Eddie had been a photographer and a clerical worker. He confessed a deep love for music and owned an extensive two-track tape library of jazz albums that he recorded from radio shows. With jazz being my first musical love as a kid, it was uncanny that, as we slid past the rough and uncomfortable part of meeting again and exchanging all that “where have you been all my life?” stuff, to have the same tastes in music felt right. Backstage after the show, Eddie grinned and told me, “Son, you’re a chip off the old block.”

  Eddie Bailey died a few years later, in the 1980s. I have no idea how I ended up with an Irish name like Bailey. One day I must trace my ancestry and find out.

  —

  All ’N All, Earth, Wind & Fire’s ninth album, was released in December 1977 and became the supreme party-down record for our fans. Maurice’s ongoing interest in many world religions and mythologies became the central themes for the album: holiness and mysticism, not politics.

  It was Al McKay who came up with the title. During the sessions, in the summer of 1977, he asked Maurice, “What are you going to call it?”

  Maurice hesitated. “Hmm . . . All . . . something.”

  “How about All in All?” Maurice looked over at Al, and his eyes widened. That look meant that you’d hit on a good idea.

  The bass-popping funk of “Serpentine Fire” was another smash hit. Flanked by the punchy Phoenix Horns and featuring Maurice’s feisty lead vocal mixed with my silky falsetto on the chorus hook, it earned us another R&B number one song as well as a Top 10 crossover hit on the pop side. The album’s second track, “Fantasy,” gave the album a solid one-two punch. “Fantasy” had an airborne feel to it. We became renowned for our soaring group vocal arrangements, and a song like “Fantasy” was a terrific vehicle for Maurice and me to multitrack our vocals throughout the verses. Laying them down in the studio was a painstaking process, but well worth it.

  Recording in Hollywood, we were sequestered for days. Janet would visit me in the itty-bitty studio we booked off of Cahuenga and Sunset boulevards, which Maurice would block out for entire days and nights to cut vocals. Recording proved to be too tedious for visiting spouses like Janet and Larry’s wife, Debbie, who would end up curled up and asleep on the couch in the control room. Once the instrumental tracks were nailed down, not many of the band members stuck around for our vocal overdubs. Even Verdine limited his visits, waiting until his brother finished his vocal parts before he stopped by. We seldom let any outsiders in because the process was so laborious that we couldn’t handle distractions. Maurice and I would go over and over and over the same vocal parts, angling for a very specific blend. If it wasn’t perfect, we would start all over again. This was no time to party or get stoned in the studio.

  Ironically, the tighter the studio sound got, the more isolated and separate we became
as a group. Rather than the band playing together live in the studio like we used to with Charles Stepney, we would often cut our parts separately. As a producer, Maurice was such a taskmaster that guys like Verdine didn’t want people watching in the event he made mistakes while laying down his bass parts. Arrangers like Tom Tom 84 and Jerry Peters now handled the string and horn parts, and engineer George Massenburg kept the mix and sound pristine. With Charles Stepney gone, Maurice doubled down on the production duties and enlisted Verdine and Larry as his production assistants. Maurice would credit himself as sole producer for the record.

  We were consistently selling out our shows as Maurice and Cavallo-Ruffalo kept up the grinding cycle of record and tour, record and tour, record and tour. When we sold out the fabulous Forum arena in Los Angeles, where the “Showtime” Lakers played roundball, our success wasn’t lost on the members who grew up in Southern California. Ralph Johnson had watched it being built in Inglewood where he played outdoors as a child. One of his proudest moments was taking his parents to see EWF at the Forum.

  All ’N All coincided with the massive popularity of Star Wars, which was released in 1977. When Maurice first saw the film, it rocked his world. He was just as hooked on the Star Wars mania as the kids lined up outside the movie theaters, watching the film for the fifth and sixth time.

  “We gotta do something like that,” he told the band, which is why we featured a pyramid spaceship onstage, combining it with a love of the metaphysics of Egyptology. Stylistically we mixed fusion, jazz/pop scat, and funky soul into our sound. When we were cutting All ’N All’s instrumental jam, a track called “Runnin’,” we were originally going to perform it with Freddie and Ralph on drums. Somehow, though, we couldn’t get the rhythm right, so Verdine, Larry, Maurice, and I worked on it, and we were cooking on that song! It sounded like something off a CTI record. Maurice was playing drums with his shirt off, and that’s the first time I noticed him showing strain. He was exhausted, digging from the bottom of the well, but we got it together after a few takes. “Be Ever Wonderful,” the album’s ballad finale, was one of those songs that Maurice wrote during a sound check. The band would try out new grooves before live gigs, as Larry Dunn remained the master at tinkering with unique chord progressions that separated us from more standard pop groups.

  All ’N All was the most difficult record we ever made. We didn’t have Step around, and we weren’t giddy kids anymore, either. Being in the studio with Step was like having your dad around. But with gold and platinum momentum behind us, we had to get this record right: The game was intensifying as the stakes were getting higher.

  In addition to the music, we were refining our dancing and working on even more ambitious visuals and special effects, and trying new costumes. The color combinations that Bill Whitten came up with for our wardrobes were ever more eyepopping. Move over, David Bowie and the Spiders from Mars! We were dressed in glitzy skintight outfits splashed in loud chartreuse, aquamarine and turquoise, blood red and cobalt blue, and glittering silver and gold fabrics with matching knee-high platform boots. One extraterrestrial-looking outfit I wore was doused in lime green with yellow and red trim, topped with bright purple boots.

  Every morning we would work out with choreographer George Faison, doing calisthenics and rehearsing our dance steps. We would take the afternoon off, then rehearse the music and the show later that night. Between the recording and the live rehearsals, nobody worked as hard as we did—not even the top rock and roll bands of the day, like Fleetwood Mac and Queen.

  —

  After All ’N All sold its first million copies, we were approached with another movie project, this time a feature highlighting the music of The Beatles. Because the Bee Gees and their manager, Robert Stigwood, were also to be involved, Bob Cavallo thought it was a great idea. Saturday Night Fever, which featured the Bee Gees’ music, was a blockbuster movie that fueled the disco era in America during that time. Stigwood and his producers told Maurice and Cavallo they wanted us to be in the new film and to help with the soundtrack. It would star Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees, with other top bands—Aerosmith, Alice Cooper, and EWF—performing covers of famous Beatles standards, and would be called Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

  While in New York, I saw an EWF “billboard” beaming across Times Square on the giant outdoor Trinitron. We were on our way to Sam Goody’s music store to pick up some sheet music for a Beatles song when Reese asked Verdine, the band’s resident Beatles fan, which one we should choose to cover. Verdine answered without hesitation, “Got to Get You into My Life.” We bought the sheet music, and later we met with George Martin, The Beatles’ famed producer. George told us we could arrange and perform the song any way we chose. Although I suspected George didn’t know much about our music, Maurice wanted to apply the indelible EWF stamp on whatever we turned in. “I want to do what we do,” Maurice told the band as we prepared to cut the tune.

  We were on a stopover on tour in Denver when we set up the session to cut “Got to Get You into My Life.” Reese called Larry from his hotel suite beforehand and told him, “Larry, we’re going to be in this movie with all Beatles tunes. I need to meet you downstairs in the convention ballroom.” The road crew had gotten us a piano and a turntable and speakers. We put on The Beatles 45 for a listen. Larry learned the chords in one sitting.

  “Now I need one of those crazy intros.”

  We cut the song—overdubs, horns, and all—in one day. Maurice and Larry worked out the frenzied but tight arrangement featuring Larry on electric piano with the Phenix Horns and Al McKay doing the crazy unison horn and guitar lines. Because Freddie had broken his ankle, Ralph played drums. Maurice laid down a swinging syncopated lead vocal. Next I cut some falsetto parts over the top. We mixed it the next day.

  Maurice couldn’t get over it. He had been getting a bit too carried away, going overboard on arrangements since Step died. When the song was completed, Maurice turned to Verdine: “Man, that’s got to be the biggest damn fluke—”

  “That’s no fluke, Reese,” Verdine insisted. “Don’t you get it? That’s a number one record! And this time you didn’t get a chance to overproduce it by adding eighteen other horns and thirty-six more string players.”

  Cavallo was so proud when he first heard it. We didn’t just cover a Beatles tune, we transformed it, the EWF way. The folks at Columbia Records went crazy, and so did Paul McCartney, who wrote the song. Everybody was pleased.

  We completed “Got to Get You into My Life” six months before the movie came out. At the time the Bee Gees were as hot as a firecracker, and the Sgt. Pepper’s film was supposed to be their next big thing. Michael Schultz, the film’s director, was an African American who had directed hit movies like Car Wash and Cooley High. (Today he’s a successful TV director.)

  After the studio showed us a rough cut of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, we realized—ouch!—what a lousy movie! We knew the film would be a loser from the get-go. Even the singing was out of synch! When the vocals came on, we squirmed nervously in our seats. At first we thought, It’s a rough cut and they’ll fix it in postproduction. But it was out of synch at the premiere! The other songs, by Aerosmith and Alice Cooper, sounded too similar to the original versions. This film had “flop” written all over it. It was destined to be yet another EWF bomb at the box office, the same scenario as That’s the Way of the World, except five years later! Bob, Verdine, and I sat in the screening room afterward, stunned and disappointed. This time nobody cried. We knew what to do in this situation.

  After the screening Cavallo-Ruffalo sprang into damage control mode. Columbia rush-released our single, and by the time the movie hit the screens, we were already number one straight across the board—pop, R&B, the whole enchilada. As the movie inevitably tanked—along with the other singles—soon after, the Robert Stigwood Organization’s RSO record label and movie empire went down with it.

  The Be
e Gees were pissed! They wouldn’t speak to us because they thought we stole their thunder. Although Barry Gibb is cool with us now, back then they gave us no love at the gala premiere. There was a red-carpet welcome for Robin, Maurice, and Barry Gibb, but by the time EWF got off the plane, they had already rolled up the red carpet! But we were the ones with the number one record.

  After “Got to Get You into My Life” hit in August 1978, we scored a quick follow-up with one of our best songs. We first released “September” as a single that November. It was written from a groove that Al McKay had worked up at a sound check one day and then made a demo track of in his eight-track home studio. After McKay played Maurice the demo—twice!—the first words out of Maurice’s mouth were “Do you remember?” Al saw that trademark smile on Reese’s face, and knew he had struck gold. Maurice later brought in a lyricist, Allee Willis, to help finish the words. “September” kicked in effortlessly across the radio airwaves.

  The Best of Earth, Wind & Fire, Vol. 1, featuring hits like “Got to Get You into My Life,” “September,” “Shining Star,” and “That’s the Way of the World,” was a hot Columbia holiday release that December and ultimately sold five million units. During that time Maurice had scored a bonanza deal that Cavallo-Ruffalo had negotiated for him. Starting with the release of The Best of Earth, Wind & Fire, Maurice formed ARC Records, a CBS-distributed label bankrolled with more than ten million dollars from the Columbia Records war chest. Technically ARC had previously existed as the American Record Company, a label entity from 1904 to 1908, in the infancy of the record player. The insignia of Maurice’s new ARC—the American Recording Company—would now appear above the familiar red Columbia Records logo on future EWF records.