Traveling Soul

by Todd Mayfield

  As the year ended and my mother neared the end of her term, the Impressions put the finishing touches on their next album, Ridin’ High, and released an EP, Soulfully. Yet again, though the movement now battled racism in his own city, Dad made no public comment. He still cared about the movement, but he was not a political man. He didn’t write made-to-order messages to inspire people; it had to come from his soul. For whatever reason, he didn’t seem to feel that soulful inspiration while King stayed in Chicago.

  In fact, he seemed to be running low on inspiration in general. Soulfully featured the single “You’ve Been Cheatin’,” a song that borrowed its DNA from Motown and returned the Impressions to respectable chart positions. The next several singles bombed, and Ridin’ High didn’t fare much better than its predecessor. The album features several love letters to Motown, cribbing their insistent tambourine-backed beats and punchy horns.

  Dad never wanted his music to sound like anybody else’s. He rarely listened to the radio or played another group’s records. When he did, he approached it scientifically, seeking to understand his competition. He remained that way throughout his life—Tracy recalls getting a lecture in the early ’70s about the dangers of listening to the radio, which seems ironic given how big a role radio played in Dad’s childhood.

  Yet, despite his desire to forge a unique sound, Dad’s music became less and less original during this period. His most complete copy of Motown came with the single “Can’t Satisfy,” which borrowed heavily from the Isley Brothers’ “This Old Heart of Mine,” and led Motown to sue for publishing rights. They won. “[Curtis] just kind of lost his way there for a moment,” Fred said. “The ideas kind of dried up. It just went dead.”

  Ridin’ High didn’t revive anything. For the second straight time, the Impressions failed to hit the charts or fit the times. In 1966 drugs came to the fore of youth culture and the psychedelic revolution swept the nation. Pop music took incredible strides into the unknown with albums like the Beatles’ Revolver, Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. James Brown was busy inventing funk with the monumental success of the previous year’s “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” and “I Got You (I Feel Good).” Motown scored seemingly endless number-one hits, including genre-defining tunes like the Four Tops’ “Reach Out I’ll Be There” and the Supremes’ “You Can’t Hurry Love,” both of which rode the heels of the Temptations’ game-changing “My Girl.” For the time being, it seemed Curtis couldn’t compete.

  Perhaps the strains of his personal and professional obligations became too much. When I was born in February 1966, my father was on tour. He wouldn’t see me for more than a week after my birth. A woman named Annette kept my mother company during that time and helped navigate the stresses of a newborn baby. Annette had two children with Lenny, the bass player in the Impressions’ band, and for a while my mother felt close to her and confided in her. Then, she learned my father was sleeping with her.

  Two months later, Dad founded his own record label, Windy C, distributed by Cameo Parkway in Philadelphia. The label focused on a family band called the Five Stairsteps, who had won a talent contest at the Regal Theatre in Chicago. In the spring of ’66, the Five Stairsteps released “You Waited Too Long” on Windy C, which climbed to number sixteen R&B. In Chicago, even the B-side—a song of my father’s called “Don’t Waste Your Time”—became a hit. Perhaps the most important aspect of their success was the fact Curtis didn’t have to write hits for them. After the exhaustion of his days as a one-man hit factory at OKeh, it was a relief to have a group that could develop their own material.

  With Windy C up and running, he launched Mayfield Records. The label became a vehicle for the Fascinations, a girl group in the mode of the Ronettes. True to their name, they had a fascinating story. The Fascinations formed in 1960 with two young girls named Shirley Walker and Martha Reeves at the helm. After a disagreement, Reeves left and rejoined her old group, the Del-Phis. The Del-Phis signed to Motown, changed their name to Martha and the Vandellas, and became one of the biggest groups in the world.

  The rest of the Fascinations signed to ABC-Paramount in 1962, where they met Curtis. He produced their first single, “Mama Didn’t Lie,” the song he’d written for Jan Bradley that almost led him to a job with Chess Records. After failing to hit at ABC, the Fascinations kicked around until my father signed them to Mayfield.

  The Fascinations didn’t write their own material, so in August my father gave them “Say It Isn’t So,” a tune that, with Johnny’s arrangement, captured the sound of the day. It cracked the top fifty R&B. A few months later, he wrote “Girls Are Out to Get You,” which went to number thirteen R&B.

  The success of these songs helped position Dad as one of the premier writer/producer/executives in America. Unlike his previous work for other artists, the singles he cut on Mayfield Records left no doubt who deserved the credit. On “Girls Are Out to Get You,” for example, the name Mayfield was stamped on the 45’s label four times—“Mayfield” was written in big block letters across the bottom, “Curtis Mayfield” appeared in parentheses below the title as the writer, “Prod. By Curtis Mayfield” appeared in the production credit below the group’s name, and “Mayfield Records distributed by Calla Records Inc.” appeared on the label’s edge. The effect was overwhelming. No longer was it ABC, OKeh, or Vee-Jay. Now, it was Mayfield, Mayfield, Mayfield, Mayfield.

  He also signed another group to Mayfield featuring two young musicians who would have an impact on his career and life over the next few years—Donny Hathaway and Leroy Hutson. Perhaps to get in good with the boss, they renamed the band the Mayfield Singers. They didn’t need that extra touch; my father already respected their artistry. About Donny, he said, “This fella, you could just talk to him over the phone and play him a piece of music, and he could call out every chord and every movement and where the fifth was and the augmented and tell you what key it was in. He really baffled me. I always admired people that could do that because I never had that kind of learning.” Dad could already see how Donny would come in handy as a multifaceted weapon—producer, arranger, writer, performer. The same went for Leroy, who studied music in college.

  Along with his new labels, Curtis created two new publishing companies—Chi-Sound and Camad. So much for focusing on the Impressions. He couldn’t help trying to take on more than one man could handle. Perhaps it was the duality of his Gemini nature surfacing again. Never satisfied with being one thing, he wanted to be both an artist and a businessman. The struggle between business and creativity would continue to tear at him.

  As Mayfield and Windy C struggled to get off the ground, serious changes wracked the movement. While the Fascinations rode the charts, Carmichael finally took over SNCC. In early June, after a white racist shot James Meredith during Meredith’s March Against Fear from Tennessee to Mississippi, Carmichael joined King, Floyd McKissick, and others to complete the march. Cops arrested them en route. After their release, Carmichael gave a speech that set the terms and language for the new movement. Much like King did with his “I Have a Dream” speech, Carmichael took a feeling that had been in the air for a while and crystallized it. “This is the twenty-seventh time I have been arrested. I ain’t going to jail no more!” he bellowed. “The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin’ us is to take over. What we gonna start sayin’ now is Black Power!”

  The crowd took up the chant—Black Power! … two words … Black Power! … an old idea that finally found its time … Black Power! … and a new movement was born.

  As Black Power resonated across the country, Negroes went through a symbolic process of renaming. No more would they accept “Negro”—a word descendents of slave owners had forced upon them. It wasn’t Negro Power; it was Black Power. Black Power was angry and impatient. Black Power was fed up with festering in the ghetto. Black Power was a short-fused keg of dynamite, and white America held a burning match just above it.

  My father supported Black Power
in theory. He was all for black pride and empowerment, and he’d remain that way to his death, but he had a harder time backing the violent streak coursing through the new movement. Shortly after Carmichael’s speech, riots raged through Cleveland and Atlanta.

  Curtis wouldn’t comment on the violence and anger for a few years. He couldn’t help but notice it growing, though. As the riots died down, two young black men named Huey Newton and Bobby Seale formed the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. It would soon become one of the most militant groups in civil rights history.

  For many black people, militancy was the only answer. They had tried nonviolence, and it didn’t seem to work—not even for King. On August 5, King marched against segregated housing in Marquette Park on the city’s southwest side. As he marched, a jeering crowd of whites mounted a counterdemonstration. One man proudly hoisted a sign that read, “The only way to end niggers is exterminate.”

  When King passed the crowd, someone hurled a rock as big as a fist at his head. He fell to his knees, and as he tried to get up, the mob let loose with bottles, eggs, firecrackers, and more rocks. “I have seen many demonstrations in the South,” King said. “But I have never seen anything so hostile and so hateful as I’ve seen here today.”

  King saw the worst of the worst in the South. White southerners beat him and jailed him, firebombed his house, and threatened his family. The fact that Chicago’s situation seemed worse to him than those tragedies speaks volumes about racial tensions in my father’s hometown. It also helps explain why Dad felt so driven to write songs to inspire his people. He grew up in a place where black people suffered extreme hatred, violence, and degradation—perhaps worse than in Birmingham and Selma.

  Throughout this period, as King spent part of his weeks in Chicago and the rest crisscrossing the country, my father played out a similar script in reverse. He toured with the Impressions part of the week and returned home to work and spend time with Tracy, Mom, and me whenever possible. Traveling the country, he watched fury and despair replace peace and hope in the movement. In the studio, he didn’t know how to deal with it. Neither did King. “I don’t know what the answer to that is,” King said. “My role perhaps is to interpret to the white world. There must be somebody to communicate to two worlds.”

  My father had already shown he could communicate with both worlds, but it seemed as if he had stopped trying. Or, perhaps his focus was drawn elsewhere. He no longer faced many of the problems King fought in Chicago. He had enough money to buy a house wherever he wanted—although racism still barred him from some areas. He also had the Impressions and two independent labels to think about, as well as the demands of a family to worry about.

  As 1966 ended, Curtis took solace in work, returning to the studio to cut the next Impressions album, as well as new material for the Fascinations and the Stairsteps. Meanwhile, by the beginning of ’67, it was clear King’s Chicago gamble would not pay off. “We raised the hopes tremendously but … we were not able to really produce the dreams and the results inherent in that hope,” King said. “We as leaders lifted the hope. We had to do it. It was a fine thing to do. But we were unable to produce.”

  The greatest successes of the movement in Chicago belonged to Jesse Jackson and his Operation Breadbasket. As for King, the time in Chicago changed his mind—not about nonviolence, but about the true depth of racial problems in America. “For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of the society, a little change here, a little change there,” he said. “Now I feel quite differently. I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.”

  As he moved the SCLC toward the popular militarism of the Black Panthers and SNCC, King’s power over the movement reached its lowest point. One journalist pointedly predicted that King’s work in Chicago marked his final moments as the country’s preeminent civil rights figure. “Both his philosophy and his techniques of leadership were products of a different world,” the writer said, “of relationships which no longer obtain and expectations which are no longer valid.” King “had simply, and disastrously, arrived at the wrong conclusions about the world.”

  The past two years had seen the movement’s most dramatic showdown with entrenched racism in the North—a showdown King and his followers lost in Chicago—yet my father still did not feel inspired to comment on it. The next album, The Fabulous Impressions, did worse on the pop chart than any Impressions album before it and was their worst showing on the R&B chart in three years. It was, however, their strongest album since People Get Ready. The lead single, “You Always Hurt Me,” was my father’s most rhythmically insistent song yet, opening with an organ glissando and conga pattern—sounds he would use to great effect in later years. He also gave majestic guitar showcases on “Love’s A Comin’” and “I Can’t Stay Away from You.”

  But The Fabulous Impressions had clunkers like a cover of “100 Lbs. of Clay,” which showed how far the group had fallen from the mainstream. It also contained a virtual copy of “Gypsy Woman” called “Isle of Sirens,” which featured some of the Impressions’ most haunting harmonies but didn’t sound new or current.

  Curtis seemed stuck between eras while music in 1967 had another watershed year. The Beatles released their magnum opus, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as well as a trippy EP/film called Magical Mystery Tour, Aretha Franklin reached down and pulled up some gut-bucket soul with the stunning I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You, and James Brown added new levels to his funk with Cold Sweat. Then, there was a new cat on the scene named Jimi Hendrix—the same kid who had backed the Impressions a few years before, now reinvented as a flamboyant frontman. He threw down the axe, literally and figuratively, with Are You Experienced, forcing every other guitarist in the world to bow down in his wake.

  Hendrix’s appearance on the scene during the lull in the Impressions’ career is even more interesting because Curtis influenced his playing so much. Hendrix even played a Stratocaster like Curtis, which wasn’t typical for blues or rock music. As musician Bob Kulick recalled from his days of jamming at the Cafe Wha?, “I asked Hendrix who his biggest influence was, and he said Curtis Mayfield.” Hendrix’s drummer, Mitch Mitchell, remembered him the same way: “I really like Curtis Mayfield & The Impressions, and I was astounded that [Hendrix] knew that style really, really fluently.”

  The influence came out in bits and pieces on songs like “Remember” and “The Wind Cries Mary,” but when Hendrix released his follow-up later that year, Axis: Bold as Love, my father’s imprint was impossible to miss. Listen to “Wait Until Tomorrow,” “Little Wing,” “Castles Made of Sand,” “One Rainy Wish,” and “Bold as Love,” and you’ll hear Curtis interpreted through a haze of LSD and a lefty playing in standard tuning. That’s not to say Hendrix brought nothing new to his style—many consider him the greatest guitarist to bend a string—but my father’s playing was a strong influence. He translated it to the psychedelic age with fuzz and wah-wah pedals, phasers, flangers, and a whole host of other effects, taking it to a place Dad was not yet ready to go.

  Ironically, as mainstream radio programming left my father still struggling to connect with a pop audience—which meant a white audience—Hendrix struggled to reach a black audience because his music did not fit R&B radio programming.

  The summer of 1967 laid bare the chasm between white and black America. For white people, it was the Summer of Love—bellbottoms, acid rock, free love, and flower power. For blacks, it was a summer of agony. White people turned on, tuned in, and dropped out as the Beatles sang “All You Need Is Love” on the first live, international satellite broadcast in history. Black people had nowhere to turn, little to tune into, and nothing to drop out of; they’d never been included in the first place.

  White people protested the war in Vietnam. Black people fought wars in their own neighborhoods. Riots tore apart ghettos in Newark, Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Birmingham, New York City, Rochester, Atlanta, Boston,
Cincinnati, Buffalo, and Tampa. By the end of the summer, 159 riots had broken out all over America. The seeds for the summers of rioting had been planted decades before, back when Annie Bell first came to Chicago and Negroes were shunted into stifling ghettos.

  Making matters worse, the rate of black unemployment was twice that of whites. These problems went untouched by the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, or anything King had done in the South. Negroes in northern ghettos were like teakettles over a fire, and by 1967, nothing could stop them from boiling over.

  With each new riot, my father watched the hope he had tried to inspire with “Keep On Pushing” and “People Get Ready” crumble, burn, and shatter like so many ghetto tenements. Even King said, “There were dark days before, but this is the darkest.” Chicago militants tipped King off to further violence planned for Cleveland, Oakland, and Philadelphia. They also let him in on the plans for Chicago. “They don’t plan to just burn down the west side,” an FBI wiretap recorded King saying in a phone call. “They are planning to get the Loop in Chicago.”

  The Loop was, and still is, the heart of Chicago. Crippling it would have crippled the entire city—the political structure, the financial structure, the business structure, everything. The riot didn’t quite go off as planned, but for King, the rebuke was personal and total. He had spent two years living with blacks in Chicago fighting for the idea of peaceful protest, and in response those same blacks had planned the worst violence in a summer full of carnage. King was warned that Chicago would break him, and it did. His wife, Coretta, watched as he slipped into a deep depression. “I have found out that all that I have been doing in trying to correct this system in America has been in vain,” King said.

  At the same time, the military continued drafting hordes of young soldiers, including thousands of black men who were asked to die for a country that refused to protect them at home. The Vietnam War now concerned my dad, too. In early May, Uncle Kenny enlisted in the army, and when the fighting broke out in the concrete jungles of America, he was halfway around the world with fatigues, combat boots, and a gun, fighting in a real jungle. He was only seventeen.