Still, he wanted no part of a movie that glorified these things. Instead of backing down, he doubled down. He crafted his songs into character studies, each one becoming its own movie in miniature. In a way, he became the film’s conscience. “I did the music and lyrics to be a commentary, as though someone was speaking as the movie was going,” he said. “It was important for me to counter the visuals—to go in and explain it in a way that the kids would not read it as an infomercial for drugs.”
With the message in place, he needed the music to match, so he returned to the man who had done more for his music than anyone—Johnny Pate. Johnny still lived in New York, working as an A&R man, producer, and arranger for MGM Records. He got a call, and the soft, high voice on the other end said, “I can’t do it without you.” Johnny dropped his work and flew to Chicago.
As usual, Curtis brought in cassettes with snippets of guitar licks and vocal ideas. For the first time though, when Johnny heard the songs, he felt little inspiration to write arrangements. “Most of [the songs had] very few chord changes, very few melodic lines,” he said. “‘Pusherman,’ ‘Superfly,’ ‘Freddie’s Dead,’ if you listen to these closely enough, Curtis was almost rapping through these things.” Johnny did get excited about “Eddie You Should Know Better”—“You’ve got chord structure, you’ve got beautiful chord changes, plus a great melody,” he said—but for the rest of the material, scoring two-chord songs didn’t leave a lot of room for a jazz cat with a full orchestra at his fingertips.
That simplification—the emphasis on rhythmic rather than chordal movement—had already pushed my father’s music into new realms. It did the same for Johnny’s arrangements. Despite the difficulties, or perhaps because of them, Johnny created unforgettable backdrops to the songs, jaw-dropping in brilliance and complexity. Harps, oboes, strings, horns, bells, and flutes do as much to paint a picture as the lyrics themselves.
The arrangements helped create an intricate tapestry of sound unlike anything Dad and Johnny had yet made together. Part of that intricacy came from the method of recording. “We had the chance to cut with a live orchestra,” Craig says. “The advantage of it is, if you have full orchestra, when you place your licks, you don’t have to worry about your licks bumping. You can hear everything that’s going to go down.”
Another part was how close my father, Craig, Henry, and Lucky had become from touring together. “As a guitar player, I wanted to make sure I had my stuff right,” Craig says.
I played on every song. Curtis would drop out sometimes and just sing. He knew I could do that. I was the only guitar player on ‘Freddie’s Dead.’ Curtis was in the control booth and Phil Upchurch couldn’t be there, so I was the only one out there. So, I knew exactly where to put all the nuances, the little licks. The way we worked was that Curtis would play something and he relied on me and Lucky and Master Henry to put our parts onto his thing. He might have an idea, but in the end we was like a team, man. You don’t even have to say nothin’. We just do it. I already knew what he was getting ready to do, and I can counter with something else.
Engineer Roger Anfinsen recalled working in a crammed studio with as many as forty musicians on some songs. Dad and the band were crowded in by harps, horns, strings, flutes, and other players, and background singers had to sing from the control booth. “This was the only time I worked in this fashion with Curtis,” Anfinsen said. “It seemed about capturing a certain electricity, a live energy.” They cut the songs in a mere three days, after which my father perfected his vocals. Then, everyone stepped back to admire the finished product.
The first seconds of “Little Child Runnin’ Wild” grab the listener by the throat. Master Henry’s percussive force mixes with undulating organ chords and the anguished wails of Craig’s guitar, creating an eerie tension. Five quick raps on the snare drum break the tension, and the song kicks in.
The groove rides on a surreptitious riff, full of upbeats and hits on the third and fourth count of the second measure. It makes the standard 4/4 time signature feel off-kilter, enhancing the sense of anxiety. Lucky’s bass propels the song—a role he filled for most of the album—while against a backdrop of morose horns and pizzicato strings, my father lays down some of his heaviest lyrics:
Little child runnin’ wild, watch awhile, you see he never smiles
Broken home, father gone, mama tired, so he’s all alone
Kinda sad, kinda mad, ghetto child, thinking he’s been had
In the back of his mind he’s sayin’, “I didn’t have to be here,
You didn’t have to love for me, while I was just a nothing child
Why couldn’t they just let me be?”
Never did his voice betray such sadness, such depth, such nuance of emotion.
Next comes the up-tempo magic of “Pusherman.” The song is flashy, funky, streetwise. Upon impact, it hooks the listener with the sweet science of a pusher on the corner, spitting game. Master Henry’s percussion dances around Lucky’s dazzling bass line, while in a vocal style becoming familiar to him, my father almost raps the lyrics:
I’m your mama, I’m your daddy,
I’m that nigga in the alley,
I’m your doctor when in need,
Want some coke? Have some weed.
You know me, I’m your friend,
Your main boy, thick and thin,
I’m your pusherman.
He’d taken the rhythm of the street hustler and put it to music. As he explained, “It’s the way a hustler really would come in with a superfly motive, superfly ego, and telling what his thing is really supposed to be … I think this one gets down.”
The message shifts back to a minor key on “Freddie’s Dead,” where Curtis deals with the character that spoke to him most. His phrasing is again proto-rap as he lets loose a flurry of words, “Let the man rap a plan, said he’d send him home / But his hope was a rope, and he should have known.” He deals with life in the space age, placing it in brutal contrast with the realities of ghetto life: “We’re all built up with progress / But sometimes I must confess / We can deal with rockets and dreams / But reality, what does it mean?” Once again, Lucky’s unforgettable bass riff drives the song.
“Give Me Your Love”—written for the bathtub love scene—sees my father taking his music down sensual alleys again, this time exceeding the raw sexuality of “Get Down.” It begins with one of those signature Curtis Mayfield guitar licks, all gorgeous hammer-ons and pull-offs, which Johnny smartly echoes on strings and harp. The song left room for Johnny to slip in a few accents, as well. “I was able to put a few other jazz licks in there that I couldn’t always do with Curtis,” he said. “But, there were holes enough in there for me to use them. I could use some percussive brass licks. I was able to do this on a few other cuts on Super Fly. Whenever I found a hole where I could shine, where I didn’t cover up anything Curtis was doing, I took advantage of that as an arranger.”
Johnny’s favorite song, “Eddie You Should Know Better,” clocks in at two minutes and twenty-one seconds—far shorter than the average for my father’s post-Impressions work—but in that short span, he tells a vividly detailed story about Priest’s right-hand man, one of the movie’s most morally ambiguous characters.
The album ends with the title track, “Superfly”—a perfect character study of Priest and an encapsulation of the entire movie into three-and-a-half minutes. As far as infectious songs go, it is perhaps my father’s best. Johnny’s horns are somewhere between big-band swing and James Brown funk, the drums pound with the insistence of a hustler trying to score, the bass rumbles like a superfly hog, and the percussion adds a Latin flare with guiro and congas. When Curtis coos the chorus, the word “Superfly” rolls off his tongue, his inflection somewhere between delighted surprise and supreme cool.
Perhaps counterintuitively, writing to a script and telling other characters’ stories allowed Dad to craft his most autobiographical lyrics ever. He wasn’t just writing about Priest and Freddie; he w
asn’t just writing about junkies and pushers; he was writing about himself and his childhood. He was writing about the things he’d seen growing up in the White Eagle, the things he’d experienced living in one of the most segregated cities in the North and traveling through the South during the darkest hours of Jim Crow. His autobiography shines through in lines like “Hard to understand / What a hell of a man / This cat of the slum had a mind / Wasn’t dumb,” and “His mind was his own / But the man lived alone,” and “Can’t be like the rest / Is the most he’ll confess.”
He also recognized his adult life in the film rushes. In one scene, a street gang approaches Priest and tries to extort money in exchange for protection. My father had just lived through that exact trouble. One day, he walked into Curtom and found the Blackstone Rangers, one of Chicago’s most notorious gangs, lurking in his office. They demanded money. Just like when the promoter in Atlantic City waved a gun in his face, my father remained cool. He had steel of his own in his desk drawer—a silver revolver with a white handle. He often kept it close in case a situation got out of hand. At home, he tucked it under his mattress or stashed it in the drawer next to his bed. Sometimes he’d even bring it on family outings for safety. One day, he showed it to me—“You see that?” he said. “Don’t touch it.”
Still, he wanted no part of the Blackstone Rangers. He cut a deal. “I’m not giving you any money,” I recall him saying, “but I’ll play a concert in Chicago and you can take the money and help the neighborhood.” They never bothered him again.
That didn’t mean he was safe, though. A black man making the money he made remained a conspicuous target, especially in a city with such strong Mafia ties. After fending off the Blackstone Rangers, Dad found himself in the shady clutches of Queen Booking again—the same company he bought into with Jerry a decade before and ultimately left because of the way the Mob took advantage of black artists. Now, Queen offered him a deal he couldn’t refuse—a six-month contract to book a tour of white-college dates. The deal was short-lived, though, since Queen never followed through. Dad soon switched to William Morris, one of the biggest bookers around, and they scheduled more than eighty white-college shows. He hadn’t given up on getting over to white crowds in America the way he did in Europe.
Though he navigated that treacherous world of gangsters and mobsters without losing control of himself or his money, he couldn’t always navigate personal relationships with such finesse. While preparing Super Fly for release, Dad and Johnny got into an argument over the album’s two instrumental tracks, causing an irreparable rift in their relationship.
The first of those tracks, “Junkie Chase,” is a classic piece of blaxploitation music—all orchestral hits, rumbling bass, and wah-wah guitar. The second, “Think,” features a guitar part that would surely have made Hendrix take notice. Both songs owe quite a bit to their orchestral arrangements, and Johnny wanted cowriting credit on them. My father refused to give it to him. Curtis the friend might have appreciated Johnny’s contributions; Curtis the businessman didn’t share credit—not with Carl Davis, not with Fred and Sam, and not with Johnny. When the final product hit stores, the album sleeve read, “Successfully arranged and orchestrated from the original dictations of Curtis Mayfield by Johnny Pate.”
Johnny refused to back down. “I orchestrated and arranged the score to Super Fly, but Curtis Mayfield got all the credit,” he told a reporter a month after the album’s release. “Everybody is ego tripping and taking credit for things they didn’t do.” By December, Dad filed a lawsuit in New York’s US District Court to declare himself the sole author and publisher of “Junkie Chase” and “Think.” He also went after one million dollars’ worth of damages for alleged defamation of character. His lawyer, Lew Harris, told Jet magazine, “We aren’t denying that Johnny Pate performed a very useful service in the arranging of the songs, but he was an author for hire; he was paid for his service.” In the same article, Johnny said, “I am entitled to half of the composing rights for those two tunes, because I wrote the melodic line for both.”
In Craig’s eyes, Johnny had a point. “Curtis couldn’t write music down,” he says. “So, he wasn’t going to orally translate those harmonies or those hits. You can listen to it and tell this is some big-band arranger putting this down. So, really, after all the things those two had done like brothers in the past, it shouldn’t have been a problem. That was just a poor way of doing something, as far as I’m concerned.”
That was how my father had always done business, though, and that was how he’d keep doing it. Even near the end of his life, in an interview for the album’s twenty-fifth anniversary, he framed the debate on his terms. “Most arrangers that I have used in the past will come in with their own contributions, but I was always careful to make changes and be assured that the music was still mine and there was no conflict in the music that was arranged against the basic rhythm pattern in the song itself,” he said. “There’s a Curtis Mayfield song that really has no singing or lyrics, which is called ‘Think’ from the Super Fly album that I especially appreciate when I listen to it. My art and my creativities were totally something that was of my own heart and mind. I could never let anybody dictate to me what I should write and how I would write it.” Sharing writing credit would have meant sharing revenues, and Curtis had toiled his whole career to avoid that. As a result, he and Johnny would never work together again.
After Johnny left, Dad suffered another major split when Eddie sold his share of Curtom. Eddie had wanted out since Marv began angling for control in the late ’60s. Now, the label Eddie worked so hard to help start was out of his hands for good. The record stickers still read Curtom, but for all intents and purposes, it had become CurtMarv. Marv lived on the North Side, and he’d already convinced my father to move the Curtom offices to a building at 5915 N. Lincoln Avenue—a more convenient location for him. Eddie planned to stay on the South Side. Thus, the split took on physical and emotional dimensions.
Eddie remembers those times with customary grace and good nature, saying, “I knew Curtis needed to stand on his own. I had to stand on my own too … You have to roll your sleeves up and say, ‘Hey, Eddie Thomas, let’s get busy. Let’s start doing things.’ That’s what I did. I said, let me get busy and do my thing. I can do something. I’m not just relying upon anybody else’s talent. We all got something to offer. You don’t hold grudges.”
The split took a toll on them both, though, and their relationship wouldn’t mend for years. My mother is more candid about what went on behind the scenes. “I saw some changes when [Curtis] went from Eddie Thomas as the business partner to Marv Stuart,” she says.
They brought [Eddie’s wife] Audrey and I in it. When Eddie and Curtis fell out, they didn’t want us to speak. We had to sneak to speak and make phone calls. “Oh, he’s coming in! Hang up!” Like that. Everything was behind the scenes because they weren’t friends anymore. They had severed their business ties. I was upset about that. I mean, this is your friend, how could you do that? And now you want me to ignore and not speak, because you and Eddie are not speaking anymore? I didn’t like that.
There again emerged the cold side Tracy spoke of. It was a business decision, and Dad knew how to separate his heart from his business. Even though few understood why he trusted Marv, it felt like the right choice to him. My mother tried to explain his reasoning, saying, “Marv Hyman, that was a Jewish name, so of course he had more connections. I did say something to [Curtis] and he said, ‘Well Eddie can’t, you know, he’s black! He’s still trying to get a little crack in the door, but Marv can open the door. And he can get better deals.’”
In my father’s defense, like Priest and Freddie, he was forced into a rigged situation that left him few choices. Radio had opened up some since the Impressions’ early days, and segregation was dead at least where the law was concerned, but America remained a racist, segregated country in almost every station of life. My father grew tired of beating his head against that wall. With
the massive success of his first few Curtom projects, he had reason to believe he’d made the right decision.
The Super Fly soundtrack continued that massive success. It dropped a month before the movie and shot to the top of the R&B chart. It was an odd way to orchestrate a release, but a canny move in this case. Making a blaxploitation film came with tremendous obstacles, and the massive pre-publicity from the soundtrack helped overcome them. Fenty and Shore had that in mind when they handed my father the script in New York. They knew working with one of the hottest artists in the world would help them secure backing, and as Dad wrote and cut the soundtrack, Fenty got that backing. He went to Nate Adams, who owned an employment business in Harlem. Adams said, “I had a good picture of what was happening on the streets, as well as what was happening in the business world.” He signed on.
Fenty also had producer Sig Shore on his side. He said, “Sig was ideal for this. He knew the market. He knew how to get things done. He knew how to hustle, how to put together an independent project with no money.” Shore received money from two black dentists that lived in his neighborhood. Gordon Parks Sr. also pitched in roughly $5,000. “It was really a struggle from the very beginning,” Shore said.
One struggle was overcome easily—casting the lead role. Fenty went to his friend Ron O’Neal, who was trained as a Shakespearean stage actor. It went without saying that Super Fly was not Shakespeare, but O’Neal felt a connection to Priest. He had grown up in a one-bedroom apartment on the West Side of New York and recognized himself in the script the same way my father did. “He really understood what that part was all about,” Shore said.
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