Perhaps he had to. On top of dicso’s prominence, other factors played into Curtis’s continued decline, and Marv spoke candidly about them in a 1976 interview with Blues & Soul magazine. One was the racism still prevalent in radio programming. “They tell you, go across town and get me a hit black record and we’ll listen,” Marv said.
Then you get them a hit black record and they’ll tell you it’s too black. I’ve heard that expression, “too black,” for years. I would love for a pop station to actually explain to me what that means…. Maybe if I printed our lacquers white—they’d play them. It affects your dollars, it affects your growth. Maybe if we had artists crossing over to the mass white market, we’d be signing rock acts as well. It limits us, truthfully. I think it’s a disgusting situation. I’ll give you an example: we just had the number one R&B record in the country with “Something He Can Feel.” It never crossed over to the white market. It sold 800,000 singles and the album’s nearly platinum.
Also, because he was either busy in the studio or locked in his room at home, he hadn’t toured much since Super Fly. “Curtis hasn’t been out for three years and I think his sales have suffered as a result,” Marv said. “He felt that after touring for years, he wanted to see his children grow up…. I know in ’77 he’s going to tour. It hurts any artists not to tour. It’s a commitment that the artists have to their fans.” My father blamed it on his workload, saying, “I’m usually working on one situation or another—and that’s why I haven’t been on the road as an artist, more or less.”
Though he’d grown tired of touring, the road was always a source of inspiration. From “He Will Break Your Heart” to “It’s All Right,” Dad wrote some of his greatest songs sitting in a car on tour, guitar resting in his lap. That source of inspiration had vanished in recent years.
Still, he felt optimistic. “I’d like to think that this company can become another Motown, as famous as all the things that Berry Gordy did for his company,” he said. Marv echoed that statement, saying, “He’s thirty-four and has spent seventeen years on the charts. His contribution to black music is beyond comprehension. His contribution to music throughout the world is the same. So I don’t look at Curtom as ‘What are we doing today’—I look at it as what are we doing today and tomorrow.”
Dad had multiple plans for tomorrow, including two new film soundtrack projects and a new solo album. By this point, he had pushed himself dangerously close to burnout, yet he didn’t rest for a moment. The first of the two films he scored, Short Eyes, was based on a popular Broadway play of the same name, and it dealt with one of the few issues of black life my father still hadn’t touched—prison. The term “short eyes” was prison slang for a pedophile, and the movie followed a man accused of pedophilia as he made his way through the complex social structure of prison life.
Short Eyes was my father’s fifth soundtrack, but unlike his other soundtrack work, this time he invested a good deal of money in the film. He also landed his first dramatic role as Pappy, a wizened old prisoner who doles out advice and sings “Do Do Wap Is Strong in Here” from the soundtrack. With so much of Curtom’s money on the line, my father needed the movie to succeed as much as he needed the soundtrack to succeed. Neither did.
Perhaps the subject matter was too heavy for the times. “We got great recognition and real good write-ups,” Dad said. “However, it was probably too real. When we did it, it was during the times of escapism and Star Wars.” The New York Times gave the movie a breathless review, saying it was “eloquently adapted” from the play. The review even praised Dad’s turn on the big screen—“Curtis Mayfield, the singer and composer, makes a brief, very effective appearance as an older prisoner who wears ‘granny’ glasses and believes there should be some decency even among people fighting to hang on to the bottom rung of the ladder.”
Still, the movie flopped. Though the soundtrack was full of Curtis’s most incisive social commentary since Super Fly, it was also a disaster, only reaching number fifty-nine on the R&B chart. Again, the failure didn’t make much sense for either project. It showed how critical approbation and artistic quality don’t guarantee commercial success.
My father felt proud of the album, especially the cut “Do Do Wap Is Strong in Here.” Many critics count it as among his best songs—impossibly funky and lyrically dazzling. Personally, I didn’t like it as a kid; it didn’t seem radio friendly to me. His response when I told him that: “Don’t listen to it, then.” The album also features “Back Against the Wall,” a heartbreaking look at prison life that pulls from a deep gospel well, while cuts like “Need Someone to Love” and “A Heavy Dude” lived up to his usual standard of quality. But, Short Eyes broke the spell he’d cast on his fans over the course of two decades. With the failure of the movie and soundtrack, my father’s reign in the music world suffered a mortal blow.
Short Eyes almost bankrupted Curtom, putting extra pressure on Dad to come up with a hit. His second movie soundtrack that year, A Piece of the Action, didn’t provide it. The album served as an interesting comparison to Let’s Do It Again, as Mavis Staples sang the songs (this time by herself) and the movie starred Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby once again. “I remember when Curtis called me to work on A Piece of the Action,” Mavis said. “He’d run into some kind of trouble, and he was on a tight deadline. So he called and said, ‘Mavis, I’m in a bind,’ and I said, ‘Okay, Curtis, I’m on the way.’ All of the musicians ended up spending the night in the studio, sleeping over two nights to get the album done.”
The trouble Mavis referred to involved Roberta Flack, whom my father first hired to sing the songs. She came into the Curtom studio to record but couldn’t produce the sound he wanted. Tracy, who watched the scene unfold from the control booth, recalls, “I remember Dad giving her instructions, and he wasn’t really feeling her. She asked for the lights to be turned out and she’s singing, and you couldn’t see anything, you could just hear her voice. She wanted it totally pitch black out there, I guess to maybe get into the mood, but he still wasn’t satisfied. She’s more of a mellow, precise intonation type of singer. He wanted that soul and that grit. Sometimes he could be very hard to please, very hard to please.”
Dad had always been that way, and he remained that way, as Tracy would learn when he went on tour with him years later. “He would get upset, like, ‘You better deliver right away. You ain’t got two, three minutes. I want to hear it right now,’” Tracy says.
You had to be doing something for him. Because he would let you know. He would say, “Hey, cat. That ain’t happening. This is what you need to be doing.” Just like that. He didn’t pull no punches. He had a very clear idea of what he wanted at all times, and he heard very well what was going on. And he would stop you or stop the music. He would put his hand out. He wasn’t a very mean person, very pleasant even when being decisive of what he wanted. But he would be very direct, and say, “Hey, that ain’t happening.”
Despite getting exactly what he wanted out of Mavis, A Piece of the Action failed. Yet again, my father churned out excellent soul music in a disco-dominated world. Two months later, Saturday Night Fever hit theaters, and with it came the Bee Gees’ mammoth soundtrack, which reigned atop the Billboard album chart for twenty-four straight weeks and sold more than fifteen million copies. At that point, Marv’s exhortations to make a disco record became more powerful, but my father wasn’t ready to relent. Instead, he recorded Never Say You Can’t Survive, a collection of soulful love songs that sounded pleasant enough but went nowhere on the charts. Now, he had another problem—moneymen at Warner Brothers began turning the screws, tired of investing in product that didn’t sell.
The failure of Never Say You Can’t Survive ended 1977 on a bitter note. Dad knew something had to change, but at the same time, he’d almost burned out his creative spark. In the seven years since he’d gone solo, he’d written fifteen studio albums—ten for himself, one for the Impressions, and four for other artists—and released two live albums.
This surge of creativity came after he’d already toiled nearly twenty years in the business, writing hundreds of songs for the Impressions and others. It is hard to think of a musician of any era who kept up that level of output for so long, let alone one who did it with such consistency and commercial success. James Brown might have been the hardest-working man in show business from a performance perspective, but my father could have claimed the title of hardest-working man in the record business.
Dad’s decline in popularity had less to do with the quality of his work than it did with the tastes of his audience. Like anyone in charge of running a business, he had to respond to the market. As he watched artists like the Bee Gees, Gloria Gaynor, KC and the Sunshine Band, and Donna Summer tear up the charts with feel-good disco songs, the pressure mounted.
His response to that pressure marked the lowest point of his career.
12
When Seasons Change
“I’ll play the part I feel they want of me
And I’ll pull the shades so I won’t see them seein’ me
Havin’ hard times”
—“HARD TIMES”
Wally Heider Studios, Los Angeles, mid-1978—Backed into a creative corner, Curtis cut a disco album. For the first time in his career, he relinquished lead writing duties on half the songs and most of the recording took place outside Chicago. Curtom arranger Gil Askey penned much of the A-side for Do It All Night, producing three meandering disco tunes that limp from the speakers. Dad gave the worst vocal performances of his career on these songs, sounding bored, unconvinced, and barely present. The song “Party, Party” is emblematic, full of bad lyrics delivered with little conviction. The man who once sang, “There’ll be no more Uncle Tom, at last that blessed day has come,” now sang, “Dance, dance, dance, here’s your chance, party, party.”
The market forced his hand. In 1978, Curtom teetered on the brink of collapse, and he’d been stubborn long enough in the face of changing tastes. In an ironic twist, the control he’d established over himself and his career forced him into that corner—too many people relied on him, too many people had invested in him, and since he could no longer provide hits to keep them all in business, he had to do whatever it took to steady the ship.
Unfortunately, Do It All Night did little except obscure his true identity. “It didn’t have much to do with me, it was Marv’s thing,” Dad said.
He wanted us to have a disco hit. Linda Clifford was having some success on the dance scene, and he thought that’s the way we should go. I had spread myself a little thin what with the Short Eyes movie score at that time, which cost Curtom a lot, as well as many other recording and tour commitments … I think that maybe I should have taken a break at that time and reflected on just what was going on, and not have listened so much to other people, but there were lots of pressures on all of us to turn things around.
Part of that pressure came from Linda’s success. She was the only Curtom artist to make a meaningful mark on the disco scene, especially with her album If My Friends Could See Me Now and its eponymous single, which hit the top of the new Billboard dance chart in 1978. Dad coproduced that album and wrote several songs on it, including “You Are, You Are,” which he also sang on Do It All Night. It shone a lone bright spot in a year of artistic darkness.
Before Do It All Night, he had collaborated again with Aretha Franklin, hoping to repeat the success of Sparkle. Franklin had no idea what to do with disco either, and the resulting album, Almighty Fire—which my father wrote, produced, and recorded at Curtom—failed by Franklin’s standards. It broke her streak with Atlantic Records of fourteen straight top ten R&B albums, including ten that went to either number one or two.
That was Atlantic’s problem, though. Do It All Night was Curtom’s. The album set a new low for my father’s solo career, selling worse than anything that preceded it. Rolling Stone called it his “flimsiest solo album yet, an indifferent collection of flaccid disco songs,” and went on to say a few more hurtful things, even taking a potshot at Sweet Exorcist.
The album also finished Curtom’s distribution deal with Warner Brothers, hanging the albatross of failure around Curtis’s neck as he searched for new distribution. In the last two and a half years, no Curtom album had even touched the Billboard Top 100. Except for the brief period after Jerry left the Impressions, my father’s commercial viability had never been more in doubt. Unlike those early days, though, he didn’t seem to have an answer.
For his next album, he doubled down on disco, giving up even more control of his music. This time, he surrendered production duties to Norman Harris, Bunny Sigler, and Ronald Tyson of the Philadelphia International label. They wrote much of the album, with Gil Askey contributing on two songs. For a man who always pursued total control of himself and his music with fanaticism, Dad had taken another huge departure. He felt it was necessary, though, especially since the pressure of running a business had only grown after Do It All Night failed. “To show your own value, you must make hit records,” my father said. “It just can’t be me, me, me. That always fails. Every once in a while even the best of the best have to say, okay maybe I better let somebody who’s proven themselves with a new track record do something to keep me going.”
He felt a kinship with the folks at Philly International. The label started as the brainchild of Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff, and Thom Bell, and released huge hits from the O’Jays, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes (featuring future star Teddy Pendergrass), and Chicago native Lou Rawls, among many others. If my father had to give up control, he found the right people to give it to.
The resulting album, Heartbeat, marked his most complete capitulation to disco. Though low on artistic vision, it hit number nineteen on the R&B chart and gave him his highest placement on the pop chart in five years. The single—a duet with Linda Clifford called “Between You Baby and Me”—was one of the only songs on the album Dad wrote alone, and it fared best on the charts, which made him happy. The album also featured “You’re So Good to Me,” a lively steppers cut that was sampled often in the next decade, most notably as the musical backdrop to Mary J. Blige’s “Be Happy,” from her triple-platinum My Life album in 1994. Of course, that success didn’t help Heartbeat at the time of its release.
My father felt ambivalent. “It wasn’t so bad,” he said. “I liked the music. It was strange how Heartbeat worked out. Other people’s styles could never express me the way I expressed myself. All my life the music I made only sold when I was being me, when I was just being Curtis. When I tried to be other than what I was, you could forget it. I had to be me to be a singer at all.”
He’d tried to be a disco artist for the past three years with disappointing results. And he was an astute evaluator of his own voice—it effused a world-weary wisdom, a deep sadness, and a deeper strength in the face of that sadness. These things fit gospel and soul music to a tee but had no place on the dance floor. As a result, when he tried to do middle-of-the-road dance tunes, the lyrics clashed with the tenor of the voice singing them. He came closest with Heartbeat—its limited success attracted RSO Records, which purchased Curtom’s distribution rights, but the move wouldn’t mean much. Curtom hobbled on its last legs, and my father didn’t have the energy or ideas to revive it. Disco, along with a string of poor albums and dismal sales, beat the fight out of him. He was exhausted and overworked. For the first time, he contemplated slowing down.
“Those were some strange times for me,” he said. “I had done so well for myself for such a long time. As far as my doing songs with messages, disco interrupted it very much. The name of the game these past few years has been escape. People have been going off and doing their thing since time began. But it’s important that they remember themselves and who they are.” He even revealed bitterness over the disco craze. “So many of the lyrics were just, ‘Dance, dance, dance, let’s get the hell outta here, cause it’s rough on the bottom,’” he said. “At times escape means you’re closing your eyes and ears to w
hat’s going on. Then when you open them up, it’s even more screwed up than before you closed them. You wish you had just gone on and lived through it.”
Even as he said that, my father continued to live in his own state of escape. More and more, he lived like a shut-in, staying locked behind his bedroom door. He even ate many meals in his room. His solitude would get worse in coming years.
As the ’70s waned, disco crumbled and a new generation of artists emerged in the ghettos and projects of New York. Two neighborhoods in particular—Queensbridge and the Bronx—experienced a renaissance with new styles of fashion, dance, and music that borrowed heavily from R&B and funk music, my father’s included. He remained far from all that, though. More than ever, he looked inward, contemplating his past while considering what to do with his future.
His next album, Something to Believe In, nodded to the post-disco sounds that would come to dominate R&B music in the early 1980s, but for the most part, it was a return to the deep soul and gospel roots that run through his best work. On the album, he decided to remake “It’s All Right,” with backing vocals from Sharon and me.
The version of “It’s All Right” we cut provides an interesting counterpoint to the original. As soul-music historian Craig Werner wrote, it “underscores the changes in Mayfield’s energy since the high point of the Movement. The Impressions’ version of the song radiates an energy of connection, especially when the three voices come together at the ends of lines. The 1980 recording accentuates the distance between the lead singer and the backup singers, who sound like they’re located in a different room. You can feel the call and response falling apart.” Of course, Sharon and I were not the Impressions, and it wasn’t 1963 anymore. Regardless, my father felt happy enough with the results to put it on the album.
Traveling Soul Page 31
