Traveling Soul

by Todd Mayfield

  Perhaps naturally, tensions also simmered among ten children vying for one man’s time and attention, and three women wanting to make sure he allocated that time and attention fairly. As usual, Dad could see the big picture—having a lot of children and remaining close to each of them—but he struggled with the day-to-day reality of making it happen. “You have to create the conditions for that to happen,” Sharon says. “You have to nurture that type of environment, because it does not just happen. One of my first memories, I remember my dad introducing me to Curtis III and saying, ‘This is your brother.’ I was confused about who are these people I don’t know?”

  Dad kept his mother and grandmother close. I remember my great-grandma Sadie vividly—she’d smoke cigarettes all day, perched by the window in the third-floor apartment where my grandmother lived. Even in her eighties, she was feisty and funny. For her part, my grandmother still followed her son’s career closer than any fan. She proudly kept a box of newspaper and magazine clippings, adding to it every time a new story appeared. We’d even see Mannish every now and again—my father never fostered a relationship with his father, but he still welcomed the old man into his house for Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner.

  Despite the hardships of the past few years, Honesty proved my father could write a great song when he stayed true to himself. Songs like “If You Need Me” and “What You Gawn Do?” lived up to his best standards. The latter featured another Caribbean arrangement and lyrics about the islands, perhaps as a tribute to his recently departed protégé Bob Marley, who had died of cancer at age thirty-six in 1981. Dad hadn’t lost his social or political edge in the Reagan era, either, as he showed in the song “Dirty Laundry.” He sings, “Dirty laundry in the country / Can’t trust Uncle Sam / Broken link / Future sinking / And no one gives a damn.” But he was not the man to comment on the Reagan years. That job fell to a new era of musicians who had learned from his work. Several months before Honesty came out, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five released their seminal single, “The Message.” The song set the tone for artists like N.W.A, KRS-One, Public Enemy, and others who would define hip-hop in the next few years. In many ways, “The Message” was Super Fly set to a new form of music. It’s hard to miss my father’s imprint on the song’s lyrics and point of view.

  In fact, Dad’s music played a huge role in the development of hiphop, even as he faded from the public eye. While artists like James Brown and Stevie Wonder remained cultural icons—and Bob Marley’s fame reached the stratosphere with the posthumous best-of compilation, Legend—Dad seemed resigned to his status. “I don’t feel that I’m a great success,” he said.

  It takes a lot of ego and playing a role that I’m not. I like the idea of having money. I’m very happy that I’m in an area that people turn their heads and listen, that I’ve got respect and naturally, I feel proud of myself. And then, every couple of years, when you get the money in, you wonder if you’re winning or losing. I cherish the time I can get away from it all.

  At the same time, he remained hopeful. “These are not easy times, yet they are not hopeless times,” he said. He just needed a break.

  Ernest Hemingway once wrote:

  In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.

  Those words could sum up my father’s career. In a span of twenty years, he put his instrument on the grindstone again, and again, and again, more than almost any artist of his generation. He crafted an immortal legacy from it. He dulled and blunted it and still demanded more of it. Now, for the first time, he rested it.

  He spent much of the mid-’80s away from music, learning to be a father first and world-famous musician second. Gray crept into his beard. He put on weight. Life changed, as it must. He spent some time in the Curtom Atlanta studio tinkering with new sounds, but he didn’t have a clear direction or a record deal. He filled most of his time with ordinary things—cooking, going to the store, tooling around town in his brown Jeep. In 1983, I began college at Morehouse in Atlanta, and I’d visit the house on weekends, where the Rolls Royce sat in the garage dusty, unused, battery dead, tires low. I’d clean it up, charge it, and take it out for an occasional spin. Sometimes I’d even ask to drive his new Corvette. He was always good about it—he’d just give me the keys and I’d take off.

  Aunt Carolyn and Uncle Kenny visited him in Atlanta often, and they found that as much as life had changed, Curtis remained in many ways the same frustrating man. “He enjoyed people, he enjoyed family,” Aunt Carolyn recalls. “But he would enjoy you for a while, and the next thing you know, he would disappear in his room. You went home. Or, you just enjoyed the rest of your day and knew that was him; that was part of his personality. I think everybody you talk to can tell you another side of him. That’s a Gemini. Everybody you talk to, they know a different side.”

  Uncle Kenny developed his own way to deal with my father’s capricious nature. He says, “I wouldn’t go out there all the time, but I could always tell when my brother wanted to be bothered, because he’d send somebody looking for me, so that meant Curtis want to be bothered. Curtis was a Gemini, you know. Wishy-washy. I remember one time I was out there, and Curtis told Altheida, ‘Get all the kids together, we’re going to go to the other house and swim.’ So, she’s up there getting all these rug rats together, and she comes down and says, ‘We’re ready.’ Curtis was laying up on the couch asleep, and he gets up and says, ‘Ready for what?’”

  A few years prior, he’d finally divorced Helen, but he didn’t marry Altheida, causing trouble with Aunt Carolyn. “Me and Theida, we got in the biggest thing,” Aunt Carolyn says. “I said, ‘You got all these babies and you ain’t married? Every man I ever had, he married me.’ She obviously would go up and tell Curtis about it, and he’d tell her—he wouldn’t tell me—he’d tell her, and I know he told her because the next day, the conversation would come back around, and she would tell me what he said. One time he told her that she was his ‘spiritual wife.’ I said, ‘Ain’t no such thing!’”

  Still, my father loved being with his family, and he always tried to include all his children in his life. Years ago, he’d become a photography fanatic, and now he enjoyed taking hundreds of pictures, developing them in his own darkroom and documenting his life during the first significant break he’d taken since 1958.

  At the same time, Dad also spent more time in his bedroom hidden from the outside world. His life continued taking on the detritus of addiction, which only fed the rumors of cocaine use. His career floundered. The house in Atlanta sat unkempt and dirty. His relationships deteriorated. “No one was taking care of the house,” Sharon remembers.

  No one was taking care of the children. It was dirty. I didn’t want my feet to touch the floor. The cabinet’s hanging off by a single screw. I withdrew from him, and I stopped wanting to come and visit. We had some bumps in the road during that time when I was in high school. I remember he called me one day. My mother said he was drunk. I couldn’t tell. But he called me one day, and he was angry with me because I was acting like I didn’t want to see him. I wasn’t returning his phone calls. He was using profanity towards me, and I got really upset. I was crying. My mother took the phone and started telling him that he’s not going to call up here and upset me and talk to me in that way.

  While he lost control of his career to changing musical tastes, he lost control of his personal life to drugs. Family relationships became strained. Tracy stopped touring with him in the mid ’80s and began running the studio. “It was very frustrating because at that point I was managing the studio, and I needed him a lot sometimes for some decision-making things,” Tracy recalls. “And that was toug
h that he wouldn’t even return my calls. I couldn’t get in touch with him.”

  After a misunderstanding between Altheida and Tracy, Dad shut down the studio completely. “I was managing the studio, and all of a sudden, the next day, the doors were locked,” Tracy says. “I had to find another job. Supposedly they were remodeling in there but there wasn’t nothing going on. It was ridiculous.” Curtis III also caught the brunt of Dad’s wrath. Curt played saxophone and was asked to go on his first tour with his father but got kicked off at the last minute after a screaming spat that almost came to blows.

  As all this happened, my father talked about reviving Curtom. He still hadn’t given up, but he needed a distributor, so along with William Bell and a few other artists, he brought a proposal to John Abbey. “They didn’t have a record deal,” John says. “They had kind of been mistreated and cheated by some of the other companies. They were disenchanted. They said, ‘Why don’t you start a distribution company so that we can put out product through you?’”

  John started Ichiban Records. “It was something that Curtis pushed me into,” John says, “And when he did, I pushed back and said now you need to do your part. And he did.” Because RSO wouldn’t release the name Curtom without payment, my father signed a deal with John under the moniker CRC—Curtom Record Company, later called Curtom Records of Atlanta, Inc.—and began recording a new album called We Come in Peace with a Message of Love.

  The album is uneven, and it failed to chart. As John says,

  Some of the tracks were very good, but there were tracks that he would put on albums that people thought, “Curtis, why are you putting that on there?” It was the way he saw it. We had discussions that I won’t say got heated, because that never happened, but certainly there was definitely disagreement there, because looking at it as a record company, you want it to sell the best you could. And you knew that once it got out there in the marketplace, people aren’t going to be kind like we are. Some of the reviews on the We Come in Peace album were not really that great, and I think that hurt him.

  After We Come in Peace, perhaps realizing that he could no longer dominate commercially, my father stepped even further from the spotlight, taking the longest recording break of his career. Five years would pass before he recorded again. In that time, he fell further into obscurity in America, but his popularity continued overseas. He formed a new road band called Ice-9 featuring Lee Goodness on drums, Buzz Amato on keyboards, and Lucky’s brother LeBron Scott on bass. They toured Europe and Japan in 1986 and ’87, including places my father had never been, like Austria, Spain, Scotland, France, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Denmark, and Sweden. Even in semiretirement, he still didn’t know how to take it easy.

  By that point, I had graduated from college and decided to go on the road with him for the first time, acting as a glorified roadie. I spent almost three months in Europe, riding around drinking all the European beer I could hold. My father was never a big drinker—when he did drink, he preferred cheap wine or a three-dollar bottle of champagne. One of my jobs on tour was bringing girls backstage that the band picked from the audience. I’d introduce them to my father, but he had mellowed quite a bit from his younger days of chasing women. Now, he just felt anxious to get back home and see Altheida.

  The tour gave us precious time together, and we talked through the days and nights on long bus, plane, and train rides. We also discussed working together in a more formal sense, giving me a chance to put my college degree to work and fulfilling my childhood hope of protecting him by handling the finer points of business he often missed.

  Dad particularly enjoyed performing in England because the people there loved him. He also liked Germany, where he played several military bases. Being a reformed sports car fanatic, he loved watching the German roadsters zoom by on the Autobahn. He’d stare at them between games of chess on the bus. In fact, that trip marked the first time I ever beat him at chess. Even though he’d taught me to play as a child, he never let me win—that just wasn’t his nature—so my victory felt even sweeter.

  In the summer of 1987, the band cut Live in Europe at the Montreux Jazz Festival and released it on CRC/Ichiban. “I think all of us were very lucky that that was so well-received,” John says. “I think that gave him a lot of confidence back.” Dad certainly seemed to grow in confidence as the European crowds flocked to see him. He sold out venues in every country and performed at a few summer festivals, where he absorbed the energy of fifty thousand screaming fans. He said, “You have to remember that when I was having all my hits in the States, my records really weren’t being exposed properly in Europe. So maybe this is like a catch-up situation. People seem more loyal in Europe. I see some of the same faces at my concerts each time I come over, and that’s a comfortable feeling.”

  He also got another shot recording a movie soundtrack for Keenen Ivory Wayans’s blaxploitation parody film I’m Gonna Git You Sucka. Wayans asked him to score the whole movie, and Dad tinkered around in the CRC studio for a while, but the result sounded thin and low on inspiration. Wayans scrapped it and only included one song of my father’s, “He’s a Flyguy.” It appeared next to songs by artists who counted Curtis as a hero. One of them was KRS-One, whose group, Boogie Down Productions, had just released their 1987 album, Criminal Minded, which many credit with starting gangsta rap. Years later, KRS paid my father homage, saying, “Curtis Mayfield was hip-hop.”

  As the 1980s came to a close, my father found a new niche. He didn’t have to record unless he felt the urge, and he could count on his loyal fan base overseas to sustain him between records. He felt pride as he watched his influence spread through the younger generation of musicians. More and more artists sampled his music, including Eric B. & Rakim, LL Cool J, Big Daddy Kane, N.W.A, and Biz Markie. Listening to what they did with his songs, my father gained an affinity for hip-hop. “I don’t see any great differences between what people are expressing now and what we used to do,” he said at a time when the new art form was under serious critical and cultural attack. “There’s observations on contemporary goings-on, personal freedoms, civil rights, and discriminations of minorities. Then of course, there’s always love, the ins and outs and movements and the happenings of love.”

  Responding to critics’ complaints against sampling—one of the most controversial aspects of the new music—he said, “It’s not that they can’t create; they’ve made a new way of creating by sampling. These are new ways of putting music together, which is fantastic. It’s as if you put together a collage of pictures into a pattern, so you look at it from afar and say, ‘Wow look at that,’ and then you come up close, and these are pictures that you are familiar with put together in a different manner.”

  He understood the role his music played in the new art form, but he knew his boundaries. His attempt at making disco had taught him a valuable lesson—he had to stay true to himself regardless of changing tastes. “We’re talking about character here,” he said.

  You can’t expect everyone to like you, but they’re sure as hell not going to like you if you jump around trying to accommodate, and can’t find yourself. I like a lot of today’s fire-up party sounds, but if I borrowed those sounds, who could trust me? Who could feel they know my character? If I’m to retain any credibility, I have to be myself. There’s a time for every mood, and even the kids into techno-rap may want to step into the cultural museum and pull out some Mayfield. Hopefully I’ll be one of those treasures that will always be there.

  In 1989, he toured with the Impressions again through Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia, mirroring the first tour they did after the success of “For Your Precious Love” thirty years before. The next year, he had two projects on his mind—a new album and movie soundtrack. It was almost like old times.

  Shortly after I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, my father and I became more serious about working together. In July 1990, I left my job in Chicago and moved to Atlanta, where Ichiban gave me a desk in their office. Dad dumped a s
tack of boxes on me, and I began sorting through them—old contracts, the Warner Brothers deal from 1975, concert agreements. I had joined the family business.

  One of my first assignments was helping coordinate Dad’s involvement with the The Return of Superfly soundtrack. It was the second Super Fly sequel—he’d wisely rejected an offer to score the forgettable Super Fly T.N.T. in 1973. On the three songs he contributed, he explored a new R&B subgenre called new jack swing, and he cut a hit single alongside rapper Ice-T with “Superfly 1990.” I felt I was making a smooth entry into the music business, until it came time to shoot a music video with Ice-T.

  Dad and I bought tickets together to fly from Atlanta to New York City for the video. We were scheduled to arrive the day before shooting began. When it came time to leave, I knocked on his bedroom door. Speaking through the door as usual, he said, “Go ahead. I’ll come tomorrow morning.” I tried to convince him to come with me, but he refused and assured me he would be there for the shoot. The next morning, he didn’t show up. He wasn’t even in New York City. I sweated it out, assuring the record executives from Capitol he would be there, not entirely sure myself if it was true. They began shooting other scenes to avoid blowing the budget, and several hours later, in walks Curtis Mayfield as if nothing had happened. Somehow he could get away with these things, and everyone loved him and his performance. For my part, I was just happy he didn’t leave me hanging. Even so, I decided to approach him about his drug use. I had recently witnessed a deal take place in his driveway, and I asked if he was OK. He told me not to worry about it. We never spoke of it again.

  Soon after, New York state senator Marty Markowitz invited my father to play an outdoor concert series he staged every year in Flatbush, Brooklyn, at Wingate Field. “Curtis Mayfield was making a comeback, and he was certainly an icon of the black community,” Markowitz says. “There was certainly a lot of respect, and devotion and love, and that’s why I hired him.” Ice-9 was scheduled to tour Europe again the next week, and Dad figured it would be a good chance to get the band geared up while making some money.