Traveling Soul

by Todd Mayfield

  Some things about Dad didn’t change at all. “He got mad from that bed, too,” Tracy says. “He didn’t play around, even though he was bound in that bed, can’t move. You’d hear that voice that you’ve heard since you were a little kid. So, it commands you, it draws you in. The same person is still there.”

  Though he struggled to maintain his spirit, my father’s life became an endless combination of medications and physical hardships. At one point he had some fifteen prescriptions for various ailments. “I think overall I’m dealing with it pretty good,” he said to an inquiring interviewer, “but you can’t help but wake up every once in a while with a tear in your eye.” To another, he expressed cautious hope:

  Some good doctor somewhere may have come up with that magical way of bringing back to life what is paralyzed. Until that happens, I fear I will probably be this way until my death. The character, they say, is in the head. It’s not what’s below my neck, it’s what’s above. So I hope to stay in good care and carry on. I have no pity on myself, nor do I look for it. You can understand sometimes when I wake with tears; sometimes you just feel like you’re bound in a mummy wrapping, and you just can’t get out.

  The next few years were a battle against atrophy—both of his spirit and body. Sometimes his sense of humor shined through. “I’m a fifty-four-year-old quadriplegic, and there’s not too much demand for that these days,” he said wryly. But no amount of humor could mask the intense physical and spiritual pain he confronted all day, every day.

  The outside world gave him few reasons for hope. Race relations in America seemed worse than at any point since King’s death. Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush, presided over a deeply conservative country and a new generation that had little sympathy for civil rights. A study concluded nearly half of African American children lived in poverty, and a national poll showed only 15 percent of white men (and 16 percent of white women) felt the government was obligated to do anything about it. In 1991, Los Angeles police beat Rodney King, an African American man, within inches of his life. Even though there was gruesome video evidence of the crime, the following year the jury acquitted all officers involved.

  The resulting L.A. riots painted a heartbreaking, frustrating picture of how little had changed since a similar police incident had set off the Watts riots almost thirty years before. This time, after six days of looting, shooting, smashing, and burning, the damage totaled more than one billion dollars, with more than fifty deaths, two thousand injuries, and seventeen thousand arrests.

  Meanwhile, in early 1993, three white men in Valrico, Florida, doused an African American man with gasoline and set him on fire. Around the same time, another African American man moved to Vidor, Texas, after a federal court ordered the town desegregated, which meant almost four decades after the movement began, pockets of complete segregation still existed within America.

  Dad was keenly aware of these events. He couldn’t avoid them as he sat stuck in front of the TV all day and night. He didn’t want to avoid them, either—one of his favorite programs was the nightly national news. It frustrated him that he couldn’t counter these issues with music anymore, but that didn’t mean his music career was over. In 1991, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted the Impressions, and late the next year an all-star cast of musicians recorded a tribute album featuring selections from Dad’s entire body of work. Around the same time, the City of Chicago renamed Hudson Avenue “Honorary Curtis Mayfield Avenue,” and even today, the street sign stands outside the Cabrini row house where he once lived. These events flattered and revitalized him. Then, he learned the Grammys would honor him with a Legend Award. It felt good after the Super Fly snub twenty years before. At the Grammy ceremony, Jerry, Fred, and Sam wheeled him onstage where he gave a short speech. They ended with a chorus of “Amen.” It was the last time my father sang in front of an audience.

  As he struggled to face each day, I stayed busy working on remasters and licensing the Curtom back catalog. The added attention after the accident pushed my father’s music to a peak it hadn’t seen in almost two decades. This led to a legion of samples in hip-hop and R&B songs, as well as TV and film licenses.

  It also had unintended consequences for our relationship. I saw his insecurities surface again—sometimes it seemed he felt jealous of me because I did all the things he no longer could. After I bought the house on Austin Road in Atlanta from him, I formed my own independent label—Conquest—of which Dad owned a share. At the same time, outsiders intent on regaining control of my father’s affairs began undermining our relationship, saying that I focused on too many other things and not solely on his business. My father and I discussed being wary of anyone who would try to undermine the relationship between a father and son, and for the time being he continued to support me. As outsiders took their shots, there also appeared to be a growing perception with some in the family that I was somehow Dad’s favorite, the one getting special considerations others didn’t get. The truth was, nobody else in the family was prepared to run Curtom, and most of the money I made came from the producers and artists I managed at Conquest, not from my father or Curtom.

  Regardless, the misperception persisted. Then, for reasons obvious to me, Marv began driving a wedge. Because Dad couldn’t hold a phone, he conducted all his calls on speakerphone, which meant I overheard many one-sided conversations where Marv tried to make me look inept and self-interested. If I scored a deal to place one of Dad’s songs in a film, Marv felt he could’ve wheedled more money out of it. If I licensed a song to a commercial, Marv thought I didn’t drive a hard enough bargain.

  I tried to explain that my quotes were the same as Warner Brothers’, who still had a stake in the publishing. For instance, if a company wanted to license a song for an ad campaign, they’d approach both Warner Brothers and Curtom to see how much it would cost. If Warner quoted $30,000 for the track on the publishing side, I would charge the same on the master side. This was an industry custom. I also used most-favored-nation clauses to ensure market rates, and I relied on many leading industry professionals who allowed me to use them as a resource, knowing the gravity of what I was up against.

  Regardless, after several years of hearing what I was doing wrong—or wasn’t doing right—my father began to believe the talk. I had several heated conversations with Marv, but by early 1995, I felt everyone aligning against me and grew tired of the constant stress. While working on an employment contract, my father promised me a piece of Curtom. After some last-minute changes, the contract became so stacked against me, I refused to sign it. I decided to focus on my label and told Dad I wanted to resign. “No, don’t do it,” he said. “I still need you.” Despite my reservations, I stayed on. For the first time in years, he had plans.

  After years of adjusting to life as a quadriplegic, Dad set his mind on making a new album. “I always said I would not be singing till my sixties or seventies, not unless I really wanted to,” he told the press. “Now I feel like I want to.” As he began figuring out how to record without the use of his body, I continued licensing his music.

  Nike had a series of barbershop commercials featuring legendary athletes like George Gervin, and they wanted legendary music to accompany it. When the press picked up the story about my father’s new album-in-the-making, Nike asked him to do an original track for the commercial, rather than licensing an old one. I felt excited because I put the deal together—$60,000 for one commercial that would run for a couple of weeks. I brought it to my father, who agreed to cut a new song for Nike.

  He still didn’t feel comfortable singing, and his first few dry runs didn’t go well. He had little control over his diaphragm, and when he tried to sing, his body tensed up. Instead of the famous, smooth falsetto, strange sounds came out of his mouth. Disappointed, he decided to read the lyrics instead of singing them. I explained that the ad agency wanted him to sing, but he refused. We got into a nasty fight about it, and in the end, he won. He read his lyrics over the music, and Nike reje
cted it. I tried to salvage the situation, wanting to protect my father even though I didn’t agree with what he had done. In the end, Nike used the track and hired a sound-alike to sing it.

  We still got paid, but after that, our relationship quickly deteriorated. As Dad worked on his new album, I spent more time on my own projects. The chatter grew louder—I wasn’t paying enough attention to him; I just used him to further my own career; other people could do a better job. In early 1996, I got a letter from Marv telling me I was fired. My father hadn’t said a word to me about it, and the wedge I felt others trying to force between us since his accident finally drove us apart. We exchanged heated words. I told him off and cut all communication. Throughout my entire life, no matter what Dad did or who was mad at him for it, I knew I wanted to keep a relationship with him. Now, for the first time, I wanted no part of him.

  I got a job on Wall Street and moved to New York as he finished making New World Order. To make the album, he worked with other musicians and producers who sent tracks and sat at his bedside discussing what he wanted to add to their ideas. The first song he worked on this way was “Back to Living Again,” written with gospel singer Rosemary Woods. “It’s not about dying,” Dad said. “It’s about living again … I always need a good challenge to push me or dare me.”

  Here was something more than a good challenge, though. For one thing, he couldn’t use a tape recorder to save his ideas, making the creative process exasperating. “I have ideas,” he said, “but if you can’t jot them down or get them to music they fade like dreams.” He also missed his guitar dearly. “For expression and harmony, my guitar was like another brother to me,” he said. “I mourn my guitar to this day. I used to sleep with my guitar. I’d write five songs a night—a day. When I couldn’t find answers, I would write songs. When I was heartbroken, I would write songs. It was my own way of teaching myself.”

  His problems were just beginning, though. He had difficulty speaking loudly as a result of the paralysis, and singing was nearly impossible. He found a way around this too, singing while lying down at a slant or sometimes flat on his back, using gravity to help his diaphragm and lungs work. He could only sing a few lines at a time, which the producers spliced together to form a complete take.

  Dad didn’t write any of the songs on the album by himself—a first in his entire career. Rather, he relied on producers. He contributed lyrics, verses, hooks, and other snippets, but he needed them to form the ideas into songs.

  A production team called Organized Noize came to assist. The trio of Sleepy Brown, Rico Wade, and Ray Murray was famous for working with Atlanta hip-hop superstars OutKast and had just produced “Waterfalls,” a number-one hit for TLC. They helped produce some of the best music my father had made in more than a decade. For a time, they also leased the Curtom Atlanta studio in the house on Austin Road before building their own facility. “Curtis worked so long and hard on that project,” Brown said. “Sometimes he was in obvious pain, but he just worked through it. He was always asking us to criticize the work, so we could make it better.”

  Roger Troutman of the 1980s funk band Zapp also helped. Troutman brought a recording console and hard drive to the house, ran some speakers into my father’s room, and put a microphone in front of him. Dad cut two tracks from bed, including a remake of his classic, “We People Who Are Darker Than Blue.”

  The loss of both voice and guitar—the two things that defined Curtis Mayfield—left him frustrated and depressed. “[I can’t sing] in the manner as you once knew me,” he said. “I’m strongest lying down. I don’t have a diaphragm anymore, so when I sit up I lose my voice. I have no strength, no volume, no falsetto range, and I tire very fast. I’m sorry to say that my style of playing is probably gone forever—the tuning—I can’t play it and there’s no one to teach it.” But he felt proud of the album. “It took all of my know how,” he said, “and we got it done.”

  Then, Lucky died. Dad had known Lucky since he toddled around in diapers. After the Impressions lost their road band in 1968, Lucky became a fixture in Dad’s life—as a musical director, bass player, creative companion, and friend. He died of a blood clot to his lungs, a sudden and unexpected end.

  Despite that hard blow, when New World Order came out on October 1, 1996, it strengthened my father. He proved to himself that he could still create and take care of his family—which by this point officially included Altheida, whom he finally married after his accident. “My particular thing is how, within my limits, to still find ways to earn a decent living, just prove to myself that I’m doing the best that I can do,” he said.

  How many fifty-four-year-old quadriplegics are putting albums out? You just have to deal with what you got and try to sustain yourself as best you can and look to the things that you can do, so that’s how I’m looking at things. I’m devoting what time I have to my children. I’m trying to get the rest of them out of here to college. I’ve got a very strong woman. You never know who’s going to take that stand and say, “Hey, I’ll do it.” Nobody wants to do it, but she’s been around all these years.

  Like most albums during the last twenty years of his career, New World Order is uneven—and like most of the work during that period, it contains flashes of brilliance. The title track and superb cuts like “Ms. Martha” and “Back to Living Again” show just how sharp my father’s creative mind was, even if his body no longer cooperated in the songwriting process. He also remade one of the most underrated songs from the Impressions’ catalog, “The Girl I Find,” and he cut a first-rate ballad with “No One Knows About a Good Thing (You Don’t Have to Cry).” The album’s crowning moment is “Here but I’m Gone,” a haunting, hypnotic song that is as good musically, lyrically, and melodically as anything he’d ever done.

  New World Order put him in the context of mid-’90s R&B and hip-hop, which suited him better than any style since pre-disco days. Dad said,

  Fusing elements of hip-hop on this CD was not so much a concession to the times, as much as it was a connection to the times. We all have to grow. You have to stay true to yourself while recognizing and acknowledging what’s going on now. Fortunately we had a lot of the young people who always admired my work so they could put music together that was of the Nineties and all I needed to do was just lay my signature down. They’re all great producers and have great ideas but they were all very kind and always left the parts for Curtis.

  The album went to number twenty-four R&B, his best showing in nearly twenty years. It brought a rare moment of happiness to a man who hadn’t experienced many in recent memory, and the renewed focus made him feel vital again. Interview requests came pouring in, as did two Grammy nominations. The Soul Train Music Awards honored him with the Heritage Award. He was back in the game.

  A few months before the Soul Train awards, I flew to Atlanta for a weekend visit. I hadn’t spoken with Dad since our falling out six months prior, but I had run into someone who knew him and heard he wanted to see me. I went to his house, we both apologized, and our relationship resumed. Perhaps he knew he didn’t have long to live.

  For the first time, he spoke to the press of total retirement. “I’ve been doing this since I was seven, professionally since I was fifteen,” he said. “I turned sixteen in the Apollo Theater. I’m a fighter, but it’s best at this point to go on and retire and be appreciated for whatever you have done.”

  He spent his last years in swift decline. In February 1998, doctors amputated his right leg below the knee due to a complication of diabetes. By many accounts, a diabetic amputee has a worse five-year prognosis than anyone, except those with the most severe forms of cancer. They die piece by piece, suffering. After the amputation, he sank into misery, avoiding interviews.

  Early in 1999, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame came calling again, this time to induct Curtis as a solo artist. His spirits lifted one last time, and he began making plans to attend the ceremony. Before he could leave, diabetes struck again. He went to the hospital, where doctors dis
cussed taking his other leg. He refused.

  Marv went with Altheida to accept the award. He gave a moving speech, despite the squabbles of previous years—and perhaps as a last olive branch before the nasty fights that erupted after my father’s death. “The honor that you bestowed upon [Curtis] tonight moved him a great deal,” Marv said.

  He wanted me to say the following things. First of all, he wants to thank the recording industry … and his fans, who have made it all possible. The artists, through the years, who have recorded his music, that have kept his music alive the last nine years, with the evolution of hip-hop and rap, all of you that have sampled his music, from Coolio to Dr. Dre, Tupac, Puff Daddy, Lauryn Hill, who just mixed and did a duet with Mr. Mayfield—all of you have made his life worthwhile. I said to Curtis, “There’s nothing I can say with the circumstances [that] befell you.” He says, “Don’t feel sorry for me; it could’ve happened to anybody. I was just there.” … All I can say to all of you in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: thank you—thank you for honoring my friend while his eyes are still open.

  After the ceremony, Dad faded quickly, one foot on Earth, one in the hereafter. Just before Christmas, he called Sharon and said, “I need you to come to Atlanta right away.” She sensed something in his voice, something urgent and grave.

  Sharon says:

  I don’t know anything about death, but I sensed that he knew he was leaving. He asked me to come, and that always meant a lot to me. He was in bad shape when I saw him. He wasn’t well. I remember talking to him the day before we left, and it was gibberish. I guess when his blood sugar got really low, his communication was unintelligible. It was just sounds, and whenever that happened, it would frighten me so much. It would make me cry because I wouldn’t know what to do or what to say. His eyes would be piercing me, and he would just be talking and making these sounds and noises, and I don’t know if he was aware of it. When we left, on the drive back to Chicago, I said, “I think that’s going to be it.”