Traveling Soul (39 page)

Dad had quit the Impressions in large part to spend more time at home working at Curtom, but with the wild success of his first three solo efforts, he found himself touring as much as ever. After one of his last shows of the year—a gig at Lincoln Center in New York City—writer Phil Fenty and producer Sig Shore slipped backstage with a script in hand and a proposition. “We hope that you might be interested in scoring this movie,” they said as they handed him the script. My father almost fell out of his chair. He'd wanted this break for years, and it had finally come.

The result would define him for the rest of his life.

“Hard to understand, what a hell of a man,
This cat of the slum had a mind, wasn't dumb.”

—“S
UPERFLY
”

S
omewhere between New York and Chicago, late 1971
—Sitting on an airplane, the
Super Fly
script in his lap, Dad couldn't stop the music from coming. “Wow, was I so excited,” he said. “I'd written a song just flying back home from New York. It took me hardly no time to prepare the songs and that's how it began … I began writing immediately upon reading the script. I was making notes and coming up with the songs already. That was just a fantastic adventure for me.”

Reading the terse script, he felt drawn to the main character, Young-blood Priest. By name alone, Priest was an obvious archetype, a broadly drawn amalgamation of every drug dealer and pimp who stalked the ghettos. The main difference—Priest wanted out. Curtis said, “I didn't put Priest down. He was just trying to get out. His deeds weren't noble ones, but he was making money and he had intelligence. And he did survive. I mean all this was reality.”

Even closer to reality, my father felt, was Priest's fall guy, Freddie. “Reading the script, I started feeling very deeply bad for Freddie,” he said. “Between his friends, his partners, and his woman, he was catching
a hard time. ‘Freddie's Dead' came to me immediately. While you might not know a lot of pimps and drug dealers, we do meet quite a few Freddies.”

Dad crafted “Freddie's Dead” on the Fender Rhodes piano he kept in his basement bedroom of the three-flat house—he said it only took him five minutes to write. He liked to work late into the night, long after we'd fallen asleep. In the morning, sometimes we'd see the aftermath of a songwriting session. As Tracy recalls, “I remember all this legal paper balled up everywhere on the floor. And I remember picking one up to read it and it just said ‘Freddie's Dead' on it. I was like, ‘Who's Freddie? Who's dead?'”

Dad had another song already written—“Ghetto Child”—which he tried to cut during the
Roots
sessions. It fit the
Super Fly
script perfectly. He renamed it “Little Child Runnin' Wild,” and as he explained, “I started writing [‘Little Child Runnin' Wild'] three years ago. It never seemed to come out right, though. And then, all at once, while I was scoring the movie, everything fell into place.”

To score the rest of the film, Dad received rushes of the scenes and watched them on a Sony VO-1600, a huge, heavy, professional piece of equipment that was a precursor to the VCR. The rushes came on three-quarter-inch videocassettes, each one the size of a book, featuring a timeline running across the bottom of the screen so he could sync the music exactly where he wanted in each scene. He had the machine set up in a room he used as a home studio, and sometimes he'd let us watch the tape while he worked. Other times, my brothers and I would sneak in and watch the famous bathtub love scene while he was napping.

Though we were still young, we'd grown accustomed to watching Dad work in such an intimate setting. He made a point of including us in his professional life whenever possible, often letting us sit in the Curtom studio as he recorded. We learned quickly, however, that watching someone write a song isn't nearly as exciting as listening to the finished product.

Dad was more than excited, though. On top of giving him a chance to score his first movie, the
Super Fly
script called for a cameo performance
featuring “The Curtis Mayfield Experience,” which would mark his first time on the silver screen. Because of scheduling conflicts, the band had to shoot the scene for the movie before recording the album, so late in December 1971, Dad called Craig, Lucky, Henry, and Tyrone and said in typical last-minute fashion, “Hey, we're going to go do this movie. We got to go to New York.”

Dad had written a song called “Pusherman” for the scene, but he hadn't had a chance to work it out in the studio. Filmmaker Gordon Parks Jr. needed a finished song for the shot, though, so the band booked a session at Bell Sound Studios in New York to cut it. Craig recalls, “I think we went in at night, because we had to go do the movie thing the next day.” The band hadn't heard any of the other songs my father had written, but if “Pusherman” was any indication, they were in for something special.

When they arrived on set, as Craig recalls, “That's when we found out what movie making is all about. We're just standing there, and they're adjusting the lights. They're trying to get all the entrances right and things.” The band mimed the song while the actors attempted to nail the scene, take after take. The next day, they did it again. As my father learned on the first Impressions' tour, what once seems glamorous often becomes mundane when viewed up close. Movies were no different.

Shooting the scene was a bit tedious, but it only lasted two days, after which the band embarked on another European tour. They had a shaky opening at the Rainbow in London on Sunday, January 23, 1972. The support band, Bloodstone, went on more than an hour late and performed to an indifferent audience. During Curtis's set, the PA crapped out, and the sound engineer didn't know he had to make up for Curtis's soft voice and left the microphones too low. On top of that, Craig's guitar was beset with technical problems. Frustrated, my father ended the show early.

Despite these difficulties, a concert review in
NME
that appeared a week later provided a glimpse into the growing appreciation white audiences in England showed my father. Reviewer Roger St. Pierre wrote, “As for those who did turn out, apart from a fair leavening of blacks, they were the kind of audience you'd expect at any rock show … Perhaps the long-hairs have suddenly, belatedly but pleasingly, turned on to soul
music; perhaps they've always secretly dug it anyway; perhaps they were there just because it's the latest trendy thing. But, maybe it's because—at long last—the barriers between musical forms are really coming down and good music per se is the new fad.”

Whether or not those barriers were coming down in Europe, they still loomed large in America. This dichotomy became more confusing as Dad's popularity in Europe continued growing. He made several TV appearances there, including
The Old Grey Whistle Test
in England and
Beat Club
in Germany. In an interview with the German hosts, he explained his message music for a European crowd that didn't live the day-to-day struggles of life in America, saying:

My comments I guess are more for the States, because black people in the States have gone through many of the things that I talk about—more so, I would imagine than in most countries, even though we do have the prejudices and the hang-ups of not only black people but most minority groups everywhere. I feel that it's very important to me to make people at least take in what I stand for, how do I feel, what do I represent. I think the masses overall today, when they come to see an artist, if they spent their money, they are more interested in the overall picture. Not just make me laugh, or make me feel good, but make me understand what you mean. What do you stand for? Love, appreciation, and anything else starts out first with respect. If I can establish some identity as to making you respect me as a human, and then accept me as an entertainer, then let's do that.

In his mind, that sort of respect wasn't just a personal need; it represented a way to cure the social ills he sang about. As he'd say years later, “Segregation will only end when people get to know the people they think they hate. To start to know somebody is to respect them.”

One host asked him, “So your function is sort of, well, it is similar to that of a preacher?” My father replied, “I would suppose so. My grandmother was a preacher, and I came up in the church, not that I really
try and relate my works with that, but I suppose in one way or another it did have a great effect to me as to my lyrics.” The host then asked about his performance style: “You have this cool and very special way of performing, which is not the cliché of black music being performed. It's very cool, it's very in a way sophisticated, convincing. It's not ecstatic in the sense we apply the word ‘ecstasy' to black music.” “Well, I agree with that wholeheartedly,” my father said. “I'm glad that at least in my presentation, I can bring about more status as to white people understanding that we are not as entertainers just people that turn flips, and holler ‘Shake your shaggy shaggy,' and ‘Do your thing,' but we also are people that think and want to progress and have culture and identity as well. Why not sell that in my music?” That was as full a summary of his musical philosophy as he'd ever given, and it helped create a European fan base that would sustain him in later years.

Apart from television shows, he mostly played military bases in France, England, and Germany, where all the soldiers said the same thing—“I'll be glad when I get back to the world.” “Back to the world” was their slang for returning home. The phrase rang in my father's head, much like “It's all right” almost a decade before. He logged it in his memory for later use.

Dad returned home in February to finish
Super Fly
, but other obligations demanded his attention first. On February 22, he appeared on the
Dick Cavett Show
and felt snubbed when Cavett didn't invite him to sit for an interview as he did with so many other artists. Cavett's producer said, “What does he have to talk to him about?” My father recognized that comment as a dig. It was a negation of the massive success he'd achieved and the toil it took to achieve it.

Next, Dad returned to his old group. The Impressions hadn't recorded since
Check Out Your Mind
in 1970, so they hit the studio to cut the songs they'd been rehearsing at Fred's house. The resulting album,
Times Have Changed
, introduced Leroy Hutson as lead singer. Dad wrote seven of the eight songs on the album, including his most
powerful antiwar song ever, “Stop the War,” featuring a haunting, passionate vocal performance from Sam.

My father produced the album and played on it with Craig, Lucky, Tyrone, and Master Henry.
Times Have Changed
failed to chart, but it contained several powerful songs, including the beautiful title track, as well as a song my father would use later for himself called “Love Me.” The Impressions' first effort without him might not have created a stir, but it was a strong album unfairly overlooked.

After wrapping
Times Have Changed
, Dad received more rushes of the
Super Fly
film and didn't like what he saw. He said, “Reading the script didn't tell you ‘and then he took another hit of cocaine' and then about a minute later ‘he took another hit.' So when I saw it visually, I thought, ‘This is a cocaine infomercial.'” He was no prude, nor from what I heard was he a stranger to cocaine—I was told he'd begun experimenting with it by the time of
Super Fly
, and soon he would enter a period of heavier use. He had also lived the truth of the movie's seedy scenes during his childhood in the White Eagle. “I didn't have to leave my neighborhood to be surrounded by the things that
Superfly
is about,” he said. “It was easier than most scripts because it was about an environment that I knew. It's not that the ghetto is thriving with pimps and pushermen, it's just they are a very visible part of the ghetto. If you stand on the corner, you're gonna notice the pimp, because he's so bright. If he goes by twice, you're gonna remember him and get to know him, while you might not remember somebody else who goes by five times. And you have to understand that half of every big city is the ghetto.”