Traveling Soul (43 page)

Still, Dad and Toni stayed together. He still hadn't divorced Helen, so he invented a new term, calling Toni his “spiritual wife.” Apparently it was good enough for her. At least for a while.

In November, Dad and his spiritual wife flew to New York to tape the first episode of a new ABC show called
In Concert
. The show featured concert performances from Curtis, Bo Diddley, Seals & Croft, Jethro Tull, and Alice Cooper, all taped at Hofstra University in Long Island.

Hanging out before the taping at Buddah's offices in New York, a publicist told Curtis that
Super Fly
had held the top position for another week. “We lost our bullet, but it was crowding up the page anyway,” she joked.
Super Fly
would hold the top slot for four weeks in total.

My father then left for his taping. As he stepped in the elevator, Buddah copresident Neil Bogart yelled to him, “Curtis, wait! We're gold, Curtis! ‘Freddie' was just declared gold!'” Bogart brought a bottle of wine and a glass. “Well, this is the first time we've ever partied in an elevator,”
my father said. Toni responded, “This is the first time for a lot of things, Curt.”

Toni was right. All told, the singles “Freddie's Dead” and “Superfly” both sold a million copies, and the album went double platinum, grossing $20 million. Just two decades before, young Curtis had listened to his mother cry herself to sleep because she'd given Kenny her last quarter as a birthday present. Now, on the strength of nine songs, he'd generated eighty million quarters. Such fortune boggled the mind of a ghetto child.

At the Hofstra concert, my father looked like the epitome of early-'70s cool—floppy cap hung rakishly over his ear, wire-rimmed granny glasses perched on the tip of his nose, superfly suit with wide lapels cut perfectly to fit his thin frame, patterned shirt open to the chest, lightning-white Fender Strat slung across his body. Surviving footage shows him leading a band that had become tight as hell—Craig's wah-wah guitar intertwines seamlessly, Master Henry hunches over his congas like a mad scientist, and Lucky's wiry frame humps the funk out of his bass. At one point, the camera pans to the audience, where a few black faces dot a sea of white college students, all of them going nuts, dancing whether they want to or not, the rhythm section leaving them no choice. As my father raps about the meaning of “Freddie's Dead,” it's clear he's doing more than performing, he's delivering his message, perhaps to the people who needed to hear it most. Indeed, the white college students in the audience had most likely never seen a black man proudly singing the word “nigga,” or heard about the real-life Freddies who died every day in the ghetto.

Dad's message was as important as it had ever been, as prospects for blacks had become more dismal in Nixon's America. Almost two decades after
Brown
, major challenges to desegregation still existed. A busing program, started as an attempt to give black students access to white schools, was met with refusal and violence. Even when the US Supreme Court ordered forty-one southern schools to desegregate, only six complied.

Meanwhile, 33 percent of blacks struggled below the poverty line, in comparison to 9 percent of whites, and the gains of the movement continued to erode. Nixon won reelection four months after
Super Fly's
release, and it seemed the crusade against Jim Crow had officially ended. Nixon spoke of allowing any remaining segregation to go untouched. Statements like that made sure he won only 18 percent of the black vote.

Though conditions remained dire for the majority of blacks, the gains of the movement also flowered in important ways. Black politicians won elections that would have been impossible even a decade before, including mayoral races in Cleveland, Newark, and Gary. A few months before the
Super Fly
soundtrack's release, the first National Black Political Convention met in Gary, bringing together diverse members of the community like Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, and Shaft himself, Richard Roundtree. Shirley Chisholm, the first black female member of the US House of Representatives, became the first black woman to run for president in 1972, strengthening the burgeoning feminist movement. In addition, black enrollment in college had nearly tripled since the mid-'60s.

Despite those triumphs, the movement of the '50s and '60s had run out of momentum. The dozing conscience of the nation, which King and company startled awake, fell back into deep slumber. Leaders like Chisholm and Jackson tried to keep pushing in the nonviolent mold of King, while the Panthers tried to expand their influence without losing their edge—but as hard as the new crop of leaders worked, they failed to gain widespread traction. Artists stepped into this leadership void. It seemed they were the only ones left who could unite people around the old movement banner. And of all artists, people expected it and accepted it most from Curtis.

Even Marvin Gaye couldn't continue making message music—when he tried to duplicate the success of
What's Going On
, releasing a message song called “You're the Man (Part 1),” it failed to cross over. Gaye worried that he couldn't count on message songs to sustain his career, and with the exception of “Trouble Man,” from his 1972 blaxploitation soundtrack of the same name, he went back to making pop music.

Unlike Gaye, Curtis had been a messenger for so long and done it so well, he'd earned special license to keep doing it. As SCLC's Andrew Young said, “You have to think of Curtis Mayfield as a prophetic visionary teacher of our people and of our time … Martin Luther King was trying to do it legally and morally, but there's a sense that the music has been more successful than the courts and the church. Even as I say that, I think of Curtis Mayfield as the church.”

After
Super Fly
, all of our lives changed forever. Dad became busier than ever before. He was in demand everywhere—in concert, on television, in the Curtom offices, and in the studio to cut with other bands on his roster. As his fame hit its peak, we became more conspicuous as well. Despite the added pressures of fame and his incredible schedule, however, Dad did what he could to include us in his professional life as well as his personal one. Whenever possible, he'd have us backstage at his concerts, where we'd often play chess before or between shows. He'd take us to television appearances and let us hang out in the control room during recording sessions. Watching Dad work, I began to envision myself working with him some day.

With
Super Fly's
success, Dad also dramatically increased his earnings on tour. He began demanding a hefty sum of $12,500 per show plus percentages. Depending on the size of the crowd, he could walk away from a performance with as much as $25,000, and he usually performed three to four times a week. He also appeared on
Soul Train
—where we often accompanied him—lip-synching a bit awkwardly to “Superfly,” “Pusherman,” and “Freddie's Dead.”

The first time Dad took us to a
Soul Train
taping was when the show was still produced in Chicago. It was great to meet Don Cornelius, and I was fascinated to see how a television show was produced. Dad always had a special relationship with Don. He was one of the first guests to appear on
Soul Train
, which helped boost early ratings and give the show legitimacy. Later, after the show moved to Los Angeles, we would fly out and view the production in its more famous, glitzy incarnation. On
one of Dad's later appearances, Don asked Tracy, Sharon, and me if we wanted to go on the floor to be on the show with the other dancers. We were all too intimidated and declined the offer. We'd watched enough on TV to know those
Soul Train
dancers didn't mess around.

During an interview segment after the
Super Fly
performances, an amply Afroed Don offered Dad “personal congratulations on that great score you did,” saying, “After hearing Isaac Hayes'
Shaft
score last year, I never thought I'd hear anything as good. And, needless to say, we did hear that in
Super Fly
this year.” A young man in the audience named Anthony Cole then asked him, “Since
Super Fly
was a very controversial movie, what type of movie would you like to score next, if you had the opportunity?” “It's really hard to say,” my father responded. “I didn't really pick
Super Fly
. It came to me. I prefer happenings.” He wouldn't have to wait long for it to happen again.

As 1972 came to a close, construction began on a sixteen-track studio at the new Curtom location, and Dad began writing a new album. Because of
Super Fly's
massive clout, record stores around the world pre-ordered five hundred thousand copies of his new album, sight unseen and sound unheard. In other words, he had a gold album before he made it. He couldn't fail. That put him in a new and exciting position.

Of course, success is not always what it seems. My father had already learned that lesson. He had everything he'd always wanted—money, fame, family, a movie score, the most popular album in the country, his own label, complete control over his career, all the material comforts and conveniences possible, and as always, a generous share of women. He was only thirty years old. Yet, Eddie's warning that he was going to burn himself out was coming true. “I'm working 24 hours a day,” he said. “This business involves mind and imagination. You can't sit back and enjoy ‘normal' activity—it always involves work.”

He had an unbelievable amount of creativity left within him, a deep well of songs that replenished at the same astonishing rate it always had. That well was in no danger of running dry, but he didn't know how
long fans would keep coming back to it. In two years, he'd recorded six albums between himself and the Impressions. The four he made for himself—
Curtis, Curtis/Live, Roots
, and
Super Fly
—surpassed anything he'd done with the Impressions in terms of commercial success. If this wasn't the peak, how much higher could he climb? As he sang in “Superfly,” “How long can a good thing last?” These thoughts crept into his mind.

“You never want to reach the peak,” he said, “because after all, when you've gone all the way up, the only way to go is down.”

“With such heavy burdens,
It's hard for one to think sometimes.”

—“S
WEET
E
XORCIST
”

C
urtom Studio, North Side Chicago, 1973
—After running errands with me on a Saturday afternoon, Dad stopped by his new office. Sitting at his desk, he pulled out his stash and rolled a joint. “Did you know your father smokes marijuana?” he asked nonchalantly, firing up the joint. “Yes,” I said, although that wasn't entirely true. I knew he did something, because I'd smell the smoke and notice the goofy look on his face, but I didn't know what to call it until then. He occasionally smoked clove cigarettes, too, but he didn't drink much, and he didn't have many hobbies outside of music, so weed became a release valve for the ever-building pressure.