Traveling Soul (50 page)

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.

“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”

—“H
ARD
T
IMES
”

W
ally 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 what'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.

Werner's assessment of the rest of the album was also on point. “If ‘It's All Right' suggested that Mayfield had lost control,” he wrote,

the best songs on the album—“People Never Give Up,” “Never Stop Loving Me,” and the searching “Something to Believe In”—demonstrated his profound understanding of the gospel vision. Even as he stood alone on the dance floor, contemplating the inevitable collapse of the disco community, Mayfield testified to the power of love. But whatever the lyrics might claim, the sound warned forebodingly of the coming world in which nothing was going to be all right.

After the triumphs and heartbreaks of the '60s and '70s, no one knew what to expect from the new decade. In the '80s, black people continued the symbolic act of renaming, adopting the term African American to pay homage to their historical roots. Despite this progress, it seemed the beautiful moment to change America had passed.

From the beginning, Dad looked at the '80s askance. Less than ten years prior, he said in an interview, “I think people in general will finally find that violence … is really not the way,” and he'd spoken of “living in harmony, which might sort of force the establishment, who say their way is the only way, to finally feel there is another way to make things work out.” With Ronald Reagan spearheading a conservative backlash, Dad couldn't muster the same hope in the '80s. Now he said, “Everything's changed and nothing's changed…. If it has always been that way, what makes you think it's going to change? It's like a bowl of fat, whichever way you tip it, the rich stuff's going to be on top and the lean stuff's gonna be underneath.”