Traveling Soul (46 page)

Writing duties for the soundtrack fell on Lowrell Simon, who had scored minor hits under Carl Davis with his group the Lost Generation. Not long after, Simon would also write for another Curtom group called Mystique, featuring two former members of the Lost Generation.

After wrapping
Three the Hard Way
, Dad began work on another soundtrack, this one for the film
Claudine
. Since the film featured a female protagonist, he wanted a female vocalist. As luck would have it, Gladys Knight and the Pips had just left Motown and signed with Buddah
in 1973, releasing “Midnight Train to Georgia,” which hit number one pop and R&B and won a Grammy Award. They were hotter than ever, and they agreed to sing for
Claudine
.

As he had with
Super Fly
, my father related to the story of
Claudine
right away. The movie follows a single mother on welfare and the ravages it wages on her children, her romantic relationships, and her life. “I had experienced all of that growing up,” he said. “Welfare, living in a home without a father; I knew welfare pretty good, because my mother was on it.” Just like with
Super Fly
, he could get inside the characters and write about their lives with depth and empathy. In a way,
Claudine
also allowed him to pay tribute to his mother's struggles. On cuts like “Mr. Welfare Man,” he seems to write in Marion's voice:

They just keep on saying I'm a lazy woman
,

Don't love my children and I'm mentally unfit

I must divorce him, cut all my ties with him

'Cause his ways they make me sick

It's a hard sacrifice not having me a loving man

Society gave us no choice, tried to silence my voice

Pushing me on the welfare
.

Gladys Knight gives a superior vocal performance, capturing the anguish of so many women stuck in a similar situation. I watched many of Gladys's vocal sessions from the control booth and developed a huge crush on her. I'm sure I wasn't the only eight-year-old boy in love with her, but I got to watch her perform in a way few others have. I'll never forget the way she made time to talk to me during breaks in recording.

The next cut, “To Be Invisible,” features some of my father's most heartbreaking poetry. Inspired by a scene in the film, he wrote about how poverty can steal one's individuality and control, with lines like “To be invisible will be my claim to fame / A girl with no name / That way I won't have to feel the pain.” Again, Gladys's performance touches the soul, and Dad liked the arrangement so much he hardly changed a note when he recorded his own version for his next album.

Claudine
also features the supreme funk of “On and On,” which hit number two R&B and number five pop as a single, as well as another hit single in “Make Yours a Happy Home,” and Gladys provides a beautiful rendition of “The Makings of You,” originally from the
Curtis
album. The soundtrack shot to number one on the R&B chart, and the movie did just as well, grossing $6 million and earning a bevy of award nominations, including an Oscar nod for Diahann Carroll, Golden Globe nominations for Carroll and James Earl Jones, and a Golden Globe nomination for “On and On.”

The only downside for my father was that the album came out on Buddah, not Curtom. Still, he climbed back on top doing something he loved. As he said years later, one of his favorite things was “hearing someone else record one of your songs, something that you had prepared, produced, and worked out for another artist—to find that it was a hit, to know that you could not only do for yourself, but you could do for others.”

Dad also had plans to do for himself, and he began cutting his next album,
Sweet Exorcist
. Perhaps because of the demands on his time, he relied mostly on songs he'd given to others, including “Ain't Got Time” (the Impressions), “To Be Invisible” (Gladys Knight and the Pips), “Suffer” (Holly Maxwell), and “Make Me Believe in You” (Patti Jo). Still, he said, “The album allowed me to say some things I'd wanted to say for quite a while, things that were in my mind which I wanted to get out.”

The retreads often followed the original versions closely, but there were important differences, especially on “Ain't Got Time.” The song is funkier than the Impressions' version, and my father's phrasing is looser. He also augmented his voice with multitracked backing harmonies, a trick he'd use with great effect on his future work. He changed the song's structure, wrote a new chorus, and added new lyrics, including the lines “Make a mess of me / Which wasn't supposed to be / We were supposed to change / It couldn't be arranged.”

He'd written the first version of the song—one of his last singles with the Impressions, recorded during the
Check Out Your Mind
sessions and
released in early 1971—as his relationship with my mother crumbled. He cut the version on
Sweet Exorcist
with the new lyrics just as his relationship with Toni, his “spiritual wife,” ended.

Dad never explained his breakup with Toni, but just before she disappeared he had a peculiar mishap, severing the tendon on his left middle finger. The injury was so serious he faced the prospect of never playing guitar again. He tried to play it off, saying he was holding a glass pot and it broke in his hand. Even as a child, I didn't buy that explanation.

Doctors reattached the tendon, but he couldn't straighten his finger, so he had to attend physical therapy. I sat with him in his rehab sessions, mulling over the accident in my mind. The best I could guess was that Toni stabbed him. I had no evidence, just a feeling. Their relationship was always volatile, and a stabbing certainly wasn't outside the realm of possibility.

Whatever happened with Toni, it didn't take my father long to find someone new. He met Altheida Sims through Craig and quickly fell in love again. They'd stay together until the end of his life. The new romance spurred one of his greatest love songs, the title track, “Sweet Exorcist,” on which his falsetto sounds lighter, thinner, and more sexual than ever. As he coos and croons, guitars and organ weave around each other like lovers entwined. “Sweet Exorcist” is a mature love song, too, full of the contradictions of life. He sings about depression and hard times but also about the persevering power of love. He even mixes in message music, singing, “The love she gives, it makes me feel so black and proud.” And he shouts out Annie Bell, singing, “I know I believe in the spirit, Traveling Soul was alone, a part of me.”

Next is his version of “To Be Invisible,” at which point his fans might have noticed that for the first time since he left the Impressions, he hadn't presented a single message song on his new album. He made a conscious decision to ease back on jeremiads after the success of
Super Fly
, proving himself a canny evaluator of his audience. “We've shouted the message from the roof-tops and if people haven't cottoned on to it by now then they never will,” he said. “It's like a paper that carries nothing but headlines: in the end they lose all effect. To carry on writing in that vein
would be just like beating people's heads against a brick wall and in the end they resent it.” He also spoke about the direction he intended to go, saying, “It's now time to carry the message in a more personalized vein, that way people relate easier. General statements are all very well but fit the statement into a personal context which the listener can place himself into and you then have something with much more impact. That's the way I'm writing songs now.”

With that in mind, the only message-like song on
Sweet Exorcist
—“Power to the People,” an infectious anthem in the mold of “Keep On Pushing”—makes more sense. Unlike his previous solo work, it doesn't bite or sear. It encourages, lifts, prods. Critics lambasted the song's title and what they saw as its trite message, and by 1974, the phrase was indeed tired—the Panthers had used it as a motto, saying, “Power to the people; off the pigs,” and John Lennon had a popular single of the same name in 1971. Still, the song is heartfelt and lyrically complex. Perhaps part of the song's joy comes from the fact that Nixon stood on the verge of resigning the presidency. He'd recently been caught up in the Watergate scandal, and the public hearings played out on national television. Dad had good reason to sing, “God bless great America!” Nixon was going down.

Despite a number-three R&B hit with the single “Kung Fu,” however,
Sweet Exorcist
faced even more disapproval than
Back to the World
. A review in
Rolling Stone
was emblematic:

Like many an overextended or depleted artist, Mayfield has dug into his past for material for this album, which sounds hastily conceived and then competently executed to meet some contractual deadline. Four of the seven tunes were written prior to 1971…. The very titles of the two new numbers, “Kung Fu” and “Sweet Exorcist,” signal the lack of invention…. The music is competently routine. Almost all of it is in the
Superfly
boogie-down mold, but without the extras that made the best
Superfly
cuts stand out…. All
that's left is Mayfield's basic competence in using the studio. At this point, the Superfly-derived material the Motown writers have been coming up with for Eddie Kendricks is far superior to what Mayfield can come up with.

Robert Christgau, music editor of the
Village Voice
famous for his “Consumer Guide” record reviews, gave
Sweet Exorcist
a grade of C, calling “To Be Invisible” the only interesting song on the record. Of course, out of all reviewers of my father's post—
Super Fly
work, Christgau was usually most off point.

Dad rarely wasted his time paying attention to critics, but perhaps these reviews contained valid points. It was an undeniable fact that only two songs on
Sweet Exorcist
were new. My father had stretched himself way past thin and didn't have the time to create to his highest standards. “I can't come in [to Curtom] and write, which I didn't know at the beginning,” he said. “I thought I'd be able to do that, but when things start happening, there's decisions to be made, you have your other artists to deal with. So usually I find myself as a client in my own place—I have to call in and book my time like everyone else.”

Sweet Exorcist
also contained many halfhearted nods to current trends without fully engaging any of them. Most obviously, there was the title itself. Now a legendary horror film,
The Exorcist
came out at the end of 1973 and remained a cinematic phenomenon well into the next year when Dad released his album. While my father claimed the film had nothing to do with his album title, the comparison wasn't hard to make. At the same time, martial arts and Eastern mysticism became hot, due in large part to Bruce Lee's recent death and David Carradine's hit TV show,
Kung Fu
. It is worth noting that the top-selling single of 1974 was a disco song called “Kung Fu Fighting.”

While Eastern mysticism had enthralled many black Americans for decades—Sun Ra, for example, had pushed it in Chicago since Curtis was a child—it now hit another renaissance in black culture. Still,
Sweet Exorcist
's far-out cover—“a skeletal Hokusai sea with reefs of doomed and skeletal men, which met with little critical favor,” as one writer described
it—drew questions from fans and critics alike as to what exactly my father was getting at. In an era when artists like Parliament, Earth, Wind & Fire, and Sly Stone took mysticism in R&B to new heights,
Sweet Exorcist
lacked the conviction to stand out in the crowd.

Despite these problems, the album sold. It went gold, hitting number two on the R&B chart. Continuing the downward trend since
Super Fly
, though, it only reached thirty-nine on the pop chart. The album also marked another shift in Curtis's music. From that point on, he returned to his Impressions-era ratio of one or two message songs per album, surrounded by love songs.

In a way, he had no choice. The Watergate scandal was everywhere, inescapable, thrust into the face of a generation still reeling from the Pentagon Papers' proof that the government had sent sixty thousand boys to die in Vietnam based on lies and deception. The public needed an escape from politics. Disco gave it to them.