Traveling Soul (53 page)

No one was taking care of the children. It was dirty. I didn't want my feet to touch the floor. The cabinet's hanging off by a single screw. I withdrew from him, and I stopped wanting to come and visit. We had some bumps in the road during that time when I was in high school. I remember he called me one day. My mother said he was drunk. I couldn't tell. But he called me one day, and he was angry with me because I was acting like I didn't want to see him. I wasn't returning his phone calls. He was using profanity towards me, and I got really upset. I was crying. My mother took the phone
and started telling him that he's not going to call up here and upset me and talk to me in that way.

While he lost control of his career to changing musical tastes, he lost control of his personal life to drugs. Family relationships became strained. Tracy stopped touring with him in the mid '80s and began running the studio. “It was very frustrating because at that point I was managing the studio, and I needed him a lot sometimes for some decision-making things,” Tracy recalls. “And that was tough that he wouldn't even return my calls. I couldn't get in touch with him.”

After a misunderstanding between Altheida and Tracy, Dad shut down the studio completely. “I was managing the studio, and all of a sudden, the next day, the doors were locked,” Tracy says. “I had to find another job. Supposedly they were remodeling in there but there wasn't nothing going on. It was ridiculous.” Curtis III also caught the brunt of Dad's wrath. Curt played saxophone and was asked to go on his first tour with his father but got kicked off at the last minute after a screaming spat that almost came to blows.

As all this happened, my father talked about reviving Curtom. He still hadn't given up, but he needed a distributor, so along with William Bell and a few other artists, he brought a proposal to John Abbey. “They didn't have a record deal,” John says. “They had kind of been mistreated and cheated by some of the other companies. They were disenchanted. They said, ‘Why don't you start a distribution company so that we can put out product through you?'”

John started Ichiban Records. “It was something that Curtis pushed me into,” John says, “And when he did, I pushed back and said now you need to do your part. And he did.” Because RSO wouldn't release the name Curtom without payment, my father signed a deal with John under the moniker CRC—Curtom Record Company, later called Curtom Records of Atlanta, Inc.—and began recording a new album called
We Come in Peace with a Message of Love
.

The album is uneven, and it failed to chart. As John says,

Some of the tracks were very good, but there were tracks that he would put on albums that people thought, “Curtis, why are you putting that on there?” It was the way he saw it. We had discussions that I won't say got heated, because that never happened, but certainly there was definitely disagreement there, because looking at it as a record company, you want it to sell the best you could. And you knew that once it got out there in the marketplace, people aren't going to be kind like we are. Some of the reviews on the
We Come in Peace
album were not really that great, and I think that hurt him.

After
We Come in Peace
, perhaps realizing that he could no longer dominate commercially, my father stepped even further from the spotlight, taking the longest recording break of his career. Five years would pass before he recorded again. In that time, he fell further into obscurity in America, but his popularity continued overseas. He formed a new road band called Ice-9 featuring Lee Goodness on drums, Buzz Amato on keyboards, and Lucky's brother LeBron Scott on bass. They toured Europe and Japan in 1986 and '87, including places my father had never been, like Austria, Spain, Scotland, France, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Denmark, and Sweden. Even in semiretirement, he still didn't know how to take it easy.

By that point, I had graduated from college and decided to go on the road with him for the first time, acting as a glorified roadie. I spent almost three months in Europe, riding around drinking all the European beer I could hold. My father was never a big drinker—when he did drink, he preferred cheap wine or a three-dollar bottle of champagne. One of my jobs on tour was bringing girls backstage that the band picked from the audience. I'd introduce them to my father, but he had mellowed quite a bit from his younger days of chasing women. Now, he just felt anxious to get back home and see Altheida.

The tour gave us precious time together, and we talked through the days and nights on long bus, plane, and train rides. We also discussed working together in a more formal sense, giving me a chance to put my
college degree to work and fulfilling my childhood hope of protecting him by handling the finer points of business he often missed.

Dad particularly enjoyed performing in England because the people there loved him. He also liked Germany, where he played several military bases. Being a reformed sports car fanatic, he loved watching the German roadsters zoom by on the Autobahn. He'd stare at them between games of chess on the bus. In fact, that trip marked the first time I ever beat him at chess. Even though he'd taught me to play as a child, he never let me win—that just wasn't his nature—so my victory felt even sweeter.

In the summer of 1987, the band cut
Live in Europe
at the Montreux Jazz Festival and released it on CRC/Ichiban. “I think all of us were very lucky that that was so well-received,” John says. “I think that gave him a lot of confidence back.” Dad certainly seemed to grow in confidence as the European crowds flocked to see him. He sold out venues in every country and performed at a few summer festivals, where he absorbed the energy of fifty thousand screaming fans. He said, “You have to remember that when I was having all my hits in the States, my records really weren't being exposed properly in Europe. So maybe this is like a catch-up situation. People seem more loyal in Europe. I see some of the same faces at my concerts each time I come over, and that's a comfortable feeling.”

He also got another shot recording a movie soundtrack for Keenen Ivory Wayans's blaxploitation parody film
I'm Gonna Git You Sucka
. Wayans asked him to score the whole movie, and Dad tinkered around in the CRC studio for a while, but the result sounded thin and low on inspiration. Wayans scrapped it and only included one song of my father's, “He's a Flyguy.” It appeared next to songs by artists who counted Curtis as a hero. One of them was KRS-One, whose group, Boogie Down Productions, had just released their 1987 album,
Criminal Minded
, which many credit with starting gangsta rap. Years later, KRS paid my father homage, saying, “Curtis Mayfield was hip-hop.”

As the 1980s came to a close, my father found a new niche. He didn't have to record unless he felt the urge, and he could count on his loyal fan base overseas to sustain him between records. He felt pride as he watched his influence spread through the younger generation of musicians.
More and more artists sampled his music, including Eric B. & Rakim, LL Cool J, Big Daddy Kane, N.W.A, and Biz Markie. Listening to what they did with his songs, my father gained an affinity for hip-hop. “I don't see any great differences between what people are expressing now and what we used to do,” he said at a time when the new art form was under serious critical and cultural attack. “There's observations on contemporary goings-on, personal freedoms, civil rights, and discriminations of minorities. Then of course, there's always love, the ins and outs and movements and the happenings of love.”

Responding to critics' complaints against sampling—one of the most controversial aspects of the new music—he said, “It's not that they can't create; they've made a new way of creating by sampling. These are new ways of putting music together, which is fantastic. It's as if you put together a collage of pictures into a pattern, so you look at it from afar and say, ‘Wow look at that,' and then you come up close, and these are pictures that you are familiar with put together in a different manner.”

He understood the role his music played in the new art form, but he knew his boundaries. His attempt at making disco had taught him a valuable lesson—he had to stay true to himself regardless of changing tastes. “We're talking about character here,” he said.

You can't expect everyone to like you, but they're sure as hell not going to like you if you jump around trying to accommodate, and can't find yourself. I like a lot of today's fire-up party sounds, but if I borrowed those sounds, who could trust me? Who could feel they know my character? If I'm to retain any credibility, I have to be myself. There's a time for every mood, and even the kids into techno-rap may want to step into the cultural museum and pull out some Mayfield. Hopefully I'll be one of those treasures that will always be there.

In 1989, he toured with the Impressions again through Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia, mirroring the first tour they did after the success of “For Your Precious Love” thirty years before. The next year, he
had two projects on his mind—a new album and movie soundtrack. It was almost like old times.

Shortly after
I'm Gonna Git You Sucka
, my father and I became more serious about working together. In July 1990, I left my job in Chicago and moved to Atlanta, where Ichiban gave me a desk in their office. Dad dumped a stack of boxes on me, and I began sorting through them—old contracts, the Warner Brothers deal from 1975, concert agreements. I had joined the family business.

One of my first assignments was helping coordinate Dad's involvement with the
The Return of Superfly
soundtrack. It was the second
Super Fly
sequel—he'd wisely rejected an offer to score the forgettable
Super Fly T.N.T
. in 1973. On the three songs he contributed, he explored a new R&B subgenre called new jack swing, and he cut a hit single alongside rapper Ice-T with “Superfly 1990.” I felt I was making a smooth entry into the music business, until it came time to shoot a music video with Ice-T.

Dad and I bought tickets together to fly from Atlanta to New York City for the video. We were scheduled to arrive the day before shooting began. When it came time to leave, I knocked on his bedroom door. Speaking through the door as usual, he said, “Go ahead. I'll come tomorrow morning.” I tried to convince him to come with me, but he refused and assured me he would be there for the shoot. The next morning, he didn't show up. He wasn't even in New York City. I sweated it out, assuring the record executives from Capitol he would be there, not entirely sure myself if it was true. They began shooting other scenes to avoid blowing the budget, and several hours later, in walks Curtis Mayfield as if nothing had happened. Somehow he could get away with these things, and everyone loved him and his performance. For my part, I was just happy he didn't leave me hanging. Even so, I decided to approach him about his drug use. I had recently witnessed a deal take place in his driveway, and I asked if he was OK. He told me not to worry about it. We never spoke of it again.

Soon after, New York state senator Marty Markowitz invited my father to play an outdoor concert series he staged every year in Flatbush, Brooklyn, at Wingate Field. “Curtis Mayfield was making a comeback, and he was certainly an icon of the black community,” Markowitz says. “There was certainly a lot of respect, and devotion and love, and that's why I hired him.” Ice-9 was scheduled to tour Europe again the next week, and Dad figured it would be a good chance to get the band geared up while making some money.

He flew to New York, leaving the band to drive the equipment from Atlanta in a van. I considered driving with them, but I didn't feel like sitting in a van for twelve hours, so I stayed home. I spoke to him by phone before the concert, and he sounded in high spirits. Promoters expected a big turnout at the show. Weathermen predicted a bad storm, but Dad didn't pay it much attention. If they had to cancel because of rain, the band still got paid.

Before we hung up, I said, “How's the weather?” Hazy, overcast, hot, he said. “You think it's going to rain?” No, he said. “You know if it does rain you still get your money?” I know, he said. My father had performed in concert thousands of times—he wasn't scared of a little bad weather.

Besides, he always felt safest on stage.

“A terrible blow, but that's how it go.”

—“F
REDDIE'S
D
EAD
”

W
ingate Field, Brooklyn, August 13, 1990
—A heavy storm slithered across the Empire State, menacing Senator Markowitz. He didn't want to cancel the show—ten thousand people had already shuffled into the park and taken seats or splayed on blankets in the grass. They came to see Curtis Mayfield, and Markowitz felt it his duty to ensure that happened. He hounded his weather contacts, hungry for updates. As showtime approached, he got word that grim weather rumbled an hour away. He decided to put my father on early, thinking even if they had to cancel, Curtis might at least get off
one
song.