Curtis Mayfield – 10 of the best

Curtis Mayfield – 10 of the best

Anonymous

Deploying sweet soul and blistering funk – and pouring his gorgeous, honeyed falsetto over it all – Curtis Mayfield veered between breezy optimism and hard-edged political commentary



1. Move on Up


By the time the 1960s drew to a close, Curtis Mayfield had already made an indelible mark on pop. His soulful, gospelised group the Impressions had topped the R&B charts and crossed over to score pop hits, moving confidently from honeyed love songs such as Gypsy Woman to powerful anthems that scored the civil rights struggle: Keep on Pushing, We’re a Winner and, finest of them all, People Get Ready. Echoes of Mayfield’s delicate, playful guitar could be heard in the work of the era’s axe heroes – Castles Made of Sand and Little Wing show Hendrix was a respectful fan – while the Wailers and the Heptones led a march of Jamaican groups covering the Impressions’ songbook, Marley later embroidering lines from People Get Ready into his own anthem, One Love.

In 1968, Mayfield became a mogul in his own right with his Curtom label, signing the likes of the Five Stairsteps, Mavis Staples and the fabulous Baby Huey and the Babysitters. Still, he was restless. Two years later he exited the Impressions to embark on a solo career, with Curtis, an ambitious eight-song album that juggled the sweetest ballads (The Makings of You, later a hit for Gladys Knight and the Pips) with dark documentary (Other Side of Town, a majestic piece, Mayfield whispering: “Depression is part of my mind / The sun never shines on the other side of town”), switching from blossoming strings to hard-edged funk. Curtis also contained what would become Mayfield’s signature tune, this perhapsuncharacteristically upbeat anthem of hope that allied its message to a capillary-flooding horn fanfare and a bustling breakbeat, Mayfield’s vocal - ascending from tenor to falsetto – offering encouragement in the face of adversity.
 
Mayfield would never again sing optimism with such an exhilarating lack of complexity or dark undertow, a mood given flight by the gleaming, heady brass. The instrumental coda on the album version, meanwhile, gave Mayfield’s white-hot studio band space to get discursive on the song’s simple, sublime chord changes, over an irresistible, rib-rattling break from ex-Rotary Connection drummer Donald Simmons and conga genius Master Henry Gibson.

2. (Don’t Worry) If There’s a Hell Below We’re All Going to Go


The flipside to Move On Up’s bright, breezy optimism was this brimstone-flavoured slab of fatalistic sermonising. It opens with ominous electric bass and the eavesdropped babble of a woman who believes if we all just read the Book of Revelations “we would really turn around and straighten out”, before Curtis addresses his people. “Sisters … Niggers … Jews … Crackers …,” he intones, doomily. “Don’t worry … If there’s a hell below, we’re all gonna go.”

What follows is a seething seven minutes of furnace-like funk, wah-wah guitar rasping like rattlesnakes underneath strings and horns blasting righteous reveries, as Mayfield runs down a shopping list of why every single one of us is as doomed as doomed can be. Those sins in brief: using pills and dope, “cat-calling, love-balling, fussing and cussing”, though Curtis suspects we don’t even have to leave this mortal coil to find ourselves in hell, what with corrupt police on the streets and Nixon in the White House.

If that all sounds heavy, well, it is. But, scored by acid-funk, it’s a gloriously danceable, fiendishly thrilling damnation. If there is a hell below, you’d probably be willing to risk the scourging of eternal fire if this were the house band.

3. Stone Junkie


It can’t be overstated: Mayfield’s backing band as he launched his solo career was blistering hot, a fact underlined by this 1971 live set, recorded at New York’s Bitter End nightclub. It’s one of the all-time great concert albums, Mayfield and band revisiting Impressions hits, tracks from Curtis and the occasional cover version – a reading of the Carpenters’ We’ve Only Just Begun, which Mayfield movingly repurposes as a statement on the civil rights movement – as well as this Mayfield original.

A rumination on the drug problem, it features an altogether less judgmental and moralistic Curtis than the narrator of If There’s a Hell Below, Mayfield introducing the track as “something I know everybody knows about … I ain’t gonna point no fingers, cos I don’t want anyone to point no fingers” over a meditative, low-key funk shuffle. Mayfield and bandmates sing the playground hookline “Stone junkie!”, hanging it on all types, all races and all classes, from dirt-poor smackheads to rich pill-poppers with prescriptions from shady doctors.

The song’s message is one of inclusiveness, of a problem that straddles every divide. “I know everybody whose heart is still thumpin’ / is drinkin’, snortin’ or smokin’ on somethin’,” Mayfield sings, prompting an outbreak of laughter both on stage and off. Certainly, you can imagine a touring funk band might be familiar with the realities of the drug scene. 


4. Keep on Keepin’ On


Mayfield’s second solo album, 1971’s Roots, was awash with hopeful paeans to peace, and this lush glide of a track only just pips the psychedelic delirium of We’ve Got to Have Peace as the LP’s most impressive reverie. The studio production is an exercise in maximalism, harps and horns and talking drums and clarinets and strings and saxophone all bolstering Mayfield’s plea for constancy and sending his message skywards.

An appearance on the BBC’s Old Grey Whistle Test the following year delivered a gem of a performance that played the song in the same sort of stripped back orchestration as Mayfield’s 1971 live album, trumping the original and swapping the studio dressing for the simple substance of Curtis’s message of love, but in both versions it’s his sweet vocal – willowy, strong if it doesn’t instantly seem so – that makes the track a delight.

5. Superfly


Superfly was the first of a series of lucrative soundtrack gigs Mayfield picked up throughout the 70s, though he almost didn’t accept it, believing that this infamous blaxploitation thriller – the violent, lurid tale of a drug kingpin outsmarting his competitors and the DEA – resembled little more than “a cocaine commercial”. “It was important for me to counter the visuals in depth,” Mayfield later said, and the songs he wrote for Superfly offer a moral counterpoint to the exploitation thrills offered on screen, whether it’s Freddie’s Dead’s cautionary tale of a low-rung crook meeting a miserable end, Pusherman positing the dealer as a leech on the community he hails from, or this title track, which sees past the supposed glamour of the hero’s lifestyle (“The man of the hour has an air of great power / the dudes have envied him for so long”) and finds a lonely loser racing his way to an early grave.

“Ask him his dream, what does it mean? He wouldn’t know,” scolds Mayfield, adding that “time’s running out / and there’s no happiness”. Curtis hooked this sharp lyric up to a sassy, bold and joyous funk that scarcely sounds like a lesson in straightening up and flying right, perhaps sensing that his message went down better with the youth if dressed in the sounds of a wild night out. “We have enough preachers in the world,” he later said. “Through my way of writing, I was capable of being able to say these things and yet not have a person feel as though they’re being preached at.”

6. Give Me Your Love (Love Song)


Mayfield’s Love Song plays passion very straight and from the heart (and possibly a good few inches further south). The lushness of the arrangements – the work of Johnny Pate, who’d worked with Mayfield since the Impressions – echoed the similar widescreen orchestrations of Isaac Hayes’ score for pioneering blaxploitation flick Shaft the previous year, and the dulcet bedroom symphonies that would soon win Barry White and his Love Unlimited Orchestra chart hits.

Sweeping harp glissandos, scything and trilling strings, slow-burning horns and a carnal squelch of wah-wah guitar (unwittingly coining the archetype for the era’s porno movie soundtracks) conjure a symphony of stasis, a holding pattern of longing, as Mayfield’s falsetto sings of the girl who “makes [his] lungs sigh”, breathing “Give me your love” again and again and again. In this yearning Mayfield and the listener are suspended, until the climax is reached – multiple times – those staccato machine-gun stabs that tore through Hayes’ Theme from Shaft reborn as paroxysms of passion. Gloriously overblown, Give Me Your Love was the physical act played as highest drama, sultry and magnificent. 


7. Right on for the Darkness


Much of Mayfield’s work throughout the 70s would explore political themes, with an insight that went much deeper than mere polemic and sloganeering. This music was complex but empathic, and on his sublime 1973 album Back to the World, Mayfield planted himself in the boots of soldiers returning from Vietnam and struggling to adjust to life at home.

In the opening title track, a soldier’s return is greeted by his mother’s cry of “the war was never won”, the discovery that his “woman has long been gone (this doggone war lasted too damn long)”, and the knowledge that “soldier boy ain’t got no job”, the refrain of “people don’t give a damn” balmed by the sweetness of Mayfield’s soulful tune.

However, that sweetness drains away for the album’s most desolate moment. Right on for the Darkness opens with a lonely guitar strum, and Curtis singing, “I am blind and I cannot see.” The sightlessness is not what breeds his blues, however: it’s that evil that men do, the injustice, the powerlessness. As the horns, strings and guitars – riding a writhing, agonisingly funky groove – tighten and sharpen, Mayfield’s chorus call, “Right on for the darkness”, finds him glorying in his blindness, for ignorance of this world is bliss.

It’s perhaps Mayfield’s most bitter message, set to his most melancholic funk, as he sings of a release only oblivion can offer, one many Vietnam veterans found any way they could. Bill Withers would also sing the veteran’s blues on his powerful I Can’t Write Left-Handed, but the sheer hopelessness of Right on for the Darkness told a story that much of American society was reluctant to admit while the war was still raging, and even for years afterwards.

8. If I Were Only a Child Again


This further cut from Back to the World sheds the minor-key bleak-funk, delivering instead three minutes of gladdening, soul-slaking, upbeat pop, with a wriggling and irresistible rhythm track, and booming blasts of brass that feel like bolts of sunshine between the blankets of grey.

Listen closely, however, and even this joyous-seeming anthem is rooted in the disillusionment of the post-Vietnam mind state, Mayfield craving the dashed innocence of childhood, when everything “seemed so colour-bright / there were never such things to me as Black and White”, when he was “too young to understand … death and war and the roles of man”.

In the final verse, Mayfield’s imagining his child-self speaking truth and wisdom to the adults in charge and bringing peace on Earth, a redemptive dream that doubtless appealed to former gospel singer Mayfield. But the salvation spoken of in the New Testament rarely bothered Mayfield’s songs, certainly not in neo-realist masterpieces like Back to the World and its 1975 sequel There’s No Place Like America Today, which offered an unflinching portrait of depression scourged urban America. 


9. Do Do Wap Is Strong in Here


Not every movie Mayfield scored was a smash. Short Eyes was a little-seen adaptation of a hard-edged off-Broadway play by Nuyorican poet Miguel Piñero, written while he was in Sing-Sing for armed robbery. The title invoked prison slang for a child molester (the lead character is accused of raping a girl, his life threatened by the other inmates) and the movie chronicled life, love and death behind bars, with Mayfield appearing in one scene to sing this account of the realities of prison to his fellow inmates.

Over the bleakest blue funk, propelled by a rumbling, roiling rhythm track and Mayfield’s fiery guitar – matching Ernie Isley for emotionally articulate, plaintive wail – his frail falsetto sketches out the brutal truths of jail, a “devil level” he compares to “snake pits and Lucifer burns”, where he witnesses rape in the shower block and must front as a “black motherfucker” to win respect of his fellows. But he knows it’s all a facade, and the overriding mood of Do Do Wap Is Strong in Here is one of depression and resignation, as Mayfield longs for his woman on the outside and admits that “all alone, all alone, all alone / I get stoned”.

Such uncompromising funk proved a hard sell in the charts: the single barely scraped the R&B top 30 in 1977, out of step at the height of disco. But it has since won a cult following and an epic Ashley Beedle re-edit that draws out its silken gloom.

10. Tripping Out


Punishing social commentary was hardly going to keep the lights on at Curtom Records, and the imprint folded before the 70s were out, Curtis moving on to the Robert Stigwood Organisation as that label was enjoying the windfall brought by disco and top signings the Bee Gees’ multi-platinum soundtrack for Saturday Night Fever.

Mayfield had flirted with disco before, and had leavened his more political work with diaphanous balladry on earlier albums, but LPs such as Heartbeat (1979) and Something to Believe In (1980) stuck hard to that groove. The choicest track off the 1980 set, Tripping Out was a dreamy love song that swapped Mayfield’s typical syncopated grooves for a solid 4/4 stomp, wreathed in his trademark strings, a bassline thick and sturdy enough to rest a pint on, and Mayfield’s gleeful, thankful love cries.

While he struggled to find chart success following his Curtom years, Mayfield remained a hard-working recording artist and touring attraction, until 1990, when a collapsing lighting rig at an outdoor concert in Brooklyn left one of soul’s greatest figures paralysed from the neck down. Seven years later, he released his last album, New World Order, its recording sessions requiring a Herculean effort on the part of quadraplegic Mayfield, who – lying on his back, struggling to draw enough to breath to sing – had to deliver the songs one line at a time. The ailing star died on Boxing Day two years later.

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