My Life with Earth, Wind & Fire Page 6

  Chess Records had lots of artists, many of them characters—and no one was more of a character than Sonny Boy Williamson. During my second month of working, the studio door was flung open, and Sonny Boy strolled in, wearing a custom-made outfit. His outrageous garb was half blue and half tan. One leg, one arm, and everything else blue on one side, and tan on the other—straight down the middle! He also had a bow tie that was blue on the front and tan on the back. He stopped as the door shut behind him, allowing us to take a good look at his grandeur. I looked over at Satterfield, who glanced back at me with big wide-open bug eyes. There was a moment of silence and then an explosion of laughter. We didn’t mean to embarrass or disrespect him, but we just couldn’t hold it in. He looked ridiculous.

  Sonny Boy sat down. Smiling widely, he pulled out a beautiful, shiny silver flask. He loved his gin. Taking a swig, he reached for his harmonica and started playing and tapping his big foot. Sonny Boy had large hands. He pulled the harmonica out of his mouth and sang the blues a capella. We all watched and listened with the reverence he deserved. Hearing Sonny Boy Williamson play and sing was like listening to a musical history of America. His blues were soulful, raw, and angelic. Yes, he was a character, but he was also a princely musician.

  In the early days of working at Chess, I was like a sponge. I absorbed everything about recording. I learned about microphones, which ones to use for different things. I also watched Billy run back and forth between the studio and control room.

  “Maurice, let’s move your drum set three feet to the right,” he said.

  “Why?” I replied.

  “The kick drum will have more air to move that way—it will resonate more.”

  Perpetually moving my drum set around, he explored how the drums sounded in each particular song. Microphone placement was critical to him in capturing the vision in his head. The relationship between where the drums and bass amplifier were placed was critical in Billy’s ideal “radio sound” of 1963 and ’64. Distinguishing that sound also meant clearly defining the difference between the verse and hooks of songs. “Break the verse down fifteen percent more,” he often said to me. He had to have his verses at just the perfect energy to set up his big hooks. Billy exemplified what would become the modern-day pop record producer, creating an atmosphere that ensured a perfect balance between pure calculation and pure spontaneity.

  Never mind the education I was acquiring in music production, though: the biggest part of my instruction was focused on the business of music. Here too Billy was a great teacher. He started to hip me to the publishing game: songwriter royalties, publishing royalties, mechanical royalties, and how they were different from one another. He had started a publishing company with Leonard Chess called Chevis Music. This was significant to me businesswise, but also racially. Billy was one of those rare black men of that era who were truly seen as equals to white businessmen. This made a tremendous impression on me.

  What was it about him? Was it his impeccable dress, his knowledge of the business, or his command of the English language? I realized that Billy understood where he was in his time. The civil rights movement was taking root in the South, and a lot of black folks in Chicago weren’t taking white folks’ racist shit anymore. Billy understood that, and applied it to the world of Chess Records. Historically, our best foot forward meant a subservient, lesser foot forward. In other words, no matter how perfect you were at your job, you were still resigned to being under the thumb of some white person, even if that person was less intelligent or less skilled than you. Even though Leonard and Phil were the owners, Billy asserted himself in the record company as a man with full-fledged and equal capabilities, without a hat-in-hand attitude.

  I don’t think Leonard and Phil Chess were bad guys by nature. They just had a dog-eat-dog mentality, highly competitive and, yes, on some level exploitative. I believe they thought that this was the way things were done. There were so many white record label owners, and they were not the worst. But I do believe that we as a people—black folks, that is—were way more gracious with them, meaning whites in the music industry generally, than they were with us at that time. Many white artist/musicians would come by the studios to talk to the musicians about how to do this and how to do that musically. But many of them would not share with us how to do things, businesswise. They wanted to keep it secret, privileged information. I knew that I would have to learn the business of the music business on my own.

  I did not want to become a victim. Many of the artists at Chess Records were lulled into a state of confusion. There was a family atmosphere at the office and studio. When artists needed money for rent, they went to ask Leonard for an advance—that is, payment against their future royalties. Well, I could pay my own rent, thank you very much. I started to view a lot of the cats at Chess as victims of the world. Most of the time they just sat around not talking about anything related to the business of music, just complaining about the situation they were in. I started to measure their complaints versus the actions they took to change their lot in life. Their inaction scared me. Many of the musicians fell into the “you’re not smart enough to handle this, so I’ll handle it for you” trap. Their lack of self-sufficiency led to all kinds of craziness. I did not want to end up like them. I resolved that I would learn all I could about how business is done.

  The majority of the cats confused the outward signs of success with actual financial security. One day we were standing outside in front of 2120, and this beat-up Rolls-Royce pulled up. As the driver got out, we noticed that a rope was holding up the rear door. We fell out with uncontrollable laughter. The driver, his hat cocked to the right side, paid us no mind as he walked around the car and proceeded to methodically unwrap the rope. He opened the door, and songwriter Tony Clarke popped out and pimp-walked into the building. The driver systematically wrapped the door back into place with the rope and drove off to park. Hilarious.

  God bless Tony, though—a very likable guy, he was just caught up in that craziness I’m talking about. He had a hit with Etta James in 1963 with “Pushover,” and he was behind the eight ball to get another. He wanted to show that he was still happening—a kind of keepin’ up with the Joneses. Tony taught me a valuable lesson that day. Success, with all its trappings and seductiveness, is nothing more than a fog that appears and disappears with the next passing wind.

  I knew for certain that I didn’t want to be solely dependent on Chess Records. I was pushing to do as many gigs as possible, one of those lessons out of The Laws of Success. I wanted to keep myself independent. I believed it was the only way to survive.

  I got a gig at the Hungry Eye on North Wells Street with Fred Humphrey and an exceptional bassist, Bill Terry. I worked there four nights a week for almost two and a half years. Great gig, great steady income. The Hungry Eye was known for having a more progressive, avant-garde, and modern lineup. There were tons of clubs in the area of Chicago known as Old Town—the Outhaus, the Plugged Nickel, and many more—offering music ranging from straight blues to folk and Latin. I believe my love for Latin music was born in those many nights spent on Wells Street. On one occasion I saw Sérgio Mendes and Brasil ’66 at a club that I used to play and hang out in, Mother Blues. I liked his brand of samba, pop, bossa nova, and Latin music rolled into one.

  Around that time I formed a group called the Quartet 4, modeled after the Modern Jazz Quartet. The Quartet 4 consisted of myself, Dick Sisto on the vibraphone, Bill Terry on bass, and the one and only Ken Chaney on piano. One of the by-products of working with those guys in 1964–65 is that I met a wonderful guitar player, Pete Cosey. Pete, who was related to Ken Chaney by way of a cousin’s marriage, was a guitar player without parallel. As fate would have it, Gerald Sims, the guitar player in the Chess rhythm section, left, and I got Pete the gig. Pete and I became fast friends, as we spent a lot of time together working and hanging out. Our Chess working hours were from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m., Monday through Friday. After work and on weekends we did sessions all ove
r Chicago. In those days Chicago was what Los Angeles would become in the 1970s, the hub of the recording studios business. There was RCA, where Curtis Mayfield later recorded Super Fly, and Universal Recording, at that time the most technically advanced independent recording studio in the country. They recorded the Platters, the Moonglows, James Brown, Quincy Jones and his orchestra, Gene Chandler, and many other stars. There were also places like Paul Serrano’s, where I would later record the Emotions, and Columbia, where we worked with producer Carl Davis. Major Lance’s hit “Monkey Time” and Jackie Wilson’s classic “Higher and Higher” were both cut there. Tons of record labels, tons of studios—and the Chess rhythm section worked in just about all of them.

  One of the reasons that the Chess rhythm section was often hired was that we saved producers money. Satterfield, Pete, and I were tight as hell. Record companies knew we could get the proper groove quickly. As good as we were in those early days, my reading of music wasn’t up to Satterfield or Cosey’s. One of the things I would do was listen to a demo of the song and take a loooonnnng time setting up my drums—anything to buy time, so I could learn all the hits and punctuation of the song before I sat down to play. But this trick of mine got exhausting. I had to get my reading chops together.

  I enrolled at the Chicago Conservatory of Music. The first day, I introduced myself to my instructor, Jim Slaughter.

  “How good are your rudiments?” he asked.

  “I’ll show you,” I confidently replied.

  I sat down at the drum set and played many different rudiments on the snare drum. I played the double paradiddle, the flam accent, and the double stroke roll. I quietly laid the sticks down, believing I had knocked his socks off.

  “Mmm, that’s pretty good. Let me show you something.” Jim sat down, took a deep breath, and went through maybe ten different drum rudiments. He played them on the cymbals, on the snare, and on the tom-toms—mixing them up, adding his own flavor, all the while keeping a four-on-the-floor bass drum beat. It was amazing. He stopped. Silence. My mouth was wide open. I was stunned by his technique.

  “You’ll be that good in six months,” he announced.

  I was, and I continued to study with him for a year. During my time at the conservatory, I was still working at a feverish pace. The rhythm section did a lot of sessions for Carl Davis at Okeh Records. We used to play for Walter Jackson, the Artistics, Major Lance, and a bunch of unknown groups. However, I never got the feeling that Carl Davis liked me. I think he was more into Al Duncan, a great drummer who played on all the Impressions stuff. Before I enrolled at the conservatory and got my sight-reading tight, I did my little trick of listening while the demo was playing to learn the song. I missed some of the cues on one session, and that pissed Carl off because we were on the clock. The whole point of hiring us as a rhythm section was to get us in and out of the studio as fast as humanly possible.

  On the upside, there was Johnny Pate. Pate was a great arranger/producer whom I loved working with. He gave me a lot of freedom to play out; in fact, he encouraged it. He would come to my music stand, turn my music sheet over to the blank side, and say, “Just play, kid, just play.” Other times I would come to his session and he would write over the sheet music in big letters: “PLAY!” I understand why Curtis Mayfield loved to work with him. Curtis was all about individual expression. Johnny Pate knew all the orchestral “correct” things to do, but he would often break the rules, which turned Curtis on tremendously.

  I met Curtis Mayfield on a rainy Sunday afternoon in 1965. He was walking into Johnny Pate’s studio as I was walking out. Sweetest man ever. In the years and decades that would follow, I tried to express to him over and over again what the Impressions’ music meant to me. I often told him how his music injected into me the power of consciousness-raising through song. “Keep on Pushing,” “People Get Ready,” and “Check Out Your Mind”—it was music that lifted black folks up instead of tearing them down. Curtis’s songs were spiritually and politically engaging, all wrapped up in three minutes and thirty seconds. They were like gentle short sermons.

  One day in late August of 1965, I went to work like on any other day. Near quitting time, Billy called up a little Carl Smith/Raynard Miner ditty, “Rescue Me,” sung by the talented young Fontella Bass. Fontella had a crisp voice that really cut through the music, and she was an outstanding piano player.

  During the session Raynard and Carl were very specific about what they wanted—a Motown swing feel with big drum fills and a loud backbeat. I counted the song off, and by the second verse, the smiles on all of our faces showed that we had something special. We did two takes. When we finished, the room was silent. You could’ve heard a rat licking ice!

  “Rescue Me” turned out to be a big-ass smash for Chess, one of the biggest hits in Chess Records’ history. After the rhythm section had our names on that hit, we were wanted everywhere.

  As important as “Rescue Me” was to my career, another musical association would greatly influence me as a drummer, producer, and performer. Billy Stewart was a young singer who was a performer unequaled by anyone. He could drive audiences crazy. Discovered by Bo Diddley, he already had one hit under his belt. Billy, a lovable guy, at first didn’t have much faith in the studio band versus his own, but through Billy Davis’s prodding and our musical abilities as a band, we won him over. Billy was a huge dude, I mean huge—maybe three or four hundred pounds—but that did not get in the way of him being a graceful and agile performer. He could do microphone stand tricks where he threw the stand down to the floor at just the perfect angle so that it would bounce right back into his hand, a trick Joe Tex and James Brown would master. He could spin around and stop on a dime. A lot of people take credit for it, but Billy Stewart alone came up with that R&B stutter vocal lick. You hear imitations of it from Chairmen of the Board’s “Give Me Just a Little More Time” to Michael Jackson’s vamp in “Remember the Time.” Billy had a beautiful high voice with a distinct style and supreme control over his gift. I played on two of his biggest hits, “I Do Love You” and “Sittin’ in the Park.” Both of those songs, especially “Sittin’,” have big drum fills, which came from Billy standing in the middle of our rhythm section and pseudo-directing me. I was more than willing to accommodate him. He would lean forward like he was going to tip over. I don’t know how he could be so large and yet so nimble. He was like one of those boxing toys that has sand in the bottom, so when you push it over, it quickly pops back upright. Billy Stewart taught me how to pull the best out of a rhythm section by just standing there, half directing, half dancing.

  The biggest-selling and most important album of Billy Stewart’s career was a collection of standards, Unbelievable, backed by the big-band arrangements of Phil Wright. The musical setting, with all of those horns, made the whole album spectacular and authentically pure. Nothing had really been done like that before, combining the contemporary R&B sound of the day with the great American songbook. We recorded “My Funny Valentine,” “A Foggy Day in London Town,” “Secret Love,” and “Almost Like Being in Love.” Stewart’s cover of the Gershwin classic “Summertime” was a defining moment in his career, becoming his biggest hit. A little more than four years later he died in a car accident.

  Our rhythm section had achieved the unique status of being able to play both jazz and soul. Back in those days there was kind of a divide in the music scene between what we call jazz and blues and rhythm and blues. The jazz cats couldn’t necessarily play rhythm and blues: they couldn’t simplify their musicality enough. The rhythm and blues cats knew how to simplify to get that jerk or snap in the groove, but they didn’t have the sophistication or training to handle free-form jazz. We had the jazz chops, and we had our ears tuned to the radio hits of the day. When it came to merging the two, we had no problem. We were starting to make real good dough, doing lots of commercials and outside gigs. Louis Satterfield bought himself a big black Mercedes. We used to kid him that he had the only Benz in the ghetto. Nobody
would mess with his car, either, which was abnormal. He lived down on Thirty-Ninth Street, where cars were stolen like the wind coming off the lake. As a matter of fact, in my neighborhood, stuff was stolen out of apartments like it was nothing. Many people would come home, and everything—I mean everything—would be gone, the apartment completely cleaned out, like somebody had moved.

  The burglaries were enough reason to make me move from Van Buren Street on the West Side to a much bigger, nicer place on Cornell Street on the South Side. It was a beautiful neighborhood. The new apartment had a vestibule, wood floors, and a wide, gorgeous view of the city. The numerous paychecks and new girls started to ease the insecurity that I had brought with me from my days of hand-me-downs and no money in Memphis. I was buying better clothes and spending more time with the mirror, grooming. Up to that point I had been gracefully insolvent all my life. I was reminded of that upon waking up the first morning in my new place. It was not an “I’ll never be poor again” platitude, but a realization that through consistent work I could have a better and more comfortable life.

  The first time I witnessed my baby brother Fred expressing an interest in music was on a visit to Mother Dear’s, not long after I joined Chess Records. Mother Dear was in the kitchen, preparing food. Fred, around eight years old, was planted on the floor, tapping some kind of plastic toy to the rhythm of a record on the radio. He was keeping good time. His tapping wasn’t straight time either, it was syncopated. On my next visit I gave him a pair of drumsticks just as a toy.