Curtis Mayfield’s ‘Super Fly’ Soundtrack: 10 Things You Didn’t Know
From RollingStone.com-
In late 1971, when Curtis Mayfield began writing Super Fly — the 1972 film soundtrack that would turn out to be his magnum opus — he should have been burned out. He had spent a decade with the Impressions, becoming one of pop music’s de facto voices of the civil rights movement with songs like “Keep On Pushing” and “People Get Ready.” He had written hundreds of songs for dozens of other artists [Major Lance, Gene Chandler, and the entire roster of OKeh Records, to name a few]. He had also dealt with the dramatic changes of the Nixon era on his first solo album, 1970’s Curtis, and his 1971 follow-up, Roots. But somehow, with Super Fly he found another gear, a new level of artistry that would define him forever. “I always felt those songs will be relevant forever, because they are so strong,” said guitarist Phil Upchurch, who was an acolyte of Mayfield’s style and played on the Super Fly album. “Curtis Mayfield was as gifted as Bach or Beethoven.”
Directed by Gordon Parks Jr., the film Super Fly follows Youngblood Priest, a drug dealer who wants to make one more big score with his partner, Eddie, and then leave the game forever. But Eddie sees no other option than a life of crime, and when a group of crooked, racist white cops offer them as much drug business as they want, plus protection, Eddie falls for it, leaving Priest blackmailed into a corner. The film — an early staple of the blaxploitation era that kicked off a year earlier with 1971’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and Shaft — ends with Priest double-crossing the double-crossers, walking away with his money, life, and swagger intact. It was important to Mayfield that Priest ended up winning in the end not through violence, but through his intellect.
Blaxploitation soundtracks produced some of the best work from many musical giants of the era, including James Brown, Marvin Gaye, and Isaac Hayes. Still, Mayfield’s Super Fly stands alone. The songs are a mixture of scene-setting [“Little Child Running Wild,” “Give Me Your Love”] and character studies [“Freddie’s Dead,” “Super Fly,” “Eddie You Should Have Known Better”]. But the album is so much more: a personal manifesto, a passionate cry, and an incisive sociological statement on race in America. To celebrate Mayfield’s gutsy, gritty masterpiece on its 50th anniversary, here are 10 things you didn’t know about Super Fly.
1. Super Fly wasn’t Curtis Mayfield’s first work for film, nor was it his last.
Before Super Fly, Mayfield wrote two songs for 1969’s volcano-themed disaster film Krakatoa, East of Java, a critical and commercial failure for many reasons, not least of which is that Krakatoa is west of Java. That film has had a strange afterlife in popular culture, with references by Monty Python, on Seinfeld, and most recently in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in … Hollywood. After Super Fly, Mayfield did some of the best work of his career, writing the soundtracks for films such as Claudine, Let’s Do It Again, and Sparkle, but these songs are often overlooked since he wrote them for other artists to sing [Gladys Knight and the Pips, the Staples Singers, and Aretha Franklin, respectively].
2. Mayfield understood the film from personal experience.
“I didn’t have to leave my neighborhood to be surrounded by the things Super Fly is about,” he told Rolling Stone in 1973. “It’s not that the ghetto is thriving with pimps and pushermen, it’s just they are a very visible part of the ghetto. If you stand on the corner, you’re gonna notice the pimp, because he’s so bright … and you have to understand that half of every big city is a ghetto.” He even lived through a frightening, real-life version of the scene where a gang tries to extort money from the film’s main character. One day in the early Seventies, Mayfield came in to work to find the Blackstone Rangers, one of Chicago’s most notorious street gangs, lurking in his office at Curtom, demanding money. He refused, but agreed to perform a concert in Chicago and give them the proceeds to “help the neighborhood.”
3. The songs were recorded in four days.
Sessions began at the end of 1971, when director Gordon Parks Jr. asked Mayfield and his band to appear in the film as a nightclub act performing behind the actors. Parks needed a finished song for the shot, so Mayfield took his band to New York, recorded “Pusherman” at Bell Sound Studios at night, and shot the scene the next day. Then came a hiatus of several months, during which he wrote a new album for his old group, the Impressions [Times Have Changed], toured Europe, and came up with the idea for his next album, Back to the World. Then he cut the rest of the soundtrack over three days at Curtom Studios on the South Side of Chicago, recording everything but his vocals live. This often required as many as 40 musicians to be in the studio at the same time. “It seemed about capturing a certain electricity, a live energy,” engineer Roger Anfinsen told Vibe in 1996. There was another reason, as guitarist Craig McMullen recalled: “The advantage of it is, if you have a full orchestra, when you place your licks, you don’t have to worry about your licks bumping. You can hear everything that’s going to go down.”
4. Super Fly was the end of an era for Mayfield, marking his split with his second wife, his longtime arranger, and his manager and closest friend. During the recording Mayfield was in the middle of a separation from his second wife, Diane, mother of his second son, Todd, and his first daughter, Sharon. He moved into the basement apartment of a three-story building he owned in Chicago [[he gave his grandmother the top floor) and wrote most of the album there.
After the recording, Mayfield ended up in a bitter dispute over a songwriting credit — for the haunting, gorgeous instrumental “Think” — with longtime arranger Johnny Pate, and the two never worked together again. Then came a more monumental split: Eddie Thomas [the “Tom” in Curtom], who had been Curtis’ manager and closest friend since the late Fifties, was unhappy with the direction Mayfield was going. After Super Fly, he sold his shares of Curtom and left the label. Mayfield signed with a new manager, Marv Stuart, and moved the Curtom studio to the North Side of Chicago. In two short years, he had cut ties with nearly everything and everyone that had helped him rise to the pinnacle of his career. Part of the impetus behind the move was his frustration with racism in the music industry and the cap it put on his ambitions. As Diane Mayfield told me during an interview for my 2016 book, Traveling Soul: The Life of Curtis Mayfield [written with Todd Mayfield], his decision to hire a white manager was at least partly based on this. “Marv was Jewish, so of course he had more connections,” she said. “I did say something to Curtis about it, and he said, ‘Well, Eddie can’t … he’s Black. He’s still trying to get a little crack in the door, but Marv can open the door.’”
5. Mayfield was shocked when he saw the first rushes of the film.
“Reading the script didn’t tell you ‘and then he took another hit of cocaine’ and then about a minute later ‘he took another hit,’” Mayfield said in Peter Burns’ Curtis Mayfield: People Never Give Up. “When I saw it visually, I thought, ‘This is a cocaine infomercial.’ I did the music and lyrics to be a commentary, as though someone was speaking as the movie was going.” This approach is perhaps most powerful on “Eddie You Should Know Better,” where Mayfield sings directly to Priest’s partner.
The soundtrack dropped a month before the film, an odd way to orchestrate a release, but a canny move in this case. It allowed Mayfield’s message to influence the audience before they even saw the film. Perhaps audiences left Shaft singing along with Isaac Hayes, but they came into Super Fly singing with Mayfield. As music journalist Michael Gonzales recalled in Rolling Stone, when he saw the film in Harlem, “The audience hummed along, mouthed the words, or sang aloud to the soundtrack.” This arrangement had another benefit, too: Since blaxploitation films were made on a shoestring budget — the actors in Super Fly had to wear their own clothes as wardrobe — to have such a major musical hit precede the film was the kind of publicity the filmmakers literally could not buy.
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