#72 – Curtis Mayfield – Super Fly (1972)

I had somehow been laboring under the impression that this was a double album, and when I discovered that it was not, I was probably a little happier than I should have been.  It wasn’t only a function of this particular music–double albums are harder to squeeze in in one sitting, and I had just gotten through Physical Graffiti.  They represent something of a pain in my ass, whatever their musical content.  But it’s also true that I’ve never quite managed to love this record the way I feel that I’m supposed to.  I had a CD of it in my car forever during a period of my late teens when I was a pizza delivery guy, and would dutifully try to listen to it, but rarely got very far into it.  I think it was a version that had tons of bonus tracks and outtakes, from whence probably sprung my misconceptions as to the dimensions of the album proper.

Curtis Mayfield is an artist I feel genuinely sheepish about not being more into.  There are some artists I’ve tried to like, but don’t feel too bad for having failed to, and others who I have given at least the appearance of attempting to like while secretly feeling that they aren’t really as great as most people think anyway.  But I really think Curtis Mayfield is great–not just soulful,but like like a wise, saintly figure, and that my disinterest in most of his music is my own failing.  I’ve become particularly aware of the great influence he’s wielded over lots of people that I do love.  I’m especially interested in his guitar playing, which has never leapt right out at me, but which I know is highly respected for its gentle and utterly unique style–one achieved in part by using an unconventional tuning.  In reading up recently on Axis: Bold as Love, I learned that the more gentle, soul-inflected songs on that album, which tend to be my favorites, were quite directly influenced by Mayfield’s earlier work with The Impressions.

A career spanning anthology of his work appeared on the list already, and there again, I confronted my basic disinterest in various elements of his music: its strong orientation toward social issues, its often overly lush orchestration, and Mayfield’s voice, which I wish I found as angelic and soulful as many people do, but which always sounds a little pitchy and unsure to me, way up there in the upper register.  And yet I do feel that he’s an artist that it’s worth my time to keep trying with.

This album represents a turn toward a grittier sound and heavier themes in his work, which does not wind up quite working for me either.  The cinematic flavor of the music feels a little overbearing and dated to me, and the toughness of the subject matter doesn’t seem to fit all that naturally with Mayfield’s basic gentleness.  I know I’m wrong about all of this, but that’s just the way it has always felt to me.

This listening–a nice copy of the record on a big stereo system–improved my experience of the album somewhat.  Some of the more familiar songs, like “Pusherman” and “Freddy’s Dead,” have been in my life long enough, if not very consistently, that I’ve begun to feel a fondness for them that I didn’t at first.  I was also pleased to discover some songs near the album’s end that were less familiar, but which I found myself getting into.  I was particularly struck by the pairing of “No Thing on Me (Cocaine Song),” and “Think (Instrumental).”  These were followed by the more familiar title track, which closed the album on a strong note. I found that I was actually left wanting more after all, albeit maybe not a whole second album’s worth.  I think it just means that I really ought to go back and listen to it again soon.

Source: LP  – a super clean, almost unplayed looking original copy.  It’s way too nice a copy to belong to someone who doesn’t love it, which is another reason to keep on revisiting it until I do.

#178 – Curtis Mayfield & The Impressions – The Anthology 1961-1977 (1992)

I take my two year old daughter to a weekly gym class at kind of a soulless corporate children’s edutainment facility in our neighborhood.  It’s not a bad way to spend a morning, for her–running around, burning off steam, and almost interacting with her peers.  For me, it can be a bit stressful.  All of one’s own psychosocial ambivalence comes right back to the surface in watching your own child learn to navigate the universe of others, and seeing my sweet deferential daughter get knocked around by under-supervised, overconfident little bastards does little to assuage my basic underlying suspicion that life is bullshit.  But she likes it, and that makes me happy.

The other good thing about it is that one of the teachers, aside from being great with the kids, has awesome taste in soul music.  As the kids are running around bouncing and climbing and whatnot, the music playing through his shattered iPhone is likely to be Otis Redding or The Jackson 5, or some other perfect music that a lesser person would never think to play for young kids, but which they seem to love.  Once a kid (not mine!) was having an all out melt down, and he put on Solomon Burke’s “Cry to Me.”

A few classes ago, I had one of those great moments when a song comes on and you know you know it, but can’t quite place it till the singing begins, and in that interim, you get to enjoy the positive right on-ness of the sound without your preconceptions about the artist getting in the way.  As soon as the vocals came in, I recognized it as The Impressions’ “It’s Alright,” and was pleased to find myself enjoying it so much, because I am in general haunted by my failure to adequately appreciate the artistry of Curtis Mayfield.  There are some albums on this list where my tack is to explain why I think the music on it is crap, and is undeserving of a place on this list.  This is emphatically not one such case.  I fully support the thesis that Curtis Mayfield was a great, large-souled musical genius, and I blame some deficiency in myself for not usually being as swept up by his music as was in that moment.

In listening to the first of the two discs in this collection, I felt about it as I have in my other attempts at listening to The Impressions–which is to say kind of puzzled by how little I enjoyed it.  Individual songs, like “It’s Alright,” pique my interest, but the general tenor and timbre of the music leaves me feeling vaguely..annoyed.  There’s a few possible reasons for this.  One is that I generally prefer the dryer sounds of southern soul over the more lushly produced soul of the north.  A lot of The Impressions’ stuff is not only too orchestrated for my tastes, but a little too…uplifting sounding.  Another is a certain ongoing squeamishness I have for listening to sociopolitical message music as entertainment in my capacity as a reasonably well-off white male.

These are all factors, but I’m pretty sure that the real reason is probably the very thing that many people love about this music–which is that I can’t warm up to Curtis Mayfield’s voice.  I appreciate its gentleness and sensitivity, and the personal largesse it portends, but there’s something in his constant falsetto that I find draining to listen to.  It feels forever right on the verge of getting pitchy, particularly against the backdrop of the other Impressions’ harmony singing.  I don’t think he ever literally ever goes out of key, but my sense that’s he right on the edge of it makes for a fatiguing listening experience.

The onset of the holidays complicated my getting through this entire collection in a timely fashion, and so I took the unusual step of listening to disc two in my car while driving up to my Mom’s house for Christmas.  It’s a bit of a trade-off, since the stereo isn’t as good, and yet the effect of driving changes–usually for the better–ones relationship to the music.  Whether for that reason or otherwise, I did find that I enjoyed at least parts of the second disc more than the first.  The later Impressions material sounded better to me than the earlier stuff–a little more gritty and less florid.  And while the “message” angle became a little more overt than I would ordinarily care for, I found songs like “This is My Country” and “Choice of Colors” among the most stirring and satisfying in the set.  I felt similarly about “Move on Up,” the first solo Curtis Mayfield song on the collection.

Much of the other solo stuff I was less fond of.  Superfly is coming up much higher on the list, so I’ll refrain from saying much about it now.  But in general, I found a lot of the solo material a little too gritty in a way that felt somehow out of step with the gentleness of Mayfield’s voice and persona–like a slightly too deliberate quest for relevance.  It also didn’t help that many of the songs were eight or twelve minutes long, as was the style at the time, when their point could have been made just as well in three or four.  But then right near the end, there was a song (either “So in Love” or “Only You Babe”-I forget) that just floored me.  It had a warm, mature soulful sound, almost in the style of Marvin Gaye, and, though it was presumably a later and more minor effort, I thought it sounded a lot better than much of what had come before it.

Again, though, my ultimate feeling is that Curtis Mayfield was a superbly talented artist (I love, for example, the songs he wrote for Major Lance), and I can only chalk up my own relative disinterest in a lot of his music to some peculiarity of my taste.  The music on this collection rightly belongs here, and I’m glad to own it.  It’s just that, a handful of tracks excepted, there won’t be too many occasions that I’ll find myself listening to it again.

Source: CD