40 Year Itch : They Called Him Boss Jack

Curtis Mayfield : Billy Jack

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In this funky dispatch from the inner city, Curtis Mayfield tells us how he learned of the death of an old friend, "Boss" Jack. Shot from across the room and left to die on the floor as everyone else bolted out of the room. His friend's epitaph : 

Up in the city they called him Boss Jack
But down home he was a alley cat
Ah! Didn't care nothin' bout being Black

40 Year Itch: Winter is Coming...

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   Three years after "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" and one year after The Intruders made his "Save the Children" the title track of a #12 R and B album, the "Godfather of rap" ,Gil Scott Heron, teamed up with jazz keyboardist Brian Jackson on Winter In America. Among the results: the R and B radio hit "The Bottle"--one of those classic feel good Summer grooves that is actually a despairing lament about the effects of alcoholism in the black community. "H20 Gate Blues" is the kind of rant today's talking heads of cable news can only wish they could come up with. Heron may not convince you he's a singer, but his message and his sense of purpose would lead the way for socio-political rappers to come.

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Curtis Mayfield had to dig into the back catalog to find enough songs to fill out Sweet Exorcist, his sixth solo album. "To Be Invisible" comes from the Claudine soundtrack while "Power to the People" and "Suffer" date back to his 1970 solo debut. Two of the originals reference two obvious 1973-74 trends : Kung Fu and The Exorcist. But even middling Mayfield is refreshing compared to what's coming over the radio these days.

40 Year Itch : Right On, Right On, Summer Soul from '73

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Curtis Mayfield followed up his #1 Superfly soundtrack with more smoothly sung, politically conscious R and B. Back To The World, a Top 20 album, features the Superfly sound-a-like single "Future Shock" but the real treats are the title cut, about a disillusioned Vietnam vets return home to the US ( known as "the World" to vets) and the monster jam "Right On For the Darkness"--one of our very fave cuts from 1973.




To help promote the album, Curtis hosted The Midnight Special June 8, 1973.

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Velvet voiced Bobby Womack keeps it real on this follow-up to Understanding. Facts of Life, recorded in Muscle Shoals, may be Womack's best. The single, a cover of the standard "Nobody Wants You When You're Down and Out", came out a month earlier and peaked at #2 on the R and B charts.

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With the Brothers Johnson backing him up, Billy Preston continued his hit making roll with Music is My Life, featuring the future #1 hit "Will It Go 'Round in Circles". Most of the album is a mixture of feel good piano-based pop and songs celebrating God. The title cut sounds like an off the cuff autobiographical confession: "I may not be the best around/But I'm surely not the worst."

40 Year Itch: Hustlin' Times And Ghetto Streets

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This dude is bad. And he ain't just fly. He's Super Fly.

Has any album captured inner city life better than Curtis Mayfield's #1 charting soundtrack? Tho' the movie has been criticized for glorifying drug dealers, the songs on the soundtrack couldn't be more critical. In his cool falsetto Mayfield sings of  ghetto princes pushing drugs and bedding the "baddest bitches", dead and dying junkies trying to get their next fixes,and children living in one room shacks and runnin' wild in the streets. All set to gorgeous string sections, funky bass lines and a cool conga player( Master Henry Gibson). 

 

It was 1972 --a year after Gordon Parks's Shaft grossed $13 million on a budget of $500,000. Now his son Gordon Parks Jr hoped to recreate the Blaxploitation magic with Super Fly, the story of Youngblood Priest, a cocaine dealer trying to quit the business and go legit. 

  Part of what made Shaft a hit was the Issac Hayes soundtrack which topped the Billboard charts,  won a Grammy and featured the inescapable Oscar Winning single "Theme From Shaft".

    In a documentary on the making of Super Fly , called One Last Deal, writer Phillip Fenty says someone suggested Curtis Mayfield do their soundtrack. As a member of the Impressions and in his solo work, Mayfield had already become a reporter of life in urban America. (Think "This Is My Country").

We had a lot of ideas and Curtis was certainly on our A List but whether we could get Curtis to do it for no money and all the rest of the stuff you know was something else.




Producer Sig Shore sent Curtis the 45 page screenplay and Curtis loved it.Nate Adams, who played the dealer and supervised the wardrobe for the film, says Curtis was a natural fit.

   He has an affinity for this drug hustler scene. He went back to Chicago and he had "Pusherman" in the can. He had "Freddy's Dead" already composed. he just didn't have it as Freddy's dead you know. When he came into the equation I knew we had something .

The movie achieved cult status. But The soundtrack was an even bigger deal --out-grossing the film thanks to two million selling singles "Freddie's Dead" (#2 RandB/#4 Pop) and "Superfly" (#5 RandB/#8 Pop).

The critics heaped praise on the album. Billboard wrote "This LP is not only great but will put the Curtis Mayfield name where it belongs -- at the top." Rolling Stone's Bob Donat wrote "Superfly is not only a superior, imaginative soundtrack, but fine funky music as well and the best of Curtis Mayfield's four albums made since he left the Impressions since the "Gypsy Woman" days."

 Other R and B artists would follow Hayes's and Mayfield's lead. 1972 saw the release of Bobby Womack's Across 110th Street  soundtrack and Marvin Gaye's Trouble Man. James Brown's Black Caesar soundtrack and Willie Hutch's The Mack both came out in 1973.

But by 1979, the year Disco Godfather came out, the days of Blaxploitation films were pretty much over.