Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 9, 1993 TAG: 9304090151
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOHN ROGERS ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
R&B LEGEND FIGHTS BACK FROM TRAGEDY
"Sometimes I'm up and sometimes I'm down," Curtis Mayfield says jovially. "Today I'm up. Today's a pretty good day."On the surface, it might seem there couldn't be many good days for Mayfield since Aug. 13, 1990, the one when a freak burst of wind blew a light tower onto him at an outdoor concert in New York and left him paralyzed from the neck down.
But Mayfield - soul music legend, Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, R&B guitar player extraordinaire - is also a fighter.
Now, after a run of terrible bad luck, Mayfield, 50, fights back. He uses the same weapon that he armed himself with in years past to speak out for civil rights ("People Get Ready"), to rail against drug abuse before most people took notice ("Freddie's Dead"), to help create a hero of mythic proportions ("Superfly"), to found an R&B group of legendary stature (the Impressions).
Music.
There is already a new album out on Shanachie Records ("People Get Ready, a Tribute to Curtis Mayfield") in which others do his songs. And there's a new Impressions anthology on MCA. But if Mayfield has a say, there will be more stuff, new stuff.
"Some friends are coming over tonight," he said in a recent phone interview from his home in Atlanta. "They're setting me up with a computer with a word processor where I can actually talk to the computer and it will do what I need it to do.
"So I'm hoping I can bring into focus, in song, some of my new ideas. And now, with these voice activators, who knows? Maybe I'll even be able to sing my melodies and lyrics right into my computer and create a song. That will be a fun challenge."
But that's not to give the impression it's been anything like a picnic since Mayfield was hurt.
Told that he hasn't lost his silky-smooth voice, that he sounds, well, just like his records, he is pleased. But then he replies, "I'm laying down as I'm talking to you and I'm pretty strong in this position because gravity becomes my friend. It sort of pulls my diaphragm in and allows me more strength to speak. When you sit up you can't laugh, can't cough, can't belt out a song the way you'd like.
"The hardest thing, of course, is not being able to be as independent as I've always been, to use my limbs, and to get out among the rest of the world as I've aways done," he continues.
"And," he adds after a long pause, "to play my guitar."
Indeed, to play the guitar. Some say he was one of the best R&B players of all time.
He was about 10 when he picked up the guitar his cousin brought home from the Army and abandoned in a corner of his grandmother's house.
He could play some piano, and not knowing any better, he tuned the guitar to sound like the chords he favored on the piano's black keys. The result: the Curtis Mayfield sound.
His musical influences were many. His mother frequently took him to hear classical music, "and being from Chicago I certainly heard my share of the blues."
And each Sunday he heard gospel, at the Traveling Soul Spiritualist Church, where the Rev. A.B. Mayfield, his grandmother, was the preacher.
"So I guess some of all that I must have just picked up," Mayfield says chuckling. "Or maybe I just inherited it. I don't know."
In any case, he was soon writing songs and singing and playing with such neighborhood friends as Jerry Butler, Fred Cash, Sam Gooden, and Arthur and Richard Brooks, and the Impressions were born. He was still in his teens when they signed their first recording contract, and such classics as "Gypsy Woman" and "He Will Break Your Heart" soon followed.
Then came a solo career, during which time Mayfield turned his attention to such topics as civil rights with songs like "People Get Ready," and drug abuse with "Freddie's Dead." The latter came from the 1972 film "Superfly," one of several movie soundtracks Mayfield composed.
But it was the late '50s and early '60s, when the Impressions were always on the road, that he recalls most fondly.
"The whole country was our neighborhood back in those days," he says, recalling how the group would do a show in one city, get on a bus, travel 300 miles and do another. But through all the cities, one stood out.
"I had a special feeling for Atlanta because of the admiration I had for so many black people here all seeming to want to do well and being in business on a mass scale," he said. "And I used to think back then that sometime later in my life I'd live here."
Thirteen years ago he settled into a house overlooking the Chattahoochee River.
The years rolled by as Mayfield worked and raised 11 kids. The Impressions, inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991, periodically got back together.
Then came the show in New York and the terrible months that followed.
But he said there have been too many good times to dwell too much on that.
"I've got a wonderful wife and all the loving fans and family that anyone could ask for," he said. "So tell everybody out there I said hello. Let them know I'm hangin' in there."