The fly

Learn how Curtis Mayfield turned a 1972 film soundtrack into a smash-hit LP. Michael Putland/Getty Images. In late 1971, when Curtis Mayfield began writing ...

“I’m glad I was in a position to let everybody see what the Academy Awards are — a personalized social club with exclusive members,” Mayfield said. “It’s as if you put together a collage of pictures into a pattern, so you look at it from afar and say, ‘Wow, look at that,’ and then you come up close, and these are pictures that you are familiar with put together in a different manner.” That Mayfield crossed over with such an unabashedly race-conscious album marked a monumental step in popular music, but he still struggled against segregation and racism for the rest of his career, including two particular, stinging humiliations. The Chicago Tribune called it a “sickening and dangerous screen venture.” A review in Newsweek said, “Going to see yourself as a drug dealer when you’re oppressed is sick. Super Fly briefly topped The Godfather as the highest-grossing film in the country, and was the third-highest-grossing film of 1972. 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. 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. 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. 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. It was important to Mayfield that Priest ended up winning in the end not through violence, but through his intellect. 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. 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.