"Back To The World" by Curtis Mayfield
In which a Chicago legend attempts to replicate a masterpiece.
“Back To The World’:
Rising from the infamous Cabrini-Green projects, where he taught himself to play piano and guitar (in the atypical key of F sharp), Curtis Mayfield began performing gospel and doo-wop on the street as a child. This ad-hoc practice soon coalesced into a group, first called The Roosters and eventually known as The Impressions. Their first hit “For Your Precious Love” (#3 R&B, #11 Pop), launched them nationally, although the stresses caused lead singer Jerry Butler to leave the group in 1958. Curtis Mayfield saw an opening, picked up his pen and stepped to the microphone. 1962’s “Gypsy Woman” (#2 R&B), featuring an early Mayfield lead, kept the group alive in the limbo that followed Butler’s departure, and “It’s Alright” (#1 R&B, #4 Pop) marked the beginnings of the lush sound for which they would become renowned, built of Mayfield’s quicksilver guitar and producer Johnny Pate’s free-floating string and brass arrangements.
But things were happening, and Mayfield couldn’t help but notice. Soon his songs began to soundtrack the Civil Rights movement. Songs like “We’re A Winner”(#1 R&B #14 Pop), “Keep On Pushing” (#1 R&B, #10 Pop) and “People Get Ready” (#3 R&B, #14 Pop) pulsated beneath and wafted above protest marches, sit-ins, and freedom rides.
But the dream dragged on and equality was still a chimera in Black America. As the sixties sputtered to their pathetic close, cynicism swallowed optimism whole and a new darkness gripped the charts as the seventies loomed and soul music began to transform into funk. Mayfield took his leave of The Impressions in 1970, two years after forming his own record company, Curtom.
His solo career was, at its outset, a sustained rush of commercial and critical successes. Each album built upon the last- and then came Superfly. Despite its Technicolor title track (#5 R&B, #8 Pop) and the moral ambiguities of its namesake film, Superfly was an unrelenting portrait of the rot stretching its hands through the gutters and ghettos of America’s cities. It recognized no comfort or hope. It was a massive hit, topping the album charts for four weeks and spawning two Gold singles. It remains one of the rare soundtrack albums to outgross its parent film, its dark, ornate funk the blueprint for legions of imitators over the next decade. It launched Mayfield into the upper echelons of his industry and set the bar impossibly high.
In the years that followed, Mayfield would become a victim of his own success, spreading himself too thin, writing and producing for all of Curtom’s acts, raising a young family, and trying to keep his own career viable. It was a struggle for him, as first evinced on 1973’s Back To The World.
In January 1973, the Nixon administration signed the Paris Peace Accords, beginning the US withdrawal from Vietnam. The war had marauded across the American psyche for nearly ten years, and the trauma ran deep in the ghetto: the Selective Service System overwhelmingly conscripted impoverished Black men.
This loss was catastrophic. Black men constituted 11% of the fighting force, but 18% of overall combat deaths. The Pentagon made belated efforts to correct this, but by then the war was nearly finished. What young men were left (whatever was left of them) were directed back onto the big birds and launched indifferently through the heavens home. The last of them left Vietnam on March 29, 1973, six weeks before the release of Back To The World.
“If I Were A Child Again”:
It’s a weary album, nowhere more so than on the title track, where a veteran, arriving amid a fanfare, is soon disillusioned by an embittered, divided society where his sacrifice counts for nothing. But nowhere is Mayfield’s own personal exhaustion more apparent than on lead single “Future Shock” (#11 R&B, #39 Pop). It’s “Superfly” re-animated, right down to the chorus hook. “Right On For The Darkness” is a minor-key class rumination with a lyric which often sacrifices coherence for rhyme. It would become an unfortunate hallmark of Mayfields’ lyrics- the foundation is mostly solid (as on “Future Song”, where Mayfield implores God to help us to be better spouses)- but attempts at depth or detail fail to register. Sometimes a groove can make a song (the lilting highlight “If I Were A Child Again” (#22 R&B), but some songs, (“Can’t Say Nothin’”) are really just grooves.
Back To The World began Curtis Mayfield’s gradual descent from the dizzying heights he reached, first with The Impressions, then on his own. The hits got smaller from here and were largely confined to the R&B charts. He was still writing strong material, but in diminishing numbers. This pattern is crystallized on 1974’s slight Got To Find A Way.