"Got To Find A Way" by Curtis Mayfield
In which Mayfield remains surrounded by darkness- and gives us his candid findings.
“Cannot Find A Way”:
Try as we might, as we scan the century, it’s impossible to definitively determine exactly when it became an accepted fact that the promises of the sixties were never, ever to be kept, but it looks to be somewhere around 1974. There had been assassinations of national leaders; a hopeless war that tainted the entirety of civic life; the inception of and absurdly disproportionate response to the Black Panthers; an uprising of incarcerated men in Attica, New York that exposed the fundamental malevolence of the American judicial system, a deep vein of malevolence that ran all the way up to the top, where Richard M. Nixon resigned the Office of the Presidency on August 8th, three months before the release of Curtis Mayfield’s Got To Find A Way.
Although it marked a precipitous decline in Mayfield’s commercial prospects, Got To Find A Way finds the Gentle Genius maintaining his creative standards: breathless opener “Love Me (Right In The Pocket)” sustains its intensity for seven minutes, despite some silly lyrics- a conditioned mirrored by the ominous “Mother’s Son”. Not all the material is worthwhile; “A Prayer” is a spiritual whiff with an opaque lyric and “So You Don’t Love Me” is a decent breakup song, until its multi-tracked falsetto chorus caused this writer to pine for Mayfield’s mellow tenor of “Gypsy Woman”.
“Love Me (Right In The Pocket)”:
“Cannot Find A Way” is the album’s peak, the most compelling lyric here and the most revealing of its creator: there’s resignation here, as there often has been, but it’s communicated from a far remove. The lyric is the typical urban alienation and frustration, but the urgency and pleading is gone from Mayfield’s voice. He’s no longer exhorting us. The resignation here is a resignation to defeat. It’s the horrible sound of a man who was a hero to many, a veteran of the Civil Rights movement, succumbing to the same torpor and malaise as America itself.
The music on Got To Find A Way is harder-edged, the arrangements sparer. Rich Tufo’s lush studio treatments are still present, but they’re quieter, smaller and less frequent. As was typical of Mayfield in this period, there are no musicians credited, either on the jacket or the lyric insert. Whoever they are, they’re vital throughout, sharp and even jagged at times, with a dim haze reserved for the slower songs. This was monochromatic music to soundtrack a “long national nightmare”. This was music for lean times.
“Mother’s Son’:
But by now the gloom of Got To Find a Way and its predecessor was growing oppressive. Mayfield himself seemed to chafe beneath it. Thankfully for all concerned, it was a rejuvenated Mayfield who recorded There’s No Place Like America Today.