Early on in “The Makings of Curtis Mayfield,” H.E.R., the 27-year-old R&B pop star who directed the film and appears in it as its interviewer and tour guide, offers a telling observation about her subject. “Curtis Mayfield,” she declares, “is one of the greatest of all time. And people don’t even know.”
I agree with H.E.R. on both counts. We’ll get to the greatest-of-all-time thing in a moment — though if you don’t know much about Curtis Mayfield and want to cut to the chase of why he was one of the greatest, I’d recommend that you simply go to YouTube and call up the nine-minute-long album version of “Move On Up,” which might be his most extraordinary song (though there’s a lot of competition). It’s built around one of those grooves that’s truly epic and truly transporting: the syncopated horns, the dancing bass, the rapidly strumming guitar you only half register (though it’s there in the mix like stock in a gumbo), the high violins for that touch of romance, and, more than any of that, Mayfield singing about a new world in which Black people could feel a freedom and mobility so large it was daunting — a message of liberation that the song somehow gorgeously embodies in three minor chords, as if it were perched, in its very harmonics, between the tragedy of the past and the promise of the future. It is, quite simply, one of the greatest songs ever recorded.
If that’s the case, though, why is it that people…don’t even know? Curtis Mayfield wasn’t an obscure figure. He was a star of his time, winning acclaim and popular success, first with the Impressions, his honey-smooth Motown-adjacent vocal trio of the ’60s (their 1965 single “People Get Ready” was named by Martin Luther King Jr. as the unofficial anthem of the Civil Rights movement), then as a solo artist in the ’70s, when he put out several albums that are stone classics, notably his 1970 debut, “Curtis,” and the 1972 soundtrack to “Super Fly,” one of the most indelible of all movie soundtracks (like the music for “Saturday Night Fever,” it’s practically a movie unto itself — and, if anything, a better movie than “Super Fly”).
Yet I think what H.E.R. really means is that if Curtis Mayfield is recognized as a major artist, he isn’t thought of, in quite the way he should be, as a giant. As a pioneer of the sound and vibe of the ’70s whose influence was impossibly large. The documentary makes the essential point that “Curtis,” an album shot through with social protest, was released before Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” Sly and the Family Stone’s “There’s a Riot Goin’ On,” or Stevie Wonder’s “Innvervisions,” which are thought of as the three formative albums of Black social protest. Rolling Stone recently chose “What’s Going On” as the greatest record of all time, and whether or not you agree with that (there’s a bit of room for debate there), I’d argue that “Curtis” is an even more transcendent album. That’s the level of accomplishment we’re talking about.
And that doesn’t begin to measure how Mayfield’s soul-funk imagination cast its shadow over such disparate sounds as the lush romantic melancholy of Philadelphia Soul (which I would say he set the table for), the percolating elegance of Chic, or the falsetto rapture of Prince. And though Mayfield chose not to try and become a disco artist, his flavors are all over disco.
So why isn’t he thought of in quite those larger-than-life terms? “The Makings of Curtis Mayfield” isn’t like other music docs — it’s structured as a series of conversations between H.E.R. and a handful of the musicians and artists who bear the influence of Mayfield’s genius (Dr. Dre, Maxwell, Mary J. Blige, John Legend, and others). Yet the film has plenty of the archival footage of Mayfield you want to see: concert clips, performances on “Soul Train” and “Hullabaloo,” interviews. And what comes across is the fascinating way that his look and persona simply didn’t fit the image of a revolutionary music star.
Sly Stone and Prince and Jimi Hendrix were extraordinary-looking people; that was part of their mystique. Smokey Robinson was as beautiful as his voice, and there was a poetry to that. Curtis Mayfield was short, with a rabbity grin and small rectangular-wire-framed glasses hanging halfway down his nose. He looked cute and brainy, like a soul-brother version of Bob Balaban, rather than sexy and swaggery. His look, in a funny way, didn’t match the voice that came out of it.
He was, in fact, one of the only singers of his era with a soaring falsetto croon that could rival Smokey Robinson’s. He sounded, at times, like he was fronting the Stylistics. But he also had a unique quality, which Maxwell pinpoints in the documentary, of sounding like he was talking right to you as he was singing. His conversational style in interviews is pensive and soft-spoken, almost professorial, which hooked up to the note of insistence just underneath the angel-cake vocal beauty. That’s what gave his social-protest lyrics such a personal dimension. When you listen to “Freddie’s Dead,” off “Super Fly,” he seems to be talking about a real person, and the song comes off as an elegy for so many Freddies — the junkies and the hustlers, innocent in their desperation, who were “pushin’ dope for the man” (a phrase that anatomizes, in four words, how the chains of heroin could be the bottom rung of a system). Mayfield’s soaring lyricism is incandescent, yet he sings out the message like a clarion call.
“The Makings of Curtis Mayfield” glances through Mayfield’s career with a deft perception of its key moments, from the record label he launched in Chicago in the late ’60s to the way that the “Super Fly” soundtrack was released before the movie, allowing it to set up the latter’s success. There are moments when you wish the film had more of the rock-solid information that’s the heart and soul of most music docs. (I was surprised when I learned — not from the film — that Mayfield had 10 children.) And there are times when H.E.R.’s conversational method lacks momentum.
That said, what I miss seeing in too many music documentaries is a deep critical appreciation of the artist in question. And that’s what H.E.R. brings to this movie in abundance. The exchanges she leads, often with musical instruments on hand or (in the case of Dre) while sitting at the recording console, so that they can dial up certain tracks within a song, have the feel of highly personable fan inquiries into what made Mayfield special, whether it’s Dre talking about why “Super Fly” is his favorite album of all time, or Stephen Marley discussing Mayfield’s influence on his father Bob Marley, or Ernie Isley demonstrating what a visionary guitar player Mayfield was, or Mary J. Blige stating that “Curtis Mayfield was the soundtrack to inner-city living.” He was, of course, widely sampled by the hip-hop artists who revered him.
The film confronts the devastating accident that took place on August 13, 1990, when Mayfield, as he was being introduced at a concert in Flatbush, Brooklyn, was struck by a falling lighting tower that left him paralyzed from the neck down. He was able to keep composing and singing, and we see a clip of him discussing this tragedy with touching equanimity. He died in 1999, at 57, of complications from type 2 diabetes. Yet as haunting as the last chapter of his life was, the film sends us out on a high note, cutting among its all-star interview subjects as each one listens to, and marvels at, “Pusherman,” his great funk track off “Super Fly,” a song that’s almost novelistic in its inside-street-life menace and snap. No artist of the time ever plugged you more beautifully into what’s going on.
