As a child who grew up with Showbiz connections in New York, Lenny Kravitz had already seen some of the most exciting live acts of music at the age of 10 or 11.
“I had seen the Jackson 5, I saw James Brown, I saw Miles Davis,” recalls the rock star. “I knew great performance. But This…“, He adds a concert he caught at the Inglewood forum as a new newcomer to Los Angeles-” It was something so deep and mystical and entertaining that it made me blow my mind. »»
The concert was of the ground, Wind & Fire, which made the forum something of a second house in the mid -1970s shortly after Kravitz's mother, actor Roxie Roker, moved him and a pre -adolescent Kravitz on the so that she can play a role on television “The Jeffers”. An R&B outfit of nine hard men was organized by Maurice White, EWF had attracted countless audiences in the first half of the decade, in particular the 250,000 estimated who saw the group play in 1974 at the legendary California Jam Festival in Ontario Motor Speedway. The group had also created studio successes, marking its first album at a million sales with “Head to the Sky” from 1973 and crushing the upper parts of the Billboard R&B graph with singles like “Mighty Mighty” And “Devotion. “”
However, it was only when Kravitz witnessed – with the group on the road behind his sixth LP, “That's the way of the world” – that everything got together for Earth, Wind & Fire: The Songs, The Stagecraft, The Charisma, The Sext Appeal, The Message.
“I had never seen anything like it,” says Kravitz. “It was a complete assault on all your senses. The fact that this file was released and then seeing it live changed the way I perceived things. ”
Released in March 1975 – 50 years ago this month – “It's the way the world” marked the creative and commercial highlight of the EWF. The album with triple platinum was the first in the group to go beyond the Billboard 200, and it generated the only single n ° 1 in the group in the “Shining Star” explosive, which was “”He doesn't love you (as I love you)By Tony Orlando and Dawn of The Hot 100 which May.
“Before this album, we were on our way,” said singer Philip Bailey, one of the three basic members of the EWF as well as the percussionist Ralph Johnson and Bassist Verdine White who still play in the group. (Maurice White, the older brother of Verdine, Died at 74 in 2016.) “We were discovering who we were and what we had. With “it's the way of the world”, you hear the earth, the wind and the fire in our stride. “
You also hear an album that would help shape music for the next half century. Originally designed as the soundtrack of a film B now forgotten on the shady record industry, “it's the world way”, threw crucial bases for the development of Afrocentrism in R&B and for the establishment of the temporary temporary radio format; Its delicate arrangements of strings and horns look towards the neo-Soul while its textures of Synth Blippy anticipate a generation of chamber odds. Emotionally, the LP strikes a tone of cautious optimism which reflected the progress of the movement of the black power and the long -awaited end of the Vietnam War. However, to say it today is to recognize a familiar feeling.
“It's marked but full of hope,” says Verdine White – one of the reasons why EWF opened with the album soothing title track when the group occurred to January Fireaid concert benefiting from the victims of recent fires in Los Angeles.
Beyond the title cup and “shining star” – listen to the latter for the cross guitars of Al McKay and Johnny Graham and what Kravitz calls “one of the most fun and intelligent bass lines of all time” – The stars of “That's the Way of the World” include the propulsive “Happy feeling '“And jazzy”African“, Both with Maurice White on Kalimba, and”All about love (first impression)“, Which presents Larry Dunn tripping on a Moog keyboard (and rings as if he could have been recorded yesterday).
Earth, Wind & Fire performed at California Jam Festival in Ontario in 1974.
(ABC Photo Archives)
The LP may also house the most sumptuous of the many romantic Ballades of EWF: “Reasons“With Bailey floating in his fal back like a guy heaven-high on desire. Is” romantic “the right way to describe a song in two people confronted with the duration of the day after a night? Who used” reasons “for wedding dances or to celebrate birthdays.
“Music is very attractive,” he says. “I think it is the sensuality of the song in which people buy. But you listen to what it says and it is clearly a loot call.” Indeed, Bailey returns to “That's the way of the world” as an album on “the loss of naivety” experienced by the members of the group, who were all at the beginning of the twenties at the time, with the exception of Maurice White, who had an older decade.
Born in Memphis, where he grew up alongside future Stax Royals David Porter and Booker T. Jones, Maurice White broke into the world of music in Chicago in the 1960s, first as a musician as the staff of Chess Records – it is playing the battery on Fontella Bass' “Save me“- Then as a drummer in the Ramsey Lewis pop jazz jazz trio. He formed the earth, the wind and the fire in Los Angeles and made two albums for Warner Bros.;
“They just finished me,” Davis told the Times of his initial meeting with the group when he opened a show for John Sebastian from The Lovin 'Spoon. The veteran executive, who is now 92 years old, remembers having stolen the group to London – “even if it was expensive,” he said – to perform for marketing, sales and promotion staff at the annual label congress. “I wanted them to see how dazzling they were in person,” he said. “How could you otherwise translate the unique character?”
EWF passed its first three LPS Columbia to perfect its approach: the mixture of grooves of funk and rock riffs, the philosophiz proto-Help, the ornate visual style which crossed psychedia with Egyptology. “Today, it is difficult to imagine a group of this size having several albums to develop and prove itself,” explains Jason King, Dean de la Thornton School of Music of the USC. However, the way Verdine White sees it, the previous work “prepared the public for what was going to happen” with “it's the way of the world”.
Adds Johnson: “It was the right album at the right time with the right record company.”
To record the album, Earth, Wind & Fire returned to Remobou Ranch distant from Colorado, where the group had produced “Open Our Oyes” from 1974 (and where Elton John cut the “Caribou” of the same year). “It was like a winter wonderland”, Dunn said Red Bull Music Academy of the studio comfortably fitted out in the Rocky Mountains. “There were brass beds in the rooms and very expensive bear carpets on the floor.”
This time, however, Maurice White raised his friend Charles Stepney, whom he had known since the days of chess and who had worked on “opening his eyes”, with a role of co -producer; Bailey, Johnson and Verdine White all agree that Stepney pushed the group to a new level of creativity – and a new level of diligence. Stepney was “definitely the father of our group,” says Bailey in the 2001 documentary “Shining Stars”; The group's goal was so intense, the singer said to Times, that he had trouble dealing with the loss of his mother, who died during the recording process.
“I didn't really take the time to cry until about a year later,” said Bailey, “when I was on a plane and everything fell on me.”
“That's the way of the world” accompanied a film of the same title directed by Sig Shore (which had produced “Super Fly” from 1972) and with Harvey Keitel as record manager of success research. Or at least, it was intended to accompany the film, which also presented the members of EWF to Sccreen: having felt that the film could not form like a classic, Maurice White pushed to release the album of the months before the film in the first in theaters; He also hid the words “soundtrack of the soundtrack” in small characters on the rear cover of the album.
“I thought it was quite smooth,” said Johnson, laughing.
Maurice White, on the left, and Philip Bailey on stage in 1977.
(Michael Putland / Getty Images)
The LP was an immediate success, even in a field as crowded as R&B was in the mid -1970s. (As the story says, “Shining Star” inspired Stevie Wonder to write “I wish“From 1976,” Songs in the Key of Life “.) The King of the USC says that” It is the way of the world “represents a maximum achievement of funk” open and assimilationist “which defined the era through demographic groups even if they were intimately talking to the life of blacks sailing in America following the fight for civil rights.
“It's not closed music,” says King. “There is something in which everyone can find their way, and I think that is part of the reason why it lasted as long as.” Although Earth, Wind & Fire was interrupted in 1984, the sound of “reasons” resonated through prince “Worship“In 1987; Kravitz paid tribute as loving to the title song of the album in his “It's not over until it is finished», From 1991, that someone on YouTube made a seamless mashup of the two songs.
“The first time I heard his air,” said a smiling white verdine, “I said:” Ok, Lenny. “”
“Shining Star” was sampled by dozens of hip-hop acts, including MC Lyte and the roots; In 2004, the registration academy inducted “it is the way to the world” at the Grammy Hall of Fame. And this summer, you are almost sure to hear several of the album cuts when the EWF plays the fireworks of July fourth on three nights at the Hollywood Bowl.
However, to hear Kravitz say, even these applause does not honor the group properly he attributes for having played “a huge role in my education” starting with this show five decades ago at the Forum. “They are like the Beatles for me,” he says. “There will never be other land, wind and fire – nothing closer.”
