Is Curtis Mayfield’s ‘Curtis/Live!’ the Greatest Live Album ever?
Deciding on the GOAT (Greatest of all time) live album is an almost impossible task which inevitably will eventually come down to a question of personal taste. However, there is a general level of agreement in music circles that certain albums - James Brown’s ‘Live at the Apollo’ for example, or Johnny Cash’s ‘At Folsom Prison’ - can at least be in the running for the title of greatest live album ever. Rock behemoths like Nirvana, The Rolling Stones, The Grateful Dead and Bruce Springsteen have also released colossally successful live sets in their careers, which could conceivably be called the GOAT. However, against such stiff competition, soul singer/songwriter/producer Curtis Mayfield’s 1971 double album ‘Curtis/Live!’, although not often mentioned in the same breath as ‘Jimi Plays Monterey’ or indeed ‘Frampton Comes Alive’, can definitely stand up against the traditional canon of ‘classic’ live albums.
Recorded over four cold winter nights at the Bitter End, a 230 seat venue in Greenwich Village New York, with the majority of the tracks coming from the first evening, ‘Curtis/Live!’ is a feast of impeccably played soul and funk, overlaid with Mayfield’s sweet soul vocals and the biting social commentary of his lyrics. Never has the background audience noise on a live album been so much a key part of the whole as with this recording. Here, in a tiny venue, we can hear every response to every lyric and every funky lick, from a tiny crowd who are clearly entranced by the performance. I’ve never been to the Bitter End but I have a picture of it in my mind, of its size, shape and feel, just from the sound of this music and audience reactions echoing around it on this record.
The cover of ‘Curtis/Live’ is all warm oranges and browns, the front picture of Mayfield shows him in front of the brick wall behind the stage at the Bitter End, clearly demonstrating just how small the club is, the stage so tiny that guitarist Craig McMullen’s instrument is only an inch or two from Mayfield’s shoulder. The back is a close up of the singer in mid-song, his face filling the entire cover, his features warmed by the stage lights.
Intimacy really is the key here; you can hear the room, the audience, their gasps, cheers and applause, but the band is so tight and so well recorded that at no point is any of the playing lost. ‘Curtis/Live!’ is of its time - Mayfield is wearing a pair of hippie bells round his neck on the cover, and both he and his audience are continually non-ironically shouting ‘Right on!’ and ‘Outa sight!’ throughout the performance. It is a superb audio portrait of a particularly fertile time in soul and R’n’B music, when artists like Stevie Wonder,Donny Hathaway, Sly Stone, James Brown and Marvin Gaye were all broadening the sonic vocabulary of soul music, stretching out the length and depth of their music, introducing unfamiliar chords, new themes and concepts, Latin percussion, increasingly complex structures, alternative rhythmic emphasis and turning soul music into funk.
The band Mayfield assembled for these dates - Craig McMullen on guitar, Tyrone McMullen on drums, ‘Master’ Henry Gibson on percussion and Joseph ‘Lucky’ Scott taking care of bass duties - are a killer team who deliver a stripped down, contemporary reworking of the fuller sound of Mayfield’s earlier work with his former band the Impressions. The sweeping strings and exuberant horns of the Impression’s 60s hits (like ‘You’ve Been Cheating’ and ‘The Young Mods Forgotten Story’) have gone, and instead the rhythm section is pushed to the fore. The groove that they generate here is immense, a churning, interlocking funk machine, somehow simultaneously languid yet tight, possessed of substantial heft yet with a light touch. They’re intense, confident, playing at peak-soul-power level.
The material includes a few of the Impressions old hits like ‘Gypsy Woman’, civil rights anthem ‘People Get Ready’, proto-funk wig out ‘Check Out Your Mind’ and ‘We’re A Winner’. When the Impressions first released ‘Mighty Mighty (Spade & Whitey)’ it was a bold, brash, lumbering beast, its chunky funky production perfectly at odds with the angry social commentary of the lyrics. Here, it’s elongated into nearly seven minutes of laid back, sophisticated funky soul, with each player filling their space with a succession of expertly executed fills, runs and riffs.
‘We’re A Winner’, is also updated particularly successfully, the band taking the joyous black pride soul song and stripping it down to its bare funk essentials. Halfway through, the drums lay back and the crowd’s clapping takes over timekeeping duties. Mayfield goes into a spoken word section and mentions that some radio stations didn’t want to play ‘Winner’ because of its lyrical content, but says “…we don’t give a damn, we’re a winner anyway!” to which the room erupts to shouts of ‘Right on!’.
His solo material is showcased too; ‘We The People Who Are Darker Than Blue’ starts out restrained, with two gentle complimentary guitar lines knitted together; Mayfield’s clean, McMullen’s wah wah’ed and fuzzed, before a minute or so of conga soloing so heavy-duty you can almost hear the sweat drop from ‘Master’ Henry Gibson’s forehead onto his drums.
Given the space and time, the band relish the chance to play with dynamics, sometimes all laying back so that Mayfield’s voice is suddenly framed and exposed by just a layer of sparse, restrained percussion and soft playing from the guitars, sometimes bursting into a full on psychedelic funk onslaught. We also get a nine and a half minute version of ‘If There’s A Hell Below, We’re All Gonna Go’, building from its conga and feedback-rumble intro, into a peaking and trough-ing epic, with killer lyrics name-checking Nixon, ‘Blacks and the Crackers, Po-lice and their backers’, drugs, the environment, declining schools, in a reality where ‘pimping people is the rule’. It’s dark. Yet halfway through he breaks it down and in moments has the audience laughing as he lists everyone who’s goin’ to hell.
Live! also features a few beautifully delivered ballads including a cover of the Carpenters hit from the year before ‘We’ve Only Just Begun’. This song perfectly embodies Mayfield’s restrained, sweet-soul approach, but although famed for his gentleness, Mayfield was utterly uncompromising in his artistic vision. Acknowledging that a ballad like ‘We’ve Only…’ might appear to be at odds with the heavy duty, civil rights / black power lyrical themes and raw driving tripped out funk jams, of the rest of this show, Mayfield states in between tracks: “A lot of folks this particular lyric is not appropriate for what might be considered underground, but I think underground is whatever your mood or your feelings might be at the time so long as it's the truth.” The meaning of ‘We’ve Only Just Begun’ in this context becomes another expression of the civil rights struggle.
‘Live!’ also includes two original songs that Mayfield never recorded elsewhere, the haunting wah wah drenched ‘Stare and Stare’ and set finisher, the sing-a-long leisurely funk opus ‘Stone Junkie’.
It is the combination of a few key factors that put this album in the ‘greats’ category: superb playing from an accomplished band, high quality recording, a small intimate venue, a crowd clearly in love, a performer who is artistically stretching out and is firmly on the upward journey towards his career heights, and of course fantastic songs. What makes it a contender for the Greatest Of All Time however, is the level of intimacy and interaction between Mayfield and his audience, the genuine warmth that emanates from him out to his fans and the sounds of their authentic reverence, affection and enthusiasm, both for the music from the band but also for Mayfield’s message of peace and social justice. The restrained fury of some of his lyrics is clearly perfectly in sync with his audience, as is his empathy and his humour, and the back and forth between Mayfield and the audience is a joy to behold, making ‘Curtis/Live!’ a serious contender for the Greatest Live Album of All Time.
Harold Heath is a freelance writer who contributes to iDJ Magazine, Thump, Ministry of Sound, Traxsource etc. When not writing words about music, Harold is a DJ, producer and music tech teacher.
