To celebrate Curtis Mayfield’s gutsy, gritty masterpiece on its 50th anniversary, here are 10 things you didn’t know about 'Super Fly.'
, Mayfield wrote two songs for 1969’s volcano-themed disaster filma critical and commercial failure for many reasons, not least of which is that Krakatoa is west of Java. That film has had a strange afterlife in popular culture, with references by Monty Python, onSuper FlyClaudinebut these songs are often overlooked since he wrote them for other artists to sing .“I didn’t have to leave my neighborhood to be surrounded by the thingsin 1973.
During the recording Mayfield was in the middle of a separation from his second wife, Diane, mother of his second son, Todd, and his first daughter, Sharon. He moved into the basement apartment of a three-story building he owned in Chicago and wrote most of the album there. After the recording, Mayfield ended up in a bitter dispute over a songwriting credit — for the haunting, gorgeous instrumental “Think” — with longtime arranger Johnny Pate, and the two never worked together again. Then came a more monumental split: Eddie Thomas , who had been Curtis’ manager and closest friend since the late Fifties, was unhappy with the direction Mayfield was going. Afterhe sold his shares of Curtom and left the label.
The soundtrack dropped a month before the film, an odd way to orchestrate a release, but a canny move in this case. It allowed Mayfield’s message to influence the audience before they even saw the film. Perhaps audiences leftsinging with Mayfield. As music journalist Michael Gonzales recalled inwhen he saw the film in Harlem, “The audience hummed along, mouthed the words, or sang aloud to the soundtrack.
as the highest-grossing film in the country, and was the third-highest-grossing film of 1972. When it opened in New York in August 1972, the theater ran out of tickets while a line still stretched around the block. “Somebody went around the side of the building and they broke the door open,” screenwriter Phil Fenty once recalled. “You saw this mass of people with police trying to stop them. … That was a very, very high moment for [director Parks] and myself.
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