FOREVER IN THE GROOVE
Surviving members of Earth, Wind & Fire keep spirit of their fierce leader, Maurice White, alive
For 40 years, Earth, Wind & Fire’s irresistibly bouncy dance anthem September has rocked countless bodies at weddings, proms and other celebrations. It has hundreds of millions of Spotify streams and inspired “21st of September” parties in honour of the opening lyric.
But if you asked EWF founder Maurice White why he put a call in the lyrics to remember the 21st night of September, he would always say there was no reason. It was simply the number that sounded the best in the song. He was lying.
“He immediately sang ‘the 21st night of September’” when working on the song, says Allee Willis, who co-wrote it with him and guitarist Al McKay.
Willis persuaded White to try other dates, but “the 21st, for some reason, was the most in the pocket.” She accepted his nonchalant explanation until last year, when Willis went to lunch with his wife, Marilyn.
As they dined, an autograph seeker interrupted to ask Willis about the significance of the 21st.
“It happens 15 times a day,” she says. “I said what I always say: ‘Nothing. It just sang the best.’ It breaks their hearts.
“But then Marilyn said: ‘Are you kidding? There was total significance. Our son was supposed to be born on that day.’”
Willis had worked closely with White, collaborating for a month on September without ever knowing the backstory of his son Kahbran, named for the writer and artist Kahlil Gibran. (The boy ended up arriving early, on Aug. 1, 1978.)
“It took this random thing at a restaurant for me to learn what it meant,” she says. “He was a pretty private guy.”
White died in 2016 at 74, having lived with Parkinson’s disease since the 1990s.
His absence from the festivities on Dec. 8, when Earth, Wind & Fire received the Kennedy Center Honors, makes the prize bittersweet for the band he formed nearly 50 years ago.
“The only thing that we wish is that Maurice was here to celebrate with us,” vocalist and bongo player Philip Bailey said back in the early fall, sitting alongside drummer Ralph Johnson and bassist Verdine White, Maurice’s younger brother.
The three original EWF members, all 68, were gathered in a dressing room at the Hollywood Bowl, where they would soon stroll onto the stage for the last of two sold-out shows.
The night before, under a full yellow moon, 17,000 fans screamed when the band appeared, and eagerly helped turn their first number, Sing a Song, with its up-tempo, doo-woppy guitar intro and cheerful horns, into a euphoric, full-throated singalong.
Fronting an ensemble of nine other musicians, Bailey, Johnson and Verdine White sang all the familiar favourites and bounded around as if they were caught in a time warp.
In the 1970s and ’80s EWF was known for shows that included elaborate magic tricks, flying pianos and exploding pyramids. Now there’s another kind of magic, an ebullience of dance energy and vocal power that looks and sounds as if the band has never aged.
EWF, one of the most distinctive, innovative and bestselling bands of all time, is the first African-American band to be awarded the Kennedy Center Honors.
But accepting without Maurice puts the remaining original band members in a sombre place.
“We were surprisingly thrown the responsibility of carrying on the legacy,” says Bailey. Maurice“started the fire, and we’ve kept it burning.”
A collective identity was forged in that fire.
Bailey, Verdine White and Johnson, all a decade younger than Maurice White, have spent more of their lives together than apart, making music together since they were barely out of their teens.
“We’re very fortunate that the chemistry between us is harmonious,” says Bailey.
“The key word, as Philip said, is chemistry,” says Johnson. “You don’t get that in all groups. You just don’t.”
EWF was always a big band, with eight or nine consistent members not including the horn players, who tended to swap out a bit more frequently.
How did such a big group stay together for so long?
“The thing is, from a business standpoint, we’ve been really fortunate,” says Bailey.
“We’ve worked. Obviously you wouldn’t be able to keep together a band and crew and all that kind of stuff if there weren’t gigs, and if there weren’t a lot of gigs.”
The gigs became so overwhelming that Maurice White disbanded EWF briefly in 1984.
He was tired from 15 years of touring. He’d plowed all his energy into the band, having dreamt it into existence as a way to celebrate what had got him through a difficult youth. He wrote in his 2016 memoir, Maurice White: My Life With Earth, Wind & Fire, about being beaten by police for being black, bullied by classmates for being light-skinned.
He found refuge in music, first in the church choir and then playing drums, inspired by the shiny suits of the local drum and bugle corps.
At 18 he moved to Chicago and became a drummer at Chess Records, playing for Etta James, Muddy Waters and Ramsey Lewis.
In 1969, White formed a band called the Salty Peppers.
After they moved to Los Angeles he renamed it for the elements on his astrological chart — Earth, Wind (more dramatic than “air”) & Fire.
He knew exactly what sound, look and message he wanted. First, music that embraced the world: jazz, funk, R&B, soul, Afro-Cuban, classical, Dixieland and rock. He also wanted the band to dress sharply, like that drum corps he’d admired.
And they’d sing about love, spiritual bliss and living right.
“I’ve always felt that they were the ultimate band,” said Donnie Simpson, a longtime Washington radio DJ.
“They had incredible grooves and musicianship, but it was music on a deeper level. Not just love songs, but songs that said, ‘You’ve got to love you.’”