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As a kid growing up with showbiz connections in New York City, Lenny Kravitz had already beheld some of music’s most thrilling live acts by the time he was 10 or 11.
“I’d seen the Jackson 5, I’d seen James Brown, I’d seen Miles Davis,” the rock star recalls. “I knew great performances. But this…,” he adds of a gig he caught at the Forum in Inglewood as a young newcomer to Los Angeles — “this was something so deep and mystical and entertaining that it just blew my mind.”
The concert was by Earth, Wind & Fire, which made the Forum something of a second home in the mid-1970s not long after Kravitz’s mother, actor Roxie Roker, moved her and a preteen Kravitz to L.A. so she could take a role on TV’s “The Jeffersons.” A hard-touring nine-man R&B outfit masterminded by Maurice White, EWF had wowed countless audiences in the first half of the decade, not least the estimated 250,000 who saw the band play in 1974 at the fabled California Jam festival at the Ontario Motor Speedway. The group had created hits in the studio as well, scoring its first million-selling album with 1973’s “Head to the Sky” and crashing the upper reaches of Billboard’s R&B chart with singles like “Mighty Mighty” and “Devotion.”
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Yet it wasn’t until the moment Kravitz bore witness to — with the band on the road behind its sixth LP, “That’s the Way of the World” — that everything came together for Earth, Wind & Fire: the songs, the stagecraft, the charisma, the sex appeal, the message.
“I’d never seen anything like it,” Kravitz says. “It was a full assault on all your senses. Having that record come out and then getting to see it live changed the way I perceived things.”
Released in March 1975 — 50 years ago this month — “That’s the Way of the World” marked EWF’s creative and commercial high point. The triple-platinum album was the band’s first to top the all-genre Billboard 200, and it spawned the group’s only No. 1 single in the explosive “Shining Star,” which knocked “He Don’t Love You (Like I Love You)” by Tony Orlando and Dawn from atop the Hot 100 that May. At the Grammy Awards the next year, “Shining Star” received the prize for R&B vocal performance by a duo or group — a win on the band’s first nomination.
“Prior to that album, we were on our way,” says singer Philip Bailey, one of three core EWF members along with percussionist Ralph Johnson and bassist Verdine White who still play in the group. (Maurice White, Verdine’s older brother, died at 74 in 2016.) “We were in the process of discovering who we were and what we had. With ‘That’s the Way of the World,’ you’re hearing Earth, Wind & Fire in our stride.”
You’re also hearing an album that would help shape music for the next half-century. Originally conceived as the soundtrack for a now-forgotten B movie about the shady record industry, “That’s the Way of the World” laid crucial groundwork for the rise of Afrocentrism in R&B and for the establishment of the quiet storm radio format; its delicate string and horn arrangements look toward neo-soul while its blippy synth textures anticipate a generation of bedroom tinkerers. Emotionally, the LP strikes a tone of cautious optimism that reflected the advances of the Black Power movement and the long-awaited end of the Vietnam War. Yet to put it on today is to recognize a familiar feeling.
“It’s scarred but hopeful,” Verdine White says — one reason EWF opened with the album’s soothing title track when the band performed at January’s FireAid concert benefiting victims of the recent L.A. wildfires.
Beyond the title cut and “Shining Star” — listen to the latter for Al McKay and Johnny Graham’s crosscutting guitars and what Kravitz calls “one of the funkiest and most intelligent bass lines ever” — standouts from “That’s the Way of the World” include the propulsive “Happy Feelin’” and the jazzy “Africano,” both with Maurice White on kalimba, and “All About Love (First Impression),” which features Larry Dunn tripping out on a Moog keyboard (and sounds like it could’ve been recorded yesterday).
The LP is also home to perhaps the most sumptuous of EWF’s many romantic ballads: “Reasons,” with Bailey floating around in his falsetto like a guy sky-high on desire. Is “romantic” the right way to describe a song about two people facing the harsh light of day after a one-night stand? (In a memoir published after his death, Maurice White says that he and Bailey wrote “Reasons” about their inability to resist the temptations of groupies he refers to as “erection machines.”) Bailey is sympathetic to folks who’ve used “Reasons” for wedding dances or to celebrate anniversaries.
“Music is very seductive,” he says. “I think it’s the sensuality of the song that people buy into. But you listen to what it’s saying and it’s clearly about a booty call.” Indeed, Bailey looks back at “That’s the Way of the World” as an album about “the loss of naiveté” experienced by the band’s members, all of whom were in their early 20s at the time except for Maurice White, who was a decade older.
Born in Memphis, where he grew up alongside future Stax Records royals David Porter and Booker T. Jones, Maurice White broke into the music business in Chicago in the 1960s, first as a staff musician at Chess Records — that’s him playing drums on Fontella Bass’ “Rescue Me” — then as a drummer in Ramsey Lewis’ pop-wise jazz trio. He formed Earth, Wind & Fire in Los Angeles and made two albums for Warner Bros.; neither did much, though they eventually brought the band (after a significant change in personnel) to the attention of Clive Davis, who signed EWF to Columbia Records in 1972.
“They just floored me,” Davis tells The Times of his initial encounter with the group as it opened a show for John Sebastian of the Lovin’ Spoonful. The veteran executive, who’s now 92, recalls flying the band to London — “even though it was costly,” he says — to perform for Columbia’s marketing, sales and promotion staff during the label’s annual convention. “I wanted them to see how dazzling they were in person,” he says. “How else could you translate the uniqueness?”
EWF spent its first three Columbia LPs honing its approach: the blend of funk grooves and rock riffs, the proto-self-help philosophizing, the ornate visual style that crossed psychedelia with Egyptology. “Today it’s hard to imagine a band of that size having multiple albums to develop and prove itself,” says Jason King, dean of USC’s Thornton School of Music. Yet the way Verdine White sees it, the earlier work “prepared the audience for what was coming” with “That’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 Colorado’s remote Caribou Ranch, where the band had made 1974’s “Open Our Eyes” (and where Elton John cut the same year’s “Caribou”). “It was like a winter wonderland,” Dunn told Red Bull Music Academy of the comfortably appointed studio in the Rocky Mountains. “There were brass beds in the rooms and really expensive bear rugs on the floor.”
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This time, though, Maurice White elevated his friend Charles Stepney, whom he’d known since the Chess days and who’d worked on “Open Our Eyes,” to a role as his 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 dad in our group,” Bailey says in the 2001 documentary “Shining Stars”; the band’s focus was so intense, the singer tells The Times, that he had trouble processing the loss of his mother, who died during the recording process.
“I didn’t really take the time to grieve until about a year later,” Bailey says, “when I was on a plane and it all came down on me.”
“That’s the Way of the World” accompanied a film of the same title directed by Sig Shore (who’d produced 1972’s “Super Fly”) and starring Harvey Keitel as a hit-seeking record exec. Or at least it was meant to accompany the film, which also featured EWF’s members onscreen: Having sensed that the movie might not shape up as a classic, Maurice White pushed to release the album months before the film premiered in theaters; he also hid the words “original motion picture soundtrack” in fine print on the album’s back cover.
“I thought that was pretty slick,” Johnson says with a laugh.
The LP was an immediate hit, even in a field as crowded as R&B was in the mid-’70s. (As the story goes, “Shining Star” inspired Stevie Wonder to write “I Wish,” from 1976’s “Songs in the Key of Life.”) USC’s King says “That’s the Way of the World” represents a peak achievement of the “open and assimilationist” funk that defined the era across demographic groups even as it spoke intimately to the lives of Black people navigating America in the wake of the struggle for civil rights.
“This is not a closed music,” King says. “There’s something that everybody can find their way into, and I think that’s part of the reason it’s lasted as long as it has.” Though Earth, Wind & Fire went on hiatus in 1984, the sound of “Reasons” echoed through Prince’s “Adore” in 1987; Kravitz paid such loving homage to the album’s title track in his “It Ain’t Over ’til It’s Over,” from 1991, that someone on YouTube made a seamless mashup of the two songs.
“First time I heard his tune,” says a grinning Verdine White, “I said, ‘OK, Lenny.’”
“Shining Star” has been sampled by dozens of hip-hop acts, including MC Lyte and the Roots; in 2004, the Recording Academy inducted “That’s the Way of the World” into the Grammy Hall of Fame. And this summer, you’re all but certain to hear several of the album’s cuts when EWF plays the July Fourth Fireworks Spectacular over three nights at the Hollywood Bowl.
Yet to hear Kravitz tell it, even those plaudits don’t properly honor the group he credits with playing “such a huge part in my education” starting with that show five decades ago at the Forum. “They’re like the Beatles to me,” he says. “There will never be another Earth, Wind & Fire — nothing even close.”
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