In the mid-60s, a struggling vibraphone participant named Charles Stepney and his spouse, Rubie, visited their pastor on the lookout for profession recommendation. Stepney’s work as a jazz musician in Chicago was intermittent at greatest: when he did get work, Rubie was sad about spending nights at dwelling alone. “So the pastor prayed,” says Stepney’s daughter Charlene. “He stated, ‘Pricey God, please give him a job the place he could be at dwelling together with his household at night time however nonetheless be capable of do his music.’ Mother and Dad laughed all the way in which dwelling. They have been like: ‘Hmm, we may have stated that prayer for ourselves!’”
Salvation, nonetheless, got here shortly afterwards within the type of a job with Chess Information, the famend Chicago label that had launched the world to Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Bo Diddley. Stepney was employed to jot down out lead sheets for the label’s producers and arrangers, and as an arranger in his personal proper. He wasn’t making a lot headway on this division till he was in a gathering with Marshall Chess, the son of the label’s founder, who observed that Stepney was carrying a portfolio “six or eight inches thick”. When he requested what it was, Stepney blithely knowledgeable him that it was “a symphony I’ve simply written”.
Intrigued, Chess put Stepney in command of a brand new venture he was assembling. Rotary Connection was an try to deliver the label into the psychedelic period: an area white rock band fronted by Chess receptionist Minnie Riperton and trade veteran Sid Barnes, who had labored with everybody from George Clinton to the Shangri-Las. “Marshall wished to see what would occur if we blended blues and classical music with the hippy rock factor that was taking place,” says Barnes.
It sounded gimmicky on paper, however the data Stepney created for Rotary Connection have been extraordinary. The previous copyist turned out to be a real musical visionary, blessed, as his daughter Chanté places it, with “the arrogance to go all the way in which, to be steadfast in any style”. His preparations have been intricate, his tackle soul music psychedelic, additional embellished by his burgeoning curiosity in synthesisers and musique concrète. Blessed with Riperton’s four-and-a-half-octave vary, Rotary Connection’s albums blended hip rock covers – the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Cream, the Lovin’ Spoonful – with suitably trippy originals: if you wish to hear what a implausible songwriter Stepney was, head first to his 1971 masterpiece I Am the Black Gold of the Solar, a confection that variously entails flamenco, acid-rock guitar, jazz piano and unbelievable concord vocals.
The group have been groundbreaking and massively profitable – they performed with Janis Joplin, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones and Jefferson Airplane. In line with Barnes, the band have been startled to find that their dwell audiences have been predominantly white. “We performed for a few Black audiences they usually checked out us like we have been loopy and stated: ‘Get the hell out of right here!’ However the hippies: they have been on acid they usually have been watching Minnie, this stunning Black woman singing notes they by no means heard earlier than. Shit, man, we tore up that motherfucking stage.”
Rotary Connection was the start of a quick however unbelievable profession for Stepney. Over the following 9 years, he appeared incapable of creating an album that wasn’t astonishing, working with Terry Callier, Muddy Waters, the Dells, Earth, Wind and Hearth, Marlena Shaw (Stepney was behind each California Soul and Girl of the Ghetto, two Shaw tracks which have turn into ubiquitous within the UK because of sampling and TV and movie soundtracks), Deniece Williams and jazz pianist Ramsey Lewis. As well as, Stepney was composing music for promoting, working as a “ghost producer” – covertly producing data for others uncredited – and frequently recording concepts at dwelling. A choice of these dwelling recordings has simply been compiled by his daughters on to a double album, Step on Step.
“He was not afraid to function exterior of the usual theories about how music needs to be finished,” says Charlene. “I feel Dad noticed his work as a method of uncategorising Black music. I feel he wished to have the ability to say: ‘We're greater than this style, we could be all of these items.’ I at all times felt like that was his voice to the political local weather of the occasions.”
Stepney was a curious, contradictory determine. He may very well be wildly opinionated and a notoriously arduous taskmaster within the studio. “He used to actually rag the fellows arduous,” says Earth, Wind and Hearth’s Philip Bailey. “In the event that they used tuning units for his or her devices, he’d say ‘Goddamn! You continue to can’t even tune your guitar?’”
“After we’d simply had an incredible tour or successful document someplace, we’d come again [to the studio] and he’d say: ‘Y’all nonetheless ain’t nothin’! Let’s get to work!’” agrees the band’s bassist, Verdine White. “He by no means allow us to bask within the glory from the ego standpoint too lengthy.”
But Stepney was additionally self-effacing. His spouse lobbied to place his title on the quilt of Riperton’s debut solo album, Come to My Backyard, which opened with the spine-tingling basic Les Fleurs, however Stepney demurred. “Mother knew how a lot work he’d put into it; she wished it to say, ‘Charles Stepney presents Minnie Riperton,’” says Charlene. “However at the moment, it was form of exceptional for a producer to be a headliner, so I feel he felt uncomfortable. Daddy loved the liberty of not being too in style as a result of he was in a position to make a very good dwelling however not should cope with among the negatives of being well-known.”
Nonetheless, Stepney’s title turned famous amongst different musicians. Stevie Surprise was a fan. So was Burt Bacharach, his curiosity piqued by the Stepney-produced album The Dells Sing Dionne Warwick’s Biggest Hits. “Oh my God! That man!” Chaka Khan exclaimed after I interviewed her in 2019, her face lighting up on the point out of Stepney’s title. “Hey Love by Rotary Connection – that’s my frickin’ album.”
In the meantime, in Britain, the period’s largest rock star wished to work with him: Elton John had been “obsessively” accumulating something with Stepney’s title on it since listening to Ramsey Lewis’s 1968 album of Beatles covers, Mom Nature’s Son. “That’s nonetheless one among my favorite albums to this present day, nevertheless it was actually Rotary Connection that did it for me,” he says. “Bernie [Taupin] and I performed their data a lot; they have been simply extraordinary. I liked the preparations – I’d labored with nice arrangers like Del Newman and Paul Buckmaster and I believed, this man is implausible, he’s pushing the envelope. What he was doing was like nothing else: stunning string components, actually daring, funky, totally different.
“While you hear somebody like that you simply suppose: this man is somebody I need to work with. Charles Stepney would have been my arranger of selection, with out query.”
However the hookup with John by no means occurred, and Rotary Connection – exhausted from touring and burdened with administration that, Barnes claims, “had been fucking us up round cash for years” – fell aside within the early 70s. Nonetheless, Stepney’s profession continued to blossom. Earth, Wind and Hearth’s That’s the Manner of the World and Gratitude each went triple-platinum in 1975. He started work on a follow-up, and there have been plans to work with Michael Jackson and Barbra Streisand.
However, in accordance with his household, he had different ambitions. “He was in large demand on the time and I feel it simply turned overwhelming for him, and he wanted to take a break, to form of reimagine life,” says Chanté. Stepney had suffered a coronary heart assault on the dwelling of music govt Clarence Avant whereas discussing a brand new cope with him. “I feel that was perhaps the final or subsequent to final manufacturing he had deliberate on doing with Earth, Wind and Hearth,” she says.
“He informed me he’d finished the whole lot he wished to do,” says his eldest daughter, Eibur. “He liked the Bahamas and he stated he was going to purchase a home there. And he stated: ‘I feel I’m going to do my very own factor now – an album referred to as Step on Step.’ I stated: ‘Wow, that’s wonderful – I’ve by no means heard anybody say that they really completed all their targets, so I suppose it’s time so that you can go on to the following degree.’
“That was what he stated to me. And my father actually died that day.”
A second coronary heart assault killed Stepney on 17 Could 1976. Earth, Wind and Hearth’s Maurice White had spoken to him that morning, desperate to play him Spirit, a brand new tune the band had written in tribute to Stepney. It turned the title monitor of their subsequent album, one other multi-platinum vendor, devoted to the late producer.
After his demise, his daughters assumed his work was largely forgotten: attempting to untangle his monetary affairs within the 80s, says Charlene, they have been hindered not simply by the truth that they “have been ladies of color and that folks weren’t dwelling as much as their phrase” however that “there was no respect for his work on the time”. It was an evaluation that modified dramatically when Chanté went to school in Washington DC. “It was attention-grabbing to have this introduction to east-coast hip-hop,” she laughs. “After I got here dwelling one vacation, I used to be taking part in some music I’d been jamming to within the membership, and Charlene was like: ‘Play that once more – is that Daddy? That’s Daddy!’ It felt like an enormous resurgence, a lift in notoriety.”
In actual fact, an internet database lists greater than 600 samples of his work on tracks by Jay-Z, Kanye West, Public Enemy, Nas, A Tribe Referred to as Quest and Tupac Shakur amongst umpteen others. It’s not simply hip-hop. Borrowing from Stepney productions hyperlinks Gorillaz to the Black Keys to Boards of Canada to Primal Scream – that’s the Feelings’ I Don’t Need to Lose Your Love offering the vocal hook on Loaded.
And Stepney’s affect hangs heavy over modern artists. His ghost lurked round Solange’s final album, After I Get Residence: Barnes even acquired a co-writing credit score on one monitor. Keep in mind The place You Are, the closing monitor of Jessie Ware’s acclaimed 2020 album What’s Your Pleasure?, is audibly a Stepney homage. Producer Sam Shepherd, higher often known as Floating Factors, says Stepney’s music is “massively necessary to me … these preparations and that recording sound helped form the way in which I write music. I most likely take heed to him as soon as a month.”
For a person who died 46 years in the past, and whom his daughters assumed was forgotten, Stepney appears extra alive than ever. You could possibly just lately have heard Riperton’s Les Fleurs booming out of the BBC’s Summer season of Sport adverts, although it’s been used on so many soundtracks you probably understand it already. Chicago has been internet hosting “the Summer season of Stepney”, a sequence of occasions together with a tribute live performance within the metropolis’s Millennium Park. The three Stepney sisters have extra archival releases deliberate: they've “90 masters with plenty of [unreleased] stuff on them,” says Chanté. “We at all times say: he received’t die! He received’t die!”
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