Even before he was federally indicted on charges of bribery, wire fraud, and soliciting campaign contributions from a foreign national, New York mayor Eric Adams had his share of WTF moments. There was the time he was asked what made New York special and he answered, bizarrely, “This is a place where every day you wake up, you could experience everything from a plane crashing into our Trade Center to a person who is celebrating a new business that’s open.” Or the time he reportedly drove up onto a Brooklyn sidewalk to avoid traffic, or when he carried a photo of a deceased police officer that had been doctored to look as if it had been sitting in his wallet longer than it had.
And then there was the favorite-concert incident.
In 2021, during his campaign for mayor, Adams — who has maintained his innocence on all charges — did a wide-ranging interview with Vanity Fair. Asked to name the best concert he’d ever seen, he brought up a show by legendary soul artist Curtis Mayfield. As Adams recalled, “At that concert there was a rainstorm and the lights fell on Curtis Mayfield and they actually paralyzed him at that concert. He died a few years ago, but it was an amazing concert before that happened. Just so unfortunate.”
It’s hard to know where to even begin to unpack this, but let’s try.
The date was Aug. 13, 1990, and Mayfield was scheduled to play at Wingate Field, an outdoor venue in Brooklyn. The show had the feeling of a much-welcome comeback. After a decade in the music-business wilderness, Mayfield was about to release a new album, Return of Superfly, which paired him with a new generation of R&B, rock, and hip-hop artists including Eazy-E, Ice-T, Dr. Dre, and Lenny Kravitz. His classic Sixties band, the Impressions, were being considered for induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Mayfield’s silky, siren-like voice was still well preserved.
As the concert was about to begin, a storm began bearing down on the area. The act scheduled to precede Mayfield, the equally classic Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, was canceled, but it was decided that Mayfield might still be able to play a few songs before the event would be shut down over safety concerns.
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Just as Mayfield made his way onto the stage, a huge wind roared through the site, followed by another. “It was like a tornado, the wind that came through,” state senator Marty Moskowitz said at the time. The wind slammed into the speakers, which wobbled, and into the lighting rig above the stage. The rig wound up falling, and one of the stage lights hit Mayfield, who crumpled onstage. As his son Todd wrote in his 2016 book Traveling Soul: The Life of Curtis Mayfield, “Dad blacked out, came to, and discovered neither his hands nor arms were where he thought they were. He lay splattered on the stage, helpless as an infant. Then it rained. Big drops. Torrents poured from the sky; thunder exploded like shrapnel.”
Rushed to a fortunately nearby hospital, Mayfield sustained breaks in the third, fourth, and fifth vertebrae in his neck. His road to recovery was arduous, including what his son described in his book as his father’s “phantom hands — an agonizing sensation he compared to thrusting his arms in a bucket of writhing snakes. Atrophy set upon his muscles, and his feet began to curve downward from lack of use.” Paralyzed from the waist down, Mayfield was unable to walk or play guitar again.
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The tragedy didn’t end there. In 1996, Mayfield managed to make a new album, New World Order, but he was only able to record his vocals while lying down. “Being a quadriplegic, it’s a life-or-death situation almost every minute of the day,” he said. In 1988, his right leg was amputated as a result of the diabetes that had worsened after his injury, and he was too ill to attend the Impressions’ Hall of Fame induction. Mayfield died in 1999 at age 57.
“Unfortunate” doesn’t even begin to describe the concert Adams says he attended and its horrific aftermath. If anything, it’s arguably one of the most tragic, regrettable performances in history, considering how it inalterably affected the course of a great musician’s life. It sounds as if Adams at least enjoyed sets by the two other opening acts, the classic soul bands the Delfonics (“La-La [Means I Love You],” “Didn’t I [Blow Your Mind This Time]”) and the Intruders (“I’ll Always Love My Mama,””Cowboys to Girls”). So there’s that. But the best show he ever caught? Maybe Adams also needs to be charged with one count of bad memory banks.
