Bobby Womack Midnight Mover

by Bobby Womack

  I learned a lot about America on that trip, about race and rights, who had them and, more importantly, who didn’t. We didn’t. It didn’t matter that Sam was a big star; in the South that didn’t cut any ice. He was black.

  He got busted in Shreveport for disturbing the peace. He’d tried to book himself into a whites-only motel. We’d sit in the car travelling between gigs and his anger would spill out. ‘I don’t like coming down here and being treated like that. They tell me how good I am, jocks come around, blow up my records and everything, and I have to stay in dumps.’

  Despite all the things he had, Sam felt he had not escaped and nor had his people. He lived in a gilded world in LA, a house with a swimming pool, nice white neighbours. All that was wiped clean in Louisiana.

  The civil rights revolution was in full swing and the tension on that tour was palpable. ‘You know you can’t go on the white side of town and do all the whites. And then go on the black side. The whites won’t come that side of town.’ He always told me that he sang the way white people like. ‘There’s two sides to me,’ he said. ‘I sing one side for the whites – “Another Saturday night and I ain’t got nobody, I got some money ’cos I just got paid” – and one for the blacks – “If you ever change your mind” – a bit of gospel that the brothers go for.’

  You might sometimes have had blacks on one side of the club, whites on the other, but there was no integration, and that’s what Sam – we all – wanted. Sometimes the cops brought their dogs out to hound the audience in case they got out of control.

  The night President Kennedy was assassinated Sam played the Apollo and I’m certain he saw a vision, he saw something was getting ready to happen.

  At the end of that year, back in LA, Sam called me up. He wanted me to drive over to Los Feliz and meet up at his house. Sam had bought the pad from a guy who worked in sound and there was a fantastic state-of-the-art system installed there.

  Sam was standing in the middle of the living room when I arrived. He looked good, he always did. He didn’t say much, just cued up a song. We listened, a great booming sound crashing out of these massive movie-studio speakers, and when it ended I had nothing to say. The song, of course, was ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’. I didn’t know what I could say. I knew what I was thinking, though.

  I looked at him and he stared right back – he looked right through me. Sam knew I wouldn’t back chat him or talk crazy, but I would voice my opinion. And that’s what he wanted right then. An opinion.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked, staring at me hard.

  ‘It sounds like death.’ That’s what I had been thinking. Yeah, death.

  ‘Death?’ Sam hadn’t expected that.

  ‘Yeah, it’s just so eerie,’ I told him. ‘It gives me the chills, Sam.’

  Sam leaned over and stopped the tape machine. Then, real slow, he turned back to me. Then he said, ‘I promise I won’t ever release that song.’

  It was like he was telling me – writer to writer, brother to brother – that, if the song was released, that would be it. The end. This was going to be Sam’s swansong, then he would be out of there, as if he’d done his work.

  He’d obviously just cut it, but it was a total surprise. He told me he’d never written a song so easy. It was obvious what had played out on that tour – the segregation, the violence, all the racial shit – had had a profound effect on him. Sam said, ‘It just came to me. Every word was like someone was telling me, “Now say this, now say that. That’s it, no doodling.” Bobby, this song was like a dream. It came so fast.’

  There was a little panic behind his eyes. Because it had come so fast, Sam thought he might have pinched it. He said, ‘Bobby, I dreamed this song, man, I wanted to ask, “You didn’t hear nothing like this on the radio did you?”’

  I’d heard nothing like it, but I knew what he meant. Sometimes you wrote something you thought you wrote, but it turned out to be someone else’s tune that maybe you had heard on the radio the day before. But I knew Sam’s song was fresh.

  I said, ‘I ain’t heard nothing like that.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘That’s heavy, those lyrics.’

  ‘That’s why that fucker will never come out, Bobby. I’m scared of that song.’

  He kept saying that, kept promising it would never be released – ‘Not while I’m alive.’

  That was one of the heaviest experiences I ever had. The tour earlier in the year had had a profound effect on him. I found out later that Sam had been impressed with Bob Dylan’s ‘Blowing In The Wind’ and wanted to deliver his – the black man’s – response. He’d recorded ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ in late December ’63 at RCA studios with the arranger Rene Hall, but I had no idea at the time.

  He used to call me for sessions, but there was no guitar or nothing. I didn’t even hear Cliff White on there. You couldn’t hear no guitar, just strings. And the death walk thing, that was a drum. That was Earl Palmer. And Sam. Sam was singing his ass off.

  We sat down after another listen. Sam was still grim. He told me he had been fighting with RCA and had already threatened trouble with the label if it released the song as a single. But it was bothering him. ‘Why do you think I am afraid of this song?’ he asked.

  ‘It sounds like death, like somebody died or somebody is going to die.’

  ‘That’s what I am afraid of.’

  ‘Death.’

  ‘It ain’t the one,’ he kept repeating.

  But then I tried to take it back. I wanted others to hear the song. It was – it is – a beautiful song. But he told me I’d already spoken my bit and that was the truth.

  CHAPTER 7

  IT’S ALL OVER NOW

  One week during 1963, I was back home visiting and I ran into my uncle Wes, my father’s baby brother. He was a pretty good singer and had helped The Valentinos work on our act.

  Old Wes was having trouble with his wife, Betty Jo. She had been the backbone of the Sanctified and Holiness Church, real religious, a God-fearing woman who went to church every day. Overnight, Betty Jo turned out, running fast and loose, dancing, drinking and partying hard. She went around with her dresses real high and stayed out all night long.

  Wes used to wait up for her, waiting for her to come home. He couldn’t understand it. He couldn’t take it neither. He thought Betty Jo had got herself another man – maybe she had. So every weekend began and ended with a fight. My uncle would scream and holler, ‘I knew you was out, out there backsliding and then trying to come back to God.’ Then he issued this threat, which just stuck in my mind. He said, ‘This is it, I’m leaving you. It’s all over now.’

  Of course, he didn’t and the following week it was the same old story. ‘Betty, I’m going to give you one more chance and then I’m leaving you. It’s all over now.’ He would tell me, ‘This is it for Betty Jo, when she comes home tonight I’m packin’ her bags and putting her out’.

  But he never got that far because she would come in and twist him around her finger. ‘Betty Jo, you are a sinful woman, you disrespect everything that God said about a woman,’ he’d tell her.

  My father would get involved too. They’d get into it with Uncle Wes pouring his heart out to his brother and my dad asking when he was going to leave. Uncle Wes was at his wits’ end. ‘You don’t know how much I love her, well, OK, I used to love her, but it’s all over now.’

  Betty Jo always had a way with him. She’d take Uncle Wes in the back room, give him some loving and he was happy again for a few hours. My father would warn him, ‘Wes, do not go in the room, I don’t care what she says. Whatever she do in there, you come out a different person.’

  Of course, when Wes came out he’d tell anyone that would listen that Betty Jo was the best wife and that he’d never think of leaving her.

  So I thought that was pretty funny – tragic, but fun. By now my brother Friendly had quit The Valentinos so he was back in Cleveland. Had himself a record store. He was quite a little celebrity aroun
d town, an ex-Valentino. The name was beginning to pay off.

  When I popped into the store one day, I was telling his wife Shirley, my sister-in-law, about Uncle Wes and Betty Jo. We sat there a while tossing lines back and forth and out came ‘It’s All Over Now’.

  People sometimes ask how I wrote that song ’cos I was only a young kid at the time. I hadn’t really had any adult life experiences like that, but I didn’t need to, I could watch it all play out with Uncle Wes. He gave me the title, the lyrics, I saw it all, man, it was a trip to write.

  So the fourth Valentinos’ single was ‘It’s All Over Now’. It came out in August 1964, a real blast of rock and a mile away from our soul or gospel roots. But it didn’t hit with the charts. Not our version anyway.

  Then Sam Cooke told me that a British group wanted to cover the song. I didn’t like the idea but by the time I knew, it was too late. I’d never heard of the Rolling Stones then. Nor had most of the United States, because they’d only been playing a couple of years with one album and three singles to their name, starting with Chuck Berry’s ‘Come On’ in 1963. Early in 1964 they released Buddy Holly’s ‘Not Fade Away’, which may have struck big in Britain but only scraped into the Top 50 in the US charts.

  They – and their manager Andrew Loog Oldham – had been working up their rebellious image. They’d pissed in a garage forecourt, big deal. Now they wanted a slice of blue-collar R&B and they went to Sam to get it.

  Sam told me that if the Stones covered the song it would be the most important move I could make. Right then I didn’t get it. Sam swore blind they were going to be huge. He told me, ‘Bobby, they ain’t got a whole of talent, the singer can’t sing, they play out of key, but there ain’t nobody like them.’

  I was sceptical, but Sam was persuasive. Man, I don’t know what he saw, but he did. He told me not to compare Mick Jagger with how we sung. Or how he sung. Sam and Mick were like chalk and cheese as singers and performers and I thought I knew who was cheese. But, Sam said, they’re stylish, nobody sounds like Mick or the band. ‘You can’t get that at the drugstore,’ he told me. ‘You can only get it from Mick. That’s what makes him pretty powerful.’

  A lot more songwriters like me had begun to sing their own songs rather than hand them to a band to perform. The writer knew the song backwards, they’d lived it, knew what the song was about. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards hadn’t started writing their own tunes by then. They were still relying on guys like me, Chuck Berry and Howlin’ Wolf, who gave them ‘Little Red Rooster’.

  I made a stink about them recording the song. I would tell anyone that would listen that the Rolling Stones could go fuck themselves. ‘Fuckers, why wait for me to create something? Why don’t they get their own song?’I’d ask. ‘Every time, the white boys come and steal from the brothers and take their music.’

  They’d done it anyway. At Chess in Chicago, and it came out on the 12x5 LP. And then ‘It’s All Over Now’ became their first UK No 1. I was still screaming and hollering right up until I got my first royalty cheque from the song. Man, the amount of money rolling in shut me right up. I have been chasing the Stones ever since trying to get them to record another of my songs.

  I got a call early in December 1964. Sam asked me up to his house again. It was a Thursday, around lunchtime. ‘I got to talk to you about something very important. I’ve made some decisions.’

  I’d been over many times since he played ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ to me. Sam had still kept the record under wraps, but I knew from the tone of his voice something was up. I didn’t know what, but I thought up a whole lot of stuff and more on that ride over there. None of it prepared me for what I heard.

  I got there. We had a drink. I knew Sam had something weighing on his mind. I didn’t have to wait long to find out what it was.

  He told me, ‘The label is hitting me for money, you guys need some money. I’m killing myself trying to run the whole company. I’m payin’ out, payin’ out, payin’ out.’

  He told me he couldn’t make any serious money out on the road, that had run its course; don’t forget he had a lot of people on some of those bills. Then there was the band to pay.

  ‘I spend more money than I make doing one-nighters,’ he explained.

  Then he laid it out. He’d been talking to Sammy Davis Jr Sammy wanted Sam in Vegas, and Sam was keen. He knew Sammy knew Vegas inside out. Sam was going to play all the big lounges.

  That was the first bombshell. The next went like this: ‘Bobby, I’m getting rid of you as my guitarist.’ It hit me like a body blow. I could hear Sam talking, but I wasn’t listening. It was just noise. ‘Getting rid of you…’

  Getting rid of me? The plan was just to keep Cliff on. Sam kept at it: ‘Your group, your brothers have suffered tremendously with me being selfish and having you on the road playing guitar for me,’ he explained.

  I didn’t agree, but my throat was dry. I didn’t say a thing.

  He told me I was the lead singer of The Valentinos, the guitarist and songwriter. ‘I’m going to put into your career because you could all be as big as The Beatles.’ He thought we could be out there making hits and opening up new markets, talking like a record-company man.

  I was still reeling from being dropped as his guitarist. He must have seen it and tried to soften the blow. ‘Not that I don’t want you to play with me,’ he said. ‘It’s a tough decision to make. Much as I like to hear you playing with me I can’t help but see your brothers sitting over there at the apartment waiting on you to come home.’

  I knew that. When I came off the road with Sam, I would go back to the apartment with food and other junk I’d collected on the road. My brothers would wait for me to put it on the table – like a peace offering.

  He said, ‘Don’t leave your brothers, you could be huge. Being brothers is very unique.’

  While I let that sink in, Sam laid out his idea for The Valentinos to become the next big black group.

  ‘I’m going to set up some dates for you guys because I can’t just keep going into my pocket and just keep giving everyone from the company money while we wait on a record,’ he said. ‘I want you to go out and make some money.’

  This was a big surprise. I still couldn’t get my head around it. I checked, ‘I ain’t going to be playing with you no more?’

  ‘No, man, you’re going to sing, write and go forward.’

  It was like he’d knocked me down. I enjoyed being around Sam, learning from him as a writer. And a man. Now, I was on my own again. Or, at least, with my brothers. There didn’t seem much more to be said. I got up to leave. Then, for the first time, I noticed what Sam was wearing. He was dressed in a pair of pyjamas. Checked pyjamas. Those were the last clothes I ever saw him in.

  A week or so after my drive up to Sam’s house, The Valentinos left to go on the road. First stop Houston, Texas. I’ll never forget it. We checked into a motel, checked into bed and fell fast asleep. Halfway through the night someone started knocking on all the doors. Then I heard a lot of shouting. Some guy was going down the corridor. Then I got a knock and the guy on the other side of the door simply said, ‘Sam’s dead,’ and banged on the next room’s door. I was half-asleep. I couldn’t take it in. I heard it again, ‘Sam Cooke is dead.’ The man was my mentor, a second father. Dead.

  I turned on the news and there it was on every bulletin. Sam Cooke was dead. Man, that was it. The tour was dead. We got right back in the bus, turned it around and headed for LA.

  There were all sorts of stories about Sam’s death in the weeks, months and years that followed. That he’d been hit by the mafia. That the white establishment or record business wanted him dead. There were so many conflicting versions of the events of that night, too, but the simple truth was that it was a tragic end and a terrible waste of a life.

  The official report ran something like this:

  At around 9pm on 10 December 1964, Sam met record producer Al Schmitt and his wife, Joan for dinner at Martoni’s, an LA restau
rant. The threesome had a couple of martinis. They were joined in a booth by Elisa Boyer, a 22-year-old. Later that night Sam left Martoni’s with Boyer, but arranged to meet the Schmitts at the Sunset Boulevard nightspot PJs at around 1am.

  They only stuck around for a short time, then took the freeway south and arrived at the Hacienda Motel, a $3-a-room joint at 9131 Figueroa Street in Watts. They checked in at 2.35am. Cooke signed in under his own name.

  The pair took a room. A few minutes later Boyer, dressed only in her underwear and carrying hers and Cooke’s clothing, knocked on the door of motel manager Bertha Franklin. Franklin was on the phone to the motel’s owner, Evelyn Carr. When she heard the knocking she went to investigate, but Boyer was impatient and had already fled.

  Franklin returned to the phone. A few moments later she was disturbed by more knocking. Franklin again broke off her conversation with Carr. This time it was Cooke banging on the door, dressed only in an overcoat and shoes. He asked where Boyer had gone. Franklin told him she had no idea. He left. Cooke got in his car and pulled off, but then had a change of plan.

  He returned to the motel reception and asked to search Franklin’s apartment for Boyer. Franklin refused. Cooke broke the door down and there was a fight. Franklin reached for a .22 handgun she kept on her TV set and shot three times at close range. Two bullets missed Cooke, a third penetrated his heart and lungs.

  The police were called twice at around 3am – once by Boyer from a payphone a couple of blocks from the Hacienda and also by Carr. Carr, who had listened in on the open phone line while Sam and Franklin fought, was a witness. She told police, ‘A guy just broke the door. I think she shot him.’

  The way I saw it, Sam was a womaniser. No question. We would party and JW would tell Sam to go home. Sam would get a dozen raw eggs, beat them up real good and drink them. Or oysters. I said, ‘You think that will work?’

  He said, ‘Yeah, man, I gotta fuck when I get home, man, or my wife will know.’