by Bobby Womack
I listened as the pair of them did a circuit of the pool table with me laid out on top of it.
‘Nothing here, boy,’ said Sly.
Then, just as they headed for the door again, Sly leaned over and whispered close so the dog couldn’t hear: ‘Bobby, ain’t no problem for Gun to jump up on that pool table. You’d better get yourself a better hidey hole next time, bro.’
Sly had a little gangsta thing going on. I don’t know why, because Sly was definitely no tough guy. There were always guns lying around and he would get his goons – one time it was a family out of New York, huge guys, really tough headcrackers – to fight each other to prove who was the meanest son of a bitch.
Everybody was testing somebody. I saw some guys get their asses whupped real bad. And if you walk with that crowd you always bring violent people to the door. Drugs would be stolen. A guy might come back with his crew and then there’d be a fight. A lot of that stuff went on.
That’s when the music began to take a back seat. I started to see all the bad shit go into the music. It was scary. When we made music it wasn’t happy any more, it had a dark side to it. The girls and the gear had taken a front seat. And the gangstas? They were sitting right there next to them in the passenger seat. I saw things slowly falling apart.
Then Sly went to jail. Busted. I reached out for him and whenever he went to jail I went and got him out. I’d fight for him. It was the needy helping the needy because that’s what they do.
I heard he got a doctor or psychologist to cop for him while he was doing time. Sly’s method was to challenge the guy, tell the doc that he would never be able to understand a guy like Sly unless he’d gone through some of the same stuff – and that meant taking the same drugs. ‘How can you talk to me about drugs?’ he was supposed to have asked. ‘You never saw a drug in your life. If you knew you’d try it.’ He demanded to be treated by someone he could relate to.
Before long, he had the doc under the desk doing a rock and Sly dished out the therapy. The doctor also switched testing bottles so that nothing showed up in Sly’s piss when it came around to screening for pharmaceuticals.
I knew I couldn’t be around Sly much longer. And he wasn’t the kind of guy you’d drop in on for half an hour and a cup of tea. The drugs had sheltered all my weaknesses, but I gradually started to break away from that scene and get my system clean. I got back into going to the studio, retreated into my music and worked on getting a new album out. The more I cleaned up my diet, the stronger I got.
It was a crazy story, but it wasn’t one with a good ending. I was glad it was over and glad that whoever survived it survived. There weren’t that many. A few came out healthy or came out with their life or just came out, but a lot of people died or got hurt and some might be better off dead because they got so whacked out they didn’t know who they were. A lot of casualties.
Sly’s life was such a trip, but if he watched over all of that he might have wished he could have done things different. Because, if anyone made people focus on the whole drug scene, it was Sly. All the great music that he created, and he became known for his drug habit.
The last time I heard from Sly, he had gotten himself straight. I was riding down Hollywood Boulevard, minding my business, looking straight ahead. I made a stop at a red light and glanced over. There was Sylvester Stewart sat in a Ferrari staring over at me. I said, ‘Hey, Sly.’
He said, ‘Hello,’ put his foot on the gas and drove off.
‘Man,’ I thought, as I watched his ride cruise off, ‘what was that shit about?’ All the stuff we had been through and everything.
Next thing, he backed up, leaned out the window and said, ‘Hey, Bobby, sorry, man. I can’t do that to you. How you doin’, man?’Then he said, ‘Call me.’
In 1970, Minit Records was absorbed into its parent group, Liberty, which closed a year later. Me and the rest of the roster were bumped over to United Artists.
This was a breakthrough. I was given the freedom to produce my own work and brought out Communication in 1971. It was a mix of covers – James Taylor’s ‘Fire And Rain’, Ray Stevens’s ‘Everything Is Beautiful’, a take on the Carpenters’‘(They Long To Be) Close To You’– and some of my own tunes.
The biggest hit was the ballad ‘That’s The Way I Feel About Cha’, which cracked the Top 30 and reached No 2 on the R&B charts early in 1972. All the time this was going on, I was helping Sly out on There’s A Riot Goin’ On.
I followed Communication with Understanding in 1972, recorded in a few feverish days at American Sound Studio in Memphis and Muscle Shoals, Alabama. One of the key songs was ‘I Can Understand It’, but they didn’t put that out as a single. What they did release from Understanding was ‘Woman’s Gotta Have It’, which I co-wrote with Barbara’s daughter Linda.
‘Woman’s Gotta Have It’ was an important song to me. Stuck through my whole life. I wanted to let men know that women are around for more than entertainment purposes. A woman has got to know that she is needed; she’s got to know she ain’t living or walking on shaky ground.
But I also wanted to say something to women at the same time. About respect. Coming from Squaresville, I could not understand hookers. I used to stop them on the street and ask them whether, if they had a good job, they would still hook. They told me it was their living and they didn’t see a way out.
After a time I stopped. Those pimps would ask me, ‘Man, what planet you come from? These bitches like to do that because they supposed to be like that.’
When I was on the road with Sam, I saw a lot of stuff. I guess I was too young to understand it all and, even if did know what was going on, that don’t mean I accepted it. If I saw a woman going in one of the musicians’ rooms, I’d tell her he’d had another woman in there not half an hour before, said things like, ‘He don’t love you. They just want to get you drunk and run a train on you.’
So she would go in and tell him and he’d come out mad at me, ranting, ‘He’s a square, a young kid. He’s just like that – saying those things – ’cos he can’t get no pussy.’ Then he might have said, ‘Hey, man, keep your little mouth shut, if you can’t say nothing about me good, don’t say nothing at all. Fuck it, this is the game. This is what it is.’
So every night we would go to a different city and run the same game on different ladies. I didn’t understand it and didn’t want a woman like that. I wanted a wholesome woman, a clean woman; I wanted to make her the queen that she was.
With ‘Woman’s Gotta Have It’, I laid it out, said if you really want to call yourself a man then you should treat a woman with respect. Treat her like you would your own mom.
A few years later, a famous rapper came to me. Instead of singing ‘a woman’s gotta have it’, he wanted me to sing ‘bitch ain’t gonna have shit’. I told him I couldn’t do it. He said, ‘Bobby, it’ll put another $175,000 in your pocket. Cash money.’
I said, ‘Man, I still can’t do it. First of all, my mom will have to be dead and gone and she’s very much alive. Then I really do believe if you got a woman and if you want a queen you got to behave like a king. It’s as simple as that.’ Also, I told him I couldn’t go against what I’d sung in the 1970s; it would have been like I hadn’t really believed what I said.
We recorded ‘Woman’s Gotta Have It’ at American Sound and it became my first No 1 R&B hit, topping the charts in the spring of 1972.
As the follow-up, UA released my cover of Neil Diamond’s 1969 hit ‘Sweet Caroline (Good Times Never Seemed So Good)’. That did OK, but a lot of black jocks played the flip side ‘Harry Hippie’, the song about my brother, and that made No 8 on the R&B charts early in 1973.
Blaxpoitation movies were big in the early 1970s. Richard Roundtree was Shaft. I wanted UA to give me a movie soundtrack to do. I’d got two successful albums under my belt and for some reason I wanted to write a film score. I thought I would be moving up with that.
UA were reluctant, but eventually they conceded, told me they had th
e right film. It was called Across 110th Street, like in New York. Cross that street and you’re in Harlem, the ghetto, not far from the Apollo where The Valentinos played with James Brown. Perfect, that was my territory. I had come from a ghetto so it was something I knew about. I knew all its stories.
Like this one: the ghetto kids don’t know who I am, but their moms might. That fact once saved my life.
I went out to get some cash. I pulled over at a Bank of America on Ventura Boulevard, and stepped out. I was looking fine, got my velvet wide brim, pair of big old shades and a funky wool coat with a trim. I pulled my wallet out of my pocket, flashed my Amex card and stuck it in the cash machine in the wall. As soon as I’d done that, two guys walked up right behind me. One said, ‘Don’t look back or I’ll blow your brains out, motherfucker.’ He poked a gun into the small of my back.
I said, ‘Hey, bro.’
He said, ‘I ain’t your brother.’
The guy with the gun pushed me to the parking lot behind the bank, the pistol pressing hard in my spine. I thought that was it. I was going to end up dead. Then I thought, ‘That’s the way it is, OK, that’s it.’
Behind the bank, the guy with the gun snatched my hat off. Fuck it, it was only a hat. Then the guy told me to turn and give him my coat. He put the gun up to my head, pressed it against my right temple. I felt the barrel, cold and hard. A cold numbness spread from it, over me. It was weird, and hard to explain. All the good things in my life ran through my mind; it made me think life was beautiful.
I had my hands up, but I turned around slowly. Unbuttoned my coat, slipped it off and handed it over. Soon as I’d done that, the other cat – the guy watching nervously left and right – took a proper look at me for the first time. Then he said, ‘Man, that’s Bobby Womack.’ He recognised me even with my shades on.
The guy with the gun looked around at him. The cat goes, ‘Womack, the singer.’
The stick-up man just stared.
‘I can’t do it, man. I can’t do it. My mother loves this motherfucker.’
The guy with the gun looked back at me.
The lookout said, ‘Man, I’m off. I couldn’t face my mother again.’ He turned and ran off.
‘Bobby Womack?’ asked the gunman. I nodded. Then he shrugged and took off after him.
I stood there for a minute, tried to stop shaking. I picked up my hat lying on the ground, put it back on and walked away. That freaked me out, but at the point when he pressed the automatic to my head I was ready to go.
I wanted to see a movie dealing with stuff like that, and I thought I could write a million songs about it. I got taken to the movies to watch the picture and walked out with the film in my head, maybe not every plot twist but at least the vague concept – trying to survive in the ghetto.
Outside on the sidewalk, an executive told me I had two weeks to complete it, just 14 short days to finish the score. That’s enough time to write a shopping list, a letter to your mom, maybe even a hit single, but a movie score? The other problem was that I had a long tour scheduled, so I was out on the road doing shows every night.
I worked it by writing every spare minute of the day; between gigs, between bus stops, on the plane, backstage, in my hotel. Writing, writing, writing, but not between sleep. I didn’t sleep. Didn’t have time.
When I finished writing, I gathered the musicians – my back-up band Peace – between sets to cut the material in a studio. I brought the masters back to UA. They were surprised I’d remembered the film, let alone written a soundtrack to go with it.
It was like my story. Written from the heart. The title track became my fifth straight Top 20 R&B hit in less than two years. It turned out to be a masterpiece, but typically I had to work under the worst possible conditions. It was like I couldn’t use no pen or paper, no time to think, but I did it anyway.
A couple of decades later, Quentin Tarantino used the tune as the title track to his 1997 film Jackie Brown. That was kind of like a reunion because Pam Grier, who played Jackie, was an old girlfriend of mine and the cousin of one of my best buddies, Rosie Grier, the former all-pro defensive linesman for the LA Rams.
I turned back to The Valentinos for my next record. I dug out our 1962 hit ‘Lookin’ For A Love’ for the next album, Lookin’ For Love Again, and put it out as a single, which topped the charts for several weeks in spring 1974. Another single from Lookin’ for Love Again, ‘You’re Welcome, Stop On By’, reached No 5 on the R&B charts that summer.
In 1974, I also had to face another tragedy: the death of my brother Harry, the second youngest. We were born a year apart and were close, probably the closest brother I had. He was also the Harry in my song ‘Harry Hippie’. I never really did find out if he liked that song.
Harry came to stay with me one Friday and was dead by the following Monday.
We were very different. As kids, we would imagine our futures, what we wanted to be, what we wanted to do. Harry’s ambition was to live on a reservation with the Native Americans. He would have loved that. He watched Westerns all the time, even when he’d grown up he was still pushing to go live in some wilderness.
‘You want people to toss you food from a plane?’ I said, laughing at the thought of Harry in a tepee.
He said, ‘They’re free, man, they don’t have to deal with a lot of stuff. Free spirits.’
Now, my map was simple, too, but it didn’t involve cowboys and Indians. It was: get famous, move to Hollywood and get a big old mansion. Harry, he always laughed at that. I wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box, I was slow at school, and Harry teased me, ‘Oh, Bobby will be nothing but a janitor. That’s what he’s going to be.’
‘We’ll see.’
We went back and forth with that.
Harry never got it, why I would want to cut all those records. He knew what came with it. ‘You get people on your case, you got to constantly come up and show them you still got it,’ he said. ‘Who wants to be under that kind of pressure? I feel sorry for you. I see you with all these people, this person doing that for you, another doing this, but these people don’t care about you.’
He was right about that.
‘All I need is my sandals, my jacket, my little pouch and some nice herb.’ That was Harry, a hippy, a beatnik, a free spirit.
So when Jim Ford, one of my writing partners, brought a song to me about a free spirit I thought the story seemed to be about my brother. Jim hadn’t written with Harry in mind so I rewrote it, putting my brother into the story.
Of course, by the time we had grown up, Harry wasn’t on a reservation and he wasn’t happy. He was always being compared with me. He was hearing that I was leaving him behind. ‘You could be doing that,’ people told him. We had both been Valentinos so it wasn’t too hard to imagine. He would shrug and roll another joint, but maybe all the comparing and criticism got to him and was what broke him up.
I had started to make a bit of money, but got lost along the way. That meant I lost contact with all my brothers, including Harry, but one day in 1974 Harry called up. He told me he was having problems with his old lady. They were fighting like cats and dogs. He complained he was going crazy with it all.
He said, ‘I need to get out of here, Bobby.’
‘Why don’t you come up to my house, stay with me,’ I suggested.
So Harry came to stay. I was living up in the Hollywood Hills, at Firenze Place, off Mulholland Drive. I could go back to looking after my little brother. It seemed like he had lost contact with the world. He’d stumble around because he couldn’t see too good, and he told me he needed glasses. I promised to fix him up with a pair.
By then he’d started using smack – snorting, not shooting – and also selling a few bags on the side to make himself some sort of living. When I saw the state he was in, the clothes he was wearing, I couldn’t believe how far the two of us had drifted apart.
What made it worse seeing Harry down on his luck was I felt bad about myself, playing over what Sam had told me
about not leaving my brothers. Thinking about when we used to sing together, me, Harry, Curtis and Cecil, and what would have come of Harry if we had stuck together as The Valentinos.
My girlfriend at the time, now she was a girl. The girl who put the voodoo on me. Part of this meant cutting pieces of my hair. I don’t know why, maybe it was part of the ritual. She asked if I’d ever been to New Orleans – more hoodoo voodoo. I told her I’d never go there with her. I was going bald with all the hair cutting.
We were together five years. She was jealous. Man, that’s right. She accused me of being with anyone.
Harry couldn’t get a fix on that. He thought with me living up in my big house with money, with cars, with whatever, that things would be cool. But my girl didn’t seem to think so.
One day he spilled out his thoughts. He said, ‘Man, I thought you’d be happy here and your girlfriend would be happy. You got everything. I’m living down there, I ain’t got nothing. People is saying, “Look at your brother, your brother has got this and that. What are you doing with your life, Harry?’ But the way I see it, there ain’t no difference. We both got our problems, Bobby. The only difference is yours are bigger, they get noticed a little more and it costs a little more.’
He was in a bad space. It was like we knew his time was running out. He even said that he believed one of us was going to be killed and he wanted it to be him. He figured I would have a better chance at looking after the rest of the family and Mom and Dad.
That was sad. I told him not to talk like that and we’d both work out fine, but he knew there was a higher power working behind the scenes. I wanted to get him out in the world again and take his mind off his problems so I gave him a car and sorted those glasses so he had no excuse about driving it.
As he drove away from the house, he shouted out that he didn’t want to go on his own. ‘Do you want a ride?’
