by Bobby Womack
Special thanks to
David Morgan who was the originator of this project.
The late great Tony Secunda (Telegram Sam).
David Thompson.
George Tremlett OBE.
and a very special thanks to Robert Ashton for writing
and finalising the project.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Acknowledgements
Prologue
1 The Facts Of Life
2 A Change Is Gonna Come
3 California Dreamin’
4 Across 110th Street
5 All Along The Watchtower
6 Somebody Special
7 It’s All Over Now
8 Woman’s Gotta Have It
9 Crying Time
10 Fly Me To The Moon
11 More Than I Can Stand
12 Fire And Rain
13 There’s A Riot Goin’ On
14 Hang On In There
15 The Poet
16 Harlem Shuffle
17 Where Do We Go From Here
Chronology
Discography
Copyright
PROLOGUE
JEALOUS LOVE
My wife was packing a .32 pistol. It was the first thing I saw. It came around the corner, followed by her. And she came fast. Yelling. And I mean yelling. ‘Bobby, you son of a bitch. You bastard.’ I didn’t wait for the rest. She was mad as hell.
I scrambled into my pants, but all I saw was the black barrel of that gun – coming closer. Too close. I stumbled, both my legs caught in the same trouser leg, and tore a rip in those canary-yellow strides. Damn. I hopped, staggered, fell, was up again. And then I ran.
It sounded like Barbara was right on my tail. That screaming was loud, but my heart was pounding louder. She was seriously pissed. Then I heard her daughter, Linda, behind. She was screaming too. ‘Don’t shoot him, don’t shoot.’ Barbara’s response made me pick up the pace. ‘I’m not gonna shoot the bastard, I’m gonna kill him.’
Oh, man, I was like Jesse Owens. Flying. Zip, out the bedroom, along the landing and down the stairs – in one leap. I was out the house. I had the drop on her. Then I hit the driveway in my bare feet. The sharp gravel sliced into my skin and I sunk to my knees. Maybe I could make it to the car? It was a long shot, but the only one I’d got.
I ducked into the garage, slammed the wooden door shut and jammed myself against it, hard. I hung on to that handle like my life depended on it. I looked around, over my shoulder, and there was the Merc. All ready to rock’n’roll. The key, the key? Where was the key? On the counter in the kitchen or in the ignition?
Barbara had caught up. Now she was the other side of the door, tugging and twisting at the handle, trying to rattle the thing off its hinges. I gripped that handle real tight. I couldn’t get to the car now if I wanted.
‘C’mon, you bastard,’ she screamed. ‘Are you going to open up?’
I didn’t have time to answer because she shot me. Barbara put one of those .32 slugs right across my scalp. The bullet ripped through the door and parted my hair just like a barber might, nice and neat. Except this time it was on the right and faster. Much faster. As the bullet whistled past it felt like a bird, its wing gently clipping me, and then it punched a mighty hole in the garage wall opposite. A roar suddenly exploded, filling my ears, and, when there was no room left to fill, the noise leaked into my skull and beat up on my mind.
She had shot me. Oh, man. My wife had shot me. Can you believe it? Did I deserve it? Yeah, maybe. But shot? I stared at the splintered hole in the door and put a hand – I was shaking like a daisy in a hurricane – to my temple. There was a trickle of warm sticky blood, but it was just a graze. Lucky? Yeah, but for how long? There were five more bullets in that cylinder.
My legs turned to jelly. I felt the blood and dropped like a stone on the concrete floor and played dead. The yelling had stopped; it was quiet. Time stopped. I played back the last few minutes in my head. It seemed hours since I’d crept into my stepdaughter’s room. Little Linda, just a kid, a teenager. She called me Daddy. I’d got up like I did most nights now me and Barbara were at each other’s throat. Supposed to be writing a song, strumming my guitar, but actually in Linda’s room. In her bed.
I’m lying there kissing Linda and the light comes on – ‘You dirty fucking bastard. What are you doing with my daughter?’ It was Barbara. She told me, ‘I’m going to kill you. Get the fuck out or I will kill you.’ That’s when she went to fetch that .32 with the deadly kick, and if someone is about to put a gun to your head you get the hell up and out of there.
So now I was lying in the oil spills on the garage floor. I was scared shitless. I knew I had done something wrong, terribly wrong. I had let this girl run this on me and I had let my dick speak for my conscience, but dick has no conscience.
This was the worst part of my life. I never did it to hurt Barbara and didn’t do it to hurt Linda. I just couldn’t be everything everyone wanted me to be and still be Bobby Womack. Now, I thought I was going to die.
I pressed my cheek against the cool slab. A drop of blood, maybe sweat, maybe both, eased out from under my hairline and slowly inched down my forehead, dripped on to my nose, slid along a-piece and then fell to mix with the oil and petrol.
The door handle twisted, the door banged open and Barbara stepped into view. I squeezed one eye shut. From the other I could see Barbara, her legs and her right arm, the gun still hanging from the end of it. And it was pointing at me. She looked ready to finish the job. For a moment all I could hear was her breathing: I held my breath. Linda, a pace behind, stepped up to me. ‘Oh my God,’ she screamed. ‘Oh my God. You’ve killed him.’ That shocked Barbara.
‘God, I shot him,’ I heard her mumble. ‘Dear God.’ She turned and ran back to the house. Maybe she was going to call an ambulance. I jumped up and started running again, down the drive to the bottom of the hill below the house.
I bumped into cops scoping the neighbourhood for housebreakers and other likely fuck-ups. They got one. I was standing down there in my shorts and nothing else.
‘What’s going on?’ asked one of the cops.
‘Man,’ I told them, ‘my wife just shot me. I should be dead.’
I felt like I might as well be. My friend and mentor Sam Cooke was dead. My wife – Sam’s widow – had just tried to kill me and was about to leave me. And Linda, my lover, the girl I was supposedly destined to marry? She hitched up with my brother and never spoke to her mother again. That was all really fucked up. And it wasn’t about to get better.
CHAPTER 1
THE FACTS OF LIFE
I was born in a ghetto. This particular ghetto was in Cleveland, Ohio. The neighbourhood was so ghetto that we didn’t bother the rats and they didn’t bother us. They walked past and hollered, ‘How you doin’, man?’
Everybody had to survive. You could hear babies crying all the damn time and I was constantly scalping myself trying to scratch out those damn flies.
My mom and pop had come up from the south. My mother, Naomi Reed, was from Bluefield, West Virginia. My old man came from Charleston. His name was Friendly. My father had seven brothers and eight sisters. On my mother’s side there were eight brothers and seven sisters. It was a big family.
My father and his brothers all sang, called themselves the Womack Brothers. It was real gospel stuff. He and his brothers would go to the little church and meet up with my mom and her sisters down there. Well, you know, someone has got to fall in love with all those pretty girls around.
Friendly quit school early, in fact all his brothers did, and around 12 or 13 they all went to work down the coalmines. But they kep
t up the singing and pretty soon him and Mom were courting. They got married when my mom turned 13 and he was 19.
My father predicted that he would have five sons and they were going to sing and he was going to call them the Womack Brothers, just like the group he had with his brothers. And you know? He was right. Every year my mom had a baby boy until she got to five and she used to cry, ‘You can have a girl now.’ But it didn’t happen.
The first son they had they called Friendly Junior. We called him Jim because that was how Junior sounded when you said it fast: Junior, Jun, Jim. His other nickname was Stony Brooks. Curtis came second. His nickname was The Colonel. I was the third brother. Robert Dwayne they called me, Bobby for short. I came along on 4 March 1944. Star sign: Pisces. My folks had moved up to Cleveland by then – the house in Charleston had burned down – and my old man got himself a job in a steel mill.
I was the sickly one in the family. My mother said I was real weak and every couple of months I came close to checking out. They’d say, ‘He’s going out.’ But I hung on. They called me Nobinee on account of the fact I had a knobbly lump on the back of my head.
After me there was Harry, who was called Goat, though to this day I don’t know why. Then Cecil, or Cornflakes, as we called him because his skin peeled right off his hands and to us that looked just like cereal.
The house stood on 63rd and Central, right in the heart of the city’s ghetto. It was a pokey one-bedroom shack, a small bathroom about the size of a closet and a living room a couple of strides wide.
My mother and father slept in the living room and the five of us slept in the big old bed – three at the top and two at the bottom. I was sucking toes every time the lights went out and tugging at the blankets in winter to get some warmth. The first song I ever wrote was a reminder of being chilled and cramped and pulling at that threadbare army blanket. It was called ‘Give That Man Some Cover’.
Getting food on the plate was always a struggle. My mother got relief cheques and she bought powdered milk, powdered butter, powdered eggs, powdered everything. It was never enough.
We used to go out back of the grocery store down the road and pick through the garbage cans. They threw away chitterlings, pigs’ tails, nose, ears, ox tails – all that stuff no one else would, or could, eat. The owner found us rooting through the bins once and he couldn’t believe anyone would eat that shit.
Chicken was the dish most blacks ate. It was wolfed down with watermelon, only we never got the choice cuts. The real meat would go right to the church. We would get the neck, the gizzard, the butt, the feet with the talons still on them. My mom would fry up those claws real good for dinner.
We had a man come around bringing ice and, if we were lucky, he brought live chickens with him. We would wring their necks in the backyard, pluck the feathers – we put the chicken in hot water and the feathers came out easier – and hang them right on the door.
Harry got sick from all that poultry. He had nightmares from some chicken, its neck half hanging off and still running around our yard. I remember when we started to move up a little in life, I asked a lady once what she was eating. It was chicken breast. I said, ‘What? A chicken has a breast?’
Sometimes my father would say, ‘We’re going to fast today,’ and we’d all start praying. That’s when I knew there was no food in the house and wouldn’t be none too soon either. Sometimes we didn’t eat for three days – one for the Father, one for the Son and one for the Holy Ghost – and just drank water. Yeah, we’d scoop up that water and drink down plenty to purify our soul. I was starving, but at the same time I believed I was fasting for God to give us strength as a family
My old man would announce, ‘On the seventh day we break bread,’ but my mom knew we couldn’t go that long a stretch without grub. The lady next door most likely would slip a little something into our kitchen, and that’s how it worked. Mostly people all got together, to try to help each other. Someone would get sugar, another flour and someone else maybe a little meat, chicken probably. So we all shared a little bit. But it was barely making it.
We realised that come Christmas time. I was about five or six and wondering how Santa Claus was going to get in the house because we didn’t have a chimney. True to form, my father put me straight. He told me right then that there wasn’t a Santa and that he had ate the mince pies we put out.
‘I’m sick of a white man getting credit,’ he said. ‘I went out there to break my ass working and get you those damn toys. There ain’t no one coming down no damn chimney. You know I practically went out and stole to get you that BB gun.’
I told him there couldn’t be a black Santa. He proved me wrong, put on a little outfit and announced, ‘I’m Santa Claus.’
We said, ‘Yeah, Ghetto Claus.’
He said, ‘See, there ain’t no Santa. It’s just a sneaky white man putting on a red suit that he got from a store in town.’
My mother was upset, she thought he’d ruined Christmas for us. I guess he did.
There wasn’t much happening in that neighbourhood. But, when there was, it was always something that would come right back and bite me on the ass. Other boys in the ghetto had nothing to do, there was no TV, and they’d play games: one was to gorilla some drunk. They’d stand on the corner and watch someone get drunk and then beat them up.
One day some kids found a cat that had about nine kittens. They started a fire in a barrel and tossed the kittens in, one by one. I saw these cats jump up, burning up, screaming and clawing at the can and then fall back. I shouted and cried, trying to get them to stop, but I was too small and they pushed me away.
Then they went for the mother, who had just watched her young get a fire lit under them. Those kids snatched her up and started swinging her around by the tail. When they let go of the cat, she landed right on my back, mad as hell and scratching. I must have run ten blocks with her pawing at me and hissing. I’ve been scared of cats ever since.
I was only allowed to wander our part of town. No blacks ever went to the east – the white – side of town after dark. The whites would kick their ass. The same thing happened if any white faces were found wandering in our neighbourhood past lights out. There’d be heads butted.
My old man was kind of funny, though. Most blacks passing a white guy on the street in those days would drop their heads and stare at the sidewalk, otherwise they could expect some smartass comment for their sassiness. Something like, ‘What you lookin’ at, nigger?’ But our father taught us different. He said, ‘Never look away when you’re passing white folk; that’s when they will hit you.’
It was nothing to step into a shop or an elevator and hear some little white kid ask, ‘Mom, is that a nigger over there?’
I remember when I was about eight and my mom took me to a park. After a couple of minutes a mounted policeman came riding up on his horse and demanded to know what we were doing. I told him we were playing baseball. This cop reached down and slapped me so hard across the head that he knocked me to the grass. My mom ran up crying for him not to hit me again. She said I was too young to know that I shouldn’t back chat. And the cop shouted, ‘Well, you teach him then.’
From that moment I thought white men were dangerous. It seemed to me that they wanted to stay in control. Blacks were allowed to become athletes or musicians, but they couldn’t move out of the neighbourhood. I thought that couldn’t go on, stopping all the blacks, all the Mexicans, anybody but the white man from being productive. One day, I thought, he wasn’t going to be able to carry it, and when that happened America would not be the greatest country in the world.
It seemed the only time blacks got respect was when they sang, doing something that hurt no one. Singing about Jesus was just about perfect, so that’s what we did every Sunday. We’d be down the church all hours. We didn’t go to the movies; there was no card playing and no profanity. Just church.
The only one in the family who didn’t have truck with that was Grover. Uncle Grover, my dad’s brother,
was the only one of us Womacks who had a ‘night life’. He was six three, sharp as a tack and had us believing he didn’t do a day’s work, making his money as a chilli pimp. But, he was slaving down on the Chevy production line like the rest of them.
Grover knew how to have fun, though. He always had a new Caddy or some other fancy ride. He drank, smoked and seemed to have three ladies on the go most of the time. Old Grover gave me my first sip of whiskey and he used to sit there and warn me against the church. ‘Don’t let your daddy take you to all those preachers,’ he’d caution. ‘They’re nothing but pimps. They fuck all the sisters in the church.’
My father didn’t go for that. ‘Grover,’ he said, ‘you’re trying to take away my kids and lead them to Satan.’
Grover would do a bit of bootlegging and he’d turn up at the house with a suitcase full of green. Later on, he had to leave town. We heard he’d shot some guy, but the police didn’t bother with it. I guess they just thought it’s another dead nigger.
School was no fun either. I went to Rawlings Junior High and East Tech High and we couldn’t afford to ride the bus to school so we had to walk maybe eight miles and it would be freezing cold. Every day. I used to put on a whole bunch of socks to keep warm, but so many socks meant I couldn’t fit my shoes on properly.
I would try and outrun that bus, hobbling along with my feet crammed in my shoes, but sometimes I made it into school before the rest of the class. I’d be sitting there waiting for the lesson to start, just so I didn’t have to answer why I never rode that damn bus.
Sometimes my mother used to make me lunch. Those sandwiches were special. Some days – no, most days – they’d be nothing but bread and butter. No meat. I’d bite down on a slice and nothing but mustard would come dribbling out. I never let on to the other kids my situation was a little bit worse than they had it. I’d just pretend those mustard sandwiches tasted real good.