by Bobby Womack
Sam and Barbara argued about having a fence put around the pool at the front of the house. Sam was against it, said it would ruin the landscape. He argued that in addition to Barbara there were two maids around to watch over and look after the kids. Apparently, it wasn’t enough. Vincent, who was around two, went through the doggie door, got in the side of the pool and drowned.
I guess the doll was supposed to represent that. It was sick and nasty. It seemed no one liked the fact that I had married Sam Cooke’s widow. And I mean no one. Not my folks, not my family, not my friends. Man, it was lonely. It started getting like a lot of pressure too.
Nancy Wilson, a good friend of ours, invited us to one of her gigs. She told the audience there were some friends in the house, breathed into the mic, ‘Say hello to Barbara Cooke…’ And the audience went, ‘Ooo!’ and applauded. …and her man, Bobby Womack.’ And the audience booed.
Many times we would go to events and – after seeing all the filthy looks and catching some vicious verbal spite – I would get out and go sit in the limo until it was all over. I got tired of dealing with all the negative attitudes, but I didn’t want to run away from it.
Sam’s family had a real problem with me marrying Barbara. It was no secret, Sam’s brother Charlie told me. He told me he thought I was trying to fuck over Sam. He called me. ‘Man, anybody else could have married Sam’s wife, but you. Sam loved you, man. If you ever come to Chicago…’ The threat was left hanging but I knew it was meant.
Now, Charlie wasn’t a pussy. He was the kind of cat who would die for Sam. I saw him take a knife off a guy, who tried to stab Sam. This kid, a stagehand, had a flick knife and was always talking about cutting Sam. There were always fuck-ups around so I didn’t take much notice. One night, Sam tried to bring some people backstage and the guy wouldn’t let them pass. Sam told him to get the fuck out of the way and he pulled his knife. Charlie jumped right in there, took a stabbing, but knocked the guy out. The next time I saw Charlie, he was in hospital with tubes sticking out of him.
I figured if Charlie was going to do something I wanted to go and get it done, get it over with. I thought, ‘Whatever they got to do, let them get it out of their system.’
Barbara and I flew to Chicago. We checked into the Roberts Motel and I called Sam’s brother. I told him, ‘I’m here. We’re in 2112.’
He said, ‘OK, I’m on my way, brother.’ And hung up.
In the motel room, Barbara busied herself loading bullets into a pistol. Now Barbara had a mean streak in her, she would react. She thought I was crazy walking into their territory, but I knew I had to get it over with. I didn’t want to be worrying about what could happen some time down the line. If Charlie made his move now, the chances were he wouldn’t fuck with me again.
Once the gun was loaded, Barbara stashed it under a pillow and went into the bathroom to put on her robe. I took the ammo out and put the gun back. I didn’t want to be creating the trouble. What would it look like if she shot Charlie? They would say Bobby Womack went to Chicago to kill Sam’s brother. I may as well have committed suicide if that had happened.
I was scared waiting. I could hear the second hand on my watch tick down the minutes. I could hear Barbara in the bathroom humming to herself and making herself beautiful. I felt cold. Then there was a knock at the door. That chilled me some more.
Charlie showed with his two brothers, David and LC. I opened the door. No one smiled, but Charlie said, ‘Oh, man, you showed up. You got a whole lot of nerve, haven’t you? You little fucker.’
I said, ‘Yeah, I’m here.’ I went to shake his hand, and Charlie punched me.
He beat me so bad – so fucking bad – my whole head was swelled up like a melon. My teeth came through my lip. He beat me unconscious, then he hit me conscious again. He broke my jaw, the whole bit.
I lay on the motel carpet and looked up at him. I could see him hitting me: after a while, I didn’t feel a thing.
I didn’t try and fight back. I figured he was mad and I wasn’t. But Barbara came out of that bathroom screaming. She thought they were going to kill me. She made a grab for the gun under the pillow and pulled the trigger. It just clicked and Barbara couldn’t understand why. ‘I’ll be goddamned. This stupid motherfucker.’ She looked down at me, bloody on the floor. ‘You took the bullets out the gun?’
I knew she’d use the gun so I saved Charlie’s life by unloading it. Charlie knocked her down too.
There was a guy in the room next door. He banged on the wall, then he called the cops. Charlie went to run out but the door was still half-open and he ran right into it and bust his head open.
When the cops saw the state of me, they said Charlie would do time. I didn’t want that. I thought if it was my brother I might have done the same thing. I was willing to take my beating like a man and get on with it. They put Charlie in jail and told me to press charges. I went down to the station house and told them to let him out. He was sitting down there looking at me so hard. I said, ‘Let him out. I don’t want him locked up.’ Then I walked away.
Two strange things happened after that. A few years later, I played Chicago. Charlie showed up to the gig with David and LC. Charlie didn’t want any bother this time around. He said, ‘We just came to give you moral support.’
A long time after that beating, maybe 20 years later, I was in a barber’s shop. I heard this guy whisper to the barber, ‘That’s Bobby Womack.’ The paranoia that I had felt after Sam’s death flooded right back. Then the guy asked if I remembered him from Chicago. He was the guy in the motel room, banging on the wall, the guy who called the police on Charlie.
Barbara was trying to sort out Sam’s affairs and the estate. She was headstrong, but she didn’t know too much about the business side, like publishing, and I tried to tell her how it worked. One thing I advised her was not to sell the publishing, Sam’s publishing. It would be a steady earner, and a big one. But some things she just wouldn’t listen to me on. It was: ‘Look, I’m running the show now. I just wanted to ask your opinion.’
She was making big decisions, but not always making them with a cool, clear head. JW lost interest in Sam’s label SAR, so in 1965 Barbara dissolved the company. It got worse when she found out that Sam owed a whole bunch of taxes.
Barbara used to get up every morning, six o’clock on the nose, fix a coffee with a little brandy in it. She also used to put $50 in my jewellery case, every day, just so I had some spends, a little cash in my pocket. It was easier than doling it out over breakfast. I felt terrible, but I had no money because no one was hiring me for gigs – my name was still mud after the wedding – and I hadn’t started writing that many songs by then. I told Barbara I’d pay her back. I had no idea how.
To add to all the other shit I got after marrying Barbara, the army called up. I’d just got married, and now with the Vietnam War raging, Uncle Sam came calling.
There was no history of our family being in the army. Not my father, his brothers or my brothers. I was reluctant to break that duck; I didn’t want anything to do with Vietnam. I thought I’d gone through enough shit just to end up in a lousy war trying to dodge a bullet.
The army wanted me to take a medical. I made some plans to ensure that didn’t go so well. I ate a bar of soap. Some guy had told me the trick was not to eat for a couple of days and then munch on soap. It ran my blood pressure sky high.
I went down to the army induction and was sick as a dog, throwing up all over the floor. My blood pressure was so high one of the docs couldn’t understand why I wasn’t dead.
When they gave me a drink of water, I started coughing up bubbles from all the soap in my stomach. That got their attention. They knew I was shirking and I spent the day down there doing all their exercises as they checked me out. I passed. One of the sergeants said, ‘Look at this guy, you really are a cheapskate that you should pull this stunt.’
I said, ‘I don’t want to hurt nobody. I can’t do it.’
This cut no ice. ‘
Oh, yeah? Well, you’re going, Womack.’
Told them I was a Muslim, name of Bobby X. That didn’t matter to them none. They knew I was bullshitting anyway; I had no ties to the Muslim brothers. The army sent me home and told me to be ready to leave for boot camp in a week.
I told Barbara what the country had planned for me – fighting out in the jungle. She hadn’t planned this when we got hitched. ‘What are we going to do?’ she asked.
I wasn’t finished yet. I had another idea: the next day I went and bought a dress. Didn’t stop at the dress neither – that was a little polka-dot number – I got the whole outfit down with black stockings, high heels, a nice wig and a big hat with a little veil. When I slapped on the lipstick and a bit of mascara, I looked pretty hot.
When I went back to the recruitment centre to show off my new look, they thought I had the wrong department.
‘No, I’m Bobby Womack.’
The attitude was: ‘Why do you think you want to go to war, ma’am? Or is it sir?’
Flashing my false eyelashes at the sergeant, I said, ‘I just want to be there to help the soldiers.’ I gave a cute corporal a wink and a flirty toss of my golden mane.
I was trying to hit on every guy in there. Told them I wanted to go through the part where everyone strips off for a full medical examination, but they weren’t buying this nut job either. ‘Mr Womack, it won’t work, you were just down here the other day and then you was a Muslim,’ said the recruiting officer. ‘Womack, we are about sick of you. Take that shit off, go back home and come back here dressed like a man. You are going in the army.’
‘I got a career going,’ I protested. ‘I just had a record, man, I just got married. I can’t go.’
Oh, man, I was going crazy then. All my best moves had fallen flat.
Next thing I knew, I had another doc examining my feet. He asked me, ‘How can you stand on those feet?’
I wasn’t listening.
‘Your feet are flat, they look like pancakes; you’ll never make it through basic training,’ he told me.
Flat feet. I laid it on thick, told him I couldn’t run and could barely walk.
His next words were music to my ears: ‘Go home, son, you won’t be any use to us.’
I would have run out of there, but I still had that dress on and I couldn’t even walk too good in heels. When I made it home, I told Barbara I wished I’d known I had flat feet. After using the other scams, the army now had it on record that I was a soap-eating, sexually ambivalent Muslim.
After that little experience, the army must have figured they’d seen enough Womacks. They never called up any of us brothers. Turned us all down.
The only one in our family to join was cousin Henry, who helped get us to California when Sam called. He got married before he left so he would have something to come home to. He couldn’t face Vietnam straight. He told me some guys were getting ganja, heroin, all kinds of shit. He figured he would be OK with drinking, but when he came out he was a drunk. Had to be drunk all the time and wore his army gear all the while.
Henry said he’d never seen so many dead people. He’d stood next to a brother talking, looked away and the next thing there was nothing there but a leg. Man, you don’t forget something like that. And, when he came back, his wife had left him for another man.
Sam’s death – the way he had died – scared me bad, but Barbara and I had only been married for a short while when I found myself at a motel with a girl. It was the same situation that Sam was in and I could feel him looking down on me. He would have said, ‘Don’t be stupid, Bobby.’
I was nervous when I took that chick into the room. I was so worried I would be recognised, so scared I couldn’t think properly. Then I didn’t want to take my pants off, or my shoes or my socks. Practically fully dressed. I didn’t want to be caught out like Sam. I made sure I could run out of there in a hurry. Not be left in just my shorts.
And all the while a voice in my head told me, ‘Oh, that was just how it was for Sam. Go ahead, it won’t be like that.’ At the same time, I also thought, ‘Man, what are you doing here? I don’t need to do this. It’s not like I’m going to die if I don’t do it.’ These two conflicting voices and I just wanted to scream, ‘Leave me the fuck alone. My dick is hard and I want to fuck.’
All that messed with my mind. We started making out and then another voice came in, asked me where my keys were at.
I told the girl, ‘Hold up, baby, hold up, hold on now.’
I started to feel for my keys in my pants, real slow. I hoped they were there. They weren’t. I panicked.
She asked what was up, then told me not to worry. ‘We’ll just do it and then let’s go,’ she said.
Didn’t work with me. ‘Nah, I’ve got to get my keys now.’
We never got around to fucking. I searched around a bit and then went out to the car. I was so paranoid that someone might recognise me I locked the keys in the car. They were swinging from the ignition.
Barbara had another set, but I couldn’t call her because she would have asked what the hell I was doing in a motel. Then I thought about being exposed in the press: SINGER WOMACK PLAYS AWAY.
I took a brick and busted the car window out, grabbed my keys. Then I called Barbara. I told her someone had tried to break into my car – thought that was pretty clever. She asked me where I was. I said I was on the way home, they knocked the window out but then saw me coming and ran off. Barbara said, ‘Hurry home.’
On the half-hour drive, I looked at that story and thought, ‘That fucking around, it just ain’t worth it.’
So for a while, a long time, I didn’t play around. Just didn’t fuck around at all. My dick went on vacation. The way I saw it, if something took my mind away so bad that my dick wouldn’t get hard then it wasn’t worth it.
CHAPTER 9
CRYING TIME
Right in the middle of all the hassle after I married Barbara, I got a call. Somebody told me Ray Charles was putting a whole new band together. He wanted me to audition. Ray had been cleaning up, trying to kick heroin and he didn’t want any musicians around him who were still using. This was late 1965.
I don’t know if Ray knew about the pressure I was under. It hadn’t let up. Nobody would give me a break. I recorded my own tracks and I would take them to radio stations. ‘This is a hit record, Bobby,’ they promised and then they threw the record right in the garbage can. The jocks would break the record right in front of me and toss it in the garbage. Just because I had married Sam Cooke’s wife. It was a boycott.
I was untouchable, but Ray probably figured he could use that. At 21, he knew I didn’t have any kind of habit that he could feed off. So I liked that; Ray Charles offered me a way out. I’d never met the man and he gave me a gig.
Ray auditioned a lot of guitar players. I didn’t want to go through all that, but I didn’t have many – or any – choices right then. He didn’t know if I could play his music. I knew I could.
I sat at the audition with my guitar and a book of music in front of me. The book was about an inch thick. I didn’t open the book. Ray walked in. He shouted out a bunch of numbers, like 48, 92, 31, 15. Then he said, ‘These are the songs we’re going to play on these page numbers, just so you know the way the songs are going to come.’
I still didn’t open the book, just looked ahead – waiting. Someone must have pointed that out. Ray said, ‘You know, young man, you ought to open up your book.’
I said, ‘I don’t read music, Mr Charles, I play by ear.’
He laughed. Then spat out 31.
The other musicians found the right page in their music books and started up on song 31. I left the book unopened, but joined in. I was going along, playing the music. Suddenly Ray stopped the band. ‘Second trumpet player. You are flat, tune up.’ The guy tuned up.
Ray kept switching songs, going from one number to another, trying to lose me, I’m sure. I kept up. I was in there playing. He stopped the band. ‘OK,’ he said to me, ‘ju
st you and me play.’ Then to the band, ‘See what kind of ears this guy really got.’
Ray launched into one of the songs in the book and off we went. Now he could hear me playing without the rest of the musicians and still couldn’t believe it. ‘You haven’t played these songs so how do you know where the chord is coming?’
‘I have to know because I don’t read.’
He didn’t know how I did it, but he was impressed. For the first time since I played with Sam, I got a gig, although Ray had a warning. ‘My music is way more complicated than Sam Cooke’s stuff.’
To play in the Ray Charles band, all the new guys had to get themselves kitted out in the house style. Man, that was the opposite of slick.
To save money, the suits were handed down. Every musician who left Ray’s band or retired passed their suit on to the new guy, so these outfits were well past retirement age. They were high water pants, but high water hadn’t been in fashion that century. Also, the last guy who wore my jacket must have weighed 300 pounds. It was like making a suit for George Foreman and then cutting it down to my size. It was a whacky mess; the coat was supposed to be beige, but had faded yellow, there were patches in the ass. There were nametags in it going back to the stone age.
I never wanted to walk out on stage because I was real skinny and the pants would be up to my armpits and the jacket hanging way off my ass. I’d go out front and whisper, ‘Mr Charles, Mr Charles. Can I just sit?’
‘No, stand, young man. Go out there, they like you.’
But when I got to the microphone with this clown suit people would laugh. Ain’t that a bitch they were looking at my pants. Behind me the band would be laughing, too, because any breeze out on that stage would blow my pants out, making it look like I was jigging.
Blind man Ray, he didn’t understand why everyone was laughing. I told him again, ‘It’s the suit, man. It’s the fucking suit.’