by Bobby Womack
That’s why they called him Wicked Pickett. Everybody called him Wicked because Pickett wasn’t the kind of guy who thought about what he did. Self-destructive. He kept a lot of stuff secret. If he got mad, he got mad and was always running somebody out of his house.
He had a thing against the system, like a lot of black artists, but most of us didn’t express it as much or make such big waves. If you were finding success, you thought, ‘Shit, I’m getting along, so fuck it.’
But Pickett, he didn’t hold back on nothing. He had a fight with anyone who was part of the machine, anyone, any time. I mean anyone, even me. I could always tell when he was getting ready for his thing and I should get the hell out the way.
This was typical: he looked at me real hard – maybe he was a little drunk – and said, ‘You like my old lady?’
‘I think she’s nice,’ I replied. I didn’t know what else to say. But she was nice, a beautiful woman.
He said, ‘I know she’s nice, do you like her?
‘Well, you know I…’
Once he’d got me to admit I liked his wife, he kept on at it. ‘What does “like” mean, Bobby?’
‘Like means…’
‘You like looking at her?’
‘I jus’ like her as a person…’
‘What kind of person do you want her to be to you?’ Then he’d start in: ‘You motherfucking, dirty bastard, you trying to fuck my old lady?’
I know he loved me but, if someone, maybe the press, gave me a little bit of attention, he would snatch it away. So he might have said something like, ‘You want to do an interview with Mr Womack?’
‘Yep.’
‘You want to do an interview with him? He works for me.’
He also said things like, ‘I don’t want you talking to those people, Womack. People come to my dressing room, don’t talk to them, don’t talk to them about nothing.’
I’d tell him, ‘They wanted to know about the album.’
He wasn’t impressed, just wanted to make a scene. ‘I don’t care,’ he would say and turn away.
There was always something like that and he could embarrass me something bad. Fortunately, we never had any physical bust-up because I would walk away or talk my way out of it. I knew someone would get hurt.
So there was always an undercurrent of tension and violence around Pickett. I used to wake on the wrong side of the bed, just wake up evil and mad at everybody. An hour later, everything was normal and cool. I don’t know what that was, but I tried to work on it and work it out.
Pickett didn’t. He was different; he was a violent man. I know he came up really hard, but I never dug into his life that deep to find the reasons that made him vicious. Why he always wanted to fight, always thought someone was trying to steal from him or someone was trying to talk behind his back.
I’ve seen him jump on people, somebody in his band, hit them across the head with a guitar because they missed a note. I know he beat one of his musicians once. Later, when he was sitting around someplace, the guy he had attacked got his revenge; he picked a poker up out of the fire and ran straight at old Pickett. Someone shouted a warning, Pickett turned his head and the poker went into his eye. I couldn’t believe it. Afterwards, Pickett had real problems seeing much out of that eye.
There was racial tension when black musicians toured in the sixties, especially in the south. The rednecks didn’t like us going into their white areas; sometimes those guys thought musicians would be poaching their women. So that was always an explosive mix – Pickett’s temper versus the racist white boys. The first time I joined Pickett’s band he asked me, ‘Bobby, have you got a gun?’ Oh, man.
Pickett always carried one. Inevitably, we were heading for trouble. He told me that, said trouble’s around the corner in some town out on that long road. ‘Last time we came through we kicked a little ass,’ he told me. ‘None of the boys got hurt.’ And then, ‘Everyone has got to have a gun. Ain’t gonna take no gamble because if we have to come out fighting we come out fighting.’
I listened to all this and thought, ‘Are we gonna play a concert or we going to get killed?’
Some other time and some other place, a club owner offered Pickett a couple of thou just to walk through his place after the band had played the set. $2000. Play the theatre and then walk through. Easy for most folks, not Pickett.
He got me and the rest of his group around him and laid it out to us. ‘Now, we’re going to walk through this club,’ he explained. ‘I’m going to be at the front walking real fast. If any of you motherfuckers stops, something bad will happen to you. Just keep walking; I don’t care what nobody says.’
And he came through that door into the club, walking so fast you’d think he was in a race. Walked straight through, out the back door – he was gone in a flash – and got into his car. He asked the club owner, ‘You got that $2000 for me?’
The guy had thought he’d stop and sign a few autographs, press some flesh, ask the punters, ‘Hey, how you all doing?’ He said, ‘Mr Pickett, I asked you to walk through my club, not run through. Nobody saw you.’
When Pickett was in a good mood, I’d try and explain that he’d go a lot further if he didn’t act like that, treating everyone mean. He’d nod. ‘You’re right, Womack,’ he’d concede. ‘But I’ll tell you something, man, if you’re fucking with me.’ And, of course, it never made much difference to how he acted.
One thing he did take advice on was setting up a publishing outfit. I got sent a royalty cheque and Pickett got sight of it. He wanted to know how I got more money than him. ‘Hey, I’m singing the song,’ he said. ‘You’re getting more money than me.’
I told him it was publishing. ‘Man, that’s what pays the writer,’ I said. I was the writer. ‘It’s important.’
Pickett had some kind of deal where he had been paid something like ten grand a year not to have a publishing company. I don’t know how that worked, but he was adamant he wanted to get one going. He got me to go into Atlantic Records to meet with the boss Ahmet Ertegun.
I was there to help him negotiate. He looked like he was going to walk through the door. That’s the way he walked all the time, real hard. The label was very uptight that I was trying to school Pickett about that, but the publishing company got formed. They said, ‘Fine, Pickett, we have no problem with that.’
He said, ‘It’s going to be different from now on, anything coming in and my publishing is going to be all over it.’
They knew you don’t mess with the Wicked.
Yeah, Pickett, he always wanted me to be right there with him. He trusted me. There was a reason for that: sometimes he had to.
He always avoided interviews, had some kind of problem with them. Like me, he’d quit school early and always had a paranoia that the journalist would try and humiliate him, worse if it was on TV, so he avoided doing interviews. He couldn’t always escape, though, and just before one he told me he had difficulties reading and writing. That was devastating to me. I said, ‘I understand perfectly now, you’re a king when you’re up on that stage and you remember these lyrics. But to be pushed into another world because of what you do, man, it’s hard.’
It was the same mentality with banks. Didn’t trust them. None of us did. I was probably in my mid-twenties before I had my own bank account. I used to keep my money in my shoe.
The way I figured it, if it’s my money I keep it. I paid cash for cars. I didn’t want to fork out for anything that I had to pay on the stump because I figured my dream would disappear one day. If I paid cash for shit, it would always be mine.
Managers, advisers, whoever, they would advise me to lease a car. Told me I could get some tax back. I said, ‘Lease, does that mean they still own it?’ I always paid cash so no one could touch what I got.
Pickett went a similar way; actually, he went Pickett’s way. When it came to someone looking after his business, he would always get someone that he could totally dominate. He thought it was better to have them
scared, knowing how much they knew. ‘Don’t you ever think of putting your hand in the kitty.’
I asked him one time what bank he dealt with. He told me the bank door. I didn’t know what he meant until he opened up a closet in his house. Instead of clothes, it was stacked full of money – all the way up to the very top.
‘Goddamn, this is crazy. Do you know what you could be making on the interest?’ I said.
Pickett knew. ‘I made this. I picked cotton and shit like that and I ain’t never going back. I keep my money right in there. Man, I ain’t putting nothing in the bank. You know what that is? That’s the white man figuring a way to steal back what he gave me. You put it in the bank, they move it.’ Then, when he saw my eyes bulging at the stack of notes, he told me, ‘You had better lose interest in what you seen in that closet or I’ll kick your motherfucking ass.’
Eventually, I had to leave Pickett’s band. All the fighting, the violence, it started to bother me. I was brought up the tough way, but Pickett was a little harder. And it bothered me seeing him hurt himself or if someone beat up on him. Things were happening all the time like that.
I think what scared me the most was when we were driving with a real pretty girl one night. He had picked her up from a gig, and she said she wanted to hang out. So we did, him driving around all these dark country roads in the middle of nowhere.
It suddenly turned ugly. Pickett stopped the car and told the girl to get out the car; he put that girl out on the highway. He said, ‘Well, you hang out here on the country road now. You think you can hang in all this darkness?’
Man, it was dark, cold and lonely there. Pitch black, middle of nowhere. She would have had to walk ten miles to the nearest town – if she knew where that was. I said to Pickett, ‘Hey, baby, don’t do this, man.’ He didn’t want to know. He said, ‘This bitch is getting out here.’
Probably the last straw, the incident that made me think I would be better without Pickett’s company, was when he left his band to drive all the way from Baltimore to New York – with no brakes.
There was about a score of them, in a truck, not a bus, more like a furniture van. And it had no brakes. The musicians told him, ‘Mr Pickett, we don’t think we will be able to make it.’ It was a long way. He said, ‘Oh, you’ll make it all right. Get home the best way, you can use the emergency brake, that’s what it’s there for – an emergency.’
It was snowing and they couldn’t slow down or stop safely. I was up front, riding in a car with Pickett. He’d told me to ride with him. ‘I want you to be out here with me. I want you with me because you’re talented, you got more talent than those motherfuckers; you don’t deserve that, Bobby.’ The band, cramped into that truck, followed our car and I could see them through the rear view – I could hardly bear to watch – slip sliding all over that highway.
To see those guys all crunched in that truck was painful. It was a death trap. I asked him why we didn’t get two or three at least to come and ride up in the car with us, but he thought that was a crazy idea. I thought, ‘Oh, man, you’re going to get those guys killed.’ But I couldn’t do anything about it and Pickett waved his hand and said, ‘Bobby, this is my shit.’
I thought then I’d rather know Pickett from a distance than be up close around him. A little while after the business with the truck, we were sitting together drinking a beer. He would always give me encouragement. Told me something along the lines of: ‘Man, when you played that song last night, when you hit me with the licks on the guitar, man, that’s what made me sing. I’ll never find nobody like that…’
I knew I had to tell him I was leaving, and I started crying. ‘Pickett, I know you cut my songs and everything, but I can’t sit here and laugh like I’m happy. I’m not happy.’
I told him I had to go. I wasn’t brought up his way, he was hard. He had a heart, but it had been fucked with so much. Pickett was cut up about me leaving, but it was the only way I was going to survive.
No doubt Pickett helped me. I’ll always have a deep love for him because he stuck by me when I was trying to get going and because he recorded my songs, gave me a break, and everybody needs a break.
After that, Pickett would change his telephone number real regular. No one could reach him. I would call around, end up going to people who owed Pickett. ‘This is Bob, I need to get Pickett’s number.’
I would put a call into him. He said, ‘Who’s this?’
‘Bobby.’
‘Bobby Womack? How’d you get my number, man? How’d you get it. Tell me how you got it.’
‘Pickett, I called…’
‘You know you can always have it. You know I love you, man.’
Then he’d call the people that gave me his number and cuss them out.
That happened so often that to the day he died I didn’t know how to reach him.
At Muscle Shoals, Pickett got into the studio and never got out. I waited. And waited. I wanted to get in there and record my material.
Then I made a big mistake. The reason Pickett was slow was he had no songs. I started showing him mine, all of them. Man, I had a few and Pickett had none. ‘So why don’t you just let me sing all them songs you got?’
‘OK,’I told him. ‘But I’m keeping the publishing.’
He said, ‘Fine, I just need some hits.’ This was 1968.
He’d take one, play it, nod and ask, ‘Got any more, Bobby?’There was probably half a dozen in total. He asked, ‘You sure you don’t want to record this for yourself?’
‘Man, I got plenty of them.’
But I ran out. I just sat there every day watching them record. He was cutting all of my stuff. He recorded his album The Midnight Mover, and left town. Left me with no songs and I still had my solo album to do. I also had my record label on my case. They would ask when I was going to start my sessions.
I always told them the same thing. Tomorrow. Then tomorrow would become the next day, then the next would roll around and I was still dry. Not one fucking song. We’d be sitting around throwing up ideas and, man, I was trying to think of something. Anything to pop out. It was like looking in the well after a dry summer. Nothing, and I was cursing Pickett. Why did he have to come into town?
Liberty turned up the pressure, kept checking on progress – or lack of it. Somebody told them I was looking pretty burned out and that I’d just given Pickett some great stuff. They didn’t know that ‘great stuff ’was the songs I’d promised them. I told them, ‘I just gave Pickett a few ideas.’
One night we were sitting around the studio and I still had no songs. But for some reason, I started to play ‘Fly Me To The Moon’. It just came to me. Everyone was asleep, but I kept playing this song.
The other musicians gradually woke up and got on the tune. They asked me what it was. It was like a joke to me, but they didn’t know it wasn’t my tune. They didn’t recognise it. I took a Tony Bennett song and put a beat on it. I thought, ‘How could you sing fly me to the moon so slowly?’ Fllllyyyyyyyy-meeeeeeee-tooooo-the-mooooooon. You’d never make it there that slow. So I picked the song up a bit, gave it an up-tempo beat. To get to the moon I thought you needed a bit of speed. So I gave the song that ‘fly de duh, me de duh, to duh, moon, de da duh’. That sounded more like it. At that speed, they might actually make it.
Then I came up with ‘California Dreamin”. The whole album was just about covers. I thought, ‘Man, Liberty are going to be pissed.’ And they were. The record company fell through the floor when they heard what I had cut. They asked about all the new material I’d said I had.
‘I gave the songs to Pickett.’
They were unimpressed. ‘And you give us this shit? This is a Tony Bennett song.’
A few years later, I was coming out of a movie theatre just as Tony Bennett was going in. In the foyer he said, ‘I liked what you did to that song.’
‘Yeah? You serious?
‘Yeah, it was tasty you didn’t mess it up,’ he told me. ‘You did a great job.’ He thought it
was very hip.
They put out ‘Fly Me To The Moon’ – my version – and it was huge.
CHAPTER 11
MORE THAN I CAN STAND
Barbara was a very witty, sharp woman. She could, and did, take a lot. She could endure. But the thing I realised – something I thought she already knew – was that she and Sam were a pair. They lived each other, they really did.
So she used to cry a lot of nights. She had these very bad headaches and used to bang her head against the wall. I asked her how long she had been doing that. She said a long time. ‘Bobby, it’s like a train running through my head.’
She said she’d seen Vincent in the pool in a dream and I felt so bad for her crying about her dead son. She was close to cracking up. Always thinking about Vincent. I said, ‘I could get you pregnant again.’
‘No, my tubes are tied, I lost babies. I can’t do it no more,’ was her response.
What made things worse was she was always talking about how my dick never seemed to go down. And she was right. I’d just be about to go on stage – ‘Ladies and gentleman, all the way from Cleveland, Mr Bobby Womack…’ – and my dick would be up. I’d have a swim and come to get out of the pool and, oh, no, there it was. Hard again. I thought, ‘Damn, what is wrong with me?’ My dick always seemed to be ready for action and I had to think about ice cream, anything, until it went down.
It got so bad Barbara said it wasn’t normal and took me to see a doctor. She said, ‘Listen, Doc, can you give him shots to take his nature away?’
He was having none of it. He took me aside and counselled me not ever to let anyone give me shots. He warned. ‘It [not getting it up] is going to come soon enough.’
So, thankfully, I didn’t get those shots and I kept on at Barbara that I could give her another boy and soon enough she was pregnant. It was the one thing I could give her. It was a boy. We called him Vincent too, after the son she had and lost with Sam. Barbara spoiled him rotten.
Nothing seemed to change the ill will people felt about me, though. Everyone still saw me as the guy that moved in on Sam’s widow. It got so I was always nervous, shell-shocked. I needed something to inure me to all that bullshit. I just didn’t know what. Until I was introduced to coke. OK, I’d never done drugs. So why not start? I had fear and I was told coke was comforting. It was, and I needed that. When I took coke, I didn’t care what people said about me. I walked up to them and smiled. ‘How you doin’, sir, have yourself a good evening.’