Bobby Womack Midnight Mover

by Bobby Womack

  All through the session, Janis was down. She was in tears some of the day and on the phone to her boyfriend. From what I heard, she wanted him to come out and see her, but he refused unless she wired him some money. I heard her scream into the phone, ‘You always want money from me, that’s all you want.’

  I put my arms around her. Jimi Hendrix had only recently died and she was really in a fix about that. Crying and talking about death. I tried to console her, but she had hit the Southern Comfort heavily and the booze got in the way. People don’t down that much just to drink. I didn’t snort coke just to snort it. I wanted to snort the shit out of my life. It looked like Janis wanted to drown hers with booze. I’d only met her that day, but I could see the girl’s life was in turmoil, a whole mess of trouble.

  After the session Janis was pretty loaded, so she left her car, a Porsche with a bad paint job, parked at the recording studio. She asked me to give her a lift a few blocks up to her hotel on Franklin in Hollywood. I’d just got myself a brand-new Mercedes 600 so I was fine with that.

  When I lived with Barbara, we would drive past the Mercedes showroom and I would point out the model. Barbara promised, ‘I’ll buy it for you.’ But I wanted to buy that car for myself. Know that I’d earned it.

  Barbara couldn’t understand that I didn’t want to be chauffeured around. I wanted to drive it myself and I just loved that car. When we split, I heard that Barbara drove past that same dealership and saw the car wasn’t in the window. Out of curiosity, she stepped in to find out who had bought it. The guys in the showroom told her it was me. I had gone in one day with a briefcase full of cash and dumped it on top of the car. I drove that Merc right off the floor.

  Like me, as soon as Janis saw that car she was knocked out.

  She whistled. ‘Jesus Christ, how did you get a fucking car like this? This is a fucking sharp ride.’ We rode a couple of streets while she fixed a tune in her head and then started singing. A line just spilled out. ‘Oh, Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz…’

  Suddenly, she was inspired and the next line came tumbling, ‘My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends…’ She was anxious to get right back in the studio again to lay the track down and ordered me to turn back. ‘Let’s go back, we’re gonna cut this… “Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends. So, Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz”…’

  I reminded her the band had already split.

  ‘Fuck it, turn the car around. Oh, Lord, this is great.’

  She kept singing, making the song up as we drove around Hollywood, back to the studio. ‘You play guitar right? Well, that’s all we need. Me and you.’

  We got back into the studio and Rothchild was about ready to leave. ‘You forget something, Janis?’ he asked.

  She told him what was on her mind: ‘We’re gonna record.’

  He told her to wait it out, until tomorrow. ‘It’ll keep; it’s the Southern Comfort talking.’

  But Janis was burning to get that song down. While Janis hummed the tune, Rothchild hooked up a couple of microphones. She was on an acoustic and I played my guitar, just the two of us; me trying to follow her. It was an easy song and when we got through she said, ‘That’s it.’ And that was it – we split.

  It was pretty late by the time we snuck out of that studio, around midnight. We headed back to where she was holed up again and I parked up in front of the hotel, a bundle of apartments set around an oasis of trees and plants and a pool.

  Janis was in 105. Nothing too fancy, a bedroom with a couple of beds, closets, bathroom and a small kitchenette with wood cupboards and a table. We got comfortable. Sat up there, rapped about music, people we knew, the usual stuff. Just two rock’n’rollers checking each other out.

  Janis had a little record machine in the corner of the room and persuaded me to get my album Lookin’ For A Love from the car. She wanted to listen to it, but she thought it funny I carried my album around with me.

  We cued up the first track and chatted some more. Janis had ideas about reaching out to black audiences and believed I was the guy who was going to help her do that. She said, ‘I got a problem. Everybody thinks I’m trying to sing like Tina Turner. I don’t want to be Tina Turner, I want to be Janis Joplin and I want to go out on the black side of town and be able to sing and show those people that I used to sing for drinks in New Orleans.’

  I had a real problem crossing over, too. I figured the pop stations weren’t playing my records – at least not enough. So her idea sounded sweet to me. A case of mutual back scratching. She pressed the point: ‘You take me to the ghetto and I’ll take you to the white side of town.’

  I was in for that. ‘Damn, that’s great. Can I put it together?’

  We figured we could set up a tour and do at least 15 cities.

  Janis told me the kids at school called her ugly. She wasn’t a looker, but I thought she was beautiful. It seemed like she couldn’t accept that people would want her, unless it was for her fame and success.

  She felt was that people saw her as a freak, but she was a free spirit. She was also a gentle person, very affectionate, and she just wanted to be loved. That drew me a lot closer to her. I understood how vulnerable she had become. It did cross my mind now we were back at the hotel that we might fuck. Ain’t too many people got the chance to fuck Janis.

  While I tried to put all that shit together, we got on to drugs. Talking about them. She was using heroin but wasn’t holding. I had my cocaine. I had a little toot of blow and asked if she wanted some, but she said, ‘Nah, I’m waiting on something else.’ Then she asked, ‘Why do you snort coke, Bobby?’

  ‘Why do you do smack?’

  She told me she became a user to bury all her thoughts and deaden her from the world. ‘Because it lays me back, that shit speeds you up.’

  My spin was: ‘Both coke and H make you feel nothing, and if I’m feeling nothing I want to be up and not feeling rather than asleep.’

  Then Janis got a call. She only spent a couple of minutes chatting and then put the phone down. She told me a guy was going to swing by right that minute. It was her connection, and he wanted me out. ‘Hey, you got to go now.’ I thought that she didn’t want me to see him or at least see her take her fix. We kissed goodnight and she said, ‘See you.’ Just like that.

  ‘OK, I love you.’ We hugged.

  And I left. I didn’t see the guy calling with the smack. I wasn’t paying any attention, just playing the day over in my mind.

  I wasn’t in my bed more than a few hours when someone called up to tell me Janis was dead, that she had OD’d. Man, I was shocked. I broke down and cried. I was the last person to see her alive, or last but one. Her dealer saw her last.

  The police asked me for a description of anyone I saw in the hotel that night, but the only thing I could tell them was that I heard some footsteps.

  A few years later, I was sat in my living room watching TV and a car commercial came on for Mercedes Benz with Janis’s song. I turned to my girlfriend and told her, ‘That’s Janis Joplin. She did that song in my car. In my Mercedes car.’

  I met John Lennon, but not under the best circumstances. Dr John was doing something down the Troubadour Club on Santa Monica. He called me up, told me to get my ass down there as there’d be a few stars I’d know; some of Fleetwood Mac were there and Lennon. So we were all hanging and jamming.

  Then they started calling everyone up on stage. I got up there and made a grab for the guitar before everybody else ’cos that was the instrument I could play.

  Lennon said, ‘Hey, give me the fucking guitar, you cunt.’

  I said, ‘Fuck you, man.’

  I got the drop on him and got the guitar. Lennon got on piano.

  We were probably playing something like ‘Johnny B Goode’. The piano was out of tune and he wasn’t playing like he wanted to. He turned around to me and said again, ‘Give me the guitar.’

  I said, ‘What? I’m playing the guitar.’

 
Lennon went crazy. I told him again, ‘Fuck you.’

  He gave it me back, ‘Fuck you.’ Then he got up off the piano to snatch the guitar off me, but before he did that he started to laugh. Said I couldn’t even play it, I’d got the thing upside down.

  Someone put him wise to who I was. Told him I was Bobby Womack.

  I told him I couldn’t play piano. I thought, ‘Shit, I got to uphold my thing. I can’t just give the guy the guitar just because he is John Lennon.’

  Afterwards, Lennon came up and apologised. He claimed he hadn’t known who I was and said, ‘I’m John. Let’s meet on better terms.’

  I told him it was cool and we shook hands.

  I never met him again.

  Marvin Gaye was a genius, but he wanted to die like a hobo. Don’t know why, I guess it was his genius, or madness. And he did have his freaky side. He told me once about driving down Sunset Boulevard making love to a hooker in the back of the car while his wife was at the wheel.

  One time we were hanging at a studio on Sunset and he told me, ‘When I go out I want to go like I came. With nothing.’

  He did. When his time came, he was bankrupt, and owed the IRS some, and had been divorced from his wife, Anna.

  A few weeks before he died in 1984, we had an album planned. His son, Marvin Gaye III, was putting it together. We talked about it and I turned up to the studio to record. Marvin’s son was embarrassed. He told me, ‘Marvin ain’t going to make it tonight.’

  Then Marvin called. He said, ‘Bobby, how you feelin’?’

  I said, ‘I’m feeling good.’

  ‘Yeah, can we book for another night?’

  I said, ‘OK.’

  ‘I just got a little thing on here; there is too much going on at this time in my life. They won’t let me be.’

  I said, ‘OK, what about Thursday night?’

  ‘That sounds like a winner.’

  Thursday night came and it was the same story. We got on the phone again and he said, ‘I know you are going to chew me up’

  ‘I ain’t going to chew you up,’ I told him, ‘we’re cool.’

  That night he wanted to talk, to talk about life. His life. Marvin liked to open up a bit of a philosophical debate.

  He said, ‘Bobby, what’s your father’s name?’

  I told him.

  He said, ‘Friendly? That means he is friendly, but what if your father’s name was Gaye and your father was gay?’ Their family name had originally been Gay.

  I said, ‘Oh, man.’

  He and his old man had had a tempestuous relationship. Always arguing. The old man beat up on Marvin when he was a kid. Marvin told me his old man, Marvin Sr, used to tell him he wanted satin sheets, like women loved. He asked his son if he thought that made him gay.

  We got into it some more that night on the phone. He wanted to tell me his problems. Some of those problems were with Motown and founder Berry Gordy. Marvin had married Berry’s sister Anna, who was much older than him. He also figured that, when they had a fight, his wife would go straight to her brother and rag on Marvin.

  I’d wanted to join Motown. When we were The Valentinos in Cleveland, we would have walked to the HQ in Detroit. At Mary Wells’s funeral, Berry was sitting behind. I asked him, ‘How come you didn’t sign The Valentinos?’

  He said our sound was too different – too gospel – from Motown. He couldn’t embrace that. ‘Man, some people you can’t control and you didn’t sound like Motown, you had a distinctive sound. You could tell a Motown act, I figured Sam would allow you to be yourselves and I couldn’t make you be something else.’

  I took that as a compliment.

  Marvin told me about how he fought to get Berry Gordy to release ‘What’s Going On’. Berry thought the song was too political. The way Marvin told it, Berry said to him, ‘You don’t have to sing no shit like that. I mean, what’s going on? Hey, if you know, keep it to yourself.’ Marvin fought hard to put that record out.

  He’d had a spell living out in Belgium in the early 80s, but he was at the end of his rope when he did ‘Sexual Healing’ in ’83. He told me he had begged not to come back to the States to do a tour. He thought he would never make it back because he was too weak. I heard that towards the end he was walking around unshaven, in his pyjamas with an overcoat on top. And this went on for weeks.

  He was shot in his mother’s house. Marvin Sr shot him. They’d had another fight and Marvin went upstairs to see his mom. The old man followed up there with a gun. Walked right in there and killed his son as he sat talking with his mother.

  When he died, I knew he’d had his problems with taxes so I found out where his second wife, Janis, lived. She was much younger than Marvin; they’d got together in 1971. I didn’t know her personally, but I had a few dollars and called her up, told her what Marvin meant to me, went out to the beach where she lived and slipped her a couple of thousand bucks. I knew everything that Marvin had left undone would be on her.

  The last time I heard from him he asked what a nigger had to do to get on the front cover of Rolling Stone magazine. I told him you had to die first.

  Sometimes when I walk on stage to perform, I start talking about all other artists I’ve known over the years. I say, ‘I know more people dead than I know living.’ I say, ‘I think about Marvin Gaye, I think about Otis Redding, I think about Janis Joplin, I think about Jimi Hendrix. You don’t know how fast these people can live their lives and go out so quick. They contribute so much in a short time.’

  Ike Turner had a studio, Bolic Sound, down in Inglewood. It had an underground passageway that ran from the studio to his apartment.

  There was a kitchen, a place to shoot pool, three studios. He had this place tricked out with cameras and mirrors. They were everywhere and that just added to the paranoia.

  He had bars on the windows and push buttons on the doors, which locked everyone in. And Ike liked locking people in and not letting them out. He was a kid with a lot of toys.

  There was also cocaine. Intimidation, humiliation, threats. There was always people hanging, a lot of people around all the time, up for seven-day weekends and Ike would go to sleep in the middle of it all. That, or he would be up raving. Ranting, raving and shouting. And issuing challenges.

  But Ike was very talented. He knew how to put a band together, he knew the music side, wrote songs. And he got some big names down on tape at Bolic. I recorded there. And Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, the Rolling Stones. What happened to the tapes? Ask Ike. Ike called and said, ‘If you come to my studio, you don’t have to go through that bullshit. You can get right on the board, you can work, I’ll give you half the price that other studios would cost you.’ But then you had to be locked in.

  Sometimes, somebody would get to go out and a whole load of people would run out with them.

  Ike and his wife Tina had opened for the Rolling Stones on their American tours in 1966 and 1969. One time when the Stones came in to town they went down to check Ike out, see his layout – this was during the early 1970s drug days; a gram of coke would never do, it was always two or three ounces in a big bowl on the console. Also, no one could have told the Stones that they didn’t want to go down to Ike’s place, not unless they wanted to be there for a week.

  Ike locked them in. He had the Stones’ management outside banging on the door, Mick and Keith trying to pull the bars off the windows. Still he wouldn’t let them out. Ike had the Stones scared.

  We all got more paranoid and devious and fucked up down at Bolic. Ike caught a friend of mine stealing blow one time. It turned ugly quick.

  Another time I was down there with my wife and she was pregnant. She couldn’t stay up all night and morning and I told Ike we had to go.

  ‘OK, Bobby,’ he said. ‘I’ll drive you. I’ll get the car.’

  He drove us, but without lights. He made a bet. He said, ‘I can get to your house in 15 minutes.’

  I said, ‘I know you can, but just take your time.’

  ‘No.
I’m going to show you how fast I can get there.’ Ike cut off his lights, put his foot on the gas and the needle started climbing. We were crossing junctions, moving at 70, 75, 80, 85mph up through Inglewood, hitting La Cienega north at 90mph. The car jumped up and down, hit a dip, screeched around a corner. I said – I screamed – ‘Man, she’ll have this baby in the fucking car.’

  It was a miracle we never got stopped by the cops. Madness. Him and Sly Stone were both crazy like that.

  I once told Ike I was in pretty good condition, that I used to run a lot. He thought that was weird. No surprise there. I told him I could run ten miles and there was no way he could keep up with me. That was all the challenge he needed.

  He turned off the mixing desk, told a drudge, ‘Get me a sweatsuit, get me some running shoes, sweat bands.’ He got himself kitted out pretty good, but we weren’t halfway around the block when I knew he was in trouble. He started panting hard, then he leaned against a wall to catch his breath. We were back inside Bolic inside of five minutes and he never mentioned running again. He told me, ‘Man, you are in shape.’

  Tina wouldn’t be around so much, unless she was in the studio doing vocals. And come the night – and next morning – she was always in bed. She did the right thing, stayed away, and I think Ike wanted it that way. Whenever I saw her, she was always very humble, asked how we got on in the studio.

  A guy called Bob Krasnow had a record company called Blue Thumb. Krasnow had travelled the country with James Brown and ran King Records in San Francisco, then Karma Sutra in LA. Krasnow hooked up with former A&M producer Tommy LiPuma and created Blue Thumb. Captain Beefheart came up with the name.

  This was 1971 and I was hot. And what do people do when you’re hot? They hook you up with someone else.

  I went down to the Blue Thumb offices on North Canon Drive in Beverly Hills and they paired me up with Szabo and told me to give him some of my songs. So I did.