by Bobby Womack
‘No, man, you’ve got to do this on your own. You’ve got to get back into the real world.’
He said, ‘I know you love me, man.’
As he hit the gas pedal, I thought I could get him to come back and play bass with me, get us working together again, just like in The Valentinos.
‘Where shall I go?’
‘Anywhere, man. Just get lost, anywhere you want to go, you’re a free man now.’
A couple of hours later, I got a call. He was lost. ‘How do you get back up into those hills?’ he asked. He was down on himself for not being able to do that one thing and also to take care of himself.
‘Hey, don’t worry about it,’ I told him. ‘It’s not like you’re going to a meeting.’ I gave him some directions.
‘OK,’ he said.
Three hours later, I got another call. He was still lost, still trying to get back up into the Hollywood Hills. He’d filled the car up twice with gas he’d done so much driving.
I had a gig up in Seattle and I told Harry that when I got back he should pick up the bass again and we’d go into rehearsal. I flew up to Seattle with my girlfriend. She made the night hell. If the maid came into my room, she’d accuse me of sleeping with her. We had a big fight, a real screamer, and I ended up putting her out of my hotel suite because I couldn’t take it any more.
That night I went out on the prowl. I thought, ‘Fuck it, I’m getting grief for not fucking anyone, I might as well pick a chick up.’ Typical of my luck, there weren’t any hot ladies hanging about the club I played, but there was a hooker, a white prostitute. She told me it was a hundred bucks – not much more than the whore in New York when The Valentinos played the Apollo.
Then I had a change of plan. I figured I could just fuck with my girlfriend’s head a bit. I told the hooker that I only wanted her to come back to my hotel and act like we’d known each other a long time.
The hooker played ball. ‘Whatever your kicks are, honey.’
Back at the hotel, I saw the light under the door of my girl’s room and I made sure she could hear us walk down the corridor. As we waltzed past her room – me saying, ‘Baby, I’m so glad I met you, this is going to be fun. You’ve got to stay over tonight’ – I heard the door creak open.
Inside my suite, the hooker was a little surprised she’d already earned her money and kept her clothes on. ‘What do you want to do?’
‘No, that’s it,’ I told her.
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, but you can stay here if you want.’
I put her out on a couch, locked the doors and went to bed. ‘Leave in the morning or whenever you want.’
I don’t know how my girlfriend got in that suite; she must have gone through about four locked doors to get at that girl on the couch, but I was woken by screams and someone being hit.
Blood was all over the show. That was scary. My girlfriend was raving and she threatened, ‘I could have killed you a long time ago, but I’m not going to hurt you. I’m going to kill her.’
On the floor, the hooker’s coat lay in about five pieces, slashed by a knife. No one was going to be wearing that again.
I managed to get my girlfriend out of there, but before too long she was back knocking on the door to my suite again. I couldn’t handle it. She was pleading to be let in again and then started going crazy on me – giving me more of her wild, crazy voodoo shit. And it was vile, evil.
She said, ‘Bobby, please I got to talk you. I just had a dream I saw Harry in a casket.’ That’s what she said.
I couldn’t believe it. Not after her trick with the whore. I said, ‘Shut the fuck up talking like that.’
‘I saw him in a casket, Bobby.’
I warned her to stop the crazy shit and that if I did open the door I would probably hurt her, but she kept at it telling me Harry was dressed in a white suit and lying in a coffin. ‘Harry’s dead,’ she said.
I wouldn’t answer her no more.
The next day I had a radio show to do. It was the kind of thing where I’d go on, shoot the breeze, take a few calls and drum up a bit of trade for the next show. I was at the station and the show’s producer put through a call from my brother Cecil.
I was surprised, but ran with it. ‘Hey, Cecil, what’s up, man?’
He said, ‘Harry got killed.’
Man, I freaked out.
The disc jockey cut the sound, the radio went dead, and I went nuts. I couldn’t believe it. I sat there stunned. Not before too long – I don’t know how many hours passed – Bill Withers showed up at the radio station and tried to console me. He’d heard Cecil and had driven over to support me.
A girlfriend of Harry’s had gone up to my house to see him, took him up a bit of weed. She must have been looking through the closets because she found some women’s clothes and got it into her head that Harry was fooling around. They were my girlfriend’s clothes. Harry hadn’t been fooling with anyone.
While Harry smoked a joint and kicked back watching TV, this woman snuck into my kitchen and got herself a steak knife – one of the ones I cooked with – from a drawer, walked back into the living room and plunged it into his neck.
The knife was still in his neck when the ambulance and cops arrived. Poor Harry couldn’t take the knife out of his neck; I guess it was just hurting so bad, but he got up, walked around, opened the front door and went outside to sit on the porch where he bled to death.
Curtis was the first brother on the scene. He told me afterwards that when he turned up Harry had already lost a lot of blood but was still just about clinging on. As he lay dying, Curtis asked him to squeeze his hand if he could hear him. Harry squeezed. It was about the last thing he did.
What made it worse was a couple of neighbours had seen Harry sat out there on the porch, but didn’t want to get involved. The doctors reckoned Harry might have made it if they had got to him earlier.
The funeral was just depressing, so sad. We had it at the cemetery at Forest Lawn, all us brothers dressed alike – suits and ties, the whole bit – just as we’d been on stage, but burying a younger brother was sad.
I started blaming my girlfriend for the whole thing. She’d been the first to tell me, but in my mind it was like she had put a jinx on him. She had to go.
On the back of Harry’s death, I was too broke up to work, and the drugs and partying at Sly’s place had all taken their toll. But I had a ton of dates I was committed to. Things were still steaming but mentally and physically I wasn’t up for doing any gigs.
The problem was the promoters had already put up their money and I thought the whole thing was being billed around Harry’s death. Roll up, roll up, come and hear Harry Hippie’s brother. I wasn’t going for that. That’s when the blind thing came in.
I was sick, sad and depressed; I would have grabbed at anything. Then an idea came to fake a bad fall. I thought that might get me off some dates. I staged the whole thing at a recording studio, somewhere public. I fell back and pretended to hit the back of my head hard against the wall, then claimed that I couldn’t see. I got myself to a hospital and the doctors did some tests. One of them was to strike a match real close to my eye to see if I flinched. I didn’t.
The diagnosis was that it was some kind of psychological thing – a little temporary blindness brought on by the fall and all the pressure I was under following Harry’s death. The medics thought that I would recover with some R&R.
It seemed like I’d hoodwinked the medical fraternity because they got my eyes all patched up, gave me a cane, the whole nine yards, but I still had to go through with a couple of dates.
What a charade. The first date, at Madison Square Garden in New York, I had my brother Friendly lead me out on stage, gauze and tape wrapped around my head. He was in on the ruse and introduced me to the audience. I asked him if he thought I could get away with it. He didn’t see any alternative. ‘It’s going to have to work, bro.’ He was right. I knew I’d be in a hell of a lot of trouble if I got caught out.
I had to be fucked out of my mind. I totally overdid the blind-man bit, stumbling around, knocking over the microphone, tripping over amps, spilling drinks, but a blind guy ain’t that obvious. He doesn’t ‘act’ blind. I’d worked with a few, Ray Charles and both sets of Blind Boys. I knew how they got by in a world without light and it wasn’t like that.
One of the most embarrassing episodes of the whole embarrassing episode was that Stevie Wonder – himself blind almost since birth – got to hear about my blindness and came to wish me well. He tried to cheer me up, told me it wasn’t the end of the world, and while he told me this I could peep out of the corner of my eye, behind all the gauze, and see Stevie sitting there sympathising.
I managed to slip out of a lot of those dates. United Artists advised me to take a break: drop the rest of the tour, get myself over to Hawaii and try and ditch the depression.
I called my old friend Gorgeous George O’Dell and he told me to take his wife, Cathy. She hadn’t been to Hawaii and was a little bored. George also said I’d be doing him a favour because he couldn’t afford to take his wife on a vacation like that. ‘I trust you,’ he said as an aside.
The thing was, George’s old lady was fine. Very fine. I mean, she was beautiful, definitely the gorgeous one of the pair. So I felt a little bad because my thoughts about the trip weren’t all pure.
Cathy and me flew to out to the islands and I was the happiest (pretend blind) person in the whole world. There was a yacht laid on, and parties were thrown for me. It was a trip. What I didn’t know was the president of the record company, Mike Stewart, had instructed some guy to follow me around and check I wasn’t misbehaving.
One night, me and Cathy were sat up in our hotel suite drinking champagne. I’d managed to keep my whole act together, but a small piece of the cotton gauze around my head kept slipping into the corner of my eye. It was irritating so I was constantly pulling at it.
I did this one time while we sipped the bubbly and there was Cathy sat there doing her nails – naked. Not one stitch of clothing on. She must have slipped out of her dress while we were talking. I tried not to stare, but it was hard. Actually, it was impossible.
Cathy got up off the bed to dry her nails, shaking her wrists and waltzing around the room. I forgot I was supposed to be blind and my eyes and head followed her every movement.
Suddenly, she caught on to the way I was watching her. She shot me a look, realised I was as blind as she was. Then she screamed, ‘Oh, my God, you bastard.’ And she ran out to fetch a towel. ‘Bobby, oh, Lord.’ She screamed so hard, ‘Bobby, how could you do something like this? I’ve got to get another room. You scared the shit out of me.’
I tried to calm her down, but felt like a fraud. I pleaded with her. I explained about the depression Harry’s death had dropped me in, and how I couldn’t face going on the road. ‘I had to do it; I had no other way out.’
She got on the phone to George and told him I was faking my blindness. I could hear them. ‘Yes, he can see… No, he’s not blind… It’s all a scam…’
It was so embarrassing. I told George the same I’d told his wife and tried to convince him that the blindness wasn’t a plot to lure Cathy to Hawaii. And that, no, I hadn’t touched her. ‘It’s the God’s truth, it’s all because of Harry,’ I pleaded.
George was cool, and he told me to slow down, relax. So I ironed it out, at least with George and his wife, and we got on with the vacation.
However, Dr Shovac then got in on the act. He spotted us on the beach. That would have been OK, but at the time I was chasing down the sand and splashing through the surf. I’d tossed away my white stick and shed my bandages as I ran along the sand like the Invisible Man unwrapping his head.
The guy the record company had hired saw it all. He got on the blower to LA and reported in.
I’d been charging the whole trip to UA. Anything you want. Champagne? Oh, put it on the tab. Dinner? Charge it. A new outfit? The company will pay. Jewellery? Yeah, we got to have jewellery. We’d only been there a week and the bill was already around $30,000.
When we got back to the hotel after our frolic on the beach, the hotel receptionist had a message for me from the label. It read something like: ‘Mr Womack, all your funds have been cut off, there is a plane back to LA tonight. Get your butt on it.’ Man, I’d been rumbled.
I tried arguing, but the hotel people said they were just doing their job and their job was to cut everything off and get me on the next plane out of there.
So that was it. We had to go home, and I had to face the music with the record company. I caught a lot of flak for pulling that stunt. The record company thought I was crazy and I had to turn the whole thing around without the press finding out or my career was over.
The plan was for me to claim I’d gone back into hospital and had been treated successfully, but some of the promoters on those cancelled gigs must have got wind of the whole shaky deal. A bunch of them clubbed together and threatened to sue me for breach of contract. They made it plain that if I ever set foot in their towns they would serve papers on me.
It got to the point where I was waiting for these promoters to die off so I could hit their towns and work again. I went out of the country to do dates, places like England, Germany, France and Italy, places where the promoters weren’t out to ambush me with legal papers.
It was a while before I could get back into the States, several years before the problem really went away. I asked my manager, ‘Hey, is Mr So-and-So still around?’
‘He died.’
OK, that meant I could play Jackson.
‘And what about Mr You-Know?’
‘Yeah, he’s still around. He’s still promoting.’
Shit. That meant Reno was still off limits.
Finally, I did one show in Arizona and I was signing some autographs at a record store and one of the promoters was waiting in line. He obviously hadn’t died. I tried to play it cool. I said, ‘Hey, Willy. You get some free tickets and dinner is on me tonight.’
He must have got tired waiting to hit me with that writ because he never served it. He told me my luck was in and then had that dinner.
I had to get back to recording, but I had an idea about that, too. I wanted to cut a country and western album. United Artists didn’t understand it. They didn’t want it, either. Told me I wasn’t a C&W singer. They thought I had been hanging with Sly too long.
I said, ‘Well, that’s the only album you’re going to get. And I want all my brothers on it, too.’
At that point, I had a lot of ambitions. To do movie scores, play instrumentals, play jazz, a comedy album. I even had a crazy idea about opening up a barbeque restaurant on wheels, but no one wanted to back it.
In those days, record companies just wanted an artist to tread the same line. Their attitude was, if you were cutting hit songs, why change the formula? Keep with the hits and don’t worry about nothing else.
I kept pressing with the C&W album. C&W was going to be big and I wanted in on the ground floor, was my reasoning. Finally, they gave me the green light. It was just crazy. My father came out to sing on it, had my brothers there too.
That was one thing I’d always wanted to do, to have my father on the record. It was the only time we got the whole family together, which was what was so spiritual about it. I thought BW Goes C&W was a great album, great songs. I really sung my heart out.
The cover shoot took a western theme. All us brothers dolled up in cowboy outfits. Guns, holsters, spurs, boots, the whole bit, but C&W meant nothing without horses and that meant us sitting on the damn things. None of us had been around horses, let alone ridden one, and, every time one of us finally got saddled up, the horse would take off, buck until we fell off and head back to the stable. I was running around that field trying to coral those horses.
I’ve got a picture in my mind of Friendly Jr, reins in his hand one minute, hanging upside down from the horse’s belly the next. We finally tethered the horses to
this post so they wouldn’t buck, but it took a whole day for the photographer to wrap the shoot.
Then I told the label the name I had planned for the album: Step Aside Charley Pride Give Another Nigger A Try. The way I saw it was simple. Charley Pride was the only black man singing C&W and now there was another black man who wanted to give it a shot.
There was nothing spiritual in how the record company received that. They exploded. The president refused to put out an album with that kind of title. Naturally, the – mostly white – suits at the label had a big problem with the word ‘Nigger’.
‘Why have you got to use the word nigger?’ the execs asked.
‘A brother can call another nigger a nigger,’ I explained. ‘You can’t call him that, but I can because I’m one too.’
If all that wasn’t bad enough, I was also getting grief from the western actor Gene Autry because I had used his song ‘I’m Back In The Saddle Again’, but corrupted the title to ‘I’m Black In The Saddle Again’. The Singing Cowboy called me to complain. He told me the song was close to his heart and he wouldn’t tolerate me using it the way I wanted. He took out a lawsuit and threatened to sue me to the end of the world if I used his song like that. The label, and everyone else, thought I was mocking him.
The label finally talked me out of the album title, told me they would never go for it and would fight me tooth and nail. Somebody came up with BW Goes C&W as in Bobby Womack goes Country & Western. Label president Mike Stewart asked, ‘Is that going to kill you, Bobby?’
I reckoned not. ‘OK, man, fuck it, you guys.’
The he told me, ‘Oh, by the way, we’re selling your contract.’
They thought I had finally flipped out.
I always look at BW Goes C&W as a classic piece of work. I wasn’t trying to be funny. I felt I was on a roll, cooking, and when you’re on a roll the road ahead can take you anywhere. I wanted to explore that new territory. I wanted to say what I found and say it the way my people would understand it, but that meant I was hurting my career. All I heard from labels was ‘you can’t write that’ or ‘the market won’t go for it’. They always wanted me to shape things for the market and not to offend anyone. I didn’t go with that.