by Bobby Womack
The Stones had recorded ‘It’s All Over Now’, but I wasn’t around for that and didn’t run into the band properly until a decade later when I hooked up to do a couple of tours with them in the mid-1970s. Their cover had been my greatest crossover record. The Stones had made my name in 1964; I was somebody. I also thought they believed I was some kind of unsung hero to them. They had tried to be everyone else in those early years, one day James Brown, the next Jackie Wilson, anyone who came into the city they would try out.
So maybe they had me on the tours because they knew I had heart and never lost it. I wasn’t the only artist working those 1970s tours. Prince was out there one time, this was way before Purple Rain. He was just getting known and working up the crowd for the Stones. The guy was having an orgasm with his guitar.
Word got back that the audience might not have been appreciating Prince’s act as much as he thought. Two roadies were instructed to throw him off the stage, and that’s what they did: walked on in the middle of his performance, grabbed him and literally threw him under a piano. Prince went sailing off and out into the wings.
At least I knew the punishment the Stones had in store for not coming up to scratch, but sometimes I thought the band just brought me out for amusement – to hear my jokes. There would be times when I was out with them, but not performing. Woody called up and said, ‘You come out, how long can you stay with us?’
I told him, ‘Woody, I ain’t got no job, I ain’t in that kind of good shape. I’m a legend – not a rich legend, a broke legend.’ He promised me a suite. ‘You got a room, we’ll get some money, we’ll rub some nickels together.’
I said, ‘Nickels don’t sound like a whole lot of money.’
They took care of me, took care of anything I wanted. Woody would tell me, ‘You know you’ll have money; it’s good for Keith, it’s good for Charlie, it’s good for everybody.’ So I would be with them on tour, but not working. And I thought, ‘This is weird. They just want me for a spiritual vibe. I ain’t an artist here, more like a priest.’
That was kind of tough because I’m a singer; I’m in the same business as the Rolling Stones, but what was I doing being a priest? They were all on stage and I wanted to be out there with them. We’d play music after the shows. Just sang songs. Keith was always up on guitar players all the way back to Robert Johnson. He knew everybody from jazz to classical players. You name it, he was into it. He also got some nice pockets. Keith would play me songs and I’d ask him to give me the song. Keith didn’t go for that. ‘This is for the band, you fuck. Don’t you dare try and catch me at a weak moment and take one of our songs.’
So, I said, ‘Man, write me one, then.’
If I was on the bill, sometimes I would go on stage to sing ‘It’s All Over Now’. And I could feel the audience – all 100,000 people or whatever – stop and look. I knew they wondered who the motherfucker was singing a Rolling Stones song, and it was my song. I thought, ‘Hey, man, I could kill the house if only I was on my side of town.’
One time I was hanging with the Stones and I had my own album out. I was all proud, but it wasn’t getting airplay. The band asked, ‘Do you think you are going to cross over on this one. Bobby?’
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘it had better cross over or I’ll end up falling over.’
A phone call came in to the Stones camp and for some reason I picked it up. It was the boss of MTV and he was trying to get the Rolling Stones for an interview. He said, ‘Who’s this?’ I told him. ‘Oh, Bobby, what a brilliant album you got.’
‘Yeah, it’s so brilliant, why aren’t you playing it?’
The guy went into a spiel and told me to get a copy over. I told him no. ‘I ain’t getting it over there, I sent 10,000 copies already.’
So he reeled me in with a deal: if I hooked MTV up with one of the Stones for an interview, then I’d get some heavy rotation on his station.
I told Keith and Woody. They both agreed to do the interview, but would only talk up my album when they got there. They made the company pick us up in separate limos, police on all sides, and also pick up the tab. I thought, ‘Man, with all these limos and stuff, they’ll never play my record now. This was more than it cost to make the album.’
In the studio, the interview was wild. They said things like, ‘The man here [me] has cut an album you say doesn’t fit your format – what fits your fucking format?’
MTV got the record on and everything, but I walked away from that thinking it was not about my music, it was about the colour of my skin. Still was.
I played on the Stones’ album Dirty Work. Recorded it in Paris and New York in 1985, did ‘Harlem Shuffle’.
The group thought I might be a good inspiration, thought it would be cool. I worked mostly with Keith and Ronnie; they would lay down the tracks and I would do the backgrounds. Those guys would call me the Womack Sisters because I could sing all the high parts like a couple of chicks.
It was a good album. Keith and Woody were tight. They worked together. Where Keith went, Woody went. But the band weren’t working as a unit. There were a lot of stumbling blocks. No real communication, for a start. Charlie didn’t seem to be feeling well most of the time and I never really saw Bill Wyman. He did his parts mostly when no one else was around. Mainly it seemed like it was all business. The vibe in the studio wasn’t right. The two main players in the group are Mick and Keith, but they weren’t talking. They never really got together.
If Mick spoke with me the rest of the group were curious to know what he said. Not that Mick said a whole lot to me anyway, although one time he decided he wanted to take a stroll down Broadway. Mick said, ‘C’mon, Bobby, forget getting a cab, let’s walk.’ As if no one would recognise Mick Jagger.
It was fine for a minute. No one had spotted him. Then I heard a rumble, turned around and saw a herd of people. Thousands of them and all running towards us. And gaining – fast.
Mick shouted, ‘Let’s go,’ and we ran. We sprinted right across the street to a Japanese joint. Jagger knocked like crazy on that restaurant door and, fortunately, the owner recognised him. He opened the door, we fell inside, the door was locked and the crowd stayed shut out.
Mick suggested we order up some sushi, give it time for the fans to drift off. Now, sushi ain’t my thing. I said I didn’t want to eat raw fish, I’d go for the tempura, but the menu had the sushi coming in at around five dollars, and the tempura was more expensive.
Mick insisted, ‘Let’s have the sushi.’
‘Nah, tempura for me.’
‘Sushi.’
It went back and forth like that. Finally, Mick said, ‘OK, I’ll buy you the tempura and you pay for the limo back to the hotel.’
Man, I was shocked, but I made the deal. It was a bum deal, though. I’d rather have paid for two dinners.
That wasn’t the only strange Mick Jagger thing. We recorded ‘Harlem Shuffle’ together. He said, ‘Womack, will you teach me how to sing soul?’
I told him, ‘I’m still trying to learn how to sing it. I couldn’t teach you in a couple of hours.’
He always teased me about my style, where I talked a little before singing. I would always do a little speech, tell people what the song was about. Jagger would laugh and said, ‘Bobby ain’t going to sing no song unless he gives you a sermon first, tell us what the song is going to be about.’
Sure, brother. ‘That’s it, like a preacher man.’
We did the track. I was really singing in there with him. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, do the Harlem Shuffle, do the monkey shine.’ I thought, ‘Man, this will be a good shot for me.’
Jagger told me, ‘You sing the top part and I’ll sing the bottom and a little bit in the middle.’
When I heard the track played back after, all of that had gone. I was basically in fade. You could hear my voice, no one could take that off, but it had been faded way, way down. Maybe that’s what he meant when he asked me to teach him how to sing soul: ‘I’ll study what Womack does on the vocal
and then put mine on it.’
There would be a few other beefs too. Trivial shit, but hurtful. When I got through singing or doing my thing at the studio – and that was well into the night or morning sometimes – I’d be beat. I’d leave, go to take the limo parked outside for the band’s use and be told by the driver, ‘Mr Womack, you should catch a cab.’ I felt like I was being disrespected.
Worse, one time I came out of the studio and was walking up 49th Street when a couple of gorillas began following me. Walking behind me, real slow, like they were weighing up a mark to roll. I was so fucking mad at having to walk back to the hotel after a hard day in the studio that I turned and told them straight. I said, ‘You motherfuckers, fuck with me now and I will kill you.’ Oh, man, I was pissed.
CHAPTER 17
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE
After about 18 years of marriage, Regina wanted to try and find herself. Come the start of the 1990s, she went to live in New York and took our daughter Ginaree with her.
I have figured all the reasons why she up and left.
A friend said it was because I got abusive. I used to get mad because she would stay out all night. I said, ‘I been there and done that. Don’t call me at five, saying you’re at some club or some house, hanging out, drinking or whatever. I don’t feel like I’m married.’
I tried to put fear in her. I said, ‘Every time you come home at four or five in the morning I’m going to jump on you.’ But it didn’t work. Regina left. I got used to people walking in and out of my life.
The first Caucasian girl I went with was Jody Laba. I never had an interest in being with a white woman, or even thought about it, really, probably because of all the problems that I saw as a kid when I was growing up.
Like the case of Emmett Till. Till, from Chicago, went down to Mississippi in 1955 and whistled at a white lady. That earned him a death sentence. The rednecks beat him to a pulp. Cut off his tongue. Cut off his balls. Knocked his right eye out of its socket, his left eye into oblivion. Knocked out most of his teeth. Cut off an ear and took an axe to what remained of his head.
His mother insisted he was left untouched, face up, in an open casket at the funeral. He didn’t know he wasn’t supposed to wolf whistle.
My father used to say that’s why white folks hang us, ’cos they think black men want their women. We would go down South as kids and stay with relatives. We were cocky, but when we went South Dad always said, ‘I don’t want you all to make any ruckus. From here on in, it is “yes, sir, no, sir”.’ He wanted us scared.
Till going down to Money, Mississippi, and not coming back, that kind of thing did scare me. His death had a profound effect on me. A lot more things could have been changed if there had been more Sam Cookes or Martin Luther Kings ready to step up.
So, I was taught to stay clear of white folk. My dad didn’t invent racism, but he ran his own school. He said, ‘Boy, get away from them. Get with your own.’ He also argued that the white man had made Jesus white, but there was no proof that he was. ‘How do you know? Do you think they had a camera back then?’
I couldn’t laugh at things like that or he’d get mad and reach for the strap. My mindset was fixed. I didn’t want anybody chasing me, giving me the evil eye or trying to hurt my family because I was hooked up with a white woman. How could I fall in love with a woman that was white? That was the attitude. The whole thing had diseased my mind.
So I always stayed away from it. Honestly? I always felt more comfortable walking into a gig with a black woman on my arm than I ever would if she was white. I knew people would make a fuss over it, same way I got ostracised after marrying Barbara. Life was tough enough without adding to the problems so I had just figured it out of my mind.
Then, in 1994, I walked into Jerry’s, a deli on Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles, and saw Jody. She was working there at the time. Jody was Swedish, from Chicago. It was a strange thing with Jody. I would keep going back to that deli and flirt with her. I thought she was very pretty.
I got sick of corned beef, though. I bought so many corned beef sandwiches to keep the management happy that I had to keep stuffing them in my pocket and tossing them in the trash when I got outside.
Me and Jody, we’d laugh and joke about stuff, things like me putting her in one of my music videos. Never happened and I was always promising it. I guessed she was Swedish, told her I travelled the world and had met a bunch of Swedes. I hadn’t. One thing I knew was that in Europe the race issue wasn’t like America. One lady over there named her baby after me. He was white. It wasn’t an issue.
‘You want a corned beef?
‘I’m tired of those. I jus’ come up here to talk to you.’
The talking didn’t go anywhere serious. After a few weeks of this, I turned up at home and there was Jody with a guy in a garage by the apartment block. A big coincidence.
‘Didn’t know you lived here.’
‘Me neither.’
‘See you around.’
And I did, by the pool. Now, I never used the pool in this complex. However, I knew Jody loved sunbathing and swimming so I sneaked up to have a look, catch Jody without her clothes on. She looked fine in her itty bitty bikini.
I was still working out my feelings, though. All the things I had run from in my life, knowing the problems caused – or I thought had been caused – because of some blonde-haired, blue-eyed princess. I had become arrogant, had copped a fuck ’em attitude. Fuck women. I shouldn’t give her the satisfaction that I was interested.
But I was. I asked if she sang. She did. I asked her out for dinner. We went to Martonis, the last place Sam Cooke visited before he was killed.
First off, I was worried about who might be looking at me in a restaurant with a white girl. We got talking, not flirting this time. I asked her what brought her from Chicago out to California. It was tragic. Her father had been a musician, but hadn’t made it and committed suicide. Right after that, her brother had fallen asleep at the wheel of his car and crashed. Killed. He was on his way to becoming a pro jock.
Because my son, Vincent, had committed suicide, we had an immediate connection and that’s what we talked about mostly that first night. I forgot about who might be watching a black man with a white girl out on a date. Didn’t care.
Jody told me she had run away, couldn’t face talking to anybody about it or watching her family suffer. I did all of that, and so I cried. Barbara had always insisted that I should never talk about Vincent. Not to bring it up, ever. That’s how she wanted to keep his name. I thought it might help others cope, but she wasn’t into saving. Told me just don’t mention it.
So no one had really asked me about my son or how he had committed suicide. It was like they wanted to give me that space and not pressure me. I probably didn’t know what to say anyway.
But that’s when I opened up to her, Jody and I talked it out and we hit it off real close. We had that tragedy in common, and because she was so straight I wanted to keep her around. Also, I noticed, her eyes were clear blue.
Problem was, she had a boyfriend – the guy I saw her with in the garage that time. Actually, he was her fiancé. I was recording an album, Resurrection, for the Continuum label. Jody could sing so I took her down to the studio while I cut the album and had her doing vocals with me. It was everything I wanted to say right then, which was I’d come back to life again. Resurrection. With a white girl.
But when I called her apartment, the fiancé would pick up. He’d tell me she was asleep, morning, noon and night. Every time I called up, same story: ‘She’s sleeping.’ I went by Jody’s place and eventually got hold of her, told her I’d been trying to reach her and her man said she was asleep. Jody never got any of those messages.
Despite this, we got close. We would go out driving in her car and I would try to touch her fingers, just her little pinkie. Brush it. She would tell me off. ‘I’m really engaged to be married,’ she insisted.
I played around with that. ‘Wow, that’s
really beautiful, maybe you’ll let me sing at the wedding.’
It got where the fiancé began to resent our relationship. I started calling him The Weasel. He looked like one too. He told me one time that he didn’t want his girl messed up in – or by – the music business. By then, I was paying her $2000 a day to help me with vocals.
The Weasel said music was all Jody had ever wanted to do. He told me one time, ‘I made a commitment to her that, if anybody came in and was serious and wanted to do something for her like you’re doing, I would fully support it, but I didn’t think it would happen. I didn’t think no one would come in.’ Then he asked me to lie. ‘I want you to do me a favour: please tell Jody she can’t sing.’ She can’t sing? She was all over my album at that point, but he kept on at me. Begged me, ‘Tell her she can’t sing. You got to do this.’
Then he called Jody’s mom and told her his fiancée was running with an ‘old nigger’. He reckoned if she was going to run out on him the least she could do was run around with a young one.
That all got back to Jody. They had a row. It ended when he put all her stuff out in the hall, outside my apartment. It was all there, Jody’s clothes, make-up, books, pictures, records, the lot, when we got back from the studio one time around four in the morning.
Oh, man. It was my fault, I felt responsible, so I told her to stay a few nights, until she got herself together: on the couch. Yeah, she thought the couch would do it. She ended up staying a while, but then the fiancé decided he wanted her back. He came around at all times banging his fist on my front door, calling her name. I couldn’t sleep. I had to get my old peashooter out, slipped it under my pillow in case he came back with a can of kerosene and wanted to burn us out.
If he wasn’t problem enough, I found out some of Jody’s family had a problem with our relationship, too. Some of it I was sure was the prejudiced kind of problem. The Weasel was back there feeding them all kinds of stuff about me and they got on the phone to chew me out.