“This Record Sold My Heart”: Bobby Womack Interviewed

"[This record] speaks for itself," says soul legend Bobby Womack of his new album. "If it didn’t sell no records at all, it sold my heart." In a frank conversation, he shares truths, histories and lessons learned with Stevie Chick

There’s little preamble when you have a conversation with Bobby

Womack. Mere moments after I’ve dialled the number for the recovery

centre where he’s convalescing, the 68 year old soulman has quickly

shifted from brief greetings to an unflinching catalogue of his recent

health woes, his take on the current pop scene, and how stars should

always make time for their fans.

“Aw, man,” he croaks, voice all flinty like charcoal. “I tell you

what… I have really been sicker than I’ve ever been in my life…”

It’s no exaggeration, and maybe that explains the breathless pace at

which he talks. Womack has, over the last six months, faced down a

setlist of illnesses that should have spelt the end. He’s survived,

however – days previously he’d received the ‘all-clear’ on the cancer

– and perhaps this rude re-acquaintance with mortality has reminded

Womack that time’s-a-wasting, that he needs to start sharing as many

of his wisdoms as he can, while he can. There’s also no doubt that

these recent, troubling times have only sharpened those wisdoms, made

them more vivid.

He’s on the line to talk about The Bravest Man In The Universe, his

latest album, written and recorded with the assistance of long-time

friend and songwriter Harold Payne, XL Records honcho Richard Russell,

and Blur bloke Damon Albarn. Albarn worked with Womack on ‘Stylo’ and

‘Cloud Of Unknowing’ from Gorillaz’ 2010 LP Plastic Beach. Russell,

meanwhile, has signed Womack to XL, after a number of years in the

wilderness, echoing how he signed Gil Scott-Heron for his thirteenth

and final album, 2010’s I’m New Here, which Russell also produced.

Gil appears, albeit briefly, on The Bravest Man… – a 23 second

‘introlude’ of inspired babble that ends on a deadpan “God was broke”

– and he and Womack shared some things in common, not least years of

drug abuse. But Womack, unlike Gil, was able to turn the corner on his

drug problems, and has earned a reprieve from the reaper. Perhaps that

explains the note of hope, of redemption, that pervades The Bravest Man…, but make no mistake, this is clearly the work of a man who has

gazed into the void.

Those wisdoms he’s learned arrive in the lyric sheet, swiftly and with

conviction. Like on the opening title track, where Womack asserts that

“The bravest man in the universe / Is the one who has forgiven first”.

That’s not the kind of conclusion a young man comes to, at least not

the way Womack sings it; he doesn’t just mean it, he knows it.

Womack’s been around the block, a number of times. This isn’t his

first brush with death; he’s been intimately acquainted with it from a

young age, since his close friend and mentor Sam Cooke – the man who

convinced Womack and his brothers in The Valentinos to switch from

gospel to soul – was shot dead when Bobby was only twenty years old.

Since then, he’s bid farewell to friends and collaborators, though

more often they were stolen away before he could say goodbye. “I think

of Sam Cooke,” he begins, “Of Wilson Pickett, of Marvin Gaye, of Ray

Charles, of Janis Joplin, of Jimi Hendrix…”

He was a sideman to some of them, to others just a friend. In the

early 1970s, his own solo career caught fire, and you should certainly

make yourself familiar with Bobby’s albums for United Artists,

especially 1971’s Communication, 1972’s Understanding, and his

soundtrack for Blaxploitation thriller Across 110th Street. As early

as Communication, he was prefacing a sublime take on The Carpenters’

‘Close To You’ with a lengthy exposition on the vagaries of the music

industry, in particular the label presidents and vice-presidents

standing between Bobby and where he wanted to be. Bad habits and label

hassles got the better of him as the seventies closed, but a pair of

albums in the 1980s, ‘81’s The Poet and ’84 sequel The Poet II,

revitalised his career, topping Billboard’s Black Music charts, as

they called them then. His last album, however, was a Christmas album

released in 2000; since then, he’s been mostly silent. But The Bravest Man… is one hell of a return: a haunting, profound, uplifting set, of

troubled soul, of aching blues, of the most feverishly rousing gospel. Call it a comeback, because Womack’s already working on the follow-up.

So here follows our Q&A, though there weren’t many Qs, and an

abundance of A. In truth, I could hardly get a word in, and whenever I

did, for the most part Bobby just took my questions as a detour back

to the points and subjects upon which he’d already decided to expound

before I rang. This was a sermon, I realised later, while typing it

up, and I was just lucky enough to have been on the receiving end.

How have you been?

Bobby Womack: Aw, man, I tell you what… I have really been sicker than I’ve ever

been in my life. I did not want to discuss it with anybody, and the

record company was saying, ‘Just talk about the album’. But you know

what? When I walk onstage I feel like I know each one of those people

in the audience personally. I don’t try and do a show, I just do what

comes naturally, the feeling of soul music. And so I just felt that I

should discuss things that people – maybe some of ‘em don’t wanna hear

it, but I feel that if people care about you, it’s okay to tell them,

‘I’m down and out right now, I’m not doing well.’ You can’t be no

honester than that to your family.

Tell me how the new album came about…

BW: If you had told me a few years ago, ‘You’re gonna meet a group called

Gorillaz, and in a sense they gonna bring you back – these guys

idolise what you do, and have done for a long time, they felt that you

were ahead of your time…’ On the Gorillaz tour, Damon kept saying,

‘Man, we gotta record something together, I see magic that’s fresh,

that hasn’t been touched, and it’ll come out of you.’ I told him,

‘Well, for twenty years I haven’t been around the music business, I

haven’t wanted to write.’

This album was put together like we had worked on it for years, but

we had only worked on it from the time we went in the studio. We just

went in and said, ‘Let’s do a song.’ And the songs kept on coming.

We’d go in the studio each morning at 11am, and at 6pm every night,

everyone wanted to go home and be with their family. Damon was very

strict about that, and I respected that, because that was how I wanted

to be, and I was persuaded in the past that you gotta hang out all

night…

You used to have a lot of late nights?

BW: Yeah, I did. [laughs] Walking away from the drug scene was tough,

only because people that I thought were my friends would no longer

come through town and say, ‘Bobby, come by.’ They would sneak into

town, and sneak out. I said, ‘Damn, man. I must be doing something

right, because everybody that’s still doing wrong feels guilty!’ They

were hiding from me, or taking bets – like, ‘I guarantee if I see him,

I’ll get him high again.’ And I thought, is that so important to

them?

Why did you stop wanting to write music?

BW: It’s not respected in America, not real soul music. You can still

hear Aretha Franklin sing, and you are blessed, but no one cares.

She’s ‘old school’, and they think they can’t relate, they just wanna

hear the ‘new school’. But how do you think you get a new school

without the old school? Everything comes from somewhere… People like

Aretha, like Sam Cooke, like Jimi Hendrix, like Ray Charles, they were

ice-breakers, man. They carried music ahead, like, five or ten miles.

And those were heavy miles. You listen to those artists, there isn’t

anyone else like that. You knew it. And when I tell stories, I tell

the truth. It’s easier to tell the truth than a lie. It’s harder to

tell a lie. And the key thing to soul music is that it’s real. You can

hear a person in their voice, their crying and their hurt, the things

they’re going through. People always wanna be reached through their

soul, through the music. But the music industry, they’re not

interested. They don’t understand that.

Sam Cooke was a key influence upon you…

BW: Sam Cooke was very devastating. You hear a song of his, that’s the

only way to sing it. He taught me a lot about… He was a gentleman,

that was the first thing. People loved him, like, they’d think, ‘If I

wanna be like somebody, I wanna be like him.’ I loved the way he

treated people. He would always say, ‘Hey, Bobby, if it wasn’t for

those people out there, these shorts I have on, the car that I drive,

the house that I live in – they paid for it.’ He always had time for

them. And as I came up, I’d see superstars – I ain’t naming names –

who, if somebody spoke to them and said ‘I love your music’, wouldn’t

even speak to ‘em. And I’d say, ‘He just hurt a person that named his

kid after him. How could he be so cold?’ That’s not the guy he

projects in his music.

I learned that from Sam. He would stay up and talk to fans all night,

and he’d say, ‘This is what I do. This is what I love to do. We the

most blessed people in the world, Bobby. We would pay someone to let

us do what we do for a living. They pay us to do our favourite thing,

Bobby, which is perform. They come to see us so they can get away.’

They feel like the bills are still gonna be there tomorrow, they’ll

have the same pressures they feel today – it’ll probably be even

worse. So they’ll come on by and catch Sam Cooke, or Bobby Womack, or

Harold Payne, and enjoy themselves. And it does ease the pain. That’s

an important position to be in, an important thing to be able to do.

Did your recent illnesses influence The Bravest Man In The Universe at all?

BW: We’ve come a long way – if you’d told me six months ago that this was

gonna happen to me, I would’ve thought you were crazy. I’ve had

prostate cancer, colon cancer, walking pneumonia – twice… I had a lung

completely collapse on me, I had to be on a machine, I didn’t come

around, I was out of it for ten days… If I talk about that, sing about

it, maybe if other people in a similar bad place hear it, they’ll

think they can deal with it too. When you have that kind of power, you

have to speak up, so people don’t feel like they’re alone. Because I

know when I was going through this illness, I said, ‘Damn, why is

everything happening to me?’ I felt alone. When I came around, my

ex-wife said, ‘Do you know you were dead for ten days? The only thing

that was keeping you alive was a machine.’ I just felt, for the first

time, you know, I’ve said it, and meant it, but never lived it.

It’s like what Sam Cooke says on the intro to ‘Dayglo Reflection’, on

the new album… We found tape of him doing an interview with Dick

Clark, and he said, ‘As a singer grows older, his perception goes a

little deeper, because he lives life and he understand what he’s

trying to say a little more.’ Like, when you first sing something,

that’s your first look at it, but as you grow older, you understand

what you’re trying to say a little more, you can explain it better.

And that song went a long way with me, because at the same time I was

losing my mom – she died Christmas Eve. Damon said, ‘I don’t think you

should come in the studio today’, because he knew about it. He said I

should take two or three days off. But I said, ‘You know what? My mom

would be highly against that.’ Sam’s no longer here, I might not be

here for much longer… But the people will never forget – it will

always be on tape, and you can play it back and feel something’s going

on that’s very special. Those kinds of things I like to share with my

audience, with my people. That’s what I’m doing.

We did it in the studio with Damon, Richard, Harold. It was a family,

for real – there wasn’t no egos flying around. It was easy, because

when you reach people, there’s no ego.

When you were starting out, Sam Cooke told you to switch from gospel

music to secular pop, like he had. There’s a lot of gospel on this

album, however.

BW: ‘Deep River’ is a song that I used to hear in the church when I was a

little kid. Somebody would be singing that song, from the audience,

and the whole room would sing it with them, and you’d think they’d

rehearsed it. It was so spiritual, I could never forget it. So when we

were recording, I started just singing the song, and they asked,

‘What’s that?’ And I said, ‘That’s like a roll call. You ain’t never

been to church if you don’t know that song. Everybody knew it.’ So

they said, keep playing it, play it the whole way through, it’s going

on the album.

There was another song, ‘Jubilee’, and I never heard people talk about

it, but when I was a kid, churches said you couldn’t use no drums, or

no guitar, or no piano – ‘This is church!’ But they had their own way

of licking that. So the singers didn’t use those instruments, but they

would sing ‘Jubilee’, and ‘Jubilee’ was a tune that was so fast that

everybody would just jump in, and there was rhythm and everything, and

I never heard nothing like that. I’d ask, ‘Nobody plays ‘Jubilee’ no

more, what happened to it?’ And it was because the instruments came

in, and it became passé. So when I started singing it, they thought it

was amazing, and it was great to enlighten people on something they

never knew. And it’s a lot of stuff that you hear, it’s been done

eighty years ago. Look at Cab Calloway, he was Michael Jackson, years

earlier. Everything comes from somewhere.

Back in your sideman days, you played guitar and sang during the

sessions for Sly Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On… What was that like?

BW: There was a riot goin’ on, alright – it was at Sly’s house! I had

hung with Sam Cooke. Sly was more funkier… Way more funkier.

Everything he was doing was right on the ground, including his

briefcase, if you know what I mean. That’s just the way he was. He

taught me to give myself more freedom. ‘Say what you feel, if it’s

real, people will get it.’ He said, ‘Your voice is a lot huskier than

Sam’s, and you come at it from a different direction. I’m not putting

it down, but if I had to pick between the two, I would pick you,

you’re more soulful.’

He’s soulful, alright. But I understood what he

said long after. When we’d come in he would be doing a song, and I

would normally just pick up the guitar and start playing with him, and

it would always be something he wanted to hear. We never planned

anything, he didn’t even know I was coming. I just walked in and saw a

microphone there and a guitar, and started playing with him. I learned

from him that the truth is always the truth, and a lie is always a

lie. It’s easy to remember the truth, and hard to remember the lie.

You know what I’m saying?

You’ve enjoyed the experience of making this album enough to do

another one, right?

BW: Yeah. Harold’s written a new song, called ‘Left-Handed Upside Down’. It

talks about me being a guitar player – that’s how I learned to play,

left-handed, upside-down. It’s gonna be on the next album. But it’s a

heavy song, and what was heavy about it was, he had to listen to me a

long time and know me well – I couldn’t have wrote it no better. I

said, ‘Harold, I got to have this song, man, it’s about me!’ And I

meant that – ‘You never gonna be able to sing this song, no way’

[laughs]. So we worked out something. That’s the way it has to be as a

writer – there’s some things you don’t wanna talk about; there’s a lot

of things people don’t wanna talk about. But when you talk about them,

they’ll go and get the record, because they can relate.

And that’s how it’s been with this album. All of the stuff I learned,

that got me to the age of 68 today… To be able to put it on this last

album, it’s more than words could ever express. I’m giving all of

myself on this album: where my head’s been, where I’m going, what I’m

trying to relate to. And it speaks for itself. If it didn’t sell no

records at all, it sold my heart.

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