"Black music is being broken down. It's no longer black music. This is not a discussion or argument...what I'm saying is that it's a reaffirmation of prejudice to me. Our vibe is being lost...What you have now is white guys standing up imitating black guys and black guys sitting back and looking at an imitation of us saying 'ohhhh' with awe in their faces...when somebody is good they don't have to do that."
– Wynton Marsalis
Springsteen ticket sales were clogging up the central box office which handles area 'road shows', thus tonight's main set –even after the one-hour wait – found Bobby Womack facing barely two-thirds of a house. But you'd never prove he or Company, his 14-piece California showband (two girl back-ups, female co-star Alltrina Grayson, a four-part bra** section and tuxedoed, three foot-tall son Truth Womack on tambourine) noticed.
Bobby Womack – the man who backed up both Sam Cooke and Sly; who lived a music's first, fiery immersion from the sacred into the profane; who ran with the Wicked Pickett, the Midnight Mover – took the stage and sought, for 90 minutes nonstop, to shake himself free of a single longing.
This one desire, welling up from the past not into words but into notes and cries and a very funny, sophisticated and raunchy solicitude, was to keep the continents (man and woman) from drifting apart. And for 90 minutes the continents obeyed. Not his eyes or his sentiments, but his gritty, unbelievably loquacious voice; that voice which encompa**ed all things from the beating of a heart to the bend of a knee, the upswing of a fist to the nonchalant Vegas slouch.
Womack's white silk socks; his sharp white slacks and the snowy sequinned top which was the single most flattering garment ever designed for a performer – these were but the weak glow in a lighthouse. They were mere embellishments to a man of molten lava, whose feet (eventually unshod) stood planted in those hot sands where hope and love run aground again and again.
Old light and now darkness twisted in the swell and floods of sound, the arguments and the scaring, believable joy of our evening. The audience clapped and giggled, congratulated and screamed, blushed and bopped and tried out their own hands against the sky.
And all that stuff about defining the soul man, the 'soul survivor', was patently just another diminishing paper wrapper to discard. The printed jargon of criticism was as foreign to what I witnessed as the pressed facsimiles were to these live renditions: from (yes!) 'Harry The Hippie' to Too Many Rivers' to 'Where Do We Go From Here' and 'Love Has Finally Come At Last' through Sam Cooke's defiantly steamy 'That's What It Is', (followed, in the star's own act of defiance, by his current hit, 'Wish He Didn't Trust Me So Much').
Hearing Bobby Womack wield a vocal s**uality as tensile and tough as it is easygoing and generous, was to learn something new about knowing. This house KNEW which was power and which was image; what before them onstage was light and what was legend. What part of this man – who at one point brought onstage a dapper, dressed-to-the-nines Johnnie Taylor – lives upon distance and learns upon emptiness and accepts mercy without explanation. That's what it is.
And it was much much bigger and more ragingly bounteous than any Bobby Womack record had prepared me for. The man comes to Britain soon: be there!