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| A home of Bill Withers |
Bill Withers struggled to get inside the recording industry and kept struggling once he got inside. He came from literally nowhere, growing up in a small town called Beckley, Western Virginia, that lived and too often died according to what happened in the mines. He had a storyteller’s sense to claim Slab Fork, West Virginia as his hometown; he was born there, but the more poetic name suggested itself for his bio. He would find his way to Los Angeles by way of the U.S. Navy and a succession of manufacturing jobs in the defense industry, but Withers spent his time off writing songs and plotting his escape.
He never trusted the industry, not even before he got into it, but reports that he held on to his day job to see what happened with 1971’s Just As I Am matches what he calls his hometown. As he admits in a 2014 interview with WNYC’s Anna Sale, he had been laid off while all that was going on and got a call to return to work and a call from Johnny Carson’s people the same day. No matter what he said at the time, he went straight to The Tonight Show and never looked back. That album featured “Grandma’s Hands” and “Ain’t No Sunshine,” a song inspired by the Jack Lemmon/Lee Remick movie, Days of Wine and Roses. The latter won a Grammy and gave Withers a chance to record a follow up the next year with Still Bill, which brought more fame and another Grammy for “Lean on Me.” With two massively successful (and ultimately iconic) singles in his pocket, Withers looked like a man with a formula - enough, even, to punch his ticket to perform at the famous Rumble in the Jungle, where Muhammad Ali fought George Foreman in Zaire. And yet his record companies kept meddling.
He put out several more albums as a solo artist through the rest of the 1970s, but basically checked out after 1978’s ‘Bout Love. Withers had reached his limit with the A&R people - “antagonistic and redundant” he called them during his acceptance speech for the lifetime achievement award he received in 2015 (great speech, btw). They’d tell him no one releases a song without a few bars of intro (he’d comeback with “’Ain’t No Sunshine’ didn’t have one) or that he should add some instrument or another to punch it up (to someone who got famous sitting on a stool playing a guitar), so Withers busied himself with a handful of collaborations and not much else. That lasted until 1985’s Watching You Watching Me, which I have yet to listen to…then again, I have a pathological distrust production from the 80s, and I’ve got a thousand other stops to make on this tour...
Withers talked about “place” as a concept across several of the interviews I read (or listened to). He identifies with where he’s from, to some extent, but the more you listen to him - which I’d encourage - the more it comes across as something you carry with you wherever you go. Because he got into music as late as he did, he went in the door, 1) knowing how he wanted things done, and 2) entirely willing to walk away when that didn’t work out. Bumping into famous people didn’t phase him - i.e., the great story about a very drunk Graham Nash crashing his recording studio to give him a pep-talk in that 2014 WNYC interview - and that, and the lack of a hungry ego, gave him a rare kind of freedom.
As for his music, I landed on folk-soul for a genre. The barebones “man-and-his-guitar” mythos doesn’t hold up - even if you'll see something close to that in some of the links, it’s all tres analog, but he pulls in the instruments he needs to fill out the sound - but it possesses an old-soul quality that a guy named Giovanni Russonello summed up like so:
“…he had an innate sense of what might make a song memorable, and little interest in excess attitude or accoutrements. Ultimately Withers reminded us that it’s the everyday that is the most meaningful: work, family, love, loss.”
About the Sampler
I expanded the sampler since the first time I posted on Bill Withers. I kept a lot of those - which include his most famous numbers, e.g., “Ain’t No Sunshine” (Just As I Am) and “Lean on Me” (Still Bill) - but also selected the short, sharp “Better Off Dead” and (still a favorite) “Harlem” from Just As I Am and “Lonely Town, Lonely Street” and (the freakin’ classic) “Use Me” from Still Bill.
A later artist I admire (think it was Open Mike Eagle) talked about listening to ‘Justments a lot to help him through a breakup, so I went heavy on that one, packing in “You,” “The Same Love that Made Me Laugh,” “Railroad Man,” a nice shout back to his youth on such of a rough album, and the strong pick of that bunch, “Heartbreak Road.” That album coincided for closely with the (reportedly) tumultuous end to his first marriage and it aches like it. You can hear Withers in a lighter vein on Naked & Warm on tracks like the smoldering “Close to Me” and the uplifting “Where You Are.” (Spotify's thing has a damn typo.) He sounds to have fully recovered from it all by 1977’s Menagerie, represented here and on the sampler by the layered light funk of “Lovely Night for Dancing,” the upbeat grinder “Wintertime,” and the bright (and also famous) “Lovely Day.” (Think Honda pipped that one for an ad.)
Withers stands as one of my best actual discoveries of 2020. I knew his biggest hits, but not well enough to connect them to the artist, or who he was. That got me back to the original intent of this project. And that makes me happy. Here’s to more discoveries in 2021, and beyond.
He never trusted the industry, not even before he got into it, but reports that he held on to his day job to see what happened with 1971’s Just As I Am matches what he calls his hometown. As he admits in a 2014 interview with WNYC’s Anna Sale, he had been laid off while all that was going on and got a call to return to work and a call from Johnny Carson’s people the same day. No matter what he said at the time, he went straight to The Tonight Show and never looked back. That album featured “Grandma’s Hands” and “Ain’t No Sunshine,” a song inspired by the Jack Lemmon/Lee Remick movie, Days of Wine and Roses. The latter won a Grammy and gave Withers a chance to record a follow up the next year with Still Bill, which brought more fame and another Grammy for “Lean on Me.” With two massively successful (and ultimately iconic) singles in his pocket, Withers looked like a man with a formula - enough, even, to punch his ticket to perform at the famous Rumble in the Jungle, where Muhammad Ali fought George Foreman in Zaire. And yet his record companies kept meddling.
He put out several more albums as a solo artist through the rest of the 1970s, but basically checked out after 1978’s ‘Bout Love. Withers had reached his limit with the A&R people - “antagonistic and redundant” he called them during his acceptance speech for the lifetime achievement award he received in 2015 (great speech, btw). They’d tell him no one releases a song without a few bars of intro (he’d comeback with “’Ain’t No Sunshine’ didn’t have one) or that he should add some instrument or another to punch it up (to someone who got famous sitting on a stool playing a guitar), so Withers busied himself with a handful of collaborations and not much else. That lasted until 1985’s Watching You Watching Me, which I have yet to listen to…then again, I have a pathological distrust production from the 80s, and I’ve got a thousand other stops to make on this tour...
Withers talked about “place” as a concept across several of the interviews I read (or listened to). He identifies with where he’s from, to some extent, but the more you listen to him - which I’d encourage - the more it comes across as something you carry with you wherever you go. Because he got into music as late as he did, he went in the door, 1) knowing how he wanted things done, and 2) entirely willing to walk away when that didn’t work out. Bumping into famous people didn’t phase him - i.e., the great story about a very drunk Graham Nash crashing his recording studio to give him a pep-talk in that 2014 WNYC interview - and that, and the lack of a hungry ego, gave him a rare kind of freedom.
As for his music, I landed on folk-soul for a genre. The barebones “man-and-his-guitar” mythos doesn’t hold up - even if you'll see something close to that in some of the links, it’s all tres analog, but he pulls in the instruments he needs to fill out the sound - but it possesses an old-soul quality that a guy named Giovanni Russonello summed up like so:
“…he had an innate sense of what might make a song memorable, and little interest in excess attitude or accoutrements. Ultimately Withers reminded us that it’s the everyday that is the most meaningful: work, family, love, loss.”
About the Sampler
I expanded the sampler since the first time I posted on Bill Withers. I kept a lot of those - which include his most famous numbers, e.g., “Ain’t No Sunshine” (Just As I Am) and “Lean on Me” (Still Bill) - but also selected the short, sharp “Better Off Dead” and (still a favorite) “Harlem” from Just As I Am and “Lonely Town, Lonely Street” and (the freakin’ classic) “Use Me” from Still Bill.
A later artist I admire (think it was Open Mike Eagle) talked about listening to ‘Justments a lot to help him through a breakup, so I went heavy on that one, packing in “You,” “The Same Love that Made Me Laugh,” “Railroad Man,” a nice shout back to his youth on such of a rough album, and the strong pick of that bunch, “Heartbreak Road.” That album coincided for closely with the (reportedly) tumultuous end to his first marriage and it aches like it. You can hear Withers in a lighter vein on Naked & Warm on tracks like the smoldering “Close to Me” and the uplifting “Where You Are.” (Spotify's thing has a damn typo.) He sounds to have fully recovered from it all by 1977’s Menagerie, represented here and on the sampler by the layered light funk of “Lovely Night for Dancing,” the upbeat grinder “Wintertime,” and the bright (and also famous) “Lovely Day.” (Think Honda pipped that one for an ad.)
Withers stands as one of my best actual discoveries of 2020. I knew his biggest hits, but not well enough to connect them to the artist, or who he was. That got me back to the original intent of this project. And that makes me happy. Here’s to more discoveries in 2021, and beyond.
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