Post by petrolino on Jun 7, 2019 22:53:19 GMT
Bill Withers
"Soul folk music? It feels good to run out of pigeonholes some times, to encounter a performer who makes categorization difficult. Such a person is Bill Withers, who is appearing through Mon day at the Bitter End, 147 Bleecker Street, on a bill with the Quinames Band.
Mr. Withers sings in a husky voice three shades to the bass side of Jose Feliciano. He plays acoustic guitar in a basic, uncluttered and very raw manner. Seldom does such a gut excitement come from a folk instrument. For this performance series, he is backed by a bassist, drummer and pianist, but it's his voice and guitar that dominate.
He writes his own songs, like “Harlem,” a country boy's ex ploration thereof; and “Grandmother's Hand,” a sentimental ballad.
My objection to a lot of soul music is it's often overblown show‐biz nature: 17 musicians, wearing silver and gold uniforms and swinging their horns in unison, and dancers in white miniskirts doing the funky chicken (a dance) while the group does standards like “Soul Man” and “Respect.” It just is too much, and Bill Withers offers a magnificent alternative, soul folk music, with his guitar and voice. The Bitter End audience, largely black for the occasion, gave him quite a reception.
The Quinames Band is a fine rockabilly quartet formed from the remains of the dis banded Jake and the Family Jewels."
- Mike Jahn, The New York Times
Mr. Withers sings in a husky voice three shades to the bass side of Jose Feliciano. He plays acoustic guitar in a basic, uncluttered and very raw manner. Seldom does such a gut excitement come from a folk instrument. For this performance series, he is backed by a bassist, drummer and pianist, but it's his voice and guitar that dominate.
He writes his own songs, like “Harlem,” a country boy's ex ploration thereof; and “Grandmother's Hand,” a sentimental ballad.
My objection to a lot of soul music is it's often overblown show‐biz nature: 17 musicians, wearing silver and gold uniforms and swinging their horns in unison, and dancers in white miniskirts doing the funky chicken (a dance) while the group does standards like “Soul Man” and “Respect.” It just is too much, and Bill Withers offers a magnificent alternative, soul folk music, with his guitar and voice. The Bitter End audience, largely black for the occasion, gave him quite a reception.
The Quinames Band is a fine rockabilly quartet formed from the remains of the dis banded Jake and the Family Jewels."
- Mike Jahn, The New York Times
'Sweet Wanomi' - Bill Withers
"Over the years, American show business has managed to struc ture its own level of reality, its own behavior patterns for en tertainers who become, at the obvious instruction of managers, press agents and other guidance experts, the most absurdly unreal types imaginable. The Business generally creates personalities composed of equal parts of paranoia, childish insecurity and a fawning, plead ing oafishness that are all performance. Similarly, the new belligerence and icy toughness of the rock star are an act to hide all traces of human definition.
Singer Bill Withers is a relief from all of that sort of foolishness, a man who is just a man, a human being thoroughly in touch with himself, his weaknesses and his strengths, who knows as much about where he comes from as he knows about where he wants to go.
Right now. Withers is doing well: his hit singles, “Ain't No Sunshine” and “Lean on Me,” have both sold more than a million copies, club dates and other personal appearances are increas ing rapidly. The green light to stardom is blinking in his eyes.
“Hey, man” he tells me over dinner in a West Side restaurant, “I don't take much of it seriously, you know? I mean, look, I'm really a factory worker. That's a real job. This thing I'm doing now, hey, it's a break, just a break. I don't expect to be here very long.”
Couple of years back, Withers was, in fact, an aircraft worker in California, a job he considers a very substantial and significant episode in his life."
Singer Bill Withers is a relief from all of that sort of foolishness, a man who is just a man, a human being thoroughly in touch with himself, his weaknesses and his strengths, who knows as much about where he comes from as he knows about where he wants to go.
Right now. Withers is doing well: his hit singles, “Ain't No Sunshine” and “Lean on Me,” have both sold more than a million copies, club dates and other personal appearances are increas ing rapidly. The green light to stardom is blinking in his eyes.
“Hey, man” he tells me over dinner in a West Side restaurant, “I don't take much of it seriously, you know? I mean, look, I'm really a factory worker. That's a real job. This thing I'm doing now, hey, it's a break, just a break. I don't expect to be here very long.”
Couple of years back, Withers was, in fact, an aircraft worker in California, a job he considers a very substantial and significant episode in his life."
- Clayton Riley, New York Times
'Another Day To Run' - Bill Withers
"In 1971, at the height of the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band's success, creative and business disagreements rendered the group apart; they never reformed. Instead, almost all of the rhythm section went to work with Bill Withers who had already minted one hit with "Ain't No Sunshine" and was at work on his second album when Gadson and the crew came through.
"We met Bill Withers through Charles Wright... he managed Bill Withers for maybe a week or two. Bill had a great sense of timing, the strum on his guitar, we locked in. See, we had already been playing together, the rhythm section. So to have a rhythm section like this, you couldn't ask for nothing better! We worked hard. Everybody was cool 'cause nobody was a star yet. For"Kissing My Love"... we were in the studio and that was the last song we were recording, and it was supposed to have been a shuffle. But... it wasn't working. So I had to come up with something, and Ray [Jackson] and I would be talking, I'd say, "What about this?" [Gadson taps out a rhythm on his knees] Next thing you know, there it was."
"We met Bill Withers through Charles Wright... he managed Bill Withers for maybe a week or two. Bill had a great sense of timing, the strum on his guitar, we locked in. See, we had already been playing together, the rhythm section. So to have a rhythm section like this, you couldn't ask for nothing better! We worked hard. Everybody was cool 'cause nobody was a star yet. For"Kissing My Love"... we were in the studio and that was the last song we were recording, and it was supposed to have been a shuffle. But... it wasn't working. So I had to come up with something, and Ray [Jackson] and I would be talking, I'd say, "What about this?" [Gadson taps out a rhythm on his knees] Next thing you know, there it was."
- Oliver Wang, 'In The Pocket With James Gadson : An Essential Mixtape'
'Stories' - Bill Withers
"Bill Withers has been out of the spotlight for so many years that some people think he passed away. “Sometimes I wake up and I wonder myself,” he says with a hearty chuckle. “A very famous minister actually called me to find out whether I was dead or not. I said to him, ‘Let me check.’ ”
Others don’t believe he is who he says: “One Sunday morning I was at Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles. These church ladies were sitting in the booth next to mine. They were talking about this Bill Withers song they sang in church that morning. I got up on my elbow, leaned into their booth and said, ‘Ladies, it’s odd you should mention that because I’m Bill Withers.’ This lady said, ‘You ain’t no Bill Withers. You’re too light-skinned to be Bill Withers!’ ”
His career lasted eight years by his own count; in that time, he wrote and recorded some of the most loved, most covered songs of all time, particularly “Lean on Me” and “Ain’t No Sunshine” — tunes that feature dead-simple, soulful instrumentation and pure melodies that haven’t aged a second. “He’s the last African-American Everyman,” says Questlove. “Jordan’s vertical jump has to be higher than everyone. Michael Jackson has to defy gravity. On the other side of the coin, we’re often viewed as primitive animals. We rarely land in the middle. Bill Withers is the closest thing black people have to a Bruce Springsteen.”
Withers was stunned when he learned he had been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year. “I see it as an award of attrition,” he says. “What few songs I wrote during my brief career, there ain’t a genre that somebody didn’t record them in. I’m not a virtuoso, but I was able to write songs that people could identify with. I don’t think I’ve done bad for a guy from Slab Fork, West Virginia.”
Withers’ hometown is in a poor rural area in one of the poorest states in the Union. His father, who worked in the coal mines, died when Bill was 13. “We lived right on the border of the black and white neighborhood,” he says. “I heard guys playing country music, and in church I heard gospel. There was music everywhere.”
The youngest of six children, Withers was born with a stutter and had a hard time fitting in. “When you stutter, people have a tendency to disregard you,” he says. That was compounded by the unvarnished Jim Crow racism that was a way of life in his youth. “One of the first things I learned, when I was around four, was that if you make a mistake and go into a white women’s bathroom, they’re going to kill your father.” He was a teenager when Emmett Till, a 14-year-old from Chicago who allegedly whistled at a white woman while visiting relatives in Mississippi, was beaten to death by two men who were cleared of all charges by an all-white jury. “[Till] was right around my age,” says Withers. “I thought, ‘Didn’t he know better?’ ”
Desperate to get out of Slab Fork, he enlisted in the Navy right after graduating from high school in 1956. Harry Truman had desegregated the armed forces eight years earlier, but Withers quickly discovered that didn’t mean much at his first naval base, in Pensacola, Florida. “My first goal was, I didn’t want to be a cook or a steward,” he says. “So I went to aircraft-mechanic school. I still had to prove to people that thought I was genetically inferior that I wasn’t too stupid to drain the oil out of an airplane.”
- Andy Greene, Rolling Stone
Others don’t believe he is who he says: “One Sunday morning I was at Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles. These church ladies were sitting in the booth next to mine. They were talking about this Bill Withers song they sang in church that morning. I got up on my elbow, leaned into their booth and said, ‘Ladies, it’s odd you should mention that because I’m Bill Withers.’ This lady said, ‘You ain’t no Bill Withers. You’re too light-skinned to be Bill Withers!’ ”
His career lasted eight years by his own count; in that time, he wrote and recorded some of the most loved, most covered songs of all time, particularly “Lean on Me” and “Ain’t No Sunshine” — tunes that feature dead-simple, soulful instrumentation and pure melodies that haven’t aged a second. “He’s the last African-American Everyman,” says Questlove. “Jordan’s vertical jump has to be higher than everyone. Michael Jackson has to defy gravity. On the other side of the coin, we’re often viewed as primitive animals. We rarely land in the middle. Bill Withers is the closest thing black people have to a Bruce Springsteen.”
Withers was stunned when he learned he had been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year. “I see it as an award of attrition,” he says. “What few songs I wrote during my brief career, there ain’t a genre that somebody didn’t record them in. I’m not a virtuoso, but I was able to write songs that people could identify with. I don’t think I’ve done bad for a guy from Slab Fork, West Virginia.”
Withers’ hometown is in a poor rural area in one of the poorest states in the Union. His father, who worked in the coal mines, died when Bill was 13. “We lived right on the border of the black and white neighborhood,” he says. “I heard guys playing country music, and in church I heard gospel. There was music everywhere.”
The youngest of six children, Withers was born with a stutter and had a hard time fitting in. “When you stutter, people have a tendency to disregard you,” he says. That was compounded by the unvarnished Jim Crow racism that was a way of life in his youth. “One of the first things I learned, when I was around four, was that if you make a mistake and go into a white women’s bathroom, they’re going to kill your father.” He was a teenager when Emmett Till, a 14-year-old from Chicago who allegedly whistled at a white woman while visiting relatives in Mississippi, was beaten to death by two men who were cleared of all charges by an all-white jury. “[Till] was right around my age,” says Withers. “I thought, ‘Didn’t he know better?’ ”
Desperate to get out of Slab Fork, he enlisted in the Navy right after graduating from high school in 1956. Harry Truman had desegregated the armed forces eight years earlier, but Withers quickly discovered that didn’t mean much at his first naval base, in Pensacola, Florida. “My first goal was, I didn’t want to be a cook or a steward,” he says. “So I went to aircraft-mechanic school. I still had to prove to people that thought I was genetically inferior that I wasn’t too stupid to drain the oil out of an airplane.”
- Andy Greene, Rolling Stone
'Make Love To Your Mind' - Bill Withers
