BOBBY WOMACK: MY PRESCRIPTION (1969)
1) How I Miss You Baby; 2)
More Than I Can Stand; 3) It's Gonna Rain; 4) Everyone's Gone To The Moon; 5) I
Can't Take It Like A Man; 6) I Left My Heart In San Francisco; 7) Arkansas
State Prison; 8) I'm Gonna Forget About You; 9) Don't Look Back; 10) Tried And
Convicted; 11) Thank You.
Pretty much the exact same formula here as on Fly Me To The Moon — not particularly
surprising, seeing as how it was produced by the same producer, released on
the same record label, and probably (I am not completely sure here) played by
the same backing band, while the songs, evenly divided between covers and
originals, cover the same soul/funk territory and work the same kinds of
grooves. Thus, although the lead single, ʽHow I Miss You Babyʼ, fared decently
on the R&B charts, on the whole, all three singles and the LP in general
sold significantly less than Fly Me To
The Moon — in 1969, I guess even R&B audiences expected innovation, and
Bobby was much less interested in innovating here than in «solidifying».
But in retrospect, My Prescription holds up just as proudly as its predecessor. It is
difficult to praise these tunes to high heaven, yet, on the other hand, it is
just as hard to find any problems with them. I mean, if you just want to write
a soulful song about missing your baby and you have no other ambitions, ʽHow I
Miss You Babyʼ will show you the right way to sew together electric guitars,
organs, brass, strings, and a yearning wail — nothing exceptional about it,
just setting a humble goal and fulfilling it 100%. The same applies to
everything else.
If there is one thing about these songs that
makes them stand out, it is Bobby's own guitar parts: as a confident player
believing in the importance of his instrument, he makes sure that the guitar is
always heard loud and clear and never gets lost behind the fanfares. Considering
also that the bass parts for the songs are consistently inventive, I wouldn't
actually mind hearing ʽMore Than I Can Standʼ, ʽIt's Gonna Rainʼ and the other
songs without that many overdubs — Bobby's funky riffs and the
fretboard-roaming basslines create enough excitement between each other.
On the arranging front, Womack continues the
practice of reinventing classics, turning ʽI Left My Heart In San Franciscoʼ
into a charmingly tight slice of fast-groovin' funk-pop with jazzy overtones à la George Benson (with whom Bobby
spent some time working earlier that year), while his mentor Sam Cooke's ʽI'm
Gonna Forget About Youʼ is, on the contrary, slowed down and turned into
something that does not bear the slightest resemblance to the original — the
original was «decisive, but melancholic», whereas Bobby throws in some wound-up
righteous anger, playing the ball-of-fire to Sam's wall-of-ice. He is being more
merciful to Jonathan King's starry-eyed, sentimentally-ironic pop hit
ʽEveryone's Gone To The Moonʼ, keeping both the sentimentality and the irony,
but substituting Southern soul for Britsy folk-pop, and the substitution works
without a hitch, probably even better this time than on ʽCalifornia Dreamin'ʼ.
Ultimately, though, the album's one highlight
probably got to be ʽArkansas State Prisonʼ, an original in every sense of the
word — the way Bobby integrates bluesy slide guitar licks and strange, deeply
mixed, ominously atmospheric blasts of strings worthy of a Paul Buckmaster into
an overall R&B arrangement shows that the man was perfectly capable of
pushing forward boundaries if he really put his mind to it. The lyrics, a
daring tale of a prison break, were quite edgy for their time, too, but it is
the musical meld that still holds up in an interesting way, not the social message.
If Sam Cooke was first and foremost a wizard of vocal melodies, then Bobby was
a master of guitar/voice grooves, but both of them saw their primary mission as
entertainment, not solution of the world's problems, although that, too, could
occupy their minds from time to time. Anyway, My Prescription on the whole is not there to save the universe, but
to give you a bit of a good time, and for that, it earns its thumbs up
without any problems.
Check "My Prescription" (CD) on Amazon
No comments:
Post a Comment