“I Got This Good Job, Makin’ These Toilets. I Don’t Need You Cats.”

Oh man, does this excite me.  And it’s so overdue!  Overdue?  Maybe it’s perfectly timed.  He’s also featured in this film.  And in a “to be posted” episode of the amazing “Soul” series.  Those quotes!  “On your way to wonderful, you’re gonna have to pass through all right.”  “I would like to know how it feels for my desperation to get louder.”

Bill Withers is one of those weird dudes who’s written legendary, damn-near standard tunes (”Lean on Me,” “Lovely Day,” “Just the Two of Us”) and who is also more or less completely unknown. He came up when he should have, he had a gift for songwriting and a great singing voice, he was good-looking.  But he wasn’t Isaac Hayes or James Brown or Curtis Mayfield.  He wore turtlenecks and sat on a stool to play.  And while Withers’ music was undeniably funky, it was also undeniably folky.  And label executives don’t like to be confused.  Hence the title of this post (Withers made toilets for airplanes, and wrote songs on the side, guys). A brief Withers-inspired auto-bio moment, after the jump.

I discovered Withers senior year in college (either ‘99 or ‘00), after having heard…don’t know if I should admit this, but here goes…”Lovely Day” used in one of those super-dancey, really popular Gap ads we all remember (There was another one with square-dancing to Queen’s “Crazy Little Thing Called Love”).  I decided to seek out the song, not knowing anything about Withers.  This was pre-Internet for me, so I went with an equally-game-for-this-sort of thing good friend (Josh) to our local Massive Music Store (called CD Warehouse or something), and asked the guy in the walled-off info section in the middle of the store–one of 9 or 10 employees working there–to look up the title in this big, colorful, proprietary, touch-screen computer database thing.  Lean on Me: The Best of Bill Withers: import-only, like 20 bucks.  I split the cost with Josh, and off we went.

The rest, if you’re reading this, is “history,” as it were.  Whoa! “Grandma’s Hands” was the foundation for “No Diggity!”  But just that little sliver of guitar and the “mmm mmm!”  Wow, this was the guy who did “Lean on Me,” too!  I thought that was just a dateless, authorless church standard!  For two guys who loved making mixtapes, the lesser-known stuff was the real goldmine: “Kissing My Love,” “The Same Love that Made Me Laugh,” “Who Is He”: no one knew this stuff but us.

And so: we drove all around the south side of Indianapolis that weekend, stopping into our friends’ apartments and parents’ houses, popping in the disc, playing a few seconds of a song, and waiting for that moment of recognition, which always came–from our music geek friends, and their parents, too.  As we drove around that weekend, we memorized lyrics, picked personal favorites, skipped the lite-jazz middle of the comp.  And sang.  Loudly and fervently.  And, because of Withers’ unique songwriting tics and talents, lengthily and repetitively.  That hypnotic “I know I know I know” sequence in “Ain’t No Sunshine,” and (especially) the 18-second held-note (some sort of achievement, scroll down) on the second word of the “Lovely Day” refrain.  I was a smoker at the time, and could never hold my voice through the whole thing.  Josh could.

I was splitting time between Indy and Bloomington then, working in the former and living in the latter, and my drive back down to B-Town that Sunday afternoon was rife with anticipation.  I couldn’t wait to play “Lovely Day” for my best friend at the time (and still my best friend today, though she’s very far away).  It was her little television I’d seen the Gap ad, and her pen I used to write a note on my palm, and her shared excitement at the awesomeness of that song.  I called her on the way down, (on my massive Cellular One-sponsored cell phone) and told her I had a surprise.  When I pulled into the lot, she was standing out on her stoop, eating a bowl of vanilla ice cream.  As she walked up to my car, I rolled down all the windows and cranked “Lovely Day.”  She let out a loud squeal after hurriedly swallowing a bite of half-melted ice cream, and we both danced around in the parking lot for a few minutes.  Awwwww.

And Withers’ own story–his own Southern modesty and reluctance to put himself too far out there, the equal reluctance of label execs to take a chance on a hard-to-market genius, his subsequent cult status–is what allowed for me and my two best friends to feel the unfettered joy of “discovering” him a decade ago.  It’s one of those ironies of fandom, really: the less well-known an artist was in their own time, the greater the emotional impact they can have when you feel like they’re “yours,” even if just for a quick weekend.

Watch that trailer, and be prepared to get a little choked up at the end, when Withers reacts to Cornell West (yup) asking Withers what he’d like his legacy to be.  Man do I love Bill Withers.

Filed under: Bill Withers  fandom