Wait Until Tonight

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Bobby Womack's The Poet -- one of the most perfect albums I know -- is pop music for grown-ups. As such, it feels quite distant from 2018; the cultural space of pop feels, to me, largely conceived of at present as a place of youthful concerns, even if the formerly young continue to reserve their right to be the ones parsing it for broader cultural meaning. (This dynamic strikes me as weird, to put my point as generously as I can.) But popular music, like God, is bigger than our need to restrict it; there is no theme too big for it, no space within which it does not belong.

Womack, the author of several timeless pop, rock, and soul tunes (he co-wrote "It's All Over Now," a hit for the Rolling Stones; he wrote "Breezin'," first recorded by Gabor Szabo in '71 and done again by George Benson in '76), had, his whole life, been writing pop music as if its function were to accompany grown men and women on their walks through an often unjust, frustrating, complicated world -- a world  where, for all its byways and pitfalls, we still seek -- and find! -- joy, companionship, and communication. 

The Poet leads off with a sort of statement of purpose in this regard. Opening with a riff that leans gently on "Master Blaster (Jammin')," the music blossoms from there into a rich, complex r&b vamp -- I looked it up; it's an alternating Amaj7/E to C#m11 progression -- that suits its lyric; neither wholly major nor minor, more suited to a space between than any single anchor. When the first chorus lands -- "So many sides of you / just in case I might make the connection / and let the love come shining through" -- the key resolves at E (whose third & fifth both of the vamp chords share), and it's the gentlest, warmest shift: like waking up to a new idea in the morning, the sun through the windows, all possibility and potential.

"So Many Sides of You" is a love song, but its theme is how complex the beloved seems, and the lover's difficulty in approaching a love that feels, to him, both intimidating and irresistible:

I've got my limitations
so do you
you see, I got my education
living right next door to the school of rules
so many doors to open
I might get lost in you
so keep your heart open, baby
just in case I do

The whole album is like this -- introspective, wrestling with particulars, musically restless but never unfocused. The musicianship throughout is dazzling: the rhythm section features the reliably great James Gadson on drums, with Nathan East on bass -- thirty-three years later, he'd write the bassline for Daft Punk's "Get Lucky"; in between, he'd play for a who's who of pop, rock, and R&B luminaries. Womack shares guitar duties here with Nathan T.  Walker, whose resumé is so dense as to boggle the mind. The riff from "ABC" by the Jackson 5 is his. A band this star-studded plays exactly as beautifully as you'd expect it to. 


"Secrets," "Just My Imagination," "If You Think You're Lonely Now (Wait Until Tonight)" -- there isn't a weak track here. Rightly, The Poet was a massive hit -- R&B audiences recognized as a masterpiece; it topped Billboard's "Top Black Albums" chart -- but on the pop chart, it stalled at #29. That's 28 spaces too low for an album that, twenty-eight years later, sounds fresher than ever. Get to know it, if you don't. 

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