Bill Withers interview

The soul legend on songwriting, stuttering and why he has no plans to return to music.

Bill Withers
Bill Withers pictured in 2009

Let us establish one fact straight away. Bill Withers is a songwriting genius. Even Lennon and McCartney at their zenith would have been proud of perhaps his finest achievement, Ain’t No Sunshine, which won the Grammy for Best R&B Song in 1972.

It made him wealthy. More than 250 artists have recorded a cover version and it has earned royalties from television adverts all over the world. Amazingly, Sunshine was originally released in July 1971 as the B-side of his debut single, Harlem. Fortunately, radio DJs flipped the disc and the song climbed to No3 on the US chart and spent a total of 16 weeks in the top 40.

Meanwhile, the anthemic Lean On Me refuses to age and if anyone has written a more chilling declaration of self-annihilating desire than Use Me, I have yet to hear it. The Withers oeuvre also extends to include co-writing credits on other great tunes, like the brooding blues of Who Is He (And What Is He To You)? and the golden MOR staple Lovely Day. Perhaps his talent is best summed up by Sting: ‘The hardest thing in songwriting is to be simple and yet profound. And Bill seemed to understand, intrinsically and instinctively, how to do that.’

So why has Bill Withers not released any new music since 1985? A fascinating new documentary, Still Bill, offers clues without quite getting under his skin. In one of the film’s candid moments, he plays a few sombre chords on the piano, turns to the camera and says, ‘Thoreau said most men live lives of quiet desperation. I would like to know how it feels for my desperation to get louder.’

I find him slumped in his wife’s Los Angeles office, from which she runs their music company, handling rights and royalties to his songs. For a second it’s hard to reconcile this figure with the powerfully built, dark-haired man who chopped out the chords to Use Me. It’s not that his curls are now grey, he also seems to have shrunk.

He’s polite but taciturn, uttering pithy statements punctuated with a defiant stare. I ask where he got the inspiration for his most memorable songs. ‘If I knew how to explain songwriting,’ he says, ‘I would write a bestselling book. If that’s what you do, that’s what you are. You are that.’

Is he still making music? ‘Not really that much. That kind of stuff, to me, was a lot more interesting at 35 than at 71 years of age. I’m not motivated to wanna draw attention to myself or travel all over the place. There was a time for that. When it was done it was done. Now it’s something else.’

This is a peculiar answer and a disingenuous one, since the documentary shows him working with guitarist Raul Midón on a song called Mi Amigo Cubano, about a recently deceased friend. Is he saying that he’s no longer interested in making music? ‘For me, the older I got, the more privacy became desirable to me. You know what I mean?’ Not really. Could he explain a little more? ‘No, that’s it.’

Born in 1938 in the segregated coal-mining town of Slab Fork, West Virginia, Withers was the youngest of six children and only 13 when his father died. His maternal grandfather, Grackus Monroe Galloway, had been born into slavery. As a boy he would attend church with his grandmother, Lula. ‘It was spontaneous singing, there was nothing programmed. People got up and sang and everybody would join in. It was my favourite kind of singing.’

His school days were conditioned by asthma and a severe stutter, which one of his teachers told him was a sign that he was ‘handicapped’. The closest he got to therapy was being slapped in the face with a dishcloth in an attempt to ‘beat the stutter out of him’. Not surprisingly he was desperate to leave and at 18 he enlisted with the US Navy for nine years, travelling the world and learning mechanical skills.

After leaving the navy, he relocated to LA, frequenting nightclubs in order ‘to meet girls’, he says. ‘I wasn’t particularly interested in music, though I sat up when it was Lou Rawls or Little Willie John. Then one night this guy behind the bar was moaning that the performer was late and he said, “You know, I’m paying this guy $2,000 a week and he can’t even show up on time!”’ Earning $100 a week at this point, Withers realised he was in the wrong business. ‘I thought, “They’re paying this guy $2,000 a week? He doesn’t even get up in the morning!”’

Withers is vague on what happened next, saying he ‘probably started singing in the shower or something, to see if it was something I could do’. By the time he had got himself a guitar, locked himself in his apartment to teach himself to play and written his first songs, he was working at an aeroplane assembly plant. Saving money from his weekly pay, he scoured the backs of album covers to find the right session musicians, then paid for demo recordings, which he shopped around in the hope of a record deal.

His break came when the small independent Sussex label agreed to pay for an album and hired Booker T Jones to produce, who drafted his ace session band, The MG’s, for the sessions. He was the sympathetic professional that the raw but talented Withers needed.

It’s a mark of Withers’ no-nonsense practicality that even after Ain’t No Sunshine was released he refused to quit his job. ‘I had been working at Weber Aircraft and then I got laid off. Then Ain’t No Sunshine started appearing on the radio. And it’s funny, I got two requests in the same day. A letter from my job, telling me I was called back to work. And a request to do The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.’ He chose the television appearance.

These days he likes to pretend it was no big deal, that his unique approach to songwriting was almost accidental. But in the early Seventies he was less guarded. ‘I would like to say something that has not been said so much,’ he told Carson. ‘I would like for music to be real for a change.’

And his music was real. Songs like Grandma’s Hands brought warmth, intimacy and simplicity to a bombastic music scene. Withers recalls A&R men telling him he should copy James Brown, and use some horns, female singers and a driving backbeat. In short, they were telling him to sound more ‘black’ if he wanted to sell records. ‘Blaxperts, I call ’em. That’s the white guys who are supposed to have some kind of tap into your black psyche.’

It’s a point that still rankles. ‘In my lifetime, music went through a huge transition, to where the biggest music in the world was derivative. White people imitating black people. Some journalist got really insulted a while back, because he asked if Elvis had influenced me.’ And what did you say? ‘Hell, no! To do what?’

Equally, he is under no illusion about the Back-to-Africa pose certain artists adopted during the same period. Withers was part of the star-studded cast that travelled to Kinshasa, Zaire, in October 1974 to give a pre-fight concert for the Ali-Foreman ‘Rumble in the Jungle’. His performance is one of the standouts of the resulting documentary, Soul Power. Did it feel like a historic event? ‘No. It was two big guys going to fight each other at four o’clock in the morning. It wasn’t this great intellectual pursuit. And there’s a certain reality to going someplace where there’s a dictator. You notice the disparity in the wealth.’

Well, I say, at the time there was a lot of hype about African-American artists discovering their roots. He chuckles. ‘Awwww, come on, man. It wasn’t a great historical moment. Interesting, but that was that. No great spiritual experience. Mostly what everybody found out was: we had been shaped and transformed by American culture and the history we had here, and they had been shaped by whoever colonised their place. They weren’t speaking any African languages. We were speaking English and they were speaking French. How African is that?’

Despite his no-nonsense persona, there’s a huge heart beating in his chest and a refreshing sense of modesty. In Still Bill he is seen talking with Princeton professor of African-American studies Dr Cornel West. Withers speaks about how we’re ‘remiss to give so much attention to performers and athletes, when so many people more deserving get so little respect’. West interrupts, asking, ‘Well, given the great artist that you are, what would you like your legacy to be?’ Withers hangs his head, appalled at this gauche and obsequious question.

But the real moment of truth comes after he travels to New York to visit a music festival where his songs are being performed in tribute and to receive an award from Our Time, a charitable organisation working with young people who have speech impediments.

At a reception in his honour, after children perform a song for him, Withers wipes away tears. He tells them how somebody recently laughed at him when he started stuttering, and says, ‘One of the ways to deal with the fear is to approach people with a prepared forgiveness. We have to be more civil than most people that we will encounter. Having had people not understand me, maybe made me wait a little beat to where I can extend something that hasn’t been given to me. And I think that makes you a much bigger person.’

I ask why he no longer stutters. ‘I probably do, depending on the situation.’ But he hasn’t stuttered here, so how did he undo his speech impediment, or most of it? ‘Well, I thought about it. And it’s not a physical handicap because you don’t stutter in certain circumstances. I came to the conclusion that it was a fear of the perception of the listener. Having too high an opinion of other people and too low an opinion of yourself.’

What was his technique for doing that? ‘There was no technique. Once you come to that conclusion, you try to get your opinion of others in a more realistic place.’ Not so much a technique as awareness of the disparity? ‘That is the technique. Most techniques are an awareness.’ How old was he when he came to that conclusion? ‘Almost 30 years old. And still it leaks in from time to time. The idea is to minimise it.’

As if to prove the point, he then stutters for the first time, saying, ‘I’ve given a c-c-c-commencement speech in a college and I wouldn’t want to stutter in that situation.’

Withers’ last album of original material was released in 1985; Watching Me Watching You reached 143 on the US chart and 60 on the UK chart. Since then, his output has been limited to repackages of his greatest hits.

Twenty-five years is a long fallow period for any artist. Is it, as singer-songwriter Angelique Kidjo insists on Still Bill, a result of his high artistic standards, and consequent reluctance to issue substandard material?

At one point in the film, he says, ‘If I was completely honest with myself, I’m probably a little manic depressive. That’s why I might write some songs that might reach somebody else’s emotions, because I have my own.’

According to his devoted wife and business partner, Marcia, Withers has been writing and recording songs, but for some reason won’t put together an album and search out a record deal.

When I say that millions of people would love to see him perform those classic tunes, he says, ‘Yeah, and if I wasn’t very good, they’d tear into me. And I don’t need that.’