Bring it on home
illiam Bell has written the story of his life many times over. At least that’s what the string of wonderfully intimate ballads he’s co-written suggest – You Don’t Miss Your Water, I Forgot To Be Your Lover, blues classic Born Under A Bad Sign, Every Day Will Be Like A Holiday, Everybody Loves A Winner, even the poppier material such as Private Number, his UK Number 8 hit with Judy Clay from 1968, and his sole US Number 10 pop hit Tryin’ To Love Two nine years later. And Bell told those stories in a rich, warm and unhurried tenor that made the delicate situations and raw emotions completely believable. He was the Great Explainer who’d thought through the events of life, and the emotions generated by them, and disseminated the personal in a way everyone could understand. More Sam Cooke than Wilson Pickett, he prized the silky touch above the scream’n’shout. Now, on his first album with Stax since 1973’s Phases Of Reality, two years before he left the Memphis label during its final disintegration, he slips back into the Southern soul groove as easy as pie. Songs like The Three Of Me, More Rooms, the title track and Mississippi-Arkansas Bridge reek of personal experience or close observation of the lives of others, of the emotions and situations that drive difficult choices and decisions. This I Where I Live has less in common with the recordings of other ’60s and ’70s soul stars who’ve successfully re-emerged in the past couple of decades – from the late Solomon Burke to Mavis Staples – than might be imagined because, of course, Bell is just as lauded as a songwriter as he is a singer, and so he doesn’t rely on others to interpret his life in song. He does that himself through compositions that cleave to a traditional, though not old-fashioned soul style. And he knows the terrain both emotional and geographical. Bell signed to Stax in 1961 as part of The Del Rios, having been a local customer at Estelle Axton’s Satellite Records Store at the front of the Stax Studios in the converted Capitol cinema at 926 East McLemore Avenue. His solo albums: The Soul Of A Bell, Wow, Relating, the aforesaid Phases Of Reality, Bound To Happen, its cover shot of a pipe-smoking William cementing the impression that he was perhaps a more profound and deep-thinking lyricist than commonly found at the label. Post-Stax, 1977’s Coming Back For More (Mercury) was a
Wcommercial high point, and in the ’80s he started his own label, Wilbe, for a series of variable releases as he, like many, many soul stars of the ’60s, struggled to find a foothold in that depleted decade. But now comes his best album by some distance since the ’70s. Produced by John Leventhal, who co-writes several songs with Bell, the 12 tracks are as well-tailored for him as any since his co-writes with Booker T. in the ’60s and early ’70s and Paul Mitchell in the later ’70s, accompaniments at their best when giving a modern echo to the guitarorgan-horns profile of the traditional Stax/Muscle Shoals Southern soul sound. Opening track The Three Of Me, for instance, finds Bell in a deep well of honest self-examination, looking back on “the man I was, the man I am, the man I want to be”, singing with the pained clarity of a chastened man trying to put his life right. “Losing your love has made me see/There ain’t no room for the three of me.” Loss is again the driving force of the ruefully sung ballad The House Always Wins, before the grittier Poison In The Well tells a familiar tale of male weakness – “the moment I fell from grace” – conjuring the Adam/Eve, Samson/ Delilah temptations: “She put poison in the well – and I drank it.” Not all is guilt and blame, of course. I Will Take Care Of You is of a piece with his more positive writing and the gentler reading of Born Under A Bad Sign breathes new life into his formerly guitar-wrangled blues song. Of the covers, Jesse Winchester’s All Your Stories is given a sympathetically pensive interpretation, while Walking On A Tightrope, co-written by Leventhal and his wife, Rosanne Cash, has Bell singing about ageing and loneliness during a story of self-sacrifice. But it’s Bell’s fresh-minted songs that inspire the most fully realised performances, notably This Is Where I Live and Mississippi-Arkansas Bridge. Both are specifically autobiographical – “I was born in Memphis in a different world,” he sings in the title track, before acknowledging the influence on him of Sam Cooke’s A Change Is Gonna Come, being “just 16 when I hit New York, singing in a big old band” and writing a song in a hotel room (You Don’t Miss Your Water, which in 1961 would become one of the very first Stax hit singles – see interview, p90). Crossing the Mississippi River on the bridge of that second song was, for numerous Stax musicians and singers, a necessary journey from East Memphis, in Tennessee, to West Memphis where they had regular work in the clubs, and Bell was no exception (see Back Story). Elsewhere, songs occasionally echo past writing: the beefier More Rooms, for instance, is completed by the phrase “in the house than the bedroom” which resonates with his ’77 song If Sex Was All We Had, while two lovely, reflective songs near the album’s end fit perfectly into the Bell canon. On closer People Want To Go Home he looks back on youth’s hope and promise, and the pull of home and hearth that’s hard to deny, while All The Things You Can’t Remember ruminates on a past, unequal partnership with “a liar and a cheat”. “All the things you can’t remember,” he sings, “I’m still trying to forget.” William Bell has forgotten nothing, it seems, least of all how to make wonderful, eternal soul music.