Withers was born in 1938 on the Fourth of July in Slab Fork, West Virginia, a town of 200. Withers’s road to the Grammys and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was a circuitous one. Cut with four former members of the smooth-yet-slinky Watts 103 rd Street Rhythm Band serving as Withers’s backing band, Still Bill features some of Withers funkiest and most elemental work, including the hit singles “Use Me” and “Lean on Me.” Recorded for a scant $7,500, Still Bill scrapes away some of Just As I Am’s polish, which only lets Withers’s tunes shine brighter. Instead, this edition of TBVO is dedicated to Withers’s self-produced sophomore album, Still Bill. And perhaps the only Withers album to receive a capital-”A” audiophile release is Live at Carnegie Hall, which was remastered for SACD by Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab in 2014.īut I’m not going to focus on either of those releases. Jones and engineered by the legendary-in-his-own-right Bill Halverson (fresh off of engineering previous TBVO pick, Crosby, Stills, and Nash), Just As I Am has received recording-focused writeups in Mix and Wax Poetics, as well as 2014 surround-sound remix. The first of those albums, Just As I Am, tends to get the most attention, partly because it’s a remarkable debut made all the more remarkable by the fact that Withers was an unknown 32-year-old factory worker at the time of its recording. But none topped those first three, recorded for " The Black Godfather" Clarence Avant’s label, Sussex Records, which (unlike Columbia) gave Withers almost complete control over his music. Withers recorded five more albums, all for Columbia, before retiring from the music business in 1985. The list grows to four if you count Live at Carnegie Hall (1973), widely regarded as one of the greatest live albums of all time. When Bill Withers passed away this April at the age of 81, I put aside the other TBVOs I’d been plugging away at and turned to Withers’s work.įew artists have produced a three-album run as superb as the one that began Withers’s career: Just As I Am (1971), Still Bill (1972), +’Justments (1974).
0 kommentar(er)
