Bill Withers in Beverley Hills, Calif., in 2015.Credit...Jake Michaels for The New York Times

Keeping Bill Withers Alive

The three-time Grammy Award winning artist has died. In this moment of isolation, I wanted to see him alive again. And I did.

Mr. Abdurraqib is a poet and cultural critic.

Even before a pandemic caused this endless ache for the community of the outside world; before the puddles on my city block no longer reflected the buzzy lights from open shops at night; and before I spoke to everyone I loved through a parade of various screens (“Zooms,” “Hangouts,” “FaceTimes”), I had gotten in the habit of watching old concert videos in the mornings.

It began sometime late last year, with my desire to see aging artists as they once were — the ones who could no longer dance or slide across a stage as they could in their younger days. As both a celebration of timeless human brilliance and a reminder of its limits, our fascinating mortality.

Bill Withers, a three-time Grammy Award winning artist, died Monday at the age of 81, and I wanted to see him alive again. So I did, pulling up a YouTube video of him playing live in concert for the BBC in 1973. There are undoubtedly better, more sprawling and inclusive performances from Withers during this era: His famed concert at Carnegie Hall, for instance, covers more ground, and is more elaborate.

But the recording of this BBC set, extant via YouTube, cuts straight to the meat of the Withers catalog. It opens, immediately, with “Ain’t No Sunshine.” Just Withers plucking guitar strings with his thumb, while minimalist bass and percussion grow at his back.

Because this performance took place in a cozy setting, in front of an intimate audience, its magic is not only in the songs themselves, but also in the way Withers fills the silence before each song. Sometimes shyly rambling. Sometimes stumbling over his words a bit on the path to saying to something heartwarming, or brilliant.

In one of those heartwarming bits of insight, he humbly talks to the audience about how it’s “fun to be traveling from one large city to another large city all over the world.” But that for a small town West Virginian like him, “When you first come to a very large place you feel a little odd.” Before finding out that knowing all “800 people” in your town leaves you, “maybe,” much better off than being in a place with “eight million people and you didn’t really know anybody.” Then, after a half-pause, he starts up “Lonely Town Lonely Street.”

These parts glow because of how comfortable Withers grows with speaking as the show goes on — with a voice that sounds, even back then, like a patient and anxious but wise elder you or I have known. By the time he plays “Grandma’s Hands,” the plodding of his guitar becomes a transportation device, and viewers — in that audience in ’73 or watching from home now — are in church with clapping grandmothers. An audience to the joyful slapping of tambourines and the maternal, stern warnings evoked in the song all at once.

In the smoothest transition of the performance, Withers takes a breath after ending “Grandma’s Hands.” Looking down for a second, before devilishly looking back up with a half-grin and saying, “Usually after that point in your life, the ladies that you meet might have a whole other kind of use for you;” launching into the slithering funk of “Use Me.”

What I have always lamented about Bill Withers is that he often isn’t included in the mainstream pantheon of the Great Black Soul Singers. Perhaps that’s because of his unconventional path to musical success.

He began adulthood in the military, joining in 1956 at age 17, before moving to Los Angeles in 1967. While trying to get his music career off the ground, he worked in various factories, doing assembly work, saving money to record his own demo tapes. He refused to quit his job at Weber Aircraft, even after he got signed to Sussex Records in 1970.

Withers kept working, installing toilet seats for commercial airplanes. His debut album “Just As I Am,” was released that next year, and on its cover, there is Withers, 32, leaning on a wall outside Weber Aircraft, lunchbox in hand.

In this story, there is no romantic mythology of a childhood prodigy, or someone who blew the roof off a church in a small town before being driven off in a Cadillac to go make hit records. If there is a mythology of Withers it is one of the working everyday man. He was the first man in his family to not work in the coal mines of West Virginia. And he had enough of a life before music to know how to walk away from it when he’d had enough.

In 1985, he became fed up with white record executives trying to tell him how and what to sing, or how to promote his album. He didn’t release any new music for the last 35 years of his life.

Withers, in both formal interviews and informally recorded banter, could sometimes be crass, even abrasive, but rarely was he oversentimental. For this, the sentimental moments within his music feel more vulnerable and float above the emptiness of the feel-good machinery within so much of the celebrity-media industrial complex — the mutually assured sanitized reproduction of life.

Near the end of the 1973 BBC concert, Withers shifts from his guitar over to a piano to play a singular rendition of “Lean On Me,” his ode to the selfless and shared duty of friendship, written after he moved to Los Angeles and longed for everyone he loved back in West Virginia.

This version has always been the version I return to. The version that sends me running to my phone to call someone I miss, just to hear their voice. And it’s the version that sits with an exceptionally heavy weight on me now, because Bill Withers is gone. And because even my friends who aren’t miles away feel miles away. Today, in hearing Bill Withers sing “If there is a load you have to bear / That you can’t carry / I’m right up the road / I’ll share your load,” it feels like an entire universe of grief is colliding.

There’s a healthy chance you too will find yourself nodding along or whispering the signature, circular moan of “I know, I know, I know” employed in “Ain’t No Sunshine.” A moment which, to me, has never sounded like anguish, but what comes after anguish — the understanding that this heartbreak is just one in an ever-growing tapestry of them.

The singer is resigned, having endured enough to know that endurance is often rewarded with fresh upsets to endure. At least in this song, Withers was a cynic, as I am sometimes. Life as a marathon of losses, loves that might never return.

Image
Bill Withers during the photo session for his 1974 album, “+‘Justments,” where he wrote on glass the meaning of the title.Credit...Norman Seeff

What a gift, to be able to put it so magically, and so memorably. I know I’ll miss Bill Withers, even though I know I’d been missing him for most of my life.

I know when that BBC camera zooms in on Withers while he sings “Lean On Me,” it looks, briefly, like he’s crossed over from pain to gratitude. I know it has rained so much this spring that I couldn’t go outside most days even if I wanted to. I know there is more than enough grief in today’s world to fill all of our glasses today, tomorrow and the next day. And yet, with the loss of Withers, I’m grieving anew.

I notice how at the end of the BBC performance, seconds after Withers flicks the final note on “Harlem,” the set’s closing song, he barely waits for the audience to clap. He hops out of his chair and walks into the all-consuming darkness offstage, as if despite the applause and newfound fame he couldn’t wait to get gone.

Hanif Abdurraqib (@NifMuhammad) is a writer from the east side of Columbus, Ohio. His latest book is “A Fortune For Your Disaster.”

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