California Dreaming. Bobby Womack. 1969. Mint.
Today, if someone needs to be reminded of the feeling of blithe, middle class harmlessness during the nineteen-sixties, in the time of the fight for civil rights, simply cue the music of The Mamas and the Papas. The further we move from the quartet’s historical point of origin, the more it becomes clear that its innocuous style made it the ideal group to have become a cultural place marker for a pop audience of maladroits obsessed with nostalgia. Recorded two years after the Mamas and the Papas charted with their version of California Dreaming, Bobby Womack’s rendition eschews the overly familiar group harmonies of the original, reducing the vantage point of the lyric from a choral to a solo perspective. This move to the personal gives Womack, along with his producer, Chips Moman, and his backing band, the Memphis Boys, the opportunity to invigorate the record with a more nuanced and intimate arrangement. Commensurate with the Womack record’s theme of having to endu...