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 endure one’s bad decisions is the feeling of having to abide the months long sensory deprivation of seasonal malaise; in this case, alone. The Mamas and the Papas evoke what is missed; Womack evokes why it is missed. It’s hard to locate where in the former version the source of anguish comes from, or if there even is one (which may explain its lasting popularity with American audiences). Womack’s version seduces the listener with that source. At only twenty-five, Womack was more than a mere recording studio professional; he was emerging, like so many black men of the last century and this one, as the  author of a musical vision so intrinsically committed to the stated values of democracy that a mythic, molecular language born of their songbook insinuated itself into the central nervous systems of many of its listeners and cursed us with obsession. Weakened by an unhealthy equilibrium, the obsessed man has no California towards which he has any hope of projecting himself. Homeless, he is alone with only the breathless whisper of his phantom DJ, equipped with his gnostic understanding of the mechanics of both Ouija board and jukebox—after a certain age you realize how little difference there is between the two—offering sage council on which direction to drive the current moment.

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