Review
Genre and Mood
Bobby Womack‘s California Dreamin’ is a cover, and a radical one: soul and R&B made from a folk-pop hit. The mood is longing and melancholic, soulful in the old sense, a singer who sounds as if the song were his own trouble.
Song Summary
John and Michelle Phillips wrote California Dreamin’ for the Mamas and the Papas, a song that opens on famously bleak lines and dreams of somewhere else. Womack recorded it for his debut solo album, Fly Me to the Moon, produced by Chips Moman. NPR’s Marc Silver heard the difference in one phrase: Womack’s rough-hewn voice “adds a load of psychic pain absent from The Mamas and the Papas’ jaunty original.” The memorable detail is the ending, which refuses to end.
Musical Breakdown
The sources describe the recording from its first chords to its coda, and this breakdown follows them.
Intro
It opens like the original, on familiar strummed guitar chords and the famously bleak first lines about brown leaves and a grey sky.
Verses
Then the voice takes over. Womack sings over what NPR called his own elegantly mournful guitar, the steady tap of a drummer and insistent horns, and he salts the lines with gospel shouts and ad-libs, pleading for someone to help him get there.
Coda
At the end he does not fade out. He picks up the pace, cries out the title and climbs into falsetto, inventing, in NPR’s words, a whole new song.
Concepts in Focus
A cover version can keep every note of a melody and still say something else. NPR called the Mamas and the Papas’ record jaunty; Womack’s is one rough voice, and the wish for California turns from daydream into need.
The falsetto is the voice above its normal range, light and strained at once. Womack saves it for the last moments, so the song’s highest notes are also its most desperate.
A tempo change usually belongs to the middle of a song. Here it is the ending: instead of the usual studio fade, the band speeds up under him, and the coda becomes a song of its own.
Artistic Context
Bobby Womack began in gospel with his brothers, in a group his mentor Sam Cooke renamed the Valentinos, and co-wrote It’s All Over Now, which the Rolling Stones covered. Around 1965 he moved to Memphis to work at Chips Moman’s American Studios, playing guitar on records by Aretha Franklin and the Box Tops. He signed with Minit in 1968 and Fly Me to the Moon followed, with Reggie Young on guitar, Mike Leech on bass, Bobby Wood on piano, Bobby Emmons on organ and Gene Chrisman on drums.
Impact and Reception
Wikipedia calls it the cover that gave Womack his first major hit, and tsort’s chart database lists it at number 43 in the US. Cover Me’s Patrick Robbins noted that by the time the album appeared Womack had sung professionally for over fifteen years, with successes and setbacks enough to draw on. Listen for the moment the fade should come, and doesn’t.
