This one gets my vote for the most effective I-miss-my-woman song ever written. Bill Withers’ breakthrough hit was inspired by one of the great parting scenes in cinema — no, not “Casablanca,” but a film we don’t hear much about anymore despite its outstanding reputation, “Days of Wine and Roses,” starring Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick as a couple battling the bottle.
Bill Withers, who was working in a factory manufacturing airliner lavatories when he recorded his first album, said, “They were both alcoholics who were alternately weak and strong. It’s like going back for seconds on rat poison. Sometimes you miss things that weren’t particularly good for you. It’s just something that crossed my mind from watching that movie, and probably something else that happened in my life that I’m not aware of.”
For Withers’ first album, released in 1971, producer Booker T. Jones lined up a stellar backing cast. He plays piano himself, with MGs colleagues Duck Dunn on bass and Al Jackson Jr. on drums, along with Stephen Stills on guitar. That esteemed company actually influenced the song’s most famous lyric. The 26 times he repeats “I know” was meant as filler until he could write some lines, but
“then Booker T. said, ‘No, leave it like that.’ I was going to write something there, but there was a general consensus in the studio. It was an interesting thing because I’ve got all these guys that were already established, and I was working in the factory at the time. Graham Nash was sitting right in front of me, just offering his support. Stephen Stills was playing and there was Booker T. and Al Jackson and Donald Dunn … They were all these people with all this experience and all these reputations, and I was this factory worker just sort of puttering around. So when their general feeling was, ‘Leave it like that,’ I left it like that.”
If there’s a running theme to this feature, it’s the tin ears of record company executives, who consigned what Rolling Stone ranked as No. 285 on song in rock history to the B-side of Withers’ first single. Disc jockeys played it anyway, and it reached No. 3 on the Hot 100.
The strings make the original sound overproduced to modern ears. I prefer this live version from a 1972 taping of the British TV show “Old Grey Whistle Test.”
The song has been covered dozens of times in all sorts of styles. The first was by smooth jazz icon Grover Washington Jr., whose cover was the first of any Bill Withers song.
Among the most interesting interpretations is this collaboration between Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Des’ree.
For the record (pun intended), here’s the hookless song some record-company geniuses thought deserved the A-side:
