Episode 8 Soul Unlimited - Let The Music Play On

A journalist meets a stranger at a bus stop who wants to meet Barry White. They go together to Barry White's office where they find everything is blue. Barry White is nonchalant and talks on the phone. The journalist's companion pretends to be a journalist too. Barry White answers questions and is honest about his music. He talks about his success and how he created his own style. He embraces new artists who are influenced by his music. People talk about how Barry White's music influenced them and made a lasting impact. The Brand New Heavies and others discuss how Barry White's music still resonates today. On my last bus that I was waiting to arrive, I was sitting there with a Caucasian gentleman, a little bit older than me, maybe 24, 25, and he's standing there. He wasn't homeless, but he was en route. He said, where are you headed? I'm a journalist and I'm on my way to interview Barry White. He said, I've always wanted to meet Barry White. You think I could come with you? Me, being the smart guy that I was, I said, you know, I don't see why not. And it wasn't until we got to Barry White's building and we got in the elevator, I thought, you know what, what the fuck did I just do? I don't know what I'm doing. And I've invited a stranger. You know, we just looked like the odd squad, but nobody thought anything of it. His secretary, Barry White's secretary came out. Mr. White, we'll see you now. And I recognized her as one of his girl group. And I thought, wow, I guess everybody does double duty around here. And the office had, you know, the double doors on it where the doors, you know, welcome to your life. And the first thing I noticed, a massive office, first thing I noticed was that everything in the office, everything was baby blue. I mean, the only thing that wasn't blue in the office was Barry White, you know. He stood up and he said, you know, how are you doing, have a seat. But he seemed completely nonplussed about the whole thing. He was on his phone, you know, this was back in the day. So he had one of these phones that had a million buttons on it. I mean, this man seemed like he was the most powerful man in the world to me. Now, my partner in crime here, he didn't say a word. But the first thing he did was he rifled through his backpack. And I thought, well, God, this guy could pull out a knife or a gun or anything. He pulled out a big journal. He's gonna pretend to be a journalist too. So Mr. White, how did you get started? And he probably looked at me and said, motherfucker, for the umpteenth time, you know, I mean, do you read the, you know, everybody knows how I got started. The guy was kind enough to oblige me in every single way. And he spoiled me, Barry White did. He spoiled me for the future because as a actual genuine journalist, I would go on to meet people in the music business who would have their publicist sitting right beside them. With Barry White, there was none of that. Barry White just said what he thought. Hello. Well, here we are, in a room full of strangers. Hopefully not. But we are almost ready to call Soul Unlimited a wrap. In the last episode, we looked at how White's music had reached a global audience and transcended time. And after his accidental sabbatical during the CBS years, we saw him reconnect with his loyal fan base. This was largely due to a resurgence of the 70s symphonic soul boom This was largely due to a resurgence of the 70s symphonic soul boom. The icon is not followed three years later. This gave the artist his first number one single on the Billboard R&B chart in almost 20 years. It also garnered a Grammy nomination for Best R&B Album. Hi, this is Larry Katz from the Boston Herald calling Barry White. Hi. He's still on the other interview. Would you mind calling back in about 10 minutes? No problem. Okay. Yes, you're all scheduled. Hi, this is Larry Katz from the Boston Herald. How are you? Very good. Very good. So I know you're opening the tour tomorrow, right? Tomorrow, that's right. Now, if I remember correctly, was the last tour about five years ago? 1990. Does it feel much different going out this time now that you're coming off a very successful album? Excitement, much more excitement. And that's always nice. I know this album has gotten a tremendous response from people. When you were making it and it was released, did you feel up front that this one was going to click where the last few had not done so? You never know that. At least I don't. I never know which one is clicking and which one isn't. It depends on what you feel like, what feels good for you, what feels good to you. The rest is up to the people, radio, consumers, everybody. So you wouldn't have been surprised if this one was ignored in the way that the others had been? Absolutely. There is a feeling, I think, for myself in listening to the new record, that it did seem to have more of a flavor of what made you so successful in the 70s than maybe the records that you had done in the 80s. Yeah, well, that was intentionally. You can only create what you can create, you know what I'm saying? And that's what I do. I create my kind of music, my way, the way I hear it, the way I like it. And you just hope that other people will appreciate it and hear it the same way. We heard in previous episodes the artist disdained for touring. Possibly, his slightly arrogant position, he regarded himself as a polymath and in a different class. Then again, he'd scuffled, scrapped and schooled his way to a position of musical privilege. His candour in media interviews bolstered in direct proportion with his age. In a contemporaneous interview, he was bullish about how he had pioneered the use of orchestra in mainstream music. By his own admission, there's nothing new in music, it's interpretations. And rather than feeling threatened by the likes of Lisa Stansfield, who had reformulated white sound, he embraced it and ended up recording a duet of the British soul star's Million Seller all around the world. That resurgence of 70s symphonic soul isn't that hard to understand. Here's another example of the indelible mark it left on music listeners in their formative years. Here's the voice of broadcasting in Birmingham, Adrian Goldberg. Well, I was a kid when I first became aware of Barry White. I would have been probably, I don't know, nine or ten. There again, I could be lying about my age. And I had older sisters who were massively into soul music. So, punk was the first music that I really discovered and owned as my own. I was winged on soul music. So, Motown and the sound of Philly, which was very strong in the early 70s. In the course of that, one of my sisters had Barry White music. But you didn't have to go far to hear Barry White music. It was all over the radio. And I think this suggestion that Barry White has been underappreciated and underrecognised is a fair one. He was clearly a terrific songwriter. He had a truly unique voice and a great presence. And I remember seeing early videos. This was when videos were not particularly common on Top of the Pops. And you'd see Barry there. And he didn't look like you expected a pop star to look like. He was obviously physically quite large. And he had this growl of a voice. And I just thought, wow. This is good. And I should be clear here. Barry White was talking about a world that I hadn't yet been introduced to. You know, a world of romance and love and ladies. So, I was too young to get all that. But I kind of had a sense that this was the world maybe that lay ahead for me. I wish. Not many people that I knew really loved. But I used to read a magazine called Blues and Soul. Blues and Soul is a magazine produced in London. A British Blues and Soul magazine. Mostly focusing on soul music. And it was the only place you could read interviews with people like Barry White or an appreciation of people like Barry White. Which my older sister had. And I used to devour Blues and Soul magazine. On BRNB in Birmingham, there used to be a soul show presented by a guy called Nicky Steele. It was on a Saturday night. What was this song when it first came to Barry White? And how did he change it? This song came to him called You're My First, My Last, My In-Between. It was a little country western type song. So he took the whole track, changed the whole track to the music you're hearing now. And I'm just curious who it was that thought that Barry White might like to see this country song. Well, it was an assistant of his that was always working around Barry. He called up to Barry and said, Check this out. You're My First, My Last, My In-Between White's staying power is one thing. But what becomes more noteworthy as you delve further is just how much the music has influenced and impacted the next generation through their songwriting. So to bring things up to date, you can't get any more contemporary than brand new. So here's the creative forces behind that groove imbued sound of the brand new Heavies, Simon Bartholomew, and then Andrew Leakey. How it reached you, but also does it still have resonance today? Whatever music you liked kind of in the 70s and 80s, you knew all the music that was going on. And I always realized that I was influenced as much by Sesame Street and I was kind of into rock and stuff. But you realize later on that you're actually absorbing so much stuff. So they were all in the charts. I think with Barry White, because I saw a documentary about him and he really loved his wife, didn't he? When you realize that, you can hear it in the music. It's kind of in the fabric of a real nice dude. He is what he is, you know. But what an amazing use of a voice. It's so unique. It's that good that it did go over. I think a lot of babies were made to Barry White. That's true. They said there was a baby boom in the US. A Barry boom, they called it. One of our songs, oddly enough, I think was a bit influenced by Barry White. It's called Never Stop. Really? Working on that with Yan in the very early stages. And we get a lot of mail. We used to get a lot of handwritten fan mail just for that record. He's a massive influence on me. Majorly. I just thought that was immense. To have your string levels up that high with a massive baby drum kit behind it. It's a special thing. The hi-hats are quite loud in his music. We love a loud hi-hat. Some hip-hop has quite loud hi-hats. Exactly. That's why it fits so well today, his music. One of the ones that I was kind of curious about, if you want to talk about it, is your partnership with Larry Neal. Can you tell me about that? It's nothing complicated. He wanted to retire, man. Larry's been around long. Well, you know. That's right. You know him. He just wanted to get out of it, man. So I retired him. Took good care of him. You gave him a million dollars cash. Yeah, is that what you heard? Black nigga. Is that what you heard? You got some motherfuckers. The bass baritone had continued to tour in the mid-90s. Inevitably with different instrumentation due to the costly nature of his original 40-piece orchestras. However, it was noticeable to others that his health was diminishing. It's no secret that White was overweight for lengthy periods of his adult life. Eventually that manifested in the artist collapsing after a summer tour in the mid-90s, which resulted in him being hospitalized in that October. The lifestyle factors were there for all to see. White was a heavy smoker, to the tune of, what, 150 cigarettes a day? Now here's a moment of candor from me. If I'm honest, I struggled with ideas about how to wrap this podcast up. It's taken slightly more than two years. I've learned a huge amount about Barry White, but also his contemporaries, and also about the social history of that time and of that place. So to round this down, I've been Stuart Large. Thank you for listening. Love Unlimited and Barry White's history was unlike any artist ever has been on the horizon as a team. We came together and we left together. We did everything together. If they didn't want Love Unlimited and The Orchestra on my show on television, I didn't do it. I turned Donna Shore down. I turned Merrick Griffin's show down. I turned down Midnight Special. They didn't want The Orchestra. They didn't want the girls. They just wanted the star, Barry White. Well, they stars, too. I can show you reports where they got gold hanging on the wall, too. You see, in my way of thinking, my philosophy is you have to be loyal to something. I think that there is a time when people give their words to each other. It has to mean something. I think there comes a time when I say to an artist, I'm with you. And an artist say, I'm with you, Barry White. That that's what it is. I'm a street cat. I've belonged in gangs. And when you have a partner, you went down with your partner. Whether you won the fight or lost it, you went down together. So I know what loyalty is, what keen participation is, gang activity, everybody knowing what you're doing. Everybody says, I understand regimental philosophy. And I've used it all my life. I've raised my children with it. The reason we were so happy together, there was no problem. I don't have the story to tell you that a lot of other entertainers had to tell you about getting screwed and all that. Because the information that I got that I told you about earlier was valuable. And I never forget nothing no one tells me, my people. Nothing. One chicken, please. I don't want to see everybody there. Hey, what's going on, man? Yeah. She's at home. Yeah, she's at home. Yeah, she's at home. Let the music play. This episode featured Barry White, Joe Smith, under Creative Commons or Fair Use Policy. All music used under the same licence. Background music by Stuart Zetterberg.