The Story Behind The Song
"We need to get our act together Take it off the street", sings Linda Womack in Love Wars. "Bring it on home and drop them guns on the floor," harmonises her husband Cecil. "Love wars (No, we don't need) Love wars".
It was fitting that a song about marital problems and reconciliation was the first chart success for Womack and Womack; it echoed the real-life love wars that began with the murder of Linda's famous father twenty years before.
In December 1964, Sam Cooke was killed at a Los Angeles motel after being shot three times by the manager. By the time of his death, Cooke was a rising star, having secured three Top 10 hits on both sides of the atlantic, and is now widely acknowledged as a pioneer of modern soul music. Three years earlier, he had signed the Valentinos to his record label. They were a R&B group of five young brothers who had been originally been a gospel group called The Womack Brothers.
With Cooke's sudden death, the group lost their mentor and their way. The situation became more problematic just weeks later when Bobby Womack married Cooke's widow. The speed of the nuptials provoked moral condemnation from Cooke's fans and sections of the music industry, hastening the end of The Valentinos. Around the same time, Cecil Womack proposed to Cooke's eldest daughter, Linda. She turned him down. "I knew we were much too young and that I had to get my priorities straight," she said later. "Here he was talking about marriage and I hadn't even kissed a boy yet." She was 12 years old at the time.
A few years later, however, the 17-year-old Linda was seeing more of Cecil's brother, Bobby, who was her stepfather. And she was doing more than kissing. When Bobby's enraged wife caught them in bed together she hollered "You dirty fucking bastard!" and shot her husband. He was lucky to flee the house with a minor head injury but unsurprisingly the marriage did not survive.
Yet the friendship betwee Cecil and Linda was more enduring. Nine years later, after a divorce and a chance reunion, Cecil finally married his childhood sweetheart in Las Vegas, and they formed Womack and Womack in 1983. Their experiences of tangled and fractious family relationships no doubt inspired Love Wars, the title track to their critically acclaimed first album.
The song is perhaps best described as synth soul-pop. With a delicious synth bass and percussive foundation, the song soars with soulful vocals over sumptuous keyboard and guitar hooks and frills. The longer album version features a more prominent and funked-up synth hook, which is given full expression in the extended version which sounds like a session musician given license to showcase his talent. The track has the unmistakable 1980s sound but its soulful R&B heart means it is snyth pop that has stood the test of time.
The lyrics also contribute to its enduring quality. These are not saccharin-filled verses about a sweet romance but a gritty love drawn from hard-bitten experiences of marital in-fighting: "I remember losing my head And calling you things". It's a love that has encountered the dark spectre of domestic violence: "I promise to stop boxing you round So don't scratch my face". And this is a love that has experienced betrayal and infidelity: "Flashbacks and uncovered tracks From when you left With my best friend". This is indeed love that has endured the wars that often breakout in a long-term relationship, yet the message is about overcoming them and starting afresh.
Love Wars fulfills all the promise that Sam Cooke first saw in the Womack Brothers decades before and he surely would have been proud that it was finally realised in no small part by the talents of his own daughter.
We hereby instate Love Wars by Womack and Womack on The Wall as No.12 Best Single of 1984
The Womack family's entangled tale of love and betrayal plays out like a plot from a Hollywood blockbuster.Dave B
