Bobby Womack Was One of the Last People to See Janis Joplin Alive — He Wrote Trust Me D

On September 25th, 1970, Paul Rothchild stepped out of the recording booth at Sunset Sound to get a coffee. In the lobby by the Coke machine, a man was sitting with a guitar. He was playing something. Rothchild stopped. He went back inside and found Janis Joplin. He said, “Come out here.

I want you to hear something.” She came into the lobby. She heard what the man was playing. Within a few hours, they were recording it together in the booth. The man at the Coke machine was Bobby Womack. The song was Trust Me. And what happened between that lobby moment and the dawn of October 4th is the story that almost no one knows about Pearl.

Bobby Womack was not a new name in 1970. He had grown up in Cleveland, the third of five brothers, so poor the family fished pig snouts from the supermarket’s trash. His mother told him he could sing his way out of the ghetto. He did. By the early 1960s, he was writing songs and playing guitar with his brothers as the Valentinos.

In 1964, they recorded a song called It’s All Over Now. The Rolling Stones covered it. It became the Stones’ first number one single in the United Kingdom. Bobby Womack was 20 years old. The decades that followed built on that beginning. He played guitar for Ray Charles.

He played sessions for Aretha Franklin, contributing to Lady Soul. He played on Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis. He was in the room when the greatest recordings of that era were being made. By 1970, he was working with Sly Stone on There’s a Riot Going On and writing songs that he had not yet placed with anyone.

One of those unplaced songs was Trust Me. He had it in his hands the day he sat down by the Coke machine in the lobby of Sunset Sound. Before that lobby moment, Janis Joplin had called him. Paul Rothchild had suggested they meet. He told Bobby, “Man, she loves you. You guys should hang out. She’ll be good.” And then Janis called.

Bobby said later he didn’t think it was her at first. She said, “Everybody else has recorded your songs and I just want to do one of your songs. Why don’t you come to the studio?” He brought every song he had ever written that had not yet been recorded by anyone. He spread them out. She chose Trust Me.

And that day, September 25, 1970, they recorded it together. Bobby on his left-handed Guild acoustic archtop, her voice inhabiting the song the way she inhabited every song she chose, completely without reserve, as if she had been carrying the words for years. John Till, her guitarist, remembered it for Mojo magazine.

Bobby was out in the lobby standing by the Coke machine strumming the song. Paul popped out to get a coffee and a few minutes later he said, “Come out here. I want you to hear something.” Next thing we knew we were back in the studio recording the song with the great Bobby Womack on guitar. The same day she recorded Me and Bobby McGee.

The same day she recorded Move Over. Three of the greatest recordings of her career. One afternoon in September. And then they became close. In a short time, Bobby Womack said, “We became very close.” They were in Los Angeles together in the orbit of the Pearl sessions and the friendship grew the way friendships do between two people who recognize something in each other.

At some point, Womack had recently purchased a Mercedes-Benz 600. He wrote about it in his autobiography, Midnight Mover. He and Janis were riding together a couple of blocks. She was in the passenger seat. He was driving. And she fixed a tune in her head and started singing. A line just spilled out.

That line, the one that spilled out in Bobby Womack’s Mercedes Benz, became Mercedes Benz, the a cappella song she recorded 3 days before she died, the last song she ever fully recorded, the song that starts, “Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz?” She wrote it in his car. She recorded it alone, with only her voice, 3 days before the end.

Bobby Womack’s car, Bobby Womack’s studio lobby. Bobby Womack’s song on her final album. He was threaded through the last weeks of her life in ways that the history books rarely fully trace. On the night of October 3rd, Bobby Womack was at the Landmark Motor Hotel. He and Janis were together.

He offered her cocaine. She said, “No.” Most at Seaf von der Mar, she said, “No.” This is a detail that stays with you. Janis Joplin, on the last night of her life, declined cocaine. And then her heroin dealer arrived. She told Bobby to leave. He walked toward the elevator. He said later, “As I went into the elevator, I remember hearing the dealer coming up the stairs.

Bobby was going down. The dealer was going up.” He did not go back. She had told him to leave. He left. He went down in the elevator while the dealer came up the stairs. And that was the last time he saw her. Paul Rothschild called him early the next morning. Bobby picked up. Rothschild said, “She OD’d.

” Bobby’s response, as he has described it, “You got to be joking me.” But it was not a joke. She was gone. Bobby Womack said, “That just broke my heart. That’s something I could never adjust to, seeing somebody today and losing them tomorrow. Seeing somebody today and losing them tomorrow.” He had seen her the night before.

He had been in the elevator while the dealer came up the stairs. He had heard the news at dawn and Trust Me was on Pearl. The song he had strummed by the Coke machine in the lobby. The song Rothschild had pulled him into the booth to record. The song that appeared on the album that went to number one. He wrote it. She sang it.

The connection between them, the lobby, the studio, the Mercedes, the elevator, the phone call at dawn, is one of the most compact and devastating small stories in rock history. Bobby Womack died on June 27th, 2014. He was 70 years old. His career had been long and complicated and brilliant and self-sabotaged and revived.

The specific arc of someone of immense talent who spent decades fighting himself as much as the industry. He talked about Janis in interviews for the rest of his life. He talked about seeing her today and losing her tomorrow. He talked about the elevator, about the stairs, about the call at dawn.

Trust Me is seven tracks into Pearl. Her voice on his song, the ballad he played by the Coke machine, the song she had wanted to record since she first heard someone else sing one of his compositions. She trusted him with the song. He was there on the last night. He went down in the elevator. He got the call.

That’s something I could never adjust to, seeing somebody today, losing them tomorrow. Subscribe. The next story goes somewhere nobody has taken you before.