JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES

They were very strict. We couldn’t dance, I remember they had dances at school. She wouldn’t let me go anywhere. How do I explain it? Their religion was very strict.

And when I got to be 9, well it started when I was 8, the Jehovah’s Witnesses trained you how to speak, teaching the scriptures. They called it “talks”. I remember the first one was about Moses. My grandmother wrote it all out. Everything I had to say, when I had to give a gesture, everything. When I got older I had to do my own. I was a good speaker though.

And I could really articulate. I don’t know how old I was when I had to make my own. Can’t remember any of my speeches either. But they would teach you how to gesture, how to make your voice go up and down. They would teach you all of that. I’m sure it helped with my teaching later on because I did it for so many years.

They taught you how: When you first get up there, don’t say anything. Pause and look out at your audience. They just taught you all kind of stuff. Oh yeah. They taught you how to articulate, make it louder, softer. I don’t know how to explain it, but they taught you the basics of how to talk to people—public speaking.

MY MOTHER

My grandmother kept me on the right path. Had I been with my mother, I would probably have been insane. My mother acted like she wished she didn’t have us. She had 3 children, all from different fathers. I think this lack of love is what destroyed my brother and sister in adulthood. I escaped that because I had gotten a lot of love from my grandparents and stepdad. For awhile we all lived together.

I know my stepfather loved me more than he loved his own son. But soon after we moved in with them, I saw my stepfather beat my mother one night, it was so bad that it has traumatized me to this day. He left and soon after that my mother moved us all to the Encinal Projects.

I wanted to live with her to escape the confines of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. My mother was unstable. She wasn’t an alcoholic at that time, but she was drinking a lot. It was constant men at that apartment. This is where she fell for the love of her life, a man we all hated. His name was Roosevelt. In retrospect, he was hostile toward us kids. We hated his guts. But looking back he wasn’t that bad. Later in life we got to know him. He and my brother Harry were in prison together.

I only lived with my mother one year. I went back to the other projects, the Estuary (The Alameda Projects), and lived with my grandparents. It wasn’t long before my mother, Harry and my sister Sharon all moved back in with my grandparents.

We hadn’t been back there for hardly any time before we all moved to Oakland. I was eleven, in sixth grade, and went to school at Manzanita Elementary. It was very white, very segregated there. I had some white friends, but same problem, I couldn’t go to their house.

Eventually, the neighborhood started changing and getting poorer and more dangerous. When black families move in there, the whites move out and the blacks are going to get those places.

I DISCOVER MUSIC

This was when my mother bought records from a record club and I would listen to them. That’s how I was introduced to Charlie Parker—I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of him. And all kinds of musicians.

They would send us every kind of record and that’s how I heard music. My mother loved music. And she would sing around the house. I have come to appreciate my mother more in the past few years. I realize now that it was her interest in jazz and putting us into the JazzTone Record Club that set me on the path to being a musician.

I had one year to go in elementary and the next year was junior high. That’s when, in 7th grade, the music teacher, Miss Margaret Spiller came by. She was a little lady, a good teacher. She went around the room recruiting for the band. She tested your ear. She played something on the piano to see if I could hum it. I passed that. I wanted to play sax but they only had one sax and a boy had already claimed that. So she said, “Play clarinet. It will be easier to play sax if you know how to play clarinet.”

It turned out to be true. And she sent a note to my mother saying I was very talented and I should take music lessons. So I took lessons at Best Music Class. I played clarinet for a year and then I played a C-melody sax (somewhere between a tenor and alto).

My teacher at Best Music arranged music for Arthur Godfrey and soon he told my mother I needed my own horn.

LIFE IS NOT EASY

Looking back, I find I had forgotten how dangerous life in the ghetto was. We were new living there and we didn’t know anyone.

One time we went down to the playground before school started, I was about nine years old. There was a gang of kids down there and a little guy called Bo Wheat started an argument with me about something. He slugged me and I slugged him back and knocked him down. Then the whole gang came in on me. A very dark kid nicknamed Wicky and Bo Wheat’s brother, a light skinned kid, both started in on me. All of them. They beat the shit out of me. Harry and Sharon were helpless and standing there crying.

After a while, they got tired of beating on me, or actually I think some grownup came through the park and told them to leave me alone. We went home – I looked horrible – lips all swollen up. Later on, all these people became my friends. Termite, Bo Wheat, Wicky – everybody had a nickname. Not me – I was called Robert. But when, later, the white kids started calling me Bob that name stuck.

I’M A SQUARE THEN I MOVE OUT

Better things were expected of me and that’s what kept me right. I was an absolute square. I remember a girl, I must have been in 11th grade. She was very pretty but she was a grade ahead of me. But she offered me sex and I was so innocent, I told her, “I can’t do that!”

When I was 15 or 16, the head of the church offered to let me run one of the study groups they had all over town. By then I was through with them. I couldn’t do that anymore. I couldn’t go door to door.

I had a girlfriend and she was no Jehovah’s Witness. What had happened, she was just crazy about me and I didn’t like her. And for almost the whole school year, I would avoid her and she knew it. But she was just in love. Towards the end of the school year, I started liking her and she asked me to walk her home and I walked her home even though I wasn’t supposed to. In fact one of my songs—that’s where I got the words from. Because she would kiss me.

I didn’t know how to kiss nobody!! I lost a couple of girlfriends because I didn’t know how to kiss ‘em. So I was square as you could be. Then as I got older, I didn’t want the boys to know that I hadn’t had sex because they’d had it. And they would ridicule me. I didn’t have sex till I was 20. I was told by the Jehovah’s Witnesses that I wasn’t supposed to have sex till I got married. They kept me square.

And the girl that I had sex with—remember I told you my mother had an apartment building and I was living there. It was an old Victorian house that had been made into apartments, and I lived in what would have been the attic. The girl’s name was Joanna, and I didn’t like her that much anyway. But she liked me. So I saw it as chance to stop being a virgin.

LIFE IN THE GHETTO CAN CATCH UP BUT I STAY SQUARE

I always had depression and anxiety attacks. It started when I was 16 and I got a therapist. But it stuck with me way long. Growing up, it was a tough place to live, almost everyday I was scared. You could get beat up. That’s how it is. I started boxing at 17 to keep the bullies off me, but my younger brother, Harry, was a lot better than me. He was Diamond Belt champion for California 5 years in a row.

So how did I keep from getting hooked on heroin and ending up in a life of crime? I went over to my brother Harry’s apartment one day. My girlfriend, Carlena, had broken up with me and I was very despondent and doing a lot of drinking.

Harry had some brown Mexican heroin laying around the apartment and I asked if I could have some. At first. he agreed. Then he thought about it and changed his mind – he told me he didn’t want me to go that route. I was kind of a square. Maybe he wanted to keep it for himself.

Most of my friends were square – guys who didn’t get in trouble. I never hung around with thugs, except for Josef who was my white friend. When I first met him we were both 11 years old. I met him on the playground and he didn’t speak English much at that time. He spoke French. But we got along great and became good friends. He was always in trouble. He became a bank robber and several times he asked me to drive the getaway car for him, but I never did. He’d disappear for a while in some prison then show up again. But I guess my squareness and desire to keep going to school kept me out of this.

I would go to the library to read. After I first went there, from that day on, I just lived in the library. That’s where I first found the Somerset Maugham books. Every kind of book.

I was depressed so much and the books helped me get out of that. I have a curious mind, even now, and so that was a big part of it. I used to read all day.

My grandmother would bring me lunch. You might have thought it was a job. I’m serious. I would read all day and this eye, I’m getting blind in it. Because I would get sleepy at night, I’d be so interested at night at what I was reading, I would lay on the pillow with one eye open and just read and read and read.

I was an avid reader until about 18 or 19 (years old). Then I decided I’d read too much and I stopped reading. But I didn’t completely stop reading.

MY JOB

You know, what I did, I was working part-time in the post office. After several months, they were eliminating that position and they said, “You could go work full time”. You know, mailman or whatever.

I was happy in the part time job but I was miserable in the full-time job. I used to go buy a half pint of Jack Daniels every night and I’d be intoxicated in there. I just didn’t want to do it. Then I got in trouble and I got fired.

ALWAYS MUSIC

But the rhythm and blues got me away from the ghetto life. I got into some bands and played the rhythm and blues scene and then I didn’t need a therapist.

I was with Marvin Holmes and the Uptights. He got the best gigs in Oakland. There was a club owned by a professional basketball player. Big, tall light-skinned black guy. He booked well-known people. He was coming along, he was pretty hot. My friend Rabu, (Buford) hooked me up with this guy. He was well-known but he couldn’t write music. So I would write his music for him, that introduced me to studio music. Sly Stone came into one of our gigs riding a big dog. So many things happened, I can’t keep up with them.

I guess, in high school I played in jazz band, we used to call them stage bands. I was in the sax section. I’m still in touch with friends from there. Now some of them died, some have a bad heart. We also had a basement band and Paul Jackson was in that band. He later became Herbie Hancock’s bass player and lived in Japan and got hooked on drugs.

His sister, Joyce, was nuts about me, but I was older and I liked the older girls. Joyce played flute and went to a famous music college back East and played in the Philharmonic with Leonard Bernstein. But last I heard, she came back and wasn’t doing so good.

Anyway, I can show you in The Real Book (standards for musicians), some of the most popular tunes by Herbie Hancock, he’s got writing credit there. Paul was just 16 then, so me and Jamie were older and were leaders of the band

DOOWOP AND LOS ANGELES

I was in a doowop band in high school called The Enchanters, running parallel to the school band. One of my friends who just died, he was the lead singer in the band. We sung everywhere — sororities, on campus.

There was a girl who really loved the group and her mother was an agent and she wanted her mother to hear us. Her mother really liked us, so we used to go up to Oakland Hills every Saturday and practice. She was going to polish up our choreography and everything.

But us, we would come close to something good and lose it. So the band wouldn’t rehearse and she dropped us. It broke our hearts.

Other than that, we formed another group. There was Otis who just died. And Harvey who had his own business as a carpenter. There were four of us and we came to LA.

So we went down there, and in a short time we had an offer of a contract from a producer. The guy was on Sunset and Vine. The guy had a small operation, really only had one artist. And we sung for him. He really liked us and he offered us a contract.

We didn’t know—we were just ignorant. So me and this other guy, Buford, looked down the street and saw Capitol Records. So we decided to walk down there with our contract. We wanted to compare—it was the silliest thing.

And the woman at the reception when you walked in, I think her name was Johnny, we told her our problem. And she said there were 2 rhythm and blues producers, Adam Ross and Jack Levy. She said, “It’s lunchtime right now, you come back after lunch and you can probably meet him.”

Just before we were about to go out, Adam Ross came walking down the stairs. She said, “Oh, there’s Adam Ross”. So we went and introduced ourselves to him and told him what we were looking at and he wanted to hear us. He told us to come back after lunch. They were on the 7th floor and Jack Levy was there too. So we sang—we always sung A Cappella—we sang one of our favorite songs to him. They liked it, but they said, “Before we offer you a contract, we got to hear you on recording. Some people can sing but they don’t come through on recording.”

When he told us that, we said, “Well, forget about it. We got a contract already”. So they said. “Wait a minute”, and they gave us a contract.

Talk about kids that didn’t know anything. We were down here 3 months and we had a lot of fun. But the boys started to fade out and wanted to go home. I stayed a little while after they left and then I came home to Oakland too.

MUSIC, GIRLS AND FAMILY

I had a friend from high school, name was Jake, a Mexican kid. And he was hangin’ out in the Latin scene, you know, mambos and all that kind of stuff. So he introduced me to a guy named John Thomas who had a Latin band. I got the gig, played quite a while with the Latin band.

By now I was a real gigolo. Once I was in that band, the girls were coming down on you like rain. I’d never had an experience like that before.

My first wife, I met her there. I did her wrong so much, she paid me back later. I started playing in a club in East Oakland, I went to a lot of clubs. She is the mom of my second daughter.

I married her, but she paid me back for all that fooling around I did. She ran off with another tenor player. He was more famous than I was. I found out because my 3-year-old daughter told me. “I told Gloria not to do it. I told Gloria not to do it”.

The little girl stayed with her grandmother, they had a home, they were very stable. Her grandfather was nuts about her. I would take her and her older sister to the zoo together, so they’re friends now. My first daughter, I got together with her mother, but I was such a gigolo, I couldn’t stay faithful to anyone.

I would come to LA a lot for the music scene. I thought at that time I could do more in LA. Eventually, I got a job in LA driving a bus and moved my wife Carla and my son Bob down here. But I didn’t like it. I was about to buy something once, and I realized I would be stuck in this if I bought it. I didn’t want to be driving this bus for the next 10 years or more cuz I owe bills.

So, eventually, I moved back to Oakland. I would come down to LA for 3 months and then go back to Oakland. I realized I needed to be in school. I had dropped out of high school, and whenever I looked for a job, they always had some requirement and I didn’t have any requirement.

So I decided that I would get an AA degree. I wasn’t thinking about 4 years or anything. But once I got in there, I really started studying hard.

By then I had my son Gus along with Bob.

                                                                     BERKELEY

I went to UC Berkeley.  You see, Johnny Talbert, the guy I was in the band with, brought a sightreading book and asked me to help him with it. I didn’t know he was enrolled in Berkeley. I thought he was doing what I was doing.

A bit later, I found out that he was a full- fledged student and I was stunned. I was like, “What?” And he had been going to a community college, but it had been quite a while before he transferred to Berkeley. He’s a jive mofo in certain ways.

The reason I ended up going there, because one day I went up there to find him to hang out and I couldn’t find him, but I knew the admissions person. Stacey was his name and I knew where he was. He was the guy that evaluated you. So I went up to the admissions office and I said, “Stacey, where’s Johnny at?” He didn’t know where Johnny was but he said, “Aren’t you about through with community college?” I said, “Yeah, I graduated”. So he said, “Why don’t you apply up here?”

It was like, every counselor I talked to said, “Oh you can try but you can’t get in there”. That’s all I ever heard from counselors and other people at community college. So that was the first big change. I said, “Really?” And he said, “Go ahead and apply”.

So I went to apply, and there was this black girl that saw me and she sat across from me at the other table and she started looking through my records to evaluate me to see if I could get into University. And I was scared. She was doing the evaluating and I was just sitting there looking at her. She said, “Sit back and relax”.

Then at a certain point she said—I don’t remember her exact words, but she told me that I could go in, I was accepted. So that was stunning to me. I had friends who went there, just various friends I knew. It was the college in the neighborhood, but I didn’t see myself there. They gave us an orientation and, oh my God, it was a completely different world.

And here I was, a little boy from the ghetto. Another boy had also come there from community college, so we got there at the same time. He told me he had to get a counselor cuz the orientation had screwed him up so bad.

It was amazing. The orientation, I don’t know how to explain it. Many people who have an education come from an educated life. But when you come from the ghetto and you go to the University and you see all they know—it was just incredible.

A NEW WORLD

I felt I entered into a new world, a place I never knew existed. Might as well have took me to Mars or something, you know. But, anyway, I had the orientation. I got through. Spent a few years there.

Music major there was one of the hardest majors. But I loved it. They had stuff there that I would have never imagined existed, just speaking of music. I had about a year of Composition, I can’t even explain to you what they taught me. Now it seems so passe, so routine. I don’t even know how to explain it.

I remember, a few years ago, I was doing a record with Andreas, I call him my protégé, he’s right about 35/36 now. And he just stretches out, stuff that sounds like he’s playin’ out of key, you know 20th century stuff, and he goes back all the way to the blues.

So he wrote this song, “Sinking Above”. In a lot of ways he wrote it for me. He has this beginning horn part and the ending, where I solo, and, I don’t know what it was, but it was a dissonant thing, and I had to play out of some weird scale. And what helped me was what I learned at Berkeley.

What I did was that I created a little motif, I played some little thing, then I played it somewhere else. So I created a story, a kind of arc. It starts more simple with more spacing and it builds at a higher pitch. I didn’t even know that I could do that. But they taught me.

You could give me two notes. maybe a triad. I could probably, if I had the time and energy, create you a thousand themes out of that from the techniques that they taught. They were just amazing.

Dr. Tucker—I just remembered his name! They had a Student Union, some student dues paid for it and they had a large building and two or three jazz bands– not for credit.

Stacey, who I was telling you about,  told Dr. Tucker who was the head of this, that I was so bad. Dr. Tucker had been trying to get me to come to the band for 2 or 3 years, but I told him, I was so busy just trying not to flunk those classes, I was studying all the time.

So after almost 2 years I said OK, so I went in the band. There were 3 bands, the best, the second and third. He put me, of course, in the top band, and I was astounded at how good those white boys could read. Oh, God! Us blacks could never read music like that. I always said some of them could read flyshit backwards. And so I went through that band for about a year.

GRADUATION

Anyway, after about 3 years I finally graduated and I had no job in mind. And I knew I should be working on a job, but I had nothing.

I met some guys. I met some of them at Berkeley. I was musical, not political. So some of my friends, if you want to call ‘em friends—did you ever hear of Stokeley Carmichael? They were socialists then. So these guys were part of Stokeley Carmichael’s party and they had been trying to recruit me. But it wasn’t me, I was musical, not political. But we were still friendly. So I said, “Well, I’ll just ask one of these guys cuz they’d already graduated.”

I was talking to one of them, I can’t remember his name. and he said I could be a substitute teacher in Oakland. They said go down to Oakland School System, they’ll hire you with a 4-year degree.

I ended up calling them and going down there and getting hired to be a substitute. You could teach with a degree and you had to be working on a credential, so I did that for almost 4 years up there.

I had to substitute teach because I had a family to support and bills to pay. I was determined to keep my kids out of the ghetto. That’s what my schooling was all about. I wanted to make enough money to live in a good neighborhood so they would not be exposed to the ghetto life that I grew up in.

I substitute taught for 4 years. Substitute teaching was miserable and I found out it was better to have a steady job, not substitute. Then I started coming to LA cuz I got frustrated being up there. That place was driving me crazy. I was sick of Oakland.

When I was in LA earlier, I taught for 2 years there and taught a second grade class, but then I decided to go back to Oakland. I knew the best way I could go back to Oakland was to enter a teaching credential program. So I went to get a teaching credential at Berkeley.

I was playing the whole time I was teaching, I had a fairly regular stream of gigs. The whole time I was still playing with Johnny Talbert. I played with him for 12 years. By now I had Carla (my wife), my sons Bob and Gus, and Carla was pregnant with our third child.

Jimmy McCracklin rented us a little house and I went with substitute teaching and playing music whenever I could. Jimmy was a very talented blues player. All the people I played with were international. They were on the level, they were hired to draw people. I worked at Eli’s Mile High Club.

BACK TO LOS ANGELES

So after I was done, LA Unified was recruiting and I got a job with them. It took me a long time to adapt to LA. It was a hard life for me. It made me grow up, though. Because in Oakland, my family would spoil me. They were always there for me—I’d need a little money, they’d give me some money.

I’m glad I stayed in LA. I needed to be somewhere I needed to really take care on my own. By then I had left Carla, the kids were with her. I went to court to try and get them back and I got them. I was a single parent. When they were 15 and 16 they decided to go back to her.

I’ve been in Los Angeles for 30 years now, I think. Oakland has changed now. There’s something quaint about it up there, but there’s something down here that’s missing up there. It’s the MUSIC. It’s GIANT. We talk on the phone and they say there’s nothing goin’ on up here. LA is the music mecca. I had to stay.

In Oakland, there are people up there that can really play and know music, but the rank and file–most of them can’t read music at all. And what they do is, they play by ear. I did both. For instance, I like to create songs. When they record, they like to record an old BB King tune or an old something that’d already been out.

In Los Angeles, I used to play Babe and Ricky’s but I couldn’t do it full time because I was teaching. After I retired, I went back full time. Then I played different places like Lucy’s 51, The French Quarter, The Seabird Jazz Lounge.

I GROW AS A MUSICIAN

At the beginning way back, I would feel nervous. I’ve been in front of people so long that…only times I felt nervous was when I thought I was going to play like shit. That’s kind of what musicians go through. Sometimes you feel like you played great and sometimes you feel like you played like shit.

You might be playing good, everybody knew you’re playing great but you didn’t know. Hearing recordings of myself, it sounds pretty good. I say “That’s me?”. I’ve conquered it in certain ways that even when I feel it, I don’t feel it. I guess it’s like a fighter—he knows he’s good and he has some kind of anxiety, but it doesn’t dominate you anymore.

I went to play at Rose Gale’s for First Monday Jazz to learn to play better on the changes. That terrified me but I went there to learn to play on the changes. My start had been in jazz but I didn’t really consider myself a jazz player.

Jazz players have a thousand different chords going through different keys. Blues players have 3 chords. You’re on the C chord then you have the F chord then you go back to the C chord then you go to the G chord, the V then the IV then the I. Almost every blues song is basically that.

So when I got the gig at Pips in 2017, I was nervous on that gig, because of where it was, with a more upscale audience. I thought I had to play soft and not show up with the blues funk. Then after a few times playing there I found that they loved that. So then I cut loose.

One night Stevie Wonder came in there, also that actor you always saw on TV. When you’re there anybody can walk in there, it was a black elite club. I was used to playing in rowdier places, The French Quarter, Babe and Ricky’s, Lucy’s. A good solid year at Pip’s, I was playing better but I couldn’t tell. I did that gig for 3 or 4 years.

HOW DO YOU GROW AS A MUSICIAN?

Listen, musicians don’t teach you their tricks. I tell a lot of people—see first of all, if you come to an average musician and you ask him about something, he’s not going to tell you the true tricks. In other words, you could go to that piano and a jazz teacher will teach you all the scales and chords. But you can learn all that and you will still sound like shit.

Until, you…Let’s say you like Coltrane. Until you sit down with Coltrane and listen the hell out of him, pick up some of his licks, you’re not going to get to the stuff. Called coppin’. Coppin’ is when you listen to somebody and learn how they play. That’s how you really learn. And most musicians aren’t going to tell you that.

Like I had a teacher in San Francisco who could play his ass off, he come out of the Coltrane school. And this is standard—he was teaching me all the slick scales but when he played it—ooh it sounded good. But when I played it, it didn’t sound worth a shit. At that time– I learned that late in my musician’s life—I didn’t know you just got to cop.

You got to sit down with a record like Junior Walker—I mean I’m talking rhythm and blues now.

You remember Shotgun? (Singing) “ Shotguuun, shoot him ‘fore he run now. Do the jerk baby. Pum pum pa lo dara dara dada. Darada da da dera da aa rada dera.”

I had to learn all that, its like learning a language. People can learn from a book but if they’re not exposed to the real people talking it’s just not going to be right. Now most of the musicians I’ve been around, they couldn’t read music, they didn’t know anything about theory but they could play—all ear learned.

If you really want to play, you got to pick someone you love. But you got to love someone, otherwise its going to be hard. And you got to listen to that shit over and over.

I didn’t know how good I was. The records I made, I felt embarrassed because I’m so critical. Now that I listen to them, they’re much better than I thought they were.

Note: In 2019, Bobby had a stroke followed by other medical complications. In 2021-22 he almost died from sepsis. He is coming back from this plays everyday, getting his chops back. He is strong enough now to perform again in clubs. Jay Jackson produced this clip for YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gVTYTQuV3E

Retha has him on Instagram and Spotify where he has many, many followers. This was a recent thing he said on Facebook:

Thanks to all of you – and especially to Retha for putting me out there! I think I’m like most of us musicians – just want to know my music is being heard and enjoyed – very gratifying – especially given the fact that I’ve been pretty much out of the picture this past couple of years.