Timmy Thomas – Why Can’t We Live Together

27th March 2021 · 1970s, 1973, Music

This is another of those uniquely strange and timeless songs that would leave its mark in any era.
Timmy Thomas’s only hit, from early 1973, combines musical and lyrical perfection with a message of universal tolerance that’s as relevant today as it was nearly half a century ago.

It still sounds like nothing and nobody else, its skeletal bossa nova beat and cheesy blasts of organ both coming from a Lowry organ, whose electronic innards contained what is essentially a primitive drum machine.

Extraordinarily, it’s the same instrument – the very same actual organ – that would later be used on the disco classic Rock Your Baby. So with just two songs, that organ sold 13 million singles.

Thomas, a former session man from Memphis who had begun his career as a sideman for jazzmen like Donald Byrd and Cannonball Adderley in the early Sixties, recorded this song when he moved to Florida in 1972.

He was inspired by a news report of deaths in the Vietnam War, intending the lyris to be an anti-war message, but they remain equally relevant as a broader plea for racial equality.

That message takes its time to arrive though… the song is a moody instrumental until Timmy comes in towards the two-minute mark. In an odd trivia note, the song was recorded in mono (though I’m not sure why).

A year or two after he recorded the song at TK Studios, a studio engineer called Richard Finch found the Lowry gathering dust there and programmed a faster version of the same beat as this.

It went on to form the basis of Rock Your Baby, sung by George McCrae (but only because he was in the studio waiting for his wife Gwen to turn up), and Finch went on to found KC & The Sunshine Band. Recycling in action, long before it was fashionable!