>Deservedly so, considering all the sensitive man loves his
>woman ballads that he wrote and performed, folks couldn't get
>with him being a monster off stage, and he lost his audience.

You've fabricated a narrative here, because his biggest hit at the time was "Lean On Me" because he was tired of love songs.

Here's the real story (which you could have found if you didn't want to apply me-too era climate to the 70's):

He and Denise Nicholas split in 1973. He wrote a biographical album (Justments) in 1974.
His record company, Sussex, went bankrupt in 1975 (this was after Lean On Me and Ain't No Sunshine). He was unhappy with the new label, Columbia.

“I met my A&R guy, and the first thing he said to me was, ‘I don’t like your music or any black music, period,’ ” says Withers. “I am proud of myself because I did not hit him. I met another executive who was looking at a photo of the Four Tops in a magazine. He actually said to me, ‘Look at these ugly niggers.’ ”
At Sussex, he had complete creative control over his music, but at Columbia he found himself in the middle of a large corporation that was second-guessing his moves. As he relives this part of his past, he gets teary. “There were no black executives,” he says. “They’d say shit to me like, ‘Why are there no horns on the song?’ ‘Why is this intro so long?’ . . . This one guy at Columbia, Mickey Eichner, was a huge pain in the ass,” he adds. “He told me to cover Elvis Presley’s ‘In the Ghetto.’ I’m a songwriter! That would be like buying a bartender a drink.” - Rolling Stone

Lovely Day came out in 1977. Just The Two of Us came out in 1980. If the people stopped fucking with him after the divorce, how did these become hits? You could have just as easily attributed the lack of success of the environment at the new label, but the "he's a woman beater!" angle was too easy, and you didn't care to find out what really happened. Allegedly, he was abusive to his wife, yet there was more going on than that... and that didn't shut peoples' careers down like that back then anyway.

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Days like this I miss Sha Mecca