#0051: Otis Redding - Otis Blue (Otis Redding Sings Soul) [*****]

I can't tell you what a relief it is to be starting the new year with an album I not only enjoyed but actually struck home to me very deeply.  That happens less frequently the older you get.  Each experience desensitises you to the next until finally you die, bored shitless, having seen it all before.  Maybe that's what ultimately kills us; there's nothing good on telly.

I've been aware of Otis Redding for many, many years but have never gone looking for more than the one song I knew.

When I was a teenager, I loved a girl.  You'll read that more and more as we approach the music of my adolescence and beyond.  But I did.  As I loved many girls.  Well, inasmuch as I became sufficiently fixated on them to write a song of desperate longing, hope and ultimately rejection and vilification.  Ah the pubescence of an infatuation junky.  I used to fall in and out of love so quickly you could hear a faint humming as I passed.  Sad perhaps, but at least I never got chlamydia.

In spite of my affliction, I did manage to build up genuine, honourable feelings for this girl and we were very close.  One night, she put on I've Been Loving You a Little Too Long, and we danced to it in her living room.  Then we had a cup of tea and I went home.  

Yeah, maybe I should have kissed her.  

But looking back at who I was, I don't think it would've ended well.  So I'm content to have the memory of a beautiful evening rather than the memory of a beautiful evening that I ruined by trying to start a relationship I wasn't capable of having.

So now that I've told you that story, you can understand there is a certain bias toward this particular singer for me and perhaps unconsciously my earlier attachment to Sam Cooke is partly explained by the similarities between their two voices.  Indeed, two of Cooke's songs are present on this collection.  

A Change Is Gonna Come isn't indistinguishable from Cooke's version.  If I remember rightly, the original is mostly accompanied by piano but their voices are very similar and I don't believe it would've been appropriate at the time to have made changes that would have detracted from the central message of the song.  It is a rare circumstance when the political objectives of the song are more important than how it is played but this is certainly one instance.  

Wonderful World is very different from the version that perhaps most people associate with Cooke's easy, laid back rendition.  This is much more in the soul vein with stabbing horns and harder corners.

My Girl,  a song made famous by the Temptations and dosed up on saccharin even further by the schmaltzy film of the same name is given a treatment here that actually lets you enjoy the simple contentment of the song, rather than spending the whole time looking for somebody to hold your hair.  

Up until I heard this album I had not realised Respect was originally a song for a man.  From the lyrics in this version, it seems to be a song about an unreasonable woman, who isn't doing her part in a time when the man worked and the woman stayed home.   Must've been wonderful for the hardcore feminist lobby when Aretha turned it round on the chauvinist phalanx and made it an anthem for women ever since.  

I think it would've have tasted sweeter if a woman had written it from scratch, mind you.  There is a part of me that tends to think of this as Adam being stabbed with a knife made from his own rib.  But that in itself is a cautionary tale to the established axiom, "Don't shit where you eat."

I could bang on about this album for hours (and I may already have) and talk about the addictive party feel of Shake, the exhausted, noble misery of Old Man Trouble and the version of Satisfaction so good that Ronnie Wood says the Stones now emulate it themselves. 

It's just superb and I'm gonna listen to it again.  Right now.