51. Otis Redding - Otis Blue: Otis Redding Sings Soul

Tracks: Ole Man Trouble // Respect // Change Gonna Come // Down in the Valley // I've Been Loving You Too Long // Shake // My Girl // Wonderful World // Rock Me Baby // Satisfaction // You Don't Miss Your Water

Analysis:

I must ask myself the following question – What does Otis Blue: Otis Redding Sings Soul mean to me? It’s no good blathering on endlessly about formal developments that could easily be pinpointed by a visit to Wikipedia. Rather ask – do I like this album? And the answer is yes. Do I love it? No, maybe not. And here I must show my work.

Otis Redding presents probably the most mature, fully-developed soul album yet enlisted. His unique and influential voice – woody and raw, yet capable of great emotional expressiveness and feats of technical daring – is contrasted with impeccably played and produced Stax-brand™ Memphis soul to give the world something peculiar in the realm of pop music. There is little doubt that this is pop music, you see – and it is infectious pop music at that. Redding, Isaac Hayes and Booker T. & the MGs combine forces like some sort of soul-powered Voltron to lend the magical, horn-laden, bronze-coloured touch to such songs as “My Girl”, “You Don’t Miss Your Water” and “A Change is Gonna Come”. In the case of “My Girl”, they even manage to better one of my absolute favourite songs! And then they switch around, take the ferocious rock of the Stones’ “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction”, and turn it into a wailing, lunatic soul-stomp extravaganza. And then they do straight-up blues on “Rock Me, Baby!”. There really are a lot of covers on this album, but they’re all quite successful, so it’s not something to complain about. And, as opposed to what was the case with all of those Beatles and Stones albums, here the covers selections are well-chosen and used purely to augment a selection of equally brilliant originals – including the very first version of “Respect”! Granted, the Aretha Franklin version is better, but most things come-up short in such comparisons.

The interplay of a host of different elements is really what makes this album work. I think someone described this album as a “dictionary of soul”, and you really couldn’t come-up with a better term for it than that. Every song on the album is unique in style, and yet, everything comes-out sounding like Otis Redding. Of course, a great deal of credit for the success of this album rests with the band, but Redding’s voice is another key element in the album’s success. It’s not really the sort of voice I’d tend to favour – a sort of wild, raving voice that tends to wander off into gospel-esque, lunatic frothings and manic-depressive asides – but when buried in amidst the rock-solid playing of the MG.s it creates the perfect contrast. This is the sort of thing Al Green would do very well in the 1970s, playing his strange little voice off against these immaculately-assembled backing tracks. Add to this the fact that Otis Redding is, unlike someone like Mariah Carey, actually credible as a performer as well as a technician and, well, it’s enough to convert even this finicky old grouch (I am actually only 23). Granted, it gets a bit much when he starts rambling about biology in “Wonderful World”, but what are you gonna do?

To many people, this is the greatest soul album of the 1960s, if not of all time. I don’t know if I agree with that assessment, but then I’m hardly qualified to judge. It’s certainly brilliant, however – not a bad track on it, all performed wonderfully. A unique sound that proved influential on generation after generation of recording artists... Fun party jams like “Down in the Valley” following the mournful introspection of “A Change is Gonna Come”, and not a seam showing... What more could you ask from in an album? Well, maybe the ranting on “You Don’t Miss Your Water” could go – because damned if that isn’t just embarrassing. Oh, also this album does not contain a single song as good as “Having a Party” or “Lost Someone”. There, I said it.

A word on formats, however – This is available in a 2 CD set featuring mono and stereo mixes. Unlike The Piper At the Gates of Dawn, which sounds great in stereo and terrible in mono, or Pet Sounds, which sounds amazing in both, this is very much an album that should be heard in monophonic presentation. I’m sure someone could make a decent stereo mix out of this, but that someone apparently isn’t the Rhino Entertainment Company.

9/10

Download:

Otis Redding - My Girl

Bob Dylan – Bringin It All Back Home (1965)

Tracks: Subterranean Homesick Blues // She Belongs to Me // Maggie's Farm // Love Minus Zero/No Limit // Outlaw Blues // On the Road Again // Bob Dylan's 115th Dream // Mr. Tambourine Man // Gates of Eden // It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) // It's All Over Now, Baby Blue

Analysis:

Another side of Bob Dylan, with the man this time trading-in his folksy raconteur persona for equal parts rock-freak and philosophical balladeer. Since these two qualities were given a side each on the old vinyl, I might as well discuss the whole affair in two parts.

Side A:

The album opens with “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, which is just a great song – a weird, surrealistic torrent of 1960s fringe-culture wrapped around a pounding blues-rock beat that just EXPLODES from the speakers like something in the process of exploding. Skipping-out on conscription; brewing-up acid in the basement; shady dealings in back streets; living in clapped-out tenements; hippy jerks. It’s just such a cool song, really, encapsulating most of what people think they know about the 1960s in America, while at the same time being cynical enough about it to avoid falling into a Ginsbergian transcendentalist bullshit-fest. Makes sense that the Weathermen would swipe a line from it.

The cynicism of the opening song carries through the album, and it’s probably the most appealing thing about it. A lot of people take this as the album where Bob Dylan gets well-and-truly fed-up with all the god damned hippies and the counterculture movement in general and just said “Damn it man I’s a-gonna do my own thing”. And really, in makes sense. “Maggie’s Farm” has Dylan quipping that he “ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more”, and delivering the rather pointed observation that

Well I try my best to be just like I am
But everybody wants you to be just like them.
They say “sing while you slave,” and I just get bored;
I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more”.

It’s a pretty good touchstone for anyone who’s ever gotten fed-up with the sort of bullshit, pseudo-intellectual, quasi-political nonsense which infests any gathering of bright young things seeking legitimacy for their anti-establishment railings.

This “Fuck off and leave me alone” vibe carries pretty well in “Outlaw Blues”, which is a fun song but not much of anything to go on about beyond it’s being pretty rocking. Although it does have the great line “Don’t ask me nothing about nothing – I might just tell you the truth”. Oh, and Dylan talks about wishing that he were somewhere on an Australian mountain range, which is something that I feel obligated to mention out of feelings of misplaced patriotism. He doesn’t seem to enthusiastic about the prospect, though, so eh. Anyway, this leads into “On the Road Again”, in which Dylan delineates the various reasons why living in this one place sucks, and why on Earth he should ever desire to stay there, finishing up with the question “You ask me why I don’t live here? I oughta ask why you don’t move!”. It may be a metaphor. And then the side ends-out on “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream”, which is just a silly song about a silly story, and I don’t really care about it all that much.

Anyway, so side one seems both pretty rocking and pretty mocking, right? Well, I think I said something about Dylan being a burnt romantic, and you get this coming through in the two songs I hadn’t dealt with yet – “She Belongs to Me”, and “Love Minus Zero/No Limit”. These are both very pretty and very delicate love songs which could be pin-pointed as the exact point of origin for every ballad that Tom Waits ever did. In contrast to his rather bitter and isolationist views on politics and such, Dylan still seems quite happy to play the complicated and confusing games of love. I suppose any port in a storm.

Having gotten Side A out of the way, let’s focus on the good stuff

SIGHED BEE

Where the first half of the album is effectively Dylan just playing about with everything-at-the-wall rock music, the songs on side two are something completely new. Delicate folk-inspired music presumably put-in as a consolation prize for his pre-electric fans, this is four songs all over five minutes long, playing with abstract poetical concepts in a way which hadn’t really been done before. “Mr. Tambourine Man” is absolutely beautiful. His voice is beautiful, the guitars strum in these little, hypnotic ways, and the lyrics really are poetry. It’s really just the narrator reflecting on the act of reflection, yearning for some sort of beautiful place outside of anything. It’s probably about drugs, then maybe it’s not.

Then you have “The Gates of Eden”, which, if I were in a symbolical mood, I would argue was a strange rumination on the loss of the American Dream. Then again, that seems to cover 90% of American art, so who knows? I do know that it has an incredible melody, with the vocals climbing up the scale and then dropping down seven semitones and a whole scale (if I’m correct) for a marvellous effect. It’s neat.

Also neat is the opening riff on “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”, which is a somewhat terrifying song where Bob Dylan does that thing where he stretches-out the verses for as long as possible, a few bars longer each line, with no real harmonic variation except perhaps for a slight slide up by a semitone or somesuch, before breaking into the hook, and then taking forever to finally get into the chorus, which is a very small and simple “It’s alright ma, I’m only etc...”. It may be apparent at this point that I have trouble explaining the theoretical concepts of music. Which doesn’t matter, because this is a frightening song. The whole thing is underpinned by a bouncy, shuffling sort of rhythm. It’s fascinating, what Dylan does vocally on this track, singing everything behind the beat on the verses and then shifting into a smoother style for the bridge and chorus. Structurally, it’s a marvel. Oh, and lyrically it’s good too, railing against the impossible unpleasantness of modern life, all the hypocrisy and such at present, in a very fiery and worrisome manner. It’s a masterpiece on all levels.

Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child's balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying.

Chipper!

And then the album ends with “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”, which is both a much softer song, and a similarly depressing one, this time kind of a break-up song I guess. I suppose it helps to ease the listener out gently, rather than having “It’s Alright Ma” drive them to suicide. After all, if everyone who listened to the album were dead, then how would it get good press by word-of-mouth. Still, it’s sad.

So, a pretty neat album. The first half is quite good, but not necessarily brilliant, while the second half is maybe the most consistently excellent thing Dylan ever did. I liked it! I didn’t at first, but then I did, and there you have it.

So should I bother rating this? What's the point to ratings? The point is that it makes me feel like I've pinned this album and can finally move on with my life.

It's a 9.5/10

Download"

The Gates of Eden.