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
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