Archives for December 2018

Certain Songs #1413: Otis Redding – “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of The Bay”

December 30, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: The Dock of the Bay
Year: 1968

I guess it’s possible that Otis Redding would have squandered it. That all of the potential, drive and momentum he had built up over the short time he was a recording artist would somehow gone to waste. But I doubt it. Which is what makes his death — via plane crash like Buddy Holly & Ronnie Van Zant — such an incredible loss.

Luckily(?), he’d had a huge burst of creativity just prior to his death: what turned out to be nearly four albums — four good-to-great albums — worth of brand-new recordings for a grieving Steve Cropper to sort through, starting with the titanic and still-inescapable “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of The Bay,” which was recorded just days before and released less than a month after he died.

Certain Songs #1412: Otis Redding – “Try a Little Tenderness (Monterey Pop)”

December 29, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Monterey Pop
Year: 1967

I dunno when I first saw or heard the magnificent version of “Try a Little Tenderness” that Otis Redding laid on what he called “the love crowd” at the Monterey Pop Festival. I only know that it was the musical highlight of the whole festival. By a zillion miles.

Yes, The Who smashing their equipment and Jimi Hendrix setting his guitar on fire were spectacular pieces of showmanship, but when was the last time you just listened to them minus the visuals? Hell, there isn’t any point when you can dial up either one on YouTube and get blown away all over again.

Certain Songs #1411: Otis Redding – “Respect (Live in Europe)”

December 28, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Live in Europe
Year: 1967

“Here’s a song that a girl stole from me, and now I’m stealing it back” is not a thing that Otis Redding ever probably said before performing “Respect” in front of a live audience, but his performance of the song on Live in Europe was ferocious enough to just about do that.

Or at least that’s what mid-1980s Jim, whose exposure to either Aretha Franklin or Otis Redding was still limited to their biggest singles or soundtrack appearances (including Aretha’s performance of “Shake” in The Blues Brothers), so when I first heard Otis locomotivate “Respect” on Live in Europe — the first song on the first Otis Redding album I ever bought — I was blown away by the sheer unbridled energy of it all.

Certain Songs #1410: Otis Redding – “Stay in School”

December 27, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Remember Me
Year: 1967

In 1967, Stax records put out a promotional radio-only album called Stay in School. Featuring many of their top artists — Sam & Dave, Willam Bell, Carla Thomas, Eddie Floyd and Otis Redding, of course — it mixed original songs with “announcements” from the artists about the importance of getting an education. Oh, and it had liner notes from then Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, because who was more cool to the DJs this was aimed at than Hubert H. Humphrey.

Now, while there were no new official songs from Otis Redding, he did to the opening announcement, and while he could have just — quite literally, perhaps — phoned it in, instead he did a quick one minute song that is a bit of a precursor for “Dock of the Bay.” And while it’s called “Announcement” on the album, when it was collected in 1992 for an bottom-of-the-barrel scraping album called Remember Me and the subsequent 1993 box The Otis Redding Story, it was retitled “Stay in School.”

Certain Songs #1409: Otis Redding – “Merry Christmas, Baby”

December 24, 2018 by Jim Connelly

B-side, 1968

I’ll admit upfront that if it wasn’t Christmas time, I probably wouldn’t be writing about this song. That said, if it wasn’t Christmas time, I probably wouldn’t be writing about any Christmas songs, a category with which I’ve always had a fraught relationship.

Happily, though, here we are, in the middle of Otis Redding, and it’s Christmas, so why the hell not?

Recorded prior to his death — duh! — “Merry Christmas, Baby” was the b-side of the “White Christmas” single that Stax put out in late 1968; the first of the posthumous singles not to chart, which doesn’t really mean anything I guess. Like “White Christmas,” “Merry Christmas, Baby” was a cover, and in fact, Booker T & The MGs had previously done a bluesy, jazzy cover a couple of years previously.

Certain Songs #1408: Otis Redding & Carla Thomas – “Tramp”

December 22, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: King & Queen
Year: 1967

Conceived as a purely commercial enterprise — Marvin Gay & Tammi Terrell had just had success with a duets album — featuring only a single original song (a throwaway), and recorded in less than a week, the duets album that Otis Redding did with Carla Thomas probably should have been a misfire.

And while it might be the slightest album of his career, it also had some inarguably great moments, the greatest of which was the silly-ass “Tramp,” which is essentially three minutes of Carla Thomas insulting Otis and Otis either defending or denying her insults over an admittedly infectious groove.

Certain Songs #1407: Otis Redding – “I’m Sick Y’all”

December 21, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Complete and Unbelievable: The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul
Year: 1966

Most of the Otis Redding songs I’ve been writing about have fallen into two camps: slow sad torch ballads or uptempo soul stompers, but “I’m Sick Y’all” falls into a third camp: down and dirty funk, like what was coming from James Brown.

That Redding had heard the sea change that Brown was cooking up was unmistakable: he covered “Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag” during his historic Whisky-A-Go-Go gigs just prior to the recording of this record, and just as he had previously done with Sam Cooke, he incorporated it into his music. So the the songs he recorded in 1966 & 1967 were often definitely funkier than what he’d done previously.

Certain Songs #1406: Otis Redding – “Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song)”

December 20, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Complete and Unbelievable: The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul
Year: 1966

If nothing else, Otis Redding had a complete and unbelievable understanding of who he was and what his brand was, and by his second album of 1966 (and fifth in a little under three years), he was chafing against his own brand, resulting in the totally meta “Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song)” the opening track of that fifth album Complete and Unbelievable: The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul.

That’s quite a mouthful, but it was also his fourth consecutive album in two years that used either his name or the word “soul” in the title, and the only one released during his lifetime where he had songwriting credits on the majority of the songs, including “Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song)” a co-write with Steve Cropper.

Certain Songs #1405: Otis Redding – “I Can’t Turn You Loose (Whisky a Go-Go 04-1966)”

December 19, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Live on The Sunset Strip
Year: 1966

The longtime readers — OK, reader — of this blog will have noticed that I like to go through an artist’s oeuvre in chronological order, because I’m often telling a story of that artist’s career post by post. In the case of Otis Redding, who was only a recording artist for a few years before he died, it’s a bit more difficult.

After all, Otis — or his estate, I guess — put out nearly as many albums in the three years after he died as he’d put out in the three years prior. Obviously, all of that music was recorded prior to December, 1967, but as we move forward, I’m going to respect the release dates for the studio albums, not the recording dates.

Certain Songs #1404: Otis Redding – “Just One More Day”

December 18, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: The Soul Album
Year: 1966

If Otis Redding’s 1965 land album Otis Blue has been feted over and over again in the intervening half-century, then the follow-up, 1966’s The Soul Album, has kinda been lost to history.

You can see the difference in their Wikipedia pages: Otis Blue has a very long entry, with sections about the composition, recording and reception of the album, track listings for multiple versions and links to nearly a dozen reviews, all of which were written years later, of course.

However, the Wikipedia page for the The Soul Album does only slightly more than declare that it’s a thing that exists, with a link to a single Allmusic review.