Otis Redding

Certain Songs #1417: Otis Redding – “Demonstration”

January 5, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Tell The Truth
Year: 1970

Sure, on the fourth posthumous album that was assembled from the songs that Otis Redding recorded in the year prior to his death, the seams were probably showing a bit: Tell The Truth is a step down from Love Man or The Immortal Redding, but at the same time, when there were still songs as great as “Demonstration” left in the can, why wouldn’t you release them?

Maybe in the alternate timeline where Otis Redding doesn’t die, some of the songs on Tell The Truth show up as bonus cuts for a future box set excavation of the amazing album he would have released in 1968, but not “Demonstration.”

Certain Songs #1416: Otis Redding – “Direct Me”

January 4, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Love Man
Year: 1969

Yet another song recorded just prior to his death, “Direct Me” is a funky rocker, fueled by a corkscrew guitar part from Steve Cropper and anchored by an insistent tambourine.

And while it seems totally unfinished — the sound is a bit distant, and there aren’t any horns anywhere — it’s still a great enough song to transcend its relative sparseness, as it’s part of that burst of songwriting & recording that Otis did just prior to his death.

Certain Songs #1415: Otis Redding – “I’m a Changed Man”

January 3, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Love Man
Year: 1969

As I’ve mentioned before, my first Otis Redding album was Live in Europe, which I got during the mid-1980s for the reasons you buy live albums as an intro to an artist you only know a little bit about.

And then after that in early 1993, I got the 3-CD Otis Redding Story, figuring that it was probably all I would ever need. Which maybe for a while it was, until it wasn’t. At some point in the mid-1990s, I realized that I needed to hear every single note of music that Otis had ever released.

Certain Songs #1414: Otis Redding – “Hard to Handle”

January 2, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: The Immortal Otis Redding
Year: 1968

Like “I Can’t Turn You Loose“, I first heard the song “Hard to Handle” via a cover version by a band with which I had a complicated relationship.

I’m talking, of course, about The Black Crowes, whose first album I really didn’t like at all, as signified by my “meh” reaction to their mannered cover of “Hard To Handle,” (somewhere, there’s a Sedan Delivery practice tape where I drunkenly go off on how much I thought they sucked) one of the centerpieces of the second posthumous record that Steve Cropper compiled from Otis Redding’s vault, The Immortal Otis Redding.

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.