Song 48: Shake

Shake - Otis Redding

This post has rather taken me by surprise. There are a few others songs I had lined up to write about, but 'Shake' came up on my iPod today and it made me happy - indeed, it made me subconsciously dance a little in the aisle of Waitrose, Sevenoaks - not something that often happens or is likely to be approved of in Waitrose, Sevenoaks, but there we go.

Well, and that's what music's all about, isn't it? Being taken aback by the joy of it all. So I started thinking about Otis Redding. Born in 1941, died in 1967. Like Buddy Holly, died in a plane crash, having barely lived. And the sheer brilliance of Otis Redding singing, the way he pronounces "early in the morning" as "err-lirr-in-tha-monnin-aa".

It suddenly struck me that part of my subconscious keeps telling me that I love Otis Redding without measure and that there's another part that keeps resisting. He never really makes it on to my lists and playlists (apart from if I'm ever making a list people might dance to), but I always love it when one of his songs come up, I don't think I put him in my list of Greatest Singers, yet when I heard him this afternoon I remembered that I've quite often thought his voice was my favourite thing in the world. I forget that Otis Redding's Greatest Hits was one of the very first CDs I ever bought when I transferred from tape to CD, I also forget that 'Dock of the Bay' was, as you'll find if you go back to the very beginning of this blog, which was almost exactly four years ago, the starting point of it all.

Have I taken Otis Redding for granted? Yes, I've taken Otis Redding for granted. Pop music has had a lot of early casualties, but I think there is a strong, strong case for saying the premature departure of Otis Redding was the greatest loss of all.

You know he recorded 'Dock of the Bay' three days before his death. Inspired by The Beatles, he and Steve Cropper tried to create a new sound, a new kind of crossover. And succeeded. What else from the 60s so easily married the soul sound with the west coast sound. What more would he have been capable of? He'd already written 'Hard to Handle', 'Respect', 'I've Been Loving You Too Long'. 'Dock of the Bay' showed there was no end to his talent. Apart from Ray Charles, Steve Wonder later, not that may soul artists incorporated that kind of singer/songwriter rock music into their sound. Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but it's still pretty possible Otis Redding was on the point of taking soul music somewhere it had never been before.

It is that certainty that his very best work was still ahead of him, which you really can't say about Hendrix, Morrison, Presley, Cobain, Jackson, Nick Drake even (though perhaps you can about Buddy Holly) which makes the death of Otis Redding such a sad milestone.

Anyway, 'Shake', not even one of the great Redding songs, but utterly uplifting and glorious. His sound is very different from Motown, less formulaic, often slower and deeper, less poppy. Hopefully, from now on, I'll give in more regularly to that part of my gut that tells me that Otis Redding was an unparalleled genius.