I think I've written words to this effect before but I'm comfortable with being someone who ran out of new thoughts a long time ago, so here goes again.
No premature loss changed the course of popular music for the worse so much as that of Otis Redding in a plane crash, aged 26, on 10 December 1967.
Of that, I'm pretty certain. For all the other tragic deaths, from Holly to Winehouse, Cobain to Joplin, Lennon to Marley, no one else was so perfectly approaching their peak, and a peak that would, surely, have brought together everything that was good about popular music and taken it to a new place.
I started this blog because of Otis Redding - the fact 'Dock of the Bay' existed, this absolute perfection just drifting around in my consciousness since I was a child without my ever having given it much thought ... made me think about the endlessness of popular music ...
The song is, while explicitly an attempt to connect with the San Francisco hippie scene, essentially genreless, and that, I think, is the greatest thing about Redding as writer (with Steve Cropper) and performer - the possibilities were endless.
Many people play with genre, often successfully, but you can always hear it. Redding's voice and style was everything without even trying, within the same album, within the same song - sorrowful and exultant, urban and rural, soul and rock, comforting and threatening - he could have easily sung country, could have sung easy-listening. It was all just there.
He was covering Sam Cooke, Dylan and the Stones, being covered by Aretha Franklin, he'd already written a handful of songs that became standards.
He had been embraced by the rock festivals, by the British pop shows ... it was only just starting to convert into mainstream success.
It's not true to say that music remained compartmentalised - from The Temptations to Stevie Wonder to Gram Parsons and Joni Mitchell, the late 60s and early 70s saw plenty of attempt at "cosmic American music" or whatever, but I just feel Otis Redding was a step ahead of all of them at making music without barriers, and was only going to get better at it.
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