I watched a recording of "Otis Redding Soul Ambasador" last night. It was just as formulaic as all the other nostalgic music programmes, but I found it very moving on all sorts of levels. Even with decent headphones, all recorded music sounds out of tune and distorted to me now, but because I knew these songs so well I could fill in the sound from memory, and seeing the fantastic excitement of his performances I wanted so much to turn the clock back and be there.
There was a lot of talk about the emotion of his songs, but nobody mentioned the timing. If you listen to his band you won't hear any great flights of musicianship; as one of them said, it's simple stuff, but it's so TIGHT. You couldn't put a cigarette paper between them as we used to say. Their sense of timing is perfect: they know to the micro-second exactly where each note should be in the bar, and they take their lead from the man at the front.I don't think there can have been anyone better at punching out lyrics with such rhythm AND meaning.
Of course Frank Sinatra was also famous for his timing, but the brief comparison they played between Otis and Sinatra both singing "Try a Little Tenderness" was quite mind-blowing. Here in a nutshell was the state of America in the early 60s. On the one hand is the raw, in-your-face energy of the poor black boy from the deep south, driven by the rhythms of West Africa - a community where singing, dancing and praising the lord go hand in hand. On the other is the smooth, sophisticated, reassuring, sentimental delivery of the sly gangster. If anyone asks me now why I loathe Sinatra and adore Redding I will simply point to this comparison.
I do admit that Sinatra was a consumate craftsman who will always be admired around the world for his skill. His are the values of white America in the 60s. They seldom heard black music and were genuinely afraid of the sheer masculinity of people like Otis.
I'm also very moved by the story of STAX records, the architypal black label where white musicians were were welcomed and greatly valued.The main thrust of the programme was something I was a very small part of. I was a little too young to be dancing in the cinema when "Rock around the Clock" hit Britain, but as soon as I heard Chuck Berry and Little Richard I knew that Bill Haley was not the real thing.
I went to Detroit as a student in the mid 60s, came back with some Motown records which had not been released here, joined a soul band and started playing this still very non-mainstream music. It was a revelation to the Stax crew that there were so many of us white kids so mad for their music.
Of course I felt, as the programme makers intended, proud that we had given these fine musicians an audience they couldn't find in colour-bar America, but in doing so we killed the thing we loved. (Paris, by the way, did the same for black American jazz musicians, though in giving them an audience they didn't harm the music.)
AS soon as R&B and Soul music hit the mainstream and the big bucks it lost its edge. Stax disintegrated in arguments about money. Louis Armstrong went on to become the architypal "Uncle Tom", but if you listen to his early 78s you get the same raw passion as the great Soul singers. Sammy Davis jnr even joined the Sinatra bunch. By the time I got to hear Little Richard live he was singing pop songs too.
Of course many great black American musicians went on to make wonderful pop, jazz, blues and soul music - Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, John Coltrane, Miles Davis to name but a few. I can't think of any now. That may be me getting too old, but I can't bear to listen to the MOBO awards now. It all seems so slick and commercialised - a reflection of the present-day culture of Black America perhaps.
Was it such a tragedy that Otis died so young? It was news to me that he
had not even quite finished "Dock of the Bay", his first and only chart
success. The Stax guys thought this near perfect pop song was a
sell-out. Would he have become another Stevie Wonder or yet another
slick pop singer? Another thing I found moving was the bright flame still carried for him by his wife and daughter. His memory is unsullied by drugs, booze, womanizing, overweight and all the other pitfalls of the public life. He is simply Otis Redding the perfect soul singer.
