On July 8, 1965, Otis Redding was a young soul singer of modest renown, less than three months removed from releasing his first Top 10 r&b hit single. By July 10, he had become something else entirely: It took only 24 hours to lay down 10 of the 11 songs that would make up Otis Blue: Otis Redding Sings Soul, arguably the 1960s' greatest studio-recorded soul LP. (The only track not recorded at that time was the #2 hit, "I've Been Loving You Too Long".) Friends and associates had noticed Redding's growing confidence as a singer, and once Otis Blue hit shelves it was clear he was poised enough to pick up the mantle of the recently slain legend Sam Cooke, up to that point the greatest soul singer in America. He was also prepared to take on the Temptations and the Rolling Stones and B.B.King on their own turf; the only way to top him would be to give one of his original compositions to Aretha Franklin ("Respect"). In the simplest terms: It's a hell of a record, the crowning achievement of a man who could sound pained and celebratory and tender and gritty and proud all at once, with a voice that everyone from John Fogerty to Swamp Dogg to Cee-lo owes a debt to.
Rhino's 2xCD Collector's Edition of Otis Blue makes a good case for this 24-hour labor of love as a wide-reaching document that just gets better with context. A set this packed-- including rarities, alternate mixes, live versions of the album tracks, and the original LP in both mono and stereo-- could easily feel sprawling and overstuffed, but it does a great job illuminating every tweaked nuance and permutation that Redding and his top-notch band could come up with during the course of a song's lifetime. Considering the personnel involved in the original LP-- Booker T. & the M.G.'s guitarist Steve Cropper, bassist Donald "Duck" Dunn, and drummer Al Jackson Jr.; keyboardist Isaac Hayes; a horn section (saxophonists Floyd Newman and Andrew Love, trumpet players Wayne Jackson and Gene Miller) filled with members of the Mar-Keys and the Memphis Horns-- it's a blessing to hear them both unified in mono and isolated in stereo. (Any concerns of redundancy can be allayed thusly: the mono version's for your speakers; stereo's for your headphones. You need them both.) And the singer holding it together is at the top of his game. There's the possibility that the death of Cooke not only inspired Redding to record three of his idol's most well-known songs, but spurred him to step up and fill an aching void in popular music, and it's not blasphemous to suggest that Otis measures up. His version of "Wonderful World" matches the original's tone of winsome modesty and gives it a rougher edge, and his juke-joint version of "Shake" is a hard-swinging, full-throated 2:40 of precision ferocity with a force that would flat-out explode during his live sets. But "Change Gonna Come", his take on Cooke's civil rights anthem "A Change Is Gonna Come", is the real gem of the three: the moment he sings "I was born by the river," you can tell he knows what he's been entrusted with, and he handles it superbly with a mix of raspy frustration and wounded gentleness that's part trained virtuosity and part raw emotion.
Like most other albums of the time, there's no shortage of covers, most of which fall under the milieu of Southern rhythm & blues: a sweltering take on B.B. King's "Rock Me Baby", with some of the best-timed "heh" asides this side of James Brown; a stomping version of Solomon Burke's "Down in the Valley" that ratchets up both the gospel beatitude and the secular lust; the staggering reworking of William Bell's "You Don't Miss Your Water" that has one of the most devastating pleading-man lead vocals in the entire Stax catalog. But there's also two other covers that really show what Redding could do in a different sort of pop context. Of all the versions of "My Girl" that sprang up in the wake of the Tempations' career-making December 1964 release, Otis' is especially inspired, twisting its familiar melodies against it and interjecting a few unexpected pauses and shifted inflections; the way he delivers its once-familiar chorus just a little off-balance can deke you right out of your socks. (Much of Redding's popularity in the UK hinged on this track, which was released in England by Atlantic to capitalize on the fact that it was one of the few places the Temptations' version hadn't caught on.) And his transformative take on "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction", growling and sneering and wailing against a 90-mph backbeat sounds like even more of an impressive accomplishment whenyou take into account the fact that he hadn't even heard the Rolling Stones' original version at the time he recorded the song. He simply went off the lyrics and embellished them where he saw fit-- underscoring the "fashion" in "satisfaction" or throwing in new verses that turned Mick and Keith's restlessness into sheer uncontrollability ("I keep on runnin' round in my sleep/ I keep on messin' up any beat").
The covers are supplemented on this collection by four originals, two of which-- the mournfully harried "Ole Man Trouble" and the Jerry Butler-co-written "I've Been Loving You Too Long" with its priceless ending crescendo of desperation-- are evidence enough that he wasn't just a flashy interpreter. Another is "I'm Depending on You", the B-side to "I've Been Loving You Too Long", and it's a simple, perfectly fine vehicle for him to turn unremarkable lyrics into remarkable vocalizations. The other one, of course, is "Respect"-- the song that Redding liked to joke was "stolen" from him by Aretha Franklin. It's true, in a sense-- Franklin claimed ownership of the song the moment she recorded it-- but it would be doing Redding a great disservice to consider his original an afterthought. Even without the brassy attitude and feminist overtones in Franklin's iconic rendition, Redding's performance is singular enough to avoid being canceled out. His band's performance isn't as much of a first-round-knockout as the one by the team Jerry Wexler and Arif Mardin assembled for the Queen of Soul (no slight-- what performance is?), but had it never been covered, Redding's version would be more vividly remembered as one of his greatest moments as a singer and a songwriter: it's no small feat to take the situation of a man asking for respect from a woman and deliver it while sounding more like a romantic diplomat than a chauvinist asshole. Better yet, there's an alternate version-- recorded around 1967 under unclear circumstances-- that compresses it all into a hectic, high-speed 1:51. It is completely insane.
Redding wasn't yet famous enough in September '65 to circumvent one of the era's most unfortunate record company practices: instead of Redding's face on the cover of Otis Blue, there's a blue-tinted photo of a non-descript white lady. But through 1966 and early 1967, Redding had steadily built on his notoriety and recognition amongst both black r&b and white rock audiences by structuring one of pop music's most energizing live shows largely on the backbone of this album's material. This collection gathers selected Otis Blue tracks and B-sides from his April 1966 sets at Los Angeles' Whisky a Go Go and his mesmerizing March 1967 performance recorded for that year's Live in Europe, the last Otis Redding recording released during his lifetime. The two shows couldn't be more different: The L.A. show features a crew of musicians that trade the studio band's painstaking precision for a rough, loose, almost garage-band quality-- "Ole Man Trouble" damn near sounds like it's backed by an especially raw nu-funk group like El Michels Affair -- and the Europe show sports Booker T. & the M.G.s in their tourniquet-tight entirety, roaring to be heard over an armada of screaming teenagers. Redding sounds at home in both venues, pouring his heart into each song and singing it the way you'd want a brand-new fan to hear it-- and all those brand-new fans came about because of an album that took one day to create.
