(Volt)
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
The great Redding's finest LP, Otis Blue, is a meditation -- a summary of and valentine to the idea of soul music as it existed in 1965. The less famous but arguably far more ambitious Dictionary of Soul (subtitled Complete & Unbelievable) is a different beast entirely, a forward-looking slab of what today sounds like disarming, sweat-fueled funk. It's prophetic because it dismisses with nuance, with every pretense to the total loss of control, the relentless thrashing and pounding and shouting along to the music. Primal yet theatrical, it sounds like some sort of rock & roll ground zero, and released in 1966 it was primed to come across as an earth-shaker.
It wasn't, for two reasons. The most obvious is Redding's death shortly after its release; though Dock of the Bay was near completion, this was the last studio album he finished. The other is a simple matter of quality control. Otis Blue remains one of the most consistent long-playing records ever issued; although there aren't really any weak cuts here, the peak moments of Dictionary are so relentless and staggering, true showpieces, that they render the material around them somewhat ordinary and trite. It's most apparent on Side Two. When you put the second half of the record on, you get "My Lover's Prayer," "She Put the Hurt on Me," and "Ton of Joy," none of which would have seemed out of place on an earlier Redding LP, full of well-wrought agony and expression.
But then the thing starts happening. "You're Still My Baby," a cover of a 1954 Chuck Willis hit, comes on and it's like waking up, and you immediately forget whatever you were listening to for the prior ten minutes. The stark, stilted but perversely romantic musical backdrop -- such a beautifully far cry from Motown, from any general conception of how '60s soul "worked" -- sticks out enough with its crying guitar lines, but then there's the vocal. If you can call it that. It's more like he cries out, like he loses his mind. "I believe it's bye byye baby," he announces, and you can hear the hurt, and over the next arduously structured and built up four minutes he grows increasingly desperate, his frayed voice more and more achingly lovely. Even against this precisely paced ballad, he sounds like he's commanding some army when he isn't merely devastated. Approximately two and a half minutes in, just after he demands to know why, the bottom falls out and he breaks in two, and you can hear it, and it's just about as amazing as a recorded vocal can get.
This is followed with the celebratde "Hawg for You" which is a close match despite its more conventional blues-derived persuasions, and then he hauls off into the night with "Love Have Mercy," but it all seems like so much small-talk pleasantry after the uncompromising reality, dread, catharsis of "You're Still My Baby." And it isn't songwriting, not at all. "My Lover's Prayer" is at least as strong a composition as Redding ever put down. But it's all in how much everything just stops spinning, time itself seems to stop, and you're just left with this man begging for mercy and finding one of the truest, most cutting voices ever put on tape.
The first half, by contrast, is full of such moments. Some are deservedly famous: "Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song)" barely makes sense as a piece of music, it's just a series of Redding howls that grow ever more infectious; and "I'm Sick Y'all" bursts out with deep-South heat seldom performed with such genuine, selfless gusto; no one needs to be reminded of the way Redding nails "Try a Little Tenderness," makes it his own and no one else's. Some are less widely beloved, for whatever reason -- the reading of "Tennessee Waltz" may not quite be up to Sam Cooke's, but it's still one of the best examples of the way Redding can begin with a lovely and conventional read of a classic but quickly get fantastically lost and generate something new, nuts, far out. The Beatles cover "Day Tripper" doesn't even make pretenses to tackling the original track, turning it upside down into alien, far-afield funk so overheated it even knocks Redding himself off course. You can scarcely recognize the song as he plows over it, picking up a few general concepts and going batshit on them, and hence actually improving a classic and even slightly eccentric song.
The trick is that Redding's mastery over a new artform within his craft was just in progress with this album was made, and what we're hearing is the beginning. He left a good deal of material behind to be issued posthumously, but we still must wonder where he might have gone next, because the "Day Tripper" and "You're Still My Baby" covers are so beyond just covers, so beyond what we conceive of as soul or rock & roll or even funk, something exciting and crafty and completely abstract -- they're just mysterious and personal and explosive enough to sound brand new and untouched, even nearly half a century later.
[SEE ALSO:]
Otis Blue (1965)
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