Otis Redding's Lonely Hearts Club Band

Otis Redding's Lonely Hearts Club Band

1967: Otis Redding plays the Monterey Pop Festival and becomes the official favorite soul singer of the rock audience; Otis Redding retreats from live performance for two months, the longest such break of his career (!), during which time he writes, among other songs, "Dock of the Bay", and is reportedly obsessed with playing, repeatedly, The Beatles "Sargeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" LP; Otis Redding records "Dock of the Bay", the unexpected sound of which baffles and dismays his friends and advisors, as well as his record company, who oppose releasing the song, (whistling on the song's outro, instead of vamp-singing - how could Otis lose touch with his most basic gifts? Where's the soul-singer's intensity? Where's the love-object? Wherefore all this chipper melancholy, or jolly resignation, or whatever you wanna call it, in the place of pleading, desperation, cajolement, flirtation, all the stuff that makes 'a soul number'. What is this shit?), despite Redding's repeated expressions of confidence at the commercial viability of what he sees as a creative breakthrough, and the first evidence of a new sound, a leap his own expressive capacity comparable to that of The Beatles - "This is it," he says, "My first number one record" ("Try A Little Tenderness" had reached #2); Otis Redding dies in a small plane crash on his way to a gig in Madison, Wisconsin; "Dock Of The Bay" reaches #1 on the soul and pop charts, though whether it does so out of inescapable intrinsic fatedness or as the result of morbid sentiment, who knows?

With A Little Help With My Friends

What little authority I bear in this matter is second-hand: my facts, and my quotations, all come straight out of Peter Guralnick's book Sweet Soul Music, or from Guralnick's commentary track on Criterion's Otis At Monterey DVD. Though Guralnick's not responsible for my projections - and a speculative piece of this sort is utterly mired in it's author's projections - he is responsible for his own, which are pretty damn persuasive. Yeah, though I sway in the storm of my own raging losses, the displacement of which causes me to weep each time I contemplate the beauty of Otis Redding's music, his ambition and confidence and unbearable charisma, his very presence on this planet, in those months before his death, but I am a puppet made very much of Guralnick's notions and his (admittedly contradictory) reportage. I never saw Redding sing, I was three years old when he died, and I required an array of concepts gleaned by reading critics like Guralnick to understand Redding as a revolutionary artist, "Dock of the Bay" as a revolutionary song, as opposed to a sweetly irresistible 'oldie' taken as much for granted at its debut as it is in retrospect. Just for one instance, I never would have heard a trace of The Beatles in "Dock of the Bay" in a million years of listening. I'm adamant that this exoskeleton I walk inside be made visible.

Otis In The Sky With Stormclouds

What are we going to have to do here, to get this piece off the ground (ha ha): have Otis survive his crash? Walk away unscathed? Or heed some time traveler's imperative and never board the plane? Then, either way, vow to waste no more time and dash into the studio to lay down his masterwork? Shit. I hate this stuff. Forget about the butterfly effect, what about all the human hours wasted reversing irreversible planecrashes? What if we could have those back - the hours of our pointless musings? Because the plane always goes down, we know this.

Getting Better

Thinking this way invites cognitive dissonance. More than that - thinking this way consists solely of cognitive dissonance and nothing else. And it has a delicious quality. That unbreachable gulf between the finished, epochal, four-disc-set accomplishments of the actual guy who died and the masochistic dwelling on what-might-have-been, the fact that the actual guy believed he was getting better, was about to roll out the good stuff and really blow some minds. The simplest definition of cognitive dissonance I know is the Aesop's fable, Fox and Grapes: the grapes look good/I can't have the grapes. Then, dissonance's resolution: those grapes are surely sour, so I didn't want them anyway. Can we believe in the album that my (Guralnick's) fable implies - an album as good as the triagulation between "a soul Sargeant Pepper" and "Dock Of The Bay" and Otis Redding's confidence in his growing power implies? Do we want to?

Fixing A Whole

Would the end of Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons be as good as the film implied in the desecrated ruins that exist? What about Sappho's poems - do we want them complete? "Dock of the Bay", thanks to Guralnick (and now, for you, my reader, thanks to me), may have gained in beauty as the cornerstone of some imagined masterwork - or perhaps as the entrance to a vanished new world. But the gain is the beauty of the fragment, so much dreamier than the whole.

She's Leaving Home

C'mon, do it with me (or for me, since I'm admittedly avoiding the imperative of this piece: to imagine it for you): thirteen songs as beautiful and diverse and delicate as the array on Sargeant Pepper. But in a 'soul' vocabulary, whatever that is. Forget that Pepper isn't your favorite Beatles LP (I don't mind if it is, though). You know what it sounded like at the time. That album's meaning in terms of the previous history of pop (or rock, or whatever) is etched in its grooves, and when we resist it now, as we often do, we're resisting that notion of the masterwork which changes everything because we're so disappointed at the revolution's double failure - both in the rejection and the adoption of its revolutionary terms, even in the lives of its own fomentors. So, c'mon, stay with me here: Otis Redding's about to do the same thing for Soul. There's no reason he couldn't have titled a song "She's Leaving Home", agreed? But what would it have sounded like? Maybe we're pushing into Brian Wilson breakdown territory here. Maybe "Dock of the Bay" is to the projected Redding album as "Good Vibrations" is to "Smile" - an unkeepable promise. Maybe we're speculating on a terrible compromise, some crap, some mush, some intolerable pretension, some kind of horrible '70's bloated art-rock suite we'd never have forgiven Redding for. I keep flinching. Those grapes suck.

Being For The Benefit Of Mr. White

The Love Crowd, that's what he called them, to their delighted faces, when he played at Monterey. He was nervous as shit, despite his confidence, at least that's what's been reported. He followed The Jefferson Airplane and their lightshow (and can't you actually hear a little bit of the San Francisco sound in the electric guitar line in "Dock of the Bay", come to think of it? More that - or a trace of The Velvet Underground - than Beatles). This whole project has an uneasy foundation in aspirations to 'crossover': the demolition of the chitlin-circuit segregated world of which Otis Redding was the current prince at the time he played Monterey and supposedly introduced so many deaf hippies to Soul. And what is Sargeant Pepper if not the single whitest album in Rock's history to that point, the one which left Keith Richard/Bob Dylan-esque race-mummery the furthest behind? What exactly are we pining for Redding to have done to soul, anyway?

Within You Without You

We're fooling with ghosts here, and we probably deserve to be punished. We're trading on a stock market of pop notions against a backdrop of real pain. We went into karmic default from the moment we took the needle off the record, quit communing in a bodily sense with the beauty and yearning of the voice of the dead man and began reading and thinking and, worst, pretending that the history of the reception of the commodified recording of that voice has any spark in it worth kindling in speculation. Notice I'm saying 'we'. Because I don't want to be alone here.

When I'm Sixty-Four

More practically, we're pretending we really want to meet the aging Otis Redding. You couldn't have been thinking we'd kill him off again right after getting our precious album - we're not that sick, are we? So, we keep him alive after, and risk the embarrassment we associate with, uh, Little Richard, James Brown, Chuck Berry. Hell, Paul McCartney. Seeing the purity wrecked, along with the body. Not that I'd ever wish anyone dead to preserve their purity, no, no, I didn't mean that. God, this is getting ugly.

Lovely Rita

Back to that damn, elusive album. Isn't part of the half-kept promise of Sargeant Pepper - and "Dock of the Bay" - the chance of a pop music with a credible subject outside of romantic love? Now we're getting somewhere. And if both artifacts could be described (ungenerously) as monuments to the self-gratifying capacities of their male artists, my preference for "Dock of the Bay" over Pepper (admittedly, it's a lot easier to love the perfect fragment than the erratic whole) could be that "Dock of the Bay" doesn't bother patronizing women in passing while it makes its way to the real subject. I don't know what I want, but I do know what I never want: to hear a soul equivalent of "Lovely Rita", let alone "Eleanor Rigby". Soul's propensity for first-person stories, for righteous complicity over faux-objectivity, went a long way toward protecting it from glibly two-dimensional portraiture.

Good Morning Good Morning

There are other times when I don't care about that album, I'm just dying to know what Otis Redding heard when he played Pepper over and over again. Did he sing along? Did he skip this song, or barely notice it, or was it one of his favorites? Did the rooster sounds make him laugh?

Otis Redding's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)

Perhaps the purloined-letter aspect of Pepper - the most obvious thing hardest to keep in mind - is the way this ostensible message from the future of music was mired in nostalgia. Nostalgia for various pre-rock 'n' roll musics; nostalgia for the artifacts of the Beatles' parents' worlds; nostalgia for nostalgia; nostalgia, in the end, for itself - manifest on the spot, in the form of a reprise (which is nevertheless not a conclusion - see below). So, in its concern with lost worlds, it seemed to instantaneously wreck the new world it claimed to bring into being. In that wake, what we're certain to fall back on, after all, is comfort. In that sense, "Dock of the Bay" is as far as Otis had to go. Why not just play that song again?

A Day In The Life

Otis Redding was 26 years old in 1967. Given that I'm 39 and have the audacity to wake up some mornings, drag the comb across my head, etc. and believe that my best work is still ahead of me, I don't really know how to measure the world it seems to me was lost. I only don't want to lie to you about it, make up a bunch of song titles, fake release dates, whatever. I'll just sit underneath those grapes until I can't stand it anymore.

Black Clock, 2004