Otis Redding is awesome. This is known. Those who don't know it haven't really heard the man. Maybe they've heard "Sittin' By the Dock of the Bay," and are off-put by the whistling at the end. But they haven't heard "These Arms of Mine." They haven't heard the original "Respect" (Aretha was an ovarian interloper!). They haven't heard "Mr. Pitiful."
James Brown may be the Godfather of Soul, but Otis is Soul. Which makes no sense, because They were both around at the same time. But while James Brown had funk to spare and could get on the good foot for the big payback, Otis didn't need no purple cape to hold a crowd. Like Howlin' Wolf, Otis was all presence.
Performance is all about commitment. Janis Joplin once described a musician's role at a concert as making love to thousands of people and then going home alone. But while Joplin's usual melancholy can be identified (and dismissed, if you insist), she has a point. The above is not the first time that man brought those emotions to that froth at that moment in the song. He'd learned to make it happen every time, really. And any sane person in the audience knows that. Nevertheless, we want it to feel authentic, and it does. Whatever raw nerve Otis was wired into stayed with him for the whole of his career, sadly cut short.
Make no mistake. In the few years he moved on the charts, he was just as important as the Beatles. If he'd stuck around longer, no one would even argue the point.
Grade: LL
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