It's the first good biography I've read in which the subject isn't rendered vividly. There seems to have been little drama. A loving family. No demon on his tail. A focused and businesslike career, built mostly on the road. Jonathan Gould says Redding is beloved - not just by music fans but by most everyone who knew him. And yet it isn't exactly packed with stories about who he was, day to day, that leave quite the same impression on the reader. But neither is there reason to object to this characterization. Reading the opening chapter, for example, detailing his great five-song headlining performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in the summer of 1967, backed by Booker T and the MGs and the Mar-Keys, and rewatching it again (and again) on YouTube, one glimpses what they mean. Asked by his manager backstage what songs he was going to sing that night, Redding "teasingly pretended not to have given the matter much thought" (5). His joking belied his uncertainty of whether he and his brand of Southern soul were really a good fit for the festival audience. In a day of music dominated by scruffy local folk and rock acts of varying quality, Otis Redding and the crew appear, in their colorful tailored suits and air of professionalism, as Gould has it, like the adults in the room. The performance that follows, his voice never sounding better, the energy, lightness, and good humor he exudes, gets the crowd to its feet and pushing toward the stage. You want to know how it's done? This is how. Masterful. At the end, forced to cut his set short, he reluctantly exits telling the audience he wants to stay but can't. And, at least to me, it doesn't sound as if he's just stating fact.
Then, for a dozen chapters or so, Redding recedes, at times almost entirely. I was a bit taken aback at first as I came to realize how Gould approaches the singer: through history, starting in the 19th century. Redding once emphasized the importance of his background and Gould takes up the challenge, delving into it deeply, eventually prompting me to reflect that it'd be natural even for Redding, a big and tall sort of man, to appear smaller, perhaps a little more vague, as anyone would placed on such a large canvas.
He goes into the earliest form of native popular entertainment to spread within the US, minstrelsy. And he gives the reader a necessary reminder of the utter viciousness of the Southern way of life, post-Reconstruction, as well as the revisionist history meant to romanticize such mindbending hideousness, sentimentally endorsed by, among others, President Woodrow Wilson. Despite a dearth of information, Gould manages to locate the thread of Redding's family within this shameful past, in Georgia.
Braided with the social history is the history of black music in the US from its beginnings through the 1960s, especially gospel, R & B, and soul: luminaries and obscure figures, development of sounds, advances in technology. Of particular fascination for me were the music labels, such as the story of the rise and fall of Redding's musical home, Stax. It grew in stature even while those who built it started out merely waiting for talent to come through the door, as Redding did, and was ran by someone, Jim Stewart, who liked the songs that wouldn't go anywhere and disliked what became the hits. Another mark of a good biography, it seems, is generating interest in other histories and biographies.
I'm not sure that the aesthetic pleasure of music can be captured on the page. From personal experience, playing it doesn't involve language. Instinct, color, feel, rhythm, structures - explanation and interpretation hardly plays a role. Some have suggested that it does something language wishes it could.... But Gould is a sensitive, astute observer of what's going on in a track and the shifts in an artist's catalogue. The most I might say about the lapses in his writing in general are a few gauche lines and a misuse of irony. Based on his summation of Otis Redding's work and subsequent listens, it seems that he had everything going for him - classic vocals, celebrated showmanship (though, like Marvin Gaye, he wasn't much of a dancer), command of the studio, stamina on the road, the looks, the charisma - except material. Soul music of the period was a singles medium. Albums were recorded quickly and commonly featured lots of covers and filler. What's more, Redding struggled to write songs and, when he did, neglected words.
The Beatles, as for many others, proved to be a crucial influence. Recovering from throat surgery after countless gigs, he repeatedly listened to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band while working on a new batch of songs. Among those he wrote was "Sittin on the Dock of the Bay." (I smiled at Gould's comparison to "A Day in the Life.") Gould insists that it's not confessional, Redding plays a character in it. For instance, he sings that he has nothing to live for when he had everything to live for. That's true. The reader might surmise, however, that the weariness - understandable after years on the road with no big hit - connects singer and song. Anyway, revealing or not, in tone and lyrics, it's by far his most sophisticated song, a true breakthrough moment. And it's a hit. (Which is to say Jim Stewart didn't like it.) It was supposed to inaugurate a new phase in his career.
He was 26 years old when he died in a plane crash. The song was the first posthumous #1.
