The Mojo Collection. Various Mojo Magazine
I play it every night like for the first time. I never go note for note on the melody – I play what I’m feeling now, not what I felt yesterday.’
King’s guitar playing throughout is articulate and thrillingly emotive, with never a hint of grandstanding or cliché. ‘You don’t play a note simply because you can find one,’ explains King. ‘You do it because it makes sense. To me, every note is important.’ Apart from the irresistible power of the music, the album is also notable for signalling the end of blues music as an exclusively black form. It’s a fair bet that there wasn’t a single white person in the Regal audience. Soon, however, King would be playing gigs at which a black face would be a rarity.
Bob Dylan
Highway 61 Revisited
Dylan’s experiments with rock backings reach full fruition.
Record label: CBS
Produced: Tom Wilson and Bob Johnston
Recorded: Columbia Studios, New York; June 15–August 4, 1965
Released: August 30, 1965
Chart peaks: 4 (UK) 3 (US)
Personnel: Bob Dylan (v, g, k, hm); Mike Bloomfield (g); Charlie McCoy (g); Al Kooper (k); Paul Griffin (k); Russ Savakus (b); Harvey Brooks (b); Bobby Gregg (d); Sam Lay (d); Frank Owens (k, pc)
Track listing: Like A Rolling Stone (S); Tombstone Blues; It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry; From A Buick 6; Ballad Of A Thin Man; Queen Jane Approximately; Highway 61 Revisited (S); Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues; Desolation Row
Running time: 51.40
Current CD: Sony 5123512
Further listening: The other core works of Dylan’s electric period, Bringing It All Back Home (1965) and Blonde On Blonde (1966), form a triple pinnacle with Highway 61 Revisited
Further reading: Chronicles (2006); The Bob Dylan Encylopedia (Michael Gray, 2006); www.bobdylan.com
Download: iTunes; HMV Digital
Mostly written in Dylan’s new 31-room mansion (which he sold within a year, preferring not to write in the same place twice), Highway 61 Revisited was the fulfilment of the musical vision he had first developed on the electric side of Bringing It All Back Home. Using a studio band based partly on the Butterfield Blues Band musicians who had backed him at his notorious 1965 Newport Folk Festival appearance, the results were streamlined, sardonic, surrealistic, and bulging with raw blues power.
‘I can’t tell you how disorganised it was,’ recalled Al Kooper of the sessions. ‘Highway 61 has a very raw edge to it, because half the people involved were studio musicians and half weren’t, so it’s got that rough thing which Dylan loves.’ Kooper had hustled his way into proceedings by seizing the chance to contribute organ (an instrument he had never played before!) to Like A Rolling Stone, the first track recorded for the new album. Dylan liked the effect, and Kooper became a staple of his studio band, eventually serving as musical director for the following year’s Blonde On Blonde.
Dylan’s new material was a quantum leap beyond the folk and pop clichés of the time, offering new possibilities for the subject matter and vocabulary of both genres, from the damning personal put-downs of Like A Rolling Stone and Ballad Of A Thin Man to the cultural critiques of Tombstone Blues and Desolation Row. In these songs, his former protest style was transmuted into a surreal stream of imagery; the protests were still there, but had become more a matter of implication and inference than direct address, as Dylan responded to the literary influence of French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud and beat novelist William Burroughs.
The record outraged or baffled as many of his old fans as it impressed (the English poet Philip Larkin, for instance, felt that Desolation Row had ‘an enchanting tune and mysterious, possibly half-baked words’), though Dylan himself – usually his own harshest critic – was in no doubt about what he had achieved. ‘I’m never gonna be able to make a record better than that one,’ he said at the time. ‘[It’s] just too good. There’s a lot of stuff on there that I would listen to!’
Otis Redding
Otis Blue
The definitive Southern soul album.
Record label: Atlantic
Produced: Jim Stewart
Recorded: Stax Studios, Memphis; April and July 1965
Released: September 15, 1965
Chart peaks: 6 (UK) 75 (US)
Personnel: Booker T Jones and Isaac Hayes (k); Steve Cropper (g); Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn (b); Al Jackson Jr (d); Earl Sims (bv); Wayne Jackson, Gene ‘Bowlegs’ Miller (t); Andrew Love (ts); Tom Dowd (e)
Track listing: Ole Man Trouble; Respect; A Change Is Gonna Come; Down In The Valley; I’ve Been Loving You Too Long; Shake; My Girl; Wonderful World; Rock Me Baby; Satisfaction; You Don’t Miss Your Water
Running time: 32.54
Current CD: Warners 8122732532 adds: Immortal and Pain In My Heart albums
Further listening: The comprehensive 4-CD box sets Otis! The Definitive Otis Redding or Dock Of The Bay – The Definitive Collection.
Further reading: Sweet Soul Music (Peter Guralnick, 1998); Otis Redding (MOJO Heroes) (Geoff Brown, 2002); www.otisredding.com
Download: iTunes
It is rare – and usually accidental – for a ’60s soul album to sit well as an entity, as a cohesive statement by the singer about his art. But Otis Blue, Redding’s third album, subtitled Otis Redding Sings Soul, is exactly that. His customary modus operandi was to arrive at the studio with an album’s worth of ideas, often worked out in collaboration with guitarist Steve Cropper, rehearse for a day or two and then cut the tracks fast. For Otis Blue he had only three originals. Respect, which he said took a day to write, 20 minutes to arrange and one take to record, the ballad I’ve Been Loving You Too Long, co-written with Jerry Butler, and Ole Man Trouble, the churning soul-blues driven by Cropper’s guitar, which opens the album.
Redding started work on the album in April 1965, three months after the death of his great idol, Sam Cooke, hence the three cover versions (Shake, Wonderful World, A Change Is Gonna Come). Cooke purists demur as to the quality of these covers but they clearly illustrate Otis’s ability to grab a song and, in the context of the album, make it his alone. He covers the Smokey Robinson-penned Temptations hit My Girl, William Bell’s You Don’t Miss Your Water, the Solomon Burke soul-gospel hit Down In The Valley and B. B. King’s Rock Me Baby: a catholic trawl. But the most audacious cover version for his core black market was Satisfaction, the Rolling Stones’ hit. For years white rock bands had usurped black hits. Here was a rare instance of a black artist turning the tables. Cropper suggested the song while Otis was out of the studio; the MGs and Memphis Horns worked up an arrangement. When Redding heard the song he didn’t care for it but tried using ‘a lot of words different – I made them up.’
‘There were no planning sessions, we just went in and did it,’ the Memphis Horns’ trumpeter, Wayne Jackson, recalled. ‘All the really great stuff at Stax was done quick, a big group effort. It would start with bones that somebody brought and the muscle and sinew and flesh and skin would be put on it and the monster would rise and live!’ Otis Blue took just two days to record.
Herb Alpert