Like Muhammad Ali and his beloved sweet science, Otis Redding was tapped as a leader meant to inherit a dying tradition, if only to keep it afloat for a little while longer. Soul and R&B music was on a very sharp and sudden decline on the national scene during Redding’s brief time in the spotlight. Shortly after his death it would disappear from the cutting edge altogether. As one of the last performers to come up through the chitlin’ circuit, Redding reflected its hard scrabble lifestyle more clearly than most of its elegant stand out stars like Ray Charles and Sam Cooke. But he was also young enough to realize where the future really lay; accordingly, he sought to tailor the same experimental spirit that rock ‘n’ roll was weaving into for his own music. Jonathan Letham once penned a speculative essay on how Redding’s ambition to create a soul response to the studio sophistication of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band might have panned out if he lived to see 1969. As an artist born the same year as Bob Dylan and weaned on the similar influences, Redding might have met Dylan’s same spirit of experimental heresy somewhere down the line.
But Shout! Factory’s The Best: See & Hear CD/DVD combo does more to preserve the musty snapshots of the soul icon then his starry-eyed hopes. It falls so short of the comprehensive Dreams to Remember: The Otis Redding Anthology that if you own that collection there’s no need for this one. However, if you only desire a primer with some of the best visual evidence of Redding’s forceful stage presence this is a good enough introduction. Skip it if you know him too well by now because this is well worn territory that’s put together more than a little clumsily. Per usual, Otis has to do all the work because his music gets no help from its compilers.
The 12 song tracklist Shout! has put together fails to contain anything terribly distinctive. Though one wonders what putting “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of The Bay” first really accomplishes as a lead-in for a song that is almost certainly a culmination. Otherwise everything is all over the place with all of the heavy hitters (“Respect” “Try a Little Tenderness”) mixed in with the modestly great gems (“Mr. Pitiful” “I’ve Got Dreams to Remember”). It would have been nice if with they had included more than “Stay” from Redding’s challenging duet record with Carla Thomas King and Queen. And the absence of songs which have appreciated over time like “Cigarettes and Coffee” and “I Can’t Turn You Loose” feels out of touch.
Of course the big lure is the accompanying DVD containing footage which turns out to have been transferred from the VHS print of the TV documentary Remember Otis.The film, taken from a Stax/Volt tour in Oslo, is superb with the addition of performances from Sam and Dave and Booker T & the MG’s rounding out the music revue among the oddly fascinating Norwegian hipster audience. Additionally, Redding’s set from the history making 1967 Monterey Pop Festival is a must have no matter how you lay your hands on it. But it’s just kind of thrown on there. There’s a good excuse for old footage being meshed together strangely on a video cassette. VHS was an inadequate format for anthologizing anything. When you get the chance to put footage on a DVD, there’s far more to work with presentation-wise; none of which is capitalized on. There’s not much care being taken with obviously great material and the results come off as stingy and even a little selfish. The economy of effort is simply too great at times.
The Best See and Hear is a low risk venture. An adequate primer if Otis Redding is almost a complete stranger to anything else in your record collection but not much more. Although this is a step up from some of the normal cash grabs associated with “Best Of”s”, it’s also a little too hokey and entombing to a music legacy which deserves a livelier presentation.
by Neal Fersko
