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Old Souls
Pound for pound, note for note, shimmy and shuffle against full on bobbing at the waist groovin’, there never was and never will be a better soul singer than Otis Redding and these live recordings show that in 1966, the man knew how to light a first and fan the flames. Listening to him pleading with the “ladies and gentlemens” to make noise for the recording, (“ain’t nobody gonna arrest you,” he assures the crowd) or working his breathless way through, “I Can’t Turn You Loose,” that Redding/Cropper classic, “Mr. Pitiful,” (I want yooouuu, I want yoooouuu!!) or a truly unusual version of “A Hard Day’s Night,” where he deliberately omits the last word of each chorus line (he’s also way outta breath by that point) to great effect. The sound of this set is not great but at least it’s not that horrible thin underwater sound that comes from a lot of live recordings from that era.
I’ve been going back to Otis because the other night I happened to put in Eli Paperboy Reed’s latest, Come and Get It. It’s not that I’m saying listening to Reed (real name: Eli Husock) forced me to go back to Redding but there’s some of that going on. To his credit, Reed obviously knows the history, and his horn and guitardriven songs are smooth evocations of soul music past. Tunes like the frantic “Explosion” or the classicsounding soul ballad, “Pick a Number,” (both of which he wrote) show that he can also write in most of the timehonored 60’s soul tune modes. His singing, which he now seems to be doing more from his nose than his throat, is also authentic in its phrasing and ringing shrieks. The kid is convincing no doubt about it. And he’s trying to move the music forward in time which you can only admire. Whether he’s gonna be able to make a career out of being a soul revivalist has yet to be seen. Some listeners will buy in, while others, older ones I suspect, will think of him as a pretender. But for now he’s riding this wave for all it’s worth. Giving it his all or as he says in ‘Explosion,”“The atomic bomb got nothing on me!”
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