Movies spend hours and novels contain millions of pages trying to describe the intricacies of relationships: good ones, bad ones, good ones gone bad. Otis Redding, whose 70th birthday falls on September 9th, 2011, usually takes about three minutes to complete this task.
He conveys heartache, despair, and ambivalence through a voice that cracks with desire and rasps with weariness. Perhaps the greatest soul singer ever, he mashes together sandpapery crooning pleas and scorching screams of joy or pain. You’re never bored listening to Otis: his words, visceral manifestations of love and loss, force their way out of your speakers and hit you right in the gut.
Otis’s path to transcendence was built on a song type I call a “RAF,” which centers around guitarist Steve Cropper’s notes as they slowly Rise And Fall. The bass and piano enter behind the guitar to provide reinforcement. Drums are more muted during verses, but they come on strong, often with horns, to add extra heft to the hook.
This platform forms the basis for Otis’s best songs, songs that unite happiness and sadness into pure, raw emotion. Otis released five classic albums before his death, but he also had a deep vault of unreleased studio material. After his death, Steve Cropper compiled many of these tracks and released them on several discs: Dock Of The Bay, The Immortal Otis Redding, Love Man, and Tell The Truth.
All these posthumous releases are worth owning, but The Immortal Otis Redding contains a little something extra: a RAF that may be the best song Otis ever sang. “A Waste of Time” begins with just Cropper’s guitar and light, steady, cymbal ticking. Cropper’s first note is expelled forcefully, with an extra kick that foreshadows the cathartic eruption to come. Otis launches quickly into the song, his voice already an anguished gasp, dragging out the word “name” till it sounds like a groan of pain.
A minute in, horns enter, providing a cool melancholy wash. The horns keep riffing as Otis belts, “There’s only twenty-four hours in a day, and that don’t leave much time to play”—“time” emphasized and stretched for as long as possible, to prove the importance of every moment—“I don’t dig that no way, honey.” These three lines sound immature, even childish, on paper, but in Otis’s hands, they validate all the sentimental dreaming of the lovelorn.
“A Waste of Time” gets even more intense when Otis implores his audience to heed his warnings, as if the mere thought of their potential pain augments his own. He sings “I’ve been told by many different girls, ‘Otis I love you,’” and then follows with, “oh boy,” sad and deep, an expression of both disbelief and empathy for all the boys that were (and will be) taken in.
The femmes fatales continue their assault—“They tell me this, from the bottom of their soul, but they didn’t mean it”—and Otis rushes through words as if he might keel over any second. He manages to pull it together, and then destroys any remnant of a fourth wall with a growl, “I’ve been let down… hit the ground… and called the biggest… fool to ever walk…” As the instruments take turns pounding, simultaneously increasing his pathos and pulling him back to the land of the living, it’s impossible to remain unmoved.
Otis manages to find the simple beat once more; haggard, he pleads with us to “listen.” All the instruments but the drums pause, and Otis crumbles, slowly exploding “I can’t stand it,” while the band floods back, following him and pulling him up as he sings with increasing volume and fire “to be built up, way on up.” At the top he plummets, vocally (singing “let down”) and spiritually, the instruments synergistically mimicking his actions. The last forty-five seconds contain Otis’s realization that his love—and maybe all love—is a “waste of time.” The drums pound with increasing speed and then die. Start up again, and stop. As the song fades out, you can hear Otis lose it, succumbing to raw screams.
Otis’s voice defies and redefines the songs it sings, cutting through language that can only approximate feeling to reveal what is actually at stake when we fall in love. Hearing his voice, we know there are deeper (and darker) forces at work than those that can be conveyed in the words of love songs; paradoxically, he shows us that by singing. He once sang, “They call me Mr. Pitiful”; hear his music and you will know that he is anything but. Today, revisit his catalogue. Rather than wasting your own time on love, listen to a RAF—or several—or all of them—in his memory.
