Thursday, January 21, 2010
Re-encountering Shuggie
My current favorite rediscovery of the 2001 reissue that David Byrne's Luaka Bop label put out of Shuggie Otis' 1974 album Information Inspiration. It is an album worth befriending, full of surprises at almost every listen. It is funky without being heavy. It has tinges of psychedelia without being spacey. It feels both simultaneously timeless yet rooted in a early seventies groove. The one anchor of Otis' work that most folks know about is his composition Strawberry Letter 23. It became a big hit for the Brothers Johnson, produced by Quincy Jones, who according to the Shuggie Wikipedia entry offered to work with Shuggie. The lyrics of Strawberry Letter, like a lot of other Otis' tunes features slinky lyrics filled with non-sequiturs and lush bright day dream imagery of time and space similar to Robert Hunter's China Cat Sunflower. Here's a sample:
Hello my love, I heard a kiss from you
Red magic satin playing near, too
All through the morning rain I gaze, the sun doesn't shine
Rainbows and waterfalls run through my mind
Shuggie Otis was a child prodigy and was featured even before his teens in his father Johnny's R&B review. Unfortunately, his two or three solo albums didn't find a large audience and he has become a kind of footnote to the funk and soul of the seventies. There is an energy to Inspriation Information that is reminiscent of Prince's pre-Purple Rain period or even the Music of My Mind/Talking Book period of Stevie Wonder. Like Prince, he would sometimes come up with strange phonetic spellings for his tunes. Probably most notable of these is Aht Uh Mi Hed which I include here on one of those audio YouTube clips accompanied with various images of the artist.
In a Luaka Bop sponsored roundtable discussion among several late-90s early 2000s hipster artists, Tim Gane of Stereolab said of the album It's almost like a new style of music that could've developed but never did. And that's the problem. It never developed past this record." And one of the most bittersweet things about digging into this record is knowing that this is it. It would be nice to be able to fill up an eight hour playlist with Shuggie's lovely grooves, but it was not meant to be. You can listen to a radio interview from last October posted on YouTube and hearing it you hope that the 56 year old legend can get his new project Novemberin' out and that it will gain some public attention, but that dream may prove to be as elusive and ephemeral as the Strawberry letter's rainbows and waterfalls.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:02 PM
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