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I admit that I do in fact know a song or two. You see, there are SoTWs that I pretty much have up my sleeve. From the underwhelming Rolling Stone list “ The 100 Greatest Artists of All Time”, I’ve never listened seriously to Bob Marley, U2, the Ramones, Nirvana, Prince, The Clash, David Bowie, Public Enemy, Patti Smith, Dr Dre, Funkmaster, Aerosmith, The Sex Pistols, Al Green, AC/DC, the Stooges, Eminem, N.W.A, Black Sabbath, Tupac Shakur, Guns ‘n Roses, Nine Inch Nails, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Roxy Music or Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry. Country swing, Chicago blues, The Carter Family, Richard Strauss, Burl Ives.
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There’s a long and very impressive list of major artists about whom I know virtually nothing: Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Genesis, Michael Jackson, Madonna, Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber. (Maybe you could call that a glinge.) They couldn’t be more wrong. Like all insecure males, I enjoy being flattered (“The way to a man’s heart is through his ego”), but when some nincompoop occasionally tells me that I know everything there is to know about music, I glow for just a short moment and then I cringe. I’ll keep you in suspense as to the identity of the other two. We’re going to start this week with Otis Redding’s great “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of a Bay”. You might not think that’s a genre unto itself, but I know of three such songs, humdingers each, memorable, moving and eerily prophetic.
#Dock of the bay song series#
This week we’re starting a series of postings on spookily existential posthumous hits. And beyond that, it’s just an insanely catchy hook, so its use as the formative break for De La Soul’s similarly divine “ Eye Know” 20 years later is both insanely inspired and totally unsurprising.Īnd even if Otis was still alive today, it’s hard to believe the song wouldn’t be just as powerful.Otis Redding - ‘(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay’ And I don’t even know what that is, exactly, but it’s something rousing and melancholy and peaceful all at the same time, and it’s one of the best musical epitaphs a legend like Otis could possibly have hoped for. Arguably the most famous whistle hook to ever appear on a modern pop song, the outro to “Dock of the Bay” says everything necessary to say that Otis couldn’t possibly vocalize in words. And of course, it’s in Otis’s brilliant vocal, appropriately restrained and mellow but maintaining enough fire to make his going gently into that good night all the more heartbreaking. It’s in the song’s climactic (and even somewhat empowered) bridge, in which Otis concludes “I can’t do what ten people tell me to do / So I guess I’ll remain the same, yeah.” It’s in the music, a sturdy, clipped rhythm punctuated by some exceptionally placed horns, and by the wave and bird sound effects that give the song its sealegs. This is Otis saying a change isn’t gonna come, and it’s fairly dispiriting to hear.īut there’s still a certain dignity to Otis’s acceptance of his static fate that keeps the song from ever lapsing into melodrama. This isn’t the statement of hope and faith implied by the last testament of the similarly taken-before-his-time Sam Cooke. “I left my home in Georgia / Headed for the ‘Frisco bay / ‘Coz I got nothing to live for / And looks like nothing’s gonna come my way,” Otis bemoans, plagued by “this loneliness won’t leave me alone”. Despite the blissful feeling of inactivity implied by the song’s famous chorus (“watchin’ the tides roll away / wastin’ time”), the verses are sort of unnerving in their despair over the inactivity.
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Really, “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” is closer to being the Waiting for Godot of 60s soul. Which, especially when compared to the irrepressible energy of so many of Otis’s earlier hits, definitely carries some logic to it, but it’s an incomplete picture, since the song isn’t really quite the celebration of life’s doldrums that it initially seems.
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Whoops.Īnd so when viewed in context with the plane crash that would claim Otis Redding’s life a mere few days after its recording, we tend to see the hard-earned tranquility of a song like “ (Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” as something close to a transmission from the next world, saying that he’s finally achieved total peace and serenity. Or, at least, it might have if Michael Hutchense had killed himself about a half-decade earlier. It’s why John Lennon’s “ (Just Like) Starting Over” sounds haunting and tragic instead of just boring and retro, why Blind Melon’s “ No Rain” is far more likely to make you weep than smile despite being one of the most utopian songs of the 90s, and why INXS’s “Not Enough Time” temporarily became the definitive sound of a nation in mourning back in 1993. Untimely deaths have a way of imbuing even the most relatively inconsequential of songs with a sort of gravitas that would never have otherwise seem intended.