Otis Redding, "Try a Little Tenderness"

I'd love to say that I came across this song on the radio, or just on one of the many Otis Redding best-of CDs, but most likely I discovered this song the same way a lot of you did, if you're a child of the Eighties. That penultimate scene in Pretty In Pink, when Jon Cryer's Duckie is lip-synching to the last part while subsequently having a grand mal seizure in the record store where his lady love Molly Ringwald works? Yep, that was where I first heard this tune.

I've gone on a little bit about cultural appropriation in some of theses, but I'll say it again: white folks be stealing from the brothers. Actually, though, in this case Redding wasn't the original author of the song (it's from the early Thirties, and according to Wikipedia Bing Crosby took a turn at it, though it's safe to say his probably sounds nothing like Otis's). Hell, I heard it as an orchestral version at the beginning of Dr. Strangelove and wondered if I was hearing what I thought I was hearing. Otis Redding, of course, made the song his own.

Otis Redding is one of those guys who really, honestly, should have been around a lot longer. In the rock world, burning out before your time is up can be a good thing (as anyone who's had to endure a Sting solo record would attest...sorry, but it's just never gonna measure up to the Police), but some people really do depart way too soon, under incredibly tragic circumstances. I recently read Respect Yourself by Robert Gordon, a fantastic history of Stax Records, and Otis is a big presence in the early part of the book. I did not know, for instance, that when he auditioned for the record label he was the chauffeur for another singer who was auditioning that day, and on a whim he tried out his vocal chops. Think how differently music would have been had Otis not stepped up to the microphone that day.

His death in December 1967 (in a plane crash, along with most of the original members of the Bar-Keys) is reminiscent of Buddy Holly's crash almost a decade earlier. Both were stars on the rise, young and dynamic and ready to conquer the world. In rock-star terms, they were Icarus flying too close to the sun literally (or at least the crash of a comet that burned really bright for a short period of time). I was surprised when I learned that Otis was only twenty-six when he died; he always came across as older in his photos and on record. An old soul, perhaps.

Otis's death forever changed Stax, they managed to redefine themselves with Isaac Hayes stepping out from behind the producer's booth to become a recording star. The label thrived and then came crashing down (no doubt a fall fueled by resentment about the perception of it being black-owned in the mostly white Memphis business community). Stax fell itself, less than a decade after Otis Redding's last hurrah, but it's back. And the story of the label in its first incarnation is an amazing one, worth seeking out if you're a fan. It might have actually helped Otis more than hurt to have one of his signature covers (the other being his frantic take on the Stones' "Satisfaction") be associated with a skinny white dude in a John Hughes film, even if in the end Duckie does not get the girl (grand romantic gestures sometimes work, sometimes fail, but this one at least was memorable). In a lot of ways, the slow build of the song connects it to other slow-building songs, especially "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin. Now, to me, the idea of "Stairway" being a classic rock song is ridiculous, and based solely on the release of the last few minutes of the song. The slow build makes the song torture for me, and I don't think it's a good song anyway. But "Try a Little Tenderness" works because of the slow build, it eases you into the eventual unleashing of Redding's soulful power. It's a fucking classic, I guess I'm saying.

I read an essay by Jonathan Lethem in which he described how Redding was studying the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album in his last months, trying to achieve something like that with his version of rock music (labeled "soul" because you can't just have music without genres, apparently). His posthumous hit "Sittin' On the Dock of the Bay" is suggestive of the direction he was going to go, had he lived. It's a loss that is assuaged somewhat by what we do have.

Nirvana, "The Man Who Sold the World"

To paraphrase Chuck D, Kurt Cobain didn't mean shit to me. Now that's not to be taken as "I didn't like him as a person and I'm glad he's been dead for twenty years," but at the time of his death I was less than grieved at his demise. Perhaps I was just heartless at fourteen.

Truth of the matter is, when Nirvana broke big I was young and not as passionate about music as I would later be, thanks to the Beatles. And while I liked the occasional Nirvana tune, I didn't get into them like a lot of my peers. Indeed, it took me ten years to get around to buying a copy of Nevermind, and that one didn't exactly take up a permanent home in my CD collection (in fact it has long since been sold). I did get around to reading books about the band (Michael Azerrad's great Nirvana bio Come As You Are, Christopher Cross's bio of Cobain), but the fact is that I just don't care that much about Nirvana.

In much the same way that I feel about the Godfather movies, I acknowledge the importance of Nirvana to the pop-music landscape without necessarily being a fan of theirs, even on a casual basis. I like the Foo Fighters all right, and some of Nirvana's songs are pretty good. But I never drank the Kool-Aid that the band were "our generation's Beatles" (whosever generation that was, it probably wasn't mine). I am sad that Cobain felt like he had to end his life. But do I think we missed out on more of that kickin' Nirvana sound? Meh, probably not.

Like I said, it's been twenty years since he died, and somewhat predictably I'm being told by the various entertainment conglomerates that I should mark the occasion by purchasing magazines or books about the main man of Nirvana (much in the same way that the Beatles' fifty-year anniversary of appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show saw a surplus of books and magazines marking the occasion). I don't behoove anyone making money off this anniversary, I just feel less than willing to part with my money in order to fuel it.

In his first book, Rob Sheffield talked about how, the weekend Kurt's body was found, he and his friends talked about how they weren't surprised Cobain had ended his life, and how they even had fun at his expense. It's probably a coping mechanism to deal with sad things by using humor, I've done it myself for sure. Kurt Cobain was a fellow human being who, as it turned out, wasn't that psyched about being famous, and his pain was real. But asking us to mourn him anew twenty years on, so you can sell some cheap book or magazine or t-shirt with the man's face plastered on it and nothing new about why his music might have mattered to some people? I'm good, thanks.

Nirvana will never be one of my favorite bands, or even one of my "they're alright" bands. I'll take a pass on remarking on what Cobain's passing means to me because (as it turns out) it doesn't mean that much to me personally. Oh sure, we could talk about the absence of a similarly large presence in alternative rock since his death (that's a legitimate topic of conversation), but truth be told, his music didn't mean that much to me at the time or even now. He entertained me, I'm sure, but did he mean anything to me? Signs point to "no."