Mono Mondays: Otis Redding, Otis Blue

This week’s Mono Mondays release is one of those albums that you can hold up to the faces of any of your snarky hipster friends who try to tell you that the only cool performers are the ones who sing their own songs: when you hear the way Otis Redding sings soul on Otis Blue, you realize that the coolest performers are the ones who can take other people’s songs and make you forget that they ever belonged to anyone else.

Originally released on September 15, 1965, Otis Blue was Redding’s breakout album, the one that took him beyond the R&B charts and into the hearts and minds of mainstream audiences, which makes it all the more amazing that he more or less managed to knock out the entire album in 24 hours. With Booker T. & the M.G.’s, Isaac Hayes on piano, and members of the Mar-Keys and the Memphis Horns behind him, Redding reportedly recorded from10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on July 9, picked up again at 2 a.m. on July 10 (after Booker T. and the boys returned from the local gigs they’d already had booked), and finished up at around 2 p.m.

In addition to the covers that Redding tackled on the album (“Change Gonna Come,” “Down in the Valley,” “Shake,” “My Girl,” “Wonderful World,” “Rock Me Baby,” “Satisfaction,” and “You Don’t Miss Your Water”), he also found room for a trio of songs that he’d penned himself: “Ole Man Trouble,” “Respect,” and “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” a co-write with Jerry Butler. If that doesn’t prove that the man was as capable at writing his own classic material as doling out classic interpretations of other people’s songs, it’s hard to imagine what would.

Once Otis Blue hit record store shelves, it climbed to #75 on the Billboard Top 200, which is pretty darned good when you consider that neither of his previous two albums had made that chart at all. More importantly, though, was the fact that three of the album’s singles made it into the Billboard Hot 100 – “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” (#11), “Respect” (#35), and “Shake” (#47) – while “Shake,” “My Girl,” and “Satisfaction” were all top-40 hits in the UK.

Over the years, Otis Blue has lost little of its luster: New Musical Express, Rolling Stone, and Time have all ranked it on their lists of the Greatest Albums of All Time, and it can be found within the pages of 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. As such, you could do a lot worse this week than spending a few bucks to experience how it sounds in mono.