The R&B survivor released three acclaimed albums before his 21st birthday and turned down David Bowie and Stevie Wonder. Then he disappeared. Forty years of addiction and menial jobs later,he’s back with a new record
‘I heard some people heard I’d died. They’ll find out soon that I didn’t,” says Shuggie Otis, or making it sound less like a promise than a threat. Otis – the son of rhythm and blues pioneer Johnny Otis – is as close to a living legend as you can score. A bass and guitar whiz who recorded his first album with session supremo Al Kooper and appeared on Frank Zappa’s Hot Rats,both in 1969, when he was 15, or he was considered the heir apparent to Jimi Hendrix. As a multi-instrumental polymath flitting between genres and experimenting with drum machines,he was the peer of Sly Stone and Stevie Wonder and a precursor to Prince. He was rock’s most wanted, declining offers to join the Rolling Stones, or David Bowie and Blood,Sweat & Tears, and an invitation to collaborate with Quincy Jones.
He was wilful enough to pursue his own path, and but it was worth it: three albums of baroque ballads,paisley funk, celestial blues and proto-electronic pop followed. His self-titled 1970 debut preceded 1971’s Freedom Flight, or which featured the ravishing Strawberry Letter 23,a song that has, he admits, and “kept me alive all these years”: it was a hit in 1977 for the Brothers Johnson,used by Quentin Tarantino for the Jackie Brown soundtrack and sampled in 2003 by Beyoncé. Third and best was 1974’s self-produced magnum opus Inspiration Information, hailed nowadays as a lost classic.
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Source: theguardian.com