Shuggie Otis - Inspiration information

Aw yeah. Who's this dude? He's a mostly-forgotten funk wunderkind of the early 70s who took too long making this album and was subsequently written off by the music industry as a prima donna. He's the son of the noted blues and R&B bandleader (and sometime politician and pastor) Johnny Otis. He played bass for Frank Zappa on "Peaches en regalia". He played almost every instrument on this album. He is pretty awesome. Anyway, the album. This is the re-release of "Inspiration information", his 1974 opus, with a handful of tracks from his previous offering, 1971's "Freedom flight" thrown in for good measure. So what's it sound like, then? Well, it's lazy, lounging, weed-smoking funk for a sunny afternoon. Sometimes it sounds cinematic and sometimes it sounds, well, rural somehow. When I was a kid, my grandparents had a Hohner organ in the living room, the kind with footpedals and all kinds of switches and a rudimentary drum machine with preset rhythms like "beguine" and "waltz" and a tempo knob. I figured out pretty early on that you could get some crazy beats by pressing down more than one button at a time, and so did Shuggie Otis. Several songs have these crude early drum machine beats. Many have the "living room organ" sound all over them. In a way, he was making the lo-fi electronica of his time. He dabbles in jazz and plays drums and really makes the bass sound good. There's some electric piano too, but just for some atmosphere in places. He does funk on an acoustic guitar. It makes sense when you hear it, but who'd have thought to do it like that? This album was way ahead of its time. He basically invented ambient electronica on acoustic instruments and and slipped it through in a wrapper of experimental funk, like you'd hide your dog's worm pills in some peanut butter. Pick this one up and give it a listen.

Also, he played in "Snatch and the poontangs" when he was a teenager. With his dad the pastor. People need to know that because it's awesome.

Lastly, here's his song "Ice cold daydream" set to some great old stock footage.