Month: April 2021

ALBUMS: The Best of Otis Redding (ATCO 1972); The Best of Otis Redding (Atlantic 1984)

MVC Rating: Both are 5.0/$$$$$

The best soul singer of all time. And I don’t say that flippantly.

I am a big fan of soul as performed by Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, Smokey Robinson, Wilson Pickett, Little Richard, James Brown, Diana Ross, Janis Joplin, Tina Turner, and Al Green, especially Al Green.

I like the Stylistics, Sly and the Family Stone, Mary Wells, Ray Charles, the Delfonics, the Temptations, Michael Jackson (Jackson 5), The Four Tops, and so on. I own records from most of these.

I do this long list of randomly associated performers to see who Redding was up against. Make no mistake about it, he was the best.

Redding who was influenced by (and played in a band with) Little Richard. James Brown was also from Macon.

Redding, who wrote many of his songs, sometimes sharing credit with Steve Cropper, the legendary session man.

Another session man Eddie Hinton, who worked out of Muscle Shoals did a pretty amazing Redding styled vocal, but Hinton succumbed to alcohol abuse and died young.

Redding died too young as well in a plane crash in 1967, leave a legacy of some great great songs ‘Hard to Handle,’ R-E-S-P-E-C-T,’ ‘I’ve Been Loving You for So Long’ ‘Try a Little Tenderness,’ and of course (Just sitting) on the Dock of the Bay, one of the greatest songs ever written. It skyrocketed to No. 1 but Redding never got to see that. His plane crash came just after the song was recorded and not yet released.

Dock of the Bay marked a departure from the deep soul in its sound and Redding’s singing. He pulled his big voice back a bit and delivered what is considered (by me) to be the most poignant blend of lyrics and music ever recorded. I know I said that about ‘Me and Bobby McGee written by Kris Kristofferson and performed definitively by Janis Joplin.

Both are wistful songs that tell a story of despair and loss. Pretty much a story we all live through as humans. Janis sang ‘Down in Salinas Lord, I let him slip away. He’s going to that place and I hope he finds it.’

Otis sang: ‘Sittin’ here resting my bones, this loneliness won’t leave me alone. Two thousand miles I roam just to make this dock my home.’

I don’t mean to take anything away from Redding’s other songs. I just wish he had lived so we can here what he cooked up to follow that one.

I see them.

In blankets all ruffled up. In bushes, trees, paintings — anything where there are patterns. I see faces, usually smiling but sometimes projecting some other emotion like fear or concern or, even anger.

This is going to be tricky to explain but what I suspect is my Lewy body dementia is supercharging a condition called pareidolia. Most dictionary definitions of this call it a ‘psychological phenomenon’ in which persons see an image, usually a face, in random objects.

Nearly everybody has this to a degree. Puffy white clouds often prompt viewers to see faces, animals or anything the mind can imagine. Famously many people thought they saw Jesus on a piece of toast.

That is not unusual. It’s the brain’s way of giving you information that might be helpful — like autofill in a document producing app.

But I think my situation is unusual. I believe it is connected to my Lewy body dementia which last year sent me deep into mind boggling hallucinations. These faces, I’ve been calling remnants of that full immersion hallucination.

These faces and sometimes entire figures with legs, a torso, arms and a head strike my vision sometimes when I walk in a room. The coat on the couch with a hat nearby and shoes on the floor all connect into a visual human-like figure.

It doesn’t bother me because since finding the right balance of medications and adding NuPlazid, an anti-psychotic, those days where I was ‘living’ inside the hallucination have been absent (going on at least three months now).

But I definitely see faces. Some of the faces are of the same people — people I met when I was hallucinating big time. They are so planted in my memory that I’m positive a sketch artist could draw them based on my memory.

Another part of my pareidolia: I can make the images change. For example if I see a pareidolia person’s head and face staring at me, I can look away and it does turn away. Although I don’t see it moving. Looking closer, shaking the pillow out or ignoring it makes it go away, as well.

Scientists are studying this phenomenon for clues on how the brain works.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22649179/

I believe our memory and imagination fill in the blanks of random visual stimuli, initiated by a prompt: three rocks in a Frisbee suddenly becomes two eyes, a mouth and the head. This is accelerated — or accentuated — in some people through an imbalance in the brain, I believe.

One would naturally link the abnormal proliferation of alpha-synuclein protein — the suspected cause of my kind of Lewy body dementia — to pareidolia.

More science is needed. I think a direct study on just Lewy body patients and Parkinson’s with psychosis patients would be in order as these neurodegenerative diseases seem to be a hotbed of hallucinations.

NOTE: Since posting Friday I came across a few more articles discussing this through the Lewy body lens.

ALBUM: The Big Heat (1986)

MVC Rating: 3.5/$$$

This is a little over-dated featuring clunky synthesizer. That means the synth (or organ) fills sometime sound like they stopped the music and banged a couple big wrenches together. CLUNK. Followed by the door of a bank safe slamming shut.. CHUCLUNK.

And speaking of hitting the wall, Ridgway was the lead singer of Wall of Voodoo which scored a hit with ‘Mexican Radio’ in 1983.

Voodoo introduced Ridgway’s distinctive voice and narrative style songwriting. The problem is the song-stories don’t always work. They do on the title song,

‘The Big Heat,’ and on ‘Pick it Up and Put it in Your Pocket’ and ‘Drive, She Said.’