As Good As It Gets
Any New Year is awash in lists: best movies, best albums, notable deaths. I don’t know how many lists in that last category included him, but we lost one of the all-time greats, the irreplaceable Otis Rush, on September 29, 2018. Considering that he never received his due in either public fame or fortune while alive, the quality of the obits was a pleasant surprise. Nevertheless, I am compelled to write. If you have never heard him, you owe it to yourself to experience all the Blues can be.
Rush was the singer/guitarist who had it all: a rich, versatile voice, a knowing way with a lyric, and remarkable skill on the guitar. Indeed, he is my second favorite guitarist – just behind Buddy Guy and a hair ahead of T-Bone Walker, B. B. King, and Earl Hooker (John Lee’s cousin and the greatest guitarist you’ve never heard of, unless you are a Blues aficionado; I’ll write about him someday).
Otis either wrote or was drawn to lyrics with a wry wisdom, and he knew what to do with those lyrics.
Then there was his voice. You don’t need a special voice to be a great Blues singer, but Rush proved that having one is no impediment, either. He could have been a pop star crooner, had he been inclined. Most assuredly, he was not so inclined, and his artistic integrity as a bluesman did his wallet no favors.
It’s tempting to delve deeper into the details of his brilliance. For example, no one could bend a note quite like Otis Rush. I am told that his playing a right-handed guitar upside down gave his note-bending a different sound. (Albert King, another great lefty who played a guitar strung for right-handers, was also justly renowned for bending notes, so there may be something to it.) Rush’s playing, like his singing, was not just different, though, but spine-tingling.
The details are secondary to his total impact as an artist, however. With Rush, the whole clearly exceeds the sum of his considerable parts. Why? What else is going on? All these skills were bound in a package of passion so powerful and authenticity so undeniable as to rivet the listener. He could play as fast as he wanted, but would not do so at the expense of a song’s integrity. Rush integrated the bent notes, the soaring voice, the perfectly chosen notes (and silences) not to show off but to convey feelings triggered by the music. This is Blues at the highest level. It is human communication.
Recordings
Otis neither recorded nor played live as often as would be expected for one so gifted. There were many reasons for this, some of which apparently involved his moods and his health. The good news is that there are still plenty of opportunities to hear him, most ranging from very good to truly great.
It was a song by Otis Rush that made me a Blues fan long ago. I was very young, probably no more than 10 or 11, but my older cousins had gotten me into rock and roll already. I stumbled upon the Blues Show on Penn’s radio station, WXPN, on a Saturday evening (a show that is ongoing and still very well done, by the way). It did not take long to have that “So THIS is where all the great stuff comes from” moment. That insight was not enough, however, to prepare me for what I felt one night on first hearing a spell-binding guitar intro, followed by an impassioned vocal, an even better guitar solo, a clever “punchline“ vocal chorus, and a guitar “outro” that may be the best of all. I was hooked on the Blues for life.
The only problem was that the song was in the middle of a long set and the host never identified the song or the artist. That it was longer than a standard three-minute song and had something to do with gambling was all I knew. Over time, I realized that Otis Rush was the artist, the song was “Gambler’s Blues”, and the album was Mourning in the Morning on Cotillion, a subsidiary of Atlantic Records. It took me years to get my hands on that record, the first of many such quests that music fans know well.
The performance remains a marvel. One might have thought that B.B. King’s classic “Gambler’s Blues” on Blues Is King (his second greatest album, in my view, after Live at the Regal) would never be topped. One would have been wrong. The rest of the Mourning album is somewhat controversial among fans – some thinking it overproduced and containing material unworthy of Rush – but, in addition to “Gamblers’ Blues”, there are stellar remakes of two songs that had helped establish his reputation (“It Takes Time”, “My Love Will Never Die”) and his remarkable take on one of the genre’s recurrent themes, “Reap What You Sow”. True story about the latter: Someone for whom I once played it exclaimed, “My goodness! What did she do to him?”
Otis first recorded when bassist and prolific song writer Willie Dixon brought him to Eli Toscano, the owner of Cobra Records in Chicago. The result was a series of landmark recordings in the history of urban blues. Issued from 1956 to 1958, the best of these Cobra recordings, such as “I Can’t Quit You Baby”, “All Your Love (I Miss Loving)”, “Three Times A Fool”, “It Takes Time”, “My Love Will Never Die”, and the astounding “Double Trouble”, are essential listening, and a great place for listeners to start. (Quick aside: Any compilation of Otis’s Cobra recordings that is complete will also include a couple clunkers. Dixon apparently insisted that certain of his own songs be included for Otis to record despite not being up to the quality of others. It’s hard to imagine Rush would have chosen [shudder] “Violent Love”, for instance.)
One of nine artists to participate in a three-record series for Vanguard called Chicago/The Blues/Today!, Otis laid down only five tracks, but they are superb. Rush also shares the bill, with Albert King, on Door to Door (Chess); among his six sides on the album is the magnificent original of “So Many Roads”.
Other studio albums worth considering include: Right Place, Wrong Time (Bullfrog); Troubles, Troubles (Verve); Any Place I’m Going (Evidence); Ain’t Enough Comin’ In (Mercury); and Lost In The Blues (Alligator).
Among albums that capture Rush live: Tops (Blind Pig); Otis Rush and Friends Live at Montreux [the friends being Eric Clapton and Luther Allison] (Eagle Records); Double Trouble (Rock Beat); and Cold Day in Hell, All Your Love I Miss Loving, and So Many Roads, all on Delmark. The last of these was recorded in Tokyo in 1975, and the roar of a very large crowd of fans who really get what they’re hearing is exhilarating.
I’m tempted to say there is no such thing as a bad Otis Rush record. I do have this caution on one, though: Screamin’ and Cryin’ (Evidence) was recorded live at a time when Otis was clearly in a bad place in his life. It makes for uncomfortable listening, at least for me; in that sense, I cannot recommend it.
Seeing Otis Rush Live
I managed to see him twice. The first was at the Commodore Barry Club in Philadelphia, backed by a group of some of the better bluesmen in the Philly area, the Dukes of Destiny. From the looks on their faces, these musicians were as thrilled to play with Otis Rush as I was to finally see him. The second was at a Chicago blues club in Lincoln Park, backed by his Chicago blues band. In each case, he was in total, scintillating command.
No one is going to do better describing what it was like to see Otis Rush at his best than Robert Palmer did in his classic 1981 book Deep Blues (Viking), so I’m not going to try:
“The set…was devastating. The first tune rocked, with Otis snarling the words out of the side of his mouth, and then he settled down to slow, minor-key blues, an idiom in which nobody can touch him. ‘He’s so good, man,’ Muddy Waters had told me, and Muddy does not dispense praise lightly…That night at the Wise Fools [Pub], during one forty-minute set, Otis focused all his extraordinary talents. His grainy, gospelish singing carried the weight of so much passion and frustration, it sounded like the words were being torn from his throat, and his guitar playing hit heights I didn’t think any musician was capable of – notes bent and twisted so delicately and immaculately they seemed to form actual words…The performance, if you could call it that, was shattering and uplifting all at once, the way blues is supposed to be…Otis Rush had something else – an ear for the finest pitch shadings and the ability to execute them on the guitar, not as mere effects but as meaningful components in a personal vocabulary, a musical language. He was playing the deep blues.”
Coda
At the top of his game, Otis Rush had no superiors, and few peers. I have listened to the original “Double Trouble” (Cobra, 1958) dozens of times. The next time it fails to send chills down my spine will be the first. Not for nothing, as they say, did Stevie Ray Vaughan name his band.
Palmer was onto something with his aside “The performance, if you could call it that…” above. Such authenticity is all to the benefit of the lucky listener. Feeling at this depth is a rare, profound treat.
Ken Bossong
© 2019 Kenneth J. Bossong