Otis Waygood

In 2011 one of the biggest rock bands in the world, the Kings of Leon, makes music that is not that big on tunes, relies very much on groove and features a vocalist with the kind of tactile lived-in voice that makes one forget the shortcomings of the lyric or the lack of actual tune.

During the Nineties the Black Crowes, who were often a heavier proposition than the Kings of Leon, were the best purveyors of a kind of blues and soul infused heavy rock that relied on groove to make its impact. When it formula worked (for about the first 4 albums) it was awesome; when it did not (most of the songs on the subsequent albums), the Black Crowes were a drag.

Otis Waygood (having dropped the “Blues Band” half of the name) was very much a band in the mould of the Black Crowes and Kings of Leon.  As the Otis Waygood Blues Band it gave us a brilliant debut album suffused with soulful blues and exciting rock and roll.  Perhaps because they wanted to go progressive and get more “underground”, the band left the blues behind and decided to go for a funkier, groove-based and totally tune free sound, on Simply Otis Waygood.  

The tracks on the second album sound like studio jams to me. The band did not want to record any blues numbers and had no great facility with writing proper songs, or perhaps did not want to, and had only a limited budget for recording a follow up album. The best solution was to book a weekend’s worth of studio time, go in there, jam and then release the most promising jams as the new album.

I could be wrong on this. The tracks on Simply Otis Waygood could have been carefully structured and rehearsed before they were recorded but it sure does not sound like that to me.  Even the song titles (like “Feeling The Good”. “Feel It In Me”, “Have Some Fun”, “No Time People” and “In Alan Car”) sound like they were made up on the spot.

The gap between Otis Waygood Blues Band and Simply Otis Waygood is so vast and unfathomable that it almost does not seem to be the same band. The difference is like the proverbial night and day. The debut is one of the great South African albums of all time. The follow up is one of the worst. Maybe it helps to listen to the album only if one is excessively stoned. Unfocussed jamming is good only if you are rehearsing or are playing a five hour set at some hippie rock festival to a bunch of potheads who simply want to experience the vibe, man.

“The Messenger” sounds like a tune that required some thought and planning. It has lyrics and an extended (and quite captivating) flute solo.

The mostly acoustic last track, “Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child”, is the sole blues number on the album and a reminder of how powerful the band could have been if it had stuck to music that was closer to where they began than the groovy bass driven sound of the rest of the album. This version is atmospheric, deep and affecting.

By the third album, Ten Light Claps and A Scream, it seems that the band realised that they needed actual songs and songs that need to be more varied than loose jams tend to be.

When RetroFresh compiled and released Otis Waygood Blues Band and Simply Otis Waygood, they included a number of tracks from Ten Light Claps and A Scream on each of those albums, possibly because they did not believe they would ever get around to releasing the last album. This means that I have in fact paid twice for the songs on the Ten Light Claps And A Scream CD.  They really aren’t worth that kind of money.

Third time around the production is more expansive. On Simply Otis Waygood, the bare drum and bass grooves plod along without adornment. On Ten Light Claps And A Scream, there is a much bigger sound and arrangements that give a fuller sound to what still sound like tracks pieced together from studio jams.

Once they left the blues game behind on record Otis Waygood sound like no other UK or American band of the period that I know and my guess is, as with Freedoms Children, that the freak rock and jazzy elements come as much from an European perception, sensibility and art insight into rock music as it might come from what was happening in the English speaking countries that spawned rock in the first place.

The groove and saxophone numbers, with some melodic guitar interpolations, would not doubt have sounded most excellent at festivals or big dance halls. This is by no means intellectual music that you needed a lot of headroom to be able to absorb. Ten Light Claps is quite visceral.

“The Higher I Go” may be a drug reference, as it is somewhat psychedelic, but it is also the best tune on the album. Harmonies abound and it is light and airy.

Final track “S.H.A.K.” has elements of mbaqanga with guitar and sax interplay that foreshadows the township pop sound of Bright Blue in the late Eighties. This is the most overtly African the music gets. Great tune too.

Otis Waygood released 3 albums in the 1970 and 1971 and then disappeared from sight. It was a legendary name of my very early teens. I was respectively 11 and 12 when their records came out. I never saw them perform live and possibly never even heard them on the radio either but I knew the name from somewhere and for many years this band haunted me. For a long time, until I read about the RetroFresh re-issues, I even came to the conclusion that Otis Waygood had just been a fantasy and not a real band at all. I never saw any of their records anywhere, not even at Sygma Records where I spent many hours flipping through album covers, and I never read about them in the local press, at least not that I remember. The band came down from Zimbabwe, had a good run in South Africa, presumably while the members were students, and then had to be discarded as a non-vital interest when the individuals went their separate ways and not only left South Africa but abandoned the continent as well.

It seems that South Africa has quite a long history of recorded rock and roll and there are many legendary bands from the Sixties and early Seventies, partly because relatively few of them recorded. In the late Eighties, in Cape Town at least, hardly any of the alternative rock bands released records. Since 1994 there are probably too many local rock albums. The legendary figures from the past stand out because they were solitary fighters in the struggle for rock and roll freedom. Who is legendary nowadays? Every bunch of musicians with some cash to spare can record their tunes; with compute software what it is, they do not even really need a commercial studio or a recording contract. If everybody is famous, who is really famous?

Otis Waygood was a legend to me. I was extremely chuffed and impressed to be able to listen to the debut album after all the years of obscurity. Not many local blues acts have made good; Otis Waygood is one, Deltablue is  another one and presently Pretty Blue Guns is a third example. There are lots of blues duffers around and the difference is that these three bands have managed, each in its own way, to make something new of an old genre that trades in cliché and over familiar forms. Otis Waygood was the first of them and deserves all the kudos they can get.

This is why the last two albums are so shocking in contrast. The freshness, verve and brio are no longer there. Now the music becomes an effort, the effort not to be restricted to a blues “bag” and yet it is the effort that exhausts terminally, as it does not redeem and it does not exalt.

Ten Light Claps is a more palatable proposition than Simply Otis Waygood and one can argue that the band went out on a high. Perhaps the band members went out high. The art might have been designed as primitive. Unfortunately the ostensible simplicity and the lack of artifice drained the lifeblood from the living and breathing entity that made the debut album. Going “underground” more or less suffocated the musicians. They no longer had clear air to breathe; they could not see where they were going; they were tunnelling deeper into oblivion not toward a seam of gold.

It is good that RetroFresh conducts this re-issue programme. Their catalogue represents an essential record, no pun intended, of South African rock history. The return of The Helicopters and even The Spectres is not all that necessary but the resurrection of Abstract Truth, Freedoms Children, Hawk, Suck and Otis Waygood meets a need we may never have known to exist until it did. Release it and they will buy.  The older guys like Brian Currin may be replacing worn out vinyl; I am acquiring for the first time. This stuff could easily have been a secret history of our times and could have remained secret if it had not been for digital technology, seeing as how most of the master tapes of the recordings of so many local acts went up in flames just under forty years ago.

I’ll be playing the tracks from Otis Waygood Blues Band for a long time to come. They are part of the permanent IPod collection, up there with Cream, Dr Feelgood and Jefferson Airplane.