Otis Redding - An Unfinished Life

Zusatztext 75038882 Informationen zum Autor JONATHAN GOULD is a former professional musician and the author of CAN’T BUY ME LOVE: The Beatles! Britain & America.   He divides his time between a home in Brooklyn and a house near Hudson! NY. Klappentext The long-awaited! definitive biography of The King of Soul! timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Redding's iconic performance at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. Otis Redding remains an immortal presence in the canon of American music on the strength of such classic hits as "(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay!" "I've Been Loving You Too Long!" "Try a Little Tenderness!" and "Respect!" a song he wrote and recorded before Aretha Franklin made it her own. As the architect of the distinctly southern! gospel-inflected style of rhythm & blues associated with Stax Records in Memphis! Redding made music that has long served as the gold standard of 1960s soul. Yet an aura of myth and mystery has always surrounded his life! which was tragically cut short at the height of his career by a plane crash in December 1967. In Otis Redding: An Unfinished Life! Jonathan Gould finally does justice to Redding's incomparable musical artistry! drawing on exhaustive research! the cooperation of the Redding family! and previously unavailable sources of information to present the first comprehensive portrait of the singer's background! his upbringing! and his professional career. In chronicling the story of Redding's life and music! Gould also presents a social history of the time and place from which they emerged. His book never lets us forget that the boundaries between black and white in popular music were becoming porous during the years when racial tensions were reaching a height throughout the United States. His indelible portrait of Redding and the mass acceptance of soul music in the 1960s is both a revealing look at a brilliant artist and a provocative exploration of the tangled history of race and music in America that resonates strongly with the present day. Monterey I was pretty sure that I’d seen God onstage. —Bob Weir Late on the evening of June 18, 1967, as Saturday night turned to Sunday morning, the San Francisco–based rock group known as the Jefferson Airplane concluded their forty-minute set to rousing applause from the 7,500 fans who filled the fairgrounds arena in the resort town of Monterey, California, on the second night of an event billed as the First International Pop Festival. The Airplane were local heroes to the crowd at Monterey, many of whom lived in the Bay Area and had followed the band’s career from its inception in 1965. Along with other whimsically named groups like the Charlatans, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the Grateful Dead, they had gotten their start in the folk coffeehouses and rock ballrooms of the Haight-Ashbury, a neighborhood on the eastern edge of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park whose recent emergence as a bohemian enclave had captured the imagination of young people across America. During the first half of 1967, a series of sensationalistic articles had appeared in newspapers and national magazines describing this self-styled “psychedelic city-state” and the long-haired, hedonistic “hippies” who populated it. This rash of publicity had inspired tens of thousands of footloose college students, college dropouts, teenaged runaways, and “flower children” of all ages to converge on San Francisco in anticipation of an idyllic “Summer of Love.” The Monterey Pop Festival was timed to coincide with the start of that summer. The idea for the festival had originated a few months before as a gleam in the eye of a neophyte Los Angeles promoter named Alan Pariser, who envisioned it as a pop-oriented version of the seaside jazz and folk festivals at Newport and Monterey that had served as a fashionable form of summertime entertainment since the ...

Product details

• Authors: Jonathan Gould
• Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.05.2017
• EAN: 9780307453945
• ISBN: 978-0-307-45394-5
• Dimensions: 165 mm x 240 mm x 35 mm
• Subject: Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Biographies, autobiographies