Shuggie Otis – Inspiration Information

Guest post by Andy Bull

Forgive me – I understand that typically human beings grossly overestimate the level of entertainment they provide to others by mulling lachrymosely over their own bygones, so I shall try to make this brief. I just want to provide some context to the music I am about to talk about. After all, music is a thing whose potential meaning can be shaped by the context in which it is consumed, and by the time I got to this record, it was thirty years old, and for most of that time, it had been forgotten.

So, to begin. There was a period of a couple of years after I left school and was living in my parents house that I rambled around in a pretty unproductive emotional haze. Despite my youth, I was afraid that somehow I might be calcifying from the inside out. It was during these listless years, where I, a laughable, fragmented creature whose dreams of life by far exceeded my own capacity to live, met another neighbourhood kid called Levins. He had a first name too, the very same as my own, but that seemed to be the end of our similarities. I had seen Levins around the neighbourhood. He mostly wore shorts and carried a backpack everywhere, and he had a round, cheery face, a mop of floppy brown hair, and kind of forward falling lumber when he walked – and he was always walking somewhere. Indeed, he was a kid, unlike myself, who I sensed was surely on the move. A mutual friend introduced Levins and I one summer afternoon, and after that introduction I seemed to see him about, marching someway or other, almost daily. Around the time I had just gotten my drivers license, and so one afternoon when I saw him walking home from the train station, I offered him a lift. In the car, we spoke about music. He turned out to be a music buff, and he said to me that he had these records of this guy called Shuggie Otis and that I would probably like them. So then there we are, standing in front of his stero, in his room, which from memory was filled with music paraphernalia and plastered with posters. Levins put the CDs in the player and while the music seemed nice enough, nothing about it blew me away. Borrow them, he said, and have a good listen. I got back in my car and looked at the covers: Shuggie Otis ‘Inspiration Information’ and ‘Here Comes Shuggie Otis’.

In those strange, vacant years, ‘Inspiration Information’ gently insinuated itself into my internal workings. ‘Here Comes Shuggie Otis’, Shuggie’s debut record, was cool too but it was ‘Inspiration Information’ that really haunted me. It was something more than just nice; it gradually and gently glued itself to my insides. And now I have finished shitting on about myself, so I will talk about the record in the hope that you too may find it and grow to love it.

My recommendation to you is to find the ‘Inspiration Information’ on CD, if you can, and then listen to it either on some big, ear covering headphones, or on a big, warm stereo system. There is a low fi quality to this album, but there is a world inside it. There is soft tape hiss, room sounds, analogue recording quirks and performance mistakes which have been left in there either knowingly and for good measure or because Shuggie didn’t feel it was necessary to clean it up. There are the nearly subliminally present rhythms of an early analogue rhythm box that, combined with the tape recording, might lead you to think of Sly Stone’s ‘There’s A Riot Going On’, released three years prior. While there are superficial similarities, and song titles like Shuggie’s ‘Aht Uh Mi Hed’ make me think of Stone’s ‘Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)’ I still think these are very different records given the very disparate personalities and intents underlying. Both men are similarly enigmatic perhaps, but whereas Sly’s musical persona is rooted in the more temporal, real world angst of social inequity, national identity and cultural struggle, Shuggie is like some sort of fey creature that accidentally blew in on a breeze. Given also that after Inspiration Information he never recorded his own material again, it seems he was content enough to blow right back out. Add to that the distance of Stone’s rough-hewn baritone from Shuggie’s, lilting tenor, and any potential comparisons become unsatisfactory.

You might call this an oblique record, a little hard to pin down exactly, but that may also be its defining character. Shuggie seems a peaceful misfit; a kind of a bemused extra-terrestrial observer, and with Inspiration he has crafted the kind hard-to-explain loose-but-cohesive quality of self produced work. Shuggie played all the instruments on this record, and this magnifies his musical idiosyncrasies. The push and pull that would normally occur between multiple performers has a markedly different quality when that discourse of intent, whether verbal or sonic, occurs internally within a single man’s mind. The product is something very personal and solitary, and perhaps that is why this album resonated with me the way it did.

The title track, whose lyrics intrigue but still elude me, is like a funky-stepping little hit-that-never-was (Shuggie’s only real career single was the beautiful Strawberry Letter 23, from a previous record called Freedom Flight), and the first half of this record has rolling, psychedelic soul shapes and pop melodies that drift and mutate casually from one form to another form on a whim (although I suspect that, since this record took three years to make, these whims may have been spontaneous but probably not rushed). In the second half, unambitious dreamy instrumental tracks like ‘Pling!’ step to tightly contained early-day funk arrangements like ‘Not Available’ to complete a record that is as enigmatic as its maker.

This is a beautiful album, but not an obvious or even immediate one, and I feel that somehow its story, like that of its maker, is incomplete. It tanked, perhaps inevitably, when it was released in 1974 and probably would have remained unknown to me if Talking Heads front man David Byrne hadn’t discovered it and reissued it on his own label ten years ago. But despite all this, if you do manage to find a copy of this album for yourself, then I hope in some way that ‘Inspiration Information’ might provide you with a little inspiration of your own.

Shuggie Otis – Inspiration Informatin

PS if you dig ‘Inspiration Information’, then you should also definitely check out:

- Shuggie Otis ‘Freedom Flight’,

- Rodriguez ‘Cold Fact’,

- Sly and the Family Stone ‘There’s a riot goin’ on’,

- Cody Chestnut ‘The Headphone Masterpiece’,

- Todd Rundgren ‘A Wizard, A True Star’,

- Paul McCartney ‘McCartney II’, and maybe even

- Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti ‘Before Today’.

Enjoy!

Andy Bull is a Sydney singer-songwriter who writes beautiful music, designs his own cover art and is an all-round good guy.