The Otis Redding song that inspired The Beatles
To be a musician in the 1960s must have been arguably one of the most exciting times to be one ever. While you wouldn’t have had access to all the world’s music at your fingertips the way that we do now, you would have nonetheless felt that exciting, constant whirr of pop music discovering itself. Of a genuinely new sound popping out of the ether every other week. Of the promise that you might go down to the record shop and discover that The Beatles are dropping a new single in a week or two.
This is fitting because the Fab Four weren’t just the ideal band to be influenced by; they were the platonic ideal of bands and artists being influenced by the sounds of the times. They spent a cup of coffee in the really early 1960s as throwback, quiffed-up, teddy-boy rockers with one foot in the 1950s, but basically from ‘I Feel Fine’ onwards, they had one ear to the ground, eager to pick up the newest and most daring sounds on the grapevine.
The most famous examples of this are the band’s shared Bob Dylan obsession, whose songwriting changed John Lennon’s songwriting voice basically overnight. Paul McCartney viewed the dearly missed Brian Wilson’s Beach Boys records as gauntlets thrown down to them by the most inspired composer in music. George Harrison was the architect behind the band’s experimentation with indian classical music. Truly, there was no corner of the Earth that The Beatles weren’t listening to music from.
In fact, one of their biggest inspirations was a genre of sound that deeply inspired the band, yet never gets the credit for doing so that it deserves. Soul music was seemingly one of the vanishingly few things that the whole band could agree upon. Their early sets covered with Tamla-Motown covers and later songs like ‘Oh! Darling’ and ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ are soul songs to their very core.
Which Otis Redding song inspired The Beatles?
Paul McCartney, in particular, was a devoted fan of soul music, being the man who listed iconic Motown bassist James Jamerson as his all-time bass hero. At the time, Macca’s bandmates were taking notice of his love of soul music too, as we see in an interview that Harrison gave to Crawdaddy in 1977. That said, McCartney seemed to be in such an intense control freak era that one almost had to notice the inspirations from his playing. You weren’t allowed to play anything he hadn’t expressly written.
When asked about how the deathless Rubber Soul rocker ‘Drive My Car’ came about, Harrison said, “We laid the track because; what Paul would do-if he’d written a song-he’d learn all the parts for Paul and then come to the studio and say (sometimes he was very difficult): ‘Do this’. He’d never give you the opportunity to come out with something. But on ‘Drive My Car’, I just played the line, which is really like a lick off ‘Respect’, you know, the Otis Redding version—duum-da-da-da-da-da-da-dum—and I played that line on the guitar and Paul laid that with me on bass. We laid the track down like that.”
This was the sort of attitude that would cause Harrison to have the mother of all chips on his shoulder when he left The Beatles. That stifling feeling that this was McCartney and Lennon’s show, and he was just there for the ride. However, if he comes to you with a song like ‘Drive My Car’, it would take a stronger man than me to hold it against him. No matter how many Otis Redding songs it rips off!
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