Otis Redding and the song that always made David Lynch “cry like a baby”
When considering Hollywood’s best record riflers, the directors with the greatest eye and ear for how to set music to screen in new and iconic leases of life, it’s tempting to default to Quentin Tarantino’s love for surfer rock or soul, Martin Scorsese’s repeated Rolling Stones deep dives, or Jim Jarmusch’s nose for punk and the counterculture, but no one handles pop with such enchanting love as surrealist titan David Lynch.
Be it Fats Waller’s church organ buried under Eraserhead‘s industrial growl, Mulholland Drive‘s chintzy cover of Linda Scott’s ‘I’ve Told Every Little Star’ as Tinseltown’s evil forces start to encroach, or Bobby Vinton’s easy listening rendition of ‘Blue Velvet’ inspiring its namesake psychosexual suburban thriller, Lynch would deploy songs to explore his unabashed love for Americana while daring to reveal its dark undercurrents.
While Lynch sought creative and thematic guidance from pop’s past, he keenly embraced the alternative underground and modern vanguard throughout his career. David Bowie, Nine Inch Nails, and Chromatics all strangely weaved into the Twin Peaks universe, and then there’s the music he crafted himself. Whether solo or with routine collaborators Angelo Badalamenti, Julee Cruise, and Chrystabell, Lynch illustrated his uncanny intersections between reality and our unconscious dreamscapes via all manner of genres from warped synthpop, factory blues, and avant-garde ambient.
Famously indifferent to storyboards, Lynch’s pre-production for any of his film and TV projects featured a collated set of songs that would lay the conceptual groundwork for the story he was telling. The Platters’ ‘My Prayer’, The Paris Sisters’ ‘I Love How You Love Me’, and Booker T & The MGs’ ‘Green Onions’ all compiled early when preparing for Twin Peaks‘ third season.
However, one live performance of Stax soul singer Otis Redding’s ‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long’ held a deep affection for the filmmaker, and it was selected for inclusion in the 2017 series revisit from the word go.
“It’s the version from the Monterey Pop Festival,” Lynch told Pitchfork. “There was Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company doing ‘Ball and Chain’, Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Wild Thing’, and there was Otis Redding. When I hear those three things, it just drives me crazy how great they are. With Otis Redding, we reach this place in him, and I just couldn’t believe that version. It was so, so, so beautiful. So much feeling comes through that thing; it’s one of my all-time favourites. I just go nuts. I start crying like a baby when I hear that thing”.
Originally featured on ’65’s Otis Blue/Otis Redding Sings Soul, Redding takes his examination of ebbing love to greater heights of gospel power for his Monterey Pop Festival slot, the audience stirred into a frenzy over his soulful command and crackling energy on stage. It’s also bittersweet, Redding sadly dying in a plane crash six months later at only 26.
‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long’s enduring power wasn’t made by Lynch, but rather, as with all the songs that haunt his work, offered a new dimension and depth of love and a latent mystical power that perhaps Redding hadn’t even considered.
