‘I heard some people heard I’d died. They’ll find out soon that I didn’t,” says Shuggie Otis, making it sound less like a promise than a threat. Otis – the son of rhythm and blues pioneer Johnny Otis – is as close to a living legend as you can get. A bass and guitar whiz who recorded his first album with session supremo Al Kooper and appeared on Frank Zappa’s Hot Rats, both in 1969, when he was 15, he was considered the heir apparent to Jimi Hendrix. As a multi-instrumental polymath flitting between genres and experimenting with drum machines, he was the peer of Sly Stone and Stevie Wonder and a precursor to Prince. He was rock’s most wanted, declining offers to join the Rolling Stones, David Bowie and Blood, Sweat & Tears, and an invitation to collaborate with Quincy Jones.
He was wilful enough to pursue his own path, but it was worth it: three albums of baroque ballads, paisley funk, celestial blues and proto-electronic pop followed. His self-titled 1970 debut preceded 1971’s Freedom Flight, which featured the ravishing Strawberry Letter 23, a song that has, he admits, “kept me alive all these years”: it was a hit in 1977 for the Brothers Johnson, used by Quentin Tarantino for the Jackie Brown soundtrack and sampled in 2003 by Beyoncé. Third and best was 1974’s self-produced magnum opus Inspiration Information, hailed today as a lost classic.
And then, nothing. Between the mid-70s and the start of this century, Otis – a sort of R&B Syd Barrett or Brian Wilson – did a disappearing act that made his old friend Arthur Lee of Love look like an amateur in the reclusive-genius stakes.
Unsurprisingly, it takes several attempts to track down the elusive musician at his home in Santa Monica: six weeks later, he’s on the phone. Less unexpected, having met him briefly in London in 2013, is his slurred speech, a consequence of medication for an ongoing medical condition. On the whole, though, 62-year-old Otis is stoked, and soon to release a new album. It is his first – give or take Wings of Love, an LP of previously unreleased, and largely fantastic, shimmery pop-soul recorded between 1975 and 1990 that accompanied the 2013 reissue of Inspiration Information – for 43 years.
That is a record, surely?
“Haha, yeah,” he laughs. “I haven’t heard anybody who beat it yet.”
There is a taster, Ice Cream Party, on SoundCloud, which finds Otis somewhat tethered to the blues, but he reassures fans of his more out-there funkadelia and sci-fi doodles that the album will be less conventional.
“It will be more like the Wings of Love material, or even Freedom Flight,” he teases. The latter LP title, he adds, is still indicative of his approach in the studio, where he prefers to take the reins and do it all himself.
He talks a lot about control being a priority, hence the decision to dismiss the overtures from the Stones et al.
“I didn’t want to be a sideman,” he explains. “I wanted to do my own music.” Whatever the cost? “I could have been an instant millionaire, a few times, probably,” he acknowledges, “but that wasn’t on my mind at all.”
Otis has few regrets, and harbours little ill-feeling towards the many record companies that spurned his advances from the mid-70s until now (he finally has a deal with Cleopatra Records), despite the fact he had material every bit as good as Prince’s, yet had to find alternative ways to make a living.
“I got tired of getting turned down, so I got day jobs,” he says. Rolling Stone magazine announced that he had retired from the business, a claim he would like to clear up. “That’s a misconception – I never wanted to be without a record label. But I couldn’t get one.” Did that sting? “It never hurt my feelings,” he says, then reconsiders. “It embittered me a little bit, although it never made me real mad or made me cry.”
He earned a crust doing “menial jobs”, including “a paper route”. Not that he’s embarrassed. Indeed, he admits he enjoyed being out of the spotlight, away from the pressures of being Shuggie Otis, the erstwhile teen prodigy who never quite managed to capitalise on all the acclaim, the one whose praises everyone from Zappa to BB King and Ray Charles had sung.
Perhaps he didn’t have the right temperament for success. He talks about being depressed as far back as 1972 and tells me he continues to “suffer” today. The word suffer crops up again while discussing his talent for music-making.
“I call it a gift sometimes, and I get very emotional about it and I don’t know what to do – whether to pick up the guitar or bass or just think about it and do nothing,” he says. “It becomes a suffering.”
If creative paralysis was a problem, so, too, was alcohol.
“I was drinking for 30 years straight,” he says. “I used to have it for breakfast. When I wasn’t working, I’d just stay home and drink.” Sober now for six years, he has “no intention of going back”.
There was also a drug phase. “Oh, I tried everything when I was a kid,” he says. Cocaine? “I liked it at first, but it wasn’t the drug for me. It was really horrible. The comedown is a drag, and the high is … I don’t like being up, because I’m a hyper person.”
He still smokes weed – he has a legal prescription – and tells a story about being slapped with a DUI, although it’s not clear whether it was for driving under the influence of alcohol or narcotics. Anyway, it climaxes with him trying to park his car and crashing into the one behind, resulting in him being incarcerated for the night.
“I was in pyjama bottoms and T-shirt, no socks, and they put me in this jail cell with the air-conditioning up for 21 hours - over nothing!” he relates with good humour. “It was just stupid crap.”
There is another tall tale involving angel dust and guns being fired in the air, and a further admission that he is prone to visions of dead people; if he suffers from anything, it is an overactive imagination. The tracks XL-30 and Pling! two decades earlier come from, respectively, “the idea of a fantasy trip ... a little rocket ship going through space” and “just a mood I got in”. He says he writes movie treatments – “Looney Tunesish, some crazy, some serious drama to do with historical facts, mostly kind of silly, with a twist. I like dark humour and science fiction” – but more than anything he loves making music.
“I’m so focused on my album, it drives me crazy,” he says. His plan is to finish the album in Europe, but it sounds more like a madcap scheme. “I’m not trying to make myself sound mysterious or anything,” he says, but there’s little chance of that.
“I’m always writing, even walking down the street. It’s been an emotional rollercoaster, but thank God I still have the inspiration to make music. Because, if that leaves me, I might as well not be here.”
The new album from Shuggie Otis is due later this spring on Cleopatra Records
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