Shuggie Otis
photo: sachyn mital · cc by-sa 3.0 ↗Johnnie Alexander 'Shuggie' Otis Jr. was the teenage guitar prodigy son of R&B bandleader Johnny Otis, sitting in on his father's sessions and sharing a stage with Jimi Hendrix at the Monterey Pop Festival before he was out of his teens. His early-'70s albums, especially the largely self-produced and self-played Inspiration Information (1974), fused psychedelic guitar, funk, and early drum-machine production into a hazy, homemade sound that went mostly unnoticed on release but was rediscovered decades later as a blueprint for bedroom-recorded soul. That homemade, genre-blurring aesthetic has made him a touchstone for later lo-fi-minded guitarist-producers like Mac DeMarco.
Shuggie Otis has said his father, bandleader Johnny Otis, was the biggest influence he ever had — not just musically but in showing him how the record business worked, since Shuggie was recording and touring in his father's bands before his teens.
listen forJohnny Otis's loose, hand-clap-driven dance groove on 'Willie and the Hand Jive' and Shuggie's own hazy, homemade 'Inspiration Information' both prize a laid-back, deeply pocketed rhythm over flash.
Otis has called Jimi Hendrix his number-one guitar influence, having watched him play at the Monterey Pop Festival as a teenager, and drew on Hendrix's wah-wah and fuzz vocabulary throughout his own playing.
listen forThe searing, effects-laden guitar of Hendrix's 'Voodoo Child (Slight Return)' and the cosmic, fuzzed-out guitar on Otis's 'Ice Cold Daydream' both use heavy effects to turn the electric guitar into something closer to a voice.
Otis has said that, alongside Hendrix, he gravitated as a teenager toward artists of his own generation like Sly Stone even as he grew up around his father's more traditional blues and R&B circle; Sly's loose, drum-machine-adjacent funk experiments anticipate the homemade production Otis pursued on Inspiration Information.
listen forSly and the Family Stone's murky, minimal groove on 'Family Affair' — one of the first hits built on a drum machine — and Otis's own drum-machine-driven 'Aht Uh Mi Hed' both trade a live band's polish for something spare, dark and strange.