Music Mondays: "I Can't Quit You Baby" by Otis Rush

"Well, I can't quit you, baby, but I've got to put you down for awhile." -- Otis Rush

I've got that one lover who got away, the one I tried it with too many times, the one I used to do anything to get alone with. This is the person I knew better than to see again, but whose calls still made my heart pound.

When I used to leave, and when we used to say it was over, for a long time I think neither of us believed that it was true. I remember driving away once and "I Can't Quit You Baby" by Otis Rush came on. It was exactly what I felt. I couldn't go through it anymore with this lover right then, but I knew I'd be back.

Ever since then, this song has symbolized that special erotic insanity that comes over people sometimes, when we act out of passion without any sense of the consequences.

There's another version of the song that I like better than the one I linked, but I have it on some mysterious mix tape and can't figure out where it's from. The old blues versions are far superior to the Led Zeppelin version, I have to say. The Led Zeppelin version feels flat and passionless to me when I listen to it after Otis Rush.

As a side note, in the video I linked, look at how entirely white the audience is--it's crazy.