Otis Redding (1941-1967): Legendary, iconic, and innovative singer, songwriter, composer, ensemble leader, producer, and teacher

SOUND PROJECTIONS

AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE

EDITOR:  KOFI NATAMBU

WINTER, 2019

VOLUME SIX       NUMBER THREE

ANTHONY BRAXTON

 

Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:

ISAAC HAYES

(December 29—January 4)

THOM BELL

(January 5-11)

THE O'JAYS

(January 12-18)

OTIS REDDING

(January 19-25)

BOOKER T. JONES
(January 26-February 1)

THE STYLISTICS

(February 2-8)

THE STAPLE SINGERS

(February 9-15)

OTIS RUSH

(February 16-22)

ERROLL GARNER

(February 23-March 1)

EARL HINES

(March 2-8)

BO DIDDLEY

(March 9–15)

BIG BILL BROONZY

(March 16–22)


https://www.allmusic.com/artist/otis-redding-mn0000414251/biography

Otis Redding 

(1941-1967)

Artist Biography by Mark Deming

 

Otis Redding was one of the most powerful and influential artists to emerge from the Southern Soul music community in the '60s. A bold, physically imposing performer whose rough but expressive voice was equally capable of communicating joy, confidence, or heartache, Redding brought a passion and gravity to his vocals that was matched by few of his peers. He was also a gifted songwriter with a keen understanding of the creative possibilities of the recording process. Redding was born in 1941, and he hit the road in 1958 to sing with an R&B combo, Johnny Jenkins & the Pinetoppers. In 1962, Redding traveled to Memphis, Tennessee with Jenkins when the latter scheduled a recording session for Stax Records. When Jenkins wrapped up early, Redding cut a song of his own, "These Arms of Mine," in 40 minutes; Stax released it as a single in May 1963, and the song became a major R&B hit and a modest success on the Pop charts. Over the next four years, Redding would cut a handful of soul classics: "Mr. Pitiful," "That's How Strong My Love Is," "I've Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now)," "Respect," "Tramp" (a duet with Carla Thomas), and "Shake." In 1967, Redding seemed poised for a major breakthrough with a legendary set at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival that solidified his status with hip rock & roll fans. Sadly, Redding would not live to see his greatest triumph: his most ambitious single, "(Sittin' on The) Dock of the Bay," was released little over a month after his death in a place crash, becoming his first number one Pop hit and his signature tune. Redding would become a bigger star in death than in life, and his recordings would be regularly re-released and repackaged in the years to come, as his legend and his influence lived on into the 21st century.

Otis Ray Redding, Jr. was born on September 9, 1941 in Dawson, Georgia. His father was a sharecropper and part-time preacher who also worked at Robins Air Force Base near Macon. When Otis was three, his family moved to Macon, settling into the Tindall Heights housing project. He got his first experience as a musician singing in the choir at Macon's Vineville Baptist Church, and as a pre-teen, he learned to play guitar, piano, and drums. By the time Redding was in high school, he was a member of the school band, and was regularly performing as part of a Sunday Morning gospel broadcast on Macon's WIBB-AM. When he was 17, Redding signed up to compete in a weekly teen talent show at Macon's Douglass Theater; he ended up winning the $5.00 grand prize 15 times in a row before he was barred from competition. Around the same time, Redding dropped out of school and joined the Upsetters, the band that had backed up Little Richard before the flamboyant piano man quit rock & roll to sing the gospel. Hoping to advance his career, Redding moved to Los Angeles in 1960, where he honed his songwriting chops and hooked up with a band called the Shooters. "She's Alright," credited to the Shooters featuring Otis, was Redding's first single release, but he soon returned to Macon, where he teamed up with guitarist Johnny Jenkins and his group the Pinetoppers; Redding sang lead with the group and also served as Jenkins' chauffeur, since the guitarist lacked a license to drive.

In early 1962, Otis Redding & the Pinetoppers issued a small label single, "Fat Gal" b/w "Shout Bamalama," and a few months later, Jenkins was invited to record some material for Stax Records, the up-and-coming R&B label based in Memphis, Tennessee. Redding drove Jenkins to the studio and tagged along for the session; Jenkins wasn't having a good day and ended up calling it quits early. With 40 minutes left on the session clock, Redding suggested they give one of his songs a try, and with Jenkins on guitar, Otis and the studio band quickly completed a take of "These Arms of Mine." Stax wasted no time signing Redding to their Volt Records subsidiary, and "These Arms of Mine" was released in November 1962; the single rose to number 20 on the R&B charts, and crossed over to the pop charts, peaking at number 85. Redding's follow-up, "That's What My Heart Needs," arrived the following October, and peaked at 27 on the R&B charts, but a stretch of singles released in 1964 failed to make much of impression.

Redding's luck changed in 1965. In January of that year, he released "That's How Strong My Love Is," which hit number 2 R&B and 71 Pop, while the B-side, "Mr. Pitiful," also earned airplay, with the song going to 10 R&B and just missed hitting the Pop Top 40, stalling at 41. Redding's masterful "I've Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now)," issued in May 1965, shot to number 2 R&B, and became his first single to make the Pop Top 40, peaking at 21. Redding landed another crossover hit in September 1965, as his song "Respect" hit number four R&B and 35 Pop. By this time, Redding was becoming more ambitious as an artist, focusing on his songwriting skills, learning to play guitar, and becoming more involved with the arrangements and production on his sessions, helping to craft horn arrangements even though he couldn't write sheet music. He was also a tireless live performer, touring frequently and making sure he upstaged the other artists on the bill, as well as a savvy businessman, operating a successful music publishing concern and successfully investing in real estate and the stock market. In 1966, Redding also released two albums, The Great Otis Redding Sings Soul Ballads and Otis Blue: Otis Redding Sings Soul; he miraculously wrote and recorded most of the latter in a single day.

In 1966, Redding released a bold, impassioned cover of the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction" that was yet another R&B and Pop hit and led some to speculate that perhaps Redding was the true author of the song. That same year, he was honored by the NAACP, and played an extended engagement at the Whisky A Go Go on Hollywood's Sunset Strip; he was the first major soul artist to play the historic venue, and the buzz over his appearances helped boost his reputation with white rock & roll fans. Later that year, Redding and several other Stax and Volt Records artists were booked for a package tour of Europe and the United Kingdom, where they were greeted as conquering heroes; the Beatles famously sent a limousine to pick Redding up when he arrived at the airport for his London gig. The British music magazine Melody Maker named Redding the Best Vocalist of 1966, an honor that had previously gone to Elvis Presley for ten consecutive years. Redding released two strong and eclectic albums in 1966, The Soul Album and Complete and Unbelievable: The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul, which found him exploring contemporary pop tunes and old standards in his trademark soulful style, and a cut from Dictionary of Soul, an impassioned interpretation of "Try a Little Tenderness," became one of his biggest hits to date and a highlight of his live shows.

In early 1967, Redding headed into the studio with fellow soul star Carla Thomas to record a duet album, King & Queen, which spawned a pair of hits, "Tramp" and "Knock on Wood." Redding also introduced a protege, vocalist Arthur Conley, and a tune Redding produced for Conley, "Sweet Soul Music," became a million-selling hit. After the release of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band took psychedelia to the top of the charts and became a clarion call for the burgeoning hippie movement, Redding was inspired to write more thematically and musically ambitious material, and he solidified his reputation with what he called "the love crowd" with an electrifying performance at the Monterey Pop Festival, where he handily won over the crowd despite being the only deep soul artist on the bill. He next returned to Europe for more touring, and upon returning began work on new material, including a song he regarded as a creative breakthrough, "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay." Redding recorded the song at the Stax Studio in December 1967, and a few days later he and his band set out to play a string of dates in the Midwest. On December 10, 1967, Redding and his band boarded his Beechcraft H18 airplane en route to Madison, Wisconsin for another club date; the plane struggled in bad weather and crashed into Lake Monona in Wisconsin's Dane County. The crash claimed the lives of Redding and everyone else on board, except for Ben Cauley of the Bar-Kays. Redding was only 26 when he died.

"(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" was released in January 1968 and quickly became Redding's biggest hit, topping both the Pop and R&B charts, earning two Grammy awards, and maturing into a much-covered standard. An LP collection of single sides and unreleased cuts, titled The Dock of the Bay, followed in February 1968, and it was the first of a long string of albums compiled from the material Redding cut in his seven-year recording career. In 1989, Redding was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, he was granted membership into the BMI Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1994, and he received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999

https://otisredding.com/

https://otisredding.com/about/

Life and music of Otis Redding

 

Born in Dawson, Ga., Otis Redding, Jr. and his family moved to Macon when he was two years old. At an early age, he began his career as a singer and musician in the choir of the Vineville Baptist Church. He attended Ballard Hudson High School and participated in the school band. As a teenager, he began to compete in the Douglass Theatre talent shows for the five-dollar prize. After winning 15 times straight, Otis was no longer allowed to compete.

Otis joined Johnny Jenkins and the Pinetoppers in 1958, and would also sing at the “Teenage Party” talent shows sponsored by local celebrity disc jockey King Bee, Hamp Swain, on Saturday mornings initially at the Roxy Theater and later at the Douglass Theatre in Macon.

Otis drove Johnny Jenkins to Memphis, Tenn., for a recording session in August 1962 at Stax Records. At the end of the session, Stax co-owner Jim Stewart allowed Otis to cut a couple of songs with the remaining studio time. The result was “These Arms Of Mine”, released in 1962. This was the first of many hit singles (including classics “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long”, “respect” and “Try A Little Tenderness”) that Redding enjoyed during his tragically short career. After nine months, he was invited to perform at the Apollo Theatre for a live recording and would go on to showcase his dance movements with “Shake” and “Satisfaction.”

After years of ambition and drive, Otis Redding’s sacrifices paid off. He appeared throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and the Caribbean. His concert tours were among the biggest box office smashes of any touring performer during his time. He was nominated in three categories by the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences (NARAS) for recordings he made during 1967. 1968 was destined to be the greatest year of his career with appearances slated at such locations at New York’s Philharmonic Hall and Washington’s Constitution Hall. Redding was booked for several major television network appearances including The Ed Sullivan Show and The Smothers Brothers Show. He was posthumously inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame in 1981 and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1989. In 1999, he was recognized with a Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award.

In 1970, Warner Brothers released an album of live recordings from the June 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival, featuring Otis Redding on one side, and Jimi Hendrix on the other. This record is evidence that the hip white audiences, better known as the “love crowd”, were digging Otis Redding just as much as the black audiences for whom he had always played. His energy and excitement, his showmanship, and his relationship with the crowd made Redding a master as a performer who had the rare gift of being able to reach audiences the world over.

The song

It was unlike anything Redding had ever written, influenced by his admiration for the Beatles’ classic “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” album. Otis played The Beatles’ album constantly during a week he had spent on a houseboat in Sausalito when performing at San Francisco’s Basin Street West in August 1967. Just sitting’ on the dock, looking out at the bay, it’s easy to see where Otis got the inspiration for the song, “(Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay”.

It had a lilt, memorable hook, and a great story. While it was typical of Redding’s previous recordings, it signaled his creative expansion as a writer and artist. That song became Otis Redding’s biggest worldwide hit and signature. This was Otis’ final recording before the plane crash that took his life in December 1967. In September 1987, Atlantic Records released “The Otis Redding Story”, a two volume record set featuring Otis’ most unique and rare hits, such as “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.” “Respect,” “Pain In My Heart,” “Satisfaction” and of course “(Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay.”

Above all, Otis was a family man. He met his wife, Zelma Atwood, in 1959 and they married in August 1961. Together they have three children: Dexter, Karla, Otis III, and Demetria, who was adopted after Otis’ death. His family was close to his heart and soul. In 1965, he moved them into a spacious 300-acre property, “The Big O Ranch” in Round Oak, Ga., affectionately named after “The Big O” himself.

Zelma has carried on as the family matriarch and continued to rear their children to successful adulthood in honor of her late husband. Sons, Dexter and Otis, III. are active music producers and songwriters, both traveling internationally. Dexter, who resides in Jacksonville, FL also is co-manager in two food franchise operations. Karla is a successful and influential entrepreneur having founded and formerly managed Karla’s Shoe Boutique with her mother and partner, in downtown Macon for almost 20 years. Today, she is the executive director of the Otis Redding Foundation, established in memory of her father. Zelma is the executrix over the Redding Estate where she, along with Karla, manages daily requests for songs in commercials, music sampling, the use of Otis’ name and image, the Otis Redding Memorial Fund and the Scholarship Foundation. Demetria is in public health administration.

As president of Redwal Music Co., Inc., Otis was very active in the company’s operation and was directly responsible for the company’s leadership in the music publishing field. To date, the company has copyrighted over 200 commercially successful songs and published many songs that have sold in excess of one million copies each.

The idea that music could be a universal force, bringing together different races and cultures, was central to Otis’ personal philosophy and reflected in his everyday life. At a time when it may not have been considered politically correct, Redding had a white manager, Phil Walden, and a racially mixed band. He took care of business, setting up his own publishing and record label, Jotis Records, making unprecedented moves for a black music artist in the ’60s. While it was not Otis’ prime motivation, he was seen as a role model by blacks. He was someone who got paid and paid well without the usual horror stories of being ripped off by promoters, agents, managers, or record company executives.

Otis Redding’s prowess as a businessman led him to form his own label, Jotis records, in 1965. In addition to his many business interests in fields related to music, he was engaged in other business interests in his native state such as real estate, investments, stocks, and bonds. His business acumen meant that Otis knew how to earn and invest his money, unlike some of the other soul artists of the ’60s. In addition to the 300-acre Big-O Ranch, complete with a three-story home, livestock and a three and a half acre lake with fish, Redding acquired two private planes. It was his twin-engine Beechcraft that he was riding on that tragic day, December 10, 1967 when it crashed into Lake Monona in Madison Wis. The world lost a great musician and a great man on that day.

His music and his legacy, however, lives on.

HONORS

1966 – NAACP Lifetime Membership Award

1966 – Voted favorite for Home Of The Blues Award, London

1966 – Melody Maker Magazine, London, England. Awarded International Male Vocalist of the Year
(note: this honor had gone to Elvis Presley for 10 years prior to Redding’s selection)

1967 – “Sweet Soul Music” reaches 1 million singles, Gold Award

1968 – Georgia House of Representatives expressed deep regrets for loss

1968 – Billboard Charts “History Of Otis Redding” #1

1968 – Annual R&B Award, Record World Magazine

1969 – Grammy Best R&B Vocal Performance for “(Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay”

1969 – Grammy Best Rhythm & Blues Song for “(Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay”

1969 – Rhythm and Blues Hall of Fame, Induction, Britain

1981 – The Georgia Music Hall of Fame, Induction

1986 – Black Gold Legend Award

1988 – Received Gold Album for “History of Otis Redding”

1989 – Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Induction

1993 – Governor’s Award, Memphis, Tennessee, Charter

1993 – United States Postal Service, Stamp Issued

1994 – National Academy of Popular Music presents Otis Redding with Songwriter’s Hall of Fame Induction.

1994 – BMI Songwriters Hall Of Fame

1998 – Grammy Hall Of Fame Induction “Respect”

1999 – Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award

2002 – Honored with a memorial statue in Macon, GA (Gateway Park)

2006 – Rhythm & Blues Foundation Pioneer Award

2006 – Billboard Excellence Award

2007 – Hollywood Rockwalk

2011 – Grammy Hall Of Fame Induction “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long”

2013 – Rhythm and Blues Hall Of Fame Induction

2014 – The Very Best Of Otis Redding Certified Double Platinum

2014 – Honored with Gibson Art Guitar on the Sunset Strip

2015 – Grammy Hall Of Fame Induction “Try A Little Tenderness”

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/in-memory-of-otis-redding-and-his-revolution

Culture Desk

In Memory of Otis Redding and His Revolution

by Jonathan Gould

December 10, 2017

The New Yorker

Otis Redding is pictured performing at the Monterey Pop Festival in June, 1967. Later that year, the multitalented singer, songwriter, and producer died at the age of twenty-six. Photograph by Bruce Fleming / AP
 

Fifty years ago, on December 10, 1967, a private plane carrying Otis Redding and the members of his touring band stalled on its final approach to the municipal airport in Madison, Wisconsin, and crashed into the waters of Lake Monona, killing all but one of the eight people onboard. Though Redding was only twenty-six years old at the time of his death, he was regarded by growing numbers of black and white listeners in the United States and Europe as the most charismatic and beloved soul singer of his generation, the male counterpart to Aretha Franklin, whom he had recently endowed with the hit song “Respect.” In the preceding year, on the strength of his triumphant tours of Britain, France, and Scandinavia, his appearances at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, and his domineering performance at the Monterey Pop Festival, Redding had pushed beyond the commercial constraints of the so-called “Chitlin’ Circuit” of ghetto theatres and Southern night clubs. He was determined to become the first African-American artist to connect with the burgeoning audience for album rock that had transformed the world of popular music since the arrival of the Beatles in America, in 1964.
Redding’s success with this new, ostensibly hip, predominantly white audience had brought him to a turning point in his career. Thrilled with the results of a throat surgery that left his voice stronger and suppler than ever before, he resolved to scale back his relentless schedule of live performances in order to place a greater emphasis on recording, songwriting, and production. In the weeks before his death, he had written and recorded a spate of ambitious new songs. One of these, the contemplative ballad “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay,” became his self-written epitaph when it was released as a single, in January of 1968. A sombre overture to the year of the Tet Offensive, the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert Kennedy, and the election of Richard Nixon as President, the song went on to become the first posthumous No. 1 record in the history of the Billboard charts, selling more than two million copies and earning Redding the unequivocal “crossover” hit he had sought since his début on the Memphis-based label Stax, in 1962. To this day, according to the performance-rights organization BMI, “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” remains one of the most frequently played (and streamed) recordings in the annals of American music.

In an age of pop culture replete with African-American superstars like Michael Jackson, Prince, Usher, Kanye West, and Jay-Z, it is hard for modern audiences to appreciate how revolutionary the self-presentations of soul singers like Otis Redding were when they first came on the scene. Prior to the mid-fifties, it had simply been taboo for a black man to perform in an overtly sexualized manner in front of a white audience in America. (Female black entertainers, by contrast, had been all but required to do so.) In the South, especially, the social psychology of the Jim Crow regime was founded on a paranoid fantasy of interracial rape that was institutionalized by the press and popular culture in the malignant stereotype of the “black brute,” which explicitly sexualized the threat posed by black men to white women and white supremacy. Born in Georgia in 1941, the same year as Emmett Till, Otis Redding grew up in a world where any “suggestive” behavior by a black male in the presence of whites was potentially suicidal.

This dire imperative began to change with the proliferation of black-oriented radio stations, in the nineteen-fifties, which enabled rhythm-and-blues singers like Fats Domino, Little Richard, and Ray Charles to sell large numbers of their records, sight unseen, to white teen-agers. Yet it was significant that these early black crossover stars were piano players, who performed behind keyboards, and whose sexuality was further qualified, in Domino’s case, by his corpulence; in Charles’s case, by his blindness; and, in Richard’s case, by the effeminacy that he deliberately played up as a way of neutering the threat of his outlandish stage presence. It was no accident that the one black crossover star of the nineteen-fifties who made no effort to qualify his sexuality, the guitarist Chuck Berry, was also the one black star to be arrested, convicted, and imprisoned, in 1960, on a trumped-up morals charge. By that time, a new contingent of black singers led by Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson was making its mark on white listeners with a more polished style of self-presentation that became the model for Berry Gordy’s carefully choreographed Motown groups.

Otis Redding was something else again. When he came up, in 1962, he was a completely unschooled performer who stood stock still onstage as he sang the pining, courtly ballads that brought him his first success. Over time, however, as his repertoire broadened to include driving, up-tempo songs, Redding found a way to use his imposing size and presence as a foil for his heartfelt emotionality, eschewing the conventions of graceful stagecraft in favor of a raw physicality that earned him comparisons to athletes like the football star Jim Brown. Marching in place to keep pace with the beat, pumping his fists in the air, striding across stages with a long-legged gait that parodied his “down home” origins, Redding’s confident yet unaffected eroticism epitomized the African-American ideal of a “natural man.” White audiences of the time had never seen anything like it. The effect was so powerful that Bob Weir, of the Grateful Dead, said, of Redding’s performance at the Monterey Pop Festival, “I was pretty sure I’d seen God onstage.”

And then he was no more. Redding’s sudden death thrust him into the ranks of a mythic group of musical performers that included Bix Beiderbecke, Robert Johnson, Hank Williams, Charlie Parker, Buddy Holly, Patsy Cline, and Redding’s own favorite, Sam Cooke––artists whose careers ended not only before their time but in their absolute prime, when there was every reason to expect that their finest work was yet to come. (Eerily, within a few years, he would be joined in this company by two of his co-stars at Monterey, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin.) Redding’s record labels, Stax and Atlantic, culled enough material from the unmixed and unfinished tracks he recorded in the fall of 1967 to release a series of singles and albums in the years ahead. Some of these records, such as the singles “Hard to Handle,” “I’ve Got Dreams to Remember” (co-written with his wife, Zelma), and “Love Man,” stood with his very best work. But, inevitably, they still only hinted at what might have been. The informality of the Stax studio had afforded Redding the freedom to function, uncredited, as the producer and arranger on the records he made there. There is no question that he would have continued in this vein, blazing a path that musical auteurs like Sly Stone, Marvin Gaye, and Stevie Wonder would follow with the self-produced albums that established them as mainstream pop stars, in the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies.

In 2007, forty years on, a panel of artists, critics, and music-business professionals assembled by Rolling Stone ranked Otis Redding eighth on a list of the “100 Greatest Singers of All Time.” This placed him in a constellation of talent that included his contemporaries Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and James Brown, who together represented the greatest generation of church-bred African-American singers in the history of popular music. What distinguished Redding in this august company was the heartbreaking brevity of his career. In his five short years as a professional entertainer, his incomparable voice and vocal persona established him as soul music’s foremost apostle of devotion, a singer who implored his listeners to “try a little tenderness” with a ferocity that defied the meaning of the word. His singular combination of strength and sensitivity, dignity and self-discipline, made him the musical embodiment of the “soul force” that Martin Luther King, Jr., extolled in his epic “I Have a Dream” speech as the African-American counterweight to generations of racist oppression. In the way he looked and the way he sang and the way he led his tragically unfinished life, this princely son of Georgia sharecroppers was a one-man repudiation of the depraved doctrine of “white supremacy,” whose dark vestiges still contaminate our world.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

• Jonathan Gould is the author of “Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain & America,” and “Otis Redding: An Unfinished Life.”
  
  
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https://www.rockhall.com/inductees/otis-redding

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Otis Redding

Induction:  1989

Category:  Performers

Biography

Although his career was relatively brief, cut short by a tragic plane crash, Otis Redding was a singer of such commanding stature that to this day he embodies the essence of soul music in its purest form.

His name is synonymous with the term soul, music that arose out of the black experience in America through the transmutation of gospel and rhythm & blues into a form of funky, secular testifying. Redding left behind a legacy of recordings made during the four-year period from his first sessions for Stax/Volt Records in 1963 until his death in 1967. Although he consistently impacted the R&B charts beginning with "Pain In My Heart" in 1964, none of his singles fared better than Number Twenty-One on the pop Top Forty until the posthumous release of “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay.”

That landmark song, recorded just four days before Redding’s death, went to Number One and stayed there for four weeks in early 1968. It marked a new direction for the singer toward a soul-folk-pop synthesis that drew from such influences as Bob Dylan and the new breed of performers at the Monterey International Pop Festival, at which Redding performed.

Redding’s relatively unspectacular showing on the pop charts at a time when he was laying down some of the most titanic soul ever recorded—classics like “Respect” (a song he wrote, later covered by Aretha Franklin), “Try a Little Tenderness” and his terse, funky deconstruction of the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction”—may mean that he was too intensely soulful for the mainstream market at that time. He was, in many ways, larger than life. Redding, a proudly self-professed country boy from Macon, Georgia, had it all: a big, gravelly voice, an enormous natural talent for songwriting and arranging, a hard-working nature and a generous disposition. As a singer, he styled himself after Little Richard (a fellow Macon native) and Sam Cooke in the early days, but he gradually acquired his own voice, imparting gruff, syncopated inflections to ballad and uptempo material.

Redding was discovered while singing with Macon guitarist Johnny Jenkins’ band, the Pinetoppers, and first recorded as a member of that group for the tiny Confederate label in 1960. When Jenkins was booked to cut some sides at Stax Records in Memphis in October 1962, Redding was given an opportunity at the end of a session, and he recorded “These Arms of Mine,” a stately, self-penned ballad. Redding thereupon embarked upon a fruitful recording career as a staple of the Stax roster, collaborating with Booker T. and the M.G.s (house band at the Stax studio), especially guitarist Steve Cropper. Redding himself was a guitarist, and he integrally involved himself with the arrangements of his songs, whistling parts he envisaged to the horn section. His recording sessions were galvanic, impassioned and intense—the very apotheosis of soul. Donald “Duck” Dunn, bassist with the M.G.s, recalls: “Otis would come in, and he’d just bring everybody up. You wanted to play with Otis. He brought out the best in you.”

There was earthiness and candor in his every performance, be it slow, soulful ballads like “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” or fast-paced numbers such as “I Can’t Turn You Loose.” Such albums as Otis Blue: Otis Redding Sings Soul—which was recorded in a single 24-hour period in 1965—are a virtual soul-music primer. In concert, Redding routinely incited pandemonium through the thunderous intensity of his performances, which included vocal ad-libs and false endings—devices that were evident in his memorable rendition of “Try a Little Tenderness” at the Monterey International Pop Festival on June 17, 1967. Redding stole the show at Monterey, as a wide-eyed new audience—the youthful counterculture—enthusiastically opened up to him. Given that launching pad and his songwriting breakthrough with “Sittin’ On (The Dock of the Bay),” Redding was poised for superstardom at the time his twin-engine Beechcraft crashed into Wisconsin’s Lake Monona on December 10, 1967, killing him and four members of his touring band, the Bar-Kays.


Inductee: Otis Redding (born September 9, 1941, died December 10, 1967)

https://www.npr.org/2017/05/13/528116058/otis-reddings-unfinished-life-still-resonates 

 

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Otis Redding's 'Unfinished Life' Still Resonates

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May 13, 2017
Heard on Weekend Edition Saturday
by Scott Simon and 

Peter Breslow 

NPR

 

Otis Redding performs on the TV show Ready Steady Go in 1966. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images 

 

This year marks 50 years since Otis Redding died. He'd ignited the crowd at the Monterey Pop Festival in the summer of 1967; later that year, he and his band were en route to a show in Madison, Wisc., when their plane hit rough weather and crashed in an icy lake. Redding was 26 years old.

Half a century later, Redding's influence as a singer and spirit of soul music remains. Author Jonathan Gould, who's written a new biography called Otis Redding: An Unfinished Life, joined NPR's Scott Simon to discuss the singer's relatively short, yet profoundly impactful career. Hear their conversation at the audio link, and read on for an edited transcript.

Author Interviews

'Like An Avalanche': Otis Redding's Unstoppable Crossover

Scott Simon: You open your book with the most stunning quote from Bob Weir, who had seen Otis Redding at Monterey.

Jonathan Gould: Bob Weir, of course, was the rhythm guitarist in the Grateful Dead, and his comment about Otis was that he was pretty sure that he had seen God onstage. I think that that sort of summed up the response of the whole crowd there, which had never really seen anything onstage quite like this.

How did Redding walk into the door of Stax Records in Memphis?

This is the Hollywood aspect of Otis' story. He was a singer in a band that was led by a very flamboyant guitarist named Johnny Jenkins. They were managed by the young white college boy in Macon [Ga.] who eventually went on to manage Otis as well — but at that time, the whole focus of Phil Walden, his future manager, was on Johnny Jenkins. And Phil and a colorful character named Joe Galkin engineered an opportunity for Johnny Jenkins and Otis Redding to record at Stax Records in Memphis. The plan called for Otis to drive Johnny to Memphis from Macon, and then hopefully to find a chance to sing after Johnny had finished his work there.

And the way the session played out was that Johnny impressed no one at Stax. After a few hours Jim Stewart, who was the owner and engineer at Stax, announced to Joe Galkin that he really didn't think that he was going to be able to make any kind of a record with this fellow. And Galkin pointed out that Atlantic Records had fronted a certain amount of money for this session and there was still time on the clock, and [he] said, "Well, Otis had a ballad that he wanted to sing." And the ballad turned out to be "These Arms Of Mine."

YouTube

 

It's just a little slip of a song; it's all Otis. But because there's so little there, my sense is it gave him nothing but a feeling to work with, and he was able to just fill all the available space on that record with his voice.

Let me ask you about another song – it's identified more with Aretha Franklin, but "Respect" is an Otis Redding song, and he certainly made a hit out of it, too.
 

Well, "Respect" was an important record for Otis — his first really successful "groove song," as they called them at Stax. And, it's a remarkable record, in part because of the power of the band. But at the same time, Otis had developed an extraordinary ability as a horn arranger, and it was all the more impressive because Otis was a "head arranger." He would simply sing these horn lines to the horn players — make them up in his head and put them together in the studio.

Music News

'Respect' Wasn't A Feminist Anthem Until Aretha Franklin Made It One

This is what I'll refer to as a complex love song. He was on the road.

Yes indeed, Otis spent most of his life on the road. He was also enormously devoted to his wife, Zelma, and their children, who lived back in Macon. That said, he had innumerable liaisons with women on the road, and this made for a complicated situation in his life. And "Respect" is a little odd, because in some ways, he's sort of putting himself in the position of his wife rather than himself. But it's a song about the idea that when he comes home, he needs to be treated with respect, and what happens elsewhere — that's another matter.

I didn't know until your book came along that Bing Crosby had recorded a version of "Try A Little Tenderness" — written by Jimmy Campbell, Reg Connelly and Harry Woods — back in 1933. What did Otis Redding bring to this? Because I think of it as an Otis Redding song.

YouTube

 

Well, I think everybody does. His cover of it was so revolutionary that I think from that point on it became his song. But it had been a Tin Pan Alley standard — everybody had recorded it. And it's a sentimental song, and what Otis did with it was he transformed it musically.

He begins by singing the song the way everybody sings it, as a slow ballad. And slowly, over the course of the opening verses, the instruments come in and the rhythmic intensity of the song starts to increase. Then, at a certain point, it moves from his original métier, which was the 12/8 ballad, into a ferocious, 4/4, stomping groove. And at that point, of course, the whole tenor of the lyrics change. It's a song about tenderness, but there's nothing tender about the way Otis sings the last few verses of the song.

Finally, as we're looking at Otis Redding's development as a singer, there's "(Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay." Did he really write it on the dock of a bay?

Otis Redding

An Unfinished Life

by Jonathan Gould

Hardcover, 533 pages
purchase

I think he might have begun it there. He spent some time in California toward the end of the summer of 1967. But Otis found himself at the end of that summer — his voice was troubling him, he would have to have a voice operation in a couple of weeks — looking back on what he had achieved and what he hadn't achieved. What he hadn't achieved was that — while he had big hits, including crossover hits that were top 40 hits — he hadn't achieved a No. 1 record. He hadn't achieved a million-selling record. But in California, he had time to reflect on where he had been and a little bit on where he was going.

There's great melancholy in this song, in lines like "Cause I've had nothing to live for / Looks like nothing's gonna come my way." But there's also a sense of peace and acceptance.

It's a very complicated song. It's about many things. The odd thing about the song is that at the time he wrote [it], Otis had everything to live for. He had not reached some kind of a dead end in his life. On the contrary, he was on the cusp of a new kind of musical success – and, I truly believe, a new kind of commercial success, also. It's a strange reflection on a moment in his life, in that way.

And then, because it came out after his death and was so wildly successful after his death, it has become regarded as kind of his epitaph.

Yeah, and it is that. It only adds to the question that hangs over his whole career and his whole life, which is what might have been, where he might have gone. And, of course, that's the premonition that lies in "(Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay."

https://web.musicaficionado.com/main.html#!/article/the_incredible_inspiring_story_of_otis_redding_by_


The Incredible, Inspiring Story of Otis Redding
by Gene Santoro
Music Aficionado

Photo by Elaine Mayes / 

Courtesy of Morrison Hotel Gallery

17 Otis Redding Songs You Should Know
 

Otis Redding

Fifty years ago, Otis Redding met his end in a tragic plane crash. He was 26.

The sad irony was, his life was snuffed just as his creativity and career were ascending toward new heights.

He worked his way up from the bottom, a teenaged singer-chauffeur on the chitlin' circuit who landed a deal with the then-struggling, now-legendary Stax-Volt label.

There, starting with These Arms of Mine in 1962, he rode a string of hit ballads, driven by his smooth-but-scruffy timbre, sure-footed phrasing, seductive inflections, and dynamic presence.

Otis Redding Essentials

Otis Redding

But he soon enough showed his more raucous side, on hits like Try A Little Tenderness and Respect; his "got-ta-got-ta-got-ta" became his tagline. By the mid-1960s, he toured far and wide and his records sold big. He proudly collected status trophies, like a 300-acre ranch and private plane.

That small craft, overloaded and needing maintenance, crashed into a Wisconsin lake and killed him, mere months after his wildly acclaimed appearance at Monterey Pop.
After Redding's death, (Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay streaked to number one and copped two Grammy awards; his music proliferated across movie and TV soundtracks; and he became immortal.

Here's how it happened.

Early Days

 

Born in Georgia in 1941, Redding, like so many African-American musicians, sang in the local Baptist church. The gospel melismas and dramatic phrasing that marked his unique vocals were rooted in those ecstatic Macon experiences.

He also learned guitar, piano, and drums; sang and played with the high school band; and won the top five-dollar prize at a Macon theater's talent show—fifteen times in a row.

At 15, he quit school to take Little Richard's place fronting the Upsetters; the flamboyant rocker had quit "the devil's music" and gone gospel. So the shy teenager filled in for his outrageous idol and toured the chitlin' circuit, home to black acts in the segregated South. A year later, he began singing with what became Johnny Jenkins and the Pinetoppers.

Spunky
 

Johnny Jenkins

Jenkins, another Maconite, was a fiery left-handed blues guitar slinger whose flashy onstage showmanship, common around the chitlin' circuit, made him a local legend—and possibly one of Hendrix's influences. He'd later have a minor hit for Stax, called Spunky.

On the road with Jenkins in 1961, Redding inked a deal with a tiny label with an ironic name: Confederate Records. His second single, "Shout Bamalama," is a Little Richard knockoff. Predictably, it didn't go far.

Because Jenkins didn't have a driver's license, Redding doubled as his chauffeur and roadie. And so it happened in August 1962 that he drove Jenkins to Memphis for a recording session at a converted movie theater—the studio for a regional label named Stax-Volt.

The tall, handsome, athletic singer pestered Stax guitarist Steve Cropper for an audition. Finally Cropper agreed to play piano while Redding crooned. He recalls, "Hairs and goose bumps stood up on my arms."

These Arms of Mine

Otis Redding

Cropper suggested to label head Jim Stewart and Jenkins' manager, Phil Walden, that they use the time left over from Jenkins' session to roll the tape on Redding. With Jenkins on guitar and Cropper on piano, 21-year-old Redding cut the ballad that riveted Cropper, "These Arms of Mine."
It was the beginning of everything. The single went to number 9 on the Billboard Hot Charts, eventually sold 800,000 copies, and would go on to grace a boxful of movie and TV soundtracks.

If you took a little of Sam Cooke and a little of Little Richard and poured it in a jar and shook it up and poured it out, you'd get Otis Redding.

Mr. Pitiful

Phil Walden, yet another Maconite, was one shrewd, big-eared guy; he'd later start the Capricorn label and launch the Allman Brothers. What he saw and heard that day in Memphis got him to switch his focus from Jenkins to Redding.

Pain In My Heart

Otis Redding
 

Otis was soon back in the Stax studio, cutting tunes over the next year that became his debut album, Pain In My Heart. He was still feeling his way, as you can hear with Mary's Little Lamb, his worst-selling single. The aching title track sparked lawsuits because of its resemblance to Irma Thomas's Ruler of My Heart.

The road wasn't always smooth. But he had Walden's support, and was forging a close creative relationship with Cropper, who'd co-write and arrange most of his hits. And he kept honing his craft, slotting into the top 100 charts time after time with the slow, yearning ballads that became his trademark: Chained and Bound, That's How Strong My Love Is, and Come To Me.

The Great Otis Redding Sings Soul Ballads

Otis Redding

When a southern DJ dubbed him "Mr. Pitiful," he and Cropper huddled and wrote another hit song with that title. These tunes became the core of his second album, The Great Otis Redding Sings Soul Ballads, released in spring 1965.
Meantime, he kept touring incessantly. In late 1963, he appeared at New York's famed Apollo Theater as part of a multi-group live recording—a staple of the time—that also featured Wilson Pickett's Falcons (I Found A Love), Ben E. King, and Rufus Thomas.

He'd hit a critical threshold.

Otis Blue

 

Now married and constantly working, Redding was about to ratchet the pace up—and redefine his musical persona in ways that made his rising star shine brighter.
In summer 1965, he and the Stax studio crew put together his next album, after 10 of its 11 tunes were written in 24 frenetic July hours. The sound was more expansive, more muscular, with varied tempos.

Otis Blue

Otis Redding

I've Been Loving You Too Long, which became one of his signature pleading smashes, was co-penned with Impressions' lead singer Jerry Butler. Ole Man Trouble, with its powerful defining guitar lick, grittily synthesizes the fundamental Stax-Volt sensibility: a combo of blues, soul, and country. "Respect" unveils another facet of this rapidly polishing gem: a hard-driving, uptempo plea that showcases Redding's gruff vocals with their surgical timing surfing between the beats, tugging at heartstrings while propelling dancing feet.

His lyrics and voice don't convey despair as much as recognition and resignation.

The Stax house band, aka the MGs, usually concocted head charts—arrangements worked out from Redding's ideas and their improvisations. As Cropper explains, "With Otis, it was all about feeling and expression. Most of his songs had just two or three chord changes, so there wasn't a lotta music there. The dynamics, the energy, the way we attacked it—that's hard to teach, and that's what made it."

Respect

Aretha Franklin

White garage bands, like the Vagrants with young guitarist Leslie West, covered "Respect" in local clubs. Two years later, Aretha Franklin would rearrange it and transform it into a feminist anthem.

A Change Is Gonna Come

Change Is Gonna Come

Otis Redding

Nothing if not driven, Redding plotted his next moves with Walden and Stax carefully. In 1965, he released a heartfelt homage to his idol Sam Cooke, A Change Is Gonna Come.
Cooke's brooding but stirring civil-rights anthem had a seemingly unlikely pair of inspirations: Bob Dylan's Blowin' In The Wind and Paul Robeson's Ol' Man River. It became a massive posthumous hit for Cooke, eerily foreshadowing Redding's fate with "(Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay."

A Change Is Gonna Come

Sam Cooke

But their situations otherwise were quite different. Cooke was killed in murky circumstances by a female motel manager. After the boy star of the gospel circuit had bolted from the church to become a secular star, believers never forgave him; many saw his death as divine retribution. But for everyone else, Cooke and Ray Charles had laid the musical foundations for the soul music that mingled gospel, blues, jazz, country, and rock and dominated much of the 1960s.

Cropper likes to say, "If you took a little of Sam Cooke and a little of Little Richard and poured it in a jar and shook it up and poured it out, you'd get Otis Redding." Like his heroes, Redding would mix up potent musical blends that drew legions of fans across America's color lines.

Live at the Whisky A Go Go

Redding and Stax were growing in tandem. His production companies, formed with Walden, signed new artists, his tours were very hot tickets, and he bought his 300-acre Georgia ranch, the Big O. Stax was claiming soul preeminence on the charts with stars like him, Percy Sledge, Clarence Carter, and Eddie Floyd. All the vectors pointed up.

In Person At the Whisky a Go Go (Live)

Otis Redding

That's when he decided to cut a live album at L.A.'s famed Whisky A Go Go. It wouldn't be released until after his death. But those jaw-dropping shows at the venue that launched the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield, the Mothers of Invention and the Doors, shook up the West Coast music scene—and helped reroute what was becoming classic rock.
Taj Mahal, whose vocals owe Redding many debts, and Bob Dylan were among the many musicians who were blown away. Dylan offered Just Like A Woman to Otis, who declined. And the glowing reviews in mainstream media like the L.A. Times helped make white America more aware of him.

Try A Little Tenderness

 

Try a Little Tenderness

Otis Redding

Ironically, what would be remembered as one of Redding's signature songs was composed in the 1930s. Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra both sang it; so did Frankie Laine, Jimmy Durante, and Mel Tormé. 

It's probably not surprising, then, that the song's publishers were terrified that Redding's "negro perspective" would ruin their cash cow, and tried to stop him from cutting it.

They were right about one thing: with charts by Stax producer Isaac Hayes and the MGs behind him, Redding transfigures the old song into a timeless blend of urgency and emotion, using dynamics and shifting instruments to propel the long rideout with an uplifting power rarely equaled.

It hit number 25 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, number four on Billboard's R&B charts; its popularity helped ease segregation on radio in many markets and thrilled white kids, though his audience was still mainly black.

Redding was now on the cusp of becoming a crossover star. For musicians, he already was. The Beatles sent a limo to pick him up when he hit London on the 1966 Stax package tour that crisscrossed Europe. Then he played the Fillmore to transported white crowds.

Tramp

King & Queen

Otis Redding & Carla Thomas

In early 1967, though, he took Jim Stewart's advice and pivoted briefly in a different direction. King & Queen mated "country boy" Otis with Carla Thomas's spitfire urbanity—the daughter of soul-music patriarch Rufus Thomas (Walking the Dog) was earning her MA in English at Howard University.

Stewart explained, "I knew his rawness and her sophistication would work." He was dead right. Tramp plays their personas off against each other perfectly, creating playful, crackling musical tension and release. The follow-up hit, Knock On Wood, finesses it.

Live In Europe

Otis Redding

A few months later, Redding was back touring Europe on his own—taking it by storm, recording his concerts, and releasing selections as Live In Europe. The only live album issued in his lifetime, it featured, along with some of his hits, his sly, romping version of the Rolling Stones' Satisfaction, and a wild revision of the Beatles' Day Tripper.

Inside Stax, some were nonplussed by this, worrying that he was losing focus—and would lose his black listeners. As Donald "Duck" Dunn recalls, "We weren't even aware of that rock stuff; it's not what we listened to. But Otis did."

By this point, there were no limits to what this sharecropper's son could pull into his expansive musical vision. His ambition to break down racial lines with his music would not be stopped.

Monterey Pop

 

Otis Redding: Next Steps

Otis Redding

For months, the word kept building about the eclectic, star-studded rock festival proposed for the site of the perennially popular Monterey Jazz Festival. The key San Francisco bands birthing American psychedelia—the Dead, the Airplane, Country Joe, Big Brother—would share the bill with established acts like the Mamas and Papas, Eric Burdon, and the Who.

It would also showcase Hendrix and Redding, two black headliners, for the fast-growing counterculture at its first mega-event. Redding got invited thanks to Jerry Wexler, the owlish, sharp-eared genius behind Atlantic's (and much of Stax's) soul-music catalog; he saw the chance to break through to mass white audiences.

Closing the Saturday night lineup, Redding rose to the occasion, delivering a performance that, even by his high-energy standards, was over the top.

He wooed the awestruck crowd like the women in his songs, and the music, driven to peaks by the pumped MGs and the Mar-Keys horns, sealed the deal with pungent rhythms, fierce dynamics, and razor-sharp ensembles.

"Tenderness" was the closer. Watching the movie clip now, seeing Otis shot in that blue haze and chiaroscuro, feels like an unsettling prophecy of his death. Then he's surfing that rideout against the swelling strains, telling the transfixed thousands, "I got to go, y'all, I don't wanna go."
And then he was gone.

Sittin' On The Dock Of The Bay

The Dock Of The Bay

Otis Redding

After the Festival hosannas, Redding continued his tour, performing at the Fillmore in San Francisco and wowing more white kids. He rented a houseboat in Sausalito, where he sketched out this deathless classic.

Cropper recalls, "That's where he got the idea of the ships coming into the bay. And that's about all he had: 'I watch the ships come in and I watch them roll away again.' I took that and finished the lyrics." Redding recorded a couple of takes days before his death. Afterwards, Cropper mixed it, adding the sounds of seagulls and crashing waves you'd hear on the shore, as his late partner had planned.
The whistling on the fadeout—very different from his usual workouts—was redubbed by Redding's tour bandleader; Otis, apparently, was a lousy whistler.

But in one elliptical, ruminative song, he captured the elegiac sense of twilight descending across a torn and divided America.

His lyrics and voice don't convey despair as much as recognition and resignation. The unusual major-chord progression hints at dusk's lingering beauties as well as night's inevitable onset. Cropper's understated guitar flanks his voice with deft counterpoint and occasional jarring notes, suggesting conflicts that somehow might get at least somewhat resolved. Then the bridge flares into a kind of banked anger that's turned into self-awareness and some sort of resolution.

Three days later, he got on the doomed plane his friend and fellow Maconite James Brown had warned him against using.




https://www.thedailybeast.com/when-otis-redding-delivered-the-20-best-minutes-of-pop-music-ever  

EXCERPT 

When Otis Redding Delivered the 20 Best Minutes of Pop Music Ever

A half century ago, the Monterey Pop Festival showcased the rock bands of San Francisco and Los Angeles, but the man who stole the show was Macon, Georgia’s Otis Redding.

by Jonathan Gould

June 17, 2017

The Daily Beast 

 

 Bob Buchanan/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty

“I was pretty sure that I’d seen God onstage.”

—Bob Weir

Late on the evening of June 17, 1967, as Saturday night turned to Sunday morning, the San Francisco–based rock group known as the Jefferson Airplane concluded their 40-minute set to rousing applause from the 7,500 fans who filled the fairgrounds arena in the resort town of Monterey, California, on the second night of an event billed as the First International Pop Festival.

The Airplane were local heroes to the crowd at Monterey, many of whom lived in the Bay Area and had followed the band’s career from its inception in 1965. Along with other whimsically named groups like the Charlatans, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the Grateful Dead, they had gotten their start in the folk coffeehouses and rock ballrooms of the Haight-Ashbury, a neighborhood on the eastern edge of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park whose recent emergence as a bohemian enclave had captured the imagination of young people across America. During the first half of 1967, a series of sensationalistic articles had appeared in newspapers and national magazines describing this self-styled “psychedelic city-state” and the long-haired, hedonistic “hippies” who populated it. This rash of publicity had inspired tens of thousands of footloose college students, college dropouts, teenaged runaways, and “flower children” of all ages to converge on San Francisco in anticipation of an idyllic “Summer of Love.”

The Monterey Pop Festival was timed to coincide with the start of that summer. The idea for the festival had originated a few months before as a gleam in the eye of a neophyte Los Angeles promoter named Alan Pariser, who envisioned it as a pop-oriented version of the seaside jazz and folk festivals at Newport and Monterey that had served as a fashionable form of summertime entertainment since the ’50s. After booking the fairgrounds and enlisting a well-connected Hollywood Brit named Derek Taylor (who had previously worked for the Beatles) as their publicist, Pariser and his partner, a talent agent named Ben Shapiro, approached the Los Angeles folk-rock group The Mamas and the Papas with the intent of hiring them as headliners. The group’s leader, John Phillips, and their producer, Lou Adler, responded with a vision of their own. They proposed expanding the size and scope of the festival and using it to showcase the explosion of creative energy that had enveloped the world of popular music in the three years since the arrival of the Beatles in America in 1964. They also proposed staging the festival on a nonprofit basis, with the performers donating their services and the proceeds going to charity.

When Shapiro balked at this idea, Phillips and Adler bought out his interest and formed a new partnership with Pariser. They then set out to assemble a roster of some thirty acts, enough to fill three nights and two days of music. Toward this end, they established a tony-sounding “board of governors” that included such prominent pop stars as Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Smokey Robinson, and Brian Wilson. Though none of these luminaries actually attended or performed, they gave the festival enough cachet to ensure that most of the artists the promoters contacted accepted their invitation to appear. In the deft hands of Derek Taylor, the advance publicity for the festival also attracted some twelve hundred loosely credentialed representatives of the press, as well as enough agents, managers, and record company executives to lend the proceedings the feeling of an open-air music business trade fair.

Phillips and Adler recognized that staging the festival on a nonprofit basis was essential to realizing their more parochial goal, which was to celebrate California’s sudden ascendancy in the world of popular music, with Los Angeles now recognized as the pop recording center of America and San Francisco as the home of the country’s most dynamic underground music scene. (Fully half the acts that performed came from the West Coast, with the balance drawn from points east, including the new pop capital of London.)

Though the Jefferson Airplane were hometown heroes to the crowd at Monterey, they were not the headlining act on the second night of the festival. No sooner had they finished their set than the harried stage crew, pressed by a midnight curfew that had already expired, began replacing their banks of amplifiers with the more modest gear of a four-piece rhythm section called Booker T. and the MGs and a two-piece horn section called the Mar-Keys. Their presence at Monterey owed to their role as the studio band for Stax Records, a small Memphis label that specialized in a distinctive brand of earthy, gospel-tinged rhythm and blues whose roots in the fervent emotionalism of the black church had earned it the label “soul music.” The most prominent and charismatic artist associated with Stax was the singer Otis Redding, and it was as the prelude and accompaniment to Redding’s eagerly anticipated performance that the MGs and the Mar-Keys now prepared to take the stage.

Whereas the members of the Jefferson Airplane blended easily into the crowd of predominantly white, long-haired, flamboyantly dressed young people who filled the fairgrounds arena, the MGs and Mar-Keys—three of them white, three of them black—could well have arrived there, as one of them later said, “from another planet.” To a man, their hair was cut short and, in the case of the white musicians, swept back into the sort of sculpted pompadour that was commonly associated in 1967 with television evangelists and country music stars. Even more anomalous was the fact that the six of them were dressed in matching, double-breasted, lime-green and electric-blue stage suits from Lansky Brothers, a local institution in Memphis whose most famous client, Elvis Presley, could be said to stand for everything in the realm of contemporary American popular music that the West Coast bands were not.

From his seat in the VIP section, just behind the photographers’ pit that ran in front of the stage, Jerry Wexler awaited the start of Otis Redding’s set with mounting trepidation. A vice-president of Atlantic Records, Wexler was a renowned music executive and producer, best known for his work with Ray Charles and, more recently, Aretha Franklin. He was also a notorious worrier, and he felt a sense of personal responsibility for Redding’s presence at Monterey. It was Wexler who had nurtured the relationship between Atlantic and Stax that put the fledgling Memphis label on the map, and who had assured Redding’s manager, Phil Walden, that the festival would be a prime opportunity for his client to connect with the burgeoning audience for progressive rock.

Yet Wexler himself was unnerved by the countercultural pageant he encountered at Monterey. It was not the thick haze of marijuana smoke hovering over the fairgrounds that gave him pause; Wexler had been smoking “reefer” since his club-hopping days in Harlem in the ’30s. It was rather that much of the music he had heard during the afternoon and evening concerts on Saturday had impressed him as amateurish, bombastic, and banal, and he was now consumed with doubt about how this crowd of wide-eyed dilettantes would respond to the raw emotional intensity and high-energy stagecraft of Otis Redding’s performance. To make matters worse, a cold drizzle was beginning to fall, and as Booker T. and the MGs launched into their opening number, Wexler’s expert ears told him that the group, known for their impeccable timing, was sounding slightly off. When Phil Walden emerged from the backstage area to pay his respects, Wexler told his young protégé that he was afraid they had made a mistake.

By the time Walden returned backstage, Booker T. and the MGs had overcome the effects of the late hour, the cold night, and whatever nervousness they may have felt at performing in such unfamiliar surroundings and were setting up an enormous groove behind the saxophonist Andrew Love as he scorched through his solo on the Mar-Keys’ showcase, “Philly Dog.” As for Otis Redding, the very real apprehension he felt was imperceptible to all but his closest associates.

A tall, thick-featured, powerfully built man whose imposing physical presence made him seem considerably older than his age of 25, Redding waited in the wings with his usual air of restless energy. Earlier, when Phil Walden asked him what songs he planned to sing, Redding had teasingly pretended that he hadn’t given the matter much thought. (In fact, he had determined his set with the band the day before.) His feigned nonchalance was entirely in character, for one of the traits that had distinguished Redding throughout his five-year professional career was his seemingly boundless confidence in his ability to win people over.

Notwithstanding Jerry Wexler’s doubts, Redding had gained a great deal of experience performing in front of nominally hip white audiences during the year that preceded his appearance at Monterey. In the spring of 1966, he had wowed the Hollywood in-crowd with his shows at the Whisky a Go Go, a nightclub on the Sunset Strip. In the fall he had toured in England and France and played a three-night engagement in San Francisco at Bill Graham’s Fillmore Auditorium, the Carnegie Hall of acid rock. (Twenty-five years later, Graham would remember it simply as “the best gig I ever put on in my entire life.”) More recently, in the spring of 1967, Redding had returned to Europe, where he was rapturously received by fans in Britain, France, and Scandinavia, and afforded a royal welcome by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the other members of London’s pop aristocracy who had revered him from afar.

At the conclusion of “Philly Dog,” the television host Tommy Smothers came onstage and encouraged the crowd to give a warm welcome to “Mister Otis Redding.” The MG’s initial downbeat was answered by a syncopated fanfare from the horns and a fusillade of accents from the drums as Redding, resplendent in a teal-green silk suit, strode to the microphone, snatched it off its stand, flashed an enormous smile, and issued what was very likely the first unequivocal command to come from the stage at Monterey since the festival began. “SHAKE!” he demanded. “Everybody say it.” And again: “SHAKE! Let me hear the whole crowd.” Between the honorific tone of Tommy Smothers’ introduction and the note of total authority in the singer’s voice and the band’s accompaniment, for the 7,500 astonished young listeners who leapt to their feet and surged toward the stage, it was as if the grown-ups had arrived.

The five songs Otis Redding performed in his rain- and curfew-shortened set at Monterey composed an overview of his brief career. The incendiary opening number, “Shake,” had been a posthumous hit for Sam Cooke, the gospel singer turned pop star whose supple voice, clean-cut good looks, and consistent “crossover” success (with white and black listeners alike) had made him, along with Ray Charles, a role model for every soul artist of the ’60s. Following Cooke’s untimely death in a shooting incident in 1964, Redding had consciously sought to assume his mantle by recording his songs and emulating his determination to be his own man in the music business.

Otis’ second number, “Respect,” was one of the three hit singles he released in 1965, the year he emerged as a full-fledged R&B recording star. “Respect” was a prototype of the sort of driving dance tune with a stamping beat and a syncopated chorus of horns that defined the sound of the Stax label, but it had recently gained a new and greater significance as a vehicle for Aretha Franklin, who recorded it as part of her stunning debut on Atlantic Records in the spring of 1967. Franklin turned Redding’s song—in which “respect” served as a euphemism (“give it to me”) for sexual attention—into a woman’s demand for the real thing, complete with a newly written release in which she literally spelled out the meaning of the word. By the time of Monterey, this feminist reprise of “Respect” stood at #1 on the Billboard Pop charts. “This is a song that a girl took away from me,” Otis told the crowd. “But I’m still going to do it anyway.”

“I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now)” was another of Redding’s breakthrough hits from 1965, and another hallmark of his style: a slow, imploring ballad in 12/8 time, paced by wistful arpeggios on the guitar and stately crescendos from the horns. “This is the Love Crowd, right?” Otis asked, alluding to the hippies’ atmospheric embrace of love (advertised by a banner reading “Music, Love, and Flowers” that ran the length of the stage). He then launched into a romantic testimonial of excruciating intensity, addressed to a woman whose “love is growing cold... as our affair grows old.” Phrasing tremulously behind the beat, edging into the song like a man edging into a difficult conversation, Otis couched his appeal in expressions of empathy (“you are tired, and you want to be free”) and gratitude (“with you my life has been so wonderful”), before plunging into an ad-libbed coda in which he searched and strained for the words that might persuade her to change her mind: pleading (“I’m down on my knees”), protesting (“No! Don’t make me stop”), and finally culminating in a thunderous declaration of “Good God Almighty! I love you.” In the nuanced emotionality of his singing on this song, Otis seemed to be drawing on a different dimension of feeling and experience than that of any other performer who would be heard at Monterey, and it dramatized the tension that lay at the core of his appeal: that a man so physically imposing and overtly self-possessed could indeed be so consumed, so utterly undone, by the force of his yearning, his desire, and his need.

Finally, with the rain coming down, the crowd in an uproar (“he had the audience spinning like a chicken on a spit,” one reviewer wrote), and the local authorities demanding an immediate end to the evening, Redding concluded his performance with a pair of “cover” tunes. The first was a frenetic rendition of the Rolling Stones’ hit “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” whose presence in his repertoire reflected a conscious effort to cater to a rock audience—the impulse that brought him to Monterey in the first place. By stripping the song down to its bare essentials of title, hook, and groove (and dispensing with the lyrics’ pretensions to social commentary), Redding recast “Satisfaction” as a swaggering carnal comedy that took his hypersexualized stage presence nearly to the point of self-parody. In addition to earning him an R&B hit in 1966, the song had served as a familiar crowd pleaser on his European tours, where many fans, aware of the usual pattern of white appropriation, mistakenly assumed that the Stones’ version must have been a cover of Redding’s original.

The finale, “Try a Little Tenderness,” was something else again. The song itself was a Tin Pan Alley standard, written in the early ’30s by a one-handed American pianist named Harry Woods and a pair of English lyricists, Jimmy Campbell and Reg Connelly, and recorded over the years by the likes of Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Perry Como. The Depression-era lyric carried an economic subtext with its account of a woman who gets “weary wearing the same shabby dress.” Redding’s version, released as a single in the fall of 1966, was a seamless synthesis of the two strains of sensibility—soft and hard, seductive and aggressive—that ran through the body of his work. Otis retained the ballad tempo of the original in the opening verses, which he sang with an exaggerated tenderness over the bare accompaniment of whole notes on the bass. (For the crowd at Monterey, he ad-libbed an appreciative reference to “that same old miniskirt dress.”) The instruments drifted in as the song progressed—a looping sax, a distant trill of organ, a thin spine of drums—until the arrival of a jaunty rhythm guitar caused the meter to shift, the beat to solidify, and the entire arrangement to assume the form of one long musical and emotional crescendo. Marching in place, waving his arms, jerking his torso like a man possessed, Otis punctuated his appeal to “hold her, squeeze her, never leave her” with strings of percussive scat syllables, extolling the need for “tenderness” with a ferocious insistence that defied the meaning of the word. When at last he had taken this exhortation as far as it could go—though not before the band had contrived a false ending, generating a dense cloud of sound from which Otis reemerged to sing a final chorus before leaving the stage for good—he had done to “Try a Little Tenderness” what black artists like Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, and Ray Charles had been doing for half a century to the genteel conventions and coy platitudes with which Tin Pan Alley composers had sought to sing the praises of love: he had cured the song of its cant and sentimentality, transforming it with a startling infusion of urgency and energy into something inextricably real. “I’ve got to go. I don’t want to go,” Otis announced as he walked offstage. And the crowd, which had been standing on its collective feet since the opening number, responded by filling the cold, wet Northern California night with an ovation that lasted nearly ten minutes.

The long and remarkably diverse history of commercial popular music in America has been marked at regular intervals by moments in which a particular artist has connected with a particular audience in a way that would serve to redefine the parameters of popular taste. Famous examples of this during the first half of the 20th century include such landmarks as the 1924 debut of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” before a gathering of black-tie culturati at New York’s Aeolian Hall; the Benny Goodman Band’s extended engagement before throngs of jitterbugging Angelenos at the Palomar Ballroom in 1935; and Frank Sinatra’s appearances before swarms of swooning bobby-soxers at the Paramount Theater in Times Square in 1943. Each of these performances symbolized a larger shift in the popular music and popular culture of the time: Gershwin’s “Rhapsody” heralded the arrival of the Jazz Age; Goodman’s triumph the start of the Swing Era; Sinatra’s success the emergence of the teen-aged audience and the return of the solo singer to primacy in pop. In the decades after World War II, the capacity of network television to command the simultaneous attention of tens of millions of viewers brought an entirely new dimension to these signal musical moments, as demonstrated by the spectacular debuts of Elvis Presley in 1956 and the Beatles in 1964, both of whom were encountered by vast national audiences whose shared experience lent a revelatory quality to these performers’ arrival in the public eye.

By the standards of Presley and the Beatles, certainly, the Monterey Pop Festival was a localized affair, its initial impact confined to the roughly 35,000 people who attended the event (many of whom never actually saw the performers onstage). But the conjunction of not one but three breakthrough performances—by Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin—combined with a host of other factors to turn the festival into exactly the sort of countercultural watershed its promoters had envisioned. As always, timing played a part: two weeks before, at the beginning of June, the Beatles had released their long-awaited eighth album, an ambitious collection of songs called Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The record was widely hailed as the most sophisticated expression to date of the expansive musical genre that would henceforth be known simply as “rock,” and it received an unprecedented amount of coverage in the press, inspiring reviews and commentary in newspapers, magazines, and even scholarly journals that had rarely paid serious attention to popular music before. With Sgt. Pepper as their touchstone, the twelve hundred practicing and aspiring journalists who attended Monterey incorporated the festival into a larger narrative that centered on the emergence of rock music as a legitimate and transformative cultural force.

Equally influential was the impact of Monterey on the contingent of agents, managers, and record company executives who attended the festival, checkbooks in hand, for whom the spectacle of 35,000 long-haired, pot-smoking, music-loving hippies served as a crash course in the new demographics of the music business. On the eve of the Beatles’ arrival in the winter of 1964, one marketing study found that 60 percent of the pop singles sold in America were purchased by teenage girls. Now, three years later, pop was evolving into rock; long-playing albums were replacing three-minute singles as the recording medium of choice; free-form, high-fidelity FM radio stations were breaking the stranglehold of Top 40 programming; and the core audience for popular music had expanded from the squealing “teenyboppers” of 1964 into a broad-based coalition of teen-agers, college students, and young adults, a great many of whom associated themselves with the lucrative and seminally American phenomenon of mass-market bohemianism, of which the scene in the Haight-Ashbury was but the tip of a vast psychedelic iceberg.

A defining feature of this new rock audience was that its members belonged to the first generation of white Americans in history who had grown up listening, as a matter of course, to black music on records and radio. Stylistically, American popular music had been in thrall to African American influences since the rise of blackface minstrelsy in the middle of the 19th century. Gershwin, Goodman, Sinatra, and Presley—all were avid students of the black music of their time, and all of them owed their careers to the African American models on which they based their styles. They belonged to the small minority of white Americans and Europeans who had always provided an appreciative audience for black folk songs, spirituals, ragtime, blues, gospel, jazz, and swing. But the great majority of Americans had always partaken of this music secondhand, relying on white imitators and emulators, impersonators and appropriators, to translate the sounds and styles of African American music and dance into forms that were aesthetically and commercially compatible with the standards of white sensibility and the doctrines of white supremacy that had prevailed since the days of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

It was not until the late ’40s, when radio stations and independent record labels began to cater in earnest to the new commercial market represented by the millions of blacks who had migrated from the farms and towns of the South to cities across America, that large numbers of white listeners could access the latest styles of black popular music at the click of a dial or the push of a button. And while the booming postwar population of white teenagers still showed an overall preference for bland appropriators like Pat Boone and gifted emulators like Elvis Presley, growing numbers of them began to seek out what they construed as the Real Thing. From the mid ’50s onward, black singers like Fats Domino, Little Richard, and Chuck Berry sold millions of records to black and white listeners alike. Together with the simultaneous entry of black athletes into the realm of professional team sports, this marked the start of a cultural revolution in America, as black faces, black voices, black style, and black prowess gradually became an inescapable presence on the nation’s airwaves, concert stages, and playing fields. It was a cultural revolution whose impact on the consciousness of the nation was compounded, in the wake of the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, by its close affinities with the social revolution known as the civil rights movement.

The Monterey Pop Festival was a product of this cultural revolution. The older members of the audience at Monterey had experienced their musical awakening as teenagers in the ’50s with the advent of rhythm and blues and its mixed-race offspring, rock ’n’ roll. Many of them were drawn in their college years to the folk revival movement of the late ’50s, when the advent of long-playing records prompted the reissue of classic prewar blues recordings by artists like Bessie Smith and Robert Johnson and drew attention to contemporary bluesmen like Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker. The younger members of the audience at Monterey had come of age in the early ’60s, listening and dancing to crossover stars like Sam Cooke and Chubby Checker, vocal groups like the Drifters and the Shirelles, and the vanguard of a long parade of talent from Detroit’s Motown label. And from 1964 onward, virtually everyone in attendance at Monterey had been swept up in the excitement surrounding the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and their fellow British bands, who had not only learned the lessons of contemporary black music better than their white American counterparts, but were forthright in paying homage to the black artists they had modeled themselves on.

The promoters of the Monterey Pop Festival were as enthralled by the sounds of black music as the rest of their contemporaries, and they had gone to some lengths to attract a cross section of black talent. Smokey Robinson was placed on the festival’s Board of Governors in hopes of drawing some Motown acts, but Motown’s president Berry Gordy declined the offer, and a number of major black artists followed suit, skeptical of an invitation to play for free in front of 7,500 paying customers.

In the end, the only three African American performers at Monterey were Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, and Lou Rawls, but their impact was disproportional, for Redding and Hendrix were among the acknowledged sensations of the festival. Like Redding, Hendrix had cut his teeth on the so-called “chitlin’ circuit” of southern clubs and auditoriums, working as a journeyman guitarist with R&B revues. But his path to Monterey had taken him on a circuitous route through the Greenwich Village folk scene and the Swinging London pop scene, in the course of which he had affected the persona of a psychedelic gypsy to complement his virtuoso synthesis of blues, soul, and acid rock. Hendrix’s performance—a ragged, rambling, theatrical set in which he famously set fire to his guitar—came on the final night of the festival, and it did more to showcase his persona than his musical genius.

Otis Redding’s appearance, by contrast, came at the end of a long day and evening of music that consisted mainly of white blues and blues-based acid rock. It fell to Redding and his incomparable band to embody the standard of authenticity that was aspired to by all of the music that preceded them at Monterey. His overpowering performance came as a vivid reminder that black music, dance, humor, dialect, and religion had served as America’s true “counterculture” for more than a hundred years. When Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead observed that it was like seeing God onstage, he was speaking for a generation of young people who would seek to base a religion of their own on the hedonistic creed of “sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.”

In the long run, the cultural legacy of Monterey was assured by the promoters’ decision to have the entire festival documented by a team of filmmakers led by D. A. Pennebaker, who was hired on the basis of his recent cinéma vérité portrait of Bob Dylan, Don’t Look Back. Shooting in color with handheld cameras, Pennebaker and his crew divided their attention between the performers onstage, the promoters backstage, the audience in the arena, and the carnivalesque army of camp followers who filled the festival grounds. Their film was originally intended to be aired as an hour-long television special, but an early screening proved much too much for the ABC executives who had paid the promoters a half million dollars for the broadcast rights. Freed from the editorial constraints of network television, Pennebaker spent more than a year editing the footage into a 90-minute feature for theatrical release.

By the time Monterey Pop reached theaters in January 1969, the Summer of Love was ancient history, the utopian scene in the Haight-Ashbury had collapsed in a Malthusian crisis of indigence and drug crime, and the entire tenor of public life in America had taken a Shakespearean turn. In the intervening 18 months, the war in Vietnam had spiraled wildly out of control; the moral momentum of the civil rights movement had been sapped by the polarized forces of Black Power and White Backlash and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; and the American political landscape had been transformed by the abdication of Lyndon Johnson, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the fiasco of the Democratic Convention in Chicago, and the election of Richard Nixon as president in November 1968.

In the world of popular music, much had changed as well. The Mamas and the Papas had disbanded, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix had become international stars, the Jefferson Airplane had appeared on the cover of Life magazine, Fillmore-style rock ballrooms had opened across the country, and all of the San Francisco bands that performed at the festival had overcome their scruples about “commercialism” and signed with major corporate record labels. Having reached the economic milestone of a billion dollars in annual sales, the record industry was well on its way to surpassing the film industry as the most profitable and, in the minds of the young, glamorous branch of American show business. A major component of this ascendancy involved the unprecedented levels of crossover success and recognition that were now being attained by African American artists. In January 1969, black singers and groups accounted for seven of the Top 10 and half of the Top 40 singles on the Billboard Pop charts.

Yet the most poignant change in the world of popular music between the time of the Monterey festival and the release of Monterey Pop was that Otis Redding was dead, killed along with his pilot, his valet, and four members of his touring band in the crash of their private plane into a lake near Madison, Wisconsin, on December 10, 1967. In the weeks before this tragedy, Redding had recorded a spate of new songs, the most distinctive of which, a contemplative ballad called “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay,” reflected a major leap in both the style and content of his music. Following its release in January 1968, “Dock of the Bay” sold more than two million copies, posthumously earning Redding his first #1 single, his first Top 10 album, and precisely the sort of mainstream success he had sought at Monterey.

Redding’s death turned “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” and his appearance in Monterey Pop into memorials to his singular talent, and it added his name to a roster of distinguished popular musicians that included Bix Beiderbecke, Robert Johnson, Charlie Christian, Hank Williams, Buddy Holly, Patsy Cline, and Sam Cooke—artists whose careers ended not only before their time, but in their absolute prime, when there was every reason to expect that their finest work was yet to come. (Eerily, within a few years, he would be joined in this company by both of his costars at Monterey, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin.) Redding’s labels, Stax and Atlantic, culled enough material from the unfinished tracks he recorded in the fall of 1967 to release a series of singles and albums in the three years after his death. Some of these records ranked with his very best work. But they still only hinted at what might have been, for Redding was preparing to make significant changes in his approach to recording and performing during the last months of his life. His final entry on the record charts came in the fall of 1970, when Reprise Records released a live album of his and Jimi Hendrix’s “historic performances” at Monterey.

Adapted from Otis Redding: An Unfinished Life Copyright © 2017 by Jonathan Gould. Published by Crown Archetype, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jonathan Gould, author of Otis Redding: An Unfinished Life, is a former professional musician and the author of Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain & America. He divides his time between a home in Brooklyn and a house near Hudson, New York.

https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/otis-redding-his-tragic-1967-in-mojo-magazine

Stories

Otis Redding: His Tragic 1967 In MOJO Magazine

The soul king’s greatest year ended in unimaginable sadness. But 50 years on, as Geoff Brown gleans from his friends and bandmates, his legacy is resurgent.
  

by MOJO Staff 

October 25, 2017

OTIS REDDING.  

Photo: Getty Images 

THE DEATH OF OTIS REDDING in December 1967 was the crushing end to a year in which The King Of Soul had grown his empire exponentially, writes soul expert Geoff Brown in the latest issue of MOJO magazine.

In March of that year, Redding had blown Europe apart with his high-energy stage show. In fact, his bandmates were still reeling from the riotous reception years later.

“The Beatles sent limos to pick us up from the airport,” remembered trumpeter Wayne Jackson. “We went from session musicians making a hundred, two hundred dollars a week to screaming, superstar treatment. Otis could have kept going back with his band he was such a phenomenon.”

“It was such a shock. Because he was a person that represented so much life.”--Isaac Hayes

With Stateside hits on Memphis’s Stax label with Carla Thomas including Tramp and Knock On Wood and a showstopping performance at June’s Monterey Pop Festival, Redding’s star was climbing high. Even an enforced layoff with throat problems brought out a new dimension in his songwriting. (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of A Bay emerged as he relaxed on a houseboat in Sausalito, across the bay from San Francisco.

But he would not live to see its release, as on December 10, a light aircraft containing Redding and the musicians of the Bar-Kays, approaching Madison Municipal Airport in low cloud and freezing fog, crashed into Lake Monona. The plane hit the icy waters with tremendous force, wildly scattering debris. Redding, plus guitarist Jimmy King, keyboard player Ronnie Caldwell, saxophonist Jones, drummer Carl Cunningham, their valet/friend Matthew Kelly and pilot Dick Fraser were all killed.

“We cried,” Stax-signed producer/arranger/keyboardist Isaac Hayes said. “It was such a shock. Because he was a person that represented so much life. When they’re gone it’s like, ‘What do we do?’ It just stunned Memphis.”

For more on the life and music of Otis Redding, as we approach the 50th anniversary of his death, and the inside story of the Stax label’s recent restoration, pick up the latest MOJO magazine, in UK shops now.

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/12/otis-reddings-try-a-little-tenderness-as-a-song-of-resistance/547655/

Culture

 

Hearing Otis Redding’s 'Try a Little Tenderness' as a Song of Resistance

The quiet, revolutionary power of one of the soul-music legend’s biggest hits, 50 years after his death

by Emily Lordi

December 10, 2017 

The Atlantic

 

The American soul singer Otis Redding performs at the Monterey Pop Festival in California in June 1967. 

Bruce Fleming / Getty

On December 10, 1967, the plane carrying Otis Redding and his band the Bar-Kays crashed into the frigid waters of Lake Monona in Wisconsin, killing nearly everyone on board. Redding was only 26 years old when he died. And while he was the life force of Memphis’s Stax Records and the internationally acclaimed King of Soul, he had not yet reached the peak of his powers. Such was indicated, anyway, by the new creative direction of a song released the month after his death, “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay.” News of his passing dumbfounded his fans and loved ones, not only because of how sudden it was, but also because Redding had seemed unstoppable. The charismatic son of Georgia sharecroppers who, according to his siblings, “was always in the spotlight about something,” Redding had become an electrifying performer whom some witnesses compared to God incarnate.

Yet his music was defined by vulnerability as well as dynamism. Redding’s gift lay in his ability to synthesize the sentimental crooning of Nat King Cole, the sanctified fervor of his early training in the Baptist church, and the bombastic flair of his hometown hero Little Richard (who was also from Macon). Some of Redding’s best-known recordings—“These Arms of Mine,” “Mr. Pitiful,” “Pain in My Heart”—are full-voiced petitions against loneliness and zealous efforts to stave off loss, displaying his sensitivity to pain and desire.

Redding’s attentiveness to both lyrical meaning and musical possibility made him a brilliant interpreter of other artists’ songs, from Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” to the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” Throughout the ’60s and ’70s, other great African American artists covered songs by white writers (Ray Charles’s “Georgia on My Mind,” Aretha Franklin’s “Let It Be”), announcing the sound of soul while symbolically reversing the process by which white artists had appropriated and profited on black musical innovation.

Redding’s 1966 version of “Try a Little Tenderness” was his most stunning such coup d’état. First popularized by Bing Crosby in 1933, this paternalistic ballad about the power of male affection to revive female morale had been covered by Aretha Franklin and Sam Cooke in the years preceding Redding’s version. But whereas Franklin and Cooke maintained the song’s basic ballad structure, Redding revolutionized it. His version begins in the usual maudlin mode: Interweaving horn lines arranged by Isaac Hayes set the scene as if drawing a stage curtain. But when Al Jackson Jr. strikes up rim shots on the drum like a metronome, the band starts to build the kind of suspense the song’s lyrics describe:

You know she’s waiting, just anticipating
For things that she’ll never, never, never, never possess, yeah yeah
But while she’s there waiting, without them
Try a little tenderness

The recording owes its drama not just to Redding’s throaty vocals and lyrical embellishments—hold her, squeeze her, never leave her!—but also to the synergy of the band as a unit. As Jonathan Gould writes in his wonderful new biography Otis Redding: An Unfinished Life, “the track is … a musical microcosm of the Stax sound, a seamless synthesis of the pleading ballads and pounding grooves that [Stax artists] played better than anyone else.” Gradually, like a group of friends adding their voices to a single appeal for kindness, the rhythm section fills in the space between the spare drum beat and Redding’s vocals: Here comes the churchy organ, crossed with an acoustic piano, both soon joined by a chicken-scratch guitar, blaring horns, and hard-driving drums. At this point, Redding manipulates the lyrics to match the wordless intonations of the band: Got to try—ma nah nah—try—try a little tenderness!

The song was even more intense in live performance. As the bring-down-the-house closing song of his sets, “Tenderness” became Redding’s signature hit and a vehicle for his electric persona. The musicians often rushed through the curtain-drawing introduction like a formality, picking up speed until Redding was shouting, jumping, and stalking around the stage like a stiff-limbed preacher while demolishing the lyrics: ga-ga-ga-ga-ga-ga-gotta-tenderness!  In a crowd-pleasing church trick that showed Redding in thrall to his own momentum, the group often “ended” the song only to strike it back up again.

In short, Redding’s “Tenderness” was a tour de force. Still, there was something bizarre about it—about a call for tenderness that was distinctly untender. Singing (then shouting) about women but not to them, Redding enacts a man-to-man aggression that seems to replicate the problem he wants to address. To make sense of this irony, we might consider a level on which Redding’s performance of “Tenderness” was not about a woman at all. We might instead hear it—in the context of the civil-rights movement that Redding had engaged with in his urgent 1965 recording of Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come”—as a veiled demand for proper treatment of black people.

In this reading, Black America itself is the “she” who is “waiting, just anticipating” the change that Redding and his band want to effect. If one imagines Redding singing on behalf of those citizens subjected to gradualist approaches to integration and brutal anti-protest measures including dogs, water hoses, and death, it seems not odd but wholly appropriate for Redding to shake the song’s addressee by the collar and insist that he try—for god’s sake—a little tenderness.

This is not to suggest that Redding himself intended the song as a political allegory. But his performances of it, in the mid-1960s, do make a space for an otherwise verboten display of black male agitation. At a moment when even the most peaceful bids for racial equality could be viewed as attacks on white Southern mores—when sitting at a segregated lunch counter or entering an integrated school could be perceived as a violent provocation—the show of actual black aggression could be a death sentence. This may partly explain the cathartic force of Redding’s performances for his African American fans, as well as for an expanding white fan base that may have sensed the power and rage black citizens were often compelled to restrain.

To hear Redding’s “Tenderness” as a plea for interpersonal love and a demand for interracial civility is also to perceive a political charge in his choice to keep ending and restarting the song when performing it live. This was a showman’s device, to be sure, but it could also be seen as a musical enactment of resilience—a reminder that the struggle wasn’t over when it seemed to be, that a band of compatriots could keep pushing, together, toward a change that might have sometimes seemed like it would never come.

When the group played the song to close their legendary set at the Monterey Pop Festival in June of 1967, Redding clearly wanted to go on reprising it. But the band’s allotted time was up: “I have to go, I don’t want to go,” he waved to the crowd before leaving the stage. His parting lament becomes haunting in light of his imminent death, six months later. Even the god-like icon couldn’t keep pushing as long as he wanted to. But, like so many others, he still had to try.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Emily Lordi is an associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her work has appeared on Slate, NPR, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is the author of Black Resonance: Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature and Donny Hathaway Live. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/arts/music/otis-redding-sittin-on-dock-bay-anniversary.html 

The Enduring Power of Otis Redding’s ‘Dock of the Bay’

Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” became a hit after his 1967 death. This week in New York, it will be celebrated at the Apollo.CreditCreditMichael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

by Gavin Edwards 

January 23, 2018

New York Times

A posthumous pop hit collapses triumph and sorrow into a single song. Only a handful of performers have reached No. 1 with a single after their deaths, including John Lennon, Janis Joplin and the Notorious B.I.G. But the first person to do it was the soul singer Otis Redding, who died in a plane crash in late 1967 at 26 and topped the charts for four weeks the following March and April with a beautifully melancholy song, “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay.”

The song ranked as the sixth-most-played composition on American radio and television in the 20th century. It has gone triple platinum and been covered by artists from Cher to Bob Dylan. Rolling Stone named it No. 26 on its 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. To celebrate its endurance across 50 years, the Otis Redding Foundation is organizing a benefit concert on Thursday at the Apollo Theater, hosted by Whoopi Goldberg and featuring a lineup including Warren Haynes, Aloe Blacc and Booker T. Jones. The Dap-Kings and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band will provide the backup.

Paul Janeway of St. Paul and the Broken Bones is scheduled to perform “Down in the Valley” and “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” at the event. He said that before his band had any original material, it performed complete albums by Redding. The lesson: “As a singer, range is great, but you got to learn to sing the right notes the right way. Otis was one of the masters of that — he was so emotive.” And the reason behind the success of “Dock of the Bay”? “It sounds like the title,” Mr. Janeway said.

“Dock of the Bay” emerged from a period of Redding’s life when he was going through dramatic transitions; had he lived, it might well have been remembered as the beginning of the second half of his career. In early 1967, Redding had made a name as the biggest star on the Stax label and the author of “Respect,” a song commandeered by Aretha Franklin. He was also famed for his electrifying performances, which were expanding beyond the R&B circuit.

Grace Slick, the lead singer of Jefferson Airplane, saw him at the Fillmore West in San Francisco in 1966. “It was the most stunning performance I had seen up to that point,” she said in a phone interview from Malibu. She remembered the stage swaying as he moved around it: “I’d never seen anybody with that much positive thrust, for lack of a better term.”

The next summer, Redding delivered a barnburner set at the Monterey Pop Festival. “This was the ‘love crowd,’” the record producer and Monterey organizer Lou Adler said in a phone interview. “He was aware of what he was getting into but had no idea of what the response would be. As much as the performer gave at Monterey, the audience gave it right back.”

Zelma Redding, the singer’s widow, said that after her husband had flown from the festival to their ranch in Macon, Ga., he told her, “I got a new audience.”

Redding threw himself into the project of reinventing himself. “It was clear that his bread and butter, which was these big 12/8 ballads, had plateaued,” Jonathan Gould, the author of the recent biography “Otis Redding: An Unfinished Life,” said in an interview. “He had done what he could do with them, which was more than anybody else could do.”

Like most of the world, Redding spent the summer of 1967 listening to the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” “He thought it was the greatest thing he ever heard,” Ms. Redding said, speaking from her office in Georgia. “I guess he was thinking about ‘How can I be this creative?’”

In August 1967, Redding returned to San Francisco for a week of shows at the jazz club Basin Street West. When he was besieged by female fans at his hotel, the promoter Bill Graham let him stay at his houseboat in Sausalito.

Redding spent his days quietly looking at the water; freed from the usual demands of travel, he could relax and write songs. His road manager, Earl Sims (known as Speedo), said he was the only witness the day Redding picked up his guitar and wrote a new song that began “Sittin’ in the morning sun/I’ll be sittin’ when the evening comes.”

Mr. Sims was used to tapping out a simple beat when his boss was writing songs, acting as a human metronome. The rhythm of this new one was totally different, he said in an interview. “It took me a minute to get into what he was doing. He was away, and he was on the water, and he was relaxed. That’s why he started that song.”

When Redding returned home, he played the song for his wife. “My comment at the time was that it was very different, unusual for him,” she said — meaning she didn’t care for it. “He said, ‘Well, I’m going to change my style, going to be different.’”

That October, Redding had surgery to remove polyps from his vocal cords; while recuperating, he couldn’t speak, so he grew a beard and spent hours in silent contemplation. Five weeks later, his voice sounded better than ever, and he was eager to get some of his new ideas on wax.

Steve Cropper, who regularly backed Redding up as the guitarist for Booker T. and the MG’s (a.k.a. the Stax house band), remembered Redding calling him from the Memphis airport to make sure he was at the studio. When Redding arrived, the pair sat on beige folding chairs, hammering out the song. “I helped him with the second verse a little bit, helped him with the bridge,” Mr. Cropper said in a phone interview. “After he sang, ‘I watch the ships roll in, watch them roll out again,’ I said, ‘Have you thought that if a ship rolls, it’s going to take on water and sink?’” Redding told him, “That’s the way I want it, Crop.”

The duo went into the studio in November, joined by Donald Dunn (known as Duck) on bass, Al Jackson on drums, Booker T. Jones on piano and three horn players. In an interview, Mr. Jones remembered the sessions as having “kind of a hectic feeling — so much so that I remember a number of people sleeping over at the studio.” Redding and Mr. Cropper planned to ask the Staple Singers to contribute backing vocals to “Dock of the Bay,” which never happened. The whistling at the song’s end came in a section earmarked for vocal ad-libbing; on one early take, Redding sputtered and the engineer Ron Capone told him, “You’re not going to make it as a whistler.”

In the middle of the sessions, Redding went back on the road. “I’ll see you on Monday,” were his last words to Mr. Cropper. He had recently acquired a Beechcraft Model 18 airplane so he and his touring band, the Bar-Kays, could fly around the country to play shows on weekends, letting him regularly return to Memphis. But on Dec. 10, 1967, as he flew into Madison, Wis., the plane stalled and crashed into Lake Monona, killing seven people, including Redding. It fell to a shattered Mr. Cropper to finish “Dock of the Bay” for a rush release. “If I had a week to work on it, it probably would have been overembellished,” he said. (He finished the job in 24 hours.)

Different lines of the song resonate with those who have covered it over the years. Michael Bolton recorded the second-most-successful version of the track (a No. 11 hit in 1988). In an email, he said he thinks the song’s key lyric is “look like nothing’s gonna change, everything remains the same.” “It states the obvious lack of our evolution as a society,” he wrote.

Mr. Jones agreed that line has a special power. “It’s one of those lyrics that has the capability of touching anyone who’s been through changes, loneliness, trying to find a secure place in the world,” he said. Over the past 50 years, that’s proved to be just about everyone.

An Evening of Respect: Celebrating Otis Redding & 50 Years of ‘(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay’

January 25, 2018 at the Apollo Theater, Manhattan; apollotheater.org.

A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 23, 2018, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Still Sittin’ in the Mornin’ Sun. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper

THE MUSIC OF THE OTIS REDDING: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH OTIS REDDING:

Otis Redding ..I've Been Loving You Too Long .. 1967 ..Live

Otis Redding "Try A Little Tenderness" Live 1967 (Reelin' In The Years

 

Otis Redding - My Lovers Prayer - Live in Olympia Paris - 1966 

 

 

Otis Redding Shake and I've Been Loving you too Long

Otis Redding Try a little tenderness Monterey 1967 

 

 

Otis Redding Live – The Best Songs Of Otis Redding Live 

 

 

Otis Redding - Try A Little Tenderness

These arms of mine - Otis Redding

Otis Redding – "(Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay"

Otis Redding Top Hits – Best Songs Of Otis Redding

Otis Redding - I've been loving you

YouTube Best Songs Otis Redding Of All Time-Otis Redding Greatest

YouTube King Of Soul – Otis Redding – The Best Songs Of Otis

Otis Redding

Otis Redding & Carla Thomas - Tramp (1967)

I've Been Loving You Too Long

Otis Redding at Monterey Pop

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otis_Redding

 

Otis Redding

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Otis Redding in January 1967

Otis Ray Redding Jr. (September 9, 1941 – December 10, 1967) was an American singer, songwriter, record producer, arranger, and talent scout. He is considered one of the greatest singers in the history of American popular music and a seminal artist in soul music and rhythm and blues. Redding's style of singing gained inspiration from the gospel music that preceded the genre. His singing style influenced many other soul artists of the 1960s. During his lifetime, his recordings were produced by Stax Records, based in Memphis, Tennessee. 

Redding was born in Dawson, Georgia, and at the age of 2, moved to Macon, Georgia. Redding quit school at age 15 to support his family, working with Little Richard's backing band, the Upsetters, and by performing in talent shows at the historic Douglass Theatre in Macon, Georgia. In 1958, he joined Johnny Jenkins's band, the Pinetoppers, with whom he toured the Southern states as a singer and driver. An unscheduled appearance on a Stax recording session led to a contract and his first single, "These Arms of Mine", in 1962.

Stax released Redding's debut album, Pain in My Heart, two years later. Initially popular mainly with African-Americans, Redding later reached a wider American pop music audience. Along with his group, he first played small gigs in the American South. He later performed at the popular Los Angeles night club Whisky a Go Go and toured Europe, performing in London, Paris and other major cities. He also performed at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967.
Shortly before his death in a plane crash, Redding wrote and recorded his iconic "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" with Steve Cropper. The song became the first posthumous number-one record on both the Billboard Hot 100 and R&B charts. The album The Dock of the Bay was the first posthumous album to reach number one on the UK Albums Chart. Redding's premature death devastated Stax. Already on the verge of bankruptcy, the label soon discovered that the Atco division of Atlantic Records owned the rights to his entire song catalog. 

Redding received many posthumous accolades, including the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. In addition to "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay," "Respect" and "Try a Little Tenderness" are among his best-known songs. 

Early life

 

Redding was born in Dawson, Georgia, U.S., the fourth of six children, and the first son, of Otis Redding, Sr., and Fannie Roseman. Redding senior was a sharecropper and then worked at Robins Air Force Base, near Macon, and occasionally preached in local churches. When Otis was three the family moved to Tindall Heights, a predominantly African-American public housing project in Macon.^[3] At an early age, Redding sang in the Vineville Baptist Church choir and learned guitar and piano. From age 10, he took drum and singing lessons. At Ballard-Hudson High School, he sang in the school band. Every Sunday he earned $6 by performing gospel songs for Macon radio station WIBB,^[4][5] and he won the $5 prize in a teen talent show for 15 consecutive weeks.^[6] His passion was singing, and he often cited Little Richard and Sam Cooke as influences. Redding said that he "would not be here" without Little Richard and that he "entered the music business because of Richard – he is my inspiration. I used to sing like Little Richard, his Rock 'n' Roll stuff... My present music has a lot of him in it."^[7][8]
At age 15, Redding left school to help financially support his family; his father had contracted tuberculosis and was often hospitalized, leaving his mother as the family's primary income earner.^[3] He worked as a good digger, as a gasoline station attendant and occasionally as a musician. Pianist Gladys Williams, a locally well-known musician in Macon and another who inspired Redding, often performed at the Hillview Springs Social Club, and Redding sometimes played piano with her band there.^[9] Williams hosted Sunday talent shows, which Redding attended with two friends, singers Little Willie Jones and Eddie Ross.^[10]
Redding's breakthrough came in 1958 on disc jockey Hamp Swain's "The Teenage Party," a talent contest at the local Roxy and Douglass Theatres.^[11][5] Johnny Jenkins, a locally prominent guitarist, was in the audience and, finding Redding's backing band lacking in musical skills, offered to accompany him. Redding sang Little Richard's "Heebie Jeebies." The combination enabled Redding to win Swain's talent contest for fifteen consecutive weeks; the cash prize was $5 (US$43 in 2018 dollars^[12]).^[13] Jenkins later worked as lead guitarist and played with Redding during several later gigs.^[14] Redding was soon invited to replace Willie Jones as frontman of Pat T. Cake and the Mighty Panthers, featuring Johnny Jenkins.^[10] Redding was then hired by the Upsetters when Little Richard abandoned rock and roll in favor of gospel music. Redding was well paid, making about $25 per gig (US$217 in 2018 dollars^[12]),^[3][4] but did not stay long.^[15]
At age 18, Redding met 15-year-old Zelma Atwood at "The Teenage Party." She gave birth to their son Dexter in the summer of 1960 and married Redding in August 1961.^[16] In mid-1960, Otis moved to Los Angeles with his sister, Deborah, while Zelma and Otis' children stayed in Macon, Georgia.^[17] In Los Angeles Redding wrote his first songs, including "She's Allright," "Tuff Enuff," "I'm Gettin' Hip" and "Gamma Lamma" (which he recorded as a single in 1962, under the title "Shout Bamalama").^[4]

 

Career

Early career

 

A member of Pat T. Cake and the Mighty Panthers, Redding toured the Southern United States on the chitlin' circuit, a string of venues that were hospitable to African-American entertainers during the era of racial segregation, which lasted into the early 1960s.^[18] Johnny Jenkins left the band to become the featured artist with the Pinetoppers.^[19] Around this time, Redding met Phil Walden, the future founder of the recording company Phil Walden and Associates, and later Bobby Smith, who ran the small label Confederate Records. He signed with Confederate and recorded his second single, "Shout Bamalama" (a rewrite of "Gamma Lamma") and "Fat Girl", together with his band Otis and the Shooters.^[4][20] Around this time he and the Pinetoppers attended a "Battle of the Bands" show in Lakeside Park.^[21] Wayne Cochran, the only solo artist signed to Confederate, became the Pinetoppers' bassist.^[19]
When Walden started to look for a record label for Jenkins, Atlantic Records representative Joe Galkin showed interest and around 1962 sent him to the Stax studio in Memphis. Redding drove Jenkins to the session, as the latter did not have a driver's license.^[22] The session with Jenkins, backed by Booker T. & the M.G.'s, was unproductive and ended early; Redding was allowed to perform two songs. The first was "Hey Hey Baby", which studio chief Jim Stewart thought sounded too much like Little Richard. The second was "These Arms of Mine", featuring Jenkins on piano and Steve Cropper on guitar. Stewart later praised Redding's performance, saying, "Everybody was fixin' to go home, but Joe Galkin insisted we give Otis a listen. There was something different about [the ballad]. He really poured his soul into it."^[16][23] Stewart signed Redding and released "These Arms of Mine", with "Hey Hey Baby" on the B-side. The single was released by Volt in October 1962 and charted in March the following year.^[24] It became one of his most successful songs, selling more than 800,000 copies.^[25]
 

Apollo Theater and Otis Blue

"These Arms of Mine" and other songs from the 1962–1963 sessions were included on Redding's debut album, Pain in My Heart. "That's What My Heart Needs" and "Mary's Little Lamb" was recorded in June 1963. The latter is the only Redding track with both background singing and brass. It became his worst-selling single.^[24][26] The title track, recorded in September 1963, sparked copyright issues, as it sounded like Irma Thomas's "Ruler of My Heart".^[24] Despite this, Pain in My Heart was released on January 1, 1964, and peaked at number 20 on the R&B chart and at number 85 on the Billboard Hot 100.
In November 1963, Redding, accompanied by his brother Rodgers and an associate, former boxer Sylvester Huckaby (a childhood friend of Redding's), traveled to New York to perform at the Apollo Theater for the recording of a live album for Atlantic Records. Redding and his band were paid $400 per week (US$3,273 in 2018 dollars^[12]) but had to pay $450 (US$3,683 in 2018 dollars^[12]) for sheet music for the house band, led by King Curtis, which left them in financial difficulty. The trio asked Walden for money. Huckaby's description of their circumstances living in the "big old raggedy" Hotel Theresa is quoted by Peter Guralnick in his book Sweet Soul Music. He noted meeting Muhammad Ali and other celebrities. Ben E. King, who was the headliner at the Apollo when Redding performed there, gave him $100 (US$818 in 2018 dollars^[12]) when he learned about Redding's financial situation. The resulting album featured King, the Coasters, Doris Troy, Rufus Thomas, the Falcons and Redding.^[27] Around this time Walden and Rodgers were drafted by the army; Walden's younger brother Alan joined Redding on tour, while Earl "Speedo" Simms replaced Rodgers as Redding's road manager.^[28]
Most of Redding's songs after "Security", from his first album, had a slow tempo. Disc jockey A. C. Moohah Williams accordingly labeled him "Mr. Pitiful",^[29] and subsequently, Cropper and Redding wrote the eponymous song.^[16] That and top 100 singles " Chained and Bound", "Come to Me" and "That's How Strong My Love Is"^[30] were included on Redding's second studio album, The Great Otis Redding Sings Soul Ballads, released in March 1965.^[31] Jenkins began working independently from the group out of fear Galkin, Walden and Cropper would plagiarize his playing style, and so Cropper became Redding's leading guitarist.^[32] Around 1965, Redding co-wrote "I've Been Loving You Too Long" with Jerry Butler, the lead singer of the Impressions. That summer, Redding and the studio crew arranged new songs for his next album. Ten of the eleven songs were written in a 24-hour period on July 9 and 10 in Memphis. Two songs, "Ole Man Trouble" and "Respect", had been finished earlier, during the Otis Blue session. "Respect" and "I've Been Loving You" were later recut in stereo. The album, entitled Otis Blue: Otis Redding Sings Soul, was released in September 1965.^[33] Redding also released his much-loved cover of "A Change Is Gonna Come" in 1965.

Whisky a Go Go and "Try a Little Tenderness"

 

Redding's success allowed him to buy a 300-acre (1.2 km²) ranch in Georgia, which he called the "Big O Ranch."^[36] Stax was also doing well. Walden signed more musicians, including Percy Sledge, Johnnie Taylor, Clarence Carter and Eddie Floyd, and together with Redding, they founded two production companies. "Jotis Records" (derived from Joe Galkin and Otis) released four recordings, two by Arthur Conley and one by Billy Young and Loretta Williams. The other was named Redwal Music (derived from Redding and Walden), which was shut down shortly after its creation.^[37] Since Afro-Americans still formed the majority of fans, Redding chose to perform at Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. Redding was one of the first soul artists to perform for rock audiences in the western United States. His performance received critical acclaim, including positive press in the Los Angeles Times, and he penetrated mainstream popular culture. Bob Dylan attended the performance and offered Redding an altered version of one of his songs, "Just Like a Woman".^[16]
In late 1966, Redding returned to the Stax studio and recorded several tracks, including "Try a Little Tenderness", written by Jimmy Campbell, Reg Connelly and Harry M. Woods in 1932.^[34] This song had previously been covered by Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, and the publishers unsuccessfully tried to stop Redding from recording the song from a "negro perspective". Today often considered his signature song,^[38] Jim Stewart reckoned, "If there's one song, one performance that really sort of sums up Otis and what he's about, it's 'Try a Little Tenderness'. That one performance is so special and so unique that it expresses who he is." On this version Redding was backed by Booker T. & the M.G.'s, while staff producer Isaac Hayes worked on the arrangement.^[39][40] "Try a Little Tenderness" was included on his next album, Complete & Unbelievable: The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul. The song and the album were critically and commercially successful—the former peaked at number 25 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and at number 4 on the R&B chart.^[41]
The spring of 1966 marked the first time that Stax booked concerts for its artists.^[42] The majority of the group arrived in London on March 13,^[40][43] but Redding had flown in days earlier for interviews, such as at "The Eamonn Andrews Show". When the crew arrived in London, the Beatles sent a limousine to pick them up.^[42] Booking agent Bill Graham proposed that Redding plays at the Fillmore Auditorium in late 1966. The gig was commercially and critically successful, paying Redding around $800 to $1000 (US$7,722 in 2018 dollars^[12]) a night.^[44][40] It prompted Graham to remark afterward, "That was the best gig I ever put on in my entire life."^[45] Redding began touring Europe six months later.^[46]

 

Carla Thomas

 

In March 1967, Stax released King & Queen, an album of duets between Redding and Carla Thomas, which became a certified gold record. It was Jim Stewart's idea to produce a duet album, as he expected that "[Redding's] rawness and [Thomas's] sophistication would work".^[47] The album was recorded in January 1967, while Thomas was earning her M.A. in English at Howard University. Six out of ten songs were cut during their joint session; the rest were overdubbed by Redding in the days following, because of his concert obligations. Three singles were lifted from the album: "Tramp" was released in April, followed by "Knock on Wood" and "Lovey Dovey". All three reached at least the top 60 on both the R&B and Pop charts.^[47] The album charted at number 5 and 36 on the Billboard Pop and R&B charts, respectively.^[30]
Redding returned to Europe to perform at the Paris Olympia. The live album Otis Redding: Live in Europe was released three months later, featuring this and other live performances in London and Stockholm, Sweden.^[36] His decision to take his protege Conley (whom Redding and Walden had contracted directly to Atco/Atlantic Records rather than to Stax/Volt) on the tour, instead of more established Stax/Volt artists such as Rufus Thomas and William Bell, produced negative reactions.^[40][48]

 

Monterey Pop

 

In 1967, Redding performed at the influential Monterey Pop Festival as the closing act on Saturday night, the second day of the festival. He was invited through the efforts of promoter Jerry Wexler.^[49] Until that point, Redding was still performing mainly for black audiences.^[50] At the time, he "had not been considered a commercially viable player in the mainstream white American market."^[51] But after delivering one of the most electric performances of the night, and having been the act to most involve the audience, "his performance at Monterey Pop was therefore a natural progression from local to national acclaim,...the decisive turning-point in Otis Redding's career." ^[51] His act included his own song "Respect" and a version of the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction."^[52] Redding and his backing band (Booker T. & the M.G.'s with the Mar-Keys horn section) opened with Cooke's "Shake", after which he delivered an impulsive speech, asking the audience if they were the "love crowd"^[53] and looking for a big response. The ballad "I've Been Loving You" followed. The last song was "Try a Little Tenderness", including an additional chorus. "I got to go, y'all, I don't wanna go", said Redding and left the stage of his last major concert.^[38] According to Booker T. Jones, "I think we did one of our best shows, Otis and the MG's. That we were included in that was also something of a phenomenon. That we were there? With those people? They were accepting us and that was one of the things that really moved Otis. He was happy to be included and it brought him a new audience. It was greatly expanded in Monterey."^[54] According to Sweet Soul Music, musicians such as Brian Jones and Jimi Hendrix were captivated by his performance; Robert Christgau wrote in Esquire, "The Love Crowd screamed one's mind to the heavens."^[55]
Before Monterey, Redding wanted to record with Conley, but Stax was against the idea. The two moved from Memphis to Macon to continue writing. The result was "Sweet Soul Music" (based on Cooke's "Yeah Man"),^[37] which peaked at number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100.^[56][57] By that time Redding had developed polyps on his larynx, which he tried to treat with tea and lemon or honey. He was hospitalized in September 1967 at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York to undergo surgery.^[58]

 

"Dock of the Bay"

 

In early December 1967, Redding again recorded at Stax. One new song was "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay", which was written with Cropper while they were staying with their friend, Earl "Speedo" Simms, on a houseboat in Sausalito.^[59] Redding was inspired by the Beatles album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and tried to create a similar sound, against the label's wishes. His wife Zelma disliked its atypical melody. The Stax crew were also dissatisfied with the new sound; Stewart thought that it was not R&B, while bassist Donald "Duck" Dunn feared it would damage Stax's reputation. However, Redding wanted to expand his musical style and thought it was his best song, correctly believing it would top the charts.^[60] He whistled at the end, either forgetting Cropper's "fadeout rap" or paraphrasing it intentionally.^[61]
 

Death

 

By 1967, the band was traveling to performances in Redding's Beechcraft H18 airplane. On December 9, 1967, they appeared on the Upbeat television show produced in Cleveland. They played three concerts in two nights at a club called Leo's Casino.^[56][62][63] After a phone call with his wife and children, Redding's next stop was Madison, Wisconsin; the next day, Sunday, December 10, they were to play at the Factory nightclub, near the University of Wisconsin.^[62][64]
Although the weather was poor, with heavy rain and fog, and despite warnings, the plane took off.^[65] Four miles (6.4 km) from their destination at Truax Field in Madison, the pilot radioed for permission to land. Shortly thereafter, the plane crashed into Lake Monona. Bar-Kays member Ben Cauley, the accident's only survivor,^[56] was sleeping shortly before the accident. He woke just before impact to see bandmate Phalon Jones look out a window and exclaim, "Oh, no!" Cauley said the last thing he remembered before the crash was unbuckling his seat belt. He then found himself in frigid water, grasping a seat cushion to keep afloat.^[58] A non-swimmer, he was unable to rescue the others.^[66] The cause of the crash was never determined.^[67] James Brown claimed in his autobiography The Godfather of Soul that he had warned Redding not to fly in the plane.^[68]
The other victims of the crash were four members of the Bar-Kays—guitarist Jimmy King, tenor saxophonist Phalon Jones, organist Ronnie Caldwell, and drummer Carl Cunningham; their valet, Matthew Kelly; and the pilot, Richard Fraser.^[69]
Redding's body was recovered the next day when the lake was searched.^[70] The family postponed the funeral from December 15 to December 18 so that more could attend.^[71] The service took place at the City Auditorium in Macon. More than 4,500 people came to the funeral, overflowing the 3,000-seat hall. Johnny Jenkins and Isaac Hayes did not attend, fearing their reaction would be worse than Zelma Redding's.^[72] Redding was entombed at his ranch in Round Oak, about 20 miles (32 km) north of Macon.^[73] Jerry Wexler delivered the eulogy.^[74] Redding died just three days after re-recording "The Dock of the Bay".^[75][56] He was survived by Zelma and three children, Otis III, Dexter, and Karla.^[76] Otis, Dexter, and cousin Mark Lockett later founded the Reddings, a band managed by Zelma.^[77] She also maintained or worked at the janitorial service Maids Over Macon, several nightclubs, and booking agencies.^[78] On November 8, 1997, a memorial plaque was placed on the lakeside deck of the Madison convention center, Monona Terrace.^[79]

 

Posthumous releases and proposed recordings and television appearances

 

"(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" was released in January 1968. It became Redding's only single to reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and the first posthumous number-one single in U.S. chart history.^[80] It sold approximately four million copies worldwide and received more than eight million airplays.^[81][82] The album The Dock of the Bay was the first posthumous album to reach the top spot on the UK Albums Chart.^[83]
Shortly after Redding's death, Atlantic Records, distributor of the Stax/Volt releases, was purchased by Warner Bros. Stax was required to renegotiate its distribution deal and was surprised to learn that Atlantic actually owned the entire Stax/Volt catalog. Stax was unable to regain the rights to its recordings and severed its Atlantic relationship. Atlantic also held the rights to all unreleased Otis Redding masters.^[84] It had enough material for three studio albums—The Immortal Otis Redding (1968), Love Man (1969), and Tell the Truth (1970)—all issued on its Atco Records label.^[84] A number of successful singles emerged from these LPs, among them "Amen" (1968), "Hard to Handle" (1968), "I've Got Dreams to Remember" (1968), "Love Man" (1969), and "Look at That Girl" (1969).^[84] Singles were also lifted from two live Atlantic-issued Redding albums, In Person at the Whisky a Go Go, recorded in 1966 and issued in 1968 on Atco, and Monterey International Pop Festival, a Reprise Records release featuring some of the live performances at the festival by the Jimi Hendrix Experience on side one and Redding on side two.
Redding had at least two television appearances booked for 1968; one on The Ed Sullivan Show and the other on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.
In September 2007, the first official DVD anthology of Redding's live performances was released by Concord Music Group, then owners of the Stax catalog. Dreams to Remember: The Legacy of Otis Redding featured 16 full-length performances and 40 minutes of new interviews documenting his life and career.^[85] On May 18, 2010, Stax Records released a two-disc recording of three complete sets from his Whisky a Go Go date in April 1966.^[86] All seven sets from his three-day residency at the venue were released as Live at the Whisky a Go Go: The Complete Recordings in 2016,^[87] a 6-CD box set that won a Grammy Award for Best Album Notes.^[88]
Carla Thomas claimed that the pair had planned to record another duet album in December the same year, but Phil Walden denied this. Redding had proposed to record an album featuring cut and rearranged songs in different tempos; for example, ballads would be uptempo and vice versa.^[47] Another suggestion was to record an album entirely consisting of country standards.^[89]

 

Personal life and wealth

 

Redding, who was 6 feet 1 inch (1.85 m) tall and weighed 220 pounds (100 kg), was an athletic family man who loved football and hunting.^[90][91] He was described as vigorous, trustworthy,^[92] full of fun^[76] and a successful businessman. He was active in philanthropic projects. His keen interest in black youth led to plans for a summer camp for disadvantaged children.^[93]
Redding's music made him wealthy. According to several advertisements, he had around 200 suits and 400 pairs of shoes, and he earned about $35,000 per week for his concerts.^[94] He spent about $125,000 in the "Big O Ranch". As the owner of Otis Redding Enterprises, his performances, music publishing ventures and royalties from record sales earned him more than a million dollars in 1967 alone.^[71] That year, one columnist said, "he sold more records than Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin combined."^[95] After the release of Otis Blue, Redding became a "catalogue" artist, meaning his albums were not immediate blockbusters, but rather sold steadily over time.^[37]
 

Musicianship

 

Style

Early on Redding copied the rock and soul style of his role model Little Richard. He was also influenced by soul musicians such as Sam Cooke, whose live album Sam Cooke at the Copa was a strong influence,^[92] but later explored other popular genres. He studied the recordings of the Beatles and Bob Dylan. His song "Hard to Handle" has elements of rock and roll and influences of Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix.^[96] Most of his songs were categorized as Southern soul^[97] and Memphis soul.^[98]
His hallmark was his raw voice and ability to convey strong emotion. Richie Unterberger of Allmusic noted his "hoarse, gritty vocals, brassy arrangements, an emotional way with both party tunes and aching ballads."^[99] In the book Rock and Roll: An Introduction, authors Michael Campbell and James Brody suggested that "Redding's singing calls to mind a fervent black preacher. Especially in up-tempo numbers, his singing is more than impassioned speech but less than singing with precise pitch."^[100] According to the book, "Redding finds a rough midpoint between impassioned oratory and conventional singing. His delivery overflows with emotion" in his song "I Can't Turn You Loose".^[100] Booker T. Jones described Redding's singing as energetic and emotional but said that his vocal range was limited, reaching neither low nor high notes.^[101] Peter Buckley, in The Rough Guide to Rock, describes his "gruff voice, which combined Sam Cooke's phrasing with a brawnier delivery" and later suggested he "could testify like a hell-bent preacher, croon like a tender lover or get down and dirty with a bluesy yawp".^[102]
Redding received advice from Rufus Thomas about his clumsy stage appearance. Jerry Wexler said Redding "didn't know how to move", and stood still, moving only his upper body, although he acknowledged that Redding was well received by audiences for his strong message.^[103] Guralnick described Redding's painful vulnerability in Sweet Soul Music, as an attractive one for the audience, but not for his friends and partners. His early shyness was well known.^[104]

 

Songwriting

 

In his early career Redding mostly covered songs from popular artists, such as Richard, Cooke and Solomon Burke. Around the mid-1960s he began writing his own songs—always taking along his cheap red acoustic guitar—and sometimes asked for Stax members' opinion of his lyrics. He often worked on lyrics with other musicians, such as Simms, Rodgers, Huckaby, Phil Walden, and Cropper. During his recovery from his throat operation, Redding wrote about 30 songs in two weeks.^[90] Redding was the sole copyright holder on all of his songs.^[105]
In "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" he abandoned familiar romantic themes for "sad, wistful introspections, amplified by unforgettable descending guitar riffs by Cropper".^[106] The website of the Songwriters Hall of Fame noted that the song "was a kind of brooding, dark voicing of despair, ('I've got nothin' to live for/Look like nothin's gonna come my way')" although "his music, in general, was exultant and joyful." According to journalist Ruth Robinson, author of the liner notes for the 1993 box set, "It is currently a revisionist theory to equate soul with the darker side of man's musical expression, blues. That fanner of the flame of 'Trouble's got a hold on me' music, might well be the father of the form if it is, the glorified exaltation found in church on any Sunday morning is its mother." The Songwriters Hall of Fame website adds that "glorified exaltation indeed was an apt description of Otis Redding's songwriting and singing style."^[107] Booker T. Jones compared Redding with Leonard Bernstein, stating, "He was the same type person. He was a leader. He'd just lead with his arms and his body and his fingers."^[104]
Redding favored short and simple lyrics; when asked whether he intended to cover Dylan's "Just Like a Woman", he responded that the lyrics contained "too much text".^[92] Furthermore, he stated in an interview,

Basically, I like any music that remains simple and I feel this is the formula that makes "soul music" successful. When any music form becomes cluttered and/or complicated you lose the average listener's ear. There is nothing more beautiful than a simple blues tune. There is beauty in simplicity whether you are talking about architecture, art or music.^[93]

Redding also authored his (sometimes difficult) recordings' horn arrangements, humming to show the players what he had in mind. The recording of "Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song)" captures his habit of humming with the horn section.^[108]

Legacy

"Otis Redding Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay", statue in Gateway Park by Bradley Cooley and Bradley Cooley, Jr of Bronze By Cooley, 2003

Redding has been called the "King of Soul",^[109] an honorific also given to Brown^[110] and Cooke.^{[111][112][113]} He remains one of the genre's most recognized artists. His lean and powerful style exemplified the Stax sound;^{[102][114][115]} he was said to be "the heart and soul of Stax",^[116] while artists such as Al Jackson, Dunn and Cropper helped to expand its structure.^[115] His open-throated singing,^[114] the tremolo/vibrato, the manic, electrifying stage performances^[117] and perceived honesty were particular hallmarks, along with the use of interjections (such as "gotta, gotta, gotta"), some of which came from Cooke.^[92][116] Producer Stewart thought the "begging singing" was stress-induced and enhanced by Redding's shyness.^[104]
Artists from many genres have named Redding as a musical influence. George Harrison called "Respect" an inspiration for "Drive My Car".^[118] The Rolling Stones also mentioned Redding as a major influence.^[119][120] Other artists influenced by Redding include Led Zeppelin,^[121][122] Grateful Dead,^[123] Lynyrd Skynyrd,^[124] the Doors,^[123] and virtually every soul and R&B musician from the early years, such as Al Green, Etta James,^[36] William Bell,^[123] Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye and Conley.^[125] Janis Joplin was influenced by his singing style, according to Sam Andrew, a guitarist in her band Big Brother and the Holding Company. She stated that she learned "to push a song instead of just sliding over it" after hearing Redding.^[126]
The Bee Gees' Barry Gibb and Robin Gibb wrote the song "To Love Somebody" for him to record. He loved it, and he was going to "cut it", as Barry put it, on his return from his final concert. They dedicated the song to his memory.

Awards and honors

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted Redding in 1989, declaring his name to be "synonymous with the term soul music that arose out of the black experience in America through the transmutation of gospel and rhythm and blues into a form of funky, secular testifying."^[127] Readers of the British music newspaper Melody Maker voted him the top vocalist of 1967, superseding Elvis Presley, who had topped the list for the prior 10 years.^{[81][125][128]} In 1988, he was inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame.^[82] Five years later, the United States Post Office issued a 29-cent commemorative postage stamp in his honor.^[129] Redding was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1994,^[107] and in 1999 he received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.^[130] The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame included three Redding recordings, "Shake", "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay", and "Try a Little Tenderness," on its list of "The 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll."^[131] American music magazine Rolling Stone ranked Redding at number 21 on their list of the "100 Greatest Artists of All Time"^[132] and eighth on their list of the "100 Greatest Singers of All Time".^[101] Q ranked Redding fourth among "100 Greatest Singers", after only Frank Sinatra, Franklin and Presley.^[133]
Five of his albums, Otis Blue: Otis Redding Sings Soul, Dreams to Remember: The Otis Redding Anthology, The Dock of the Bay, Complete & Unbelievable: The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul and Live in Europe, were ranked by Rolling Stone on their list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time". The first album was singled out for praise by music critics; apart from the Rolling Stone listing at number 74, NME ranked it 35 on their list of the "Greatest Albums of All Time".^[134] Music critic Robert Christgau said that Otis Blue was "the first great album by one of soul's few reliable long-form artists",^[135] and that Redding's "original LPs were among the most intelligently conceived black albums of the '60s".^[136]
In 2002, the city of Macon honored its native son by unveiling a memorial statue (32°50′19.05″N 83°37′17.30″W) in the city's Gateway Park. The park is next to the Otis Redding Memorial Bridge, which crosses the Ocmulgee River. The Otis Redding Memorial Library is also housed in the city.^[137] The Rhythm and Blues Foundation named Redding as the recipient of its 2006 Pioneer Award.^[138] Billboard awarded Redding the "Otis Redding Excellence Award" the same year.^[36] A year later he was inducted into the Hollywood's Rockwalk in California.^[82] On August 17, 2013, in Cleveland, Ohio, the city where he did his last show at Leo's Casino, Redding was inducted into the inaugural class of the Official Rhythm & Blues Music Hall of Fame at Cleveland State University.

Discography

Main article: Otis Redding discography

Studio albums

Pain in My Heart (1964) The Great Otis Redding Sings Soul Ballads (1965) Otis Blue: Otis Redding Sings Soul (1965) The Soul Album (1966) Complete & Unbelievable: The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul (1966) King & Queen (1967)

Posthumous studio albums

The Dock of the Bay (1968) The Immortal Otis Redding (1968) Love Man (1969) Tell the Truth (1970) Remember Me (1992)

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Further reading

• Schiesel, Jane (1973). The Otis Redding Story (1st ed.). Garden City, New York: Doubleday. ISBN 978-0-385-02335-1.
• Delehant, Jim (2004). "The Blues Changes from Day to Day: Otis Redding Interview". In David Brackett. The Pop, Rock, and Soul Reader: Histories and Debates. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195125702. OCLC 628872571.

External links

Otis Reddingat Wikipedia's sister projects

• Media from Wikimedia Commons
• Quotations from Wikiquote
• Data from Wikidata

• Official website
• Wikilivres has original media or text related to this article: Otis Redding (in the public domain in New Zealand)
• Otis Redding on IMDb