If one looks back at the 1960s through a high-magnification lens and with a healthy sentience of culture and the innate role popular music played within it, two songs might very well reveal everything there is to know about the nature and meaning of that decade. Indeed, within this book’s covers, the argument can and will be made that these two recordings—Aretha Franklin’s cover of Otis Redding’s “Respect” in the spring of 1967, and Redding’s posthumously released “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” early in 1968—rise above all other three-minute, 45-RPM, vinyl-backed symphonies derived from those turbulent and terrifying times. One reflects the need for generational outcasts to find a place among new societal norms, the other the need to find sanctuary in that new place.
Unlike “Sgt. Pepper”/“Incense and Peppermints” entreaties to tune in and drop-out, or “Blowin’ in the Wind”/“Eve of Destruction” vetoes of hubristic war and group-think intolerance, “Respect” and “Dock of the Bay” provided the thread and threnody of the most uproarious and portentous of decades. Performed not incidentally by the “king” and “queen” of soul, they helped seed social change that, alas, never came to fruition in Redding’s time and was in fact smacked down metaphorically in the decade’s dying days by the literal deaths on a motel balcony in Memphis—mere blocks from where Otis Redding recorded most of his songs—a hotel kitchen in Los Angeles, and a speedway in Altamont.
Both of these priceless, timeless, chart-topping capsules of an America at war with itself, were so perfectly timed, just months apart, that they stand as a cause and effect. With them, Otis Redding found his own calling, not as musician, but as a prophet and a poet. In other words, Redding—simply the most overpowering and electrifying soul stage performer of his time, and just as profound an influence behind the scenes—became the nerve and conscience of soul music about to be fully integrated into the rock and roll arc.
“Respect” was clearly much larger in overall meaning than its individual verses, which were meant to add dynamite to the emotional ammunition of Redding’s raspy, open-wounded wailing, which was perfectly coordinated with the edgy call-and-response horn blasts and soul-deep back beat that stamped the jazzy, sweaty funk of the “Memphis sound.” But because it was recorded in 1965, the year of the Voting Rights Act, a year after the Civil Rights Act, and two years after the March on Washington, such a demand by a black man—to be appreciated for his hard work and the sacrifices he made—transcended the song’s narrow trope of a man looking to be respected by his woman after a hard day. Civil rights anthems were not necessarily tightly and obviously focused on the cause; during the march, when Dr. Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” peroration, Little Stevie Wonder’s raucous “Fingertips (Part 2)” was the top song on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, a major crossover step for a black artist, and for no easily discernible reason was a sort of quasi-anthem for the event, wafting as it did on transistor radios through the crowds on the Mall between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial.
In the same way, the songs of Motown and Stax/Volt were heard often on Armed Forces Radio in the jungles of Vietnam, offering American GIs who didn’t want to be there the familiarity of life back home, a hint that such music soldered civil rights to anti-war protests and another prompt to question why they were indeed there.
•
REDDING’S “RESPECT,” cut on July 9, 1965, in a converted movie theater in Memphis that would become the center of popular music a few years later, was just another day at the office for the staff at Stax. It was produced by Steve Cropper and anchored by the best house band known to man, the inimitable Booker T. and his MG’s—Cropper, Donald “Duck” Dunn, Al Jackson, and their leader, Booker T. Jones. When it was released on August 15, 1965, the song only made it to number 35 on the pop chart. Yet its impact was felt within the well of black pride. It was Top 5 on the Black Singles Chart, a category soon changed in favor of the more politically correct R&B Chart. But, like “Fingertips (Part 2),” its grooves and that sweeping title of pride against prejudice were important cultural markers, for inner-city America a command to keep fighting the de facto segregation of Jim Crow, to not sit at the colored lunch counter or follow the signs to the “Colored Only” bathroom.
Still, it’s one of the threads of the Redding story that he would nurse his aversion to being labeled and interpreted instead of merely heard. Yet even neutrality was reflexively criticized by some in a black cognoscenti impatient to present “their” stars as patriotic equals of white performers who knew enough to pay lip service to men in war. “Why won’t top Afro-American entertainers go to Vietnam and entertain the troops there? It’s a sore subject, and one they do not like to talk about,” asked the venerable black newspaper of Harlem, the New York Amsterdam News, in 1967.1 Needless to say, standing against the war would have been far out on a limb, indeed.
When Otis in 1965 cut a cover of Sam Cooke’s posthumous 1964 release “A Change Is Gonna Come”—as brilliant a landmark as ever there was among sixties soul “message” songs—Redding’s intent was less urgent than Cooke’s, who came of age in the 1950s when black men were paid not to make a ruckus anywhere but onstage. Cooke’s conscription of protest into an ingredient of his bombastic stage show was enough of a leap forward. Change wasn’t here, but it was going to come—in time. For Redding’s prime influences—Little Richard and James Brown—there never was such a revelatory transition; indeed, Brown’s political coming-out (as opposed to his racial coming-out in such anthems as “Say It Loud I’m Black and I’m Proud”) was, confusing to many, as a Republican, his statement made almost tragicomically, wearing a flag-draped jumpsuit while performing “Living in America.”
It was only logical, then, that Redding’s version of “Respect” was not as successful or earthmoving as Aretha Franklin’s cut, arguably one of the greatest recordings in modern music history. Although each version was recorded under entirely different conditions and protocols—Franklin’s a technical marvel made in New York under the watch of uber engineer Tom Dowd, and Redding’s in Memphis, the product of nearly impromptu jams, one or two takes, all live—both had the benefit of some of the most talented session musicians ever born.
But Aretha also had the benefit of two more years of cultural give and the progression of inner-city norms into a hip white society that was just now learning to respect the talent and contributions of black men and women. Redding had provided the groove and beat of a song so infectious it has been covered by literally dozens of artists from every idiom. In the maw of the ’60s, it could be interpreted any number of ways—indeed, when Franklin verbally spelled out R-E-S-P-E-C-T, she also had the advantage of a yearning for respect that was being echoed by a fledgling women’s rights movement. And when she told her man, “Take care . . . TCB,” a line she added to the song, this command from a strong woman to take care of business cut in a million directions: political, sexual, generational, and all in between. Little wonder that Otis, as ambivalent as he was about being one-upped on his own song, began using the line in his own renditions of it.
Jerry Wexler, the grand doyen of Atlantic Records’ soul music empire, produced the Franklin version, a symbolic and sonic connection between the Memphis sound and the company that muscled in as its Northern overlord and creative partner. He once remarked that “Respect” was “global in its influence, with overtones of the civil rights movement and gender equality. It was an appeal for dignity.”2 In a great leap forward for the song’s marketability, such an appeal, and the impudence of a woman making it, broadened the implicit significance of the deceptively ingenuous lyrics. As a result, Wexler and Franklin took the song to number 1 on both the pop and R&B charts. This meant that even assassination and conditioned opposition could not stop what was now the developing lay of the land in American culture.
•
OTIS REDDING was many things—in the coolly autobiographical “Love Man” he sang, about being “six feet one” with “fair skin”—and his performances multi-flavored. He preened, he pouted, he strutted, and he bled. And if his work didn’t appear to be overtly political in nature, it was because he was canny enough to know the most trenchant messages always were up to the listener to realize. Like the song masters who came before him, Redding wrote and performed to allay the pain lurking in the folds of three-chord pop music. Redding could neither read nor write music, nor did he really know how to dance. But as he reached his apogee, cornering the market on its emotion and sincerity, he practically carried black music on his back.
His rise from the son of a preacher man in Macon, Georgia, to a preacher of three-minute soul sermons on vinyl discs was, in every way, the final stage in the maturation of African-American music as an idiom and an industry. Given its ticket to the big dance of emerging soul, Stax/Volt, encouraged and financially stoked by the biggest of the Northern soul–driven record companies, Atlantic Records, impudently but accurately called itself “Soulsville U.S.A.” in pointed contrast to “Hitsville U.S.A.,” Motown’s founding father Berry Gordy’s consciously less racially identifiable persona. And Redding was its vulnerable soul, laying out a full-on emotional release that flowed from what he defined as a pain in his heart. His musical palette, a cosmic alloy of gospel and blues, hammered into a gritty but elegant template by both black and white musicians, remodeled soul and rock and anchored the most infectious native music America had heard since the big bands.
The allied and alloyed Stax/Volt and Atlantic Records roster didn’t last long, but it was profound—Booker T. and the MG’s, Wilson Pickett, Sam and Dave, Percy Sledge, Eddie Floyd, and Solomon Burke, among others. Their sonic resonance was heard in 167 songs that made the top 100 on the pop chart, 250 songs on the R&B chart. Even novelties like Redding’s Christmastime duet with Carla Thomas, “New Year’s Resolution”—which, with his version of “White Christmas” can be found on the greatest and most underrated holiday album ever, Atlantic Records’ 1968 Soul Christmas (guarantee: You ain’t never heard “Silver Bells” the way Booker T. and the MG’s did it)—are like mined gold today. Considering all this occurred at a time when the cultural hurdles were many for a place in the South calling itself Soulsville, it is no surprise that Stax/Volt became far more celebrated in review than in its currency, and in England more than America.
Within the music world, the South was always like Mecca. Seeking to glean some of the magic within the region’s hallowed studio walls, the biggest musical acts in the world would beat a path to Nashville and Muscle Shoals. Still, there was no replicating what they were doing in Memphis, though even Elvis Presley, when he needed a shot of rejuvenation in the ’70s, came to Soulsville to record. Saddest of all, however, despite Redding’s high influence, it required his untimely death for him to sell records in large numbers in the United States. For that reason, “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” is a metaphor for much in Redding’s life. Its ode to lonely longing is a somber refrain indeed, and one he may well have intended to be taken in a mournful context.
Indeed, there is an unmistakable resignation to it, his voice far softer and more quaveringly vulnerable than it ever had been; when he sang of “watching the tide roll away,” it is evident that he was watching not just the waters of San Francisco Bay roll away but also his optimism, his achievements, even his own life. Unsure of whether the song would be succor for his legacy or be stillborn, he spent much time during an introspective sabbatical after throat surgery obsessively playing Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, seeking clues to what pop music demanded in a postmodern world.
•
NOT INCIDENTALLY, in between the releases of “Respect” and “Dock of the Bay” Redding enjoyed his greatest moment of triumph. On June 18, 1967, the second day of the three-day Monterey Pop Festival, during the wistful ideological apogee of the rock era known as the Summer of Love, an idyllic twilight beneath the northern California bluffs served as his backdrop. This was the first grand ritual of rock and roll’s post–teen idol evolution. The marquis featured some of the biggest mainstream acts on the globe. And while, for many, the breakout stars of this epochal bash were the sublime Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix—a white Texas woman who sang soul and a black man from Washington State who played white rock and roll—Redding was essentially reborn, a Deep South black-as-night soul man who for a decade dragged himself from stage to stage, turning himself inside out extracting the blackness of each word he sang.
Even on this stage, and at the age of twenty-six, he braved the trend of a culture given to leather, spangled jeans, long hair, and headbands. An imposing, well sculpted, beautiful looking man, Redding normally performed while looking ready for a GQ photo shoot, in leisure tops, cardigans, open-necked shirts and sport jackets, and neatly pressed slacks. On this night, he was dressed to kill, chitlin’-circuit style, all eye candy in a turquoise suit, not a hair of his close-cropped Afro and manicured mustache out of place.
“This is the love crowd, right?” he teased at the beginning of his set, betraying his tenuous connection to the new ethos. He needed no lines though, only a song to sing. When he broke into one of his hypnotic, ultra-sensuous trademark ballads, “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now),” the song built to sonic bliss. Then, as he stalked the laser-and-strobe-lit stage, he fell to his knees as if pain had kicked his knees out, breathing fire, oozing sex. His raspy-throated bellowing and honey-coated purring blended seamlessly into the wailing horns of his backup band, the peerless Stax house musicians, and the effect wasn’t rock but pure, unapologetic, uncompromising soul.
If there is only one clip that could be viewed, it would be the one from 1967, when he performed “Try a Little Tenderness” at Monterey, writhing and then exploding. He would remain onstage milking every last drop out of it, spitting out a machine gun–like barrage of “got-a, got-a, got-a, got-a,” arms and legs conducting their own separate tribal dances. The very stoned audience of record industry lice and mainly white, middle- and upper-class teenage hippies on summer vacation, was left stunned and damp, turned incredulous by a black man singing a 1932 big band tune by Bing Crosby that had been refashioned into a soul standard.
Redding made his point. Loud and clear. Not entirely incidental was that everyone went home from the festival with Redding on their minds and in their ears, as much as they did Joplin and Hendrix, the festival’s other big breakout stars. The Stax/Volt idiom now carried immense cachet, at least as important as was Motown in the public eye. At last, Redding stood as the cynosure of a new rock order that venerated African-American music but sublimated African-American artists. But he had precious little time to enjoy the air up there.
•
IT WAS no wonder that, after Monterey, Redding could sit back and ask for a little time before heading back to the cultural battlefront. He was a different breed than many in the rock and roll vanguard; projecting a traditional hip-to-be-square brand of cool, eschewing beads, bangles, robes, Beatle-esque lyrics that pimped a drug lifestyle, though he was hardly a bluenose in these matters. He took to the stage at Monterey somewhat or fully stoned, fueling himself with weed. Still, while few examined the lyrics of his songs closely, it was clear that his drug of choice was writing the perfect song and banging it out in the studio.
On December 10, 1967, just as he had put “Dock of the Bay” in the bank, time ran out. He died in perhaps the most tragic of the litany of small plane crashes that have sundered some of contemporary music’s most promising and brilliant talent—from Buddy Holly/Ritchie Valens/J. P. Richardson (a.k.a. the Big Bopper) to Patsy Cline to Lynyrd Skynyrd to Jim Croce. All were grievous losses; none perhaps more cruel than the one that took Redding from the new order of music he had already begun to define—though he would continue to do that, anyway, having shaped the landscape in so many ways. He was only twenty-six when his plane went down but already had seen the tidal wave of America’s civil rights struggle and the liberation of the music industry that mirrored its halting progressions, already had achieved exalted status as a singer, songwriter, producer, and record company executive. But it was the genuine undercurrent of open-wound vulnerability and grim fatalism in those pastoral images that sold “Dock of the Bay” and still does; by one measure, “Dock of the Bay” is the fifth biggest jukebox hit in history, behind “Hound Dog,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” Patsy Cline’s “Crazy,” and “Rock Around the Clock.”3
Few have ever cut the same sort of broad swath in transmitting statements that even years later contain equal currents of glory and tragedy. Not for nothing has Robert Hilburn, the venerable Los Angeles Times music critic and witness to Redding in the context of his time, written that “Dock of the Bay” and “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now)” “conveyed marvelously the tenderness and heartache that rests at the foundation of soul music.”4
It’s no easy thing to verbalize the tragic components of life—all life, good, bad, and worse—so clearly that it physically makes you feel joy or pain. When Redding sang, every inch of him seemed to resonate in hallelujah celebration or woebegone anguish; hearing him sing “Mr. Pitiful” was to climb inside his heart and count its scars from being broken. That this was a primary trait was evident early; his first album, in 1964, was titled Pain in My Heart. That kind of deeper-than-deep soul can find its way into many contexts—for example, Redding’s 1966 song “My Lover’s Prayer” was on a 2001 soundtrack album of music used in The Sopranos TV series, along with the likes of Vivaldi, Frank Sinatra, Lorenzo Jovanotti, Keith Richards, and Henry Mancini. And, in retrospect, Redding’s rare ability to make a heart hurt can only have been because his own was so breakable.
This sadness made Redding’s joy even more joyous, those being the moments when he could ignore all the prophesies of impending doom, even if not for long. What he really feared was that a lurking scythe, one marking time until it could drop on him, making all the work he had done for naught. Of course, he was wrong about that; as with Caruso, Sinatra, and Lennon, Redding’s death meant perpetual renewal.
•
AND WITH death emerged a kind of sainthood, something few deserve, and certainly not Redding for anything beyond his music. His prim but hardy wife, Zelma, knew that when she married him at the age of sixteen. Ever since, she has had to endure gossip, much of it falling into the realm of craziness. Pushed beyond her limits by a 2001 Redding biography with more than a little dirty laundry, she up and sued the author for $15 million.5 Though she settled short of victory, it was because of her objections that the book was banned throughout Macon, Georgia—the hometown Redding never left—in many bookstores and in the library of the now-defunct Georgia Music Hall of Fame.6 To be sure, misinformation has always pervaded the Redding legend. Upon his death—when, unlike for any of the other famous rock and roll plane-crash victims, stunningly bad-taste pictures of his corpse, still strapped in the copilot’s seat, were published—Esquire ran an article that nonchalantly and wrongly posited that he had been at the pilot’s controls when the flight went down, a fable many still believe. Questions are still asked about odd aspects of his death, some legitimate due to inconsistencies in the police reports, including that a mysterious missing attaché case supposedly full of cash and marijuana either was or was not found in the wreckage—and, in one print story, cocaine and opium.7
Redding’s life can fairly be, and has been, called a “riddle.”8 But whatever else it is, the soundtrack has churned away as a profitable enterprise. Zelma Atwood Redding, in her seventies and still hardy even on one leg, the other amputated a few years ago because of diabetes, sits atop the legacy, zealously trying to cleanse and protect her husband in death from interlopers and despoilers. She mulls over projects including potential movies of his life, all of which have thus far failed to pass muster with her. A few years ago, she took back her husband’s personal papers that she had once donated to the Macon public library, rather than having them available to any prying eyes. Having never remarried, her memories have only been partially for sale; the rest can be classified by the title of the one song she wrote with her husband—“I’ve Got Dreams to Remember.” All the songs he ever wrote are personal to her. “I always thought everything he sang,” she says, “he sang for me.”9
•
IN TRUTH, Redding was not in the same league of depravity that his biggest influence, Little Richard Penniman, was. Although Redding became a hugely wealthy man, the bread never drove him—he would have been the first to nod in agreement with the John Lennon line “You don’t take nothing with you but your soul.” As stable and clean an image as he created for himself, the cruelest irony was that, while both Joplin and Hendrix derailed themselves with drugs and personal weakness, Otis—the strong one, the clear-eyed ballast against the wind—had less time left than they did riding that dangerous wind.
Redding’s conflicted state of mind was helped neither by his difficulty assimilating into a white-dominated industry or the tangled web that the industry was, and is. The record game, to be polite, is one of the most venal and soulless entities ever known, and a bane to creatively inclined people easily manipulated by power brokers with a fast line and legal levers to rip them off. This was of course a trap that a generation of black performers fell into. Redding did much to alter that evil equation, but not nearly enough to suit him or make the industry cower, or even stop abusing him. Indeed, some have even wanted to avoid the pressures Redding had in establishing a conveyor belt of crossover soul without compromising the fundamental bedrock of his own inner soul, which was always translated through his sound and style.
On the other hand, Otis learned valuable lessons from his church deacon father—who tried mightily to nip Otis’s singing in the bud when Otis was a teenager and in possession of an ungodly voice and a “Jazz Singer’s”–style obsession—about living modestly and purely but with ferocious commitment. Otis willingly and voraciously craved more and more hegemony, and kept so true to his roots that many of his own songs, meant not to be commercially winsome as much as a kick to the gut, were not made-to-order pop hits. His mission was to make soul the overarching musical format of his generation, with himself as the gatekeeper. His loyalty thus was to his art, his craft, and not necessarily his wallet, and he wanted everyone to know that about him, every time he cleared his throat.
Even so, he parlayed his ambition and talent, with a tempered personality that was irresistible—a “soulful force of nature,” as one chronicler of music history called him, or “a magic potion,” to Stax/Volt co-founder and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member Jim Stewart.10 Although Stewart was not normally open to the adaptations that an artist with fiercely independent ideas like Redding insisted on, and there were times they butted heads, both always understood that such “magic” would be conceived and actualized on Redding’s terms. Those adaptations after all were what put Stax/Volt, that onetime speck on the music map, into a position of inordinate power in the mid-1960s.
While Gordy built the first black-owned music empire at Motown, Redding did something at least as impressive: converting one of the whitest bastions of the post-Confederate South into the vital core of black music. America’s musical evolution had been redirected to and refashioned in the South, taken there by black artists whose immediate ancestors had been shunted aside by the big labels, their work cribbed and covered in antiseptic pop for a ride up the charts. Then Redding came along and suddenly it was more common for black artists to cover Rolling Stones and Beatles’ songs, stripping them down to their soulful components. And when whites covered the songs that had come out of Memphis and Muscle Shoals, the difference was that the songs had already been massive hits. It was an inversion of the highest order, and with the utmost . . . respect.
Redding’s whole career was a matter of building and flexing his muscle, with music, with women, with rivals, but with a gentleness that belied that side of his ambition. But he knew early on that he was God’s chosen vessel of transition, from lounge act to corporate player, cutting a common path through the shrubbery of soul, funk, and R&B compatible with acid rock. The fruits of this labor are heard today—as were, for a time in the ’80s, the fruit of his loins, his sons Dexter and Otis III, fronting the funk/dance band the Reddings. Few had any idea that the Black Crowes’ 1989 hard rock hit “Hard to Handle” was a 1967 Redding song. In this way, Otis never really dies, no more than Sinatra or Louis Armstrong or Sam Cooke does.
There is of course endless repackaging of his albums and an argosy of literature about Stax/Volt. Then, every once in a while, the name will leap from the gene pool of pop music for another go-round. There was George Faison’s Suite Otis, the choreographer’s ballet set to six Redding songs, performed by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 1986. Of more recent vintage was Kanye West and Jay-Z’s 2011 Watch the Throne album—one of its tracks, “Otis,” noted as “Featuring Otis Redding,” sampled Redding’s vocal on “Try a Little Tenderness,” helping sell over a million copies.11 In 2014, the classic rocker Paul Rodgers covered three Redding songs on his album The Royal Sessions. And on and on it goes.
TRUE STORY: There is a man in Italy named Graziano Uliani, whom Memphis Horn trumpeter Wayne Jackson swears is “the biggest Otis Redding fan on the planet.” A record producer and president of the Otis Redding Appreciation Society of Italy, he lives on Via Otis Redding, overlooking the quaint town of Porretta. He speaks English haltingly, but every word he knows he learned from listening to Otis Redding records.12 Another true story: In a quaint little railway station in Rochelle, France, one of the station walls bears a gigantic art deco mural with the images of two people: Ray Charles and Otis Redding.13
Then there is this. The Al Jazeera America website recently carried a news story from civil-war-torn Liberia. At one point, the story quotes a Liberian army general who “sits in a dim powder blue bunkerlike room with two other aging servicemen as Otis Redding’s ‘I’ve Got Dreams to Remember’ plays from a large speaker on the street.”14
This is all part of the enduring dominion built by Otis Redding, who, taken merely as a performer, was one of the most enduringly passionate and tragic icons music has ever witnessed. He earned the postage stamp that bore his image in 2003, having stood at the top of the heap of consistent and consistently good artists and live performers of the sixties. For what it’s worth, contemporary retro-rankings by Rolling Stone a decade ago placed him eighth among the “100 Greatest Singers of All Time”—Aretha was number one, with Marvin Gaye, Sam Cooke, and Ray Charles just ahead of him in the soul subset15—and twenty-first among the “100 Greatest Artists of All Time” topped by the Beatles.16 But of course, all the others had time. Much more time.
It only takes a listen to his records or a glimpse of him onstage, always a revelatory experience, to be left breathless; and thank the heavens for film and videotape of some typically wondrous performances through his career. Big, manly, emotional, and full of piss, vinegar, and heart, the man never cheated his audience. Each of his songs was calculated for maximum stage bang. Up there, a three-minute interlude of “Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song),” “Try a Little Tenderness,” or his riotous cover of “Satisfaction” were, and still are, like, weightless, free falling emotions unabridged. Many of Redding’s live performances are available on DVD and the Internet, and if there is only one that could be viewed it should be a choice between the 1967 clip of him belting out “Tenderness” at Monterey or during the legendary Stax/Volt tour of Europe. To watch him nearly collapsing in his fervor at these venues is to see a man who was soul music in the sixties, the clues to the DNA of that era endless and fascinating; and even a few minutes can teach one something about his art and his times.
•
THROUGH REDDING we can trace a lineage, a heritage, dating back to Jelly Roll Morton and Lead Belly. Drawing on the sound and fury of the early R&B-cum-rock-and-roll acts like Billy Ward and the Dominoes, the original Drifters, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Etta James, and the first wave of doo-wop harmonizers, Redding had carefully crafted a sturdy, transformative, postmodern epoxy of the bombast of James Brown and Jackie Wilson, the heaving emotional R&B kick of Ike and Tina Turner, and the shale-smooth gospel pop-soul of Ray Charles and Sam Cooke. Even in pain, his songs are odes to the joy of full-on emotion, something lacking from the grooves of music since his death. For the 2003 Soul Comes Home DVD, recorded at the Celebration of Stax Records concert at Memphis’s Orpheum Theater that year, Solomon Burke sang not any of his soul standards but rather “Try a Little Tenderness.” Such deference is reserved only for a scant few.
But it sure wasn’t as easy as Redding made it look. If “Dock of the Bay” came about as a reflection of his own growing visions of personal apocalypse and mortality, one can imagine that his fatalism wasn’t limited to his own life. Within the cauldron of a decade gone to hell, he had no idea where the madness might end. As it happened, the song hit the market less than three years after the assassination of Malcolm X, three months before that of Martin Luther King Jr., five months before Robert Kennedy. Sadly, he had only a little while himself, and would find no real serenity. During his final months on Earth, he was back again in the mortal beehive, squabbling with industry canons over intra-industry pettiness, so much so that he intentionally spent more time with his protégé, Arthur Conley, a Stax reject, writing and producing a number 2 pop and soul hit for him, “Sweet Soul Music.”
What’s more, when he came in with “Dock of the Bay,” no one at Stax/Volt, Atlantic, or even his own manager thought it up to snuff; they said—and Jerry Wexler was the most adamantly critical—that the vocal was lost, it was too stark, too subtly soulful, too quirky. Otis had to threaten to walk away from everyone involved if the song wasn’t released as it was recorded. This demonstrated how innately soulless this ever-corrosive industry was, and still is, if even a man like Otis Redding could be asked to do the bidding of men who should have just let him do his thing and not get in his way. This was the way of the industry, yet in this case it seemed punitive to black men even like Redding who had earned their cachet but apparently not quite in America.
Not uncommon for black stars, he was far more cherished in England, where appreciation for black American musical idioms was a revelatory experience not clouded by guilt or denial. Not that Britain was free of racist contamination—it took until the mid-1960s proliferation of pirate radio ships to lift a longtime BBC ban on African-based rock music—but in a world where no one was conditioned to accept a plantation society and a century of de facto segregation, Redding, in the year he died, was voted the world’s number one male vocalist in the Melody Maker Pop Poll, ahead of James Brown. Otis, who had no doubt about it himself, played it humble. Wilson Pickett, he said, should have won.17
•
THE REDDING story is one of great conquest and, sadly, a requiem, which can seem like a short story with endless significance. Not just was his life briefer than it needed to be, just five years of prime time, he was also a soul man unhappier than he had a right to be—his best album, the remarkable 1965 breakout Otis Blue, was well named. As far as he came, he lived with considerable unease about an industry that refused him full appreciation—and never awarded him a Grammy until he was in his grave. Out on the road, away from the Georgia clay that always brought him back down to earth, he was not the affable, big-hearted gentleman the PR material painted him to be. He was impulsive—once risking his career by shooting through a window and wounding a man in the leg, an incident that curiously went unreported—and had a decidedly broad view of marital fidelity. But even with the endless tap of his influence, he deserved better. In retrospect, if the loss of any one man mattered to the perpetuation of what Southern soul had become, it was Otis Redding.
Not by coincidence, his death left the entire idiom without a broad back to ride on. It was almost as if what had been built in a decade fell to the ground with that plane. The unlikely union between Memphis and Broadway, which had made for strange bedfellows but sweet soul music, was dashed within a year of Redding’s demise when Atlantic sucker-punched Stax, breaking the partnership and looting it of its biggest resource, its precious song catalog.
With little sentimentality, soul re-created itself, its center of gravity shifted from the streets of Memphis to the history-rich studios of Philadelphia. Stax itself was raised from the dead, the horns and hooks of the ’60s transformed into a politically acute and impolite conveyor of ’70s funk and “badass” black stereotypes, its main man now “soul man” Isaac Hayes, its anthem his “Theme from Shaft,” its Woodstock the 1972 Wattstax concert. Surely this rephasing, and rephrasing, of soul would have happened, regardless; that is the nature of musical evolution. But if Otis Redding could never have been a “badass” or sing of a black private dick who’s a sex machine to all the chicks, neither would he likely have faded away quietly. He would no doubt have found a way to hold the pins of Southern soul to the sacred ground on which it was built. A likely scenario is that his own record company would have churned out crossover soul that itself would have evolved into a Ray Charles–style pop bent while still retaining the sweatier roots of soul. Still, at an eternal twenty-six, Redding survives in far more tangible ways than he ever could have imagined, as a fix for an American culture that has become diluted of soul in so many ways since his death. Redding in the end was bigger than the music he sang, because of how he sang and interpreted it during the most traumatic, metamorphic decade in history. And, given how little soul has survived him, Lord how we could use him now.