With providential timing, Otis Redding matured into a viable act just as the transition of soul music from pure rhythm and blues to mainstream pop music was taking hold, not with entirely positive consequences for African-Americans. If the rise of Little Richard seemed to portend a grand awakening of “race music” for teenagers, white record industry power brokers, seeing its raw power, quickly moved in. The first time it happened was when the Ivy League–looking Crew-Cuts covered a song from the soul group the Chords, taking the minor top 10 1954 hit “Sh-Boom,” and turning it into a number 1 for nine weeks and singing it on The Ed Sullivan Show. More egregious was a clueless, squeaky clean 1956 cover of “Tutti Frutti” by the vanilla crooner Pat Boone, which went to number 12, five notches higher than Richard’s, who had a theory why. “They didn’t want me to be in the white guys’ way . . . They needed a rock star to block me out of white homes because I was a hero to white kids,” he once said. “The white kids would have Pat Boone up on the dresser and me in the drawer ’cause they liked my version better, but the families didn’t want me because of the image that I was projecting.”1
By the mid-1950s the white co-option of the form was near total when Elvis Presley broke big. He was another son of the Deep South lower class, his way up charted by a guitar and the blues. He began his career as a novice picker and warbler in Sam Phillips’s Sun Studio in Memphis in 1954. But Presley’s abiding respect for country’s blues roots led him to pivot from rockabilly to smooth, superbly crafted rhythm and blues–style rock and roll that even began easing parents’ early vapors about his elastic-legged pelvic swiveling.
Still, the original blues rockers cut deeply into the culture. Little Richard appeared in movies, just like Elvis Presley, alongside hot rock and roll acts like Bill Haley and His Comets—who when they were chosen to sing “Rock Around the Clock” for the opening credits of The Blackboard Jungle in 1955, were believed by many to be black. Little Richard was followed onto the silver screen in rock and roll movies by acts such as the Platters, Chuck Berry, the Cadillacs, the Flamingos, and Frankie Lymon, with much credit for this going to the New York DJ Alan Freed, unarguably the biggest and most sincere champion of black music among the white establishment, even if payola was part of the equation. His role was subsequently taken by the slicker and more superficial Dick Clark, who did not shy from presenting black rock and rollers on American Bandstand, especially acts he profited from as a partner in the Philadelphia record company Cameo Parkway. The lessons were becoming clear: White brokers could be allies of black rock and roll, as long as they were the ones making the biggest profits. That was the price of civil rights in the vinyl world, and it was worth it if black performers could actually perform as black performers.
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THAT OTIS Redding had to sing, not by choice but necessity, became a fact in 1958 when the deacon contracted tuberculosis and was confined to a hospital in Rome, Georgia. Because Fannie’s income from her work as a domestic wasn’t nearly enough to keep food on the table and make the fifty-dollar mortgage payment, Otis had to be the breadwinner. He dropped out of high school—where his presence had become sporadic to nonexistent after late nights at the clubs. While he was able to find a little work on an oil rig out in the flatlands, some roofing and construction work, as well as some hours as a delivery boy for a market, the irony was that the family was eating mainly because he was doing what Otis Sr. despised, under spotlights on a stage in smoky dens of the devil. A few times the deacon, believing his end was near, sent farewell letters to friends. Almost always, he would make a request to help Fannie with his oldest son. “Keep him out of those nightclubs,” he wrote.2
That wouldn’t happen. Indeed, by the age of seventeen, Otis Jr. not only practically lived at the clubs but was already something of a bad influence on others. Because he didn’t have a car, he befriended a neighborhood guy, Bubba Sailor, who did. Otis, who now hated going back to his room and the deacon’s glare, would talk Bubba out of going to see his girlfriend and instead go hunting greater prizes. “All this pussy out here?” he would tell him. “Come get me. Me and you goin’ out.” Said Sailor, “It was like Little Richard sang, you don’t get no pussy unless you had a car. So we had a combination. I had the car and Otis could sing. So we rolled around pretty good, you know what I’m saying?”3
Otis, his reputation preceding him, seemed to have gained immunity from the normal protocols of keeping to your own ’hood. If he wandered across the borderline, the gangs cut him a pass, both because they knew him by name and because he could take care of himself, having proven it with his fists—though he would sooner rely on his charm and coolness, or to comply with a directive from some hood to sing a few bars right there on the corner. He always had a cool about him. Recalling the Rolling Stones’ line about not being a man without smoking the right cigarette, his friend Sailor said, “I smoked Kents and he got me smoking Salems.”
“Kents?” Otis would say, dripping cool. “That’s your momma’s cigarette.”
He even had his own retinue of sorts, a revolving cast of teenage singers, some of them neighborhood guys, old schoolmates and co-workers, among them Sailor, Eddie Ross, and Benny Davis. They were a rather ragged clique, none able to afford snazzy suits of the kind the Fabulous Flames wore. But one listen and you’d know who was the leader of the band. At one of his last gigs at the Douglass, in 1958, Otis was so compelling that the leader of another, much bigger R&B band was willing to make room for him knowing that would shift the attention onto the new kid.
Johnny Jenkins, a hunky, loose-limbed, light-skinned, left-handed guitar player, who had a striking resemblance in looks and style to Little Richard, was two years older than Otis and had worked at least as hard building a buzz around the clubs. His band, Pat T. Cake and the Mighty Panthers, formed by drummer Charles Abrams, who was known as “Cake,” included Sonny “Hip” Goss, who’d played sax in Little Richard’s road band the Upsetters, and lead singer Bill Jones, who called himself Little Willie Jones, after Little Willie John, the teenage R&B singer who was the first to record “Fever.” But Jenkins was the clear star, as his eye-catching antics onstage, such as full splits, Chuck Berry–style duck-strutting across the stage, and playing on his knees, gained the group a following.
In other words, Jenkins was the coolest guy in Macon. He spoke in rhyme, never looked scruffy, and had star appeal. He was also nicer to other talent than he should have been—including one singer he helped make better. Jenkins had first seen Otis Redding performing at the Hemp Swain shows and asked if he wanted Pat T. Cake to back him up on his last few appearances. When that gig ended, Jenkins, seeing the visceral reaction to Redding when he sang, made him an offer to join the band, for twenty-five cents a show. It was a pittance, but Pat T. Cake played a wide range of clubs, with a steady gig at Club 15, a popular music and dance club in Macon.
As it happened, Otis was tight with Little Willie Jones, too; in a music community remarkably free of jealousy and cutthroat instincts, Otis seemed to ingratiate himself to everybody. Incredibly, Willie didn’t begrudge him when Jenkins brought him in, knowing that the kid had the kind of voice any band would be thrilled to have. And so Willie moved on, remaining friends with the man who replaced him as they both traversed the circuit. Jenkins was electrified with his new find—in his opinion, one expressed frequently through the coming years, he had “discovered” Otis Redding, a claim also made by many others—but impressed on him the necessity to bring more to the table than a voice. Jenkins, a ball of fire onstage, saw Redding as stiff and even a little withdrawn and worked with him on some basic hip-swaying moves and facial expressions. The real difference however was that Jenkins’s guitar licks gave Otis’s singing a broader emotional pull and context, the right sonic synergy. As Jenkins was always eager to note, “He sounded great with me playing behind him.”4
Otis couldn’t disagree. It was the first time he realized the importance of the right accompaniment, though it took some time for him to get used to singing with a showy guitar player. Not stepping on Johnny’s toes, all he could do was stand awkwardly clutching a microphone, to the rear next to Pat T. Cake, respectfully out of Jenkins’s way at the front of the stage. A publicity still of the group is indeed an awkward sight. While Jenkins, with his pencil mustache and slicked pompadour, does a semi-split, and his bass and sax men play on bended knee, Otis is partially obscured by Jenkins, left hand holding the microphone over much of his face, all but unidentifiable.
Nevertheless, Redding was increasingly the one the audiences came to hear. He got better still at Club 15, where Pat T. Cake’s regular Sunday night slot began at 12:01 A.M., when the Sunday blue law prohibiting the sale of booze expired. As his profile grew, he couldn’t abide any lulls in performing, and sometimes on his band’s off nights he moonlighted with other acts, including one from Memphis called Jazzbo Brown and the House Rockers—yet another case of a soul singer borrowing the name of a more famous singer, in this case Jazbo Brown, the turn of the century Delta blues musician who appeared in Porgy and Bess on Broadway. It was also one of numerous bands that affixed the phrase “house rockers” to their name.
Even though Jenkins was the main man of Pat T. Cake, it eventually got to a point where club promoters would run ads for upcoming shows in the Telegraph touting not Johnny or the band but “‘Rockin’ Otis Redding” or “Otis ‘Rocking Robin’ Redding.”
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TO A mega-star like Little Richard, young climbers such as Otis Redding and Johnny Jenkins were merely two in a long line of imitators. As is always the case in music, Richard himself was derivative of precedents such as Jackie Brenston, the Drifters, and Hank Ballard. Richard generally was cold and distant to other performers whether in his mold or not, and the young Redding was barely on his screen. But Redding picked up something more from Richard than the screechy aspects of R&B. He also learned that the normal rules of God that the deacon always taught him simply did not apply to a man who reached a certain stratum of fame. Little Richard’s sexual conquests and appetites were the stuff of legend, not least of all because Richard would brag about them: “What kind of sexual am I?” he once asked. “I am omnisexual! Sex to me is like a smorgasbord. Whatever I feel like, I go for.”5
If there were any conflicts with God’s biblical teachings, Richard had the answer. “When I had all these orgies going on, I would get up and go and pick up my Bible. Sometimes I had my Bible right by me.” Despite the pitfalls of living a life of sin and the devil’s music—which was particularly parlous to black men on the road, as Chuck Berry found out in 1962 when he was sent to prison for a year and a half on a dubious charge of violating the Mann Act, for taking an underage girl across state lines6—Otis had caught the bug. He had begun to enjoy a “smorgasbord” of his own, filling his plate with a variety of women, both teenaged and some many years older, who would wait for him backstage after his shows.
He had also filled out into, a big, chiseled man by 1959. While he essentially was a Little Richard clone, he performed from the opposite angle, as a man’s man with a range of emotions, from brash and brusque to vulnerable and hurting. In this way he was less Little Richard than James Brown, who a decade later would put into words and music the ethos that defined both himself and Otis Redding—“It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” a song called “biblically chauvinistic” in the irony of its underlying truth that all the material possessions in the world “mean nothing without a woman or a girl.” Of the Macon triumvirate, Redding would be the least overt at primping and leering and spouting outright sexual jargon; no references to intercourse, no self-serving ego games, and Lord knows, no gender-bending. While Richard would tell the world how “pretty” he was—a shtick soon to be used by a budding boxer from Louisville named Cassius Clay—Otis was a different kind of cat. He had an aversion to bragging on himself or performing any gimmicks. This of course set him apart from Brown, whose trademark was actually one stolen from his forerunner, who had been brought onstage with the intro “Ladies and gentlemen, the hardest working man in show business today, Little Richard!”
Brown surely earned the honor to call himself that, by working himself to exhaustion, the act peaking with the famous cape shtick, when he would drop to his knees clutching the microphone, then when a sideman draped a cape over his shoulders and began leading him offstage, he would break free and launch into his encore. Otis, however, didn’t care to tell anyone how hardworking he was; he wanted the audience to know it. He wanted not to be pretty but bold, with a vulnerable soul. It was a kind of primordial funk style, and he was attracting a good deal of attention with it. Pat T. Cake and the Mighty Panthers had never gotten anywhere near the attention they did with Otis as the lead singer. It was only then that things began to happen for Johnny. Late in 1958, when Satellite Poppa got together a troupe of acts on a tour through Georgia, they made the roster, and some nice bread, dividing three or four hundred dollars per show. But Johnny would have to get used to going on without Otis every now and then when a better gig came along for him.
One of those times when Otis was called away, he was given the chance to stand literally where Little Richard had, in front of the Upsetters. Richard, in one of his mercurial sabbaticals from the torturous grind of rock and roll, had decided he would sing gospel and become an ordained Baptist minister—a sinecure that would always serve as a respite and guilt balm for his deranged lifestyle. The Upsetters pushed on, booking gigs around the Southeast, and needed a vocalist. The best they had heard, that Redding boy, got the job. It was a one-off, a temporary arrangement, but Otis could hardly pass up the opportunity to feel like Little Richard and get paid twenty-five dollars a gig for it.
As it happened, both Otis and Johnny Jenkins were moving apace, in tandem. Johnny had been having problems with Pat T. Cake, who wanted to keep the songs they played the same rather than adding new material; Johnny, who had written a few songs and wanted to play them, told Cake he was through and formed a new band, the Pinetoppers, after those fragrant treetops out in the flatlands. He recruited Isaiah “Ish” Moseley, an old pro who had played for a time in Little Richard’s band, but the others—who included electric bass player Sammy Davis and another Davis, Charles, who was Otis’s old buddy Benny Davis’s kid brother, on drums—were primarily there not to step on Johnny’s star turns. When they went out on their first gigs, it was under the aegis of a talent booker, though one hardly in Clint Brantley’s league. Rather, he was an eighteen-year-old white Macon native, Phil Walden, a lantern-jawed, heavy drawling freshman at Mercer who thought hanging on the black side of town was cool and representing and booking black R&B acts even cooler.
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PHILIP MICHAEL WALDEN was a very strange bird, easy for some to pass off as an impressionable white kid trying to fit into black culture. While he looked like a vanilla wafer, skinny enough to break in half in a good wind, there was something compelling about him. He didn’t try to speak the lingo of the street or come off like a music expert. He could neither sing a note nor play an instrument. He didn’t greet black men with jive or the ’50s equivalent of a high five. Instead, he talked like a businessman, with a rush of overheated enthusiasm, telling black entertainers that if they were ever going to make money they would need a manager, that he could guarantee they’d thrive if they went with him.
Many of the black performers came from broken families and had no paternal influence. Even if Walden was a kid, younger than many of the people he ingratiated himself to, he seemed to care about them as people and his fast-talking spiels were focused more on how they would all make money together, as a family, all for one, etc. To many, he seemed much older than he was, and it was surely impressive that he could rattle off the names of obscure R&B songs, promoters, and club owners. On the Mercer campus, where he seemed to hone his skills as a social operator, he was a top student and president of his fraternity. Although he was not from a wealthy family, people thought he was loaded because he made friends with the rich kids. All in all, Phil Walden could talk the talk, and make bullshit walk proud.
He had caught the R&B/rock bug by listening to Little Richard records on WIBB, and a great epiphany for him was actually running into Richard on the street one day and greeting him with the first line of “Tutti-Frutti,” whereupon Richard engaged in a brief duet with him. There was a certain daftness to his impetuosity about sidling up to black performers. Much of his time was spent in an Animal House–like surreality, entering hardcore black clubs, blissfully, as the only white face in the joint. Rather than being run out the door, he would have patrons schmoozing with him as if they’d known him forever. The first booking he did was a one-shot deal, bringing in Percy Welch and His House Rockers, who had just released the record “Back Door Man” backed with “Nursery Rhyme Rock” on the small Fran label out of Louisville, to play at his college frat party. The first group he made a continuing arrangement with was called the Heartbreakers, whom he booked to play frat parties at Mercer then clubs around town. As his clientele grew, he decided to set up shop in his first office, which was the cramped garage apartment behind his parents’ home, where he would be found at all hours, phone stuck to his ear, pitching one or another act to some club owner or frat house.
Alex Hodges, who would come to study at Mercer a year later and become the second employee of the fledgling agency, never met anyone more memorable. “The first time I ever met Phil, he was lighting up a cigarette and he had a matchbook with a logo on the cover, a circle with a P and W on it, his initials. He had ordered these matchbooks to hand out to people, to singers, musicians. He was just so damn cool. That garage, I remember, he had a name for it—the Sin Bin Din, for no other reason than it sounded cool.
“Here was a kid living at home, goin’ to school, and his head was in promotion—self-promotion. He already had a name for the operation. It was ‘Phil Walden Artists and Promotions . . . Presenting Outstanding Entertainment . . . Key to Fit Your Occasion.’ It was long, but it had to be because Phil had big dreams.”7
Walden saw Johnny Jenkins as potential star material and latched on to him after Johnny walked away from Pat T. Cake to start his own unit. Walden, filling his head with promises about what he could do for the band, made hundreds of calls to the clubs. After Otis returned home from the Upsetters’ tour early in 1959, Johnny filled him in on his new band and Otis too left Pat T. Cake. Thus, by extension, Otis had himself a manager, in the pasty-faced teenager. Walden, of course, had known of him. The Heartbreakers had been among Redding’s victims at the Hamp Swain contests. But Walden had not been able to catch up to the peripatetic young man until he was finally able to make the connection at a gig he booked for the Pinetoppers at the Lakeside Amusement Park early in 1959. By now, Otis was even better than he’d been at the Swain shows, and Walden listened, mouth agape.
As Walden later recalled, “He was singing ‘There Goes My Baby’ and he did a Jackie Wilson song and he did ‘Endlessly,’ the Brook Benton song, and he did a Little Richard song. And he just sounded fabulous.”8
Otis, who had modified his “Rockin’ Redding” brand during the time he was with Jazbo Brown’s House Rockers—ads billed him as “The Boy Who Rocks the House”—struck the slightly older Walden as bright, ambitious, and eager. As such, they were two of a kind. Like Johnny, Otis got the full-on “Phil treatment,” and within an hour of meeting was going over lists of clubs, frat houses, and church socials Walden had compiled. Young and raw, they seemed to know even then how much they would mean to each other down the road, that the timing of this connection was something more than chance. Soon after, they made the alliance official, when Walden signed a personal services contract with Otis Redding, independently of the Pinetoppers. “It was all very naive,” Walden thought. “Thank God that when you’re young that you’re naive like that. If we’d have failed so what? I was only eighteen and he was nineteen when I signed him. I wasn’t even old enough to sign a contract. My father cosigned it. It was just blind belief in each other.”
Actually, this was a fable promoted by Walden in later years. He did not technically sign Redding then. The relationship was based on a handshake, man-to-man, Southern trust. It is also telling that Walden apparently didn’t know that Otis was a year younger than him. But then, to many who fell under the spell of the man with a voice that could make time stand still, he seemed older than he was, possessed of talent and savvy always just a bit better than anyone else.