By the dawn of JFK’s New Frontier, not only was Little Richard becoming passé, but so was Elvis. At the same time, strides in social justice created new challenges. The Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling struck down segregation in public schools “with all deliberate speed,” but across the Jim Crow South that phrase was taken literally; moving as deliberately as possible, boards of education erected ways to stall a civil right now being as sullied as voting and housing opportunities. De facto segregation marched on, scarred but unbowed. Cast as a relief from these stomach-turning realities of life, the loud, untamed, and egalitarian properties of the new R&B idiom had grown far beyond what anyone would have seen coming in the previous decades when African-Americans were far more docile and accepting of servile stereotypes. Not that anyone was daring enough to write or sing a song specifically addressing this, the most egregious aspect of American life. But the urgency of such causes seemed reflected by a new tenacity in black singers to make their mark. The vehicle of that dynamic was doo-wop, a form of controlled madness, with tight harmonies backed by a riveting bass line and scat-form lyrics, which had arguably begun with the Five Satins’ “In the Still of the Night” in 1956, a sensuous love ballad with a hook that went “Sha-doop-n-sho-be-doo.”
Of course, it did not take long before co-option hit again, when records by mainly Italian-American vocal groups, the bulk of them from New York—such as the Harptones’ “Sunday Kind of Love” and Dion DiMucci and the Belmonts’ “I Wonder Why”—hit the market. But the deep bench of soul music was evident in black artists expanding doo-wop to buttery ballads like the Flamingos’ cover of the evergreen “I Only Have Eyes for You” and Jerry Butler’s emotive lead on the Impressions’ first hit, “For Your Precious Love.” When Butler left the Chicago-based group, the profoundly important Curtis Mayfield took the Impressions into a gospel-seeded, socially conscious niche, which owed a great debt to the gospel roots of Sam Cooke with the Soul Stirrers. The handsome, impeccably dressed, and unctuously confident Cooke had now moved into smooth, tony soul as the dominant singer of the era, not with themes of godly benediction but carnal conquest, something Cooke practiced, hard, in his private life, with many women. And he wasn’t alone in scripting the soul of the late 1950s to the sound and beat of raging hormones. The brazenly sexual, electrifying Jackie Wilson, who after he had replaced the golden-throated Clyde McPhatter in Billy Ward’s Dominoes left in 1957 to go solo in his native Detroit, kept pace with Cooke as the hottest draw of the sweet soul pack. In so doing, the lithe, spit-curled Wilson, a live wire of a man, also provided the first real outlet other than pimping and numbers running for a sawed-off, big-talking Detroit hustler and onetime prizefighter named Berry Gordy Jr. Gordy, even with the pedigree of being a member of one of Detroit’s most prominent and wealthy black families, seemed incapable of holding down a job. But his persistence paid off when, after failing as a record store proprietor, he was able to sell to Jackie Wilson’s manager, who ran one of the speakeasies Gordy frequented, many of what would become Wilson’s finest testosterone-soaked anthems, including “Reet Petite,” “Lonely Teardrops,” and “That’s Why.”
These black men of high distinction laid critical groundwork and made the music that drove the era. But who made the bread? In the pecking order of the rock establishment, publishers and various power brokers were the CEOs. No better example existed than Dick Clark, who in the mid-1950s had begun hosting an after-school dance party on Philadelphia TV that, carried by rock’s rising power, became the baby boomer pipeline for music that had a beat. Soon the show was shown on local stations across the country, setting trends in dance and song, as well as bobby-sox chic and duck’s-ass haircuts—leather jackets, however, were taboo. Clark, whose affinity for black talent was noble and unquestioned, also realized the profit potential of soul. He was financially tied to the Cameo Parkway label, which shuttled acts onto his show. Yet unlike the DJ Alan Freed, Clark had the influence to fend off payola charges and moved ever upward, in 1960 breaking out a chicken-plucker named Ernest Evans. As the renamed Chubby Checker, he recorded a cover of Hank Ballard’s “The Twist,” which became a national craze after Checker performed it on Bandstand. The only thing that could change the racial status quo would be the rise of a new class of black autonomy and power. And even then, there would be catches to it.
•
DOWN IN Macon, Phil Walden spent the last year of the decade that changed the way America heard music working the phones hard, but for all the strides he had made, he was so broke that he was close to no longer being able to afford school. Walden years later told of the crisis this way: “It was like January. I was registering for the winter quarter at Mercer. And during Christmas I was particularly generous with everybody, including myself, and spent all the money I’d earned. So I went to see my father and said I needed some money for tuition, and my father was not receptive to what I was doing. He said, ‘You know, if you’re gonna continue to hang out with those ‘Negras’—that was a nice way of saying it; it was a big concession for a Southerner at that time not to say ‘nigger’—you’re gonna have to depend on those folks.’
“I was president of the fraternity and I thought, socially this is gonna destroy me, ’cause I gotta go over and tell them I gotta drop out. It was so embarrassing. So Otis came into the office and said, ‘What’s wrong with you? You got the blues today.’ ”
“I explained the situation to him and he said, ‘Well I gotta do some errands, you gonna be here later?’ ”
A few hours later, Otis returned with a bulging manila envelope tucked under his arm. Reaching Walden’s desk, he plopped it down on the desk, spilling out quarters, dimes, nickels, half-dollars, and crumpled bills—sixty-three dollars and twelve cents in all—all over the desk and floor. “I think there’s enough there,” he said, meaning Phil’s tuition money, a stash he said he had accrued by having “borrowed from everybody [he knew].”1
In truth, he should have been starting to save those nickels and dimes for his own purposes, having fallen head over shiny heels for a girl, the first one he’d met that wasn’t a hussy, a hooker, or a user.
•
ON A lazy, hazy Saturday afternoon in the late summer of 1959, Zelma Atwood, who was just fifteen, went with her friends to see a soul music show at the Douglass Theatre. Petite and almost scrawny looking, she was not classically pretty, but her small frame, quick wit, and fetching smile made her a popular catch for the schoolboys. But she was not easy. Indeed, she never took crap from anyone—not even eighteen-year-old Otis Redding. Though she lived across the back alley from the Redding flat, on Jackson Street, the two of them never met until she caught his eye while he was onstage during a Pinetoppers Saturday matinee. Spying her in the audience, he made a mental note to seek her out after the show—a common rite of manhood for any magnetic hunk who sang onstage was to identify a conquest and cash in after the show. Indeed, as a student of Jackie Wilson and Sam Cooke, Otis had come to see a show as a prelude to some recreation afterward. Usually, he would need to look no further than the women waiting for him at the stage door.
This time was different, however. Zelma was no groupie. Nor was she waiting at the stage door. When the show ended, he found her in the exiting crowd. As Zelma has remembered the moment, he strode over to her like he owned the world and said, “How’s it going, baby?”
“I ain’t your baby,” she told him.2
Thrown back on his heels, he persisted. She took offense. Soon they were sniping at each other, which only seemed to stoke a fire between them. Neither walked away, and when the yelling stopped, they began a normal conversation, which continued as they walked down the street. She laughed at his humor, as he did at hers. She found herself more and more under his spell, and he under hers. She was flattered that the man she had just been so captivated by was so taken with her, especially when he could have any floozy he wanted. Under the bold surface, he was just a teenager with uncertainties and pain. And it didn’t hurt that he was easy on the eyes. They made a date to see each other again, and before long it was a steady thing. Otis would have Bubba Sailor take them around town in his car, and they would steal intimate moments at either Bubba’s or some other buddy’s house.
What Otis saw in Zelma was something his friends couldn’t quite figure out, but the mystery unraveled whenever he had one of his spats with the deacon, or spoke ruefully of his cleaved home life. When Alex Hodges met them, they were already interlocked, all but inseparable. The chemistry flowed. “It really was a balancing act, the two of them. Otis was a wonderful, big-hearted guy, but he had a little ego and Zelma wasn’t enamored of it. She would make it clear to him that his ego was bigger than it had a right to be. She brought him down to earth, and he would then be just Otis. And he liked that she could shoot straight with him, not play him. She was honest. She wasn’t a giddy little drugstore-lovin’ girl. And she really became a strong woman who could keep him under control, keep his career, the finances, all of it, under control, and shield him. Hell, she’s still shielding him today.”3
In truth, the meek-looking teen seemed even then to realize the power she had over him. A word or two could stop him in his tracks and cause him to heel like an obedient beagle. A common such verbal brake was when he’d start bragging on himself and she’d say, barely above a whisper, “You better learn a little humility.” Indeed, having all but lost the family bond with the deacon and Fannie Mae, it was as if Otis counted on her to establish a bond with her. Adds Hodges, “Otis never got crazy in his life, for the most part. He didn’t live self-destructively. And a lot of that was due to Zelma. She had an important impact on his life. She was an amazing woman, still is, and he really loved and respected her. But most of all he needed her.”
•
IN KEEPING with the complexities of his lingering relationship with his father, and grudging respect they had for each other, the deacon’s patience with him became frayed, but never severed. Once, when he and Johnny Jenkins needed wheels to get to a gig out of town, Otis thought nothing of hot-wiring his father’s Mercury—just one of his talents besides singing—and driving off without a word to the deacon, who called the police and said his car was stolen. Not long after, a cop saw the vehicle out on the interstate and pulled it over, ordering Otis and Johnny to get out and lie facedown in the road. Because Otis’s ID showed he was the owner’s son, no charges were filed—though he and Jenkins missed their gig, costing them some money. To Jenkins, the misadventure seemed only to bolster his feeling that Otis “didn’t have much respect for his daddy,” something that he thought contributed to his singer’s recklessness. About a lot of things, he said, “We didn’t know no better. But he was more dangerous than I because I had the sense to back off. . . . He never did back off anything [and] didn’t know the word dangerous.”
In truth, Otis’s recklessness had a kind of blithe, spontaneous quality, as if knowing he was wrong and making a bad decision was a kick, and cars seemed to only ignite this facet of his thought process. When he was seventeen, he got himself into trouble again when he sold a car, a ’55 Buick Roadmaster he had bought from a garage for sixty-five dollars, either forgetting or ignoring that he was still paying it off. He was arrested for disposing of mortgaged property, pleaded guilty, and paid a thirty-five dollar fine.4 Such episodes only underlined his increasing boredom in Macon, and the clashes with his father that would inevitably arise when he had to explain himself. The best solution, he came to believe, was getting away for a while, maybe a long while.
Accordingly, in the late autumn of 1960, he had made plans to take a road trip to Los Angeles with his sister Debra and stay with his uncle, Otis Sr.’s brother, who lived there. Debra, who had been the first to graduate high school and had been working as a secretary, had herself become progressively bored with the mundane routines of her life in Macon, and saved up enough money to buy a used car, with the purpose being to spend her summer vacation that year driving cross-country. The deacon, who adamantly refused to allow her to go alone, was actually pleased when Otis’s own plans dovetailed with hers. In fact, the timing was perfect. For Otis, of course, music played a part in the equation. Otis figured he had done enough in Macon, a town that now seemed to him too small, and small-minded, to be worth wasting any more time in. Almost nineteen now, he had survived seething vibes but was convinced that a black man could never go far in the business unless, like Little Richard, he went where the vibes spoke to a more liberal-minded America. Having achieved a modicum of notoriety, he was now worried about running afoul of some redneck with a rifle or noose. Once, when Phil’s kid brother Alan drove him somewhere, he went through a white area. For that part of the ride, Otis remained slumped down in the passenger seat.5 Phil Walden couldn’t disagree with Otis that far too many folks in Macon were “stupid motherfuckers.”
Phil Walden, who people suspected (and he confirmed years later) had higher hopes for Johnny Jenkins than Otis at the beginning, encouraged Otis to go. Phil was still laboring at Mercer and couldn’t give his all to any of his acts. And when Otis surveyed his existence as a singer in a band with limited potential, he saw no downside to making the move. As it was, the Pinetoppers had become an afterthought to his more urgent ambitions and Jenkins now had to live with the real possibility that Otis might walk on him at any time.
It was during this interval that Zelma Atwood had begun to have morning sickness. She went to her doctor and was told she was pregnant. When she sat Otis down, he was just as stunned as she. But, seeing how set he was on going to L.A., she did not try to get him to stay. He told her what she needed to hear—he would be coming home to see her give birth. He never, however, mentioned the word marriage. Not seriously, at least. As Zelma would later recount, in the liner notes to the posthumous alum The Definitive Otis Redding, “When Otis went to California to record I was three months pregnant. . . . He said he was going to California, and he was going to be a star and going to come back [with] all this money, and we going to get married, and I’m like, ‘Sure you is.’ ”6 But she felt she had no right to blunt his dreams, and so just after Thanksgiving of 1960, Otis followed Little Richard out of Macon all the way to L.A.—another turn that, literally now, put more distance between him and the deacon, the mounting tension between them also having contributed to his decision to go. Before leaving, however, Otis Jr. blithely told Zelma that, pending the birth, she should finish school. She nodded her head, wanting to believe he’d be there when the time came. But she didn’t kid herself and knew there was every chance she might never see him again.
•
OTIS AND Debra Redding headed west, sharing the driving in her used car, and when he arrived, he quickly immersed himself in the L.A. soul music community. He began to hang with a young singer-songwriter named Jackie Avery, who seemed to know everybody who was anybody. Avery took him to a freelance producer, James McEachin, a man who would gain far more notice a decade later as a character actor on TV and in movies, with roles such as DJ Sweet Al Monte in the movie Play Misty for Me. A Purple Heart and Silver Star recipient in the Korean War, McEachin knocked around L.A. as a cop and fireman before doing studio work under the name “Jimmy Mack.” When he heard Redding sing, he recalls now, “I dropped everything else I was working on. He could draw on something from deep in his soul and it just flooded out.”7
Soon enough Otis moved into McEachin’s apartment on Manhattan Boulevard, where he not only lived but also rehearsed songs, preparatory to a recording date. While there, the producer got to know the young man, like everyone else, thinking he was years older than he actually was. “I had no idea he was only eighteen at the time. He was so good and so confident. He had that swagger. He knew he had talent and he was right. There were some other very accomplished singers living in the complex there, guys from the Olympics, who did ‘Western Movies’ and ‘(Baby) Hully Gully.’ We’d hang out in my living room and sing, and Otis just took over, he’d be the center of attention. He was a big, personable kid. My wife loved him. Everyone did.”
Sparing little expense, McEachin hired arranger Rene Hall, who had worked with Sam Cooke, and paid for a session at Gold Star Studios, a famous shop in Santa Monica where Cooke, Eddie Cochran, and Ritchie Valens had also recorded. Gold Star’s acoustics were one of a kind, its glutinous echoes leading Phil Spector to soon make his “Wall of Sound” records there. Otis would cut four songs, the main aim being to make him sound as much like Jackie Wilson as possible. “Jackie Wilson was Otis’s favorite singer, he thought Jackie was God. So I let him stay in that direction, the beat, the intro, the whole nine yards.”
On the first of two songs written by McEachin as Jimmy Mack, “She’s All Right,” he even appropriated Wilson’s familiar “ah-ha-ha” background vocals and flute accents, with Otis singing in an unnaturally high key that strained his voice. The second, “Tuff Enuff,” with its notable early use of “ghetto” misspelling in the title, was less an imitation and a good groove even if it was buried in a jumble of echoed noise. When McEachin had asked Otis for two songs he had written himself, Otis suggested one called “These Arms of Mine,” a plaintive, pleasing ballad. McEachin turned thumbs-down. “I thought he was selling himself short with that song,” McEachin says ruefully. “I wanted to keep in that Jackie Wilson mold.” Instead, the last two tracks were raucous blues rockers, “Gamma Lama” a cop on the Edsels’ 1958 “Rama Lama Ding Dong,” and “Gettin’ Hip,” which cribbed from both Little Richard and Jackie Wilson.
According to McEachin, Otis was “easy to work with, very determined,” but it was clear he had his own methods. “He didn’t just sing lyrics, he made them his own, according to how he felt. He improvised, changed words, sang all around, not up and down. He was like a jazz man, not playing the same note twice.” Before finishing that day, Otis left McEachin with serviceable records. “I was happy with them so I took “She’s All Right” to KUDU, a radio station in Oxnard. And the guy there started playing it, played it like twenty times that night. But the problem was, I didn’t have the money to properly distribute it in L.A. I needed a label to do that.” He pitched the song to several, but the only one that was receptive was a Denver-based label called Trans World, run by Al Kavelin, a Russian-born bandleader who was quite popular in the 1930s when his band included pianist Carmen Cavallaro. Kavelin gave the Redding record to his partner Morey Bernstein. When McEachin played it for him, Bernstein liked what he heard but had a problem.
“I couldn’t understand a word he sang,” he said.
Replied McEachin, “It’s something called soul.”
Bernstein had released mostly white pop records by groups like the Hollywood Argyles and Doug and Freddy and the Pyramids, but also a Chicago doo-wop group, the Fabulous Enchanters, whose “Why Are You Crying” is a wonderful relic of the era, with sound effects of a girl sobbing all through it. Another employee there, the magnificently eccentric Kim Fowley, a cape-wearing L.A. industry moth who later worked with Frank Zappa and founded the punk-rocking girl group the Runaways, recalls that “Otis Redding was the first black artist” on the label, and that he “showed up and knocked on the door of the building [with] a tape of ‘Gamma Lama’ [which he had] recorded in Muscle Shoals.”8
As is the case with Redding’s early career, even people who were there got it wrong. “Gamma Lama” was neither recorded at Muscle Shoals nor bought by Trans World. Indeed, while Bernstein would be yet another on a list of thousands who would later claim to have “discovered” Otis Redding, he seemed not overly interested in him. “She’s All Right” and “Tuff Enuff” went out on Trans World just before the new decade of 1960—not under Otis Redding’s imprimatur; rather, it was billed as performed by the Shooters, another act McEachin was working with who had played on the Redding session. If Otis Redding’s voice was compelling, clearly his name was not.
IN L.A., the main conduit for R&B was Johnny Otis, white and the son of Greek parents, who grew up in a black section of Oakland and did most everything a man could do in music. A singer, big band leader, and arranger, he had co-written and produced Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog” and played drums on the session (though he was later revealed to have forced the underage, soon-to-be-famous writer/producers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller to cede him a writer’s credit of the song they had written and a publishing cut, which were later stripped from him by court order when Elvis cut his version).9 Otis’s 1958 big band hit “Willie and the Hand Jive” went number 1 R&B and top 10 pop, taking back the “hand jive” beat that Bo Diddley had appropriated from Johnny Otis, who had written songs with that beat a decade before. A label owner as well, Johnny Otis had become a kind of West Coast kingmaker. His radio gig on KFOX in Long Beach, California, was a soul landmark, playing hardcore R&B. He also hosted legendary Friday and Saturday night shows at El Monte Legion Stadium. There, one could see the likes of the Penguins, Shirley and Lee, Brenton Wood, and Johnny “Guitar” Watson on the same stage. The Beatles even played there in March of 1965.
However, Otis never really got a footing on the L.A. turf, as Debra so enjoyed the new scenery that she took an extended leave from her job in Macon and both she and her brother remained with their uncle into the summer of 1961. But, much as he tried to plant new roots, he simply never got the break he needed. While Morey Bernstein did begin to value the man he “discovered,” changing the name on a new batch of records to “Otis Redding and the Shooters” (it only became solely “Otis Redding” much later when the songs would appear on various packages after Redding’s death, most cleanly on the Rhino Records’ massive 1993 box set, The Definitive Otis Redding), he was in no hurry to release “Gamma Lama” and “Gettin’ Hip.” “The problem was,” says McEachin, “Morey Bernstein didn’t know the R&B market. He and Al Kavelin had money, but they had no clue where to put it for a record like that.” Feeling adrift, McEachin sold the two songs to Alshire Records, a budget album label, which put out a few promotional copies but nothing more. By then, in mid-summer 1961, Otis was itchy again, wanting his feet to take him back home, not coincidentally, just as Zelma was nearing her due date. As blithe as he was about leaving her in the condition she was in, he wanted now to fulfill his promise to be there when she gave birth. What’s more, Debra, too, was homesick and ready to hit the road and resume her life in Georgia. The eight months of living dangerously in L.A. was, for both, done.
As McEachin recalls, “He thought he wasn’t getting anywhere fast. He had stopped coming around and I hadn’t heard from him. Then someone said he was gone, went back to Macon. He just blew away like a leaf.” A laugh. “He owed me some money, maybe that’s why he went.” Another laugh. “Or maybe it was some of those girls who ran him out of town. Whatever it was, I felt I was remiss in not paying him the attention he deserved, and if he’d stuck around longer we could have gotten it right. But Otis was like that. If he made his mind up about something, he’d do it. I never saw him again. I hear when he was in L.A. five years later or so, he wanted to see me but I was gone, too, to Liberty Records, scouting talent down in New Orleans. We were the two ships, we passed in the night.”
In retrospect, it wasn’t that those records were bad; the Redding groove can be felt on them all. But they didn’t convey the “pain in my heart” emotional lava that came from a certain environment, one he would never stray far from.
“Otis thought he should be in the big town, but he learned he wasn’t cut out for it,” says Alex Hodges. “Otis was a country boy. When he sang on ‘Dock of the Bay’ about being so far from home, that was the perfect word for how he felt about home: dock. Macon was the dock.”
The L.A. detour turned out to be so unfruitful that even Otis got some facts wrong. Abridging considerably, years later he would tell author Stanley Booth, “In 1960 I went to California to cut a record, ‘She’s All Right.’ It was with Lute Records, the label the Hollywood Argyles were on. It didn’t do anything [and] I came back to Macon.”10 As disenchanted as he was, the approaching birth of his first child made the decision to leave easier. The sassy, painted-up women in the clubs had made him long for Zelma, and increasingly jealous of what she might be doing back home, and with whom. At first, when she told him she was pregnant, his mind had run wild with the thought that some other guy had knocked her up. She had to assure him otherwise. Suddenly he felt a proprietary need to own her, and for her to mother not only their child but him as well.
He was no longer Rockhouse Redding; he was simply Otis Redding, a man who needed to somehow face being a man and a father before turning twenty-one.