Otis got back to Macon in early August 1961, the month Zelma Atwood was due to deliver, and went right to work back at the Macon clubs. His impending fatherhood, however, was yet another reason for the deacon to be irritated. What else could his boy do to be a sinner? Otis for his part promised to marry Zelma before the child was born, and made good on it, tying the knot on August 17 at the Tindall Heights church, the ceremony performed by the family pastor, Rev. C. J. Andrews. His son, a boy he named Dexter Redding, was born days later. With no money for a place of their own, the three of them moved in with Zelma’s grandmother, who had a larger apartment. When Otis said he found a house, they rented that, but only for a couple of weeks, the place being filthy and nearly falling down. When a local record company owner loaned Otis two hundred dollars to find a suitable place, they finally wound up in a bi-level apartment near the Fort Hawkins section of Macon.
Even with the new digs, however, Otis only rarely saw his boy. Getting home from the clubs in the wee hours, he’d sleep until noon, then get ready to go back out and perform, often for such paltry pay that Otis had to pick up other work on the side. But with all the energy and time needed for his shows, it was impossible to hold a job and Otis had been fired from about every nonmusical job he’d had. While this meant that Zelma had to go out and find work, she was still forbearing about his obsession, and was even more impressed with his continued determination and sense of optimism. “He had his own mind about what he would dream. . . . He didn’t complain,” she said. “If it was fine, it was fine. If it wasn’t, it was, ‘It’ll work out.’ That’s what he’d say. ‘Oh, it’ll work out.’ And that’s how he kept himself going.”1
By 1962, he had returned to the Pinetoppers, but was getting impatient with Phil Walden, who was about to graduate from Mercer and was ready to build his one-man agency into a more professional operation, which he now named “Phil Walden Artists and Promotions.” Walden however was struggling to get more than the usual low-paying gigs for his top client. Not that Phil was rolling in dough, either. In fact, to make ends meet, he had taken a job as a salesman—his true calling—at the Hayes clothing store owned by his cousin Roy, and he even sold fireworks. That allowed him to hire, for pocket change, two other employees, Alex Hodges and Phil’s kid brother Alan, both of whom were also at Mercer. Alan, a beanpole then with shaggy blond hair, cut his teeth on the business, helping get gigs for his brother’s acts during his hours as a soda jerk at a local club where, he recalled, “We promoted bands like Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts, the Delacardos, and Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs.”2
Hodges came aboard, he recalls, “because Phil went around school asking guys who could type to send out promotional material, and I could do that. Phil had it all in his mind how to run this little agency. He would make up a budget for things like spare guitar strings, or gasoline for the car we used to take around the bands.” Walden rented a closet-sized office on the twenty-first floor of the Macon Professional Building on Mulberry Street—the Robert E. Lee Building today—a few floors above where WIBB had their office and Hamp Swain did his show. He had two phone lines installed (Sherwood 6-8810 and Sherwood 3-6555) and obtained phone books from big cities, to cold-call nightclubs and pitch the new agency’s talent.3
Otis believed he had a personal commitment to advancing the company’s success, and, Hodges says, he “had a hands-on presence in the office. Hell, he even painted the walls after we moved in.” The Walden parents, C.B. and Carolyn, who had once reeled in horror that their son was working with black nightclub singers, pitched in as well, answering the phone when the company “officers” were in class or working other jobs. It seemed anything but a big-time operation, but, as Hodges says, laughing, “We were too young and naive to know how crazy a dream it was.” Otis Redding was anything but big-time, either. Yet even then, the jovial, future big-time promoter tells you, “You knew. Instinctively, you just knew he was something special. I mean, Otis had it going on. He was a big, handsome guy who was comfortable with himself. He walked into a room and it lit up.”
•
OTIS AND Johnny Jenkins were now only technically members of the Pinetoppers. Indeed, both regularly went alone or together to local record companies looking to cut a record. Either of them could have been the name on the label, with the other playing or singing on the session, just as long as a deal was made. One of those times, in late 1961, Otis, who was too itchy to rely solely on Walden to make things happen for him, strode across the hall of the Professional Building, where Walden’s shop was, to the office of a Macon label called Confederate Records, owned by former car salesman Bobby Smith.
Smith had nearly died in a car wreck a few years earlier, leaving him with one eye that he could barely see out of. But he had as sharp a pair of ears as any in Macon. He managed a Jerry Lee Lewis clone named Wayne Cochran, the first self-avowed white soul singer, whose shtick would soon be an Alp-high silver pompadour, flowing, sequined capes, and Little Richard–type leaping and prancing. Smith also had a stable of musicians at his disposal, including Dennis Wheeler, who was white but a regular performer at black clubs. According to Wheeler, who still performs today in the Georgia and Florida clubs, “Bobby really developed a whole culture in Macon that was color-blind. See, among us musicians, nobody even thought about color.” If so, it was mainly because racism was so ingrained it seemed almost part of the woodwork in town. Wheeler matter-of-factly recalls the time when as a young man he boarded a city bus with a black friend and without thinking went to the back of the bus along with him and sat down, prompting the driver to kick Wheeler off the bus for violating the sanctity of Jim Crow.4
Seeking an audience with Bobby Smith, Otis boldly walked into his office with a proposition. As Smith once related, “Otis said he was a singer and wanted to see if I was interested in him. I asked if he had a tape with original material on it, and he said he didn’t but would sing for me. He sang ‘Shout Bamalama.’ That was all I needed to hear. I signed Otis to a recording contract with Confederate Records [and] obtained studio time at the University of Georgia’s channel 8 TV studios in Athens to record [the song].” The tune, a reworking of “Gamma Lama” into a tale about an Alabama chicken thief, was produced by Smith as a thinly veiled copy of Gary “U.S.” Bonds’s “Quarter to Three,” with party-like caviling quieted by his spoken “Okay, hold it, hold it” and “a-one, a-two, a-one-two-three-four” intro. The Pinetoppers were the session musicians, plus Cochran, who played bass, but it was a muddy job, the vocal and honking sax echoed into ghostliness at times. Still, infectious as it was, Smith was pleased to have signed the young man—and was careful to do it in a legal fashion, or so he thought.
“What Bobby told me,” says Wheeler, “was that because Otis was underage, he had Otis’s momma come in and sign the contract. That was how it was done. I know, because my momma had to sign my contract with Bobby. He was very meticulous about that.”
Yet this very subject would become the biggest and most hotly argued circumstance in the career advancement of Otis Redding, and it brought home the fact that Otis looked and seemed older than he was. “I thought he was, too,” notes Wheeler. “He was so dang big and commanding. His voice made him older. He didn’t try to be what he wasn’t. His niche was flat-out soul. It wasn’t that he had the greatest singing voice, it was just that it was him. He was like Ray Charles. Just him, what was inside him. Nobody could ever copy that. But those early records, they didn’t do him justice at all.”
Regardless, Smith believed he owned more of Redding than Otis may have realized, not having read the fine print. According to that print, he was now Otis Redding’s manager, something that Phil Walden had not codified with regard to his work representing Otis. Not that Walden was prepared to accept any such thing. As far as he was concerned, Smith had a record contract with Otis, nothing more, and nothing to stop him from shopping Redding to bigger honchos.
•
IN THE fall of 1962, “Shout Bamalama” and a more Little Richard–esque tune, “Fat Gal,” were released, credited to “Otis Redding and the Pinetoppers,” on Confederate Records—a circumstance that would quickly become a problem for Smith, who designed a logo that displayed the stars and bars of the Confederate flag. This was a decade before the Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd made this imprint of slavery synonymous with “redneck chic,” though with regular explanations that the flag wasn’t an endorsement of antebellum slavery but Southern “heritage.” The flag may have been an innocuous regional relic to Smith, who obviously was no racist, but to those outside the South—and to many within it who proudly flew or pinned it to a car window, pickup truck, or living room wall—it was anything but innocuous.
Smith seemed oblivious to the politically incorrect implications. “He needed a name for the label and came up with Confederate,” says Wheeler, “because it was regional. And you know what? I don’t recall Otis or any other black person I knew object to it.” Indeed, such was the power of a century of conditioning. Yet Smith was not only facing static from politically sensitive quarters, but, like Phil Walden, was running against the white Southern grain by taking black entertainers under his wing. “If Bobby thought about it at all,” Wheeler adds, “it was that he was putting black guys on a label named Confederate, he was saying, ‘Hey, this is a new Confederacy now down here.’ ”
Good intentions aside, Smith was given a firsthand lesson in modern civics. He once recalled, “Otis and I went on the road promoting ‘Shout Bamalama.’ We stopped at an Augusta radio station, WTHB, and we were told by the DJ it would be played if it were taken off the Confederate-flagged record label. I promised to do so. We went on to Columbia, South Carolina, and met with a program director, a guy named Big Saul, at WOIC, who also promised heavy play, but only if the label [name] was changed. Otis and I hit it off very well with Big Saul. As we drove and listened to legendary DJ John R. on Nashville’s WLAC, Otis said, ‘Bobby, if that man played my record I would think I had made it.’
“When we returned to Macon, I wasted no time creating the Orbit label and putting ‘Shout Bamalama’ on it. The following week I went to Nashville and talked to John R. and I explained the situation with Confederate and Orbit. John R. was impressed with the record and promised me he would give it heavy duty air play.”
It might however have been too late for the record. As Wheeler can recall, letters and calls came pouring into the office from the NAACP about the issue regarding the label name, further muddying the waters for its advancement. For Redding, inured as he was to Jim Crow, there had been no objection to the Confederate label. In fact, Redding’s lack of any discernible racial worldview, or much of a sense of what was going on in the news, would never really change much. The Bay of Pigs disaster in ’61, the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year, and the March on Washington in ’63 would not be on his personal radar. While some early discontent was arising about Vietnam after John F. Kennedy dispatched the first “advisers” there, Otis had no reason to fret. He had registered for the draft, as all young men were required to when they reached age eighteen, but unlike both Walden brothers and Alex Hodges—and Elvis and even Willie Mays—he was safe, given III-A deferment status, as a married man with children—a “Kennedy husband,” as such lucky men were dubbed.5 But he was a family man who rarely saw his family. Confederate, Orbit, whatever the signposts, his attention was almost completely confined to music.
•
OTIS HUNG around every day at the Confederate office, digging the vibes of a record company he thought he might help build. Smith, seeing that Otis was itching to write songs, put him to work on one, for a group called Buddy Leach and the Playboys, who Smith had signed in Atlanta. That was when he unveiled the song James McEachin had rejected in L.A., which Smith thought was brand new and under his aegis.
“We needed a B-side for Buddy Leach,” said Smith, “and Otis wrote ‘These Arms of Mine’ for me. He came to my office to play the song for me. . . . Otis had his guitar and played the song for Wayne Pierce, who played organ for Wayne Cochran’s band. Wayne and I both thought it was a terrific song. Otis went with me to the session to record Buddy Leach and afterward I told Otis that ‘These Arms of Mine’ would be his next recording.”6 The lead singer of the Playboys was actually not Buddy Leach but Dennis Wheeler, who also played keyboards. “We gave it a good ride, but our version was an appetizer,” he says. “Otis’s was gonna be the main course.”
Johnny Jenkins by now had cut his first record, as well, for a label that, like Smith’s, had been geared more to white guys in pickup trucks than to the soul crowd. Tifco Records, located in Tifton, down near the Florida border, was owned by Jim Newton, a Dixieland bandleader whose roster was mainly hillbilly acts. In February 1962, after Phil Walden agreed to finance the session—though he needed a bank loan to do it—Jenkins recorded two songs for the label in an Atlanta studio, both guitar-driven blues in the style of the ’50s instrumental hits “Raunchy” by Bill Justis, a horn man at Sam Phillips’s Sun Records, and Chuck Berry’s “Guitar Boogie.” One was called “Pinetop.” The other, playing off the success of Chubby Checker’s now-fading dance craze, was “Love Twist.”
The session included Ish Moseley, Sammy Davis, and Pat T. Cake, and the record was credited to Johnny Jenkins and the Pine-toppers, though one important Pinetopper was left out, there being no vocals. But Otis Redding’s career would, coincidentally, still be advanced by this record, which was released in May 1962. “Pine-top” was the original A side, but only until DJs began flipping it to play “Love Twist.” When that song generated a buzz on the local soul stations, it attracted the attention of a man who would have an enormous impact on the course of American music, even if almost no one knew of him at the time. This was a Runyonesque character named Joey Galkin, a short, garrulous, thirty-six-year-old Russian-born New York expatriate. He had actually grown up in Macon and tried a singing career before turning to booking acts and doing promotion for Atlantic Records in New York. On a whim, he quit, opened a failed bar in Queens, then moved back to Macon on a loose leash for Atlantic, his job to get records played on local radio. At first, Jerry Wexler, the Atlantic vice president, told him, “You’re crazy. That’s all they need down there is an obnoxious Jew like you coming into the radio stations.” But then Galkin called one day and said, “I got a hit,” after creating wide airplay for soul bandleader Solomon Burke’s “Just Out of Reach (of My Two Open Arms).”7
Galkin was originally paid fifty dollars a week, but given a fairly loose expense account, to make hits keep on coming, and he was a minor legend in Macon and Atlanta, often seen holding court in clubs and restaurants, regaling and keeping station directors sloshed, a fat cigar stuck to his mouth, thick horn-rimmed glasses on his nose. Wexler once said that “nobody had ever promoted records the way he did it. . . . He’d be in his car, and whenever he saw a radio tower transmitter, he’d stop, get out of his car, and go hustle his records. [He was] a hustler with good hunches.”8 Galkin also formed a label called Gerald Records to acquire new talent, keeping them in his pocket until he could shunt them to Atlantic, with the requisite 10 percent finder’s fee and a 10 percent cut of royalties.
When he heard “Love Twist” on the radio, that became his plan for Johnny Jenkins. While Jim Newton was pleased with the regional reaction to the song, like all small label owners he lived for a chance to partner up with a national network to make it into a big hit. And while Gerald was hardly RCA or Mercury, Galkin’s link with Atlantic, combined with his big talk and free-flowing booze, led to a deal. Newton sold Jenkins’s two sides to Galkin in exchange for a commission of the sales, and within days “Love Twist” was pressed on vinyl discs reading “Gerald Records.” Not only that, by signing Jenkins to Gerald, Galkin technically became Jenkins’s manager, and of all the Pinetoppers, even the one who hadn’t been on their two recordings.
At this point, Phil Walden, who still focused as much on Jenkins as Redding, had no particular plans for the latter. “I thought my entire world rotated around Johnny Jenkins’ guitar,” he said years later. “I was convinced he could have been the greatest thing in rock ’n’ roll.”9 However, Jenkins and “Love Twist” were only a lever for Galkin. He never did take the record to Atlantic, believing it was not up to the company’s standards, but it still sold around twenty-five thousand copies, not at all bad for a first record and far more than any of Otis’s previous recordings. Galkin and Walden thought they had a tiger by the tail, and even though Phil, as with Otis, had not signed Johnny to a contract to manage him, he bartered with Galkin as if he had. Before long they were carving up Jenkins’s royalty and publishing splits like a duck on a plate, with not a word of input from Johnny himself, and they came to an agreement to split publishing rights. Johnny would get the normal three and a half cents per record, and zero cents of the publishing royalties for his own song.
It was a tangled web of deceit, but the only way both white men could ensure that they would profit from another black talent. And it was the precedent for another private deal between the same two men soon to come, regarding the ownership of Otis Redding.
•
JOE GALKIN had not heard of Redding and only became aware of him when he attended some gigs by the Pinetoppers around Macon. Like everyone else with ears, Galkin was knocked out by him, and immediately broadened his plans. With Otis in the same fold as Jenkins, spoken for by Phil Walden (Galkin probably never knew of Bobby Smith’s claim on Redding, or if he did, never took it seriously) the two of them discussed how to get both artists to Atlantic. For now, the priority was still Jenkins. The first step was having him record again, this time in a studio where the New York label had a foothold in the South. Galkin, a man who kept his ear to the ground, was well aware that Atlantic had recently entered into an alliance with the Stax Records label in Memphis.
There, in that old converted movie theater on East McLemore Avenue, the company’s co-founders, Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Stewart Axton, had reaped some national hits. Two of the bigger hits were Carla Thomas’s “Gee Whiz (Look at His Eyes)” in 1960 (when the label was still called Satellite Records), which went top 10 pop, number 5 R&B, and became the first of the great smooth-groove soul records; and “Last Night,” by the Mar-Keys, the Stax house band, which made it to number 3 pop, number 2 R&B, in 1961. Another, the coolly metronomic, almost dark-hearted “Green Onions,” by Booker T. and the MG’s, was climbing the charts as Stax’s first big hit in the fall of 1962, when Joey Galkin had a good reason to call Jerry Wexler.
“Wexler,” Galkin barked, “I want you to finance a session.”
“Who?” Wexler inquired.
“Johnny Jenkins and the Pinetoppers. I’m managing them and I want to record them at Stax. Give me two thousand dollars.”
“Never heard of ’em.”
“You will. Johnny’s a great guitarist and one of his sidemen can sing. It’ll take two thousand dollars.”10
Coyly dropping Redding into the conversation was no accident. Indeed, once Wexler agreed to send the bread to him, Galkin scheduled a session for mid-February, as he knew he wasn’t going to leave Memphis without somehow getting Otis a witness.
Not knowing any of this, it was now Otis who was stagnating. Zelma was pregnant again, necessitating that he had to hustle for a few more bucks. Johnny Jenkins, however, seemed to be playing the game much better. He was able to buy a car, a big red Chevy, even though he had never learned to drive, believing he should be taken around by a driver, which became Otis much of the time. While Johnny would sit in the back basking, Otis would wonder what he was doing wrong. Not that he wasn’t happy for Johnny, but he still had no doubt he ranked higher on the showbiz ladder, despite getting nowhere. Worse, Phil Walden had gotten his military notice and would be going into the Army when he graduated from Mercer that year, commissioned as a second lieutenant and stationed in Germany. As a result, he’d be forced to leave the agency in the hands of his family and Alex Hodges.
The timing seemed less than providential for Otis, who had no other fallback and fewer chits in the industry to cash in. But he still acted like he owned the clubs. “I never saw Otis change, not one whit,” says Dennis Wheeler. “He was always confident. He believed in himself. If his daddy didn’t deter him, nothin’ was gonna.”
With as little success as Otis had reaped by late 1961, the blandishments of the deacon seemed well-founded. But Walden still believed in him and, in his absence, Bobby Smith lined him up on gigs around town with Wayne Cochran. Wayne and Otis made for a wildly odd couple, but the trade-off of vocals between the two was so irresistibly fun that it always sold out the house. Otis also made several appearances with Eddie Kirkland, an aging blues singer and guitarist who was managing John Lee Hooker. Any paying gig helped, but they weren’t getting him far enough, nor was living on the road any easier. Otis, whose loneliness wouldn’t leave him alone, even back then, began to bring along Oscar Mack, the man who had displaced him as the regular winner at Hamp Swain’s talent shows. Otis made Mack his driver, if for nothing more than bragging rights, and albeit in cars borrowed from friends. If he only knew where the road was going.
•
PHIL WALDEN and Joe Galkin had tiptoed around each other in the weeks leading up to the Stax session. Galkin, playing it cool about Redding, acted as if he cared little about him. Otis, he told Walden, unconvincingly, was “a lousy singer.”11 He also brought up Redding’s string of failed records. Walden also played it equally cool. “Phil may have been young, but he had smarts up the yin-yang,” says Alex Hodges. “Do you seriously think he would have let Otis get away from him because he was conned by a big-talking guy like Joey Galkin? Phil could see right through him. He didn’t believe a word Galkin said. He never let him forget who managed Otis. Not that Galkin would have let that stop him. The main thing for Phil was, ‘Hey, let’s get this thing done, let’s get Otis on tape for Jim Stewart, then we’ll cross the next bridge.’ ”
Bobby Smith was that bridge. With no idea what was happening behind his back, Smith kept his word to Otis, by having him cut a demo of “These Arms of Mine.” Smith again took him to the studio, where Dennis Wheeler was hanging out. “He came in and started humming this song, and me and a bunch of other guys just jumped in and started playing behind him. That’s something I’ll never forget, being with Otis’s very first recording of ‘These Arms of Mine.’ And you know what? It sounded just as good as when he recorded it for Stax. When Otis sang, he didn’t hold anything back, demo or not. He sang for the love of singing, not according to where he was. The thing to remember is that Otis loved Bobby, they were very, very good friends, like family.” A pause. “But even family don’t tell each other everything.”
How much Otis was keeping from Smith only he knew, though he could hardly have believed he was destined to land at Stax, and he was no doubt being kept in the dark about what was bubbling all about him. All he knew was that he had been slogging away in the clubs and amusement parks, and on nights with no gigs, he took jobs as a parking lot attendant and a hospital orderly. His first daughter Karla’s birth was a month away, meaning even bigger bills staring him in the face.
When February came along and it was time for Jenkins’s audition at Stax, all he knew about it was that Johnny would need a lift to Memphis. That, of course, was a perfect coincidence for Galkin, whose job it was to get both Jenkins and Redding to Memphis. The other Pinetoppers would not be going, since Stewart had made it clear he was taking a flyer only on Johnny, not his group.
That’s all that Smith knew, as well. Always trying to be of help, Bobby helped write his own death warrant when he kicked in a car for the trio to use on the 467-mile drive to Memphis. The car turned out to be owned by Wayne Pierce, whose station wagon was usually parked outside Smith’s house. Pierce agreed to give Otis the key. What’s more, although Smith had no inkling that Otis might sing for Stewart in Memphis, Wheeler ventures that Bobby would have been all for it, as such an audition might redound to his benefit, if Stax and Atlantic became involved with Confederate Records. Phil Walden had indeed told Otis to be ready to sing, and not some Little Richard impression but real soul. But Phil would not be able to go himself. He was preparing for his Army induction, leaving Galkin all the room he needed to present himself as Redding’s sole manager.
And so it was, with all this intrigue and clandestine thievery in the air, Fate and an old station wagon took Jenkins, Galkin, and Otis Redding up to Memphis on a midnight ride.