“These Arms of Mine” had a belated trip to the charts. Aimed by the Atlantic song pluggers exclusively at the R&B market, it earned a very rare distinction for such a record by somehow showing up in the November 21, 1962, issue of Variety as a “record review top pick of the week.” It began selling slowly, sporadically, not enough to make a wave. Alan Walden and Alex Hodges found no great rise in temperature on the club circuit over Otis Redding getting a tour up and going, so a caravan was created with Otis and two soul veterans, Percy Welch and Joe Tex, one of King Records’ stable of ’50s R&B acts. Tex was a ridiculously exciting showman, building a following by opening for, and damn near stealing the show from, Little Richard, Jackie Wilson, and James Brown, with his nimble, even acrobatic moves, in which he used the microphone as a prop, either as a phallic symbol or to be tossed high in the air and caught with perfect timing.
The tour around Georgia and the Carolinas barely broke even, and by the new year of 1963, Otis was once more back in the Macon clubs. Then, during this lull, John R., the Nashville DJ who had first heard “These Arms of Mine” on record, couldn’t keep from playing it, even if it was “stolen” from his friend Bobby Smith. He even told Jim Stewart he thought it was a potential smash. Stewart, who had come to hear the song as a black country record for its slow-drawling lyrics, got a laugh out of that, but the jock kept on playing it, night after night. By March 1963, four months after its release, it finally made the R&B chart, peaking at number 85 pop, number 20 R&B, and selling a quite healthy 800,000 copies. In gratitude, Stewart gifted John R. his share of the publishing royalties that had been lifted from Otis.1 If this was blatant payola, no one ever knew it, or considered it worth looking into. But then, the Stewarts seemed to be bulletproof in matters like these. Estelle Axton, for another example, not only operated the Satellite record store next door, she was somehow able to have it designated by Billboard as a “reporting store” in the mid-1960s, one of a number of selective music emporiums around the country from which the magazine could extrapolate its chart rankings, according to the records that moved the most vinyl. And Estelle, an enormously respected figure, did not hesitate to pump up the sales of Stax/Volt product. She also, it was said, sold records that disc jockeys had gotten for free and funneled to her.2
At this juncture, money was almost a secondary concern for Otis, who shared the same lineage and predicament of countless other young black singers for whom a signed contract with a reputable record company offered only vague promises of future profit, and hardly ever immediate reward. Alan Walden, handling royalty disbursement in place of his lieutenant brother, basically paid Otis out of his own pocket, as generously as he could, which wasn’t very much, given that Walden Artists and Promotions was very much in the red. As Walden says, “Phil had trained me to be a booking agent and the manger of Otis Redding. Twelve hours to run a company singlehanded for the next two years! The first year it was very rough. Phil told me he left five thousand dollars in the bank—but failed to mention ten thousand dollars worth of debts.”3
As it was, Otis was probably better off than many other artists who were tenured longer and had bigger hits under their belts. That was glaringly evident at Atlantic, where the backbone of the roster was the Drifters, a band managed by George Treadwell, the former big band horn man who was married to blues singer Sarah Vaughan. This would be the longest-running, and most exploited, franchise in the rock and roll era. Treadwell’s penury was what led the Drifters’ lead singer Clyde McPhatter to go solo, opening a revolving door operated by Treadwell until his death in 1967, with around sixty members of the Drifters cycling through without ever getting a fair share of royalties. “We were just boys from the ghetto,” says Charlie Thomas, a Harlem native who toured with the group well into his seventies. “We were getting screwed all our lives.”4 Another example: Louisiana blues singer Phil Phillips notched a number 1 R&B and number 2 pop hit in 1959 with the haunting “Sea of Love.” While it sold over a million copies, Atlantic paid Phillips all of $6,800 and no future royalties. Phillips, who is eighty-seven, says he never went back in the studio because “I never received justice and to this day have not received justice.”5
But if Otis wasn’t much heavier in the pocket for “These Arms of Mine,” at least he had a record to sell, and a tour in support of it. With new avenues opening up, Alan Walden and Alex Hodges could book him without making a single call; the promoters were calling them. “That little record got around,” says Hodges, “especially in the urban demographic. And we were getting sometimes three hundred to four hundred dollars a gig. You could tell things were happening out there. You could feel it. The world was ready for Otis Redding.”6
•
OTIS TRAVELED mainly solo and rehearsed with local bands, before a backup band was hired to sojourn with him. As Walden describes them, they were “this great band from Newport News, Virginia, that had a great horn section, full rhythm section, and a male singer, Roy Hines, and a female singer named Gloria Stevenson.” Looking sharp, they rented a 1949 Flexie tour bus draped with signs reading THE OTIS REDDING SHOW AND REVUE. At times they would play seven nights a week, all in different towns. In fact, about the only thing that broke up these endless travels were recording sessions, something that now were of utmost importance. “These Arms of Mine” certainly earned Otis a return trip to Memphis, and when he went back for a session on June 24, 1963, he was no longer the driver and valet, he was a man Jim Stewart was banking on. Whether he had become more arrogant or simply more comfortable with the musicians, Otis came in completely in charge.
“I mean, we had a lot of strong-willed guys, but this was his second time in the building and he was ready to give orders,” says Wayne Jackson.7
The musicians in the room—Studio B, Stewart was calling it, though there was no studio A, perhaps because Motown’s landmark studio was called Studio A—consisted of not only the Mar-Keys/Booker T. nucleus (Steve Cropper, Lewie Steinberg, Al Jackson) but a horn section for the first time: Wayne Jackson on trumpet, Packy Axton on tenor sax, and Floyd Newman on baritone sax. Newman, who may or may not have been there when “These Arms of Mine” was cut, was bowled over by the young man arriving armed with a full horn arrangement, all in his head. “He had his songs down one hundred percent. He’d worked it all out. He knew exactly when he wanted the horns to come in. He would hum what he wanted us to play. It was a lot like James Brown. He wanted the horns to fill the gap between lines, a basic call and response thing. It wasn’t like he was feeling around for something. It was gonna go down only one way.”8
Otis had also brought along Johnny Jenkins, whose guitar work had so affected the texture of “These Arms of Mine” that Cropper was once again forced to the piano on the first of two songs cut that day. The first tune, a soul-stropped version Cropper had written of an old children’s song he retitled “Mary’s Little Lamb,” was an idea first broached by Chuck Berry’s guitar on “Guitar Boogie” and Stevie Wonder on the harmonica in “Fingertips (Part 2),” a song that was shooting up the charts at the time. In Cropper’s concept, the song came out with a cheeky urban skew about the little lamb who, in this take, had “bleeks” as white as snow—ghetto slang for dark-skinned white people. Of note too was that the song had backup vocals by the Veltones—a white band that in 1959 had been the first ever recorded at Stax. It was to be one of the few times anyone would ever sing behind Otis.
The other track, without Jenkins and with Cropper on guitar, was “That’s What My Heart Needs,” a jilted man’s plea, with some hip Redding street vernacular: “I’m calling you out loud and clear, baby.” Like “These Arms of Mine,” it began with Otis kicking right into the lyrics, to be joined by the horns, Cropper’s country-style pickin’ (Otis’s idea), and climaxed with Otis’s wailing, gospel-flecked fadeout.
There were flaws in the song but the voice burned hot, and as it hit the market Stewart wanted to keep the momentum and stockpile enough material for a Redding album. By September 26, only three months after recording “That’s What My Heart Needs,” and “Mary’s Little Lamb,” Stewart had him back in the studio again, despite Otis having run dry on original material. Instead, Otis brought two songs he and Phil Walden had allegedly co-written before Walden left for Germany, “Pain in My Heart” and “Something Is Worrying Me.” If anything, what should have been worrisome was that “Pain in My Heart” was actually taken from a song earlier that year by Irma Thomas, the “soul queen of New Orleans,” called “Ruler of My Heart,” written by the wonderful Allen Toussaint under the pseudonym Naomi Neville. Otis and Walden reworked the title and lyrics, and Otis gave it a muscular, heart-palpitating ride, escorted by the horns of Wayne Jackson, Packy Axton, and Floyd Newman—one variation of what Jerry Wexler would by early 1965 come to semi-officially call “the Memphis Horns.”
The song, which the Rolling Stones would also eventually cover, was likewise credited to Redding-Walden when released in October, but it quickly stalled on the charts. Part of the problem was that the performance of harder-core soul records like this could not be accurately gauged because Billboard, that same fall, had suspended its R&B singles and albums charts that had been around since 1949, on grounds that the genre had succeeded in crossing over into the broader pop category. This unfortunate decision ignored the still-extant ethnic appeal of black-rooted music, and would last until the magazine wised up and reinstated the R&B chart in 1965 (and endure until 1969 when the “Hot Rhythm & Blues Singles” chart was renamed “Best Selling Soul Singles”).
While the “blackout” was in effect, it was as if all but the most popular crossover soul music (Motown, even though a fixture on the R&B list, had no problem coping) was in exile, and the marketing value of a high chart ranking stripped from just about every Stax release. The company, and Otis, had to make do with the Cash Box version of the R&B chart, which like the trade paper’s other charts were generally less respected, and ranked “What My Heart Needs” at number 27 R&B, and “Pain in My Heart” at number 61 pop, number 11 R&B. Nonetheless, when Jerry Wexler surveyed his rich roster of soul acts and came up with an ambitious project for them, Otis was to be a major part of it.
•
THE PROJECT was a live recording to be made at Harlem’s famed Apollo Theater on November 15. The idea, called the Atlantic Caravan of Stars, was hatched by Jerry Wexler and meant to unite Stax and Atlantic acts in a weeklong extravaganza, the second night of which, the traditional Apollo Saturday midnight show, would be recorded and released as a live album showcasing the biggest talent in soul music. It would be one of the top concert events ever arranged up until then, a major leap for soul, and among the assembled acts—Ben E. King, the Coasters, Rufus Thomas, Doris Troy, and the Falcons—Otis was something like a rookie in the big leagues. Hyped heavily in the press, it drew headlines in the black papers, such as ATLANTIC TO RECORD STARS ON APOLLO STAGE SATURDAY in the New York Amsterdam News.9
Otis, as a “star,” would take a step up, singing with the house band for the engagement, one culled from the cream of Atlantic’s New York studio session players and headed by sax legend King Curtis and his band, which included a monster brass section, with Curtis, Jimmy Powell, Alva McCain, and Noble Watts on sax; Elmon and Lammar Wright Sr. on trumpet; George Matthews on trombone; as well as Jimmy Lewis on bass and Ray Lucas on drums. The Redding literature features differing versions of how he got to New York. In one account, he drove up from Macon in a Ford XL convertible with his brother, Rodgers, whom he often traveled with, and an ex-boxer, Sylvester Huckaby, as his bodyguard, and that the trio had so little money they had to stay at what Huckaby called “a big old raggedy hotel called the Theresa.”10 Another has it that Redding came all the way alone, on a bus, and had tried in vain to convince passengers he was going to sing at the Apollo.11
Jerry Wexler, for his part, recounted that he picked Otis up at LaGuardia Airport, having paid the fare for what was Redding’s first ride in an airplane. Expecting an entourage of Macon peeps around him, he was surprised, he would recall, “to see him standing there alone—no valet, no roadie, no manager.” Wexler thought there was “something pure about his personality, calm, dignified, vibrant. . . . The Otis I saw that night was essentially the same Otis I would always see. Stardom never changed him. He had a strong inner life. He was emotionally centered. His manners were impeccable. His humor was sly and roguish.” Wexler would be especially amused when, after Redding met Ahmet Ertegun, he would call him “Omelet,” with a straight face, not giving away if he did so intentionally.12
Wexler said he drove Redding to the Apollo, introduced him to the theater’s owner, Bob Schiffman, then took him to dinner before dropping him at the Theresa. Rather than a “raggedy” flophouse, this storied old hotel was actually an oasis of elite black culture and society. Its thirteen-story, terra-cotta architecture and triangular steeples high above Seventh Avenue marked a familiar destination for swells who lived in its spacious rooms, including March on Washington organizer A. Philip Randolph, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Malcolm X, who fifteen months later, after renouncing the Nation of Islam, was gunned down a few blocks away at the Audubon Ballroom. Fidel Castro had also stayed there in 1960. While Otis was there, a young boxer named Cassius Clay was renting the entire seventh floor for his entourage while he did promotional work for his upcoming challenge to Sonny Liston’s heavyweight title that February.
Redding would be second in line at the Apollo shows, coming out after the Falcons and before Doris Troy. He, like many first-time arrivals at the old theater, was a bit let down by what he anticipated as a majestic mecca of black entertainment. The place was cramped, the stench of urine escaped from the bathrooms, the walls and floors were dingy, and as a newbie in the business he was given a dressing room on the top floor, up a long flight of stairs from the lobby. Yet, as with the Theresa, those walls practically breathed with history and tradition, and, rarely for him, Otis was extremely nervous on the opening night of the engagement. He had heard all about the Apollo, how the crowds were demanding and rabid, freely booing and catcalling performers, who, on Amateur Night, would be shooed off the stage by the “Executioner,” a guy in a clown costume with a broomstick or a hook.
During these shows, and during rehearsals the week before, Otis was given advice by old pros Rufus Thomas and Ben E. King, yet it was still a daunting experience to go out onto that fabled stage. Said King, “Otis told me he was up from home and he was terrified. [He] said to me, ‘You think they’re gonna go for what I do, what we do down home?’ ” What’s more, King believed, that fear became something of a permanent trait. “As long as I knew him, Otis never did get over that little bit of stage fright.” King recalled that as Redding began, he kept looking to where Thomas was standing offstage.13
Rufus agreed, saying that Otis was so nervous and unsure of his stage presence, that not only he but the Apollo MC, King Coleman, had impressed on him that he should go out and focus very narrowly. “I trained him up in the moves, and showed Otis how to catch the eye of one girl, just one girl, and sing to her, so that her enthusiasm spread through the crowd. Coleman introduced him with the line, “He can sing baby, he can sing!” Otis, Thomas said, seemed in a trance. “He kept on repeating how he would miss his band, how his clothes were all wrong.” Coleman once described Redding as a “big, bearlike man, sweating and trembling worrying about his suit, his voice, the band, everything.”14
If so, then, he used the fear to play the part, withdrawing every ounce of passion he had. There was only enough time for him to sing two songs, “Pain in My Heart” and “These Arms of Mine,” and he launched into a pair of remarkable exhibitions of both. As Thomas had tutored, he swayed and sometimes caressed the microphone as he would a woman’s arm, but he rode solely on his voice. At first, seeming a little kinetic, the teeming audience was noisy, even rude during the early moments of his set, but began to pay closer attention as he emoted with ever more emotional power, drawing a few audible gasps and moans from the young women.
Watching from the audience, Wexler fell in love with Redding’s voice, saying later that “Otis was magic,” despite what he called the physical “inertia.” As he noted, Redding “didn’t know how to move in those days,” a similarity he had with the young Marvin Gaye at Motown. “He just stood still, and he’d bend from the waist.” But Wexler marveled at how the voice cut like a vector through aural space. “You could feel this plea coming from him.”15 Another time, Wexler said, “The women at the Apollo loved him, not only for his looks—he was tall, strapping, and handsome—but for his voice and vulnerability . . . Otis had chops like a wolf; his voice was big and gorgeous and filled with feeling. He also had a warmth that tempered the aggressive side of his soul, a porous strain of generous emotion that covered every song he sang.”16
The last show of the Atlantic Caravan of Stars was, as it happened, on one of the darkest days in history, November 22, 1963. At around noon, Otis and Rufus Thomas were lounging around at the Theresa when people began screaming in horror at something, which, it became clear, was the shooting of the president while in arguably the most hate-filled city in the country, Dallas. Redding sat watching the TV in his room in glaze-eyed disbelief as reports confirmed the worst news imaginable an hour later. Some of the Apollo acts, including Otis, did not want to go on that night, but too much money had been made in ticket sales and the Atlantic honchos recast the show as a sort of gospel funeral, a laying on of hands for a man who openly courted black voters and had met with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the White House after the March on Washington.
The delirium and mighty joy always stoked in the venerable theater was greatly tempered, even shrouded. The audience was muted, and each act dedicated their set to the slain president. When Redding came out, his fear had turned to genuine sadness and worry, allowing his performance to draw upon an even deeper well that night; he left with tears in his eyes. The live album of the gig, Apollo Saturday Night, released on the Atco label with a bright yellow and black jacket, had to contend with post-assassination ennui across all music corridors and, like all other music product, suffered for it. (The tracks would also be reissued on Otis! The Definitive Otis Redding.)
The spell would be broken in February when the Beatles came to America and immediately transformed the nature of music and the industry. While this was also crucial to recovering from the trauma of Dallas, it would pose a fresh set of challenges for American music, which would need to find a whole new center of gravity of its own in order to survive.