Otis Redding had been so richly entertaining at the Apollo yet left New York poor, so drained in the pocket that he had to bum a hundred bucks off Ben E. King after the final show (typically, he repaid the loan out of the blue, with King opening a piece of mail one day and finding a check from Otis)—and virtually on the same level playing field as the other acts, even though without a top 40 hit. But he had gained enough of a reputation that Stax and Atlantic were eager to record a Redding album. Such compilations at the time were normally perfunctory exercises meant to wring a few dollars more out of an artist’s one or two hits by surrounding them with filler, mainly songs that had been rejected for release.
This formula was applied again; his three modestly successful singles, “These Arms of Mine,” “That’s What My Heart Needs,” and “Pain in My Heart,” were padded by covers of Rufus Thomas’s “The Dog,” Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me,” Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me,” the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie,” Little Richard’s “Lucille,” and a real curve, R&B drummer/singer Don Gardner’s 1962 duet with Dee Dee Ford, “I Need Your Lovin’ (Part 2)” (not the Four Tops’ “Baby I Need Your Lovin’”), on which he repeated the song’s gospel-style stop and start mid-song. The supplemental songs were recorded on January 16, some sounding hurried even with Redding’s gushing abundance of sincerity on each track, and released two weeks later, not on the Volt label but, as with all the sub-label’s albums, on Atco, per the Atlantic arrangement with Stewart. Not that it mattered much; by April, it peaked at number 103 on the album chart (again, there was no R&B album chart).
However, Jim Stewart had to deal with Redding’s attempt to pull a fast one with “Pain in My Heart,” which was also used as the title of the album. Though Otis no doubt believed he had sufficiently altered Allen Toussaint’s tune, when the New Orleans producer got wind of it, he had his lawyer call Stewart, begging to differ. Dead to rights, Stewart agreed to redirect the writing royalties and replace Redding and Walden with Toussaint, as Naomi Neville, on all future pressings. However, in another sleight of hand, when the album was issued in England, where Redding’s records were released by Atlantic on the London label, the credits still read “Redding, Walden,” and would remain so, out of Toussaint’s reach. Since the album hit number 28 on the British album chart, that ploy was profitable.
When it came to the fraternity of the business, sometimes it was more like fratricide. Still, Otis had merged easily into it and despite the slow sales of the album, Stewart hastened to release two more singles in quick succession, “Come to Me,” which was cut at the sessions but saved for the next album, and “Security,” the latter, co-written by Margaret Wesson, a perhaps too-conscious insistence that his purview was not monetary comfort—“Don’t want no money, right,” he sang, “I don’t want no fame.” It was the security of “sweet tender lips” that was his reward. If this was a call for deliverance from insecurity, it seemed only apropos that the melody, horns and all, seemed lifted from the Impressions’ inspirational song whose title could have been intoned at the end of “Come to Me”—“Amen.”
THOSE WHO actually knew Otis Redding were able to glimpse insights into his personality that ran deeper than the affable, seemingly carefree surface. Dennis Wheeler, for one, got a front-row seat for such revelations. “Otis was the type of guy who had a million acquaintances and few real friends,” Wheeler says. “That’s why if he really liked you, he’d hang on to your friendship. And he’d want you to experience his life.” Once, when the pair exited the Peppermint Lounge, Otis suddenly said, “Come on,” and they were rolling up Emory Highway in Dennis’s car, with Otis giving him directions to a funeral parlor. A few days earlier, Redding’s uncle had died and Otis thought it would be instructive to Wheeler to see how black people held a wake, which was, Wheeler says, “more like a family reunion, a party. His uncle was all dressed up in his casket and people came over and were talkin’ to him, makin’ jokes, like he was still alive. They’d leave a glass of booze on the casket and dance away.” Wheeler, the only white person in the crowd, found himself toasting and dancing with everyone else. Otis, watching him enjoy the proceedings, at one point told him, “Dennis, I want to go out the same way. I wouldn’t want no one just droppin’ me into the ground. Have a party for me.’ ”1
That he remained close to Bobby Smith and his boys at Orbit, was another “tell,” especially considering what had been done to him in the Stax shuffle. Being a favored artist in Memphis was plenty good for the ego, but Redding needed to know he had a sanctuary in Macon, where he spent a decreasing amount of time. When he was home, however, he always hung with the old crowd and even tried to do them favors. Not only were Speedo Sims and Oscar Mack on his payroll, but he also employed both in the backup band he had on standby when he played what would be one very big show a year at home, at the Macon City Auditorium. So eagerly awaited was this event that it earned Otis his first of what would be only a handful of articles in his hometown paper, the Telegraph, which on July 11, 1965, headlined a story about the show, MACON’S OWN OTIS REDDING RETURNS HOME, polishing the apple by writing, “With 1965 already half gone, music people have already established this year as THE Otis Redding year.”2
He also got Oscar, who could sound uncannily like Redding, a shot at the big time, lining up a recording session for him at Stax in May 1964. There, Mack cut two songs, both of which he had written—“You’ll Never Know How Much I Love You” and “Dream Girl”—with the latter being a tasty pop-soul confection that Otis unofficially produced, sang harmony on, and intoned a spoken intro paean to “the girl of my dreams.” Though the ensuing record did little, Otis, too, would cut “Dream Girl,” which would go unreleased until 1990.
Otis also brought in Jackie Avery, who had left L.A. to record in New Orleans. Avery would write for Otis’s later protégé Arthur Conley, then in the 1970s he would be hired by Phil Walden’s Capricorn Records label, composing “Blind Bats and Swamp Rats” for Johnny Jenkins and recording with the Allman Brothers and on his own, cutting “Our Love Has Brought Me (A Mighty Long Way).” “Otis would have produced all of us if he could have,” laughs Wheeler. “He wanted to build his own studio and make us all stars.”
This apparently included Johnny Jenkins, who swore until his last breath that Otis never stopped trying to ease the guilt he had over what had happened in Memphis. In 1963, Otis asked Jenkins to join his road band, something Jenkins said he had no interest in doing, one of the most ironic reasons being that he hated flying. Moreover, Jenkins quietly nursed a grudge and later in his life, after Redding had been deified in death, unleashed some harsh words that clashed with the man’s saintly public image, telling author Peter Guralnick, “I knew [about] the prostitutes, the whores, but nobody wants to hear none of that . . . Well, you can put him up on a pedestal, call him an idol, but he wasn’t no damn idol. He was a human being, that’s what.”3
Even as Otis kept moving up the ladder at Stax, he would make demos at Bobby Smith’s new studio at the Georgian Hotel on Mulberry Street, which would be followed by barbecues, hunting and fishing forays, and bull sessions at the barbershop. These routines of life were his buffer zone, a way of keeping his feet planted in the Georgia soil, and refusing to rise too far above it. Once, he and Wheeler decided to have a barbecue at the latter’s house, near the woods. Needing some meat, they picked up hunting rifles and waded into the brush. Seeing something move, and thinking it was a calf, Otis took a shot. When the moving stopped, the two men checked the kill and saw that the animal lying dead was in fact a bull, a huge one, so big they couldn’t get it across the field, so they left it there. Before the shoot ended, they had bagged some chickens, not concerned that they happened to be in the yard of a farmer who lived in the woods. “We’d shoot and the lights in the house would go on so we’d stop, then when they went off we’d shoot again and go rustle up more chickens,” Wheeler laughs. “We went on like that for hours and at the end Otis said, ‘Lord have mercy, how many chickens have I stolen?’ ” Seeing Otis immensely enjoy himself in this country environment, Wheeler couldn’t imagine him ever leaving. “Otis could have moved, anywhere, but logically to Memphis so he would be there whenever he wanted to record. All those Stax acts lived in Memphis. But that wasn’t home to Otis. That was his place of business. Home was right here.”
•
NEITHER “COME TO ME” nor “Security,” both released in mid-1963, had lit any fires on the charts. Each rose no higher than number 69, though they found the mid-20s on the Cash Box R&B chart. But Jim Stewart was satisfied and further convinced that Redding was only one good song from a breakout. The search for one led to endless commuting to Memphis. On September 9, 1964, Otis cut “Chained and Bound” and “Your One and Only Man,” which, if taken as a Rorschach of where his head was at, perhaps indicated some seriously schizoid divergence about the nature of a man and woman “chained” in love and marriage and the decree that he had better be the only one. On the other hand, no such requirement needed to be said that she be the only one for him. As if trying to merge the two abstractions, he clarified in the hip-grinding ballad that he was proud of such bondage. The up-tempo “Your One and Only Man” seemed, conversely, to hold back some joyous emotion, possibly a subconscious struggle to give everything to the notion of being a one-woman man. Both were essential Redding bridges to becoming a more nuanced and more mature man, and writer, but “Chained and Bound,” released as his next single, failed to catch crossover lightning and stalled at number 70 on the pop chart, though he did plant his flag deeper in the soul turf when it zoomed to number 6 on the R&B, his highest ranking there yet.
On December 28, 1964, he recorded two more, “That’s How Strong My Love Is” and “Mr. Pitiful.” The former was a cover of a ballad written by Memphis songwriter Roosevelt Jamison, who had sung it as an audition for Stewart. When nothing came of it, Stewart presented it to the ill-fated gospel soul singer O. V. Wright—victim of an early death at age forty-one after years of heavy drug use—who recorded it on another Memphis label. Only days after, Steve Cropper pitched it to Otis, who cut it, the intention being to release it as his next single. The session was beefed up by an already robust horn section, originally featuring Sammy Coleman on trumpet and Packy Axton and Floyd Newman on sax. When Cropper held a dub session, he brought in Wayne Jackson on trumpet, Ed Logan, Andrew Love, and Jimmy Mitchell on sax. All that brass, along with Cropper’s stabbing guitar and by turns a thundering and whimpering rhythm section seemed to further brand Otis’s gritty, barely tempered pleadings.
However, when the session was done, “Mr. Pitiful” got the play. Written by Redding and Cropper, their first collaboration, it cheekily adopted a moniker that A. C. “Moohah” Williams, an influential DJ at KDIA in Memphis, had recently hung on Otis for the torture he’d put himself through on songs like that. It had been cut as a demo before, and Cropper produced it in a more funky vein, its up-tempo brass accents different from any used before in a Redding song. With the trademark Booker T. piano swirls in the background, Otis seemed completely free and at ease, ad-libbing a falsetto “I want youuu, I want youuu” over and over on the fadeout, pleading and joyous at once—the prototypical Stax/Volt aural milieu. Cropper’s influence on the songs he co-wrote with Redding has often been noted for giving them tighter structure. But Floyd Newman, a cynical old bird if ever there was one, had an alternate, if distinctly minority, view.
“Listen, here’s the truth,” he says. “Steve was just one of the musicians. A good guy, but he was part of a system set up by Jim Stewart. He owned the publishing and he wanted more, he wanted it all. So when Otis would come in with a song one hundred percent finished, Jim didn’t want him to think it was a hundred percent finished. Jim had a setup where Steve would go with the artists somewhere, like a hotel, to work out songs and the next thing you knew, he’d be one of the writers of the song. And Jim had a piece of any song Steve had a writer’s credit on. You can’t fault Steve for that. He did what the boss told him. That’s just how it worked.”4
Cropper doesn’t see it that way. To the guitar man, Redding “had the softness of Sam Cooke and the harshness of Little Richard, and he was his own man. When I wrote with Otis, my job was to help him finish his songs. He had so many ideas that I’d just pick one and say, ‘Let’s do this,’ and we’d write all night long.” Clearly, Redding was eager to accept Cropper’s aid, as he wanted to grow as an artist and writer. Still, any modifications in lyrics or arrangements were secondary to what Redding brought to the studio. On a technical level, there was not much tinkering required.
“With Otis,” Cropper noted, “it was all about feeling and expression. Most of his songs had just two or three chord changes, so there wasn’t a lot of music there. The dynamics, the energy, the way we attacked it—that’s hard to teach. So many things now are computer-generated. They start at one level and they stop at the same level, so there isn’t much dynamic, even if there are a lot of different sounds.”
He does agree with Newman about one thing—Redding never changed his own personal dynamic. He was a ball of movement, a blur in the dim studio. And he needed little help to mature as a singer or songwriter. As Booker T. Jones points out, “Range was not a factor in his singing. His range was somewhat limited. He had no really low notes and no really high notes. But Otis would do anything that implied emotion, and that’s where his physicality came in, because he was such a strong, powerful man. Backstage, he would be like a prizefighter waiting to get out there.”5
Lyrically, “Mr. Pitiful” was more nuanced, not just a simple plea/demand for sexual satisfaction. It seems to upbraid a shallow, materialistic friend until the emotion builds to where it becomes clear that he is the voice of his own conscience; he is the pitiful one, a beggar for love. What’s more, the tonal signature of the song was more pungent. As Newman says, “Otis’s songs from then on had a lot of sharp keys, which raise the notes a little, project more, let him sing in a wider range. He didn’t even know about keys or theory or nothin’ like that. He just knew what sound he wanted, every time.”
•
ZELMA REDDING had always been understanding and then some about the realities of the road, never fooling herself into believing he was keeping his fly up. This was anything but unusual; Ray Charles, for example, had twelve children by ten different women, and married twice.6 Otis was more responsible (or just lucky) and he had no intention of ever having another wife. Indeed, as tough and no-nonsense as Zelma was, like all music wives she had to readjust the traditional meters of fidelity. The reality was that Otis loved her and just passed time with whomever else wound up in his bed. And more than a few “whomevers” wound up there. Alan Walden, who often traveled with Otis on his seamless tours, enjoyed the spillover.
Walden once said that “there were always flocks of ladies backstage waiting just to touch his hand or whatever. Being single, I thoroughly enjoyed traveling with a guy who had such appeal. I stayed in his room one time and had more sexual conquests in one week than I had had maybe in a year before—and all I was doing was answering the phone. It was outrageous.” There was a toll to pay, though. Zelma and Otis began butting heads about his endless time on the road and her place in his burgeoning career. As Zelma herself once recalled, “I just felt like I wasn’t going to fit with him ’cause he was outgrowing me.” Soon, this rumbling stretched long distance. The Temptations’ Otis Williams recalls a telling interlude when he ran into Redding while the latter was performing in Detroit at the Phelps Lounge, a popular blues club. Chatting in the dressing room, they were competitive and territorial, but respected each other’s style and respective domains. And Otis, who sometimes found it easy to unburden when in the company of those on the same uncertain climb up the industry backstairs, revealed more of himself to the Temptation than he may have realized. “I said, ‘Otis, is your show over?’ And he said, ‘No, man, I came all the way down here to have a phone conversation with my wife, and she done hung up on me.’ He was angry. He said, ‘I don’t play that shit.’ Evidently they had an argument and he was turned off by it. But then he said he was gonna fly back to Macon. He was gonna do what he had to do with his life and then turn around and fly right back to Detroit. I stood there and thought, ‘I don’t believe he’s gonna go all the way back there just to get in his wife’s face and come on back. I never heard of such a thing. I mean, he was really upset by this argument they had.”7
It was unclear whether Otis flew home to lay down the law to his woman—or to grovel at her feet for forgiveness. Given his split personality about fidelity and opportunity, and what constituted manliness and weakness, either would have been plausible. Regardless, the next day he would be right back in the same old maw of confusion and inner conflict. Perhaps the result of his flight to Macon became tangible nine months later when, early in 1965, another son, Otis Redding III, was born, which not only smoothed things out a bit with Zelma but honored the name handed down by Otis Ray Redding Sr.
“Mr. Pitiful” b/w “Strong,” meanwhile, had a nice run up the charts in the winter of ’65. “Pitiful” went to number 41 pop, twenty notches higher than “Pain in My Heart” had and Top 10 R&B (on the Cash Box chart). “That’s How Strong My Love Is” then broke out on its own, reaching 74 and 18 on that chart. Clearly, the clever and visceral “Mr. Pitiful” had put Redding on a higher level and set the tone for virtually all of his ensuing recordings. In its wake, a second album was pieced together which would include what was now four certifiable R&B hits.
With this success, Redding sessions at Stax had become events. Not only would every employee of the company crowd into the control room to watch, but Stewart, who booked every recording date in his studio himself, needed only to tell his musicians “Otis is coming in” for them to drop whatever they were doing and head for East McLemore.
One song earmarked for the new album had already been recorded, and prospered when released over the summer, “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now),” another gushing, wrenching ballad that Otis had written with the mellow, veteran Chicago soul singer Jerry “Iceman” Butler in a Buffalo hotel room when their paths coincided. Hearing Butler sing the unfinished song, Otis said, “Hey, man, that’s a smash. Let me go mess around with it. Maybe I’ll come up with something.”8
Butler heard nothing more about it, but Otis turned the ballad into a groaning, fragile plea. As he envisioned the arrangement, and as how it was recorded, it slowly built from quaint piano triplets to, with a sudden shift of key, a horn swell. But the lyrics, again, go deep, as an accusation that, in the relationship he sings of, only his love was real and true, growing ever stronger even as his woman’s love grew “tired” and “cold.”
Otis pointedly referred to this love scenario as an “affair” and even a “habit.” For Redding, it seemed, loving was unconditional, even if it could seem more like a chore. That clearly was baggage he still carried from the deacon’s church sermons he absorbed as a child, leaving an unbreakable “habit” that salvaged the morality and sanctity of any breakable relationship. Furthermore, it was apparent that he believed it was his job to save any such union, even beg if he had to. But if he also believed he had earned no demerits for a lack of fealty when he was on the road, he was conning himself. When it came to blame for his selective adultery, he could pin that on no one else.
•
RELEASED ON April 19, 1965, “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” backed with “Just One More Day,” got off strong. Atlantic distributors shipped one hundred thousand orders in one day and it ultimately had a very nice showing on the charts, both charts, going to number 2 R&B and, even better, number 21 pop. As soon as it hit the streets, Otis had called Jerry Butler, excitedly telling him, “Hey, man, it’s a hit! I told you it was a hit.” Butler couldn’t imagine what he was talking about. When Otis said it was the song Butler had come up with, he couldn’t believe it. Otis had not told him he had finished the song, much less that he had recorded it. In fact, Jerry was going to cut it himself, as is. He had Otis play it over the phone, and though he still felt somewhat betrayed, the majesty of the record was obvious. No one else could have recorded it as had Otis, he would say that “it was intended for him.” Butler told author Scott Freeman, “He sang ‘I’ve been . . .’ and then he just paused and let you think about it: I’ve been what? . . . then ‘too long.’ And he made ‘long’ a ten-syllable word! . . . Like when Ray Charles says ‘Georgia.’ It was a statement. It was a paragraph. It was just beautiful.”9
He told the same thing to Al Bell, an influential black DJ in Washington, D.C., at this point, who was stunned. “Jerry said there was no use in him even recording it, wouldn’t even try. And this is Jerry Butler, one of the greatest singers of all time!”10
After “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” lost steam, “One More Day” broke off on its own run, hitting numbers 15 and 85 (Cash Box), respectively. That breakthrough hastened the compilation of his third album, one that Atlantic decreed should be released in stereo, the first time a Stax album was cut in two channels. For this they sent Tom Dowd, the famed Atlantic engineer who had overseen sessions for Ray Charles, Ruth Brown, Bobby Darin’s “Mack the Knife,” John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, and Thelonious Monk, and whose wizardry on the mixing board had earned him the moniker of “Soundman God.”
Dowd installed in the studio Stax’s first two-track machine, guaranteeing that if Atlantic acts were barred from Stax, there would be no such injunction for the wizard of the control board, who would be a regular from then on. Even though most studios had four- or eight-track recorders by that time, even two-track recording was a grudging concession by Stewart, who was so worried that a stereo mix might distill the usual Stax sound that he demanded that Dowd engineer a separate mono track. It was a skill that seemingly Dowd alone had. Stewart, though, would only accede to full Stax albums going out in stereo; his crown jewels, the singles, continued in mono.
The bulk of material on the album was culled from several sessions from the past year: “Come to Me” in February; Redding’s “I Want to Thank You” (not the Sam and Dave “I Thank You”) in April; his “Your One and Only Man” and “Chained and Bound” in September; “That’s How Strong My Love Is” in December, featuring the biggest brass blast on a Redding song yet. He cut six more highly emotive tracks in January 1965: Otis Blackwell’s “Home in Your Heart” and Obie McClinton’s “Keep Your Arms Around Me”; a cover of Butler’s “For Your Precious Love”; Chuck Willis’s “It’s Too Late”; Sam Cooke’s “Nothing Can Change This Love”; and, perhaps most trenchant, cover of Jackie Wilson’s “A Woman, A Lover, A Friend.” As eclectic and soul-savvy as the list was, many of these titles were deeply founded in Otis’s own angst, hopes, and letdowns.
Often given as a fact is that this album marked the debut at Stax of Isaac Hayes, who indeed was listed on the sleeve as one of the session players, on piano. Hayes, an orphan who lived with his grandmother, boasted a shaved head even before it was a style. He had been hired by Stewart at the age of twenty-three after a brief career as a meat-packer and a stint in the clubs around Memphis singing and playing piano with various bands, including one headed by Floyd Newman. When Jim Stewart brought him into the Stax fold early in 1965, Hayes worked with low-level act the Mad Lads, a group of teens in Booker T. Washington High School. The first song he wrote for them, “The Sidewalk Surf,” flopped but the next, “Don’t Have to Shop Around,” an answer to Smokey Robinson and the Miracles’ “Shop Around,” surprisingly made it to number 11 R&B and 93 pop late that year.
Hayes would branch out, teamed with yet another Booker T. Washington student, Dave Porter, who had hung around Stewart’s office bugging him for work and eventually landed a job as a staff writer. Hayes in time would become one of the most identifiable and distinctive of all soul men, sanctifying that very phrase, but in July of 1965, he was making his studio debut on a Redding session, which he would recall, saying, “I was frightened. Here I am in this place I’ve always wanted to be and all these giants have been through here.”11
While the album was originally titled That’s How Strong My Love Is, Stewart felt the title needed to showcase something stronger than a love song that did only so-so. That something was Redding himself. Atlantic Records was ahead of Motown in one way. As far-fetched as it seems today, the first black-owned record company did not put the images of its own talent on their record jackets, Berry Gordy believing that black faces could only dampen sales, a preposterous notion that endured until 1965. Atlantic, however, had put a large photo of Redding on Pain in My Heart and would now array a grid of twenty-four identical images of him on this album. Thus, the next logical step was to use his growing brand to sell the record, the title of which became The Great Otis Redding Sings Soul Ballads.
That was surely presumptuous, but a core part of the PR campaign being waged was to convince the industry that Redding was indeed a star. He surely was not, based on sales and crossover appeal, quantifiably “great,” not like Ray Charles or Nat King Cole, much less Little Richard or in the hard-earned sense, like Rufus Thomas. But the underground word of mouth about his electrifying concerts was the best selling point Jim Stewart and the Walden agency had. As a cult figure with a sense of anticipation and curiosity about him, the press releases churned out by Alan Walden and Alex Hodges—all routed through Atlantic’s promotions department and put out on Atco letterhead, just as Atlantic had to sign off on every Redding song—shamelessly pumped up an identity that Redding himself might not have recognized.
“It was cold in November 1962 but a young man with a lot of soul warmed it up,” read a release from late in 1963. “Across the nation people were asking who is this soul master of the blues ballad? The answer was OTIS REDDING . . . In the day of gimmick sounds and long hair, OTIS REDDING had a message! This message was heard by millions as each recording effort continued to prove the REDDING sound was here to stay. . . . ‘Mr. Pitiful’ is ‘Mr. Consistent.’ ” Another, from 1964, burbled, “OTIS has established himself as one of the nation’s top recording artists. ‘THE OTIS REDDING SHOW’ is constantly in demand throughout the country. The show includes OTIS’ dynamic nine-piece show band . . . one of the top road shows in the nation traveling over 150,000 miles in 1964 playing for thousands of fans. 1965 is even bigger as OTIS works from coast to coast. . . . OTIS REDDING is proving he is quite deserving of the title: THE KING OF SOUL!”12