Otis Redding, to his credit, never seemed to take any of the personae people hung on him, Mr. Pitiful or the King of Soul, even a little seriously. This explained why he had fun parodying that image when he recorded “Love Man” in 1967, a song not released until after his death, when it would be a sly wink from the grave about a man who was “six feet one, two hundred and ten,” a prize for every woman who breathed, who could please her around the clock. It was fully intended as a spoof of generic lady killers, not unlike him, and would inevitably define him as a good-natured, harmless, even lovable kind of cad. The very qualities that every successful soul man has always embodied.
His next big step came when Phil Walden had booked him for a three-day Easter weekend engagement in L.A. at the Whisky a Go Go, the then-two-year-old music club/discotheque on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Clark Street. Named after a similar hot spot in Paris, this rudder of the rock and hippie chic scene was where music’s bigwigs hung, watching a passing parade of aspiring acts and snorting cocaine, shielded in VIP sections reserved for them by the main owner Elmer Valentine. It was an intimate place, 250 seats, but the Whisky stage was where the Byrds, the Turtles, and Johnny Rivers had gained traction, and where, not far down from Sunset outside another club, in November, a police “riot” during a confrontation with counterculture types would inspire another new act, Buffalo Springfield, to write “For What It’s Worth.” In June 1967, Van Morrison’s Them would take the stage, their opening act the Doors.
There were two things that conjoined these wide-ranging acts—they were invariably white and sang rock. No major black performers had gotten a booking there, but Walden had no trouble securing three days for Redding, which he and Otis envisioned as a crucial inroad into the rock mainstream. Jim Stewart immediately signed off on plans for a live album to be recorded from the shows and sent Al Jackson Jr. to act as de facto producer. Atlantic’s brain trust also thought it would be an exploitable product, and Nesuhi Ertegun flew cross-country to oversee the details of the album. On opening night, Ahmet Ertegun also arrived and watched from the VIP lounge.
Otis had warmed up for the gig with an April 2 appearance at the Hollywood Bowl, the seventeen-thousand-seat band shell nestled under the comely HOLLYWOOD sign in the hills surrounding it. The Bowl, founded in 1922, had been a regular venue for philharmonic and symphony orchestras, operas, and pop and jazz singers such as Al Jolson, Judy Garland, and Ella Fitzgerald, and had hosted the Beatles in 1964 and ’65, the latter performance recorded for a live album. Redding, booked for a concert to benefit the Braille Institute of America, was the only soul act among the likes of Donovan, Sonny & Cher, the Righteous Brothers, the Turtles, and the Mamas & the Papas, and was on and off before he could leave much of a mark in the biggest house he had yet played. Still, the crowd was up on its feet as with any Redding performance, and he told Walden if he got another open-air venue, with more time, he would kill.
THE WEEK before the Whisky gig, he arrived in L.A. along with his ten-piece Otis Redding Revue. This outfit consisted of three sax men, Robert Holloway, Don Henry, and Robert Pittman; trumpeters Sammy Coleman and John Farris; guitarist James Young; bassist Ralph Stewart; drummer Elbert Woodson; and even a trombone player, Clarence Johnson. Another member, Al “Brisco” Clark, a horn man whose band had often backed up James Brown, would serve as the emcee for the shows. There were also three background vocalists Otis liked to call his “protégés,” Katie Webster, Carl Simms, and Kitty Lane. At the Whisky on opening night, the house was sold out and dozens of L.A. blues buffs who worshipped Redding hung around on the street outside trying to hear his voice seeping through the walls.
The crowd inside came mostly out of curiosity and word of mouth, his éclat more known to the Sunset crowd than any of his work. When Brisco introduced Redding by screaming the names of some of his successful R&B songs, there was almost no reaction. Otis then ambled onto the stage, looking like a time traveler from another era. In a simple black tux, he was wedged between gyrating go-go girls in hydraulic cages, wearing spangled green hip-hugger pants and crop-tops. Trying to keep his concentration, he reeled off a two-hour-long set, not saving an ounce of juice. According to Atlantic Records logs, over the three shows, recordings were made of practically every song he knew, no less than eighty-six tracks in all, though many of these were multiples of the same songs. He sang around two dozen each night, opening with “Pain in My Heart” or James Brown’s “I Feel Good.” Liberally sprinkling the set list with covers, he also threw in Brown’s “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” “Satisfaction,” “Put On Your Red Dress,” “If I Had a Hammer,” “Danny Boy,” and “A Hard Day’s Night.” At one point a young black woman shouted out, “Otis, would you please sing ‘These Arms of Mine’? ” “Yes I will,” he said chivalrously, and did.1
The audience at first didn’t seem knocked out, their applause polite, and his voice began to get hoarse from trying so hard to get them going. “Right now,” he said at one point, nearly out of breath, “we’re gonna sing a soulful song, ladies and gentlemans [sic], for everybody that’s unhappy, and this song is something everybody need and everybody wants, and I been trying to get it.” That, of course, was “Respect,” which perked up the mood considerably. He then had them for good with an exhausting “I Can’t Turn You Loose,” which only a cadaver could have sat still through. Rising to their feet, martinis in hand, the Hollywood elite in suits and miniskirts shouted back at him his improvised chants of “got-ta, got-ta” and “hold on, hold on.”
“Holler as loud as you wanna—you ain’t home!” he commanded.
Watching from the side of the stage were members of the Rising Sons, who had done a brief opening set. Though the band never made it big, two members would, Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder, in blues-folk and as a guitar legend, respectively. Taj Mahal recalled that “at that time, Otis was it. Great band, great songs, great show . . . one of the most amazing performances I’d ever seen, and I’ve seen some great performances.”
It wasn’t that Redding had a certain style, it was just that he could articulate the sum and substance of soul so convincingly. After performing, Taj Mahal couldn’t wait to get offstage to watch Otis do his thing. By the second night, Cooder had tuned his guitar in the same key in which Otis wrote most of his songs. A bigger thrill for the group was when Otis asked to borrow that guitar to do some noodling around when he had an idea for a new song.2
When the tapes of the Whisky gig were played for Stewart, however, he was aghast. Stax had paid good money to hire Wally Heider and his famous mobile recording studio to get a studio level of perfection, yet Stewart thought some of the musicians were off-key and decided to keep the album on the shelf. The L.A. critics, however, ate up the show, seduced like everyone else who ever experienced Redding in the raw. The show, raved Los Angeles Times’ music writer Pete Johnson, “was the most exciting thing that rock-worn room has ever harbored,” calling Otis “a magic singer with an unquenchable store of energy and a great fluttering band.” Titling his review OTIS REDDING’S SOUTHERN-STYLE BLUES BAND LETS OFF STEAM, Johnson was not shy about hyperbole: “Drawn by his growing popularity, a fervid audience shoehorned into the club, chorused in on some of his songs, and, at one point, interrupted his introduction of a ballad by clamoring for more of his fast-paced tunes. Redding was assured of an In Group following . . . when, from among his spectators, emerged Bob Dylan, trailed by an entourage of camp followers.”3
Johnson thus earned the right to pen the liner notes when, in 1968, during the rush to get out posthumous Redding material, the first incarnation of the album was released, In Person at the Whisky a Go Go. It was limited to just ten songs, the ones least affected by acoustic clinkers. Yet, opening with “Turn You Loose” and closing with “Respect,” the work drew much critical praise, as it does decades on, for its sense of gritty soul undiluted by rock pretenses.4
It would be another fourteen years before eight more unreleased tracks were issued, and until 2008 for a far more complete record of the engagement to come out. Then the 2010 Live on the Sunset Strip, which contained that entire set list of the three shows, bumbles and stumbles and all. One reviewer noted that, in these, “Otis struggles for traction as his startlingly inept road band flails about behind him, out of tune and out of sync . . . Otis has to tell them the key of ‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long’ before he performs the song, and then even he hits a few flat notes along the way.”5 But it was nonetheless clear why at the time the engagement could be filed under “conquest.” His voice, unrelentingly sincere and overwhelming present, could likely have saved him from any disastrous stage complications. Few have ever had as deep a reservoir of personal ingratiation. In a 2010 retrospective longtime chronicler of the L.A. rock scene Harvey Kubernik headlined an article for the Goldmine.com website that read: OTIS REDDING WAS KING OF THE SUNSET STRIP IN 1966.6
A telling footnote of the L.A. interlude was that Otis thought he might have stumbled onto that elusive crossover hit. Robbie Robertson, the writing juice of the Band, who at the time was backing Bob Dylan, recalls that while recording “Just Like a Woman,” Dylan asked him, “ ‘Who do you think would be good to cover this song?’ And I said, ‘Otis Redding. He’s one of the greatest singers that ever walked the earth.’ And he said, ‘Really?’ I said, ‘Absolutely. He would just tear it up.’ ” After catching Redding’s show at the Whisky, Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman took Dylan and Robertson backstage to meet Otis and Phil Walden. “So we get together and I’m pitching this song. And Otis says, ‘That sounds great to me’ and we play this song and he says, ‘Oh man, what a song—she breaks just like a little girl. Oh, that’s fantastic. I’m definitely gonna record this.’ ” The song clearly did seem compatible with the Redding oeuvre, its lyrics about the fragility and pain of love. Yet when it wasn’t on Redding’s next album, Robertson asked Walden what happened to “Just Like a Woman.”
Walden told him, “We went in and recorded it and Otis couldn’t sing the bridge. Otis said, ‘I don’t know how to sing the bridge,’ ” referring to oblique lines in that portion of the song that dealt with conjoined bits and pieces such as fog, amphetamines, and pearls. Robertson recalled, “Walden said Otis couldn’t get those words to come out of his mouth in a truthful way. The rest of the song, no problem. And I thought, God, I understand that. If you can’t sing something with a complete honesty, then you shouldn’t be singing that song, and he was just being honest about it.”7
ALEX HODGES, who now was doing his own hitch in the Army and stationed in Europe, was kept in the loop about the business at home. “Phil sent me every new Otis record, and let me tell you, I was a very popular guy because whenever I’d play it, a crowd would grow around me to listen. He had fans everywhere. I was in Turkey for a while, and I was the most popular guy in Ankara.” When Hodges told Walden of Redding’s foreign constituency, Phil booked his first tour in England later that year. The Otis Redding experience wasn’t about one-nighters in the sticks anymore. Indeed, being booked into places like the Whisky a Go Go was part of a master plan to go broad, go big, beyond the ken of the soul circuit. When Phil and Otis had meetings in the office, they would take turns shouting “We’re gonna conquer the world!’ ” It was a joke, but it really wasn’t. It was deadly serious.8
Wringing every drop out of the California market, Redding would be back in the late summer, headlining an August 21 “Midsummer Dance and Show” in Oakland’s Continental Club. Not to be outdone, Bill Graham, the big Bay Area promoter at the Fillmore Auditorium, had begun booking soul acts for his place, with the Temptations playing there in late July. A hatchet-faced man who held the future of many rock acts in his hands, Graham was a Jew born in Berlin as Wolodia Grajonca, and as a child had walked with his family hundreds of miles to get out of Nazi Germany. Rarely, however, did he have to venture far to book an act he saw as in the vanguard; usually, managers came to him, and his intense ego and volatile temper made him both a respected and loathed figure in rock. But Graham wanted Redding, badly, to do what he had done at the Whisky before an auditorium full of rabid young rock pilgrims, who had made the Fillmore ground zero of the psychedelic-cum-flower-power culture sparked by the Beatles’ teasingly lyrical and sonic parables of hallucinogenic reverie.
Graham made his name promoting rock, but loved blues and soul. In fact, the Fillmore itself is located on Fillmore Boulevard and Geary Street, a grid that was called the Bay Area’s version of 125th Street and Lenox Avenue, and was originally leased to a black entrepreneur, Charles Sullivan, who booked acts like James Brown and Duke Ellington. Graham, an ex-mambo dance champion and born hustler, began promoting dance troupes in the early ’60s and after Sullivan was found murdered in June 1966 took over the lease on the grand ballroom.9 While rock acts like the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Janis Joplin leaped out of the city’s underground scene, Graham spoon-fed young hippie audiences the elixir of soul, booking R&B and soul acts to open shows for the rockers. King Curtis had recorded a live album at the Fillmore, with Billy Preston on keyboards and Curtis’s legendary saxophone buttressed by the Memphis Horns.
Memphis was, in fact, Graham’s focal point for soul, not Motown. And he was one of the west coast’s legion of Redding acolytes, the centerpiece of the idiom for Graham. He had seen him perform in L.A. and was so smitten he told Harvey Kubernik in the August issue of the Brit music fanzine Melody Maker that Redding was “the single most extraordinary talent I had ever seen . . . a six-foot-three black Adonis . . . who moved like a serpent. Or a panther stalking his prey.”10 Graham, who died in a 1991 helicopter crash returning from a concert, would recall that “there was an ultimate musician everyone wanted to see. Everybody said, ‘This is the guy.’ Otis Redding. He was it.”
That summer, Graham flew all the way to Macon to ask Redding personally to commit to a series of holiday shows in December. Even though Otis would never have come close to the new “acid generation” idiom, or even had any idea what the screaming, adenoidal, long-haired rock bands of the day were singing about, he liked the challenge. Graham recalled, “I could have offered ten thousand dollars, which would have meant I would have been dead. Out of business. Or I could’ve said that when I talked to artists I respected, Paul Butterfield, Michael Bloomfield, Jerry Garcia, when I asked, ‘Who’s your guy? Who’s number one on your list?’ they all tell me it’s you.”11
Otis and Phil Walden were a bit leery of the scene. L.A. hippies were one thing, but the Haight-Ashbury kind were something really wavy. They asked, said Graham, about “the kids . . . and the drugs they took. They thought it was like voodoo rites out there. The lights, the paints, the crazy clothes. It was strange for them.” To Graham, the sale was made because he himself “was a pretty straight guy and I didn’t dress fancy.” They signed off on the gig and career move. Or, as Walden would later say, another move into territory that other white promoters advised him not to go. Even in 1966, black entertainers, he recalled, were expected to reach only so far. “They’re never satisfied,” was the refrain.
“Why should they be satisfied?” was Walden’s response. “Why shouldn’t they want the same damn things [as whites]? I never would be satisfied with just the finger. I wanted the hand too. The arm. The whole damn body.”12
•
WHEN HE’D get to the ’Frisco Bay, it would be with some much-needed fresh material on his plate—his newest release, in May, being the emotive, measured ballad “My Lover’s Prayer,” which, backed with a bright and bouncy “Midnight Hour” sound-alike called “Don’t Mess with Cupid,” had gone top 10 soul and 61 pop. On August 2, he made it to Memphis for his first session in months, cutting ten songs for the album that would take the place of the aborted live one. The result, The Soul Album, was an eclectic brew. Just three tracks were co-written by Redding—the previously recorded “Just One More Day,” “Any Ole Day” (with Steve Cropper), and “Good to Me” (with Memphis blues singer Julius Green). The rest were paeans to the four corners of soul, past and present, with covers of Wilson Pickett’s “634-5789 (Soulsville, U.S.A.),” the Temptations’ socially aware “It’s Growing,” swamp bluesman Slim Harpo’s “Baby Scratch My Back,” country soul man Roy Head’s “Treat Her Right,” the old Bessie Smith wailer “Nobody Knows When You’re Down and Out,” Jerry Butler’s “Cigarettes and Coffee,” and Sam Cooke’s “Chain Gang.”
It was fascinating as an homage to his contemporaries and idols, and to his own near infinite breadth within the soul genre. The cliché that Redding could make any song seem his own was settled law; his renditions were uniquely his, the precedents merely vague outlines for his own emotionally supercharged versions. In “Cigarettes and Coffee,” by example, his woebegone plea to save a love gone bad was every bit an update of the classic song of hopelessness, “One for the Road,” leaving indelible images of an Otis Redding, unable to sleep, sucking on cigarettes and downing coffee in the wee hours while talking on the phone with “my baby.” His granular texture and mood changes, with every little nuance seeming preternaturally anticipated by the sad horns and tinkling honky-tonk piano, cast an almost visual image of a man about to rupture in agony before the sun came up.
While each track created a similar mental picture of despair and hope, the album’s potential for spawning even R&B hits was limited. Indeed, though the album was his deepest penetration yet into the white mainstream, peaking at number 54 while holding its soul credentials by going to number 3, no single would come from it. On August 30, only weeks after the album was out, Otis was back in the studio to record two original songs in the Otis Blue mold. One of them was the unforgettable “Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song),” the rhythmic repetition of that musical syllable something that would become a Redding signet. As Dennis Wheeler tells it, “I asked him one day, I said, ‘Otis, why’d you put all them ‘fa fa’s’ in there, and he patted his butt where his wallet was bulging in his back pocket and said, ‘I put my fa fa in here.’ He meant fatbacks, I guess, really greenbacks, but the country boys call ’em fatbacks—not pork but big bills.” A laugh. “But maybe that was after the song made him all that ‘fa fa.’ ”13
Actually, whatever other meaning the syllabic repetition had for Otis, “fa-fa” was what he would commonly hum in the studio to mark where the horns would play—and, perhaps with a wink, he would say he took the drily melodic horn riffs of the song from the theme of the TV quiz show The $64,000 Question, though it had been off the air for years.14 (Sly Stone would crib those riffs note for note in the 1970 hit with the Family Stone “Everybody Is a Star.”) In the tradition of similar nonsensical rock/scat patois like “Doo Wah Diddy Diddy” and “Da Doo Ron Ron,” he and Cropper realized that certain gibberish just seemed to work to match lyric to melody. The whole song, in fact, developed, as had “Mr. Pitiful,” a good-natured kickback for Otis, or as one retro-review perceived to be “a slight dig at his gloomy image.”15 It was subtly so, since anything he ever sang was like a bleeding wound, and the lyrics brought the usual Redding unburdening, now with the admission that all his life he had been singing sad songs, the only kind he could sing.
The tells were that the opening horn riff was almost satiric in its pomp, and the interplay with the Memphis Horns slyly cuing his rolling cascade of the “fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa” hook beefed up by a harmony vocal by Dave Porter. It was the most fun he ever had during a recording. The song unfolded in a slow, funky groove, the mood so relaxed that it apparently was necessary to note in the title that, yes, it was a sad song, carrying the joke further. “Sad Song” was done too late to make Soul Album and, with “My Lover’s Prayer,” it would go on the next LP, which after a thirteen-song marathon session on September 13 yielded six more tracks. The work came out in mid-October as Complete & Unbelievable: The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul, an affected but accurate recognition that he had indeed rewritten the dictionary definitions of soul. Its cover, returning to the Otis Blue formula, was graced by another winsome woman, but this time she was black.
This lava flow of Redding product was enough to satiate any Otis, or soul, aficionado, the work including some of his best blues busters, some real curios, and a good bit of filler. Like “Satisfaction,” his newest foray into rockin’ soul, a cover of the Beatles’ “Day Tripper,” was recognizable only by the title and a few phrases from the original about a cheating lover. Riding a steamroller of hard rhythm tempered a little by a church organ, his paroxysms of something from start to finish—intermingling lines with more of his trademark “got-ta, got-ta” paroxysms—was deliriously incoherent and just as infectious. And the usual Otis curveball was his keening version of the 1946 ditty “Tennessee Waltz,” confirmation that country music often has the same elements of pride and pain as the best soul song.
There were two other Redding-written songs, the ballad “Ton of Joy”—containing the all-time great Otis line about a lover who “sets me on fire but I’m willing to burn, children”—and the finger-popping dance song “She Put the Hurt on Me,” featuring a slinky Booker T. organ line. Also featured was another by Otis and Al Bell, under his birth name Alvertis Isbell, “Sweet Lorene,” a good, workmanlike soul turn perhaps most notable for the inclusion of the mid-sixties street slang “I’m gonna sock it to ya”—a phrase that would soon be used to give even more juice to another of his songs, turning it immortal.
“That was all Otis,” Bell says, “everything was spontaneous. We hadn’t planned on writing together. I wasn’t a songwriter but I was good with words.” Fatefully, Bell happened to be in the studio with Stax piano player Allen Jones. Encountering them, Otis invited Bell and Jones to flesh out the song with him, asking for lines and riffs that might work. The “sock it to me” exhortation was one Otis thought of using, for no other reason than it sounded right. Not sexual, as was the derivation of the phrase, but because it fit into a cranny he needed to fill during the vocal. “It was a way of saying, ‘Gimme some soul, gimme some heart, gimme your attention! C’mon—sock it to me!’ ” says Bell. Even so, everything he said or sang sounded like it meant something sexual.16
The Hayes-Porter duo was represented on the LP by “Lord Have Mercy” and “I’m Sick Y’all,” which they wrote with Cropper and is one of the hardest rocking and “British” sounding of Redding entries. But the killer was another Tin Pan Alley cover, of the kind that simply no one else would have even attempted. This was “Try a Little Tenderness,” which more than anything else would become his most enduring personal proverb. That result was a surprise to Redding, inasmuch as he recorded it only because the Stax staff—Stewart, Cropper, Hayes, and Porter—believed the pop tune originally done in 1932 by the Ray Noble Orchestra could be contoured to an anguished Redding treatment. Indeed, it had actually been one of Bing Crosby’s most soulful ballads, his crooning coated by lush strings in the 1933 version, and one of the most venerable Tin Pan Alley standards. It had also been covered to death by everyone from Frank Sinatra to Jimmy Durante to Mel Tormé to Aretha Franklin, who gave it its first soul burnishing on her third album for Columbia in 1962 and, in the clincher for Otis, Sam Cooke, as part of a medley on his At the Copa album. Estelle Axton’s contribution to these selections should not be overlooked; from years of seeing records come in and go out the door at the Satellite, she had an encyclopedic knowledge of pop music and which songs fit the mold of each artist.
For Otis, the fit of “Tenderness” was its lullaby-like first eight hushed bars, which gave any singer free reign to show off his or her soft side, at a deliberate meter that most versions maintained throughout while the orchestration swelled behind them—such a sweet confection that Stanley Kubrick had to use an instrumental version of the song for the opening credits of the darkest comedy of all, Doctor Strangelove. Cropper and Hayes/Porter pretty much let it all fly live and congeal according to what Otis felt. After a brief horn intro peeled away into a quiet gospel-style piano, Booker T. organ and sax fugue, he began the prelude, each word drawn out with meticulous phrasing and restrained but heaving emotion. The words he applied to women aging too fast and too lonely, such as “weary” and “shaggy,” beckoned him to pull back from his usual demands for satisfaction and, delicately and hushed as he could, transform himself, appeal for a little bit of tenderness as a salve.
He continued at this pace and pitch for two more verses, the rhythm still muted, until, out of nowhere, Al Jackson, sensing Otis was going to detonate before long, quickened the beat, to double-time. “We didn’t know he was gonna do that,” Duck Dunn would say. “It was amazing.”17 Feeling the fire now, Redding eschewed the lyrics and went all Otis. Raising the volume, the pace and the key, horns blaring all around him, he barreled into a near seizure of semi-lyrical Otisisms that went on until the song had gone nearly four minutes, blasting right through Jackson’s cheddar-sharp cymbal ruffle designed to tell him he was running too long. Checking the clock, and knowing a four-minute track would never fly on the radio, Stewart faded it out with Otis still in a lather, keeping it at 3:50 on the album and cut down to 3:20 for single release, though it prevented listeners from getting every drop of arguably the best Redding performance ever recorded.
Released probably a few weeks too soon, Dictionary’s lighthearted touches were personified by the cover art of a natty, grinning Otis, in a red jacket and vest, white slacks and shoes, and graduation cap, tassel hanging next to his face, standing beside an enormous textbook with the album title and an enigmatic, oversized “My-My-My” at the bottom. Well-received when put out in mid-October, the album had to fight off Otis Blue and reached only as high as 73 on the pop chart, 5 on the R&B. The single of “Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa,” released weeks earlier as a teaser, notched rankings of 29 and 12, followed in November by “Try a Little Tenderness” going to 25 and 4—modest numbers that belie how deeply both songs, and the album, burrowed their way into soul as the idiom of choice in a new cultural mainstream. Indeed, Jon Landau, who had reviewed Redding as a twenty-something Brandeis history major and freelance rock writer before finding his own comet to ride as Bruce Springsteen’s producer and manager, would write in the liner notes of the album’s 1993 expanded CD rerelease that Complete & Unbelievable was “the finest record ever to come out of Memphis and certainly the best example of modern soul ever recorded.”18
And yet, soon, Otis Redding would want more.