14

“The Only Son-of-a-Gun This Side of the Sun”

Otis was rapidly nearing hallowed ground by the beginning of 1967. In that year, the New York Times’ Robert Shelton would write in retrospect that Redding was as polished a performer as any in the rock gentry, and was “comparable, perhaps, to the life-is-sad-but-bearable moods of Frank Sinatra . . . what might be described as ‘an ecstasy singer,’ finding both joy and pain ecstatic and communicable emotions.”¹ So, too, was he capable of self-mockery, a component that made his songwriting wonderfully engaging.

On a broad arc, Otis had accomplished more than he could have been aware of at the time. One of the better repercussions of the now fully fledged soul genre was that singers like Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Sam and Dave, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and the Temptations need not step aside for white acts covering their songs, usually badly but also with more market success. Those days were, mercifully, over. The crossover appeal of these acts was carved on the singularity of their respective niches; simply, their songs could not be attempted without acute embarrassment, excluding when a Stax hand redid a Motown song (witness Redding’s cover of “My Girl”). And now, apropos of Redding’s “Satisfaction,” soul acts could cover rock and roll standards with impunity, with a whole new groove, and were valuable even if few of these works matched the sales level of the original.

White or “blue-eyed” soul acts—the term having been semi-seriously coined by black Philadelphia DJ Georgie Woods in the early ’60s, and more cynically adopted by music journalists in the British press apropos acts such as Tom Jones and even the Beatles and Rolling Stones—were of course free to create a similar groove. Some, including the Righteous Brothers, Rascals, the Soul Survivors, and the Box Tops, even did so admirably, frequently aided by producers like Tom Dowd and Muscle Shoals’ Rodney Mills and Jimmy Johnson. Then again, by the mid-sixties most rock songs were in some form an inculcation of the soul groove. However, the old rule still applied, only now as stone cold reality: When something new, and salient, was heard in pop music, it came from the soul stew, and if it was appropriated by the white rockers, it was almost always inferior.

Knowing this was a tremendous impetus for men like Otis Redding, who was practically knighted when he crossed the ocean. Otis, to his credit, now had a worldly view, quite more layered and empowering than when he was still in Macon, and an insouciance that other soul singers simply did not have. Alex Hodges attests to the fact that “around sixty-six, sixty-seven Otis really grew. He was still the country boy but he could walk into a chandeliered room filled with guys in Guy Laroche tuxes and women in Yves Saint-Laurent gowns, wearing his cardigan and casual slacks, and regale them, always know what to say. Women who hadn’t smiled in years were almost swooning like schoolgirls.”2 Redding was compatible with the paradigm shift in culture from “A Hard Day’s Night” to “Norwegian Wood,” from beach blanket bingo movies to What’s New Pussycat? and A Man and a Woman. Indeed, this was the very same distance between “Shout Bamalama” and “Try a Little Tenderness.”

Still, no matter how decked out he could be, and despite rising from the streets of Macon, Redding cultivated the image of a country boy, something that kept him grounded in the soil and manure of the backwoods he loved. As it would turn out, this would provide an opening for Jim Stewart to continue keeping pace with Berry Gordy. Late in 1965, Motown recycled an old niche—the soul duet, which dated back to the ’50s teaming of Brook Benton and Dinah Washington. First they paired Marvin Gaye with Mary Wells in 1964 on the modestly successful album Together, then with Kim Weston for a smash pop and R&B hit “It Takes Two.” Stewart liked what he heard, and believed there was a natural chemistry in tone, style, and geography between Otis and Carla Thomas—“his rawness and her sophistication.”3

When he posed the idea to them, neither Otis nor Carla was crazy about it. Worse, she was on leave from recording, studying at Howard University for a master’s degree in English. That meant they would need to lay down their vocals for some tracks at separate sessions, whereupon their vocals would be stitched together. Carla also fretted about doing harder soul than the sweet ballads that were her meat. Otis talked her into doing the album, but he too had limited time and could only compose one song, “Ooh Carla, Ooh Otis,” co-written with Al Bell, again as Alvertis Isbell. The other ten tracks were all covers, including “It Takes Two.”

The Hayes/Porter team would be charged with finding the others, which included their own “When Something Is Wrong with My Baby” and “Let Me Be Good to You,” as well as Eddie Floyd’s “Knock on Wood,” and Aaron Neville’s “Tell It Like It Is,” and the oft-covered blues song “Lovey Dovey” (co-written by Ahmet Ertegun). But they struck gold by choosing “Tramp,” west coast blues guitar legend Lowell Fulson’s pop and R&B hit of the year before. Hayes and Porter took Fulson’s humorous monologue of a country sod whose possessions pale beside the fact that lovin’ “was all he knew how to do,” and made it a sassy point-counterpoint of the mating game. Perhaps to rub it in on Motown, they took a guitar lick from the Temptations’ “I’m Losing You” to break up the steady melody of the original. Otis and Carla had a ball with it, sending up and putting down materialism and superficiality. Carla, playing the bitchy gold digger to the hilt, surprised herself with her ability to improvise put-downs about the country bumpkin from the Georgia woods who doesn’t wear “continental clothes and Stetson hats.” They gamboled on, going back and forth, jabbing, joshing, strutting, and flirting, clearly attracted to each other’s arc despite the barbed protestations—until Otis dropped the pretense and ’fessed up that he may have been a bumpkin but a rich one, with a string of cars in his driveway, something he didn’t need to imagine writing the song—and not only that, but a “lover” too, just like all others in his lineage.

The trippy beat and the counterpoint dialogue between the two would still be as cheeky and fresh when it was heard endless times through the years. The album, King & Queen, as in “of soul,” was, as Robert Christgau’s retro-review calls it, “enormously vivacious, catchier and funnier [than] most soul music,” adding, “Carla Thomas was never anything special, but with Redding counterposing his rhythms, she sounds like she could scat with Satch himself (well, almost).”4 Released on March 16, 1967, it had liner notes written by, of all people, Tennessee’s Republican Senator Howard Baker, who in a few years would co-chair the Watergate hearings. Having Baker participate was Al Bell’s idea. “It was a scratch each other’s back thing,” he says. “He wanted to rub off our success and we wanted the publicity. So I said, “We’ll come to D.C. and present you with a plaque and take pictures. I went up with Otis, Carla, her dad Rufus, and Jim, and the pictures ran in the papers. That was a big deal for us.”⁵ That Baker knew almost nothing of Stax was reflected in his notes, which lavished more praise on Tennessee Ernie Ford, Dinah Shore, Pat Boone, Minnie Pearl, and Elvis, than on Otis or Carla.6

King & Queen went to 36 pop, 5 R&B, and made top 20 in England. This, in turn, led Motown to play one-upmanship, creating the heavenly pairing of Gaye and Tammi Terrell later in 1967. Stewart, in return, planned another Redding-Thomas album. The war between the soul shops was getting good and hot now, and for Stax, it was a most satisfying reminder that whatever Motown could do, they could do just as well. Or better.

•

THAT THE Redding avalanche had continued to roll, and make tons of money, despite a paucity of pop hits, was no longer an anomaly but proof of the gathering dominance of albums as the primary means of sales. It was paradigm in the music business that Otis himself helped bring about. Where in the 1950s and early 1960s they were cheaply packaged excuses to wring some more sales out of one or two hits, the albums of the mid and later ’60s were thoughtful showcases for well-regarded talent, the better ones stitched a tonal narrative in which songs seemed to follow each other logically, even if there was no real ligature between them. While an album could create a hit when the DJs plucked a popular cut off it, there was no real need for one if an album just went on selling and stuck on the LP charts for months, something common for Sinatra, the Beatles, and Redding. This paradigm fit Redding well, given that he was not interested in selling his soul, or selling out soul, for a formulaic hit. What’s more, by the late sixties, as Al Bell says, “The general public was moving toward him. They were buying those albums like crazy.”

Not that the crossover conundrum didn’t increasingly become an issue. Otis, who could look all around him and see the fruits of his success, was still waiting for that big hit with mainstream white audiences. He might have had one in 1966, with a song that Cropper wrote with Eddie Floyd during a thunderstorm, “Knock on Wood,” the repetitive cadence of the first word a conscious effort to replicate the Redding “stutter.” Floyd, in fact, says he wrote it for Otis, but Jim Stewart thought it was too much like Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour.” Other accounts have it that Jerry Wexler, wanting to break Floyd out as a singer, told Stewart to send Eddie into the studio; when he did, the result was a song that went to number 1 R&B and 28 pop.7

Perhaps tougher for Redding, was the irony that the Memphis sound was virtually being copied all around the soul meridians. Over at Motown, they may not have seen fit to cover Stax songs but its manicured formulas of the mid-’60s soul sound had given way to heavier, funkier horn arrangements, which by the time a now mature Stevie Wonder recorded “Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours” in 1970, he sounded more Memphis than Motown. Somewhere along the line, it just seemed Redding too would have to get the big crossover hit, and while the issue was becoming a bit prickly, no one was really rushing him to do that at Stax given his sales and his almost permanence on the R&B charts. And to be sure, the old fissures between black and white were slowly being bridged as pop was increasingly embraced by soul. In Billboard and Variety, mentions of Redding and other Stax artists pre-1966 had been scarce and fleeting, their records almost never pitched as a “top single of the week.” A breakthrough of sorts came in the October 19, 1966, Variety when the trade paper finally had a review of a Redding record, The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul, on page 184 in the Record Reviews column, which also included Simon and Garfunkel’s Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, Peggy Lee’s Guitars a là Lee, Liberace’s New Sounds, Chet Atkins’s From Nashville with Love, and the soundtrack from A Man and a Woman. The unsigned review read, “Otis Redding, one of the top current purveyors of the rhythm & blues idiom, belts with terrific force in this set. About half the songs in this set are his own compositions . . . . He also does an unusual version of ‘Tennessee Waltz’ and an up-tempo slice of ‘Day Tripper.’ ”

These dishwater entries, in an age before record reviews in the trades, were shallow and a joke as actual music critiques. They still could nonetheless move lots of vinyl—one reason why record companies routinely purchased expensive ads in Variety, Billboard, and Cash Box, which often was the price to pay for a review—really a blurb—of a pivotal act, though Al Bell had no budget for such ads and had to pitch Stax acts to the trades with his cheek, not checks. The second time Redding made that same page was an April 26,1967, review of King & Queen, which, it read, “brings together two of the top names to come out of the Memphis school or rhythm & blues” and hailed “a solid string of R&B ballads delivered [with] a powerhouse beat.” Again, more than the boilerplate notices, the victory here was that Otis was on the same page as mainstream giants and climbers, in this case albums by Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé, Morton Gould, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, Cream, the Hollies, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and the Who. Still, it was only on the “other” charts where one could gauge what was going on in the black world. Randomly perusing the Billboard R&B singles list on October 22, 1966, one would have seen:

1.  634-5789 (Soulsville USA)—Wilson Pickett (Atlantic)

2.  Baby Scratch My Back—Slim Harpo (Excello)

3.  Love Makes the World Go Round—Deon Jackson (Carla)

4.  Get Ready—The Temptations (Gordy-Motown)

5.  Shake Me, Wake Me (When It’s Over)—Four Tops (Motown)

6.  One More Heartache—Marvin Gaye (Tamla-Motown)

7.  This Old Heart Of Mine—The Isley Brothers (Tamla)

8.  Darling Baby—The Elgins (V.I.P.)

9.  Stop Her on Sight (S.O.S.)—Edwin Star (Ric Tic)

10.  I Want Someone—The Mad Lads (Volt)8

That was still the port through which Otis Redding’s records sailed onto the market—such as his cover of “Satisfaction,” which on this chart was sitting at number 14 with a bullet. Motown had hit the jackpot in crossover appeal, while Redding was waiting for his shot. He was moving along a steady course, racking up royalties but remaining still pretty much a mystery to all but R&B-conscious white buyers, who found Otis records more readily available in the black record stores from which Billboard extrapolated its R&B list. Of course, it would have been impossible to determine whether blacks were buying records in white stores, making the two charts highly unreliable indicators to begin with. But the truth was that “slow and steady” could have been the motto of the man himself. Because Redding was so entrenched and seemingly immune to (and removed from) cultural and industry fads, he did not need to be force-fit into trendy Fleet Street “mod” fashions, flowery shirts, flare-bottom pants, headbands, and bandannas, such as were covering the lanky physiques of even black acts at the time. The Temptations had put their tight suits, skinny ties, and ankle-length slacks in the closet. God knows, tattered jeans, bargain basement jackets, and, soon enough, “Sgt. Pepper” psychedelic drum-major duds never found their way to East McLemore Street.

One other divergence between Motown and Stax was that, while both soul labels had maintained their ground during the transformation of rock, the “Redding look”—natty, shiny, sharp-creased, conservative, even if bathed in sweat—remained proudly square albeit eminently cool in its own way. And this could be traced to Redding alone, since, as Floyd Newman notes, “he never changed one iota from the time I first laid eyes on him. I can tell you one thing. Had he lived, you never would have seen the guy in those aluminum space suits like George Clinton and Earth, Wind and Fire, no six-inch heels and scarves around his hair like Jimi Hendrix. Uh-uh.”9 To be sure, the only thing that changed was that his old process was replaced by a modest Afro. It was all the “mod” Otis Redding needed.

•

BY 1967, and with an estate valued at over a million dollars, he had all the money he needed, too.10 Not that he didn’t crave more. Getting into rarefied rock air had almost literal meaning for many solo and group acts, mandating that they step up from endless bus rides on crevice-pocked back roads through the hinterlands to comfortable seats on commercial airplane flights—and then, for those in the elite, on private charter flights and, for a very privileged few, their own private planes. Of course, the history of such private flight in the entertainment industry was an already grievous one. Plane crashes had claimed the lives of notables from bandleader Glenn Miller in 1944 to the tragic troika of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and “The Big Bopper,” J. P. Richardson, in a field in Crystal Lake, Iowa, during a winter Midwest tour in 1959, to country superstars Patsy Cline in 1963 (along with Grand Ole Opry cohorts Cowboy Copas and Hawkshaw Hawkins) and Jim Reeves in 1964, the last two having fallen from the sky over Tennessee. Still, obvious perils aside, for the big-time rockers slumming it on a rickety bus simply wouldn’t do, and Otis was no exception. Not only did he believe the Lord would bless and keep him, things like walking away from a shootout with neither a scratch nor punishment may have led him to judge himself invincible from harm. At times, he could act just the opposite, expressing fatalism about life that was bigger than any human had the power to alter.

Thus, beginning in 1965, he had begun taking flying lessons, working toward learning how to fly in a twin-engine Beechcraft H18, the same kind of plane that James Brown had been using before he stepped up even higher in class and bought a sleek, black-painted Lear jet for $713,000—which he proudly boasted about in his 1968 song “America Is My Home,” declaring the Lear proof that a soul brother had reached the pinnacle.11 The H18 wasn’t a Lear, but for the younger soul brother on his own flight path upward, it was definitely a status symbol, and Walden gave in and shelled out $125,000 for Otis to buy the plane he was learning to fly in, though it wouldn’t be until December that he would hire a pilot and use the plane to ferry him around.

That year, too, Jet reported that he had “200 suits and 400 pairs of shoes.”¹² Thus, it was good timing that he could now move all he had to where space seemed unlimited. Alan Walden, who had once slept on Otis’s couch in his cramped first apartment, having no place of his own, had now stepped up, too, having been given a guest room out in the new house. There, he says, they “could ride horses, go fishing and hunting, and just do anything we wanted to without people staring at this black man and white man doing things together, laughing and having a good time. Otis and I both loved Round Oak and planned to make it one of the largest ranches and farms in our state. We grew vegetables and hay and raised cows and hogs. We even had fresh eggs from our chickens, and an occasional glass of goat’s milk from a pet nanny goat. He built a three and a half acre lake for fresh fish and the largest privately owned swimming pool in the state in the shape of a Big O. Plans were drawn and construction was scheduled for an airstrip so he could land his [plane] at the ranch.”¹³ During the summer of 1966, the BBC sent a film crew to make a documentary on Otis’s life for British television and he ended up coming off as an ebony Lil’ Abner in overalls. He was seen riding a tractor, chopping down trees, and lugging firewood into the house.

He disliked leaving the place so much that he would build a recording studio with state of the art equipment in the basement, the goal being to make his demos there. At the same time, Phil Walden began construction of a studio in downtown Macon, which he wanted to make the center of Redding’s recording, with his own musicians, so he wouldn’t need to go up to Memphis. Otis had been renting a house in Nashville for those visits; soon, he hoped, he wouldn’t need it, according to plan. Macon, as the blueprint went, was soon going to have a renaissance, be the epicenter of soul, just like in the fifties, only this time built not around Little Richard but Otis Ray Redding Jr. If everything fell into place, Otis would be able to record in a studio in his hometown, and at times in his own studio at the Big O Ranch. And if that happened, he allowed himself to project, no longer would the commute to Memphis be required—a heavy symbolic shift far more significant than having a private jet. This had little to do with any major disagreements with Jim Stewart, at least not yet. Instead, though eminently grateful for all that Stewart had done for him, he saw progress through a cold, business-is-business prism, in which the already storied studio on East McLemore Street that he had carved into the loam of American pop music might recede in importance—to the new musical order that Otis Redding envisioned was about to coalesce right there in his own backyard, hell, within his own four walls.

•

IN FEBRUARY 1967, Jerry Wexler was something like a soul king himself. His early revelations and premonitions about Stax and Southern soul had been right on the money. Now, he turned to finding Atlantic’s first female soul singer since Ruth Brown. Early that year, he signed another child of a preacher, Aretha Franklin, who had won early fame singing in the choir for her famous father, Reverend C. L. Franklin, at the New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit. She quickly became a hot club act and had a few R&B hits with Columbia, before the label, who never fully utilized her gospel roots, let her go. Digging her deep-throated but feminine soul, Wexler took her to Muscle Shoals and recorded her first Atlantic song, “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You),” which went top 10 pop and R&B in 1967. For the follow-up session, Wexler believed he had a surefire song for her. Tom Dowd, engineering the session, which was moved to Atlantic’s New York studio at 1841 Broadway, didn’t know what it was until he came in and asked Wexler what song was to be recorded. Told it was “Respect,” Dowd thought the melody was familiar.

“I know that song,” he said. “I made it with Otis Redding like three years ago.”14

Not that flipping the gender thrust of the song wasn’t a tricky business. In 1967, a woman simply did not demand respect, not openly, and certainly not sex. Yet Wexler, who co-produced the song with Atlantic engineer Arif Mardin, allowed priceless embellishments that were suggested by Aretha and her sisters Erma and Carolyn, two of her backup singers. The result not only preserved the intent of the song but also conveyed an even rawer sexuality. Here, she would demand her man obey her and give her “propers.” Of course, there was the epochal “sock it to me” refrain by the background singers, which few listeners would even be able to recall had been used by Mitch Ryder in 1966 on “Sock It to Me Baby” and—unbeknownst to all but the most hardcore Redding fans—by the man himself on “Sweet Lorene.” And though Al Bell notes that Otis’s exhortation of the phrase was a shout to the world to sit up and listen to him, through Aretha’s lips it could not possibly have been mistaken for anything but mandatory sex as the bargain for him coming home.

Neither did the new version discard Otis’s highly unconventional lyric about the woman spending his money—with his assent, as long as she delivered the respect, and lots of it. Here, in Aretha’s take, she would give the man all her money for a little time with him—a very un-feminist notion, especially in the 1960s, and one that might have caused double takes among both sexes. Instead, with Aretha’s astonishing range and zeal—not to mention King Curtis’s blazing sax solo on the added break, taken note for note from Sam and Dave’s “When Something Is Wrong with My Baby,” and ballsy beat of several members of the Muscle Shoals rhythm section—it exploded into a license for a woman’s right to “get some,” without stepping back an inch as a cultural/racial rallying cry. The most enduring embellishment of all—the spelled-out “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” preceded immediately by the still-enigmatic “Take care, TCB”—may be the single most profound writ of common law ever heard in pop music history. It surely paved the way for women to be able to be more than second-string vessels of pain and desire—as did, appropriately enough, Aretha’s older sister Erma Franklin that same year with “Piece of My Heart,” for Shout Records. That song was built around the proposition that a woman can be tough, a battle cry line seemingly made for Janis Joplin, who immortalized it in her 1968 cover with Big Brother and the Holding Company.

Using two idiomatic phrases—“Sock it to me” and “TCB,” the latter a short-lived late-’60s acronym, originally in the black community, for “taking care of business”—might have made the cover a ’60s curio. But when the song was released in April 1967 as the first single from Franklin’s groundbreaking I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You album, it had a universal appeal, staking ground for both men and women to repeat the strange slang that few knew the meaning of. Streaking to number 1, pop and R&B, and staying there for eight weeks on the latter, it won Franklin two Grammys, elevating her to the role of the “Queen of Soul”—and netting for Otis Redding a bigger royalty windfall than anything else he ever wrote. Still as fresh a piece of music and ontology as has ever been recorded, the redux also turned out to be an unprecedented boost to the visibility of Otis Redding, who was regularly mentioned as the song’s composer when it was played on the radio. Even Otis was blown away by how much his song had been stretched and a little hurt and sheepish that Franklin had the big crossover hit he hadn’t had with it. Indeed, the song was now so viscerally associated with Aretha that Wexler would decades later insist it was really about her life, saying, “If she didn’t live it, she couldn’t give it” and “Her middle name is Respect,”15 despite the fact it had come from the pit of Redding’s soul and angst. Although Otis had not met Franklin, and would not get to know her well beyond the sound of her incredible voice, he realized at once the full potential and cosmic power she had given his words and music. Even if resentful on some conscious level that she had bettered him, he was gracious enough to indemnify Aretha and praise her for a superior version. Himself humbled by it, when he performed the song now, he too was spelling out “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” and the “take care, TCB” line, a titanic nod to a young singer. What’s more, the magnitude of the Aretha version made other strong women try to repeat the formula. Etta James, the soul priestess of the 1950s, tried to make a comeback by also covering and flipping the gender of one of Redding’s songs, “Security,” without much success.

But now Redding had added pressure, too, to live up to his cemented reputation in the booming American soul market. That meant he could not go much longer without a pop hit and remain inviolate, even if he was still in a nice sinecure. His records were prominent on the black stations, and those stations were increasingly becoming the new top 40 outlets, in a few years to be the most listened-to format in the country. As Alex Hodges says, “I equate what was happening in music in sixty-six, sixty-seven with the rise of hip-hop in the sense that white suburban kids were buying the kind of records that had sold only in the black record market. Otis was wildly popular with the young crowd, the college crowd. He was really a rock act, and began to sell more records in that demographic.”

To be sure, Otis’s crossover appeal, and potential to change the ground rules of future rock/soul fusion, was palpable. Robert Palmer, the New York Times’ music writer, ventured in 1968 that “Otis Redding, Booker T. and the M.G.’s, and the Mar-Key horns . . . just may have been the greatest rock-and-roll band of all time [and] rank with Elvis Presley’s Sun recordings as a pinnacle of American vernacular music-making.”16 Then there was Otis’s take. With sharp analytic distinction, he pointed out that the idiomatic lines were blurred and claimed for himself the most salient term of the new rock order:

Everybody thinks that all songs by colored people are rhythm and blues but that’s not true. [Little] Johnny Taylor, Muddy Waters, and B.B. King are blues singers. James Brown is not a blues singer. He has a rock and roll beat and he can sing slow pop songs. My own songs, “Respect” and “Mr. Pitiful,” aren’t blues songs. I’m speaking in terms of the beat and structure of the music. A blues is a song that goes twelve bars all the way through. Most of my songs are soul songs.¹⁷

For many with more than a passing interest in the evolution of popular music, Redding’s credentials needed no further burnishing in 1967. A year later, another Times music critic, Robert Shelton, would eulogize him with the grandly sweeping conclusion that, “In his final year, Redding symbolized the transfer of leadership in Negro pop music from its long-standing base of popularity in Detroit to the closer-to-the-roots center of Memphis . . . the essence [of which] lies in the greater simplicity of elaborate recording techniques in the Tennessee studios. Redding made a near-fetish of simplicity, yet his was not a style without its artifices, its subtleties, and its overwhelming impact.”¹⁸

•

UNFORTUNATELY, REDDING’S impact and talent was not transferable to those who were coming up right around him. As successful as the Redding brand was, his custom label, Jotis Records—the new shop operating out of Macon—was doomed from the start. The first to come aboard was Macon soul singer, and Otis sound-alike, Billy Young, whom he took to Memphis in 1965—Redding’s contract renewal deal with Stax having given him the right to book Jotis sessions there, with the top session men—to cut two Redding-penned tunes, the ballad “Same Thing All Over Again” and the dance song “The Sloopy,” the name applied to a brief dance fad spawned by “Hang on Sloopy,” the McCoys’ 1965 bubblegum cover of the Vibrations’ original soul song a year before. Both songs were produced by Otis in a tight, clean manner, though when the disc came out, they read only “Produced by Big O Productions.” Then, late in 1965 when Redding played a show in Baltimore, the local DJ Rufus Mitchell played him a ballad, by the nineteen-year-old Atlanta singer Arthur Conley, called “I’m a Lonely Stranger.” Conley’s gospel-flecked, high-pitched trill reminded Otis of Sam Cooke. He had Conley rerecord the same song at Stax and when it was released, Otis was magically listed as co-writer. A follow-up single, Conley’s own “Who’s Fooling Who,” would come out in early 1966.

In between Conley’s records, Redding and Walden also added the long-limbed and sexy Loretta Williams, whom Otis had heard singing in a club during a Revue trip to Mobile, Alabama, where she lived. He first hired her to be a backup singer in the Revue, with a promise to pay her, she says, a weekly salary of “$450 to $650,” which was “more than I ever made.”19 He then signed her to Jotis and during a trip to New York for an Apollo Theater gig, he recorded her at Atlantic’s studio singing two songs, his “Baby Cakes,” a frantic dance record later covered by Maxine Brown, and a ballad written by Williams, “I’m Missing You,” which when the 45 with both songs was released late in ’65, the latter bore the writing credit “Redding/Williams.”

Redding considered Conley to be a major league talent. However, with Jotis unable to move decent numbers of vinyl, even with Atlantic distributing the records, Otis and Walden folded the label in 1966. This meant that Jim Stewart was no longer under any compunction to allow Conley to record in his studio. Not happy about his protégé being given the Wilson Pickett treatment, Otis began to nurse a grudge against Stewart and spent quality time not on writing new songs but on shopping Conley to other labels. After getting assurance from Atlantic that it would still distribute Conley’s records on Atco, Otis obtained a contract for him with the FAME studio’s in-house label, then booked an early January session with Conley at the Muscle Shoals shop to record a tune they co-wrote, “Sweet Soul Music.” This was a soul hymnal. Appropriating, and baldly so, Sam Cooke’s “Yeah Man”—which began by asking rhetorically, “Do you like good music?”—they copied the melody, some lyrics, and the background hook. Conley answered the opening question with the response “Sweet soul music.” Otis had replaced the litany of dance fads of the Cooke piece with the names of soul stars and a taste of their signature songs, including Lou Rawls, Sam and Dave, “that Wicked Wilson Pickett,” and of course Otis Redding, whose signifier was a string of “fa-fa-fa’s.” The final shout-out went to “the king of ’em all,” James Brown.

Redding, through Phil Walden, began to pump the song even before it was released, with Walden feeding word of it to music writers. The February 4, 1967, Record World complied, reporting that “Otis Redding makes his debut as producer with the new Arthur Conley recording of ‘Sweet Soul Music’ on the Atco label.” This placed Otis as far as he had ever been from the Stax brand, and no one in Memphis could fairly object. The question now was how far he would get from it.