As the summer of 1967—the one that wore the patent of the Summer of Love—began to unwind to the accompaniment of Sgt. Pepper, “Light My Fire,” “Incense and Peppermints,” “Groovin’,” “White Rabbit,” and “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” one hundred thousand human gypsy moths with dilated eyeballs converged on Haight-Ashbury wearing flowers in their hair, or so the song said of those going on the pilgrimage to San Francisco. Otis Redding would come, too, or at least close enough, but not with any flowers in his Afro, or weed or acid in his pockets. He would come because another of those portentous turns in the road lie 112 miles to the South of the Haight, in a place on the edge of Monterey Bay, close enough to feel the surf.
Several months earlier, plans were formulated for an annual rock event there, one in the manner of the Monterey Jazz Festival, which had been held each September since 1958 on the rustic twenty acres of the Monterey County Fairgrounds, with the performers—including the likes of Billie Holliday, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, and Dave Brubeck—going unpaid and profits from ticket sales donated to music education. The festival’s promoter, Ben Shapiro, watching the formation of a rock culture just up the coastline, had been broadening his purview; in 1966, one of the acts was the Jefferson Airplane, and this year Janis Joplin’s Big Brother and the Holding Company would play. Shapiro’s idea was to consolidate the separate three-day festival, not on five stages spread through the grounds but one, attracting perhaps one hundred thousand people, five times that of the jazz venue.
To do that, he’d need to attract some pretty big rock names, and the first person he approached was the Mama and the Papas’ John Phillips and the band’s producer Lou Adler, in L.A. They thought it sounded cool enough to put the word out to Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Paul Simon, and Brian Wilson, and soon seemingly everyone with a claim to rock royalty was involved in some way, including the Beatles’ publicity man Derek Taylor. A board of governors convened that included Jagger, McCartney, and the Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham, and sponsors began lining up to kick in funds for performers’ travel expenses, stage construction, lighting, and security, the latter of which would be under the watch of the Hell’s Angels, an iffy prospect to be sure. Bill Graham contributed $100,000.
The Monterey city council hemmed and hawed but approved when money was put aside for local charities. The weekend of June 16–18 was chosen, with ticket prices ranging from $3 to $6.50, though it would be impossible to stem a tide of gate-crashers. A documentary film would be made of the proceedings by D. A. Pennebaker, who had made a similar visual record of Bob Dylan touring England. It all added up to a major event, and not surprisingly, Otis Redding was invited to the party, with Andrew Oldham telling Phil Walden it would be the defining moment of Otis’s career. The problem was the no-pay part. Otis’s first reaction was to say forget it. But when Graham made a pitch, Otis could not say no, out of gratitude. Al Bell also had a promotions man in the Bay Area, Freddie Mancuso, a “hippie type guy,” he says, who explained how big a deal it was, and that it was his chance to show he really was the top act in the world. Bell agreed. “Oh, God, yes, I wanted him to go. Man, he had to go.”1
The hedge was that, besides the hippies, many attendees would be holdovers from the folk and jazz scene, purists that once booed Bob Dylan off the stage at the Newport Folk Festival for playing an electric guitar. How would they react to Southern soul? It wasn’t booing that might erupt, but, worse, blasé diffidence. As well, Otis needed a backup band, having fired his last one after returning from Europe. Fortunately, Jim Stewart—with much convincing from Jerry Wexler—agreed that for an engagement packed with so much significance, he would do his part, sending out Booker T. and the MG’s and two Memphis Horns, Wayne Jackson and Andrew Love. They wouldn’t need to buy new suits this time; they took the same lime green ones they’d worn in Europe, as would Otis.
BY THE summer of 1967, soul in the deepest sense seemed an afterthought. Even though Smokey Robinson was on the festival’s board of directors, Berry Gordy had forbidden his stable from performing at a rock venue; and the Impressions dropped out, leaving only Redding and Lou Rawls, who after years on the R&B circuit had finally found an audience for his high-toned soul, with a gold album and a number 1 R&B hit, “Love Is a Hurtin’ Thing,” in 1966 and a Grammy in 1967, though he was all but overlooked at the festival. Some major white acts, not sold on the compensation or the benefit of being merely one among a pack of acts that might dilute the impact of each, backed out, too: the Beach Boys, the Kinks, and Cream. The Doors were snubbed and Donovan was refused a visa because of a drug bust.
The Monterey International Pop Music Festival would commence on Friday, June 16, with Simon and Garfunkel, Eric Burdon, Johnny Rivers, Rawls, and the Association; the Saturday show, Joplin, the Byrds, the Jefferson Airplane, and Redding; Sunday, the Grateful Dead, the Who, Buffalo Springfield, Ravi Shankar, Jimi Hendrix, and the Mamas and the Papas. Adjunct acts like Country Joe and the Fish, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Blues Project, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Moby Grape, Canned Heat, the Electric Flag, Laura Nyro, and Hugh Masekela would be sprinkled in. As unfamiliar as Otis was with most of these acts, to many of them he was the most eagerly awaited. Janis Joplin, for one, kept touting him to anyone who would listen, saying, “Wait’ll you see him. You gotta see him. Otis is God, man.” At one point, Grateful Dead pianist Pigpen wanted to know, “So does God have a big dick?” “Only if you believe in him,” she replied.2
In recognition that the hordes might not have come to see him, but would leave with a tingle when they did, Otis was given the coveted closing slot on the middle night. Another young black musician causing the same kind of stir was of course James Marshall Hendricks, but not as a soul man, those days gone since he had played in Little Richard’s backing band in the mid-1960s. Hendrix soon was moving down the same fateful, albeit opposite road that took Otis Redding to Monterey. His mission, he said, was “to do with my guitar what Little Richard does with his voice.”3 With his guitar seemingly able to evoke any ungodly sound he wanted it to, even when played with his teeth, he had risen by circumventing soul and American audiences. Just twelve days before, the Experience had been on a bill with Cream and Procol Harum at London’s Saville Theatre. Paul McCartney himself had urged the promoters to book him, and Hendrix would be introduced onstage by an acid-blitzed Brian Jones. Jimi Hendrix’s time had come. But so had Otis Redding’s.
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AROUND TWO hundred thousand people, many actually with flowers in their hair, attended the three idyllic shows, close to one hundred thousand alone on the second night, not a one of which seemed able to focus their eyeballs. Wayne Jackson still seems a bit fazed by the sight of hordes “openly smoking pot and dropping acid. There were cops roaming around but it looked like nobody cared. Cops, hippies, and marijuana all mixed up together.” To him, it seemed not only crazy but “scary.”4 Sweet, pungent aromas wafted across the grounds, carried by the cool sea breeze. With some performers bedecked in pastoral robes and with druggy montages projected onto blinding screens behind the stage, these were tribal rites of an era unfolding by the minute, but not quite metaphysical enough for competition to recede. The Who—tipped off that Hendrix would climax his set by copping Pete Townsend’s signature shtick of smashing his guitar to bits, accompanied by smoke bombs—refused to go on after Hendrix and took an earlier slot.
Otis had no such competition, but worried endlessly that he had made a mistake. Zelma, who made the trip with him, recalled him being more nervous than she’d ever seen him, not eager to have to conquer an event with so little soul in order to ensure his place in the newest rock reformation. On the 17th, as the night went on, similar fears grew among those who encouraged him to play Monterey. Phil Walden later said that Jerry Wexler told him that night, “I think this is a mistake,” something that occurred to him after watching the Jefferson Airplane “with all the psychedelic stuff and the light show and everything.” Wexler barked, “You don’t have all that!” whereupon, Walden said, “My heart just jumped, like what have we gotten ourselves into?” At that moment, however, he spotted Otis waiting to go on, looking like “he wasn’t concerned about anything.”5
Indeed, contrary to what Zelma remembered, Otis seemed a little too unconcerned. It was obvious to Walden that Otis was on an unnatural high, trying to relax by taking some hits from a joint someone had slipped him. To be sure, Otis was hardly a virgin when it came to drugs, having been around much of it on the mean streets of Macon and on the chitlin’ circuit. Indeed, the hippies and their dope hijinks may have seemed quaint by comparison to what he’d seen in his own bands; one account even had him sending someone all the way to New York to “score a bag” of heroin for one of his players after he ran out of the stuff in Texas and was desperate for a fix—one of those typical wild tales that somehow come from somewhere. Yet never had Walden seen him take a toke before going onstage. “Man, don’t smoke that shit now,” he told him. “Not before we go on.”
Clearly less than nervous, Otis said, “Aw, fuck, don’t worry about it, man.”6
Worse, Otis had put so little preparation or thought into the gig that, when Walden asked what he was going to sing, Otis couldn’t tell him. He was going to do it on pure feel. Walden suggested he start with “Shake.” The rest, it would be, well, potluck.
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WHEN OTIS was set to go on, it was around 1:00 A.M. and getting cold. Rain had also begun to fall, prompting concerns that if it became heavier, the show might have to be halted as a precaution that someone holding an electric guitar might be fried. But while John Phillips cursed the rain, Otis, with just enough cannabis in him to be Otis, was ready to roll. Brought out with a perfunctory introduction by the drily subversive comedian and TV star Tommy Smothers, Otis bounced on stage in his incandescent turquoise suit, the Memphis Horns blowing as entrance music, looking, as the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir said, “twelve or fourteen feet tall,”7 and broke into “Shake,” volleying the title with the audience, who, after each line would enter with a more fervid cry of “Shake!” His feet twiddling like James Brown’s, he blew through the song, to a rich reception. As Robert Christgau noted in Esquire, all he’d needed to do was “trot his big self onto the stage and rock into [the song] and he had made it, wham bam thank-you-ma’am. The rest of his act—the dancing, the chuckling, the running around, the whole image of masculine ease on which [his] career is based—was icing.”8
“He knew from the get-go he had ’em,” a relieved Walden said. “When he got that kind of reaction, he was better than great. He’d notch it up.”9
It was after “Shake” that he uttered, famously, slurring his words slightly, “This is a song that a girl took away from me,” chirpily but with some grit, before adding with a half-laugh that the girl was “a good friend of mine. . . . This girl took this song, but we’re gonna do it anyway.” A snare burst from Al Jackson set in motion an especially pleading, high-fever rendition of “Respect,” into which he dropped a convincing “ooh Lord” into the off-the-cuff riffs, which moved at a tempo at least twice as fast as that on the record Jim Stewart had produced, and, fortunately, was not there to see. Finally hitting a last note, he was exhausted, and the crowd was, in the vernacular of the day, out of its tree, flat-out crazy. Having been so revved up, people were standing on fragile chairs, girls riding piggyback on men’s shoulders, half-naked, through the rain.
Prodded by the cops, Phillips, when the song ended, motioned him to the side of the stage and told him, “We’ve got to get everybody in their chairs again.” Otis sardonically told him, “I thought that was the whole idea, to get ’em up.”10
Still, he promised he’d calm everything down, at least until he tanked everyone up another time. Stage center again, he said in a soothing voice, “We’d like to slow it down this time, and do a soulful number.” Then, “This is the Love Crowd, right?”—in a fey voice, “Half ironic, half-intimidating,” thought New York Times critic Renata Adler,11 and which might have come off as a put-down if not for the entirely ingenuous attempt to grasp something he didn’t really understand. And they began to wake up—“Yeah!” they shouted back.
“We all love each other, right?” he went on, bringing another raucous reply.
Sensing an opening, he was yelling now, smile streaming across his face: “AM I RIGHT?”
An even louder “YEAH!”
“LET ME HEAR YOU SAY YEAH!”
“YEAH!”
Now bringing it back down, to smooth and mellow, he grinned and said, “All righhht.”
Then, wrote Christgau, in a kind of play-by-play, “on some unheard but nevertheless precise beat, Redding began to . . . well, emote, part-singing, part-talking, part-moaning: ‘I’ve been [Steve Cropper lightly on guitar] loving you [pause] too long [lone shout from press section] to stop now,’ and the Mar-Keys started to blow, and the arena was in an uproar once again. Superspade was flying high.”
“Good God almighty I love ya!” Otis blessed the crowd. Then, “Jump again—let’s go!” Now he was into another smoking benediction, with an equally explosive “Satisfaction,” after which, feeling no pain, he dedicated “Try a Little Tenderness” to “the miniskirts, I dig ’em.” This, his closer, was a number he always transformed into a raw, throbbing nerve. Now, sweat glistening on his brow, an over-urgent passion in his voice, he launched into the raging manifesto of deep love and mournful regret. When he got to the signature “got-ta got-ta-got-ta” and “ta-ta-ta-ta” rapid-fire machine-gun bursts, couples hugged and pawed each other as they danced in the cool night air. “I got-ta go now, I got-ta go,” he rasped, but after a quick exit, he quickly reappeared for the encore that was an extended ending of “Tenderness,” a roiling, rolling tide. “Let me have some . . . let me have some,” he repeated endlessly, to the vamping of the band, as his name was flashing on the screen behind him in strobe-lit blobs, helping blast everyone into a climactic frenzy. Brian Jones, watching with Mick Jagger and Jimi Hendrix offstage, was even seen crying as he watched this great paroxysm onstage.
And then, like the clouds of pot smoke around the fairgrounds, he was finally gone, his presence needed on a radio show, but the vibrations of the performance were still consuming voltage. People stood, calling for more, the buzz in the air around them almost audible. The set had lasted about a half hour, far too brief, but plenty sufficient for him to claim victory, again, having received what Christgau reviewed as “the most tumultuous reception of the Festival” he and the Mar-Keys “all conservatively dressed and groomed, succeeding with nothing more than musicianship and a sincere feeling for the roots of the blues.” This, of course, was an obvious counterpoint to the molten performance given by Hendrix the following night, when he literally left jaws agape. He fell to his knees during “Wild Thing,” “humped” an amp, and “made love” to his guitar by squirting lighter fluid on it, setting it afire, then smashing it, indeed doing what Townsend feared he would, soldering generational nihilism with undefined sexual rage, which made the Who almost forgettable that night. Not that it was very compatible with the gentle sexual “freedom” ethos of the “love crowd,” and Hendrix still would not be fully accepted by American audiences and critics.
Christgau contrasted the two performances with no mercy for Hendrix’s—“a psychedelic Uncle Tom,” he wrote, a stunningly boorish phrase not lessened by its intended irony (as was his subsequent defense that “ ‘psychedelic Uncle Tom’ is more accurate than ‘just another Uncle Tom’ ”)—whose act was “a consistently vulgar parody of rock theatrics.” In reviewing the D. A. Pennebaker’s brilliant documentary Monterey Pop—an aural and visual feast if ever there was one—which came out over a year after Redding’s death and a year into Hendrix’s hard upward thrust, Christgau called the pair “two radically different black artists showboating at the nativity of the new white rock audience. . . . I admired Redding and was appalled by Hendrix,” though “in retrospect they seem equally audacious and equally wonderful.”12
OTIS CAME away from Monterey even cockier than before. Giddily, he and Walden culled newspaper reviews, all of which hailed him. Beyond the personal victory, however, the indelible impact of Monterey was palpable. Early in 1967, some in the industry had begun to sour on an increasingly glitzy incarnation of soul, typified by Motown ditching almost all of its formerly top-shelf acts to showcase, and enjoy untold riches from, an ultra-glamorous Diana Ross. By the end of summer, with Otis slaying diverse pop music venues at home and abroad, his glittering moment at Monterey seemed to relight the soul spark, as if Redding’s performance had officially solidified soul as a component in the white rock and roll mainstream. The avatar of the newest soul assimilation had not changed his style or sensibilities; as Al Bell had predicted, the rest of the world had. And now, reassuringly, the soul man whose pyrotechnics came all from within his own soul was a massively significant icon, whose future turns demanded to be observed, and heard, as he further assimilated.
That Redding had initially captured the cream of the white rock cognoscenti was a key element in all this, allowing them to bask not only in his glow but their own prescience. One of those was Jon Landau, who had been touting Redding in the underground rock press for two years. Now, seeing him on his biggest stage yet, Landau would say his Monterey performance was the “highest level of expression rock ’n’ roll has yet attained” and that “Otis Redding is rock ’n’ roll . . . past, present, and future.”13 Or at least until Landau latched on to Bruce Springsteen and transferred that very same honorific on him.
In August, Hit Parader, asked, “Who will be the big soul singer, the one to last and last? We have James Brown, Joe Tex, Wilson Pickett [or] Otis Redding.” In a semi-answer, the magazine noted that “Otis believes Wilson Pickett should get the crown as the best and he isn’t just being modest.”14 As it turned out, he had already transcended soul. A month later, when Melody Maker released its annual reader poll, Redding, who had been seventh in the previous year’s vote for “world’s top male vocalist,” ended Elvis Presley’s decade-long, seemingly permanent hold on the accolade. And Phil Walden sure got a lot of mileage out of that one.
To be sure, not all in the white literati were ready to swoon over Redding, not even in England. Nik Cohn, the acidic Brit music journalist, who was all of twenty-one when Redding died, dismissively insisted in his then-important 1970 epistle of the rock evolution, Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom, that the typical Redding performance was “instant grunt and groan” and the Stax template a “sweat-and-Tom syndrome [that] has much to answer for.” Monterey, he sniffed, had even made room for Redding and Ravi Shankar, as if he was an appurtenance.15 In this light, Otis was fortunate that his time didn’t cross the threshold of an era when white critics felt empowered, impudent, and immune enough from bad taste and limited scope to freely call black performers “Toms,” without figuring in that an entire race, and most of another, saw it quite differently. Still, this may not have been personal. Indeed, it was significant on some level that, as far as soul had come, it could be insulted as freely and dimly as white rock was.
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IN SEEKING the middle of the road after Monterey, the rub for Redding was that white rock and black soul were running in opposite directions—acid rock toward soul, black rock toward the area vacated by white acts. Motown, for example, would soon be recording metaphoric pseudo-drug anthems like “Psychedelic Shack” and “Cloud Nine,” and Otis took seriously his new mission to assimilate somehow into the rock terrain. During a trip to New York early in January 1967, he was invited by Buffalo Springfield’s drummer Dewey Martin to catch the band’s East Coast debut after signing with Atlantic, at the ritzy disco Ondine’s on Fifty-Ninth Street. Otis saw the chance to further see what this L.A. rock thing was about, and Martin excitedly told everyone he met, “I called Otis and he’s coming to see us tonight,” though Springfield’s producer Brian Stone recalled, “Everybody thought Dewey was full of shit.”16 But Otis indeed blew in, causing his usual ruckus, and was more than enjoying the evening when the band called him up on the stage, whereupon, as Atlantic promotion man Mario Medious said, “Otis was so drunk that when he took a bow, he fell over. But then he sang with them and he was fantastic.”17
Apparently adopting Springfield as a sort of accessory during his stay in New York, he also was at the session during which they cut Neil Young’s “Mr. Soul,” a session that, legendarily, saw Stone’s co-producer Charlie Greene punch Stephen Stills in the mouth. Otis was taken with Young’s curiously soulful nasal delivery and clever, earthy, and surprisingly bluesy lyrics that hit home with him far more than Bob Dylan’s. In Young, he again thought he’d found his key to the rock door. As Stone remembered, “He said, ‘Holy shit, I love that song, man. I want to record it. I’m gonna cut that song, man.’ ”
Like many such ideas that streamed in and out of Otis’s head, however, this one was soon forgotten as he tried to find his own path to American chart success. In his meticulous process of deciding what to do, pandering to alien rock territory just never felt right to him. Neither was Monterey going to catapult him to the promised land. “It wasn’t gonna be a performance that put Otis over the top,” Phil Walden once recalled, “it was gonna be a song.”18 Al Bell, though, believed that since Otis was winning over white audiences, there was one idiom that could fit his style. “We’d had discussions about this, and I told him we needed to get a folk-sounding song from him. That was the only time I ever got involved with telling him what he should write. Because I felt we could get the black stations and some of the middle-of-the-road stations, the top forties. I could even see an album. I had a title for it, Otis Redding: Soul Folks.”
This was not such a radical idea. Just for one example, the Four Tops had scored big with a cover of the Left Banke’s British-influenced folk-rock hit “Walk Away Renee,” which was easily molded into a soul and pop chart hit. But this kind of tinkering posed some vexing inner unease for Otis, who never before had to think about how to balance going deeper into rock while holding on to his native soul roots. The New York Times’ Robert Shelton wrote that year of the artificial barriers still being invoked, “The white rock ’n’ roll craze, British and American, helped build an audience for Negro blues performers. [But] if the blues is truly a language, and an international language at that, why must it be spoken exactly the same way by all and spoken in the same terms? On their own level, Joe Tex, Otis Redding, and Percy Sledge are folk-derived performers as much as Bukka White and Mance Lipscomb. . . . Compatibility, not irreconcilable differences, is the message.”19
Otis clearly took Bell’s advice under advisement, perhaps more than Bell would have thought.
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REDDING HAD scant downtime after Monterey. Walden had booked a tour of California for him, which would conclude with a weeklong gig at San Francisco’s Basin Street West nightclub. As the Mar-Keys had gone back to Memphis, and having fired his band for an umpteenth time, this one after the mess with Loretta Williams, a new backup band from Memphis flew out to meet up with him. This group was a six-piece unit that had been serving as the backup house band at Stax. Known as the Bar-Kays—a name not coincidentally similar to the Mar-Keys though its genesis was a Memphis dance blues band—the group was named after a Bacardi street billboard near the studio.20 They were, in Stax-style, integrated, with keyboard player Ronnie Caldwell the sole white, playing with guitarist Jimmie King, sax man Phalon Jones, trumpeter Ben Cauley, drummer Carl Cunningham, and bassist James Alexander. None of them were even twenty, yet they already had a hit under the belt, one they had collectively written, the instrumental “Soulfinger,” the title coined by Hayes and Porter. Driven by fluttery horns, the song featured raucous street kids who were paid with Cokes to make noise and chant the title.21 (It also recycled Otis’s old “Mary Had a Little Lamb” riff.) The result went to number 3 R&B and 17 pop in early summer. The flip side, “Knucklehead,” written by Cropper and Jones, also charted briefly.
Otis had rarely used a band so small over the previous four years, so they rehearsed with him before Monterey, and he was pleasantly surprised that they could re-create big band arrangements with only two horns. They joined him when he was back on the road early the morning after Monterey, headed for L.A. What he could have used was a few days rest, for his body and his punished vocal cords, which had been giving him trouble ever since Europe and even gave out for fleeting moments during some overheated performances, such as during “Satisfaction” at Monterey, after which his throat was inflamed and he could speak only in a whisper, sounding like Edgar Buchanan. Sipping hot tea all the way down the Pacific Coast Highway, he ignored the pain and held back nothing on the tour, with the only chance to rest coming between shows.
During the Basin gig, one account has it, he was staying at a hotel with the band, when Speedo Sims, again working as road manager, witnessed Otis being hectored by so many female fans that he had to move hotels, renting Bill Graham’s houseboat in Sausalito, north across the Golden Gate Bridge.22 The boat was moored on the main dock of Waldo Point Harbor, a poetically serene setting that even during a cold snap and under gloomy gray skies, with the incessant din of choppers taking off and landing at a nearby heliport, was isolated enough to cushion his bones and make him both reflective and melancholic. The dock itself, however, was hardly serene, with hard-rock bands rehearsing loudly at the other end and the battered hull of a semi-sunken ship called the South Shore being used by squatters.
Still, Otis freely mingled with these “dock people” and he and Sims would literally sit each day on the dock of the bay, watching ships roll in and then away, prompting Otis to begin jotting down rudimentary song lyrics of just that peaceful vision, playing an unhurried melody on a guitar, perhaps mindful of Al Bell’s advice about trying a little folk along with tenderness. But Speedo, having been around him when he had written songs before, was baffled. “I couldn’t quite follow it,” he once said. “We must have been out there three or four days before . . . I could get any concept where he was going with the song . . . He was changing with the times is what was happening.”23
Otis as much as confirmed this to Zelma after getting back to the Big O Ranch, where he strummed and sang the unfinished song for her, as he did with most every tune he wrote. Her reaction, as she once recalled, was that “I really couldn’t get into it.”
“Oh, God, you’re changing,” she told him.
“Yeah,” he said, “I think it’s time for me to change my music. People might be tired of me.”24
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ZELMA’S LUKEWARM reaction to the song made him turn away from it temporarily, leaving it unfinished, not even recorded in demo form at his home studio. In the meantime, there was much else on his plate. In August, he was in New York to play in the first of what would be an annual outdoor concert series in the humid summer air in Central Park. Called the Rheingold Central Park Music Festival, its promoters, Hilly Kristal and Ron Delsener, usually booked three or four acts per show—Duke Ellington and his orchestra, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, and Thelonious Monk shared the stage. But Phil Walden laid down the ground rule that Otis had to play alone. OTIS REDDING STARS IN 2 PARK CONCERTS read a headline in the New York Times.25 Both shows sold out the seven thousand seats, leading the promoters to add a 10:30 P.M. show. At a buck a seat, the demand could not have been anything less than a stampede.
Indeed, the Otis Redding operation had gotten so big that Walden could not possibly book all of Otis’s appearances himself anymore and also have time for his other properties. To arrange most of the tour dates, back in 1964, Walden had hired, for a 10 percent cut, a major New York agency, Shaw Artists Corporation (SAC), which booked top R&B talent like the Platters, Dinah Washington, and the Drifters. An early SAC contract for a March 1964 Redding gig at Baltimore’s Royal Theater shows that he made six hundred dollars, a typical high-level fee at the time for him. Three years later, a SAC tally sheet of a one-week period in July 1967 looked like this:
7/21 Columbus, Ga., $2,000; 7/22 Macon, Ga., $2,000; 7/23 Greensboro, N.C., $2,000; 7/24 Chattanooga, Tenn., $2,000; 7/25 Atlanta, Ga., $2,000; 7/26 Birmingham, Ala., $2,000; 7/27, Little Rock, Ark., $2,000; 7/28 Mobile, Ala., $2,000.
Furthermore, these figures, which were on the low end of his scale, were advances; often, he would clear thousands more when all the tickets bought were added in. For another Atlanta date, at the city’s Municipal Auditorium on July 17, when all the cash was counted for 5,500 tickets, he walked away with $16,247.50, after taxes of $502.50.26 Otis himself would often pack this kind of cash into an attaché case, not willing to have promoters send SAC or Walden a check. By the end of some tours, he would be walking around with over a hundred grand in that case, which he would dump on Phil’s desk the way he had the chump change that kept Walden in school. Phil would then bank or invest it for him.
What’s more, the doings of the Redding corporation, Otis Redding Enterprises, Inc., were lucrative enough to draw the attention of the IRS. That year, when another booking agency sent Walden a proposal for future shows, it somehow got into an audit of the company’s finances, leading the IRS to wonder why earnings from the proposed gigs had not been declared. “As you can imagine, that caused us a lot of agitation,” recalled Alex Hodges.27
But the IRS did not find anything amiss, and once the IRS was out of the way, Redding looked down the long road and all he could see were bookings, stretching far into 1968. His retinue had grown after Monterey into a fourteen-piece band, valets, bodyguards, and assorted roadies who seemed to appear from out of the blue. One of those was a former Navy veteran Walden took under his wing, Twiggs Lyndon—his actual name—whom he made Redding’s road manager, working with Speedo. A bearded, tattooed guy with an eye for detail, Lyndon had worked in that capacity for Little Richard. Unfortunately, he also had his own share of demons to deal with and in 1970, as road manager for the Allman Brothers, he would stab a club manager to death, claim temporary insanity created by the rock and roll lifestyle, serve eighteen months in jail and six months in a psych ward, and go right back to managing. In 1979, he died while skydiving.28
The crowd around Redding was the freight paid for a figure who was traveling at the speed of sound now. But there was a price for Otis, too.