Episode 163: “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” by Otis Redding

A history of folk music in 500 songs

by Andrew.

Episode 163 Sitting on the Dock of the Bay by Otis Redding

A quick note before I begin.

This episode ends with a description of a plane crash, which some people may find upsetting.

There's also a mention of gun violence.

In 2019, the film Summer of Soul came out.

If you're unfamiliar with this film, it's a documentary of an event, the Harlem Cultural Festival, which gets called the Black Woodstock because it took place in the summer of 1969, overlapping the weekend that Woodstock happened.

That event was a series of weekend free concerts in New York, performed by many of the greatest acts in black music at that time.

People like Stevie Wonder, David Ruffin, Mahalia Jackson, B.B.

King, The Staple Singers, Sly and the Family Stone, Nina Simone, and The Fifth Dimension.

One thing that that film did was to throw into sharp relief a lot of the performances we've seen over the years by Legends of White Rock Music of the same time.

If you watch the film of Woodstock, or the earlier Monterey Pop Festival, it's apparent that a lot of the musicians are quite sloppy.

This is easy to dismiss as being a product of the situation.

They're playing outdoor venues with no opportunity to sound check, using primitive PA systems, and often without monitors.

Anyone would sound a bit sloppy in that situation, right?

That is, until you listen to the performances on the Summer of Souls soundtrack.

The performers on those shows are playing in the same kind of circumstances, and in the case of Woodstock, literally at the same time, so it's a fair comparison.

And there really is no comparison.

Whatever you think of the quality of the music,

and some of my very favourite artists played at Monterey and Woodstock, the musician's ship is orders of magnitude better at the Harlem Cultural Festival.

None of what you hear.

Baby, but I just can't help make the biggest eyes.

True,

And of course, there is a reason for this.

Most of the people who played at those big hippie festivals had not had the same experiences as the black musicians.

The black players were mostly veterans of the Chitlin circuit, where you had to play multiple shows a day in front of demanding crowds who wanted their money's worth and who wanted you to be able to play and also put on a show at the same time.

When you're playing for crowds of working people who have spent a significant proportion of their money to go to the show, and on a bill with a dozen other acts who are competing for that audience's attention, you are going to get good or stop working.

The guitar bands at Woodstock and Monterey, though, hadn't had the same kind of pressure.

Their audiences were much more forgiving, much more willing to go with the musicians, view themselves as part of a community with them, and they had to play far fewer shows than the Chitlin Circuit veterans, so they simply didn't develop the same chops before becoming famous.

The best of them did, after fame, of course.

And so it's no surprise that while a lot of bands became more famous as a result of the Monterey Pop Festival, only three really became breakout stars in America as a direct result of it.

One of those was the Who, who were already the third or fourth biggest band in the UK by that point, either just behind or just ahead of the Kinks, and so the surprise is more that it took them that long to become big in America.

But the other two were themselves veterans of the Chitlin circuit.

If you buy the Criterion Collection Blu-ray of Monterey Pop, you get two extra discs, along with the disc with the film with the full festival on it, the only two performances that were thought worth turning into their own short minifilms.

One of them is Jimi Hendrix's performance, and we will talk about that in a future episode.

The other is titled Shake: Otis at Monterey.

Midnight hours stay.

Everybody say,

everybody says that Jake.

One more time in the state.

Everybody says, Day, one more time and stay.

Everybody go to the state.

Fuck out yesterday.

Come back and take.

Come

Otis Redding came from Macon, Georgia, the hometown of Little Richard, who became one of his biggest early influences.

And like Richard, he was torn in his early years between religion and secular music.

Though in most other ways, he was very different from Richard.

And in particular, he came from a much more supportive family.

While his father, Otis Sr., was a deacon in the church, and didn't approve much of blues, RB, or jazz music, or listen to it himself, he didn't prevent his son from listening to it.

So young Otis grew up listening to records by Richard, of whom he later said, If it hadn't been for Little Richard, I would not be here.

Richard has soul too.

My present music has a lot of him in it.

And another favourite, Clyde MacFatter.

Indeed, it's unclear exactly how much Otis Senior did disapprove of those supposedly simple kinds of music.

The biography I used as a source for this, and which says that Otis Sr.

wouldn't listen to blues or jazz music at all, also quotes his son as saying that when he was a child, his mother and father used to play him a calypso song out then called Run Joe.

That will, of course, be this one.

As Joe ran out, brother Moe then began to shout.

Run Joe, any man at the door!

Rocho!

The man won't let me go!

Rogo!

Run as fast as you can!

Rogo!

Police holding me hand!

Joey, Joe, Joey, Joe!

I find it hard to reconcile the idea of someone who refused to listen to the blues or jazz, listening to Louis Jordan.

But then, people are complex.

Whatever Otis Senior's feelings about secular music, he recognised from a very early age that his son had a special talent and encouraged him to become a gospel singer.

And at the same time, he was listening to Little Richard.

Young Otis was also listening to gospel singers.

One particular influence was a blind street singer, Reverend Pearlie Brown.

Reading was someone who cared deeply about his father's opinion, and it might well have been that he would eventually have become a gospel performer because he started his his career with a foot in both camps.

What seems to have made the difference is that when he was sixteen, his father came down with tuberculosis.

Even a few years earlier, this would have been a terminal diagnosis, but thankfully by this point antibiotics had been invented, and the deacon eventually recovered.

But it did mean that Otis Jr.

had to become the family breadwinner while his father was sick, and so he turned decisively towards the kind of music that could make more money.

He'd already started performing secular music.

He'd joined a band led by Gladys Williams, who was the first female bandleader in the area.

Williams sadly doesn't seem to have recorded anything.

Discogs has a listing of a funk single by a Gladys Williams on a tiny label, which may or may not be the same person, but in general she avoided recording studios, only wanting to play live.

But she was a very influential figure in Georgia music.

According to her former trumpeter Newton Collier, who later went on to play with Redding and others, she trained both Fats Gonder and Lewis Hamlin, who went on to join the lineup of James Brown's band that made Live at the Apollo.

And Collier says that Hamlin's arrangements for that album and the way the band would segue from one track to another were all things he'd been taught by Miss Gladys.

Redding sang with Gladys Williams for a while and she took him under her wing, trained him, and became his de facto first manager.

She got him to perform at local talent shows, where he won 15 weeks in a row, before he got banned from performing to give everyone else a chance.

At all of these shows, the song he performed was one that Miss Gladys had rehearsed with him: Little Richard's Heeby Geebies.

He for Teebi gotta jump back, jump back, keep a tee, gonna get back, get back, keep a tee, you gotta jump back, jump back, keep a team, come a bad luck, baby, put the jane on me, I got the heap and tee, come, love it, so I got them, keep a team, money, have to go with it, no more me dollar, gotta be a good one.

At this time, Redding's repertoire was largely made up of songs by the two great sub-50s Georgia R and B,

Little Richard and James Brown, plus some by his other idol, Sam Cook.

And those singers would remain his greatest influences throughout his career.

After his stint with Williams, Redding went on to join another band, Pat T.

Cake and the Mighty Panthers, whose guitarist Johnny Jenkins would be a major presence in his life for several years.

The Mighty Panthers were soon giving Redding top billing, and advertising gigs as featuring Otis Rockin' Robin Redding, presumably that was another song in his live repertoire.

By this time, Redding was sounding enough like Little Richard that when Richard's old backing band the Upsetters were looking for a new singer, after Richard quit rock and roll for the ministry, they took Redding on as their vocalist for a tour.

Once that tour had ended, Redding returned home to find that Johnny Jenkins had quit the Mighty Panthers and formed a new band, the Pine Toppers.

Redding joined that band, who were managed by a white teenager named Phil Walden, who soon became Redding's personal manager as well.

Walden and Redding developed a very strong bond, to the extent that Walden, who was studying at university, spent all his tuition money promoting Reading and almost got kicked out.

When Reading found this out, he actually went round to everyone he knew and got loans from everyone until he had enough to pay for Walden's tuition, much of it paid in coins.

They had a strong enough bond that Walden would remain as manager for the rest of Reading's life, and even when Walden had to do two years in the army in Germany, he managed Reading a long distance, with his brother looking after things at home.

But of course, there wasn't much of a music industry in Georgia, and so with Walden's blessing and support, he moved to LA in 1960 to try to become a star.

Just before he left, his girlfriend Zelma told him she was pregnant.

He assured her that he was only going to be away for a few months, and that he would be back in time for the birth, and that he intended to come back to Georgia rich and marry her.

Her response was, sure you is.

In LA, Redding met up with a local record producer, James Jimmy Mac McKeekin, who would later go on to become an actor, appearing in several films with Clint Eastwood.

McKeekin produced a session for Reading at Gold Star Studios, with arrangements by Renee Hall and using several of the musicians who later became the wrecking crew.

She's Alright, the first single that came from that session, was intended to sound as much like Jackie Wilson as possible and was released under the name of The Shooters, the vocal group who provided the backing vocals.

Well, I know that this feeling girl I see so fine.

I like a hurdle and make a man on mine at all.

She's All Rights was released on on Transworld, a small label owned by Maurice Bernstein, who also owned Finer Arts Records, and She's Alright seems to have been released on both labels.

Neither of Bernstein's labels had any great success.

The biggest record they put out was a single by the Hollywood Argylls that came out after they'd stopped having hits, and they didn't have any connection to the RB market.

Redding and McKeekin couldn't find any RB labels that wanted to pick up their recordings, and so Redding did return to Georgia and marries Elma, a few days before the birth of their son Dexter.

Back in Georgia, he hooked up again with the Pinetoppers, and he and Jenkins started training local record labels, attempting to get records put out by either of them.

Redding was the first, and Otis Redding and the Pine Toppers put out a single, Shout Bama Lamma, a slight reworking of a song that he'd recorded as Gamma Lamma for Makein, which was obviously heavily influenced by Little Richard.

I'm going back and try to get in.

I'm letting more study getting them made up.

I love a chicken, baby.

Shouting back a labor.

That single was produced by a local record company owner, Bobby Smith, who signed Redding to a contract which Redding didn't read, but which turned out to be a management contract as well as a record contract.

This would later be a problem, as Redding didn't have an actual contract with Phil Walden.

One thing that comes up time and again in stories about music in the Deep South at this time is people operating on handshake deals and presuming good faith on the part of each other.

There was a problem with the record which nobody had foreseen though.

Redding was the first black band signed to Smith's label, which was called Confederate Records, and its logo was the Southern Cross.

Now, Smith, by all accounts, was less personally racist than most white men in Georgia at the time, and hadn't intended that as any kind of statement of white supremacy.

He'd just used a popular local symbol without thinking through the implications.

But, as the phrase goes, intent isn't magic.

And while Smith didn't intend it as racist, rather unsurprisingly, black DJs and record shops didn't see things in the same light.

Smith was told by several DJs that they wouldn't play the record while it was on that label, and he started up a new subsidiary label, Orbit, and put the record out on that label.

Redding and Smith continued collaborating, and there were plans for Redding to put out a second single on Orbit.

That single was going to be These Arms of Mine, a song Redding had originally given to another Confederate artist, a rockabilly performer called Buddy Leach, who doesn't seem to be the same Buddy Leach as the Democratic politician from Louisiana, or the saxophone player with George Thorugood and the Destroyers.

Leach had recorded it as a B-side, with the slightly altered title, These Arms Are Mine.

Sadly, I can't provide an excerpt of that, as the record is so rare that even websites I've found by Rockabilly collectors, who are trying to get everything on Confederate records, haven't managed to get hold of copies.

Meanwhile, Johnny Jenkins had been recording on another label, Tiffco,

and had put out a single called Pine Top.

That record had attracted the attention of Joe Galkin.

Galkin was a semi-independent record promoter who had worked for Atlantic in New York before moving back to his hometown of Macon.

Galkin had proved himself as a promoter by being responsible for the massive amounts of airplay given to Solomon Bergs just out of reach of my two open arms.

That runs

away from me,

dreams that just

won't let me be,

blues that keeps

on bothering me,

chains that just

won't set me free

too far away

from you

and all your

Just out

of reach of my

empty arm

After that, Jerry Wexer had given Galkin $50 a week in an expense account and Galkin would drive to all the black radio stations in the South and pitch Atlantic's records to them.

But Galkin also had his own record label, Jebbald Records, and when he went to those stations and heard them playing something from a smaller label, he would quickly negotiate with that smaller label, buy the master and the artist's contract, and put the record out on Jebald Records.

And then he would sell the track and the artist onto Atlantic, taking 10% of the record's future earnings and a finder's fee.

This is what happened with Johnny Jenkins' single, which was reissued on Jebald and then on Atlantic.

Galkins signed Jenkins to a contract, another of those contracts which also made him Jenkins's manager, and indeed the manager of the Pine Tops.

Jenkins' record ended up selling about 25,000 records, for when Gulkin saw the Pintop as performing live, he realised that Otis Redding was the real star.

Since he had a contract with Jenkins, he came to an agreement with Walden, who was still Jenkins' manager as well as Redding's.

Walden would get 50% of Jenkins' publishing, and they would be co-managers of Jenkins.

But Gulkin had plans for Redding, which he didn't tell anyone about, not even Redding himself.

The one person he did tell was Jerry Wexler, who he phoned up and asked for $2,000, explaining that he wanted to record Jenkins' follow-up single at Stax, and he also wanted to bring along a singer he'd discovered who sang with Jenkins' band.

Wexler agreed.

Atlantic had recently started distributing Stax's records on a handshake deal of much the same kind that Redding had with Walden.

As far as everyone else was concerned though, the session was just for Johnny Jenkins, the known quantity who'd already released a single for Atlantic.

Otis Redding, meanwhile, was having to work a lot of odd jobs to feed his rapidly growing family, and one of those jobs was to work as Johnny Jenkins' driver, as Jenkins didn't have a driving license.

So Galkin suggested that, given that Memphis was quite a long drive, Redding should drive Galkin and Jenkins to Stacks and carry the equipment for them.

Bobby Smith, who still thought of himself as Redding's manager, was eager to help his friend's bandmate with his big break, and to help Galkin in the hope that maybe Atlantic would start distributing Confederate too.

And so he lent Redding the company station wagon to drive them to the session.

The other Pine Toppers wouldn't be going.

Jenkins was going to be backed by Booker T and the MGs, the normal Stacks backing band.

Phil Walden, though, had told Redding that he should try to take the opportunity to get himself heard by Stacks, and he pestered the musicians as they recorded Jenkins's Spunky.

Cropper later remembered: During the session, Al Jackson says to me, The big tall guy that was driving Johnny, he's been bugging me to death wanting me to hear him sing.

Al said, would you take some time and get this guy off my back and listen to him?

And I said, After the session I'll try to do it, and then I just forgot about it.

What Redding didn't know, though Walden might have, is that Gulkin had planned all along to get Redding to record while he was there.

Gulkin claimed to be Redding's manager, and told Jim Stewart, the co-owner of Stax who acted as main engineer and supervising producer on the sessions at this point, that Wexer had only funded the session on the basis that Redding would also get a shot at recording.

Stewart was unimpressed.

Jenkins' session had not gone well, and it had taken them more than two hours to get two tracks down.

But Gulkin offered Stewart a trade.

Gulkin, as Redding's manager, would take half of Stax's mechanical royalties for the records, which wouldn't be much, but in turn would give Stewart half the publishing on Redding's songs.

That was enough to make Stewart interested.

But by this point, Booker T.

Jones had already left the studio, so Steve Cropper moved to the piano for the 40 minutes that was left of the session, with Jenkins remaining on guitar, and they tried to get two sides of a single cut.

The first track they cut was Hey Hey Baby, which didn't impress Stewart much.

He simply said that the world didn't need another little Richard, and so with time running out they cut another track, the ballad Redding had already given to Buddy Leach.

He asked Cropper, who didn't play piano well, to play church chords, by which he meant triplets, And Cropper said, He started singing These Arms of Mine, and I know my hair lifted about three inches, and I couldn't believe this guy's voice.

These arms are

mine.

They

are lonely,

lonely

and fielding in blue.

These arms of mine,

That was more impressive, though Stewart carefully feigned disinterest.

Stewart and Gulkin put together a contract which signed Redding to Stacks, though they put the single out on the less important Vault subsidiary, as they did for much of Reading's subsequent output, and gave Gulkin and Stewart 50% each of the publishing rights to Reading's songs.

Redding signed it, not even realising he was signing a proper contract rather than just one for a single record, because he was just used to signing whatever bit of paper was put in front of him at the time.

This one was slightly different though, because Redding had had his 21st birthday since the last time he'd signed a contract, and so Gulkin assumed that that meant all his other contracts were invalid, not realising that Redding's contract with Bobby Smith had been countersigned by Redding's mother.

and so was also legal.

Walden also didn't realise that, but did realise that Gulkin representing himself himself as Redding's manager to Stacks might be a problem.

So he quickly got Redding to sign a proper contract, formalising the handshake basis they'd been operating on up to that point.

Walden was at this point in the middle of his army service, but got the signature while he was home on leave.

Walden then signed a deal with Gulkin, giving Walden half of Gulkin's 50% cut of Redding's publishing, in return for Gulkin getting a share of Walden's management proceeds.

By this point, everyone was on the same page.

Otis Redding was going to be a big star, and he became everyone's prime focus.

Johnny Jenkins remained signed to Walden's agency, which quickly grew to represent almost every big soul star that wasn't signed to Motown, but he was regarded as a footnote.

His record came out eventually on Volt, almost two years later, but he didn't release another record until 1968.

Jenkins did though go on to have some influence.

In 1970 he was given the opportunity to sing lead on an album backed by Dwayne Allman and the members of the Muscle Shoals studio band, many of whom went on to form the Allman Brothers Band.

That record contained a cover of Dr.

John's I Walk on Gilded Splinters, which was later sampled by Beck for Loser, the Wu-Tang clan for Gun Will Go, and Oasis for their hit, Go Let It Out.

Welcome to the single.

Jenkins would play guitar on several future Otis Redding sessions, but would hold a grudge against Redding for the rest of his his life for taking the stardom he thought was rightfully his, and would be one of the few people to have anything negative to say about Redding after his early death.

When Bobby Smith heard about the release of These Arms of Mine, he was furious, as his contract with Redding was in fact legally valid, and he'd been intending to get Redding to record the song himself.

However, he realised that Stax would call on the resources of Atlantic Records, and Joe Gulkin also hinted that if he played nice, Atlantic might start distributing Confederate too.

Smith signed away all his rights to Redding, again thinking that he was only signing away the rights to a single record and song, and not reading the contract closely enough.

In this case, Smith only had one working eye, and that wasn't good enough to see clearly.

He had to hold paper right up to his face to read anything on it, and he simply couldn't read the small print on the contract, and so signed over Otis Redding's management, record contract, and publishing for a flat $700.

Now everything was legally, if perhaps not ethically, in the clear.

Phil Walden was Otis Redding's manager, Stacks was his record label, Joe Gulkin got a cut off the top, and Walden, Gulkin, and Jim Stewart all shared Redding's publishing.

Although, to make it a hit, one more thing had to happen, and one more person had to get a cut of the song.

burning for wanting you.

These aren't the mine.

They are wanting,

wanting

to hold you.

That sound was becoming out of fashion among black listeners at the time.

It was considered passe.

And even though the Stacks musicians loved the record, Jim Stewart didn't, and put it out not because he believed in Otis Redding, but because he believed in Joe Gulkin.

As Stewart later said, the black radio stations were getting out of that black country sound.

We put it out to appease and please Joe.

For the most part, DJs ignored the record despite Gulkin pushing it.

It was released in October 1962, that month which we have already pinpointed as the start of the 60s, and came out at the same time as a couple of other Stacks releases.

And the one they were really pushing was Carla Thomas's I'll Bring It Home to You,

an answer record to Sam Cook's Bring It on Home to Me.

Oh,

bring it to you.

Bring my

sweet loving.

Bring it on home to

These arms of mine wasn't even released as the A-side.

That was hey, hey baby, until John R came along.

John R was a Nashville DJ, and in fact, he was the reason that Bobby Smith even knew that Redding had signed to Stacks.

R had heard Buddy Leach's version of the song and called Smith, who was a friend of his, to tell him that his record had been covered, and that was the first Smith had heard of the matter.

But R also called Jim Stewart at Stacks and told him that he was promoting the wrong side, and that if they started promoting These Arms of Mine, R would play the record on his radio show, which could be heard in 28 states.

And as a gesture of thanks for this suggestion, and definitely not as payola, which would be very illegal, Stewart gave R his share of the publishing rights to the song, which eventually made the top 20 on the RB charts and slipped into the lower end of the hot 100.

These arms of mine was actually recorded as a turning point for Stacks as an organization.

By the time it was released, Booker T.

Jones had left Memphis to go to University in Indiana to study music, with his tuition being paid for by his share of the royalties for Green Onions, which hit the charts around the same time as Reading's first session.

Most of Stax's most important sessions were recorded at weekends.

Jim Stewart still had a day job as a bank manager at this point, and he supervised the records that were likely to be hits.

So Jones could often commute back to the studio session work and could play sessions during his holidays.

The rest of the time, other people would cover the piano parts, often Cropper, who played piano on Redding's next sessions, with Jenkins once again on guitar.

As these arms of mine didn't start to become a hit until March, Redding didn't go into the studio again until June, when he cut the follow-up, That's What My Heart Needs, with the MGs, Jenkins, and the horn section of the Marquis.

That made number 27 on the Cash Box RB chart.

This was in the period when Billboard had stopped having one.

The follow-up, Pain in My Heart, was cut in September, and did even better, making number eleven on the Cash Box RB chart.

And I want you to love me, love me, love me, baby.

Will I get enough

pain in my heart

in my arm?

It did well enough, in fact, that the Rolling Stones cut a cover version of the track.

And one day,

my days are getting done.

Won't you come back, come back, come back, baby?

Beat in my heart.

Won't it be big

like that?

I wake up restless night.

Though Redding didn't get the songwriting royalties, by that point, Alan Toussaint had noticed how closely it resembled a song he had written for Irma Thomas, Ruler of My Heart.

When you're alone,

the going gets rough.

I'll come back, I'll come back, I'll come back.

I've had enough.

Make me a queen,

happy again.

You're my crap.

And so the writing credit was changed to be Naomi Neville, one of the pseudonyms Toussaint used.

By this point Redding was getting steady work and becoming a popular live act.

He'd put together his own band and had asked Jenkins to join, but Jenkins didn't want to play second fiddle to him and refused, and soon stopped being invited to the recording sessions as well.

Indeed, Redding was eager to get as many of his old friends working with him as he could.

For his second and third sessions, as well as bringing Jenkins, he brought along a whole gang of musicians from his touring show, and persuaded Snacks to put out records by them too.

At those sessions, as well as Redding's singles, they also cut records by his valet, which was the term RB performers in those years used for what we'd now call a gopher or roadie, Oscar Mack.

if you love me

someone

should tell

everything

that

is on,

no, no, no,

be afraid

for Eddie Kirkland, the guitarist in his touring band, who had previously played with John Lee Hooker, and whose single was released under the name Eddie Kirk.

And Bobby Marchan, a singer and female impersonator from New Orleans, who had had some massive hits a few years earlier, both on his own and as the singer with Huey Piano Smith and the Clowns, but had ended up in Macon without a record deal and been taken under Redding's wing.

What can I

do

to make, to make the fake you want to be?

Redding would continue, throughout his life, to be someone who tried to build musical careers for his friends, though none of those singles was successful.

The changes in Stacks continued.

In late autumn 1963, Atlantic got worried by the lack of new product coming from Stacks.

Carlo Thomas had had a couple of RB hits, and they were expecting a new single.

But every time Jerry Wexter phoned Stax asking where the new single was, he was told it would be coming soon, but the equipment was broken.

After a couple of weeks of this, Wexter decided something fishy was going on, and sent Tom Dowd, his genius engineer, down to Stax to investigate.

Dowd found when he got there that the equipment was broken and had been for weeks and was a simple fix.

When Dowd spoke to Stewart though, he discovered that they didn't know where to source replacement parts from.

Dowd phoned his assistant in New York and told him to go to the electronics shop and get the parts he needed.

Then, as there were no next-day courier services at the time, Dowd's assistant went to the airport, found a flight attendant who was flying to Memphis, and gave her the parts and $25,

with a promise of 25 more if she gave them to Dowd at the other end.

The next morning, Dowd had the equipment fixed, and everyone involved became convinced that Dowd was a miracle worker, especially after he showed Steve Cropper some rudimentary tape manipulation techniques that Cropper had never encountered before.

Dowd had to wait around in Memphis for his flight, so he went to play golf with the musicians for a bit.

And then they thought they might as well pop back to the studio and test the equipment out.

When they did, Rufus Thomas, Carla Thomas' father who had also had a number of hits himself on Stacks and Sun, popped his head round the door to see if the equipment was working now.

They told him it was, and he said he had a song if they were up for spot of recording.

They were, and so when Dowd flew back that night, he was able to tell Wexler not only that the next Carla Thomas single would soon be on its way, but that he had the tapes for a big hit single with him right there.

Baby black, dressed in black,

silver buttons all down her back.

Hallelujah,

tipsy toe.

She broke a needle and she can't soap walking a dog.

That's a walking bird dog.

If you don't know how to do it, I'll show you how to walk the dog.

Walking the dog was a sensation.

Jim Stewart later said, I remember our first order out of Chicago.

I was in New York in Jerry Wexter's office at the time, and Paul Glass, who was our distributor in Chicago, called in an order for 65,000 records.

I said to Jerry, do you mean 6,500?

And he said, hell no, he wants 65,000.

That was the first order.

He believed in the record so much that we ended up selling about 200,000 in Chicago alone.

The record made the top ten on the pop charts, but that wasn't the biggest thing that Dowd had taken away from the session.

He came back raving to Wexler about the way they made records in Memphis, and how different it was from the New York way.

In New York, there was a strict separation between the people in the control room and the musicians in the studio.

The musicians were playing from written charts, and everyone had a job and did just that job.

In Memphis, the musicians were making up the arrangements as they went, and everyone was producing or or engineering all at the same time.

Dowd, as someone with more technical ability than anyone at Stax, and who was also a trained musician who could make musical suggestions, was soon regularly commuting down to Memphis to be part of the production team, and Jerry Wexer was soon going down to record with other Atlantic artists there, as we heard about in the episode on Midnight Hour.

Shortly after Dowd's first visit to Memphis, Another key member of the Stacks team entered the picture.

Right at the end of 1963, Floyd Newman recorded a track called Frog Stomp, on which he used his own band rather than the MGs and Marquis.

The piano player and co-writer on that track was a young man named Isaac Hayes, who had been trying to get work at Stacks for some time.

He'd started out as a singer and had made a record, Laura We're On Our Last Go Round, at American Sound, the studio won by the former Stacks engineer and musician Chips Mohan.

Twice I proved my love is true,

but now I leave it up to you.

Cause Laura,

we're on our last go round.

But that hadn't been a success, and Hayes had continued working a day job at a slaughterhouse, and would continue doing so for much of the next few years, even after he started working at Stacks.

It's truly amazing how many of the people involved in Stacks were making music as what we would now call a side hustle.

Hayes had become a piano player as a way of getting a little extra money.

He'd been offered a job as a fill-in when someone else had pulled out at the last minute on a gig on New Year's Eve, and took it even though he couldn't actually play piano, and spent his first show desperately vamping with two fingers, and was just lucky the audience was too drunk to care.

But he had a remarkable facility for the instrument, and while unlike Booker T.

Jones, he would never gain a great deal of technical knowledge, and was embarrassed for the rest of his life by both his playing ability and his lack of theory knowledge, he was as great as they come at soul, at playing with feel, and at inventing new harmonies on the fly.

They still didn't have a musician at Stacks that could replace Booker T, who was still off at university, so Isaac Hayes was taken on as a second session keyboard player, to cover for Jones when Jones was in Indiana, though Hayes himself also had to work his own sessions around his day job, so didn't end up playing on In the Midnight Hour, for example, because he was at the slaughterhouse.

The first recording session that Hayes played on as a session player was a notice reading single, either his fourth single for Stacks, Come to Me, or his fifth, Security.

I'm telling you once again.

Security

and I want it.

No, they told me that.

You're the one for me.

How can I forget it?

How can I forget it?

Come on, let's forget the

Security is usually pointed to by fans as the point at which Redding rarely comes into his own, and started directing the musicians more.

There's a distinct difference, in particular, in the interplay between Cropper's guitar, the Marquis's horns, and Redding's voice.

Where previously the horns had tended to play mostly pads, just holding chords under Redding's voice, now they were starting to do answering phrases.

Jim Stewart always said that the only reason Stacks used a horn section at all was because he'd been unable to find a decent group of backing vocalists, and the function the horns played on most of the early Stacks recordings was somewhat similar to the one that the Jordan Ayers had played for Elvis, or the pics for Buddy Holly, basically doing ooh sounds to fatten out the sound, plus the odd sax solo or simple riff.

The way Redding used the horns though was more like the way Ray Charles used the rayolette or the interplay of a do-what vocal group with call and response interjections and asides.

He also did something in security that would become a hallmark of records made at Stacks.

Instead of a solo, the instrumental break is played by the horns as an ensemble.

According to Wayne Jackson, the Marquis's trumpeter, Redding was the one who had the idea of doing these horn ensemble sections, and the musicians liked them enough that they continued doing them on all the future sessions, no matter who with.

The last Stacks single of 1964 took the security sound and refined it, and became the template for every big Stacks hit to follow.

Mr.

Pitiful was the first collaboration between Redding and Steve Cropper, and was primarily Cropper's idea.

Cropper later remembered, there was a disc jockey here named Muhar.

He started calling Otis Mr.

Pitiful, because he sounded so pitiful singing his ballads.

So I said, great idea for a song.

I got the idea for writing about it in the shower.

I was on my way down to pick up Otis.

I got down there and I was humming it in the car.

I said, hey, what do you think about this?

We just wrote the song on the way to the studio, just slapping our hands on our legs.

We wrote it in about 10 minutes, went in, showed it to the guys, he hummed a horn line, boom, we had it.

When Jim Stewart walked in, we had it all worked up.

Two or three cuts later, there it was.

But people just don't understand that.

What make a man feel so beautiful?

Ooh, they call me Mr.

Pittifo.

Cause I know someone.

Cropper would often note later that Redding would never write about himself, but that Cropper would put details of Redding's life and persona into the songs.

From Mr.

Pitiful right up to their final collaboration, in which Cropper came up with lines about leaving home in Georgia.

Mr.

Pitipal went to number 10 on the RB chart and peaked at number 41 on the Hot 100, and its B-side, That's How Strong My Love Is, also made the RB top 20.

Cropper and Redding soon settled into a fruitful writing partnership, to the extent that Cropper even kept a guitar permanently tuned to an open chord so that Redding could use it.

Redding couldn't play the guitar, but liked to use one as a songwriting tool.

When a guitar is tuned in standard tuning, you have to be able to make chord shapes to play it, because the sound of the open strings is a discord.

But you can tune a guitar so all the strings are the notes of a single chord, so they sound good together even when you don't make a chord shape.

With one of these open tunings, you can play chords with just a single finger barring a fret, and so they're very popular with, for example, example, slide guitarists who use a metal slide to play, or someone like Dolly Parton who has such long fingernails it's difficult to form chord shapes.

Someone like Parton is, of course, an accomplished player, but open tunings also mean that someone who can't play well can just put their finger down on a fret and have it be a chord, so you can write songs just by running one finger up and down the fretboard.

So Redding could write, and even play acoustic rhythm guitar on some songs, which he did quite a lot in later years, without ever learning how to make chords.

Now, there's a downside to this, which is why standard tuning is still standard.

If you tune to an open major chord, you can play major chords easily, but minor chords become far more difficult.

Handily, that wasn't a problem at Stacks, because according to Isaac Hayes, Jim Stewart banned minor chords from being played at Stacks.

Hayes said, we'd play a chord in a session and Jim would say, I don't want to hear that chord.

Jim's ears would just tuned into 1, 4, and 5.

I mean, just simple changes.

He said they were the breadwinners.

He didn't like minor chords.

Marvell and I would always try to put that pretty stuff in there.

Jim didn't like that.

We'd bump heads about that stuff.

Me and Marvell fought all the time that.

Booker wanted change as well.

As time progressed, I was able to sneak a few in.

Of course, minor chords weren't completely banned from Stacks, and some did sneak through, but even ballads would often have only major chords.

Like Redding's next single, I've Been Loving You Too Long.

That track had its origins with Jerry Butler, the singer who had been lead vocalist of The Impressions before starting a solo career, and having success with tracks like For Your Your Precious Love.

Means more to me

than any love

could ever be.

For when I

wanted you,

I was so lonely

and so blue.

For that's what love

will do.

Redding liked that song and covered it himself on his second album.

And he had become friendly with Butler.

Butler had half-written a song and played it for Redding, who told him he'd like to fiddle with it, see what he could do.

Butler forgot about the conversation until he got a phone call from Redding, telling him that he'd recorded the song.

Butler was confused and also a little upset.

He'd been planning to finish the song himself and record it, but then Redding played him the track, and Butler decided that doing doing so would be pointless.

It was Redding's song now.

You are tired,

and you want to be free.

I've Been Loving You Too Long became Redding's first really big hit, making number two on the RB chart and 21 on the Hot 100.

It was soon being covered by the Rolling Stones and Icantina Turner.

And while Redding was still not really known to the white pop market, he was quickly becoming one of the biggest stars on the RB scene.

His record sales were still not matching his live performances.

He would always make far more money from appearances than from records.

But he was by now the performer that every other soul singer wanted to copy.

I've Been Loving You Too Long came out just after Redding's second album, The Great Otis Redding sings Soul Ballads, which happened to be the first album released on Vault Records.

Before that, while Stax and Vault had released the singles, they'd licensed all the album tracks to Atlantic's Atco subsidiary, which had released a small number of albums put out by Stacks artists.

But times were changing, and the LP market was becoming bigger, and more importantly, the stereo LP market was becoming bigger.

Singles were still only released in mono, and would be for the next few years, but the album market had a substantial number of audiophiles, and they wanted stereo.

This was a problem for Stacks.

because they only had a mono tape recorder and they were scared of changing anything about their setup in case it destroyed their sound.

Tom Dowd, who had been recording an 8-track for years, was appalled by the technical limitations at the McLemore Avenue studio, but eventually managed to get Jim Stewart, who despite, or possibly because of, being a white country musician, was the most concerned that they keep their black soul sound, to agree to a compromise.

They would keep everything hooked up exactly the same.

The same primitive mixers, the same mono tape recorder, and Stacks would continue doing their mixes for mono.

And all their singles would come directly off that mono tape.

But at the same time they would also have a two-track tape recorder plugged into the mixer, with half the channels going on one track and half on the other.

So while they were making the mix, they'd also be getting a stereo dump of that mix.

The limitations of the situation meant that they might end up with drums and vocals in one channel and everything else in the other.

although as the musicians cut everything together in the studio, which had a lot of natural echo, leakage meant there was a bit of everything on every track, but it would still be stereo.

Redding's next album, Otis Blue, was recorded on this new equipment, with Dowd travelling down from New York to operate it.

Dowd was so keen on making the album stereo that during that session, they re-recorded Redding's two most recent singles, I've Been Loving You Too Long and Respect,

which hadn't yet come out but was in the process of being released, in sound-alike versions so there would be stereo versions of the songs on the album.

So the stereo and mono versions of Otis Blue actually have different performances of those songs on them.

It shows how intense the work rate was at Stacks, and how good they were at their jobs.

That apart from the opening track All Man Trouble, which had already been recorded as a B-side, all of Otis Blue, which is often considered the greatest soul album in history, was recorded in a 28-hour period.

And it would have been shorter, but there was a four-hour break in the middle, from 10pm to 2am,

so that the musicians on the session could play their regular local club gigs.

And then, after the album was finished, Otis left the session to perform a gig that evening.

Tom Dowd, in particular, was astonished by the way Redding took charge in the studio, and how even though he had no technical musical knowledge, he would direct the musicians.

Dowd called Redding a genius, and told Phil Walden that the only two other artists he'd worked with who had as much ability in the studio were Bobby Darwin and Ray Charles.

Other than those singles, An Old Man Trouble, Otis Blue was made up entirely of cover versions.

There were three versions of songs by Sam Cook, who had died just a few months earlier, and whose death had hit Redding hard.

For all that, he styled himself on Little Richard vocally, he was also in awe of Cook as a singer and stage presence.

There were also covers of songs by The Temptations, William Bell, and B.B.

King.

And there was also an odd choice.

Steve Cropper suggested that Redding cut a cover of a song by a white band that was in the charts at the

I can't get more

sad disfaction.

I can't get more

sad disfaction.

Cause I've tried,

I tried.

Redding had never heard the song before.

He was not paying attention to the white pop scene at the time, just to his competition on the RB charts.

But he was interested in doing it.

Cropper sat by the turntable scribbling down what he thought the lyrics Jagger was singing were, and they cut the track.

Redding starts out more or less singing the right words.

know.

I tried.

I can't get no.

But when I'm a dying in my talk,

then the man calls on the red door.

Mess up my imagination.

And I can't get it home.

No, no, no, that's not.

But quickly ends up just ad-libbing random exclamations in the same way that he would in many of his live performances.

Early in the morning,

back to them.

I'm late in the evening for the sad fact.

And you'll be fine now.

Otis Blue made number one on the RB album chart and also made number six on the UK album chart.

Reading, like many soul artists, was far more popular in the UK than in the US.

It only made number 75 on the pop album charts in the US, but it did a remarkable thing as far as stacks was concerned.

It stayed in the lower reaches of the charts, and on the RB album charts, for a long time.

Redding had become what is known as a catalogue artist, something that was almost unknown in rock and soul music at this time, but which was just starting to appear.

Up to 1965, the interlinked genres that we now think of as rock and roll, rock, pop, blues, RB, and soul had all operated on the basis that singles were where the money was, and that singles should be treated like periodicals.

They go on the shelves, stay there for a few weeks, get replaced by the new thing, and nobody's interested anymore.

This had contributed to the explosive rate of change in pop music between about 1954 and 1968.

You'd package up old singles into albums and stick some filler tracks on there, as a way of making a tiny bit of money from tracks which weren't good enough to release as singles, but that was just squeezing the last few drops of juice out of the orange.

It wasn't really where the money was.

The only exceptions were those artists like Ray Charles who crossed over into the jazz and adult pop markets.

But in general, your record sales in the first few weeks and months were your record sales.

But by the mid-60s, as album sales started to take off more, things started to change, and Otis Redding was one of the first artists to really benefit from that.

He wasn't having huge hit singles, and his albums weren't making the pop top 40.

But they kept selling.

Redding wouldn't have an album make the top 40 in his lifetime, but they sold consistently, and everything from Otis Blue onward sold 200,000 or so copies, a massive number in the much smaller album market of the time.

These sales gave Redding some leverage.

His contract with Stax was coming to an end in a few months, and he was getting offers from other companies.

As part of his contract renegotiation, he got Jim Stewart, who, like so many people in this story, including Redding himself, liked to operate on handshake deals and assumptions of good faith on the part of everyone else, and who prided himself on being totally fair and not driving hard bargains, to rework his publishing deal.

Now Redding's music was going to be published by Red Wall Music, named after Redding and Phil Walden, which was owned as a four-way split between Redding, Walden, Stewart, and Joe Gulkin.

Redding also got the right as part of his contract negotiations to record other artists using Stacks' facilities and musicians.

He set up his own label, Jotis Records, a portmanteau of Joe and Otis for Joe Galkin and himself, and put out records by Arthur Conley.

Oh, yeah, who's cool and who

you're cooling

Loretta Williams.

She's all lonely

I

also

with a

way

of

saying you

and Billy Young.

Keep on doing this loop, baby.

I gotta, gotta, I gotta, gotta, gotta snoop it all night long

after

it

Well known as little dance,

it's the latest in the world.

Going.

It's a real cool bath, baby.

Have yourself a little girl.

None of these was a success, but it was another example of how Redding was trying to use his success to boost others.

There were other changes going on at Stacks as well.

The company was becoming more tightly integrated with Atlantic Records, Tom Dowd had started engineering more sessions, Jerry Wexler was turning up all the time, and they were starting to make records for Atlantic, as we discussed in the episode on In the Midnight Hour.

Atlantic were also loaning Stacks Sam and Dave, who were contracted to Atlantic but treated as Stacks artists, and whose hits were written by the new Stacks songwriting team of Isaac Hayes and David Porter.

on a dust road.

Good love,

I got a tongue load.

And when you get it,

you got some.

So don't worry,

cause I'm coming.

I'm a soulmate.

I'm a soulmate.

I'm a soulmate.

Redding was not hugely impressed by Sam and Dave, once saying in an interview, When I first heard the Righteous Brothers, I thought they were coloured.

I think they sing better than Sam and Dave, but they were having more and bigger chart hits than him, though they didn't have the same level of album sales.

Also, by now, Booker T and the MGs had a new bass player.

Donald Duck Dunn had always been the other bass player at Stacks, ever since he'd started with the Marquis, and he'd played on many of Redding's recordings, as had Louis Steinberg, the original bass player with the MGs.

But in early 1965, the Stacks studio musicians had cut a record, originally intending it to be a Marquise record, but decided to put it out as by Bucket T and the MGs,

even though Bucketee wasn't there at the time.

Isaac Hayes played keyboards on the track.

Booker T.

Jones would always have a place at Stacks and would soon be back full-time as he finished his degree.

But from that point on, Duck Dunn, not Louis Steinberg, was the bass player for the MGs.

Another change in 1965 was that Stax got serious about promotion.

Up to this point, they'd just relied on Atlantic to promote their records, but obviously Atlantic put more effort into promoting records on which it made all the money than ones it just distributed.

But as part of the deal to make records with Salmon Dave and Wilson Pickett, Atlantic had finally put their arrangement with Stax on a contractual footing, rather than their previous handshake deal, and they'd agreed to pay half the salary of a publicity person for Stacks.

Stacks brought in Al Bell, who made a huge impression.

Bell had been a DJ in Memphis, who had gone off to work with Martin Luther King for a while, before leaving after a year because, as he put it, I was not about passive resistance.

I was about economic development, economic empowerment.

He'd returned to DJing, first in Memphis, then in Washington, D.C.,

where he'd been one of the biggest boosters of Stacks records in the area.

While he was in Washington, he'd also started making records himself.

He produced several singles for Grover Mitchell on Decker.

I

Those records were supervised by Milt Gabler, the same Milk Gabler who produced Louis Jordan's records and Rock Around the Clock, and Bell co-produced them with Eddie Floyd, who wrote that song, and Chester Simmons, formerly of the Moonglows.

And the three of them started their own label, Sapphice, which had put out a few records by Floyd and others on the same kind of deal with Atlantic that Stax had.

And you just won't let me find out.

You better make up your mind

so I can

Floyd would himself soon become a staff songwriter at Stax.

As with almost every decision at Stacks, the decision to hire Belle was a cause of disagreement between Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton, the axe in Stax,

who wasn't as involved in the day-to-day studio operations as her brother, but who was often regarded by the musicians as at least as important to the spirit of the label, and who tended to disagree with her brother on pretty much everything.

Stewart didn't want to hire Belle, but according to Cropper, Estelle and I said, hey, we need somebody that can liaison between the disc jockeys, and he's the man to do it.

Atlantic's going into a radio station with six Atlantic records and one Stacks record.

We're not getting our due.

We knew that.

We needed more promotion and he had all the pull with all those disc jockeys.

He knew E.

Rodney Jones and all the big cats, the Montagues and so on.

He knew every one of them.

Many people at Stacks will say that the label didn't even really start until Bell joined, and he became so important to the label that he would eventually take it over from Stewart and Axton.

Bell came in every day and immediately started phoning DJs all day every day, starting in the morning with the drive-time East Coast DJs and working his way across the US, ending up at midnight phoning the evening DJs in California.

Booker T.

Jones said of him, He had energy like Otis Redding, except he wasn't a singer.

He had the same type of energy.

He'd come in the room, pull up his shoulders, and that energy would start.

He would start talking about the music business or what was going on, and he energized everywhere he was.

He was our Otis for promotion.

It was the same type of energy charisma.

Meanwhile, of course, Redding was constantly releasing singles.

Two more singles were released from Otis Blue.

His versions of My Girl and Satisfaction, and he also released I Can't Turn You Loose, which was originally the B side to just one more day, but ended up charting higher than its original A side.

It's around this time that Redding did something which seems completely out of character, but which really must be mentioned given that with very few exceptions, everyone in his life talks about him as some kind of saint.

One of Redding's friends was beaten up, and Redding, the friend, and another friend, drove to the assailant's house and started shooting through the windows.

starting a gun battle in which Redding got grazed.

His friend got convicted of attempted murder and got two two years' probation, while Redding himself didn't face any criminal charges but did get sued by the victims and settled out of court for a few hundred dollars.

By this point, Redding was becoming hugely rich from his concert appearances and album sales, but he still hadn't had a top 20 pop hit.

He needed to break the white market.

And so, in April 1966, Redding went to LA to play the Sunset Strip.

Redding's performance at the Whiskey Ago Go, a venue which otherwise hosted bands like The Doors, The Birds, The Mothers of Invention, and Love, was his first real interaction with the white rock scene, part of a process that had started with his recording of Satisfaction.

The three-day residency got rave reviews, though the plans to release a live album of the shows were scuppered when Jim Stewart listened back to the tapes and decided that Redding's home players were often out of tune.

But almost everyone on the LA scene came out to see the shows.

and Redding blew them away.

According to one biography of Redding I used, it was seeing how Redding tuned his guitar that inspired the guitarist from the support band, The Rising Suns, to start playing in the same tuning.

Though I can't believe for a moment that Rai Kuda, one of the greatest slide guitarists of his generation, didn't already know about open tunings.

But Redding definitely impressed that band.

Taj Mahal, their lead singer, later said it was one of the most amazing performances I'd ever seen.

Also at the gigs was Bob Dylan, who played Reading a song he'd just recorded but not yet released.

Have fallen

from her curls.

She takes

just like a woman.

Yes, she does, she makes love just like a woman.

Redding agreed that the song sounded perfect for him and said he would record it.

He apparently made some attempts at rehearsing it at least, but never ended up recording it.

He thought the first verse and chorus were great, but had problems with the second verse.

That baby can't be blessed

till she finally sees that she's like all the rest

with her fog, her amphetamine, and her pearls.

She takes

just

Those lyrics were just too abstract for him to find a way to connect with them emotionally, and as a result he found himself completely unable to sing them.

But like his recording of satisfaction, this was another clue to him that he should start paying more attention to what was going on in the white music industry, and that there might be things he could incorporate into his own style.

As a result of the LA gigs, Bill Graham booked Redding for the film more in San Francisco.

Redding was at first cautious, thinking this might be a step too far, and that he wouldn't go down well with the hippie crowd.

But Graham persuaded him, saying that whenever he asked any of the people who the San Francisco crowds most loved, Jerry Garcia or Paul Butterfield or Mike Bloomfield, who they most wanted to see play there, they all said Otis Redding.

Redding reluctantly agreed, but before he took a trip to San Francisco, there was somewhere even further out for him to go.

Redding was about to head to England, but before he did, there was another album to make, and this one would see even more of a push for the white market, though still trying to keep everything soulful.

As well as Redding originals, including Fa Fa Fa Fa Sad Song, another song in the mold of Mr.

Pitiful, there was another cover of a contemporary hit by a guitar band, this time a version of the Beatles' Day Tripper, and two covers of old standards.

The country song Tennessee Waltz, which had recently been covered by Sam Cook, and a song made famous by Bing Crosby, Try a Little Tenderness.

That song almost certainly came to mind because it had recently been used in the film Doctor Strange Love, but it had also been covered relatively recently by two soul greats, Aretha Franklin.

I may get weary.

Women do get weary

wearing the same

shabby dress,

but to one who's weary,

try a little,

try a little chimney.

And Sam Cook.

Here's what we want to tell you.

Listen,

it says very simply that look,

oh, she may be weary,

women do get weary wearing

the same shabby dress.

And oh,

if she gets weary,

try a little tenderness.

No, let me tell all you fellas that

I know you won't regret it.

Women don't forget it.

This version had horn parts arranged by Isaac Hayes, who by this point had been elevated to be considered one of the big six at Stax records.

Hayes, his songwriting partner David Porter, Steve Cropper, Duck Dunn, Booker T.

Jones, and Al Jackson were all given special status at the company and treated as co-producers on every record.

All the records were now credited as produced by staff, but it was the big six who split the royalties.

Hayes came up with the horn part that was inspired by Sam Cook's A Change Is Gonna Come, and which dominated the early part of the track.

Oh, she may be weary.

Them young girls, they do get wearied,

wearing

that same

old shaggy dress,

yeah.

But when she gets

waiting,

just and just

painting

for things that you never,

never, never, never possess yet.

But while she's there waiting,

then without them

track

her little

But Al Jackson surprised them when they ran through the track by deciding that after the main song had been played, he'd kick the track into double time and give Redding a chance to stretch out and do his trademark grunts and gutters.

The single version faded out shortly after that, but the version on the album kept going for an extra 30 seconds.

song will be in the top lip.

Man, I want to die.

You want no loser, no, no.

You got the love of

feeder.

You got the drop, man, and that drop bottle

in the leg.

Now what the loser

do, man,

break it and wipe it.

As Booker T.

Jones said, Al came up with the idea of breaking up the rhythm, and Otis just took that and ran with it.

He really got excited once he found out what Al was going to do on the drums.

He realized how he could finish the song, that he could start it like a ballad, and finish it full of emotion.

That's how a lot of our arrangements would come together.

Somebody would come up with something totally outrageous.

And it would have lasted longer, but Jim Stewart pushed the faders down, realizing the track was an uncommercial length even as it was.

Live, the track track could often stretch out to seven minutes or longer, as Redding drove the crowd into a frenzy, and it soon became one of the highlights of his live set and a signature song for him.

In September 1966, Redding went on his first tour outside the US.

His records had all done much better in the UK than they had in America, and they were huge favourites of everyone on the mod scene.

And when he arrived in the UK, he had a limo sent by Brian Epstein to meet him at the airport.

The tour was an odd one, with multiple London shows, shows in a couple of big cities like Manchester and Bristol, and shows in smallish towns in Hampshire and Lincolnshire.

Apparently, the shows outside London weren't particularly well attended, but the London shows were all packed to overflowing.

Redding also got his own episode of Ready, Steady, Go, on which he performed solo, as well as with guest stars Eric Burden and Chris Farlow.

After the UK tour, he went on a short tour of the eastern US with Salmon Dave as his support act, and then headed west to to the Fillmore for his three-day residency there, introducing him to the San Francisco music scene.

His first night at the venue was supported by The Grateful Dead, the second by Johnny Talbot and Dee Thangs, and the third by Country Joe and the Fish.

But there was no question that it was Otis Redding that everyone was coming to see.

Janice Joplin turned up at the Fillmore every day at 3 p.m.

to make sure she could be right at the front for Redding's shows that night.

And Bill Graham said, decades later, by far, Otis Redding was the single most extraordinary talent I had ever seen.

There was no comparison, then or now.

However, after the Fillmore gigs, for the first time ever he started missing shows.

The Sentinel, a black newspaper in LA, reported a few days later, Otis Redding, the rock singer, failed to make many friends here the other day when he was slated to appear on the Christmas Eve show, failed to draw well, and Redding reportedly would not go on.

The Sentinel seemed to think that Redding was just being a diva, but it's likely that this was the first sign of a problem that would change everything about his career.

He was developing vocal polyps that were making singing painful.

It's notable though that the Sentinel refers to Redding as a rock singer, and shows again how different genres appeared in the mid-sixties to how they appear today.

In that light, it's interesting to look at a quote from Redding from a few months later: Everybody thinks that all songs by coloured people are rhythm and blues, but that's not true.

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 12 bars all the way through.

Most of my songs are soul songs.

So, in Redding's eyes, neither he nor James Brown were RB.

He was soul, which was a different thing from RB, while Brown was rock and roll and pop, not soul.

But journalists thought that Redding was rock.

But while the lines between these things were far less distinct than they are today, and Redding was trying to cross over to the white audience, he knew what genre he was in, and celebrated that in a song he wrote with his friend Arthur Conley.

oh yeah.

We are here on the flow, y'all.

I know when you are over,

dancing with the music.

Oh, yeah, oh, yeah.

Spotlight on Lou Rosa.

I'm lonely looking for some

sick love to hurting them.

Oh, yeah.

Or at least the label credits on that single, which Redding produced for Conley, who he got signed to Atco after Jotis record closed down, say it was written by Redding and Conley.

Some might say that it bears a slight resemblance to Sam Cooke's song, Yeah.

Do you like all the dances?

You're crazy about the dances.

Long as a swingin'.

Certainly J.W.

Alexander, Cook's old friend and music publisher, thought so.

Luckily for Redding and Conley, Alexander was a good sport about it, and agreed to a deal in which Redding would give Alexander the publishing.

and would keep on cutting covers of Sam Cooke's songs on his albums.

Hardly a hardship for Redding, who had been doing so regularly anyway.

Indeed, he did so on his next album, an album of duets with Carla Thomas.

Bring it on home to me.

Yeah,

yeah, yeah, bring it, bring it.

Bring my cell phone home, bring it on,

that album had been suggested by Jim Stewart, who wanted to replicate the success of It Takes Two by Marvin Gaye and Kim Weston, which had just become a big hit two years after it was recorded.

in love.

One can say how it really feels.

One can worship on a star.

Two can make that wish come true, yeah.

One can stand alone in the dark, two can make the light shine through.

It takes two, baby.

It takes two, baby.

Me and you.

This was something Stax did a lot.

Al Bell talked about how he'd got friends working for Motown who would tell him what Motown's new releases were going to be, and Bell would try to coordinate Stax releases so they'd have something similar come out at the same time, reasoning that people who were in the shop for the Motown record would be more likely to buy a similar Stacks release.

Redding had plans for several more albums, including one intriguing project he talked about where he'd cut his greatest hits, but with the style swapped around, so I Can't Turn You Loose would be reworked as a slow burn ballad, while I've Been Loving You Too Long would become an up-tempo stomper.

But first, there was another tour to do, a Stacks tour of Europe.

When Redding had toured the UK, it had been a revelation for him, and he came back telling tales of a place where the lemonade was syrupy and full of bubbles, and where they loved his music.

Quickly, another tour was set up, and this time, while some shows were billed as the Otis Redding Show, In fact, it was a much bigger event than just Otis.

Phil Walden, Jerry Wexler, and the people at Polydor, Atlantic's UK distributor, put together a list of Walden's acts to tour as a package deal, to promote Stacks as a brand in Europe, the way that Motown had already been promoted.

The list was all those acts that Polydor thought most likely to go down well, which caused some ruffled feathers among those like Rufus Thomas who didn't get invited.

The final line-up was Reading, Carla Thomas, though she had to go back to the USA early and miss much of the tour, Sam and Dave, and Eddie Floyd, plus Booker T and the MGs and the Stacks Horn section, Builders the Marquise, Backing Everyone, and the non-Stacks actor Arthur Conley, included because he'd just had a big hit and was a friend of Reading's and managed by Walden.

The tour started with an invite-only show at the Bagger Nails Club in London, and while Carla Thomas regretted having to go home after only a few shows, she would always remember seeing Paul McCartney watch her as she performed his song Yesterday.

I must have done

something

wrong.

Cause I long

for yesterday.

While most of the singers had toured widely, the musicians were studio musicians first and foremost, and the home players, unlike the MGs, weren't even salaried studio players.

They actually worried if they could go at all, because they had to ask for time off at a regular gig they were played, and were told, you can go, but don't come back, and lost $15 a week each.

There was also the problem that, as Wayne Jackson put it, everybody assumed that Bucketee and the MGs played on the records, the marquees had played on the records, and we knew the stuff.

Wrong.

You use slight memory when you're doing records.

You remember something for three minutes over and over, and when you start the next song, you erase that.

We didn't play those numbers all the time.

We had to try and learn a bunch of them, we had to hustle real hard.

We had to rehearse the day we got there with no sleep and hungover, of course.

It was like a ship constantly on the verge of going out of control.

They also, amusingly, tried to rehearse a version of Winchester Cathedral for the UK audience, but gave up when Redding kept singing Westchester, and never ended up performing it.

The tour went beyond anyone's wildest imaginings, and everyone remembers it as a contest between Redding and Sam and Dave as to who could put on the most dynamic show, with most giving the slightest edge to Sam and Dave.

coming.

We got to get out of here.

We got to go.

We got to go.

But the tour did something else too.

It showed the musicians they were important.

As Steve Cropper later said, it was totally a mind-blower.

Hell, we were just in Memphis cutting records.

We didn't know.

Then we got over there, there were hordes of people waiting at the airport, autograph hounds and all that sort of stuff.

That was something that happened to Elvis or Ricky Nelson.

But it didn't happen to the Stacks Vault band.

Wayne Jackson said, We didn't know we were stars.

We thought we were kids working at the club to make enough money to pay the rent and making records just getting by.

We found out there was a big world out there, and that we were a big part of that world.

We weren't just playing horns in a nightclub and putting horn parts on other people's records for a fee.

We had had an impact.

This led to immediate changes.

Cropper and Al Bell, who was along as the MC,

had a massive row on the tour over what Bell saw as Cropper's ego and Cropper saw as someone who'd been with the company five minutes trying to take over, and both nearly quit.

At the end of the tour, Bell got promoted to executive vice president.

But where before the production credits credits had been to staff?

Now they would go solely to the musician who did most to produce the record, which a lot of the time would be cropper.

And there was more to do on the production side, because by now Tom Dowd had managed to persuade them to upgrade to an actual four-track machine.

Meanwhile, the Marquise Horn section had realised that they should be getting a salary just like the MGs.

They were stars too after all.

One of them, Joe Arnold, quit working for Stacks, so the others were quickly put on a salary.

As a result of the tour, Redding got voted the top international male vocalist in the Melody Maker poll in September that year, knocking Elvis off the top spot for the first time in a decade.

With typical humility, Redding said that Wilson Pickett should have won.

After Europe, the next thing was Monterey.

Redding had broken his own band up as he was planning on getting off the road soon.

He needed to deal with his vocal polyps, which were getting worse.

So for Monterey, he was once again backed by Booker T and the MGs and the Marquis.

He followed Jefferson Airplane, and Jerry Wexler, having seen their performance with the psychedelic light show, was convinced that Redding, in his natty green Chitlin circuit-style suit, would go down like a lead balloon.

On the other hand, Janice Joplin was busily going around telling everyone she could that they needed to watch Redding because Otis Redding is God.

The crowds agreed with Janice.

in the ring the stay, midnight hours day.

Everybody says, Day,

everybody's in the stay.

One more time, it's a day,

everybody says, Day, one more time, and say,

Everybody goes and stay, one time,

yeah,

got the cop and change, got the company,

after that, he did a short tour of California.

On that tour, he was backed by a new band, the Barquets, named in imitation of the Marquis,

who had been signed to Stacks recently and had had a hit with Soul Finger.

The Barquets were all teenagers and were being groomed as the next Booker T in the MGs or Marquees,

studio players who could have their own hits.

Redding got on well with them and decided that when he resumed touring in December, he'd have them as his full-time backing band.

But for now, as he finished up the short tour of California in San Francisco, he was looking forward to getting off the road.

He had an operation book to deal with his polyps, and was nervous about what that might do to his voice.

But he also wanted to relax.

While he was in San Francisco, he had to leave the hotel he was staying in, because he was getting mobbed by fans.

and he ended up staying on a houseboat owned by Bill Graham.

While he was there, he and his road manager Speedo Sims would sit and watch the boats in the dock, and Redding started working on a song about it.

It wasn't like anything else he'd ever worked on.

For the last few months he'd been absorbing the new psychedelic rock.

He would spend the summer listening obsessively to Sergeant Pepper and Revolver, and of course he'd just been at the center of the new movement, and seen the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and the rest.

He'd also been impressed by Bob Dylan, even though he did find some of Dylan's lyrics a little abstract, and Al Bell had suggested he should do an album of folk songs.

Maybe he would.

This song sounded a bit folky.

But it was different.

Speedo Sims said, I couldn't quite follow it.

We must have been out there three or four days before I could get any concept of where he was going with the song.

He was changing with the times, is what was happening.

Similarly, when he got home and played what he had to his wife, she didn't like it, and said, Oh god, you're changing, to which his response was, yeah, I think it's time for me to change my music.

People might be tired of me.

That wasn't the only reason he had to change.

After his polyp surgery, he wasn't allowed even to talk for two months.

But he kept writing new material, and by the time he could get back into the studio again in late November, he was bursting with songs.

He spent three weeks recording in a creative explosion.

Songs like Happy Song, Dum Dum, a self-mocking reworking of his old Fafa Fafa sad song.

Come on now.

Happy song.

Happy song now.

On a cold rain and wind and night.

She shit on my dumb.

But he had to sing differently.

He had to develop a whole new style of singing.

He couldn't rely anymore on yelling and grunting and gutter gutter gutter, as effective as those were.

His vocal cords were simply too delicate.

He had to sing gently, but his new style worked.

Redding had about 30 new songs he wanted to record in those three weeks.

And not only that, he wanted to redo some of his old stuff.

According to Cropper, there was only one reason, and that was because he had his throat operated on.

He was singing better than he ever had in his life, it was just obvious.

So we went back and listened to the things that had been cut on Fordrak.

Things that he didn't sound all that good on, we re-cut them.

Things that probably would never have come out.

Some of them were over a year old.

Many of these tracks weren't initially recorded by the full band.

Redding was doing so much recording and cutting so many tracks that a lot of the time it would come down to a group they called the Midnight Recorders.

Redding on acoustic rhythm guitar, Cropper on lead, and Ronnie Capone on drums.

Capone wasn't even a drummer, he was a trainee engineer at Stacks, but he was willing to stay up all night drinking whiskey with Cropper and Redding and playing a basic beat while they recorded, and Carl Cunningham of the Bar Kays would later overdub drum fills.

A possibility now they had actual multi-tracking.

What happened next has been so mythologised that every single aspect of the rest of this story comes in about four different versions, happening in a different order and with different events depending on who you ask.

This version of the story seems to be the one that fits the facts best, but everything in it might be wrong in its details.

Redding was on his way to the airport to start a tour, and for the first time he was going to be travelling by private plane, something he'd been bragging about for a while.

He'd actually bought his own plane, not yet a Learjet like James Brown, but a small eight-seater plane, and he'd been taking flying lessons, though he had hired a pilot for the tour.

He got to the airport, remembered he had one more song to cut, and phoned Steve Cropper from the airport saying, I've got a smash.

He turned round, got back to the studio, and played Cropper the one verse he had.

I'll be sitting when the evening come.

Watching the ships roll in.

And I'll watch them roll away.

Cropper argued with him about the lyrics, saying that boats don't roll, and if they did, they'd sink.

But Redding insisted that those were the lyrics he wanted.

Cropper said okay, and then worked with him on a second verse.

which as Cropper so often did involved elements of Redding's actual life, going from Georgia to the San Francisco Bay.

Cropper also came up with the Middle Eight, and here he took inspiration from an unusual source, one of the other acts who performed at Monterey.

The association are often divided now, as they were a bit too soft-pop for modern tastes, but Cropper was impressed by how many ideas their records had, and in particular their recent hit Windy, written by Ruth M.

Friedman.

He didn't steal anything directly from the record, but there's a definite resemblance between the bridges of Windy.

And sitting on the dock of the bay.

It was recorded with the full complement of MGs and marquees there, and at the end of the track, Cropper did what he usually did, and left a long instrumental section for Redding to vamp on.

But this time, instead of his gut ta gut ta vamping, he did something very different,

and whistled.

Cropper got to work overdubbing the track.

He added lead guitar, some of his most tasteful playing, and was pleased with the results, though opinion was split in stacks.

Al Bell wasn't sure if the track was commercial, and Duck Dunn was hesitant, saying it had no RMB whatsoever, and it didn't impress me.

I thought it might even be detrimental.

Steve Cropper, on the other hand, was sure it was a smash, and Booker T called it a mother.

Redding was convinced it was going to be his first million seller, though he thought the tape was still missing something when he went off on tour.

It was only after he left that Cropper had the perfect idea.

He remembered that on the early takes, Redding had joked around making seagull noises at the beginning of the song, and it's interesting to think, given how much he was listening to the Beatles, that Redding might have had the sound effects on Tomorrow Never Knows in mind when he did that.

Cropper went to a nearby ad agency and borrowed a couple of tapes from their sound effects library, Waves and Seagulls, and overdubbed them onto parts of the track.

Sitting in the morning sun,

I'll be sitting in the evening come,

watching the ships roll in,

and then I'll watch them roll away again.

Yeah,

I'm sitting on the dock.

But as Cropper said said later, Otis never heard the waves, he never heard the seagulls, and he never heard the guitar fills that I did.

Indeed, some versions of the story have Cropper not even adding them while Redding was still alive.

Because three days after recording the track, on the 10th of December 1967, precisely three years after the death of his idol, Sam Cook, Otis Redding got on a plane from Cleveland, Ohio to Madison, Wisconsin.

just like Buddy Holly, though for very different reasons.

He was making a late-night flight in an upper Midwestern winter, and just like with Holly, there were two more people travelling than there was room for on the plane.

For every tour stop, two members of the touring party would have to fly commercial rather than go on Redding's plane, and this time it was James Alexander, the bass player with the Barquays, and Carl Sims, the backing vocalist.

The other five members of the Barquets, plus Redding, the pilot, and Redding's valet, were all on the plane when, just after radioing asking for permission to land in Madison, it crashed into Lake Monona, four miles from its destination.

The only survivor of the crash was the trumpet player Ben Corley.

Corley had fallen asleep on the plane, clutching his seat cushion, which would work as a flotation device, and with his seat belt unbuckled, he only woke up when he heard Phelan Jones, the Saks player for the group, say Oh no

the last words the nineteen year old would ever say.

Corley's story varied over the years, understandably given how traumatic the event was, but it seems that he was flung away from the crash still clutching a seat cushion, and was saved because he wasn't wearing a seatbelt.

The cushion kept him afloat even though he couldn't swim.

Everyone else in the plane was trapped in the ice-cold water and died.

Otis Redding was 26.

The four members of the Barquets who died were 18 and 19.

Sitting on the Dock of the Bay became the obvious song to release after Redding's death.

Jerry Wexter wanted Steve Cropper to remix it, thinking the vocals weren't loud enough.

But Cropper couldn't face touching the track again so soon after his friend's death.

The track nearly didn't come out, but then Cropper remembered that what he'd sent Wexter was the stereotape, with Redding's voice just in one channel.

If he sent him the mono mix, Redding's voice would sound louder.

He did.

Wexter was happy, and the record came out and became the first posthumous number one record ever in America.

headed for the Frisco Bay.

Cause I've had nothing to fear for

and look like nothing's gonna come my way.

So I'm just gonna sit on a darker bay,

watching the tide

roll away.

I'm sitting on a darker bay,

waiting.

The second would come sooner than anyone hoped, and would be by Janice Joplin, the woman who had been such a fan of Reading.

Sitting on the dock of the bay marked the end of the first phase of Stax in many ways.

Not only had Otis Reading been the face and voice of Stax, and the one person everyone looked up to, but just after it was released, it was announced that Atlantic had been sold to Warner Brothers.

Stax's agreement with Atlantic said that if Atlantic was ever sold, they had the ability to walk away from Atlantic, and they chose to do so.

And it was only then that Jim Stewart found out that the contract he'd signed, which he thought formalized a handshake agreement, actually said: You hereby sell, assign, and transfer to us, our successors or assigns, absolutely and forever, and without any limitations or restrictions whatever not specifically set forth herein, the entire right, title, and interest in, and to, each of such masters and to each of the performances embodied thereon.

He'd sold all the rights to every record Stacks had made up up to that moment for a dollar.

Otis Redding was dead.

Sam and Dave were signed to Atlantic, not to Stax, and it turned out that for nearly three years they'd all been living a lie.

They'd thought they were working for themselves, for a company which gave its musicians shares of the profits, for one big family.

Now the favourite son of the family had died young, and it turned out they'd sold the family's silver for a dollar to a massive corporation.

While Jerry Wexter always claimed that he'd known nothing of that clause and it was inserted by lawyers, according to Al Bell, Wexter did it deliberately and had wanted to take over stacks.

But now that Otis Redding was dead, he just wanted to leave them to rot.

Otis Redding Sr., the father who Otis had loved and respected so much, never recovered from his son's death.

He lived to see Dock of the Bay at the top of the charts, but soon after it left the top spot, he died himself of a heart attack.

There's one final coda, in the words words of Steve Cropper.

Years later I was in Sausalito on tour, and found myself at a place by the bay having a hamburger.

I was watching the water when my eye caught something.

The ferries crossing from San Francisco turned a little as they came in, to slow themselves down.

The move created a rolling wave to cushion their arrival at the pier.

That's when it hit me.

Otis had been watching the ferries roll in.

Robin

is music to my ears.

Roll and rock and rim of the sea.

Bolla do, rock and roll,

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