A soul requiem. Otis Redding’s death hurt Stax to the core, and the role of talking to the press fell on the young shoulders of crash survivor Ben Cauley of the Bar-Kays.
Courtesy of author
CARL CUNNINGHAM’S CARDBOARD REQUIEM
8 January
It was a routine delivery. A parcel truck parked illegally outside a dilapidated cinema on East McLemore Avenue in South Memphis. No one even looked at the driver as he stacked a tower of cardboard boxes and delivered them to the foyer, to the ramshackle offices of one of the most prodigious independent recording studios in the world. This was Stax Records, the flagship home of Memphis soul and a beacon of hope for hundreds of young musicians and teenagers who hung around its doors as if it were a fairground. The boxes were addressed only to the company and they lay by the entrance, unacknowledged, for several days. It was only when a curious staff member opened them that their sad significance came to light. They contained the remains of the drum kit of Carl Lee Cunningham, the deceased drummer of the Bar-Kays, the backing band of Stax’s most famous star, Otis Redding. The cardboard lay scattered over the lavender carpeting, a banal requiem to the tragic events of the previous month, when seven young people plunged to their death in a plane crash. The drum cases were in a bad state, battered by the waves and rusted by cold waters, with their skins partly torn from the rims. The red strips of tape that had once secured the cases top to bottom had peeled off in the deep, and now hung pathetically.
Carl Cunningham’s death hurt Stax to the core. He was a familiar face around the studios, a boy obsessed with music and bewitched by the beat, who came from a famous family of drummers well known at Stax and on the streets of Orange Mound. Like many of his generation, he lived a hand-to-mouth existence, holding down a low-paid job as a shoeshine boy at King’s Barbershop on the corner of College Street and East McLemore. Cunningham’s drums were the last items to be salvaged from the crash site. His horn-rimmed glasses had disappeared, and the drumsticks he had cradled in his hand as the plane plummeted were never recovered. They were presumed lost in the frozen waters of Lake Monona, Dane County, Wisconsin.
Talking to the press was a tough thing to ask anyone to do and that role fell heavily on the shoulders of Cunningham’s friend, the trumpeter Ben Cauley, who was still only twenty. He had been hospitalised in the immediate aftermath of the crash and had spent a difficult Christmas recuperating. Now that 1968 had arrived, he was facing up to the loss of his best friends. He stood in the reception area at Stax, head bowed down in grief and holding back the tears, barely managing to answer the questions in a stammering, fading voice. He was dressed in a double-breasted military raincoat with epaulettes and an Ushanka hat that perched perilously on his head and looked as if he had bought it second-hand from the Russian army. It was in fact a hat that he had bought in Wisconsin as the winter winds grew stronger. On his left arm he wore a new wristwatch, to replace the one he lost in the deep waters of the lake. Ben held his hands in front of him as if he were at a wake and his eyes gazed wearily at the floor. He started to explain his ordeal. He had all but passed out in the freezing lake but miraculously survived by clinging on to a soaking wet seat cushion. Hallucinating with hypothermia, he had watched each of his friends try to escape from the wreckage, but fail to keep their heads above the surface. All drowned before the rescue party arrived. Cauley spent twenty-five minutes in the water. When he could no longer hold the sodden cushion in his numb and frozen hands any longer, he drifted into unconsciousness. ‘Just as soon as I let it go, somebody yanked me up,’ Cauley remembered, still bewildered by the randomness that had saved his life and killed his friends. He admitted to the journalists that his near-drowning provoked recurring nightmares in which ‘the rush of the lake’s icy water, the chill of fear, and the helplessness’ lapped through his mind.
The Stax songwriter David Porter watched the press conference in disbelief. From that day on, he described Cauley’s survival as divine: ‘Ben is a miracle. It’s really that simple.’ Yet Cauley was not alone in his luck; bass guitarist James Alexander had travelled by a different route and survived, and the Stax singer Mary Frierson, who had been given the stage name Wendy Rene by Otis Redding and was pencilled to appear as a warm-up act and a backing singer, stayed in Memphis, having just given birth to a baby boy. Frierson eventually drifted away from music as a consequence of the crash, leaving only a few obscure songs as her legacy. Cauley then told the press that he was rushed to the Methodist Hospital in Wisconsin, suffering from exposure and shock, where he remained for several days. His first visitor was James Alexander, another member of the Bar-Kays, who had missed the doomed flight. The group had drawn lots. Alexander lost out and, with no seat available on the private plane, flew safely by commercial airline via Milwaukee. On his arrival at Mitchell airport, Alexander had been met by police who drove him to visit his friend in hospital. Then he was taken on the grimmest visit of his life – to the mortuary, where he was asked to identify the naked bodies of his friends, name tags hanging limply from their big toes.
When he was asked what had caused the crash, Cauley hesitated, then looked around to Stax’s staff members for guidance. He explained nervously that he had been visited by aviation investigators and had told them that the aircraft had been cold when they first boarded. The Bar-Kays had asked the young pilot if he could crank up the heat, but ominously he told them that the battery reading was too low for extra heat and almost certainly too low to guide the plane to safety.
The crash that killed Otis Redding and six others was a mess of misinformation. Even eye witnesses were unsure of what had happened. It seems that around 3.30 p.m. on 10 December 1967, just three miles from the safety of Dane County’s regional airport Truax Field, a twin-engine Beechcraft-18 plane plunged through low-lying clouds and fog. The gusting rain and squally conditions seemed to tip the plane into a tailspin and it crashed down into Lake Monona. Only a few witnesses saw the crash, but many more claimed to have heard the engine fighting with itself as the pilot tried desperately to descend into an instrument-led landing pattern. What no one knew at the time was that the plane was a private jet owned by soul singer Otis Redding, one he had bought several months earlier from James Brown. The distinctive green-and-white livery, recently painted and emblazoned with Redding’s name, was barely visible in the low-lying clouds, and, according to one of the few eye witnesses, the plane seemed to break apart as soon as it hit the surface of the lake. If it had continued for another mile it would have crash-landed into Madison’s heavily populated East Side. By some small mercy a major catastrophe was averted. That was cold comfort to Stax, whose heart had been ripped out by the crash.
Police divers and volunteers, including a small contingent of local doctors, quickly gathered at the scene. Defying the freezing cold, they plunged into the water to look for survivors, but when it became clear that there was little likelihood of saving lives, a crane was hired from a local contractor, and police began what was to become a painstaking rescue operation. A razor-thin film of ice formed on the bitterly cold waters of the lake, the temperature plunged, and after a day of searching, the search was called off. Later, they managed to winch the wreckage up from the lake. The body of Otis Redding, one of the greatest soul singers in the world, was slowly dragged up from the water. A police photographer captured the moment. Redding’s head was inelegantly trapped between the winch and the police barge, his mouth battered and blood clotted around his lips – those lips that had sung the saddest of songs with such elegance and pleading – ‘Fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa, I keep singing them sad, sad songs y’all, Sad songs is all I know.’
The police barge headed at a glacial pace to the shore, obscured by the dense fog that hung over the lake’s surface. The remnants of the Bar-Kays’ stage suits, bought at Lansky’s on Beale Street back home, floated pathetically to the surface. Only these freezing waters knew the full story of what had actually happened. On board was the plane’s log, which had been found near the
aircraft. It was eventually turned over to Federal Aviation Agency officials, but by the time it was in their safe hands, the impact of one of soul music’s greatest tragedies was reverberating around the world.
Redding had been scheduled to play a concert at the Factory, a club in a converted garage in the city’s West Gorham Street. Local art student William Barr had designed a surreal psychedelic poster advertising Otis, the Bar-Kays and a warm-up group from Illinois, prophetically known as the Grim Reapers, who later morphed into the rock band Cheap Trick. By the time Redding’s body arrived at the laboratory of Dane County, much was still to be unexplained. Coroner Clyde Chamberlain trundled the gurney down a corridor past the county sheriff’s department, with no idea whose the body was or its significance. Chamberlain had never heard of Otis Redding, Stax was a name he was entirely unfamiliar with, and Memphis was a remote southern city he had never visited. Nor was he expecting the attention that would descend on his office. Usually, dead bodies arrived at his autopsy room on gurneys or carried on police stretchers, and with a brown paper carrier bag containing the personal effects of the deceased, typically small sums of cash, a wristwatch, a cigarette lighter, a wallet and a photograph of wife and family.
Otis Redding had always been conscious of his appearance. His colleague and collaborator at Stax, Isaac Hayes, called him ‘a statue of a man’, Jerry Wexler, the emperor of Atlantic Records, described him as ‘a natural prince’, and others talked about him as being of ‘chiselled marble’ and ‘god-like’. A keen amateur pilot, Redding had been sitting upfront, and had been propelled forward into the control panel at the time of the crash. His leg was broken, and a small attaché in which the soul singer kept his cash earnings from two previous concerts was missing, but unlike Cunningham’s drum kit the missing attaché was never found. It has always been the subject of unresolved intrigue – and long-term family resentment. Redding had just completed a lucrative three-night concert trip to Cleveland and the attaché was presumed to have contained $10,000 in cash. Redding’s widow Zelma always presumed that it was stolen by rescue workers or expropriated by a rogue police officer. However, it is more likely to have remained in the silty grey unforgiving waters of Lake Monona.
Redding had died at the pinnacle of his career. His now classic album Otis Blue, released in the autumn of 1965, had gone to number one in the R&B charts and stayed in the pop charts for thirty-four weeks. Rock critic Dave Marsh was convinced it was vocal range that set Redding apart, describing him as ‘one of the great live showmen . . . a masterful ballad singer and a true rocker in the spirit of his boyhood hero, Little Richard’. Three months prior to his death, Melody Maker selected him as the world’s top male vocalist, dethroning Memphis’s most famous son, Elvis Presley, who had held the top spot since 1956. Redding’s fame had brought him to the attention of the White House and he had recently accepted an invitation from Vice President Hubert Humphrey to head a troupe of Stax/Volt artists to entertain US troops in Vietnam in the spring of 1968. He had destroyed all before him when he appeared the previous summer at the celebrated Monterey Pop Festival. In the few weeks prior to his death, Redding had undergone a period of intense creativity, scribbling lyrics down on notepaper as he travelled, improvising ideas on stage, and soaking up influences from urban soul to the new festival rock. Excitedly, Otis was in daily contact with his collaborator and sometime producer Steve Cropper, who as a teenager had bought his first guitar by mail order and was now a mainstay of the Stax studio system. Redding rarely completed songs. He threw ideas out there like confetti, often asking for help to complete the best of them. Cropper was his sounding board and often brought shape to the initial idea, moulding it until it was ready to record. Unlike the more controlled Motown system, or, more famously, the Hollywood studio system, Stax was informal, haphazard and collegiate, and in contrast to the urban sounds from the north, Stax was heavy with southern heat. Cropper was drawn to a ballad that Otis had sketched out while relaxing on a houseboat on Waldo Point, California, after a residency at the Fillmore. He sensed that ‘(Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay’ had a wider appeal, way beyond the narrow register of Redding’s trademark deep soul ballads, like ‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long’ or ‘Try A Little Tenderness’. The song’s narrative was one of departure, loneliness and yearning for home, universal themes that could appeal far beyond the ghetto bar-rooms. It was one of a catalogue of songs Redding recorded in a period of intense activity at Stax studios in December 1967, and his death brought the songs prophetically to life. In a fast turnaround, motivated by a mixture of remembrance and market greed, Stax – with the help of their distrusted colleagues at Atlantic Records in New York – rush-released the song. It hit the streets on 8 January 1968 and became an instant success – number one in the USA, the UK and much of Europe – selling over four million copies and dominating awards throughout the year. Out there on radio stations, and in the stores, it took on a watery mournfulness, as if Otis had written the song as his final farewell. Suddenly, a song about love took on much greater significance, and the metaphor of the dock of the bay came to mean a lover’s requiem, suicidal self-reflection, or the chronicle of a death foretold. The song ends with Otis whistling the final refrain, as if he is lost for words, fading into a distant forever. Many have claimed that in the recording session Redding had simply run out of words and ideas, but keyboardist Booker T. Jones was adamant that it was all planned, observing that the song was ‘beautifully simplistic – all major chords. Otis’s lyrics touched me – about leaving home and watching the bay, trying to figure things out as everyone’s pulling at you. My notes on the piano fed into that. I wanted to capture a maritime feel – the sound of a boat on the Mississippi River, and the sounds of gospel and New Orleans. I put those flourishes around Otis’s voice.’ Cropper filled out the under-produced parts of the song by borrowing sound effects from a rival studio on Union Avenue. ‘I went over to a local jingle company [called] Pepper-Tanner, and got into their sound library and came up with some seagulls and some waves, and I made the tape loop of that, brought them in and out of the holes, you know. Whenever the song took a little breather, I just kind of filled it with a seagull or a wave.’ The finished recording remains one of the greatest posthumous pop songs of all time: enriched by death and given profundity by the circumstances. Writer Jack Hamilton describes the song as ‘another thing entirely, a song about homesickness that Redding turns into something elemental, existential . . . It is personal, bold, warm and warming, completely magnificent. And written and performed by a man who was only twenty-six years old.’
The coroner’s office in Madison had become a place of chaotic activity. One by one, the bodies of young black men were brought in, and all were pronounced dead due to drowning: Jimmy King (18), guitarist with the Bar-Kays; the drummer, Carl Lee Cunningham (18); organist Ronnie Caldwell (19); Matthew Kelly (17), a personal valet to Otis Redding; and pilot Richard ‘Dick’ Fraser (26). Fraser had been raised in Warner Robins, Georgia, near Otis Redding’s hometown of Macon. Although there was talk of low battery power and ice on the carburettor, the consensus within the light-aviation industry was pilot error.
The Bar-Kays had been students together at Booker T. Washington High School, deep in South Memphis. It was the informal academy of southern soul, and many of its most precocious pupils had gravitated to Stax Records as odd-job staff, session musicians and eventually soul superstars. In the improvisational world of the East McLemore studios, the Bar-Kays hustled a Top Ten hit with the infectious ‘Soul Finger’, a storming party track that opened with the riff from the nursery rhyme ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb’. Propelled by Cunningham’s relentless drums, it became a street funk anthem. The song captured the spirit of the place and the times. Young neighbourhood kids from the Memphis ghettos had packed into the studio to add authenticity as they chanted effusively to the music. A few days after high-school graduation, the Bar-Kays joined Otis Redding on the road, and once performed at the famous Apollo Theater in Har
lem, where, unrehearsed, James Brown had jumped onto the stage and performed an unscripted duet with Redding. Resplendent in their canary-yellow suits, the Bar-Kays tore up the theatres on the old Chitlin’ Circuit and were blasting a reputation nationwide until the day that the last remnants of their yellow suits floated to the surface of Lake Monona.
It was to be death, rather than street funk, that bound the lost Stax boys together. Between registering the deaths of the teenage band members and liaising with the Madison police, Clyde Chamberlain eventually managed to make phone contact with Redding’s widow, Zelma. She insisted on travelling to the Wisconsin morgue together with her father-in-law, Otis Redding Sr, in order to accompany her husband’s body back to his native Georgia. Redding’s father, a southern preacher, had resented his son’s career as a soul singer and chastised him for appearing in godless nightclubs, but fame, critical respect and money had tempered his criticism. With the unspoken blessing of the dead star, they agreed that the final resting place would not be Memphis, but Redding’s 300-acre Big O Ranch, which was situated about twenty-five miles north of his hometown. Redding had bought the ranch in 1965 for $125,000 on the back of two years of hits and a relentless itinerary of live shows. ‘He always wanted a ranch,’ Zelma told the US news broadcaster CNN, recalling the ‘freedom I could see him have when he came home off the road’. Redding’s ranch was a world apart from where Carl Cunningham and the teenage Bar-Kays grew up. They were from the blistering segregated streets of Memphis’s Orange Mound, the biggest African-American community outside Harlem. It was this contrast and contradiction that gave Stax uniqueness – urban and country were thrown fortuitously together. Redding was most at home in rural environments, raising cattle, riding horses and working away in his barn while Cunningham grew up thrashing skins on a makeshift drum kit in his family’s overcrowded shotgun-style house near Kimball Avenue.
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