Estelle Axton and Jim Stewart, late 1963 or early 1964. Rufus Thomas has a hit, Otis’s release is hanging in. In two years, Jim will quit his day job at the bank.
In the wake of the first single, Otis formed a touring band with players from Macon, and he promoted “These Arms” as best he could. Well over half a year passed before he returned to Stax. Working with the MG’s, he recorded “That’s What My Heart Needs,” a ballad in the mold of “These Arms” that expanded the sound with horns, and indicates a blossoming ease between Otis and Steve’s musicianship; it broke the top thirty on the R&B charts. Redding’s powers of persuasion were also evident away from the microphone, convincing Jim Stewart to record singles by three members of his road band, which buoyed their draw at shows.
When Redding returned a third time, his musical ideas had significantly crystallized. He recorded a treatment of “Ruler of My Heart,” a song by Irma Thomas and Allen Toussaint. Otis’s “Pain in My Heart” is a full-on realization of the textures in his voice, a beautiful interaction with the band. The MG’s, who backed him in the studio but did not tour with him, lay down a deceptively simple backing track, allowing Steve’s guitar to play sinuous fills that accent the embellishments in Otis’s singing. The love affair between Otis and the horn section is in its springtime. “I really think Otis was a genius,” says Wayne Jackson, trumpeter. “Genius means being touched by God. In your mind and your heart, you’re able to focus that power. That’s a genius.” The three horn players would each take a note to form a chord, and they played whole notes. Otis, however, would get right in the player’s face—horns, guitar, drums—and imitate the sound or rhythm in his head by using his whole body to convey the impact he desired. You’d feel what he was saying before you heard it, but you’d hear it soon enough. Fans sent “Pain in My Heart” to number sixty-one on the pop charts. (The industry magazine Billboard, ruler of the charts, was not maintaining an R&B chart during this period, not because it was discounting R&B, but because the African-American sound had so influenced the pop sound that Billboard no longer recognized a distinction. Black music—once segregated at best, and often simply dismissed—was being fully embraced by America. However, the R&B chart returned the following year; in its absence, the chart’s influence on sales became very clear to the labels and artists, and they welcomed its return.)
In the spring of 1964, with the recording of “Security,” Otis was a new man in the studio. The horns sound like him singing, the guitar sounds like his hands waving about between lyrics. He’s learned to commandeer the ineffable and give it his own accents. “He made everybody smile and he made everybody a better musician,” says Duck. “After that, when Otis came in to cut, no one was late. He wore a halo.”
This sense of Otis in a golden glow, a firmament of goodness, is universal at Stax. In his hometown of Macon, there are those who claim authorship of some of his biggest hits—notably “These Arms” and “Respect”—and there, Otis is judged differently. (Not giving proper credit is a form of theft, substantial theft when the song becomes a hit; it’s possible others wrote those songs and Otis stole them outright, but his personal imprint is so individual that whatever elements others supplied, he surely supplemented and finished, making him at least coauthor. A Macon bandmate of Otis’s, Benny Davis, is one of several people who claim authorship of “These Arms,” and he says, “I always thought he’d do the right thing about it, you know? But he never did.”) At Stax, Otis was beloved. “Otis was the nicest person I ever met,” says Steve. “He didn’t have any vices, and he didn’t have any faults—which sounds like you’re making it up. Everybody loved him. Kids gravitated toward him. Women worshipped the guy. His fans were unbelievable. He was tall, good-looking, and he sang his gazoo off, so why not? He was always on time, always together, loved everybody, made everybody feel great. He was like a country preacher, always wanting to help people out and always paying people compliments.”
Mid-1965, Stax signs Otis Redding and Rufus and Carla Thomas to new contracts. The future looks bright. Jim quits the bank. “My suits were a little more continental than bankers appreciated,” he says. (Promotional photo by API Photographers/API Collection)
Otis’s drive to find his own voice—his brute power, his insistence on precise backing, his consistent drive and demand to be pushed—reverberated throughout Stax, influencing a change in the MG’s, a retuning of their own voice. Though Lewie Steinberg and Al Jackson were the same age, they played from different generations. Steinberg had a classic “walking bass” sound, loping up and down the scale, common especially in big bands and jazz-based combos; it’s a fun sound, makes you feel like you’re taking a walk on a pretty day, bobbing your head and humming a little tune. But by the mid-1960s, with the growth of rock and roll, the bass was becoming more of a power tool, an automatic weapon, a car that rumbled instead of a pedestrian that ambled, and Duck Dunn, who’d been playing on sessions at Stax since the earliest days of the Mar-Keys—and who was a prizewinning dancer—knew how to wield the same instrument (a Fender Precision bass) in the fashion of the new era. “Times changed,” says Duck. “Lewie could play the hell out of that walking bass, but then music went in the syncopation thing, like with Otis’s ‘Security.’ Maybe I was a little bit faster, but rhythm and blues went from walking to syncopation.”
Duck played on “Security,” and the change in the MG’s lineup was public with their early 1965 single featuring one side with Steinberg and the other with Dunn (and neither with Booker T. Jones who in his final year at Indiana University was replaced by Isaac Hayes). The Steinberg side is the hard-driving but somewhat carnivalesque sounding “Outrage” (named, perhaps, to acknowledge Steinberg’s hurt), while the Dunn side, “Boot-Leg,” is as hard-rocking and exciting as anything the MG’s had released to date. A walking bass couldn’t run to keep up with it.
Duck joins the MG’s in 1965. L–R: Donald “Duck” Dunn, Booker T. Jones, Steve Cropper, Al Jackson Jr. (Promotional photo by API Photographers/Earlie Biles Collection)
There was one other issue. “The group talked to me about problems they were having with Lewie and his drinking,” says Jim. “It’s no secret. But I didn’t say, ‘Get him out.’ The decision came from the group that they were going to have to do something.” Al demanded a command of the beat, and demon alcohol wasn’t improving anyone’s timing. Clean living was still the order of the day in 1964; beatniks may have introduced marijuana on the coasts by now, but in the insular Bible Belt, booze was considered wild and even the Mar-Keys knew to separate the fun from the studio work.
Steinberg has his own theories, and his own magnanimity: “Every time Stax would get a hit record, I would be the one that would put the bass to it. And every time it comes out, somebody else is reaping the benefits. I’m in there recording as one of the Mar-Keys. The next thing you know, Duck Dunn is the Mar-Key. I recorded with Booker T. & the MG’s—next thing you know, Duck Dunn is in Booker T. & the MG’s. There’s a reason for that: Duck and Steve were childhood friends, all through life, which is very beautiful. I admire that two people are able to stick together like that.”
Indeed, whatever other issues there were, Cropper, the boss’s right-hand man, wanted the company of his friend since fourth grade. Ability was not an issue—Duck could play, and in a style that helped modernize the sound. And the replacement presented a beautiful racial symmetry onstage, a message no one looking at the band could ignore.
For Steinberg—thirty-one years old in 1964—although the big time was about to pass him by, he’d made his mark. He’d contributed to several MG’s classics, including “Green Onions,” “Chinese Checkers,” and “Soul Dressing” (and shared in the songwriting royalties). With his band mates, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992, and awarded a Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award in 2007. In 1964, he remained a favored bassist in the era’s better bands and combos—Willie Mitchell, Al Jackson Sr., and Bowlegs Miller sought him. And he had his day job, where he was able
to do all the blending he wanted, and all that he couldn’t achieve at Stax. “I was working with United Paint Company, what they call a mixologist. Any color you might want, I can make it. Ain’t no such thing I can’t make that color.”
Duck’s ascension was the realization of a dream that began with the Royal Spades. “Here’s a bunch of white guys trying to do a bunch of black guys’ music,” he says. “And eventually it led to Steve and I playing with Booker and Al. I didn’t care about the money. I just wanted to be accepted by these great musicians.” He’d been listening to Al Jackson in clubs since he’d been tall enough to sneak in, and he continued to seek him out. “I was working at King Records during the day and playing a hillbilly club called Hernando’s Hideaway and I’d stop by and see Al before going home. He was my mentor. Watching him, he taught me how to play, when to play and when not to play—and it’s mostly when not to play.” Now he was playing alongside him, and in the beginning every session felt like a test. “I was young then, but I knew I had to kick ass. You got Al Jackson over there looking at you, saying, ‘Here it is, Dunn, get it.’ You had to get it or your ass is out of there.”
The Mar-Keys had been drunken teens playing fun music; the MG’s were a serious band. “Al Jackson was the pulse,” says Steve. “His playing said, ‘Here’s a groove, sing to this. Play to this.’ He was demanding that way in the studio, and he was that way onstage. A lot of good drummers want to follow the singer, or they’re watching the guitarist, or trying to lock with someone. At Stax, we all followed Al Jackson. More than any other musician on those records, he was probably the biggest influence in how they sounded.”
Steve’s own style developed in relation to what Al played. “I treated the guitar more as a percussion instrument,” he says. “I treated the guitar very much like I would a set of drums, picking up from the little things that you do on the high hat, on the cymbals, and little stabs and rim shots. I would weave in and out of Al and play where he didn’t and lay out when he did. It was a great combination and we always kept that rhythm going.”
“Al played a cross between jazz and blues,” says Booker. “Al’s idol was Sonny Payne, who was Count Basie’s drummer. Sonny Payne was untouchable. Al’s background was playing blues in Memphis clubs, and at Stax that got combined with rock and rockabilly. Al played that music with his jazz background, so that type of drumming was completely unique—the simplicity that he brought to it combined with the jazz chops.”
“The first thing that Al used to do when he would come to a session was reach in his back pocket, pull out this big fat billfold, and plop it on the snare,” says Steve. “That way the snare didn’t ring too much. And there’s not a lot of cymbals because we didn’t mike the cymbals.”
Otis Redding was a perfect vehicle for Al Jackson’s talent. Otis was guided by his gut, and Al could anchor him, could determine the rhythm, the groove, and the feel that would hold the song and allow Otis to get his ideas across. Their increasing synchronicity and the resulting hits were making Redding ever more confident, and a trio of songs he released in late 1964 and the spring of 1965 were three small steps for the artist, one giant leap for the record label.
“That’s How Strong My Love Is” was written by Roosevelt Jamison, an entrepreneurial music lover with a day job in the lab of a Memphis blood bank. Jamison had begun managing the careers of O.V. Wright and James Carr, two deep-soul singers who came up in the church and were ill-prepared for the temptations of the pop world; Wright would enjoy many R&B hits before withering under a heroin addiction, and James Carr’s notable career was blunted by mental health issues. But in the early 1960s, the future looked bright, and Jamison wrote the song, recorded it with Wright, and brought it to Stax to see if they were interested. Steve Cropper thought Wright’s version was too churchy, but he liked the song and recorded Jamison singing it. At a session, Steve played “That’s How Strong My Love Is” for Otis.
The song is startlingly simple, the music a bed for a plea for understanding from one lover to another: simple yet precise in its emphases—the drums set up the horns, the drums drive the guitar and its fills, the drums anchor the recurring piano chords. This wide but spare foundation allows Otis to stretch out his vocals, to moan low, to rasp and roll and plumb the depths of the imploration. He takes us inside his hurt.
“I loved Otis doing ballads,” says Jim. “To me that’s where he stood out, and that’s where you got the real Otis and the real warmth, and everything about him.” The song became a top-twenty R&B hit, and broke the Hot 100 pop list; within a year’s time, the Rolling Stones would cover it on their first album. Stax was flowering on national—international—soil.
Redding’s musicality reached new heights with “Mr. Pitiful,” the flip side to “That’s How Strong,” which went even higher on both charts. A.C. “Mooha” Williams, a disc jockey on WDIA, Memphis’s premier African-American radio station, would play a Redding ballad and, referring to the sorrow infused in the song, dubbed him “Mr. Pitiful.” On Otis’s next visit to Memphis, Steve suggested an upbeat tune based on the downbeat name, and between the airport and the studio—fifteen minutes—they had most of the song. “They call me Mr. Pitiful,” Redding sings, “that’s how I got my fame.” Al Jackson drives the song but the horns bring the funk, adding their swooping riffs and jive punctuation. They shine midsong when they solo and set up the bridge; Wayne remembers Otis leaning into the section to sing them the part. The notes are so fast, the part so unique, that they were both exhilarated and taken aback. “When he had the rhythm section cooking along, then he’d come back to the horns,” Wayne says. “We were behind a partition. He’d get right in your face with his fist and sing the part, da, da-da, da-da, da-da. And he’d have you breaking out in a sweat and dancing. He was like a big football coach, a huge man, and he had all this energy aimed at you and di-di-li-di-li-de-da, di-di-di-di-di-di-dee-da while we were scrambling to find those notes and play with the rhythm pattern that he was singing.”
“Otis would always have us play in funny keys,” says saxman Floyd Newman. “He had us in sharp keys, like A and B and F sharp, and nobody ever played in those keys. It’s difficult to play in a sharp key, but it’s more of a brilliant sound. And it made us think. There were funny little lines that he would hum to us that would fit perfectly—Otis would know every riff he wanted you to play.” The song hit number ten on the R&B charts.
Redding’s confidence was infectious, and before he cut “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (to Stop Now)” in the first quarter of 1965, Jim Stewart finally found the label reliable enough to do what every dedicated musician would love to do: He quit his day job. His company had been creating chart singles for five years. They’d had hits with established artists, discovered new talent, been so overrun with opportunity that they’d opened on Saturday mornings to give everyone a chance to be heard. But Jim was interested in calculated safety. At the bank, his day was spent analyzing risk. “Stax might not make it, better hold on to my job,” Jim remembers thinking. “But my job began costing me money. And I really didn’t fit in with that banking atmosphere either. My hair started growing longer. My suits were a little more continental than bankers appreciated. The company was growing rapidly and it needed my services twenty-four hours a day. It was a business decision.”
One thing about this new work he was fully committing to—it was fun. He had no training for running a record label, had never worked at someone else’s and wasn’t schooled in the business. Every day was different. And Otis was coming through the studio several times a year, each session a long stride toward artistic success and financial reward. Always ready to write a song, Otis arrived in early spring 1965 with a collaboration that had begun in a nondescript hotel room with Jerry Butler, former lead singer of the Impressions; hanging out after a show together, Butler shared an idea he’d begun but couldn’t finish. It was the first couple lines of “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.” For three years Butler had been trying to figure out where to t
ake it, and he’d taken it nowhere. Otis called him not long after—he’d not only figured out where to take it, he’d taken it there, recording and releasing the song (and sharing the writer’s credit with Butler). “I never would have approached it the way he approached it,” Butler said. “It was just beautiful.” Otis wrenched all the dynamics from the song, building it slowly, the horns teasing the excitement of the lover who wants to go on, then suddenly cutting off to the spare sounds—the lover who wants to quit the relationship. The recurring rise and fall of the melody, the building and disassembling of the instruments, his moans of pity and woe—it’s an artistic triumph not only for Redding but for all of Stax, an indication of how far they’d pushed themselves. “That song, to me, was the beginning of him being that superstar that you always dream of working with in your lifetime,” says Jim. “Just the words, to hear him say, ‘I’ve been loving you too long to stop now’—what more do you have to say? It makes you want to cry. He was such a sincere person. He was so intense. This man—I’ve never known anybody like him.”
“Otis became that power-packed, raw, gutsy, emotional, serious performer,” says DJ Al Bell. “You felt him. You heard the tear in his voice, and that captivated me, and when I went on the radio, it was Otis Redding and me. We were having an affair on the air.”
It was that “tear” in Otis’s voice, the crying and the ache that it evoked, that made him a transcendent vocalist. His songs were about love, but the sense of longing he conveyed was deeper than the love between a man and woman; Otis touched the heart of desire. He sang about love but summoned the poignancy of his times, of people used and being used and wanting an embrace instead of a fist. Black, white—no matter the listener’s race, only the listener’s empathy. Those seeking comfort found it in Otis Redding’s songs.
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