Filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker, the documentarian responsible for Bob Dylan’s Don’t Look Back, was there with a camera crew, and his film Monterey Pop (and the subsequent DVD of the entire Stax set) documents the crowd’s reaction. After the warm-up there’s a quick and low-key introduction from Tommy Smothers of the folk-comedy act the Smothers Brothers, and the audience reacts with mild applause. The horns play a galloping fanfare and Otis hustles onstage, his blue mohair suit contrasting with the band’s matched green. Behind them is a thirty-foot psychedelic display of swirls and strobing blobs. Moments into the first verse of “Shake,” the Sam Cooke song performed at a trillion miles per hour, half the band drops out, leaving just Otis, Al Jackson, and Duck Dunn to carry the song—and they drive it, hauling the tens of thousands of people with them. Every audience likes dynamics, and Otis was winning them over. Aretha had just made a pop hit with her version of Otis’s “Respect,” and he next let the audience know where the song originated.
Catching his breath before the ballad—everyone needed a ballad after that fiery romp—he chatted with the audience, Booker’s organ quietly evoking prayer time at the neighborhood church. Introducing a “soulful number,” Otis asks, “This is the love crowd, right? We all love each other, don’t we?” They assure him it is and they do. He can hear them, but he’s not satisfied. “Am I right?” he screams, and they scream back at him affirmatively. “Let me hear you say ‘Yeah,’ then!” And he hears them, a pregnant pause following, organ notes falling, a hole opening in the sky and the music outlining God’s face. It’s only a few seconds, but it’s a world, too, and then Otis eases in: “I’ve been—” and he takes a breath, maybe two. It’s as if he’s finished his sentence. Subject, verb. The past tense is made present by the next words, framed by breaths, “loving you”—and the guitar begins to rise—“too lo-o-ng”—another breath—“to stop now.” As fast as the other songs were, this one is that much slower. Did we rock your socks off? (Let me hear you say Yeah!) Well, now we’re going to wrench your heart. (Yeah!) The horns stair-step up, soon to be answered by Booker’s cascade down. Every note Steve plays is distinct—there’s that much space. The verse is punctuated by three staccato notes, the whole band together, and Otis’s body flails on each note. As if the song could get more intense, Otis shares the intimacy of the group with the masses by casually turning toward the drummer and, totally unplanned, interrupts the song (without it feeling like an interruption) and says, “Can we do that one more time, Al, just like that?” and without pause or hesitation—the band is that tight—they give Otis three more notes. Each one fires like a rifle, and he flails and wails, then asks twice more to do it again—oh, oh, oh—and then eases into the rest of the song. It’s showmanship, it’s artistry, it’s love and affection, and that night in Monterey, California, it was contagious. The Love Generation caught Otis Redding.
They were living the crossover moment, the cultural connection between the insular southerners and progressive America—the white, record-buying hippies and the deep soul of Redding and the MG’s. He followed with a reinterpretation of the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” that was familiar enough to keep the audience comfortable but also distinctly his own; the lead-guitar riff was played by the horns. The set and the night closed with “Try a Little Tenderness” rising from a ballad to a full-on soul maelstrom—“I don’t want to go but I have to go y’all”—and when he leaves, the heavens open, a destiny manifest, a new audience that will leave the show and seek his records. Louis Armstrong crossed over, Sammy Davis Jr. crossed over, Sam Cooke crossed over, and finally, great God almighty, Otis Redding was reaching that fabled shore.
“After that,” says Jim Stewart, “especially on the West Coast, his sales mushroomed.” Otis’s career had been a steady and constant ascension, a fire that continuously grew in both light and heat. Finally, it was raging.
Zelma Redding, Otis’s widow, recollects him standing in the doorway after he made his way home. “He said, ‘You just can’t believe what happened.’ He said, ‘I blew them away.’” Zelma laughs. “Monterey was a highlight. Him walking in that door and looking with those big eyes, saying, ‘I killed them.’ He just knew he was on the right path.”
Sam and Dave were also walking that path. Since hitting with “Hold On, I’m Coming,” the duo had released “Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody,” “You Got Me Hummin’,” and “When Something Is Wrong with My Baby,” all written by Isaac Hayes and David Porter and all top-ten R&B hits. From the European tour, their live version of Sam Cooke’s “Soothe Me” also hit the charts. They performed nearly three hundred shows a year, carrying a band that would soon grow to sixteen pieces—mostly horn players whose energetic moves with their gleaming instruments became solar flares radiating from these two stars. They were widely known as the greatest live act of all time.
Songwriters Hayes and Porter were also on an astral plane, merged into a single identity. Their songs seemed pulled from the ether wholly formed for listening enjoyment, but their channeling of the ordinary to create something extraordinary was in fact a laborious process requiring dedication, discernment, and discipline. “It’s amazing how one little spark will ignite,” Isaac says, explaining how they wrote the duo’s next timeless hit. “‘Soul Man’ was written when there was a lot of racial unrest in this country. There was uprising in various cities, people burning buildings—Watts, Detroit. So I was watching TV and one of the news commentators said, ‘If the black businesses write soul on the building, the rioters will bypass it,’ and I thought about the night of the Passover in the Bible, blood of the lamb on the door, the firstborn is spared. And I realized the word soul keeps them from burning up their establishments. Wow, soul. Soul. Soul man. ‘David, I got one!’ So we started working on it and came up with ‘Soul Man.’”
Released in August of 1967, the song opens with Steve playing a (deceptively) simple two-string guitar lick, backed by a tambourine beat. But that restraint gives way to a playful horn line. As Sam’s lead vocal kicks in, he’s nearly growling, singing of a daring love rescue. Each part is perfectly placed as the song progresses, a carousel of leads and hooks, none battling the other, each a support when not in the spotlight. The horns have applied all they’ve learned from Otis, alternating between complicated but catchy lines and bedrock foundations for the other instruments. Steve injects such exciting bluesy slide-guitar parts that Sam Moore can’t contain himself during one of the choruses and, seeing him create these sounds by moving his Zippo lighter along the strings, Sam hollers out, “Play it, Steve!” Play it he does, they all do, all the way to the number-one spot on the R&B charts (where it stayed for seven weeks) and to number two on the pop charts. Race riots were occurring in Boston, New York, Chicago, and cities large and small across the country. “When ‘Soul Man’ becomes a national number one record,” wrote Rolling Stone magazine at the time, “it indicates that a much more earthy, low-down kind of soul is beginning to get to white America.”
The Sam and Dave Orchestra, widely known in the late 1960s as the greatest live act of all time. (Photograph by Jack Robinson/Jack Robinson Archive/The Conde Nast Archive)
Isaac Hayes (far right) and David Porter (next to him), in front of Stax, February 1968. L–R: Booker T. Jones, Ronnie Stoots, Bonnie Bramlett, Al Jackson Jr. (looking down), Duck Dunn, Delaney Bramlett, Steve Cropper (obscured). (Photograph by Don Nix/Courtesy of the Oklahoma Museum of Popular Culture, Steve Todoroff Collection)
On the heels of Monterey, Otis was ready to tour again, his management eager to capitalize on his success. The MG’s were tethered to the studio, and he needed a band. He’d been hearing of the MG’s protégés, the kids they’d been training and who’d had their own hit, but it wasn’t till that spring that he got to hear them. On a visit to Memphis, he went with Carla Thomas and some other Stax artists to Beale Street, where the Bar-Kays were playing at the Hippodrome. “The Bar-Kays were doing their thing,” recalls Carla. “We were all sitting at the table, and Otis
said, ‘Listen to those little boys!’ He called them ‘little boys.’ ‘Listen to those little boys! My goodness, they sound like tenfold.’”
The Bar-Kays could play the hits of the day as well as their own material (they were nearly done recording their first album, a mix of originals and cover songs). Guests began sitting in with the band, and Otis leapt at the opportunity. “When Otis got up there and we started playing behind him,” says James Alexander, “he kept looking back. We were just teenagers, we had all this energy—boundless energy. And when we finished our performance, he just kept saying, ‘I like this band.’” He mentioned going on the road, an idea that appealed to these “little boys” much more than attending school. “He said he would get us a tutor so we could travel and be his band,” James continues, “but our parents banded together and said, ‘We’re not going to let these kids go until they finish high school.’ At that time, all of the Bar-Kays except for me were in the twelfth grade. I was in the eleventh grade. And it was very clear that we was going to end up playing with Otis Redding.”
Otis Redding
“Oh, Otis loved those kids so much,” says Zelma. “One of the reasons for getting a new, bigger plane was so the Bar-Kays could tour with him and he could get them home on Sunday night or Monday morning so they could go to school. They was his babies. That’s exactly what the Bar-Kays were. And they had so much talent.”
Four of the five Bar-Kays threw their high school graduation caps in the air and then all of them, including rising senior James Alexander, boarded a plane that very night bound for New York and a series of gigs at the Apollo. They’d had no rehearsal; Otis had told them which records to learn, and in the dressing room before the first show, they discussed the gig. “The night of graduation,” says James, “we took a flight to New York—a group of guys that have never been no more than a fifty-mile radius in all directions of Memphis, Tennessee. That whole thing that Stevie Wonder says—‘skyscrapers and everything’—we’re just looking all around.” The bill had other soul stars on it, and between sets of the whole revue, the Apollo ran a feature film. “The Apollo audience is tough,” James continues. “They had four or five shows a day, starting from like twelve forty-five [in the afternoon]. We didn’t have but one uniform at the time, so we would wear that uniform all day. Parents would drop their kids in the morning and there wasn’t no such thing as turning over the house. You’d ask the crowd, ‘How y’all doing this evening?’ Nobody would respond. If somebody has been there since a quarter to one, they might answer, ‘When you going to change clothes?’ We were there for ten days, and before we left, we won them over.”
“The last day at the Apollo, we did one of the best shows of my life,” says trumpeter Ben Cauley. “As the group played, Otis called James Brown onto the bandstand, and we were doing ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.’ We was playing some stuff there that I couldn’t explain to you. But Otis was stepping, James was stepping, and we started stepping right with them. ‘One thing’s for sure,’ Otis said, ‘I don’t care if y’all are stepping because y’all be playing your behinds off!’ We were in full bloom. Whatever we needed, it just opened up.”
That summer, Otis toured heavily with the Bar-Kays. He’d upgraded to a twin-engine Beechcraft private plane; it held eight people, but they were a ten-person entourage: Otis, the pilot, two valets, and six Bar-Kays. They worked out a rotation system. “When we got to each city,” explains James Alexander, “we would always rent two vehicles. The two not on the private plane would drop the group at the hangar, then return the rental vehicles and take a commercial flight.” They played all over the continent, including a show at the Expo ’67 World’s Fair in Montreal, Canada, on July 4, and a week in San Francisco at the Basin Street West that James recalls as among their best gigs. The Bar-Kays pushed Otis hard; he’d been developing a serious hoarseness, and it worsened. When a doctor found polyps on his vocal cords, surgery was required. The operation would risk that he’d never sing again, but if he didn’t have it, he was guaranteed to lose his voice. Some of the Bar-Kays had enrolled for the fall semester of college in Memphis, so there was a natural break around Labor Day. The convalescence required six weeks of total silence, and Otis decided to throw a last party. He was having a swimming pool installed at the Big O Ranch, so he planned a huge gathering there for Labor Day weekend. He set up a stage and featured Sam and Dave, Arthur Conley, the Bar-Kays, and others. They cooked five pigs and two cows, and guests arrived on buses from Atlanta. Otis didn’t perform, worn out by the summer’s travels, but he was a gracious host. “He was so tired he was just sitting there out in the middle of the front yard,” Zelma said. “He spoke to everybody but he just couldn’t move.”
For the first time in this constant climb for success, Otis would have a few weeks off. His children were five, four, and three, and he’d taste bonding time with them. He’d have quiet time with Zelma, from whom he’d grown distant by the constant travel. And he’d have time with his thoughts—to be creative, to reflect on where he’d come from and where he was going. He was twenty-six, and the past five years had been a blur. He’d be able to consider his relationships: with his manager, with his record company, with his wife. After Labor Day, he went under the knife, and the Bar-Kays went back to school.
Otis wouldn’t know the surgery’s results until six weeks had passed. If he tested his voice, he could do irreparable damage. Strict silence, doctor’s orders. He couldn’t even shout for joy when the October issue of the British magazine Melody Maker named him top male vocalist; he’d dethroned Elvis from the position the King had held for ten years. In the quiet, he wrote new material. Instead of having to snatch an hour after sound check, or pull out the guitar before going to bed, he could really focus on songwriting. “He dissected the Sgt. Pepper album,” says manager Phil Walden. “I’d get him Bob Dylan albums and stuff like that. It made him much more conscious of the importance of lyrics.”
When he returned to the doctor, the results were very good indeed. Given clearance to resume his career, his voice quickly regained strength. With a mixture of excitement and trepidation, he booked time at Stax for the end of November and beginning of December, more than two weeks—time enough to polish some songs with Steve Cropper and to record a batch of new material.
“Otis was so busy on the road we could hardly get time to do any sessions with him,” says Jim. This booking was going to be different.
“Otis called me from the airport,” Steve remembers. He’d just landed in Memphis, and he was excited. “He was coming in to write, and then we were gonna set up the sessions based on what we’d written. He said, ‘I gotta show you this song.’ He said, ‘I’m coming right down the studio.’” When he walked in, he told Steve to get his “guh-tar” (as he pronounced it); Steve kept an acoustic Gibson B-25 at the studio. Otis wrote songs in open tuning, so Steve tuned to open E. “He started singing this ‘Dock of the Bay,’” says Steve. “He had the intro and most of the first verse. I helped him with, I think, ‘I left my home in Georgia, headed for the Frisco bay,’ and then I wrote the bridge with him.”
They quickly recorded the song. (Steve remembers doing it early in the sessions; Jim says it was the very last song.) “We had been trying to find something that Otis could sing that would be a crossover hit,” Steve continues. “We tried ballads, from ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ to ‘Try a Little Tenderness.’ We came close, but we didn’t really have that record that leaves rhythm and blues and starts going up the pop charts, being played by popular demand. The day we recorded ‘Dock of the Bay,’ we looked at each other and said, ‘This is our hit, we got it.”
Jim Stewart, harking back to his first session with Otis, wasn’t terribly impressed by “Dock of the Bay.” The song was unusual for Otis, and didn’t strike Jim like “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” or “Try a Little Tenderness.”
In fact, “Dock of the Bay” has none of the trademark Otis Redding characteristics. There’s not the rambunctious energy, there�
�s no growling vocals, it’s not a ballad that aches. Rather, it’s introspective and contemplative, a sudden synthesis of the Beatles and Bob Dylan by a soul singer. He’d been captivated by Sgt. Pepper—but the song is hardly derivative of the Beatles. It conveys a new worldliness, an ability to present the ultimate sophistication, which is simplicity. It’s a leap in the way that Otis’s first session was, when he went from imitating Little Richard to establishing his own ballad style, walking through a door he hadn’t previously the confidence, nor the artistic development, to enter.
During those couple weeks in Memphis, Otis recorded and sang, sang and recorded. “Hard to Handle” hit the tape. They cut the Five Royales’ “Tell the Truth,” Zelma’s “I’ve Got Dreams to Remember,” the propulsive “Love Man.” Things kept getting better. “Before the operation, he couldn’t sing all night,” Steve explains. “His voice would break up. But after, he just kept going. We were up till six one morning.” His post-surgery voice sounded so much stronger and warmer that they dug up multitrack tapes from prior sessions and replaced the older vocals. Over the two weeks, they cut nearly four albums’ worth of material.
On Friday, December 8, they took a break. That weekend, Otis was to perform three shows with the Bar-Kays—Nashville, Cleveland, and then Madison, Wisconsin—and the MG’s (with David Porter on vocals) were going out Saturday to play Indiana State University. “Otis stuck his head in the studio before leaving,” says Steve, “and said, ‘See ya on Monday.’”
Otis’s Friday-night gig in Nashville ended early, so at his suggestion they left for Cleveland right away, giving them a chance to catch a bit of the O’Jays and the Temptations at Leo’s Casino, the same Cleveland club they were booked into. It was a treat for the band. They did the Upbeat TV show that afternoon and when they played Saturday night, “It was just unbelievable,” says James, “the crowd response was just unbelievable.”
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