A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Episode 163: “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” by Otis Redding

Episode Date: February 27, 2023

Episode 163 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay”, Stax Records, and the short, tragic, life of Otis Redding. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-three minute bonus episode available, on “Soul Man” by Sam and Dave. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

A History of rock music and 500 songs by Andre Hick. 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 at 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 Soul 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. 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 mini-films. One of them is Jimmy Hendricks' performance, and we will talk about that in a future episode. The other is titled Shake. Otis at Monterey. 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, R&B 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 you 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 Senior 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 a me calypso song out then called Run Joe. That will, of course, be this one. I find a candy store

Telling fortune behind the door Carp grab more And as Joe ran out I've refused to listen to the blues or jazz Listening to Louis Jordan But then people are complex Whatever Otis Sr'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 Pearly Brown. Reading was someone who cared deeply about his father, opinion, and it might well have been that he would eventually have become a gospel performer, because he started his career with a foot in both camps. What seemed to have made the difference is that when he was 16, 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 that 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 Gunda and Lewis Hamlin, who went on to join the line-up 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 you've 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 Richards' Hebe G-Bs. at my baby, then I know down where I'm gonna ring your door till I break your beer. You gotta jump back, jump back, jump back, heap of cheap, you gotta get back, get back. At this time, bedding's repertoire was largely made up of songs by the two grades of baby, put the drinks on me. I got a heap it's even because I loved it so. I got a heap of jeep a jeepa while you have to go with it.

Don't want me, darling. At this time, Bedding's repertoire was largely made up of songs by the two grades of 50s, Georgia R&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 Redding and almost got kicked out.

When Redding found this out, he actually went around 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 his marriage for the rest of Redding's life,

and even when Walden had to do two years in the army in Germany, he managed running 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 L.A. in 1960 to try to become a star. Just before he left, his girlfriend Zellma 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 with the birth, and that he intended to come back to Georgia Rich and marry her. Her response was, sure you is. In L.A., Redding met up with a local record producer, James Jimmy Mack, 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 René Hall, and using several of the musicians who later became the wrecking crew. She's all right, 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. She's All Right was released on Trans World, a small label owned by Morris Bernstein, who also owned Finer Arts Records, and She's All Right 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

Argyles that came out after they'd stopped having hits, and they didn't have any connection to the R&B market. Redding and McKeekin couldn't find any R&B labels that wanted to pick up their recordings, and so Redding did return to Georgia and marry Zellmer a few days before the birth of their son, Dexter. Back in Georgia, he hooked up again with the pine-toppers, and he and Jenkins started trying local record labels, attempting to get records put out by either of them. Redding was the first, and Otis Redding and the Poundoppers put out a single Shout Bamalama, a slight reworking of a song that he'd recorded as Gamalama from a Keekin, which was obviously heavily influenced by Little Richard.

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 man 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 Thorogood 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 have 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, TIFCO, and had put out a single called Pinetop. 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 Berks just out of reach of my two open arms. 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, Gerald 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 Jebeld Records and then he would sell a 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's single which was reissued on Jeveld and then on Atlantic. Galkin 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's record ended up selling about 25,000 and records, for when Galkins saw the Pyn Toppers 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's manager as well as Redding's. Walden would get 50% of Jenkins's publishing, and there would be co-managers of Jenkins. But Galkin had plans for Redding, which he didn't tell anyone about, not even Reading 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's follow-up single at Stax, and he also wanted to bring along a singer he'd discovered, who sang with Jenkins's 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 Jenny Jenkins's driver, as Jenkins didn't have a driving licence. 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 Reading the company station wagon to drive them to the session. The other pint-oppers wouldn't be going. Jenkins was going to be backed by Bucketty and the MGs, the normal Stax backing band. Phil Walden, though, had told Renning that he should try to take the opportunity to get himself heard by Stax, and he pestered the musicians as they recorded Jenkins as Spunky.

Cropa 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 Golkin had planned all along to get Reading to record while he was there. Golkin claimed to be Redding's manager

and told Jim Stewart, the co-owner of Staxx, who acted as main engineer and supervising producer on the sessions at this point, but at Wexler had only funded the session on the basis that Redding would also get a shot at recording. Stuart was unimpressed. Jenkins's session had not gone well, and it had taken them more than two hours to get two tracks down.

But Golkin offered Stuart a trade. Golkin, 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 Stuart half the publishing on Reading's songs. That was enough to make Stuart interested. But by this point, Bucket E. 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 Stuart 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 Reading 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. That was more impressive, though Stuart carefully framed disinterest. Stuart and Golkin put together a contract which signed Reading to Stacks, though they put the single out on the less important vault subsidiary, as they did from much of Redding's subsequent output, and gave Golkin and Stuart 50% each of the publishing rights to Redding's songs. Redding signed it, not even realizing 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 Golkin assumed that that meant all his other contracts were invalid, not realizing that Redding's contract with Bobby Smith had been countersigned by Redding's mother, and so was also legal. Walden also didn't realize that,

but did realize that Golkin representing himself as Redding's manager to Stax 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 Golkin, giving Walden half of Golkin's 50% cut of Redding's publishing, in return for Golkin 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. Jenny Jenkins remained signed to Walden's agency, which quickly grew to represent almost every big sole 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 Mussel 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 Luzer, the Wutan clamp for Gun Will Go, and Oasis for their hit, Go Let It Out. Jenkins would play guitar on several Futurotus Redding sessions, but would hold a grudge against Redding for the rest of 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 Reading to record the song himself. However, he realised that Stax could call on the resources of Atlantic records, and Joe Golkin also hinted that if he played nice, Atlantic might start distributing Confederate too.

Smith signed away all his rights to Reading, 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, Stax was his record label, Joe Golkin got to cut off the top, and Walden, Galkin, 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.

That sound was becoming out of fashion among black listeners at the time. It was considered passe, and even though the Stax 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 Golkin. As Stuart 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 Galkin 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 Cucks, Bring It On Home to Me. 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 Stax, 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 Paola, which would be very illegal,

Stuart Gavar his share of the publishing rights to the song, which eventually made the top 20 on the R&B charts, and slipped into the lower end of the Hot 100. These arms of mine was actually recorded at a turning point for Stacks as an organisation. 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 Redding'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 hit. So Jones could often commute back to the studio for session work and could play sessions during his holidays. The rest of the time, other people would cover the piano parts, or from Cropper, who played piano on Reading'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 Marquise.

That made number 27 on the Cashbox R&B 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 11 on the Cashbox R&B chart. It did well enough, in fact, that the Rolling Stones cut a cover version of the track. Though Reading didn't get the songwriting royalties. By that point, Alan Tucson had noticed how closely it resembled a song he had written for Irma Thomas, ruler of my heart. And so the writing credit was changed to be Naomi Neville, one of the pseudonyms Tucson 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 R&B performers in those years used for what we'd now call a gopher or rowdy. Oscar Mack? 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 Marchant, 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. 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. Carla Thomas had had a couple of R&B hits, and they were expecting a new single. But every time Jerry Wexler phoned Stacks 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, Wexster 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 Stuart, 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 electronic 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 in $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's father, who had also had a number of hits himself on Stacks and son, 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 a 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.

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 Wexer'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 10 on the pop chart, 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 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 Wexel 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 Stax 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 Marquise. The piano player and co-writer on that track was a young man named Isaac Hayes, who had been trying to get work at Stax for some time. He'd started out as a singer and had made a record, Laura were on our last go-round at American Sound,

the studio run by the former Stax engineer and musician Chip's Moorman. 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 Bucketty 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 Stax who could replace Bucketty, 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 Tower, for example, because he was at the slaughterhouse.

The first recording session that Hayes played on as a session player was a notice Redding single, either his fourth single for Stacks, Come to Me, or his fifth, Security. Security is usually pointed to by fans as the point at which Redding really comes into his own, and started directing the musicians' moments. There's a distinct difference in particular in the interplay between Cropper's guitar,

the Marquis' 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 Stax recordings was somewhat similar to the one that the Jordanaires have played for Elvis, or the picks 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 Rayellette, 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 Stax. Instead of a solo, the instrumental break is played by the horns as an ensemble. According to Wayne Jackson, the Marquis' 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 Stax 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 Moohar. 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. 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. Pitiful went to number 10 on the R&B chart and peaked at number 41 on the Hot 100, and its B-side, that's how strong my love is, also made the R&B top 20. Cropper and Redding soon settled into a fruitful writing partnership, to the extent that Cropper even kept the 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-shaped. 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, 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 were just tuned into one, four and five, I mean just simple changes. He said they were the breadwinners. He'd 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 codes 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 Precious Love 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 Reading who told him he liked 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 so would be pointless. It was Redding's song now. I've been loving you too long, became Redding's first really big hit, making number two on the R&B chart, and 21 on the Hot 100. it was soon being covered by the Rolling Stones and I can Tina 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 R&B 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 Reading'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 At Co-Subsidiary,

which had released the small number of albums put out by Stax 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 next. few years, but the album market had a substantial number of audio files, and they wanted stereo. This was a problem for stacks, because they only had a monotaped 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 mixes, the same monotap recorder, and Stax would continue doing their mixes for mono, and all their singles would come directly off that monotape. 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, 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 sounder-like 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 sole 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 Reading took charge in the studio, and how even though he had no technical

musical knowledge, he would direct the musicians. Dowd called Reading a genius and told Phil Walden that the only two other artists he'd work with who had as much ability in the studio were Bobby Daren 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 time.

Redding had never heard the song before. He was not paying a attention to the white pop scene at the time, just to his competition on the R&B 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. Reading starts out more or less singing the right words, but quickly ends up just ad-libbing random exclamations in the same way that he would in many of his live performances.

Otis Blue made number one on the R&B album chart, and also made number six on the U. album chart. Redding, like many soul artists, was far more popular in the UK than in the US. It's only made number 75 on the pop album charts in the US, but it did a remarkable thing as far as Stax was concerned. It stayed in the lower reaches of the charts, and on the R&B 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, R&B 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 Reading 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 Reading 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 Redwall Music, named after Redding and Phil Walden, which was owned as a four-way split between Reading, Walden, Stuart and Joe Galkin.

Redding also got the right as part of his contract negotiations to record other artists using Stax's 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, Loretta Williams and Billy Young. 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 Waxter 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 Tower. Atlantic were also loaning Stacks Sam and Dave, who were contracted to Atlantic but treated as Stax artists, and whose hits were written by the new Stax songwriting team of Isaac Hayes and David Porter. Reading 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, Bucketty and the MGs had a new bass player. Donald Duck Dunn had always been the other bass player at Stax, ever since he'd started with the Marquise,

and he played on many of Redding's recordings, as had Louis Steinberg, the original bass player with the MGs. But in early 1965, the Stax studio musicians had cut a record originally intending it to be a Marquise record, but decided to put it out as by Bucketty and the MGs, even though Bucketty wasn't there at the time. Isaac Hayes played keyboards on the track. Booker T Jones would always have a place at Stax

and would soon be back full-time as he finished his degree, but from that point on Duck Dunn, not Louis Steinberg, was the base player for the MGs. Another change in 1965 was that Stacks 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 Sam and Dave and Wilson Pickett, Atlantic had finally put their arrangement with Stacks 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 and 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 Stax 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. Those records were.

was supervised by Milk Gable, the same Milk Gable 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, Sappice, which had put out a few records by Floyd and others on the same kind of deal with Atlantic that Stax had. Floyd would himself soon become a staff songwriter at Stax As with almost every decision at Stax, the decision to Haya Bell 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 a 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. Stuart didn't want to hire Bell, 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 Stax record.

We're not getting our due. We knew that. We needed more promotion than he had all the pull with all those disc jockeys. He knew E. Rodney Jones and all the big cats, the Montague's and so on, He knew every one of them. Many people at Stax 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 Stuart 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 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 L.A. to play the Sunset's trip. Redding's performance at the Whiskey Agogo, 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 Reading 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 Rykuda, one of the greatest slight guitarist 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 with Bob Dylan who played Redinger song he'd just recorded but not yet released Redding agreed that the song he sounded perfect for him and said he would record it. He apparently made some attempts of 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. 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 Reading for the film war in San Francisco. Reading 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 Reading originals, including Fafafas Sad Song, another song in the mould 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 Cuck, 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 Dr. Strange,

love but it had also been covered relatively recently by two sole greats aretha Franklin I may get weary women do get weary but to one who's weary try a little and Sam cook says very simply that love oh she may be weary women do get weary Oh, if she gets weary, try a little tender. 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 Stacks records.

Hayes, his songwriting partner David Porter, Steve Cropper, Doc 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 Cucks a change is going to come, and which dominated the early part of the track.

Then the band came in, slowly at first. Anticipating Never, never, never, never Forzette Without them Try Tender Nair By deciding

That after the main song Had been played He kicked 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. As Bucketty 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 realised 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 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 there 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 Sam and Dave as his support act, and then headed west to the film war 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 De 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. Janet Joplin turned up at the film war every day at 3pm 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 film or 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 Reading 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 Reading as a rock singer, and shows again how different genres

appeared in the mid-60s to how they appeared today. In that light, it's interesting to look at a quote from Reading 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 Bee-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 R&B. He was soul, which was a different thing from R&B, 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. Or at least the label credits on that single, which Redding produced for Conley, who he got signed to Akko after Jotis record closed down. Say it was written by Reading and Conley.

Some might say that it bears a slight resemblance to Sam Cook's song, yeah. Certainly J.W Alexander, Cook's old friend and music publisher, thought so. Luckily for Reading and Conley, Alexander was a good sport about it, and agreed to a deal in which Reading would give Alexander the publishing, and would keep on cutting covers of Sam Cuck songs on his albums, hardly a hardship for Reading, who had been doing so regularly anyway. Indeed, he did so on his next album, an album of duets with Carla Thomas.

That album had been suggested by Jim Stewart, who wanted to replicate the success of 8 Takes 2 by Marvin Gay and Kim Weston, which had just become a big hit, two years after it was recorded. This was something Stacks did a lot. Al Bell talked about how he'd got friends working for most, 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 Stax 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 styles 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 Stax 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 Stax 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 Redding, 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 in the MGs and the Stacks Horn section,

billed as the Marquise, backing everyone, and the non-stacks act Arthur Conley, included because he just had a big hit and was a friend of Reddings and married 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.

While most of the singers had toured widely, the musicians were studio musicians first and foremost, and the horn 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 Bucketty and the MGs played on the records, the Marquis 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 hung over, of course. It was like a ship constantly, 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. 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 Cropa's ego and Cropa 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. president. But where before the production 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 Marquis Horn section had realised that they should be getting a salary just like the MGs. They were stars two after all. One of them, Joe Arnold, quit working for stacks. 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 from Monterey, he was once again backed by Booker T in the MGs and the Marquise. He followed Jefferson Airplane, and Jerry Waxler, 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 Reading because Otis Redding is God. The crowds agreed with Janice.

After that he did a short tour of California. On that tour he was backed by a new band, the Bar Cays, named an imitation of the Marquise, who had been signed to Stacks recently and had had a hit with Soulfinger. The Bar Cays were all teenagers and were being groomed as the next Bookerty and the MGs, or Marquise,

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 back. 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 Spido 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 centre 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 Dillon'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 fokey. 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, Dumb Dumb, a self-mob. mocking, reworking of his old fafafafas sad song. 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 gutta, gutter, as effective as those were.

His vocal chords 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 four track, things that he didn't sound all that good on, we recut 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 Staxe, but he was willing to stay up all night drinking whiskey with Cropper and Redding and playing a basic beats while they recorded, and Carl Cunningham of the Bar Cays 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. Reading 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 yet 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 Sitting at the dock of the bay, take one Cropper argued with him about the lyrics 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 hits Windy

written by Rutham 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 marquise there, and at the end of the track, Cropper did what he usually did, and left a long instrumental section for Reading to vamp on. But this time, instead of his gutta-to-gut-ta-vamping,

he did something very different and whistled. Cropper got to work overdubbing the track. He had a lead guitar somewhere 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 R&B 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 Tamara Never Knows in mind when he did that.

Cropa 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. and sun, I'll be sitting when the evening come, watching the ships roll in, and then I watch and roll away again. Yeah, I'm sitting on the dark of a... But as Cropa 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 Cropa not even adding them while Reading 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 Cuck, 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 Midwest and 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 Barcais, and Carl Sims, the backing vocalist.

The other five members of the Barcaes, 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 Manona, 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 seatbelt unbuckled. He only woke up when he heard Phelan Jones, the sax player for the group, say, oh no, the last words the 19-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 his 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 Bar Cays who died were 18 and 19. Sitting on the dock of the bay became the obvious song to release after Redding's death. Jerry Waxter wanted Steve Cropper to remix it, thinking the vocals weren't loud enough. But Cropa couldn't face touching the track again so soon after his friend's death. The track nearly didn't come out, but then Cropa remembered that what he'd sent Waxter was the stage.

Stereo tape with Redding's voice just in one channel. If he sent him the monomix, Redding's voice would sound louder. He did. Wexler was happy, and the record came out and became the first posthumous number one record ever in America. on the dock of the bay watching a tire away

and sitting on a dock of the bay 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 stacks in many ways not only had Otis Redding

but the face and voice of stacks 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 their handshake agreement, actually said, You hereby sell a sign and transfer to us, are successes 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 to that moment for a dollar. Otis Redding was dead. Sam and Dave was signed to Atlantic, not to stacks, 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 silver for a dollar to a massive corporation. While Jerry Wexler always claimed that he'd known nothing of that clause, and it was inserted by lawyers. According to Weil, Wexler 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 Senior

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 of Steve Cropper years later I was in Sorcellito 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. A history of rock music and 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon.

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is now available. Search Andrew Hickey 500 songs on your favourite online bookstore or visit the links in the show notes. This podcast is written and narrated by me, Andrew Hickey, and produced by me and Tilt Ariser. Visit 500Songs.com. That's 5000-the-numbersongs.com to read transcripts and liner notes

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