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Loving You Too Long to Stop Now:
the Beginner’s Guide to Otis Redding
 Just a regular day at Stax. The studio players—Booker T & the MGs and the Mar-Keys—were set to record some instrumentals for Johnny Jenkins who had a regional hit and was coming back to build on that. Outside, MGs guitarist Steve Cropper caught a stocky kid unloading mics from the car he’d just driven from Macon because Jenkins refused to fly. “Hey man,” Cropper said, “You know we have our own mics. You don’t have to get all that.” The kid kept up what he was doing, politely saying he was supposed to.
A half hour was left on the session, and the whole day, that kid had pestered folks for a chance to sing. Drummer Al Jackson begged Cropper for help. “Let him sing so he’ll get off my back.” And so they did, though Booker T had already left. Jenkins picked up his guitar, something he was used to doing with the singer of his band, The Pinetoppers, and Cropper took a seat at the piano, asking what he needed to play.
“Just do some of those church notes,” he said, referring to triplets. His request met, he opened his mouth and let out his soul. Otis Redding sang. For the uninitiated, time stopped. Here this roadie, this 21-year-old chauffer, this lowly valet was toying with their world, just rolling it sideways between four slow, trembling, pained words: These… arms… of… mine…
Mar-Key horn man Wayne Jackson says, “I was just stunned, like we all were. It was like he sent out a shockwave.”
It took six months for the shockwave to reach far beyond the studio. But “These Arms of Mine” got heavy rotation on Nashville’s WLAC, which could reach 34 states on a clear night so sales picked up. After that, every record Otis cut charted.
But this beginning wasn’t even the beginning. His beginning was in Macon, in church with his preacher dad, at Hamp Swain’s Teenage Party, the high school frat parties, at talent shows at the Douglass Theatre where he was eventually barred from competition to give someone else a chance to win. He hooked up with Jenkins, and sang in bands with names like Pat Tea Cake and the Mighty Panthers. But he did a lot of that as a copycat. In 1960, Otis broke camp for L.A. where he recorded a Little Richard knock-off, “Shout Bamalama”. Like Little Richard before him, he had to come back home. That “Otis Redding Sound” took time to develop. Even that day at Stax, he recorded what could’ve been a Little Richard tune, “Hey, Hey Baby”.
That Otis Redding Sound. Take Sam Cooke’s intangible, cool smoothness and put it on Little Richard’s runaway train tempo, give it the gut-check grit of a juke joint Saturday night then take it to a Sunday morning homecoming church service, and that might sound like Otis Redding. But only in the way imposter colognes smell like the original; something would be missing: the want. When Otis Redding wanted something, everyone would feel it, like the quickest way to having it—whether it was keeping love or building a solid horn line—was for everyone to want it too.
June 1967, on the heels of an incredibly successful trip to Europe with the Stax/Volt Soul Revue, Otis Redding, the Mar-Keys and Booker T & the MGs set down at the Monterey Pop Festival as the only soul act on the Saturday bill. Everyone else in the line-up was of that late-60s psychedelic, hippie stuff: Jefferson Airplane, The Byrds, Steve Miller and the like. Management and staff were nervous, and so were the players—this was not their crowd and it was the biggest they’d ever seen too. But Otis wasn’t worried.
Booker T & the MGs opened, playing some of their hits, priming the audience as best they could for the coming firestorm. Otis came out with a roaring cover of Sam Cooke’s “Shake” and within seconds—listen to the recording—the audience is in full-blown call and response. “Shake! Everybody say it now! Shake!” Oh how they echoed. Oh how he owned them. Just like that.
 Almost exactly six months later, after he’d broken into a new audience—not simply “the white crowd” but the hippie, rock crowd—and set the stage for a success he hadn’t yet known, with his popularity growing both here and abroad, Otis Redding and the Bar-Kays, his touring band, boarded a plane bound for the next gig. That plane crashed into Lake Monona in Madison, WI, and all but one of the passengers, Bar-Kay Ben Cauley, perished. Otis Redding died at 26, his recording career cut short at five years.
The week before, Otis Redding recorded an astonishing number of tracks out of which, “(Sittin on) the Dock of the Bay” surfaced. Since most modern fans of his hear it first, it’s often difficult to understand that this was a major departure for Otis Redding, a new direction, one heavily influenced by the Beatles, Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones. The undisputed King of Memphis Soul, who was becoming one of the world’s most beloved voices, was branching out again. Where he would’ve or could’ve taken soul music—or just music in general—is a mystery and loss that itself has already changed the direction of those who’ve come since.
The 40th anniversary of his passing approaches and we’ve just passed what would’ve been his 66th birthday. The superlatives continue, and in the scattered praise about the music we all hear and likewise struggle to explain, the most important aspect emerges: Otis Redding was a great human being. As Alan Walden says, “In my entire life, I’ve only heard three people speak bad about Otis, and they were all jealous of him. He was just a light. I not only lost my best friend but a big piece of my heart as well.”
If you want to contact Chris Horne, his email is chris@11thHourOnline.com.
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