Otis Redding The Dock Of The Bay Album Zip
Towanda Tuning
The main resource I used for the biographical details of Redding was Dreams to Remember: Otis Redding, Stax Records, and the Transformation of Southern Soul by Mark Ribowsky. Ribowsky is usually a very good, reliable, writer, but in this case there are a couple of lapses in editing which make it not a book I can wholeheartedly recommend, but the research on the biographical details of Redding seems to be the best.
Whatever you think of the quality of the *music* (and some of my very favourite artists played at Monterey and Woodstock), the *musicianship* is orders of magnitude better at the Harlem Cultural Festival
What seems to have made the difference is that when he was sixteen, 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 junior 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.
That was enough to make Stewart interested, but by this point Booker T. Jones had already left the studio, so Steve Cropper moved to the piano for the forty minutes that was left of the session, with Jenkins remaining on guitar, and they tried to get two sides of a single cut.
Jenkins would play guitar on several future Otis 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.
The changes in Stax continued. In late autumn 1963, Atlantic got worried by the lack of new product coming from Stax. Carla Thomas had had a couple of R&B hits, and they were expecting a new single, but every time Jerry Wexler phoned Stax asking where the new single was, he was told it would be coming soon but the equipment was broken.
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 of a big hit single with him right there:
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 few years, but the album market had a substantial number of audiophiles, and they wanted stereo.
Redding agreed that the song sounded perfect for him, and said he would record it. He apparently made some attempts at 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:
And it would have lasted longer but Jim Stewart pushed the faders down, realising 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 they 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.
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:
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.
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 booked 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 Speedo Sims would sit and watch the boats in the dock, and Redding started working on a song about it.
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.
It was recorded, with the full complement of MGs and Mar-Keys there, and at the end of the track, Cropper did what he usually did, and left a long instrumental section for Redding to vamp on. But this time, instead of his got-ta-got-ta vamping, he did something very different and whistled:
Hi Andrew, I recently found this podcast, when a friend suggested it. I had tickets to see Otis Redding at The Factory in Madison Wisconsin, the day his plane crashed. I was living in Monona at the time, about 200 yards from the crash site.
This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli. Stax Records produced some of the most important Southern soul music of the 1960s - music by such performers as Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Rufus and Carla Thomas, Booker T and the M.G.'s, Isaac Hayes and The Staple Singers. Here are some examples of the Stax sound.
SAM AND DAVE: (Singing) Don't you ever be sad. Lean on me when times are bad. When the day comes and you are down in a river of trouble and about to drown, just hold on. I'm coming. Hold on. I'm coming. I'm on my way, your lover.
RUFUS AND CARLA THOMAS: (Singing) You know the night time, yeah, yeah, is the right time to be with the one you love, with the one you love. You tell them, Carla. Baby, baby - I said tell them, Carla. Baby...
BIANCULLI: Stax Records was based in Memphis. It evolved out of the pop and country label Satellite, which was started in 1957 by Jim Stewart, who ran it with his sister, Estelle Axton. The first letters of their last names, S-T from Stewart and A-X from Axton, gave the new label its name. Their interracial operation was an anomaly in Memphis at that time. The new four-part documentary "Stax: Soulsville U.S.A.," streaming on Max, is an excellent and exciting series that tells the story of the label. Here's a clip from the first episode. Booker T. Jones is explaining how lessons in music theory led him to come up with one of Stax's first big hits.
BOOKER T JONES: What if, I started thinking, the second chord didn't always go to the major? What if it went - (playing piano)? And then the four-chord - what about that? (Playing piano). That sounds kind of odd. It sounds kind of cool, though. (Playing piano). Oh, yeah. (Playing piano).
BIANCULLI: For this Memorial Day holiday, we're going to feature interviews with a few of the people who helped create the Stax sound. First, Steve Cropper - he was the house guitarist at Stax Records. The house band recorded its own records under the name Booker T. and the M.G.'s. Cropper also worked as a songwriter and producer for Stax. He produced some of Otis Redding's hits. Steve Cropper spoke to Terry Gross in 1990. He told her he always thought of himself as a rhythm guitar player.
STEVE CROPPER: I never really was a lead player. I never tried to be a lead player. I've been lucky enough to have played a few solos on some great artists' records. But really, I'm a rhythm man, and my best forte, I think, is capturing the feel of a song during its inception in the studio. That's - I think that's where I'm best. Even though people fly me in all over to play on their records and overdub, I think they would be better using me on the ground floor, you know, as a building block rather than as a cherry on the cake.
TERRY GROSS: You had your first hit with a band called The Mar-Keys, and it wasn't long after that that you became affiliated with Stax Records. And you became the guitarist in the house rhythm section. You became a producer. You became a songwriter with...
CROPPER: He was a tenor player with the Mar-Keys. He was on the record "Last Night" and everything. He came to me, and he said, I hear you guys got a pretty good band. He said, you know, I play saxophone. I'd like to be in your band. And I said, well, I'm not really interested. I don't think we're interested in adding horns to the group. And I said, how long have you been playing, you know? And he said, oh, I've been, I've been taking lessons for three months. And I'm going, oh yeah, great, you know? And somewhere in the conversation, he goes, oh, by the way, my mother owns a recording studio. And I said, can you show up for rehearsal on Saturday?
CROPPER: And that is a true story. Now, I might stretch it a little bit, but that's an actual truth. And we went out - his uncle, Jim Stewart, the owner of Stax Records, had a little studio in his garage in Memphis, and we went out there and jammed around, and then they moved from his garage to a little place out in Brunswick, Tenn., where they had the Satellite label. And we would go out there every weekend and play and all that. And of course, Jim Stewart said, we never had a chance. We'd never make it. But I think he just was being devil's advocate to just see if he could push us into something. And we kept trying. We cut a bunch of instrumentals and some crazy little things that never saw the light of day. And until the time that we came up with "Last Night."
But what happened was Estelle - I don't know. Estelle Axton - I don't know if she saw any talent there or what she saw, but she liked me enough to keep me around, and she put me to work in her record shop, and I sold records. That's what I did. And I kept working on - on the weekends, I would kind of do a little A&R because people were always coming in, and on Saturdays I would hold auditions because people are always bringing in songs and all that, and that's sort of how I got started, you know, in the A&R thing. And finally Jim said, wait a minute. He said, you know, Steve's spending more time in the studio than he is in the record shop and whatever. And so they got together and decided that I would be - start getting my salary from the record company rather than the record shop. And I started working, I guess, A&R full time at that point.
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