When I wasn’t luxuriating at the Lorraine at Albert’s expense, I played every conceivable musical instrument at Stax Studios. I was the cleanup man. From tuba to trombone to sax to tambourine, I tried to contribute whatever was needed or asked for. The “pop” with the snare on the backbeats of “Soul Man” is me, hitting a tambourine with a stick. All the mikes and inputs on the session were used, so I had to jump on the drum platform and play into the hi-hat mike, standing next to Al.
We hadn’t been that physically close during a performance since the club days. This time, I didn’t miss a beat. I wasn’t “little young motherf—er” anymore.
In June 1967, I had just moved my new family from Gary, Indiana, to a house in Memphis next door to my parents. I was two-timing my wife with a beautiful girl who was lead singer in a girl group with great prospects. We would meet at the Lorraine Motel for lunch, lovemaking, and a swim.
Things were going so well. We had recently completed a sold-out tour of Europe and had been treated like headliners at the Monterey Pop Festival. Otis Redding had become a superstar in Europe and had killed it at Monterey. We had played for over fifty thousand people that night. Sales and moods were up. People were excited about the prospect that Otis might soon become a major rock star.
Near the end of the summer of 1967, though, something was amiss. Otis Redding was missing from the Stax scene in Memphis. He was quietly absent—for an extended period of time. I thought he was taking some well-deserved time off at his ranch in Macon. As it turned out, Otis hadn’t gone home after our Monterey performance. He had ventured alone to Sausalito, California, and spent some time on a houseboat. I flew back to Memphis, completing the Europe/Monterey tour, not realizing anything was wrong.
At night, I would frequent a new downtown club, the Hippodrome, which was owned by my friends Al Jackson and Al Bell, where the Bar-Kays played nightly. The place gave them somewhere to dress up and hang out and audition new talent. Sometimes Otis would stop in because he loved sitting in with Carl Cunningham (Al’s protégé) and the rest of the Bar-Kays. One night a good friend of Otis told me that Otis was going to have an operation on his throat. This friend wasn’t very specific about the details but confided that it was not a joke.
Fear paralyzed me at the table. I didn’t talk or move. I had never considered the absence of Otis and his singing. He had become the energy center of the entire operation. He was spending more and more time in Memphis. I had taken him for granted. If he couldn’t sing, what would this mean to us, to Otis, to his fans? Why couldn’t I have a positive attitude about the outcome of Otis’s operation?
My mother had recently suffered throat surgery and regrettably had to quit the choir at church. She never sang again. She had been Mt. Olive’s featured soloist for years, doing cantatas and arias. We could not afford to lose Otis. What was really going on with our newly created rock star—my quiet friend, who said so much with only a well-timed glance?
I was unavailable to Otis. So much was going on in my life with my new family and my marriage in turmoil. I was emotionally headed to California myself, with growing uncertainty about my future. I wish I had been there for him after the show in Monterey. He would have said, “Book, I want to talk.”
Otis and I had a quiet understanding. A silent communication. Neither of us was a man of many words; all it took was a look or a gesture. In the studio, Otis was comfortable with my piano accompaniment, having come from a similar gospel background. There was an intuitive flow between us—I related to his passion when he sang, which transferred to my playing. There was an ease and comfort, a certain joy in our musical relationship—it didn’t seem to matter if I was playing piano, organ, or guitar, we were musical kin.
Suddenly, the roadie who was begging to sing had people begging him to sing. That fateful twist put Otis in a position of not being able to give enough or do enough for anybody. Otis’s inner nature became disquieted, and—not used to these types of pulls from so many sources—he had no experience, no place to turn for advice.
Otherwise, from the outside looking in, the growing Stax family was a happy one. And for all intents and purposes, it was. People loved what they were doing and wouldn’t have given it up for anything. Otis Redding (like some others) was evolving as an artist. In England, he had hung out with and listened to music with British rock stars who had been influenced by the same blues artists as him. His horizons and options expanded as his star rose, and he began thinking for himself. By the time Otis rented that Sausalito houseboat, he was searching for the meaning of his new level of stardom.
Soon, everyone knew about the operation, but no one would discuss it. I never knew the nature of the procedure and hated not understanding the details. I kept on with my activities and commitments with a deep sense of regret that Otis would have to go through the surgery and the resulting uncertainty about his voice and future.
MEMPHIS—Fall 1967—2
One day late in the fall, I noticed Steve Cropper’s mood was up. What was going on? Otis had fully recovered from the operation, and he was singing! What? Otis was singing, man—really singing! As a matter of fact, Cropper said that we would be going into the studio soon—for an extended session. He had been writing new stuff.
There could be no better news. I had begun taking a salary at Stax—enough to purchase the house I was renting from my dad. Otis was back. Life was good.
I thought “extended sessions” meant going a little longer than usual—maybe starting a little earlier than ten, quitting at midnight instead of eleven. No, we were about to be ensconced at 926 McLemore and taken over by a man possessed. Otis was consumed not only by music but by some supernatural premonition of his fate and destiny.
At Otis’s behest, meals became takeout affairs consumed over desks in the private offices. Everyone started calling home to assure wives and families that “everything is OK, just staying at the studio a little longer tonight.” Just like last night and the night before. Some, including me, slept on the floor. We had been engulfed in a marathon of songs and music surrounding Otis Redding.
People don’t question kings. Not real kings. They just try to do what’s expected of them. Ron Capone stepped in as the most capable engineer we ever had. Steve Cropper was amazing as Otis’s producer. His stamina and sense of purpose set a steady pace for the whole novel, slightly illogical marathon we had slipped into. Steve had been the Stax A&R man for years—but this week he took all his cues from Otis Redding, ubiquitous, who sent energy in every direction and to every person. We may have become stupefied by the music; we were so insulated. Song after song after song was recorded. I don’t remember the sequence.
There was no place in the room Otis wasn’t—sitting next to me at the piano, in the booth barking horn lines at the horn players, in the control room looking over Ronnie’s shoulder, in the vocal booth with his arms flailing, pounding one foot after another into the carpet along with the rhythm—his face torn with emotion. We could see him through the small, rectangular glass in the tall gunny-sack baffle that kept his voice from ripping into our microphones.
Otis was out on the street during the day—talking to kids and people passing by, who couldn’t believe they were meeting and talking to Otis Redding. Pretty soon, Otis was in our heads too. His voice was in my head when I hit the low, midrange piano circle of fourth chords on “Dock of the Bay,” my fingers finding the notes to emulate the nautical, seagoing tone I envisioned. No problem. Stuff like that just happens when you follow people who know where they want to go. I had experienced it before with Prince Conley, Mahalia Jackson, Bobby Darin, William Bell, Albert King, and others.
Looking back, the throat problems were not the main problem. The lyrics of “Dock of the Bay” tell the story. How could it be that this jovial, tremendously popular star was deeply troubled by a lack of being understood and by crippling loneliness? How had we let our beloved star escape to a place where he thought he couldn’t confide in one of us? Sadly, this was the case w
ith Otis Redding in the fall of 1967.
The playback, however, was amazing. Cropper was at the top of his game. My memory is of him sitting at the console with a long piece of quarter-inch tape draped about his neck, adjusting a couple of faders, and in the next two and a half minutes experiencing something that had never happened before in that room! The most unlikely music you could expect from Stax’s most unlikely artist, an anomaly for sure. An uncompromising tone poem of the simplest chordal structure created the setting for Otis’s most heartfelt plea for love and understanding. The song took us on a journey together right there in the control room and washed us clean. For a minute, we were one.
The silence after the playback said everything. No one wanted to make the first attempt to comment on how “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” had made us feel, but we were all happy and proud to be where we were right there in that moment. Otis was both depleted and energized. He was still ready to go.
After that, my memory escapes me, but most likely someone said, “Well, back to work!” or something to that effect, after which we piled out and, in the most professional manner, started to learn the chords to the next song.
It was a song Otis Redding and I wrote together and may be his most suggestive. “Let Me Come on Home” appears as an album cut on his Dock of the Bay LP. Written after our trip to Europe, Days and nights feeling so blue, Lord, I just don’t know what I’m gonna do, the collaboration marks my return to the acoustic guitar as a staple and reflected both our leanings toward rock music. Neither Otis nor I, however, could part completely with our past habits, so the song starts with a characteristic Otis horn line, and I am playing piano triplets, even though I wrote the tune on a Gibson J-45 acoustic. Indeed, old habits die hard.
The only reminder that we are a blues band comes from Steve Cropper’s soulful fills and Otis’s inescapable pleadings, singing
Crying my eyes out over you
I don’t know nothing in the world that I’m gonna do
Typical for me, the tune veers from blues changes at bar 9, going to an E minor chord instead of the traditional blues D chord change, but makes a token attempt to get back in line by going to the D chord for the resolution in the last two bars of the phrase. Unconventionally, there is a short, gripping interlude after Steve’s solo on the D chord. It’s a build that incorporates syncopated drums, horns, and rhythm. A false climax, if you will, that allows Otis to moan into the final verse. With that, we are on our way home, but not before revisiting the compelling interlude briefly, to let Otis plead once again and Steve twang once more, before we play the resolving chords into the fade-out.
To my knowledge, there has been no singer in the Western world who pleaded with the earnestness of Otis Redding. It wasn’t fake. His tempestuous inner self was full of apprehension, yearning, and love for everything he touched.
Otis milked Eddie Floyd’s lyric for every note it was worth in his rendition of “More Than Words Can Say.” Eddie and I wrote it expressly for Otis, knowing this would be the outcome. He needed the song to complete his album Dock of the Bay, as he didn’t have time to write everything himself.
Standard structure found me once again playing triplet piano arpeggios—a sad 6/8-time ballad, à la Jerry Butler. The painful verse, which Eddie crafted for Otis like a skilled tailor, leaned on the seventh chord in the melody. As Otis sang the word please, you couldn’t imagine him in any other posture but on his knees. By the time the song floated to the second verse and Otis crooned halfway through: “I was tempted to call it a day,” one is reminded of the vocal renditions of Percy Mayfield and Ray Charles, or Billie Holiday, which implied love was more important than life.
There I am, nearly pinching myself, goose bumps on my arm, unbelieving of my participation in such moving music, trying to focus and concentrate on my part.
Otis was made for singing heartbreaking songs, and I was made for writing unrelentingly unconventional verse and bridge changes. Such was the case with “More Than Words Can Say.” What song moves from the major one chord to the major two after two bars? Somehow it works. There are only five chords in the whole song. The simplicity makes way for Otis’s soulful melismas and Eddie’s painful words.
“(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” became a huge hit—not because it was a musical side trip by Otis but because its theme touched the hearts of a million people who recognized the lament either in themselves or someone they were close to—or they just simply felt for the fella singing the song.
DECEMBER 10, 1967—6
In a Cincinnati, Ohio, airport bar with Steve and Al, Duck was teasing me: “You just wastin’ that drink; why did you order it?” We were marking time, waiting for a connecting flight to Memphis. A page came over the loudspeaker for Al Jackson. It was his wife, Barbara, on the phone with news that Otis’s plane had crashed in Wisconsin. I finished my drink. So did the others.
I was twenty-three years old. The Bar-Kays were onboard that plane. Not that long ago, we were in the studio recording the Bar-Kays singles, rubbing shoulders, and playing music together. It was the first shock of that kind in my life. The Cunningham family was like my own family. Leander and Luther (Carl’s older brothers). They filled out the drum line next to Maurice White at Booker Washington High School and were like brothers to me. Carl was the youngest in the line of drummer brothers. His mother would be devastated.
It was unthinkable news. My mind went blank. All I can remember are the details of the airport bar. The shape of the counter, the bright light of the morning, the glasses on the counter, the bottles behind the bartender. The conversation escapes me, as do the details of the flight we took back to Memphis and much of the next few days in general.
Barbara had few, if any, details for Al. Just the crash. My mind raced. Phalon Jones was the tenor sax player in the Bar-Kays. His mother, Willa, was one of the comely waitresses at the Harlem House, a hamburger restaurant right next to BTW High School. I stopped by there every day after school, and I was one of her favorites. Willa would be beside herself with grief.
Then there were Ronnie Caldwell, organ, and Jimmie King, guitar, my favorite. The candidate to take Steve’s place. We weren’t told that Ben Cauley (trumpet) survived or that James Alexander (bass) wasn’t on the plane.
My next distinct memory is sitting at the organ in Macon, Georgia, playing music for the funeral, and before that, being squeezed in the back seat of a limo between Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun after having waited an eternity for Jerry’s plane from New York to land because they refused to fly together. It was company policy to ensure one of the Atlantic executives survived a crash. I remember thinking, But they will ride in a limo together?
The funeral was unbearably sad; once again the details escape, just an inescapable reluctance to look at Otis’s widow, Zelma, and no glances at his children at all. It was all I could do to focus on playing the organ without falling apart. I was a different man in those days, full of the southern edicts that a man is not supposed to cry. If I had to do it again, I would let the tears flow, I’d let it all out without reservation instead of keeping it all in. But it was 1967, in Macon, Georgia…so the crying was mostly done by the women and children.
I had played “Jesus Keep Me Near the Cross” a thousand times at Mt. Olive—for the men’s Bible class and in Sunday school since I was a boy. Joe Simon was to sing this song, and I had agreed to provide the organ accompaniment. But this morning, at Macon’s City Auditorium, the song, the melody, all, became lost on me. It left my mind, and I didn’t know where to start. My professionalism vanished. Joe, down at the podium, waited for me to start. An endless, uncomfortable interim. Fortunately, I brought the music, fumbled frantically to place it on the stand under the light at the huge pipe organ, and began to play. The hymn always brought tears at Mt. Olive during regular church services, and when Zelma Redding heard Joe Simon’s mournful strains, she fell apart. I could hear her stomping the floor from where I sat at the organ. My heart sank lower. Where did
I find the strength to keep playing? Why did the job fall to me? I was a mourner too. It was the saddest funeral I had ever been to.
The pain and disbelief were felt by all. The church was full; the day was surreal. Otis was gone. He was a good friend to me…didn’t talk too much, always straight to the point. He was just quietly there, keeping company in the old southern way.
Chapter 12
Time Is Tight
MEMPHIS—1972—4
In 1972, someone set fire to the Cossitt Library Negro Branch on Vance Avenue in Memphis, Tennessee, and it burned to the ground. The system was desegregated in 1960. Until then, the Vance branch was the only public library available to black Memphians.
For a boy growing up in Memphis, the Cossitt Library was so much more than just a library. Until I made the band, it was my destination after school. In second grade, I learned to use the card catalogue. The large two-story building was a refuge for hundreds of my classmates as well. There I learned of the Dahomey man of Africa and saw photos of Siamese women in Indonesia and cobra snakes in India. At the library, I was able to see photos of African men that resembled me to my eye. My father would take me there on Saturday mornings.
I can still place myself in the building with its tall windowpanes and its imposing front lawn stretching out from formidable steps leading up from the street. My father often dropped me off at the back entrance, where I could quickly skip in from the small rear parking lot.
The Cossitt Library was Memphis’s only depository of titles by and about black authors, save a few shelves in the small libraries of the seven black high schools. The Cossitt was where the black history books lived alongside European and world literature. It was the treasure chest of Memphis’s African American written word.
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