Otis Redding‘s famous set at the Monterey International Pop Festival was just a few weeks behind him in the rearview mirror and he sensed that he was on the cusp of becoming a very big star, his crossover appeal to young white audiences already proven by his reception for that legendary performance. He could become one of the “greats,” like Ray Charles or Sam Cooke. Redding—the epitome of the Stax Records sound—was hoping to move beyond the soul shouters he was known for and into something more complex musically. Something that was more along the lines of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s. Additionally that fall he’d had throat surgery and wanted to develop some numbers less demanding on his vocal cords.

Redding was playing a six-night residency at Basin Street West in San Francisco and had been staying at a houseboat owned by rock promoter Bill Graham that was docked in Sausalito. It was here where he saw the ships rolling in from San Francisco that inspired “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay.” He very simply and directly wrote about what he was experiencing one perfect sunny California day:

“I left my home in Georgia,
Headed for the Frisco bay”

This much was surely true: Redding was born in Macon, although it was his co-writer Steve Cropper (of Booker T. & the M.G.‘s AKA the Stax house band) who suggested that bit.

“If you listen to the songs I wrote with Otis, most of the lyrics are about him. He didn’t usually write about himself, but I did. “Mr. Pitiful,” “Sad Song Fa-Fa,” they were about Otis’ life. “Dock Of The Bay” was exactly that: ‘I left my home in Georgia, headed for the Frisco Bay’ was all about him going out to San Francisco to perform.”

I think it’s pretty safe to assume that this entire verse came from direct personal experience well:

Sittin in the morning sun,
I`ll be sittin’ when the evening come,
Watching the ships roll in,
And I’ll watch ‘em roll away again, yeah,
I’m sittin’ on the dock of the bay,
Watching the tide roll away, ohh,
I’m just sittin’ on the dock of the bay,
Wasting time.

But while these words are on a surface level merely descriptive of a day of (apparent) mundane laziness experienced by an up-and-coming Georgia-born soul singer chilling out on a sunny dock, for the past half century, each and every person who has ever listened to Otis Redding sing those immortal words has been able to adapt the song to their own circumstances, and mentally project their own lives onto it, whether or not they were fishing or barbecuing on a hot summer day with a cool beverage in their hand or standing with a gun in a rice paddy in Vietnam. It’s one of those “one-size-fits-all” occasion classics that can be happy or sad depending on who sings it, or how.

It’s a mirror of humanity itself in that way and this is the reason why music licensing company BMI has cited “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” as being the sixth-most performed song of the 20th century. It’s been covered by the likes of Cher, Peggy Lee, Bob Dylan, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, Dennis Brown, Jacob Miller, Pearl Jam, even T.Rex (Bolan’s version was on the B-side of his “Dreamy Lady” single in 1975). Sammy Hagar and Michael Bolton have both covered the song. All in all, BMI has clocked over six million known performances. That’s not including all the karaoke renditions.
 

 
“(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” is recalled by most people as having a joyful or whimsical message, but just two lines later than what’s quoted above he’s singing:

“I have nothing to live for,
Look like nothing’s gonna come my way”

The lazy day in the sun gives way to a far bleaker-sounding reality, but no one ever uses the latter verses in TV commercials or rom coms:

“Sittin’ here resting my bones,
And this loneliness won’t leave me alone, yes,
Two thousand miles I roam
Just to make this dock my home”

Redding didn’t have much more than the basic chords, first verse and the chorus when he brought the song to Steve Cropper. Cropper wrote the bridge trying to ape the style of the chart-topping Association. Redding’s manager Phil Walden and Stax Records’ Jim Stewart were unsure of their artist’s search for a new direction, but not even his own wife Zelma was not all that encouraging of what she’d heard of his new style. Cropper and Redding felt sure that they’d written a #1 hit.

When Redding and Cropper recorded the song, they had yet to come up with a final verse, so Otis just whistled it. The plan was for him to return to Memphis and fill in that last verse after performing a set in Madison, Wisconsin, but that never happened. When Steve Cropper produced the song, he left the whistling in,and it is probably the most famous whistling in any song. Sound effects of water, seagulls, and so forth were added to the unfinished recording by Cropper with Stax Records’ newly purchased 4-track recorder.

“(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” went to #1 as Redding and Cropper predicted and it won Redding a posthumus 1968 Grammy Award for Best Rhythm & Blues Performance, plus the Best Rhythm & Blues Song for writers Redding and Cropper. It’s been fifty years since mankind first heard this classic song and that’s an anniversary worth marking.
 

 
One could be forgiven, perhaps, for thinking that the ongoing national conversation (or racist jagoff chest-thumping tantrum, if you prefer) about the appropriateness of Confederate flag display is a new thing. But that point of view is ahistorical; this isn’t new, just newly launched into noisier, more vigorous debate. That symbol has been considered divisive and offensive for quite a long time.

For example, as early as 1961, that flag kept an early Otis Redding single from receiving airplay! Redding’s second single, the acutely Little Richard-ish “Fat Gal/Shout Bamalama,” was released in 1961 on a label called “Confederate Records,” an imprint owned by a young white Georgia car salesman named Bobby Smith. The center label on Confederate’s releases, unsurprisingly, was a design based on the Confederate flag, which all by itself was a good enough reason for R&B DJs to utterly disregard the single. From an article in the December, 2007 issue of Atlanta magazine:

A rebel flag crisscrosses the first vinyl single of “Shout Bamalama,” released by the Confederate Records label in 1961. Consequently, African American disc jockeys chucked it into the trash without bothering to listen. Had they put the needle to the groove, they would’ve heard Otis Redding belting out his jump-blues tribute to Bamalama, a one-eyed busker who played a washboard with a thimble. It was another inauspicious break for the Macon vocalist, who was reportedly booed off the stage, in tears, the first time he performed outside of church.

 

 
Georgia had incorporated that flag into its own in 1956, as an explicit thumbs-up to white supremacy and segregation. Having been advised that adopting it as a logo for his wares was doing him no favors with his intended audience, the no longer so clueless Smith reissued the recording on Orbit Records, an ad hoc label he started for the sole purpose of getting the pariah Dixie flag off of Redding’s single. Per Smith himself:

Otis and I went on the road promoting “Shout Bamalama”. Stopping at Augusta radio station WTHB, we were told by the DJ it would be played if it were taken off the Confederate-flagged record label. I promised to do so. We went on to Columbia, SC and met with a program director, Big Saul at radio station WOIC, who also promised heavy play, but only if the label was changed. Otis and I hit it off very well with Big Saul. As we drove and listened to legendary DJ John R on Nashville ’s WLAC, Otis said, “Bobby, if that man played my record I would think I had made it”. When we returned to Macon, I wasted no time creating the Orbit label and putting “Shout Bamalama” on it. The following week I went to Nashville and talked to John R, and I explained the situation with Confederate and Orbit. John R was impressed with the record and promised me he would give it heavy duty air play.

 
More after the jump…

 
The December 10, 1967 small aircraft accident that took the lives of singer Otis Redding and most of the Bar-Kays was to the soul music of the ‘60s what the famed Buddy Holly/Richie Valens/Big Bopper crash was to early rock ’n’ roll—a pointless and bottomlessly tragic snuffing out of massive potential. Redding was only 26, and had just recorded the song that would go on to be his first #1, “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay.” The Bar-Kays, a prodigiously gifted Memphis session group whom Redding had selected as his touring band, were only in their late teens. The plane crashed, for unknown reasons, into Lake Monona near Madison, WI.

The lone survivor was Bar-Kays trumpet player Ben Cauley (bassist James Alexander also lived—he took a different plane). Cauley related the harrowing story of the crash in the Dec 28, 1967 issue of Jet.

I guess God was with me. I was asleep. And I remember waking up because I couldn’t breathe. The engines sounded real loud and I had a funny spinning sensation of falling through space. I thought the plane had hit an air pocket. I heard [saxophonist] Phalon [Jones] moan ‘Oh, no.’ Just like that. ‘Oh, no.’ And I turned to say something to him, but I couldn’t because I couldn’t breathe. I reached down and unbuckled my seat belt. I don’t know why. I just reached down and unbuckled it. This may have saved my life. I don’t know. God must have been with me. Otis (Redding) was sitting directly in front of me in the co-pilot’s seat. I didn’t hear him say a word. Didn’t see him do a thing. The next thing I remember is bobbing up in the water holding onto this cushion.

The group was traveling from Ohio to Wisconsin for a performance, having just finished an engagement at Leo’s Casino in Cleveland. But on Redding’s last night alive, they also did a televised performance that still survives. Upbeat was a nationally syndicated musical variety show shot at WEWS in Cleveland and hosted by a young Dick Clark manqué named Don Webster. After its 1971 cancellation Webster stayed in Cleveland to serve variously as the station’s weatherman, announcer, and station manager for another three decades, but in its heyday, the show was host to an incredible lineup of talent including James Brown, the Monkees, Rolling Stones, Stevie Wonder, Love, and no kidding The Velvet Underground. Nowhere near enough of those episodes have seen the light of day in the YouTube era, and let’s hope they exist somewhere, but fortunately, we can see those last recorded performances of Redding and the original Bar-Kays, performing “Respect” and dueting with Mitch Ryder on “Knock on Wood.”
 
The clips, after the jump…

 
Before Otis Redding became a star in America, he was already a superstar in Europe. He was feted by The Beatles, hailed by the NME and Melody Maker as the world’s greatest male vocalist, and had major record sales and sellout concerts wherever he appeared. A generation of young singers ranging from Rod Stewart—who claims he modeled his singing style on Redding—to Bryan Ferry were in awe of The Big O: Mr. Otis Redding—the King of Soul.

By 1966, Redding was so popular in the UK he was given his own one-off special in the primetime music show Ready, Steady, Go!. Redding joined a very select band of artists who were honored in this way—the others being The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Who. 

For Otis and the other Stax artists who toured the UK and Europe during the mid-1960s, the biggest surprise was discovering it was the white kids who idolized them. Unlike America, there was was no racial segregation in Europe. No color bar. No diners or rest rooms for “whites only.” None of the brutal racism blacks encountered in their homeland on a daily basis. It was a discovery that altered all of these artists’ belief in themselves and was a sign that right was on their side and the times they were a-changin’.
 

 

Otis Redding on ‘The!!!! Beat,’ 1966.
 
One of those small shifts in change with seismic importance happened fifty years ago this week, when ABC affiliate station WFAA recorded the first of their music series The!!!! Beat in Dallas, Texas. Hosted by legendary DJ Bill “Hoss” Allen—who played blues and black gospel on his radio show during the 1950s—his beautiful piece of delicious pop history ran for one season of 26 episodes in 1966. It was one of the very first music series to be shot on videotape and in color. The!!!! Beat showcased such legendary artists as Otis Redding, Percy Sledge, Etta James, Carla Thomas, Sam & Dave, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, Joe Tex and many, many more. If asked what my idea of heaven would be—if heaven was a TV show—I would reply something like The!!!! Beat with its wall-to-wall R ‘n’ B and soul artists.
 

 
Watch the first five episodes of ‘The!!!! Beat’ after the jump…

 
When the question of “What’s the best/great rockumentary of all?” is asked, the answers can range quite widely obviously, from something like Don’t Look Back or Let It Be to The Last Waltz or Stop Making Sense (which both seem to make almost everyone’s lists) to something totally out of left field and life-affirming like Half Japanese: The Band That Would Be King. I really loved the new Pulp: a Film about Life, Death and Supermarkets... and wouldn’t “Heavy Metal Parking Lot” be in the running for all-time best rockumentary? Of course it would be!

It’s an impossible question to answer, but sidestepping it somewhat, if I had to pick the best overall “time capsule” of the rock era to preserve for future generations, it would probably be Peter Clifton’s Superstars In Concert.  Also known as Rock City in a different edit, the film was directed and produced by Clifton (The Song Remains the Same, Popcorn, The London Rock and Roll Show) and is a hodge-podge compiling (mostly) his promotional short films and snippets of concert performances shot between 1964 and 1973 by the likes of Peter Whitehead (Wholly Communion, Charlie Is My Darling, Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London), Michael Cooper (who shot Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising), Ernest Vincze (the cinematographer responsible for the 2005 Doctor Who reboot) and Ivan Strasburg (Treme).
 

 
Featured in the film are The Rolling Stones (several times), Eric Burdon and The Animals, a typically demure appearance of The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, Otis Redding bringing the house down, Cream, Steve Winwood, Blind Faith, Cat Stevens (a stark Kubrickian promo film for his “Father and Son” single) , The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Donovan, Joe Cocker, a segment with The Ike and Tina Turner Revue that will bring a smile to your face, Pink Floyd and Rod Stewart and the Faces. Pete Townshend is seen getting in his digs at the Stones for promoting pot use, managing to make himself look like a blue-nosed twat in the process, while Mick and the boys are seen doing “Jumpin Jack Flash” in the (decidedly more evil) warpaint version of that promo film (there were two, this is the one that was NOT shown on The Ed Sullivan Show for obvious reasons) and in their promo film for “We Love You” which features Keef in a judge’s wig, Marianne Faithfull as a barrister and Mick nude wrapped up in a fur rug (a sly joke that if you don’t get, then google “Rolling Stones,” “Redlands,” drug bust, her name and “Hershey Bar.”)

Superstars In Concert came out in Japan on the laserdisc format and that’s how I first saw it, in the late 80s. Since then, other than the various clips showing up cut from the film on YouTube, it’s remained an obscurity. Apparently there was a Malaysian bootleg and then in 2003 a Brazilian magazine called DVD Total gave away the film for free with one of their issues. So far fewer than 200 people have viewed the video.

DO NOT miss what’s perhaps the most intense version of Pink Floyd’s “Careful with That Axe Eugene” ever captured on film. This entire film is absolutely amazing from start to finish, but it jumps off the scale during that part (Otis Redding is no slouch, either!) I highly recommend letting it load first before you hit play, otherwise it’s kind of flickery. If you wait a while, it doesn’t hang up and looks and sounds great.
 

 
On that long list of those sadly departed musicians, singers, pop stars and what-you-will, who I wish I had seen in concert, Mister Otis Redding is up near the very top. It’s not just because I like Redding, and think he had immense talent, or that his band played like “some well-oiled machine,” or that together they lit up the stage when they played, but because Otis always looked like he truly enjoyed what he was doing, and wanted the audience to enjoy it just as much as he did.

Take a watch at his appearance on Ready, Steady, Go! from 1966 and you will see what I mean. Otis gives a powerhouse performance and his guests, Eric Burdon and Chris Farlowe, both look awe-struck.

Otis begins with “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” then goes into “My Girl” and “Respect,” before Eric Burdon sings “Hold On, I’m Comin’” and Chris Farlowe tries on “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” for size. Then it’s back to the main event, with Mr. Redding joined by Messrs. Burdon and Farlowe, finishing up with “Pain in My Heart,” “I Can’t Turn You Loose,” and “Shake,” which understandably gets the audience up and dancing.
 

 
Otis Redding was a child when he started singing and playing with the Vineville Baptist Choir. He also tried out his skills playing with the school band. His obvious natural proficiency led him to enter talent competitions at the Douglass Theatre. You see, Otis was more than just prodigiously talented he was thoughtful and kind-hearted and wanted to earn money for his family. That he did and after winning the $5 top prize 15-times in a row, he was banned from the competition.

The ban led him to start out playing with his idol Little Richard’s backing band The Upsetters, and by the early 1960s, when he was performing with The Pinetoppers, it was clear Otis was a dynamic and unstoppable talent.

In 1962, after recording tracks with The PInetoppers at Stax Records, co-owner Jim Stewart allowed Otis to cut some solo material. The result was “These Arms of Mine”.

From there, Otis Redding went onto become one of the biggest stars of the 1960s—especially in Europe where he was viewed as one of the greatest artists on the planet. In 1967 Redding outsold that year’s combined record sales for Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra, and kicked Elvis Presley’s sorry ass from the top of the Melody Maker‘s World’s Greatest Male Vocalist chart. Then he eventually conquered America with his mind-nlowing set at the Monterey Pop festival—where he turned on thousands of hippies to the joys of R’n'B and soul. It should have been the start of an even greater career but it was tragically cut short when redding died in a plane crash in December of that year.

All these years later, you can still have sunshine on a cloudy day with Otis Redding. Here he is a selection of The Big O, the King of Soul at his best in Paris and London performing some of his best known and biggest hits “Respect”, “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long”, “Shake”, “My Girl”, and “Try a Little Tenderness”.

Push back the chairs, turn it up and cut a rug.
   

 
The incomparable Mae West proving she was still “Hard to Handle” at the age of 77. Here Ms West sings the Otis Redding classic from the 1970 movie Myra Breckinridge. The film, based on the novel by Gore Vidal, and starred Raquel Welch, Farrah-Fawcett and Mae West, but was sadly a flop. Watching this fab little clip, who couldn’t be won over by the incorrigible Statue of Libido?
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

Mae West Room in the Dali Theater-Museum

 
With thanks to Tommy Udo!