The ability to walk onto a stage in front of strangers and completely go into their souls to light a fire inside is not something every singer can do. It takes a power beyond the ordinary, and a sense of purpose that is otherworldly. Sometimes it’s something that happens without conscious knowledge, like a happy accident the cosmos allows to be born right before our eyes. The great singers achieve that like it’s second nature. It is what separates them from other humans,
Otis Redding was someone who did that every time he stepped onstage. He had an inferno of feelings boiling inside, like there was something caged that needed to be released. Maybe it came from growing up without much beyond a belief in yourself. Redding started mostly watching others grab the spotlight. Born September 9, 1941, he’d quit school at 15 years old, and it wasn’t long before he was working for fellow Georgian Little Richard’s backing band the Upsetters. Both had spent their youth in Macon, and knew what it was like to own nothing. Show business and sports were the two legal roads out of town for young men like them, and each was determined to make music their future. Little Richard had exploded onto the early rock & roll scene and set off a neutron bomb of outrageousness. The world had never seen anything like it then, nor since. Music wouldn’t be the same after Little Richard, as he was more than happy to tell anyone who would listen.
Otis Redding started out living inside himself. He didn’t have the flamboyance of many singers at the time, but what he lacked in outward exhibitionism he totally made up for with an inner incendiary essence. He could stand totally still, grab the microphone with one hand and bring an audience to the ground. From the very start. When he started working with bandleader Johnny Jenkins, sometimes Redding got to sing a song but he mostly was Jenkins’ valet and driver. No the doubt the younger singer was going to school on how his elder worked the crowd, pushing their blood pressure into the danger zone and making sure the ladies knew that the man onstage was there to take care of business.
Johnny Jenkins had the goods, no doubt about it. He could get the rhythm section to race for the stars, stop a song on a dime and have a nickel left over. Still, Otis Redding had the spirit. From his earliest live appearances that was as obvious as the strings on a guitar. Call it command, call it strength, call it whatever needs calling, but Redding exuded an aura of absolute authority, even if he was only opening the show with a song or two.
When Jenkins went into Stax Studio to record one day in 1962, at the end of the session there was some unused time left. Otis Redding stepped up, informed everyone in the room he’d written a song and wanted to take a run at recording it. “There Arms of Mine” might not have been an explosion of sound, but what it was contained enough audio dynamite and pure vocal expression of feeling that time stopped. Jim Stewart, a co-owner of Stax Records immediately sensed a new star was in their presence and signed a contract with the very young Redding on the spot.
When the single was released, it was a harbinger of modern soul. Rhythm & blues, which was born in the late 1940s with a collision of blues and swing, had begun to play itself out. The younger Afro-American audience was looking for a little more deep-seated emotions, something with some sophistication at its center. Bobby “Blue” Bland had brought that kind of style to the bandstand, and Sam Cooke was making his searing secular run once he’d freed himself from the constraints of his gospel group the Soul Stirrers. But Otis Redding was different. He still had a touch of country life on him, but the near-athletic attack he was capable of marked him as a man who could not be stopped. He was going all the way to make a play for greatness, and there would be no holding back. A follow-up hit of Allen Toussaint’s “Ruler of My Heart” renamed “Pain in My Heart” announced a formidable artist had arrived, and listeners started lining up.
The America that Otis Redding ventured into in the first half of the 1960s was still one openly divided. Segregation didn’t allow the races to really mingle, and except for some free-thinking white listeners it took a year or two for the entire country to discover the young singer’s undeniable amazingness. But Redding was too great to be overlooked for long. James Brown might have been tearing down some of the walls of segregation, but Redding was right behind him establishing himself as a beacon for everyone. Easily less extroverted than Brown, there was still a massive presence Otis Redding had onstage. He could charge around like a football fullback looking for daylight to cut through the line, and then stand in place and stomp his leg until dust rose up from the boards beneath him. No one had the muscularity in his body or his voice quite like him. There wasn’t anything really smooth about him, not like when Brown could dance across an entire stage on one leg, or Jackie Wilson could swoop here and shing-a-ling there as if his feet weren’t even touching the ground. Redding wasn’t like that. In so many ways he was so much more. Devastating in everything he sang, there was a near-visible ethereal halo around the man. And once he turned up the tempo, that halo blasted into a million shining rays.
Hits started rolling with regularity: “Mr. Pitiful,” “Security,” “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” “Ole Man Trouble,” even a version of the Rolling Stones’ monster hit “Satisfaction.” It was like the singer owned the black radio airwaves, and his audience became a devoted army of true believers. Historically, artists like Otis Redding and others led the charge for integration without always realizing it. Young white listeners were drawn to their music, and found a whole mountain of soul within it which hadn’t been obvious before. It opened eyes about the commonality of the races, and let blacks and whites share a true love for the same thing. Once that happens, sharing begins, lives change and dividing lines come down. The United States was being taught equality without often realizing it.
My own introduction to Otis Redding’s unequaled ability to destroy an audience came on the evening of March 22, 1966. I was in the 10th grade, and had been going to see artists like James Brown, Bobby “Blue” Bland, the Impressions and B.B. King at the Pladium Ballroom in Houston. It was my living classroom. I learned not only about music, but about life and how it is capable of pure joy when the musicians and audinece take flight together. Redding came out that night like a man possessed. From the very first song, he knew he had to bring the Houston audience to its knees. Houston was the center of black culture in the South, much like New York in the east, Chicago in the north and Los Angeles in the west. There was no way the singer was leaving town until the crowd had been pulverized. Redding would look into the audience like a hypnotist, never breaking contact with the eyes in front of him, as he stomped and strode in wild abandon singing all his best-known songs.
When he hit “Respect,” every breathing soul at the Pladium shook with delirium tremors as they shrieked at top volume, set free from an earthly bond and headed for the sky. The band kept raising the tempo and volume until the big ballroom felt like it was tilting on its foundation, spinning uncontrollably and ready to take off from a physical axis and roam the cosmos. Life as everyone there knew it would never be the same.
I had to call my parents from the old wooden phone booth by the front door to tell them I wouldn’t be making my 11 p.m. curfew that school night. There was no way I was leaving the Pladium Ballroom while Otis Redding showed us all how exciting and unforgettable life could be if only we would open up and let it. Huge lessons were being taught that March night, ones that still reverberate through me as if only yesterday. When the big man finally left the stage, no doubt to get on a crowded band bus and head for the next town’s show, we envisioned a giant force of nature had saved us all from daily boredom and given us a glimpse of the promised land. When it was time to finally walk out the front door on Southmore Avenue and into a dark Houston night hemmed in by reality, I saw an Otis Redding poster advertising the show on the Pladium’s front door. I asked the deputy sheriff standing there if I could have it, and he just laughed at me and said sure. Carefully pulling it from the small tacks that held it to the wood, I made sure to not to bend it. This was solid gold.
When I got home I put it on my bedroom wall. Once I moved out of my parents’ Houston house in 1968 and into a series of apartments in Austin and then, 12 years later, to different Los Angeles houses, I always had it hanging on a prominent wall wherever I lived. The black and white and red poster reminded me of what Otis Redding had given us all that night in 1966. It was a testament to greatness and a peek into eternity, a place where pain and hopelessness melted away and love and light took over. It was a place where Otis Redding once ruled the world, and pointed the way to a fleeting chance at redemption. The big man from Georgia would be gone less than two years after that March night in 1966, falling from a black Wisconsin sky into a big frozen lake. But the man is not gone, because his songs still sing loud and true and fill the world with a soul like no other. For that, Otis Redding lives. Always.
Bill Bentley