A phone rang in a small Memphis apartment on the night of June 14th, 1967. Otis Redding was sitting on the edge of his bed, still wearing the same clothes he had performed in the night before. He had been staring at the wall for the better part of an hour, the kind of staring that isn’t really seeing anything, the kind that happens when a man is trying to hear something inside himself over all the noise the world keeps making.
He picked up the phone. The voice on the other end belonged to someone he trusted, a man close to his world, close to the business, close to the people who decided where Otis Redding performed and when and for whom. Don’t go to Monterey, Otis. Otis didn’t say anything right away. I mean it. That’s not your crowd.
Those are white hippies from California. They don’t know you. They don’t want to know you. You go out there and embarrass yourself in front of 50,000 people who came to see Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin, and that’s it. That’s the story they write about you. Not the soul man from Georgia, the soul man who flopped at the pop festival.
Oh, Otis still didn’t answer. You hearing me? I hear you, Otis said finally. His voice was quiet, the kind of quiet that meant he was thinking hard about something, not the kind that meant he was agreeing. Good. Stay in Memphis. Stay in your lane. Your people love you. You don’t need them. The call ended. Otis sat with the phone in his hand for a long moment.
Then he set it down, looked at the wall again, and picked up his notebook. He was 25 years old. He had already recorded more soul music than most men twice his age. He had a voice that could make grown men weep and women stop breathing. He had played the Apollo, the Fillmore, uh toured Europe, and watched audiences who barely spoke English stand up and lose their minds while he sang.
He knew what music could do to a room full of people. He had felt it a thousand times. But the man on the phone wasn’t entirely wrong, and Otis knew it. The Monterey Pop Festival in June of 1967 was not a soul music event. It was a gathering of the counterculture, the flower child generation, the West Coast rock revolution.
The Grateful Dead were playing, Simon and Garfunkel, the Mamas and the Papas, and Jimi Hendrix, who occupied a space between worlds that nobody had quite figured out how to describe yet. The pressure wasn’t just coming from that one phone call. It had been building for weeks. Disc jockeys who spun his records on black radio stations in Memphis and Detroit and Atlanta, promoters who booked his shows in venues that had always been his home, even musicians around him, all asking the same question with different words.
Why do you want to play for them? The question had layers. Not just commercial layers, though those were real enough. If Otis crossed over too hard into the white rock audience, he risked being seen as someone who was abandoning his roots, chasing something that wasn’t his to chase. There was a word for it that people used quietly, the kind that didn’t get said directly to someone’s face, but hung in the air of every conversation anyway.
Sellout. And beneath that word was something older and more complicated, something about who owned what in American music, who got to stand on which stages and be called a genius and who got filed under a category and left there. The soul world had always been Otis’s. He hadn’t had to negotiate for it. He walked into a room and it was his.
The question now was whether he was willing to walk into a room where that wasn’t automatically true. He thought about all of that sitting on the edge of his bed on the night of June 14th. And then he picked up his notebook and kept writing. Otis Redding grew up in Dawson, Georgia, a small town about 30 miles southeast of nowhere in particular.
The kind of place where the summers are brutal and the opportunities are few. His father, Otis Redding Sr., worked as a sharecropper and later as a church deacon and he died of tuberculosis when Otis was still a teenager, which meant that Otis, as the oldest son, became the man of the family at an age when most kids elsewhere were worrying about nothing more serious than school dances.
He started singing in church. The gospel tradition he grew up in wasn’t polite. It wasn’t restrained. It was the kind of singing that understood emotion as something physical, a something that lived in the body and had to be expelled through the throat or it would destroy you from the inside. You didn’t perform gospel in Dawson, Georgia.
You survived it. He idolized Little Richard, who was also from Georgia. Little Richard had gone from being a poor black kid in the deep south to being one of the loudest, most undeniable human beings in the history of American popular music. If Little Richard could do that, then the geography of poverty was not necessarily the geography of destiny.
Otis started performing wherever he could find a stage. Talent contests, local clubs, anybody who would let him stand up with a microphone. He won a talent contest so many times that the organizers eventually barred him from entering so that other kids could have a chance. He ended up in Macon where he fell into the orbit of a singer named Johnny Jenkins who had a band called the Pinetoppers.
Otis drove the van. He set up equipment. He did whatever needed doing and occasionally, when Jenkins would let him, he sang a song or two. He was 20 years old and he was hauling gear and sleeping in the back of a van and waiting. The waiting ended in October of 1962. Otis came in with Johnny Jenkins who had a session booked at Stax Records in Memphis, Tennessee.
Jenkins finished with time left over in the day and Jim Stewart, who ran Stax, let Otis use the remaining time to cut a few songs. One of them was called These Arms of Mine. It was a ballad, slow and aching, the kind of song that sounds simple until you realize that simple is the hardest thing in the world to actually achieve because simplicity has no place to hide.
If the emotion isn’t real, a simple song exposes it immediately. The emotion in These Arms of Mine was real. Jim Stewart heard something in that recording that he hadn’t been looking for and hadn’t expected to find. He released the single and it spent 7 months on the rhythm and blues charts. It was not a massive pop crossover hit.
It did not make Otis Redding famous outside the world that already knew this kind of music. But inside that world, it announced something. For the next 4 years, Otis built a body of work at Stax that would eventually be recognized as one of the essential catalogs in the history of American soul music. He recorded with Booker T and the MGs, the integrated house band at Stax, whose combination of Booker T.
Jones’ organ, Steve Cropper’s guitar, Donald Duck Dunn’s bass, and Al Jackson, Jr.’s drums created a sound that was simultaneously tight and loose, controlled and on fire. He released “Mr. Pitiful” and “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” and “Respect”, which he wrote himself, and which carried the weight of a man asking for something he is not sure he deserves and is afraid he will not receive. He toured constantly.
He played the Chitlin’ Circuit, the the network of venues across the American South that were safe for black performers and black audiences during the era of segregation. Places where you could be who you were without negotiating for the right to exist. He played the Apollo in New York, well, the most demanding audience in soul music, an audience that had heard everything and had no patience for anything less than everything you had to give. He survived the Apollo.
He thrived there. He played Europe, which loved American soul music with an intensity that sometimes embarrassed Americans who had not yet fully reckoned with what they had in their own country. Musicians who would go on to redefine rock and roll were spending their formative years in England trying to understand how Otis Redding made sounds that felt like they came from a place deeper than technique.
They understood that it was real, and that realness was what they were chasing. By the spring of 1967, Otis Redding was the king of soul music. Not a pretender, not an up and comer, the king. But he was a king whose kingdom had walls. He was not a pop star. He was not on the covers of the magazines that white teenagers read.
He was beloved inside a world that America had spent a long time pretending was separate from the main event. Monterey was the main event. The Monterey International Pop Festival was held on June 16th, 17th, and 18th of 1967 in Monterey, California. In a county fairground surrounded by pine trees and ocean air.
It was organized as a kind of coronation for the counterculture. A gathering of everything that rock and pop and folk and the new psychedelic music had become. Somewhere between 50,000 and 200,000 people came to see what their generation had made. Otis Redding was not naturally part of that story. He was being asked to walk into the middle of someone else’s narrative and find a place inside it without losing himself.
He said, “Yes.” He arrived with his band, the Bar-Kays, seven young musicians from Memphis, deeply rooted in the same soul tradition that had produced him. They stepped off the bus into a world that was not Memphis, not Dawson, Georgia, not the Apollo or the Howard or any of the rooms where Otis Redding was already a god.
It was a field full of mostly white kids in tie-dye and beads. In the backstage area, musicians gathered before and after their performances, and it was into this backstage area that Otis Redding walked with his band. The general state of affairs was that nobody talked to them, not out of hostility, more out of the particular social blindness that happens when a world doesn’t know what to do with something it hasn’t categorized yet.
The rock musicians backstage at Monterey knew each other or knew of each other. They existed inside the same story. Otis existed inside a different story and the two stories hadn’t yet found a way to speak to each other. Janis Joplin was there, already a force, already consuming herself at a rate that was frightening to watch.
The Who were there having recently performed one of the most shocking sets in rock history. Jimi Hendrix was there preparing for his own set. What nobody backstage could see was what was happening inside Otis Redding’s body as he waited. What nobody could see was the accumulation of everything that had brought him to this moment and everything that was being said about it by people back in Memphis and Atlanta.
What nobody could see was the question sitting in the middle of his chest. The question he had been carrying since June 14th when he sat on the edge of his bed and stared at the wall about 10 minutes before his scheduled performance time. He did something alone. In a bathroom in the backstage area, Otis Redding stood over his sink and he was sick, not from food or illness, from the specific nausea that comes from standing at the edge of something enormous and not knowing whether what is on the other side will hold you or let
you fall. He ran cold water over his wrists. He pressed his forehead against the mirror. The glass was cold. His heart kept doing what it was doing. He thought about Dawson, Georgia. He thought about his father who had worked a piece of land that would never belong to him. Oh, who had sung gospel in a church every Sunday, who had died before he had the chance to see what his son would become.
He thought about the back of Johnny Jenkins’ van. He thought about Jim Stewart’s face in the control room at Stax when he first heard the playback of These Arms of Mine. The way Stewart had gone very still and looked up from the mixing board with an expression that Otis had never forgotten.
He thought about all the phone calls and all the people who had told him this was not his stage and this was not his crowd and this was not his moment. And then he dried his face with a paper towel, straightened his jacket, and walked back out toward the stage. The announcer said his name. Otis Redding walked out onto the stage. The first sound the audience made was not enthusiasm.
It was uncertainty. A crowd of 50,000 people is never silent, but it can be quiet in a particular way. The way it gets when it doesn’t quite know what it’s looking at yet. When it hasn’t decided whether to give itself over to something or hold back. This crowd was quiet in that way for the first few seconds. They were looking at a man who was clearly not from their world.
Who had walked out onto their stage with it an expression they didn’t immediately know what to do with. The expression was not intimidation. It was not apology. It was something simpler. It was the expression of a man who had been singing his whole life and had come to understand that when you are truly inside a song, when you are not performing it, but actually living inside it, the distance between you and whoever is listening collapses.
It doesn’t matter who they are. It doesn’t matter where they come from. When the thing inside you is real, they feel it. They can’t help it. It’s how human beings are built. He opened with Shake, which is a song that doesn’t give you any time to think about whether you want to be part of it. It just takes you.
The band hit the groove and Otis opened his mouth and 50,000 people who had come to Monterey to hear the music of their generation were suddenly inside a different tradition, a tradition that was older and deeper and came from a place in the body that psychedelic rock, as wonderful and strange as it was, did not quite reach.
The crowd started to move, not all at once, but in sections, in clusters, in the way that rhythm physically compels the body before the brain has finished deciding whether to participate. Otis kept going. He went into I’ve Been Loving You Too Long, which is a ballad that requires the audience to slow down and pay attention, to come close instead of just react.
With a crowd that doesn’t know you, you have to earn every transition. Otis earned it. The crowd got quiet in a different way, the way a crowd gets quiet when it is actually listening, when it is leaning forward instead of standing back. He played Respect. He played Try a Little Tenderness, which he had transformed from a gentle pop song into something almost violent in its emotional intensity, a song that starts as a whisper and ends as a kind of ecstatic collapse, a song that by its final moments requires a performer to be
emptied of everything, to have given all of it away. One minute the crowd was watching. The next minute it was standing. All 50,000 of them. Not because they were politely applauding, because they had no choice. The body does what the body does when something real has moved through it. He said goodbye to them the way he always said goodbye to crowds.
He said, [snorts] “I’ve been trying to put something in each and every one of you.” And then the band played him off. And he walked into the wings. He was drenched in sweat. His hands were shaking, but not from nerves this time. From the specific exhaustion that comes from having spent yourself completely, from having reached all the way into yourself and pulled something out and given it away.
And then someone was standing next to him. He looked over and it was Jimi Hendrix. Jimi had barely spoken to Otis during the entire time they had both been backstage. He had been in his own world, his own preparation. He was about to deliver one of the most legendary performances in the history of live music.
He was about to set a guitar on fire in front of 50,000 people. He was about to change what people understood electric guitar to be capable of. But first he stood next to Otis Redding in the wings and he said something. What he said has been reported in different ways by different people. None of whom were standing close enough to hear it clearly.
All of whom were watching rather than listening. The versions vary in their specifics, but they converge on something. They converge on the idea that Jimi Hendrix looked at Otis Redding after Otis had just played the set of his life and said something that acknowledged what he had witnessed with a directness and a humility that neither man usually showed publicly.
Some accounts say he said, “You’re the best there is.” Some say he said, “That’s what it’s supposed to sound like.” Some say it was more personal than that. Something about what the music meant and where it came from. Whatever Jimi Hendrix said to Otis Redding in the wings of the Monterey stage on the evening of June 16th, 1967, Otis walked to the side of the stage and stood with his back against a pillar and put his face in his hands for a moment.
The people around him who noticed thought he might be crying. He might have been. He might have been doing something that doesn’t have a clean word for it. The thing that happens when a weight you’ve been carrying finally lifts. When a question you’ve been living with for a long time is suddenly answered. He had played for 50,000 people who weren’t supposed to be his people and they had become his people in 45 minutes.
He had walked into someone else’s story and found that the story was big enough for him. The phone call had said, “You don’t need them.” But standing in the wings with Jimi Hendrix’s words still warm in the air, Otis Redding understood something different. Something about need running in both directions. Something about what it means when music crosses a boundary and the people on the other side reach back.
The next morning, before Otis left Monterey, a different phone call came. This one from Memphis, from inside the orbit of Stax Records. The concern was about what the Monterey performance meant for Otis’s identity. He had crossed over. He had played for a rock audience, and they had loved him. Which sounded like success from the outside, but felt to some people inside his world like something more complicated.
Because if Otis Redding could play Monterey and win those 50,000 people over, then the pop machinery would notice. And the pop machinery had a way of taking what it noticed and smoothing it down, cleaning it up, making it more palatable, more marketable, less itself. There was something underneath that practical concern, something harder to say out loud.
If Otis became a pop star, what would that make him in relation to the world that had made him? What would it say about who his music was for? Otis listened to all of this on the phone, and then he said something that the person on the other end apparently found frustrating in its simplicity. He said the music is for everybody.
That’s the whole point. He flew back to Memphis with his band, and he went back to work. In December of 1967, toward the end of a long tour, Otis Redding went to a houseboat studio on a lake near Sausalito, California. He had some time. He had been carrying a piece of a song around with him for months. Not even a song, really, just a feeling, just the outline of something, just a melody and a few words that kept coming back to him.
The feeling had to do with stillness, with sitting and watching and not moving toward anything, with the particular piece of being in a place where the demands stop, where you don’t have to be anybody or prove anything. The feeling came from a specific place, a dock somewhere, Lake Lanier maybe, outside Atlanta, where Otis had spent some time when he wasn’t on the road, sitting by the water and letting the minutes go by without forcing them into anything.
He sat in the houseboat studio and started playing with it. The melody was simple, deceptively simple, the kind of simple you only arrive at after you’ve gone through all the complicated versions and come out the other side. The words came the same way, slowly, one right word replacing three wrong ones, until what was left was exactly what needed to be there and nothing else.
Sitting in the morning sun, I’ll be sitting when the evening comes, watching the ships roll in, and then I watch them roll away again. He recorded it on December 7th, 1967. The people in the room recognized immediately that something significant had been captured. The kind of thing you don’t have to argue about, the kind of thing you just know.
The song was called Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay. Otis added a whistled outro because he didn’t yet have lyrics for that section and meant to come back to it later and fill it in with something real. He never came back to it. The whistling stayed and it became one of the most recognizable sounds in the history of American music.
Three days after recording that song, Otis Redding boarded a twin engine Beechcraft aircraft in Cleveland, Ohio, to fly to his next scheduled performance in Madison, Wisconsin. The plane went down over Lake Monona outside Madison on December 10th, 1967. Otis Redding was 26 years old. Four of the Bar-K’s died with him. Ben Cauley, the trumpet player, survived.
He would spend the rest of his life carrying what that meant. Sitting on the Dock of the Bay was released in January of 1968. It went to number one on both the pop and the rhythm and blues charts, the first posthumous single to reach number one in American music history. It stayed there. It kept going. It has never entirely stopped.
The song is built from stillness, from watching, from the particular state of a man who is not trying to go anywhere, who has stopped pushing, who has let the current of time carry him to a place where he can just sit and be. There is something in it that feels like the answer to a question, though the question changes depending on who is asking and what they carry with them when they listen.
The world that received Sitting on the Dock of the Bay in January of 1968 was a world that desperately needed something like it. Martin Luther King Jr. would be shot in Memphis in April, in the city where Otis had made his music, two blocks from a building Otis had walked past a thousand times. Robert Kennedy would be shot in June.
The war in Vietnam was consuming young men at a rate that the American government had decided was acceptable and that the American people had decided was not. Into all of this, a dead man’s voice came over the radio whistling, watching the tide roll in, wasting time. The song did not offer solutions. It did not offer revolution.
It offered the thing that stillness offers, which is the reminder that underneath all the noise and the urgency and the demand that you keep moving and keep proving, there is a dock somewhere. There is water. There is the sound of waves. There is the permission to just sit for a moment and be a human being who is tired and alive and watching the ships.
The world heard it and did not stop crying. The footage of Otis Redding performing at Monterey, filmed by D.A. Pennebaker, is available to watch. Has been available to watch for decades. And what you see when you watch it is a man who arrived uncertain and left certain. A man who walked onto a stage that was not supposed to be his and made it his through the only means by which anything is ever truly claimed.
By giving everything you have until nothing is being held back. Otis Redding’s voice carried a long way. It carried from a church in Dawson, Georgia to a converted movie theater in Memphis to the Apollo in New York to the concert halls halls of Europe to a county fairground in Monterey, California. It carried from a houseboat on a lake in Sausalito into the air on a January morning in 1968 and then into every radio that was playing and every ear that was listening and then into all the years that followed.
It is still carrying. The notebook Otis kept on the road, the one that held the fragments of what would eventually become sitting on the dock of the bay, is held by his estate. The pages exist. The words crossed out and the words written in their place exist. The evidence of a man working late at night to find the right word.
The evidence of a man who understood that the right word mattered because the right word was the difference between saying something and meaning it. He knew that difference. He had spent his whole life learning it. He had learned it in the church and in the van and on the stages where he gave everything and in the houseboat studio on the lake where he whistled because he hadn’t yet found the words, but he knew the words would come.
They had always come. Some sounds don’t end when the voice that made them stops. They go into the air and stay there, available to be heard again whenever someone needs them, which is to say they are available always, which is to say they are permanent in the way that few things are permanent. Sitting on the dock of the bay is permanent.
Otis Redding’s voice is permanent. The moment at Monterey when 50,000 people who didn’t know his name stood up is permanent. The question he carried from the phone call on June 14th to the stage on June 16th, the question of whether he belonged there, is permanent, too, in the way that questions we live all the way through become part of what we leave behind.
He belonged there. He belongs everywhere. That is what he proved. That is what the music keeps saying year after year to every new person who finds it for the first time and feels the dock underneath them and hears the tide coming in and sits for a moment in the stillness that Otis Redding built out of Georgia and Memphis and the road and the sky above Lake Monona and all the years of all the songs. Sit down. Stay a while.
Let the time roll by. He’s still out there, watching the ships come in, watching them roll away again.
