“I’ll see you on Monday,” were his last words to Mr. In the middle of the sessions, Redding went back on the road. The whistling at the song’s end came in a section earmarked for vocal ad-libbing on one early take, Redding sputtered and the engineer Ron Capone told him, “You’re not going to make it as a whistler.” Cropper planned to ask the Staple Singers to contribute backing vocals to “Dock of the Bay,” which never happened. Jones remembered the sessions as having “kind of a hectic feeling - so much so that I remember a number of people sleeping over at the studio.” Redding and Mr. The duo went into the studio in November, joined by Donald Dunn (known as Duck) on bass, Al Jackson on drums, Booker T. “After he sang, ‘I watch the ships roll in, watch them roll out again,’ I said, ‘Have you thought that if a ship rolls, it’s going to take on water and sink?’” Redding told him, “That’s the way I want it, Crop.” “I helped him with the second verse a little bit, helped him with the bridge,” Mr. When Redding arrived, the pair sat on beige folding chairs, hammering out the song. the Stax house band), remembered Redding calling him from the Memphis airport to make sure he was at the studio. Steve Cropper, who regularly backed Redding up as the guitarist for Booker T. Five weeks later, his voice sounded better than ever, and he was eager to get some of his new ideas on wax. That October, Redding had surgery to remove polyps from his vocal cords while recuperating, he couldn’t speak, so he grew a beard and spent hours in silent contemplation. “He said, ‘Well, I’m going to change my style, going to be different.’” “My comment at the time was that it was very different, unusual for him,” she said - meaning she didn’t care for it. When Redding returned home, he played the song for his wife. He was away, and he was on the water, and he was relaxed. “It took me a minute to get into what he was doing. The rhythm of this new one was totally different, he said in an interview. Sims was used to tapping out a simple beat when his boss was writing songs, acting as a human metronome. His road manager, Earl Sims (known as Speedo), said he was the only witness the day Redding picked up his guitar and wrote a new song that began “Sittin’ in the morning sun/I’ll be sittin’ when the evening comes.” Redding spent his days quietly looking at the water freed from the usual demands of travel, he could relax and write songs. When he was besieged by female fans at his hotel, the promoter Bill Graham let him stay at his houseboat in Sausalito. In August 1967, Redding returned to San Francisco for a week of shows at the jazz club Basin Street West. “I guess he was thinking about ‘How can I be this creative?’” Redding said, speaking from her office in Georgia. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” “He thought it was the greatest thing he ever heard,” Ms. Like most of the world, Redding spent the summer of 1967 listening to the Beatles’ “Sgt. “He had done what he could do with them, which was more than anybody else could do.”
“It was clear that his bread and butter, which was these big 12/8 ballads, had plateaued,” Jonathan Gould, the author of the recent biography “Otis Redding: An Unfinished Life,” said in an interview. Redding threw himself into the project of reinventing himself.
Otis was one of the masters of that - he was so emotive.” And the reason behind the success of “Dock of the Bay”? “It sounds like the title,” Mr. The lesson: “As a singer, range is great, but you got to learn to sing the right notes the right way. He said that before his band had any original material, it performed complete albums by Redding. Paul and the Broken Bones is scheduled to perform “Down in the Valley” and “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” at the event. The Dap-Kings and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band will provide the backup. To celebrate its endurance across 50 years, the Otis Redding Foundation is organizing a benefit concert on Thursday at the Apollo Theater, hosted by Whoopi Goldberg and featuring a lineup including Warren Haynes, Aloe Blacc and Booker T. 26 on its 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. It has gone triple platinum and been covered by artists from Cher to Bob Dylan. The song ranked as the sixth-most-played composition on American radio and television in the 20th century. But the first person to do it was the soul singer Otis Redding, who died in a plane crash in late 1967 at 26 and topped the charts for four weeks the following March and April with a beautifully melancholy song, “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay.” 1 with a single after their deaths, including John Lennon, Janis Joplin and the Notorious B.I.G.
Only a handful of performers have reached No. A posthumous pop hit collapses triumph and sorrow into a single song.
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