Otis

How did two white 13-year olds in the middle of suburbia discover, and bond over, Otis Redding? Me and McKenzie did. It’s not like we heard him on the radio. Otis’ music played outside the Top 40, so WABC didn’t touch him. Neither did WMCA. We might have caught him on WWRL, between breaks in the storm of static that made listening to New York’s R&B channel a challenge, but I doubt it.  

What I think drew us in was an album cover. We had a habit of going to Korvettes or Modells, with their monster record departments, to flip through looking for records that struck us as “different.” We’d hold them up to get the other guy’s reaction, and sometimes buy them (49 cents from the cut-out bin) if they invoked the right response.

McKenzie bought a record by Sister Rosetta Tharpe; we liked saying her name, but didn’t care for gospel music. Olatunji’s Drums of Passion, a field recording of African chants and drums, worked for us. We played it to death and were thrilled when Santana covered one of its songs. Hey, someone else bought this record too.

The album cover that may have hooked us was Otis Redding’s Dictionary of Soul. As a recruitment poster for dopey, impressionable kids, it’s perfect. But the music, on that record and all the subsequent ones we bought, hit us square. Gutbucket blues. Imaginative horn arrangements. Otis’ voice, moving from pleading ballad to all-out roof raisers. Referring to himself in song in the third person – and as “Big O” yet. The “got-ta, got-ta” and “Lord have mercy” asides.

And the songs. Aretha had taken “Respect” to the top of the charts. The horn-driven “I Can’t Turn You Loose” (better known today as the Blue Brothers’ theme). Pain In My Heart, covered by the Stones. Otis mined Depression-era Tin Pan Alley for “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out” and “Try A Little Tenderness,” covered BB King (“Rock Me Baby”) and the Beatles (“Day Tripper”), then returned the favor to the Stones with “Satisfaction.”

We played Otis’ duet with Carla Thomas, “Tramp,” over and over. I had a friend who memorized some of Bill Cosby’s album routines, and he’d recite them as we walked home from school. “Tramp” was funnier than Cosby and not nearly as long-winded.

Otis’ fame grew beyond the two blocks in Hackensack where me and McKenzie lived. Otis played Scandinavia. The Hippodrome in London. The Monterey Pop Festival. The Whiskey A Go-Go. Then, with his star steadily on the rise, it crashed.  

McKenzie and I were having one of our stupid lover’s spats when Otis died. We weren’t talking and then we passed each other in the hallway between classes. We actually said, “Otis,” to each other almost simultaneously.

Otis died at age 26, one year short of membership in the half-baked concept of the “27 Club,” but he had the brightest future – and the clearest head – of anyone on that list. When his plane went down into Lake Monona in Madison, WI 50 years next month, we lost so much. He had just written and recorded an introspective song unlike anything he had done before called “Dock of the Bay.” He was said to be listening to Dylan and wanted to cover “Just Like A Woman.” He wanted to remake a bunch of his old songs, speeding up the ballads and down-shifting the fast ones.

I used to travel to Madison frequently for work. Once, we held an offsite at a conference center designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, with a terrace that overlooked Lake Monona. Although the weather there is normally mercurial, it was a warm October day and I spent quite a bit of time on a bench staring out at the water. It felt like a pilgrimage.

McKenzie and I went our separate ways a long time ago. I’m sure that by now he’s forgotten about Olatunji and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. But I’d like to think that if he ever finds himself in Madison, and the weather is right, that he would park himself on that same bench. The dock of the bay.