Merry Christmas Baby

 It's that time of the year again when THC posts the Otis Redding version.

 

Nobody's Fault But Mine

From Otis Redding's last Stax recording session just before his death in a plane crash at Madison, Wisconsin in December 1967.  Composed by Otis and Steve Cropper.  What a talent lost!

Merry Christmas Baby

 It's that time of the year again, and Otis Redding has a message for you.

Merry Christmas Baby

 Time for annual posting of my favorite Christmas song, Otis Redding's version of Merry Christmas Baby.

Try A Little Tenderness

Composed by three English songwriters, Jimmy Campbell, Reg Connelly, and Harry M Woods in 1932, first recorded by the Ray Noble Orchestra before Bing Crosby made it a hit the following year, and twice recorded by Frank Sinatra, it is Otis Redding's 1966 recording that is the definitive interpretation.

Produced by Isaac Hayes and backed by Booker T & the MGs, along with the Stax house horn section.

Otis was one of the greatest of soul singers and this is one of his best efforts.  He pays attention to every phrase, word, and syllable.  It may seem a strange connection but it reminds me of Joni Mitchell's vocal on A Case Of You where she differentiates her phrasing throughout the song to appropriately reflect the content of the lyrics.

And the arrangement is splendid.  Every little musical touch is perfect.  Pay attention to the little guitar riffs, keyboard touches, and horn flourishes.  They all fit.

This video gives a taste of Otis performing the song.  It's from his breakout performance at Monterrey Pop in July 1967.  The first part is the audio over video of concert goers but he appears in the last minute.

Merry Christmas, Baby

Composed by Lou Baxter and Johnny Moore in 1947, covered by lots of artists, but this is the perfect version.  From Otis Redding and the Stax house band: Booker T Jones, Steve Cropper, Duck Dunn, and Al Jackson Jr.  What a great holiday song.  Be of good cheer.

Hard To Handle

A great cut from Otis Redding, a song he co-wrote with Alvertis Isbell and Allen Jones.  During a two week studio session in the fall of 1967, Otis recorded a slew of new songs, the most famous being Sittin' On the Dock of the Bay, and none released before his death in a plane crash at Madison, Wisconsin on December 10, 1967.

Hard To Handle was on The Immortal Otis Redding, an album released in June 1968 which also contains a lot of other terrific material from those last recording sessions.  I've been going back recently to listen to his recordings and found quite a few lesser known songs that are just wonderful.

The Stax Playlist

A companion to the Motown Playlist, but with some differences.  The Motown Playlist is exclusively artists who recorded in Motown Studios and were on the Motown label.  For my Stax playlist my criteria were looser.  While several of the artists listed below were exclusively on the Stax label or recorded in the Stax studio in Memphis, not all did so.  In the cases of Wilson Pickett and Sam & Dave, about half the songs below were recorded at Stax.  In the case of Aretha Franklin, all of the featured songs were recorded either at the studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama or at Atlantic Studios in NYC.  I included Aretha because her style is closer to Stax than Motown (though she was a Detroit native) and Stax and Atlantic had a distribution deal negotiated by Jerry Wexler (for more on that see the post linked below).  I've also thrown in a song by Percy Sledge, recorded in another Alabama studio.  And, as a coda, the playlist (which is arranged chronologically, unlike Motown) ends with tunes from Al Green, all recorded in a Memphis studio about one mile from Stax.  The quality and quantity of music coming out of Memphis from the 1950s into the 1970s is staggering.  Two miles from Stax was Sun Records where Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins got their starts.  Less than three miles away were the Beale Street clubs where many famous blues musicians, like BB King, played.

Motown and Stax are a study in contrasts.  Motown was founded, and run, with an iron-hand, by the brilliant black entrepreneur Berry Gordy.  Like Motown, Stax was founded in the late 1950s, in this case by Jim STewart and his sister, Estelle AXton, who were white, and who, while they were good at spotting talent, proved poor at the business side, unlike the Motown founder.  Gordy was determined to create a unique sound with black artists that would break into the pop market dominated by white teenagers and was immensely successful in achieving his vision.  Stax had a grittier, funkier sound that, in the 60s, limited its wider reach until Otis Redding deliberately composed Sittin' On The Dock Of The Bay to appeal to a pop audience, a single released after his death in December 1967 and reaching the top of the charts.  You could hear the difference on WABC-AM, the New York City radio station I grew up listening to - Motown got a lot of play; Stax not as much until Dock Of The Bay.  It was Redding's death along with two other events in early 1968 that led to the demise of the classic period of Stax Records about which you can read in my post Respect Yourself.

One other note on Stax. Its house band, Booker T and the MGs, consisted of Booker T. Jones, Al Jackson Jr, Steve Cropper and Lewie Steinberg, replaced in 1965 by Donald "Duck" Dunn, the first two black the others white.  It was unusual for the time, and extremely unusual in Memphis, where the band members could play together in the studio but not have lunch together in a restaurant.

1962

Green Onions - Booker T & The MGs

1963

Walking The Dog - Rufus Thomas

1964

That's How Strong My Love Is - Otis Redding

1965

I've Been Loving You Too Long - Otis Redding; watch him live at Monterrey Pop (1)

I Can't Turn You Loose - Otis Redding

Respect - Otis Redding; yes, he composed it

You Don't Miss Your Water - Otis Redding

A Change Is Gonna Come - Otis Redding (cover of the Sam Cooke classic)

Midnight Hour - Wilson Pickett

1966

Fa Fa Fa Fa (Sad Song) - Otis Redding

Satisfaction - Otis Redding

Cigarettes & Coffee - Otis Redding

634-5789 - Wilson Pickett

Land of 1000 Dances - Wilson Pickett

Mustang Sally - Wilson Pickett

99 And A Half - Wilson Pickett

Knock On Wood - Eddie Floyd

Hold On, I'm Coming - Sam & Dave

You Don't Know Like I Know - Sam & Dave

When A Man Loves A Woman - Percy Sledge

1967

Try A Little Tenderness - Otis Redding; perfect in every element.  Peak Stax.

Shake - Otis Redding

Funky Broadway - Wilson Pickett

Born Under A Bad Sign - Albert King

Soul Man - Sam & Dave

I Never Loved A Man - Aretha Franklin.  Simply incredible from start to finish.

Respect - Aretha Franklin

Baby I Love You - Aretha Franklin

Natural Woman - Aretha Franklin

Chain Of Fools - Aretha Franklin; alternate take (2)

Let's stop for a minute.  These five songs were released as singles in this order by Aretha in 1967!  Any one of these singles would have made for a remarkable year; to have five like this . . .

Do Right Woman - Do Right Man - Aretha Franklin

Dr Feelgood - Aretha Franklin

1968

Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay - Otis Redding

Too Hard To Handle - Otis Redding

I Thank You - Sam & Dave

Think - Aretha Franklin

1971

Respect Yourself - Staples Singers

Theme From Shaft - Isaac Hayes

1972

I'll Take You There - Staples Singers

The Al Green Coda

Let's Stay Together (1971)

Call Me (1973)

Here I Am (Come And Take Me) (1973)

Love & Happiness (1977) - Maximum Al

 

(1) At Monterrey Pop, Otis was backed by Booker T and the MGs. 

(2) Although this video and others of the same take say it is unedited, this is incorrect.  Not only is the introduction different but also the background vocals behind the entire song.  This is an alternate take and they may have used Aretha's vocal and matched it with different background vocals.

I've Been Loving You Too Long

 . . .  to stop now

The great Otis Redding.

Shake

Now this is high energy!  Otis Redding from the Stax All-Stars Europe Tour of 1967.  Song written by Sam Cooke.

Respect Yourself

Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Sam & Dave, Booker T & the MGs (with Steve Cropper and Duck Dunn), Carla & Rufus Thomas, Eddie Floyd, Isaac Hayes, The Staple Singers, Luther Ingram

Over a period of about fifteen years, from 1960 to the mid-1970s, Stax Records had all these artists, pioneering a unique funk and soul sound and, in its early years blending white and black musicians and executives in the most unlikely of places, segregated Memphis, Tennessee.

The story is well-told by Robert Gordon in Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion (2013) with a foreword by Booker T Jones.  It's a story with a first act and a second act with the first act being the more compelling.

  (Booker T)  It started with Jim Stewart, an aspiring country-music musician who wanted to get in on the growing music recording business in the late 1950s and his sister, Estelle Axton, who  loved music, all types of music.  They came up with the name of their label by combining the first two letters of their last names.  With very little money they purchased their initial recording equipment and rented a closed movie theater which they converted into a recording studio and expanded the ticket office and made it into a record store, run by Estelle. According to Gordon:

The store would be a way to gauge what shoppers were buying, would provide immediate customer response to new and developing songs, and would yield a working library so writers and musicians could keep current.  The initial purpose was plain and simple: cash flow to help pay the rent.

     (Estelle & Jim)
At the time when there was no set template for the record industry or recording labels and to the extent there was any developing template Stax didn't follow it.  There were no union studio musicians, no charts developed before recording sessions; they were making it up as they went along.

What's remarkable is how young everyone was.  What became the core of the studio musical team, Booker T, Steve Cropper, Duck Dunn, The Bar-Kays and the Mar-Keys were all in high school when they started working at Stax and Booker T and Cropper, in particular, became executives, managing the recording process while still in their teens.

          Gordon entertains us as he tells of how Jim and Estelle became the promoters of soul music and of the growth of Stax from its first hits Walking the Dog by Rufus Thomas and Green Onions by Booker T & the MGs to Cropper and Wilson Pickett writing Midnight Hour in a room at the Lorraine Motel to that magic moment when Otis Redding showed up and changed the destiny of Stax.

Steve Cropper:

He put a spark under Stax.  No question about it  . . . Otis Redding was the one artist that everybody looked forward to recording with.

  (Cropper)
Booker T:

Otis Redding seemed to be a person with a mission and we picked up that mission and it became all of ours.  His intent was so strong and so powerful when we were recording that it translated to more than the music.  

It was Redding who made the break through to a white audience at the Monterrey Pop festival in July 1967 and late that year he and Cropper wrote the song that he was certain would be his first Number One, (Sittin' On) The Dock of The Bay (for the full story see Sittin' In The Morning Sun).  Here's Otis at Monterrey (and stick around for the last minute of the video):

And it was Redding's death (along with most of the Bar-Kays) when his plane crashed into Lake Mendota in Madison, Wisconsin in December 1967 that was the first of three events over six months that transformed Stax and signaled the closing of the curtain on its first act.  Released soon after his death, The Dock of The Bay became one of the best selling singles of 1968.

The second was the revelation of the awful distribution agreement Jim Stewart had entered into with Atlantic Records back in 1965.  Stewart had entered into it without consulting a lawyer.  Jerry Wexler, the Atlantic producer claimed he didn't read it either but there is room for doubt.  In any event, when Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun sold Atlantic it turned out that the contract gave Atlantic control of Stax's masters destroying the economic value of the Stax catalogue.

The third was the murder of Martin Luther King at the Lorraine Motel in April 1968.  Throughout Respect Yourself, Gordon weaves the story of race relations in Memphis and, in particular, of the struggle of the black sanitation workers to gain respect and have their unionization efforts recognized by white politicians.  This struggle, which had gone on for several years, was what brought King to Memphis.
    (King in Memphis)
Stax had been an oasis amidst the racial strife.  The one place in Memphis where blacks and white could work together.  Booker T and the MGs was unique, two black and two white musicians.  In the introduction, Booker T writes of Jim Stewart's hiring of a black man, Al Bell, as an executive at Stax:

It was 1965 in Memphis, Tennessee, the heart of the American South.  Throughout this wide region, race mixing was nothing short of an assault on the social realm.  Inside Stax Records, whites and blacks had worked side by side for half a decade.  People who couldn't publicly dine together were making beautiful music, that the public - black and white - loved to hear.  Many times, however they'd step outside the studio and white cops would stop to check on the whites' safety, to hassle the blacks.

One telephone and one desk.  While Al situated himself, Jim made a call.  When he hung up, Al watched as Jim slid that phone across the desk, toward him.
(Al Bell & Jim Stewart)
Al Bell made his call.  When done, like his boss, he slid the phone back across the desk.  It was such a quotidian act, yet revolutionary in 1965. . . In Memphis, thirty three African American men had been recently fired from the sanitation department for fomenting strike talk . . . the City of Memphis defied integration orders by closing its public swimming pools - for two consecutive hot summers - rather than having blacks and whites share the same water.

"I was amazed to sit in the same room with this white guy who had been a country fiddle player", says Al . . . "The spirit that came from Jim and his sister Estelle Axton allowed all of us, black and white, to come off the streets, where you had segregation and the negative attitude, and come into the doors of Stax, where you had freedom, you had harmony".

King's death changed it all.  The distrust and anger overwhelmed all of the city, including Stax.  THC encountered the way attitudes were impact.  About 20 years ago he managed a team based in Memphis and one of the group was a white Memphis native born in the 1930s who told THC that "things wouldn't be right in Memphis" until the day when everyone, white and black, who was there the day King was murdered had themselves died.  

For Stax it meant changes in the working relationships, in the management and even in the sound of the music.  Over time Estelle Axton and Steve Cropper left and Al Stewart was bought out and the management became explicitly focused on a black audience.  There were some great successes, Isaac Hayes and the Staple Singers being two of the biggest, but Stax ultimately overexpanded, got out of financial control was finally went bankrupt.  In a sad note, Jim Stewart, who had walked away with enough to make him financially sound for the rest of his life, came back at the end and pledged all his personal assets to help keep Stax afloat.  When it went bankrupt he lost everything. 

(Isaac Hayes)  The second act of Respect Yourself is well told but it is essentially a sad and dreary story after the uplifting first act.  But we all still have the music and we'll leave you with Hold On, I'm Coming by Sam & Dave, written by Isaac Hayes and David Porter and you can read Respect Yourself for the story of how the song ended up with its title.

  

Sittin' In The Morning Sun

On January 8, 1968 Stax Records released (Sittin' on) The Dock Of The Bay by Otis Redding.  It became his first #1 single, holding the top spot on the charts for four weeks.  Otis never knew it.  He had died on December 10, 1967 when the small private plane he was traveling in crashed into a lake in Madison, Wisconsin just after he had finished a concert.  Forty-five years later it remains a song that everyone knows.  In 1999 it was named as the 6th most performed song of the 20th century by the music publisher BMI.

In a recent Wall St Journal article, several of those involved with the production of the song spoke about Otis and the making of the recording.  One of these was Steve Cropper, who co-wrote Dock Of The Bay with Otis.

Cropper recounted that when Otis came into Memphis in November 1967 he called and said "Crop, I've got a hit, I'm coming right over" and they sat together and finished the song.  Otis told him that he started writing the song when he was in San Francisco and producer Bill Graham let him stay on his houseboat in Sausalito.

The core of musicians on the recording were the members of Booker T. & the MGs, with Booker T Jones on keyboards, Duck Dunn on bass, Al Jackson on drums and Cropper on guitar.  For you comedy fans, Cropper and Dunn were also part of The Blues Brothers Band in the late 70s.  Having an integrated band, as Stax did, in the mid-60s Deep South was highly unusual but it resulted in some of the most memorable singles of that era.  Along with Redding, the band also backed Wilson Pickett, Sam & Dave and Eddie Floyd among others.

Cropper went on to say that when Otis showed up with the song he sang the verse that went:

Sittin' in the mornin' sun
I'll be sittin' when the evening come
Watching the ships roll in
And then I watch them roll away again

Cropper objected, "Otis, hold on.  If a ship rolls, it will take on water and sink" and Otis replied "That's what I want, Crop".

He then goes on to tell this story:

Years later, I was in Sausalito on tour and found myself at a place by the bay having a hamburger.  I was watching the water when my eye caught something.  The ferries crossing from San Francisco turned a little as they came in, creating a rolling wave to cushion their arrival at the pier.  That's when it hit me.  Otis had been watching the ferries rolling in. 

By Otis Redding standards Dock Of The Bay was laid back and mellow.  He'd made his reputation as a bluesy, soulful singer (he was also a talented songwriter, including composing Respect, Aretha Franklin's monster hit) as well as being a dynamic and riveting live performer.  His performance at the Monterrey Pop Festival in July 1967 had been his breakthrough to a broader white audience.

This is Otis performing Try A Little Tenderness in London.  It picks up mid-song but it captures his electric style.  You can also see Dunn and Cropper backing him up.